I crashed early last night, around 8:45, and zonked out. At 9:30, the town's tornado siren (which can also serve as a nuclear attack siren and 5:00 drinking time notice), went off. I helped bundle the three smallest downstairs, while yelling to the two middles to run downstairs, while yelling at the two eldest to turn one TV to The Office and the other TV to the SFU v. Rutgers game (might as well enjoy the crisis). I stayed until 10:05, then went back to bed. At 10:40, the freakin' siren went off again, and we went through a replay. The doppler showed more storms behind the one that was currently hitting us, so we all crashed downstairs, which worked out fine, but I slept in later than I had hoped, and now I'm behind schedule.
Brews You Can Use
Heck, if they let you drink in prison, the culprit might turn himself in: A New Zealand brewery is reportedly offering a lifetime supply of beer for the return of a stolen laptop. And what is a lifetime of free beer? Twelve bottles a month. I don't know if that's sufficient. I don't drink every day, but if you're offering a lifetime supply, it seems like the winner should get at least 30 a month.
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The ironies of the market: As microbrews grow, the megabrews grow. The microbrews through quality, the megabrews through mergers. The WSJ article says sluggish sales have prompted the merge talks. The article attributes the sluggishness to wine and spirit competition, but I'm pretty certain I've read that microbrews are taking their bite out of the big dogs. The New York Times appears to agree with that assessment.
Industrial beer is still the vast majority of the American market, and it's not going away tomorrow, but there is no future in it. While industrial beers suffer flat or declining sales, craft brewers are experiencing double-digit growth. The big brewers now try to copy craft beers. European brewers, who once laughed at watery American beer, now look to the United States for inspiration.
MillerCoors is not a threat to craft brewers but a warning: we should not walk the road of overexpansion or be tempted by the lowest common denominator of the mass market. Miller, Coors and Anheuser-Busch were once small breweries making fine local beer, too.
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Newest star to the beer blogging world. I scanned the site briefly, and it looks like he takes his drinking/writing/fact-finding seriously. My advice to him: Slow down (the blogging, not the drinking). You'll burn out with the first blogging hangover, which occurs when you realize that you're only making $25 a month from blogging efforts that take 25 hours a month. Of course, if you establish your blog and brewers give you free beer for advertising space, well, that changes the type of hangover altogether.
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Best beer picture I saw this week while surfing for beer news:
