KLEM FM

I'm enjoying what's left of my birthday tonight. This helps:

The beer is called "Effective Dreams." It's made locally and is all the rage -- part of the "haze craze." You can't even it buy it in stores -- online only.

I like the groovy art work. It's very trippy and goes somewhere back to the 1960's.

linky

You dirty rats.......

McSorley’s bar closes over rat problem 

New York Post By Gabrielle Fonrouge and Jennifer Bain November 10, 2016

McSorley’s survived prohibition, two world wars and 9/11, but one of the Big Apple’s oldest and most storied watering holes was no match for these unwanted patrons.

On Wednesday the East Village institution was slapped with a big yellow sticker and instructions to close from the Department of Health after a surprise inspection found 42 rodent droppings and “conditions conducive to vermin and pest activity,” a Department of Health spokesperson said.

“It’s probably the most embarrassment I’ve had here in 54 years; it hits hard to see it closed… Nothing phased McSorley’s in 1962, we had 9/11, the hurricanes and a little mouse closed the place,” Matthew Maher, the bar’s owner since 1977 told The Post.

“It’s the first time we’ve been closed since 1854… This is the first violation, a little mouse found a loophole.”

Maher said the droppings were found in the basement after a construction worker left a grate open when he replaced a gas pipe last week. Apparently the critter crawled in and set up shop in the ancient bar’s basement, which has hosted everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt.

DoJ Approves Largest Beer Merger In History

Big Bud gets to swallow MillerCoors: Forbes link

We have something like 120 independent commercial brewers in San Diego County. I drink much less beer than I did in my youth and am willing to pay a bit more for the privilege. I just wish the lager revolution would happen a little quicker.

Every Pitcher Tells A Story, Don't It?

"Milwaukee's Finest Beer" Plastic in Blatz Glass

I put a nice creamy head on that beer, just the way ricpic likes it.

The glass is a small tavern glass, just like they used to pour in Milwaukee taverns. Wisconsin people never used to say "bar" -- it was always "tavern."

Blatz was one of Milwaukee's first breweries, and was the first one to bottle and ship beer around the country. I have a large Blatz pitcher as well, which I picked up a yard sale in Wisconsin last time I was back:

You can't find that kind of stuff out here. The ubiquitous pitcher was the unit of beer you shared with friends. Do people still do that?

As Beers Go Bye...

So I've decided to focus on beers. Here is an example of an Oktoberfest prop I recently made:

Plastic in glass

Notice there isn't a full head on that beer.  That is something I'm able to do, but I think gives a false impression of what a beer really looks like as a prop. To further illustrate, here is a real beer with a full head and after it's been enjoyed a bit:

 Beer in glass, full

That by the way, that is a real beer in glass.

Beer in glass, enjoyed

I like the half-full look. My wife saw me working on this one in the morning and accused me of starting too early:

Plastic in glass

But, there's something about that which strikes people the wrong way. I think it's dashed idealism.  What say ye?

All of these are for sale.

KLEM FM

Raucous:

link in case the video doesn't load

"Velvet Merkin" -- that's an LOL beer name. 

No Hippie Punching In The Comments, Please!

Dogfish Head Brewing is issuing a special 50th Anniversary commemorative label for their "American Beauty" beer. The Grateful Dead are celebrating 50 years together this summer. The beer is brewed using almond honey granola and hops. The beer haz 9% ABV which is enough to whack a polyp. The new label is supposed to look like this:

Link to original

I've always liked the iconography associated with the band, along with some of their music. I've only seen them twice though--not enough to qualify as a Deadhead. The Dead (the ones who aren't dead-dead) have been together 50 years, since the halcyon days of the San Francisco hippie scene.

According to the late Hunter S. Thompson, 1965 was the best year to be a hippie:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.  Link

Mary the panhandler

Long story shortened: I had the little-old-lady shopping cart when entering the bottleshop by the backdoor, having used the little blue cart to haul an oversized load of trash directly to the dumpsters outside.

Lurch was on the telephone. I stocked up on cold beer, the kind I recently discovered that I like, and the usual 12-pack of Coke. I was just in time too because Lurch hung up the phone quite cross about a package being misdelivered. He must close shop now and hasten down there and rush back. We walked out the front door together onto Broadway.

Immediately we two were approached by a woman who appeared to be in waiting, and appeared to be native. Lurch addressed her directly. "We're closed for a moment. I must go down there and check something." The woman spoke sweetly, haltingly, timidly,
"Do you guys have fifty-seven cents? I only want a beer and I need fifty-seven cents." Now Lurch snapped, "No panhandling in front of the store" and sped down the street.

The woman turned away dejected. I started off in the direction of Lurch where I would tuck into my entrance before his return, then halted before taking a second step. I have a cart with two cold six-packs of premium beer that I like, my favorite types that I just now discovered since the story back then about the Belgium town that named a beer for American soldier Vince Sperancza of 101 Airborne, and designed ceramic mugs in the shape of army helmets to serve it. I tried a lot of beers with silly names and labels with fantastic individual character. Even Colorado beers have become quite interesting. Sold at premium beer prices everything I've tried so far, pretty much, is worth it. Beer seems inexpensive. Compared to everything else. Come on. I don't even drink most of it. I decided to keep some cold for emergencies, for unexpected things, and it worked. I offer beer to people all the time. And it is good tasting beer too, a topic of conversation. There I am out on a main street of town with a cart of bottles of beer, a very cross Lurch down the street, and a distressed woman short mere cents in immediate want.

"Hey, come 'ere."

Damn, she's agile.

"Wass'yur name?"

"Mary." 

"I'm Chip. You got a bottle opener?"

"What?"

"Do you have a bottle opener?"

"I can open one with a lighter."

Clever girl. I would like to see that. "Here. Mary, you are really going to like this beer." 

Back home, I haven't put the bottles away yet, every time I walk past and see the two untended six packs with an empty slot I think of Mary and her delightfully round face lighting up at having a beer passed to her like that following such a sharp rebuke from Lurch, the big meanie who is always so serious.

I must also recall the Denver architect, among the most impressively ironclad liberal and politically active persons that I know, declaiming moralistically and ethically about how he will not give cash to bums because they'll go immediately and spend it on liquor anyway. I told him that I sure get my share of free drinks, and much of that from people I don't know all that well. We were at such a gathering at the time, the host and hostess hired a bartender. He agreed when you travel in the right circles you do get a lot of free drinks, I respond poorly to that type of thinking and my impulse was argue about traveling in circles but the point was made and ever since then I've tried to broaden my circles or else increase them. I don't feel bad at all for contributing to the delinquency of a minority, in fact I feel good about it, besides, Jesus told me to stop being such a dick. 

Hey-sus, the guy on the building department crew.

I think that empty beer six-pack slot is funny. Lurch would not approve, and that makes it even more funny, in fact, I am leaving the beer out just so I can see the empty slot more. 

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Dear Blog:

Tonight I poured a cold beer into a tall, clear glass and then poured an equal volume of water next to it. Then I proceeded to add dye to the water, mixing colors to approximate the color of the beer, taking notes of amounts added per unit volume. I will translate the results into plastic. I wish I had an extra $2k to invest in a SPEC20 spectrophotometer. Then I could get at the true colors using Beer's Law instead of eyeball spectroscopy. Did you know that every beer is assigned a SRM value?

Color based on Standard Reference Method (SRM)[edit]

SRM/Lovibond	Example	Beer color	EBC
2	Pale lager, Witbier, Pilsener, Berliner Weisse		4
3	Maibock, Blonde Ale		6
4	Weissbier		8
6	American Pale Ale, India Pale Ale		12
8	Weissbier, Saison		16
10	English Bitter, ESB		20
13	Biere de Garde, Double IPA		26
17	Dark lager, Vienna lager, Marzen, Amber Ale		33
20	Brown Ale, Bock, Dunkel, Dunkelweizen		39
24	Irish Dry Stout, Doppelbock, Porter		47
29	Stout		57
35	Foreign Stout, Baltic Porter		69
40+	Imperial Stout		79

In Heaven There Is No Beer...

Im Himmel es gibt kein Bier,
Darum wir trinken es hier.
Denn sind wir nicht mehr hier,
Dann trinken die andern unser Bier. 

~ German Folk Song

"Trick" after the jump:

The golden child

Ob/Gyn staff: I wouldn't leave messages for mom via her child. @kksheld @paulkoerner @DrMartyFox @drscott_atlanta pic.twitter.com/bkougv2Ove
— Ruste Via (@RusteVia) January 13, 2014

Malt VS hops

I concluded I like malty ales and do not like hoppy lagers. That is my final answer, my o pin yun and I'm sticky with it.

Hey, turns out that's a thing.

I am frequently asked to clarify the difference between “malty” flavors and “hoppy” flavors in beer. Nearly every day someone stumbles upon this blog with the search query “malty beers vs. hoppy beers.” I find that people can often describe the flavors they taste, but aren’t necessarily able to attribute those tastes to one or the other source ingredient.

Ably answered at a perfect pint blog.

But they did not mention that malt is the flavor of malted milk shake vs regular milk shake, it is the flavor difference between wet Wonder bread and Malt-O-Meal, the difference between chocolate milk and Ovaltine, the difference between Newcastle ale and St. Pauli Girl lager. I think.

I did not realize that hops is like spice. That changes my attitude.