Seasonal Beer Review: Isolation Ale

(Could only find a picture of all three seasonals for this brewery)

Reminds me of an Octoberfest, not much added flavor or extra spices, but a good solid 'I'll have another one" type of ale.

Seasonal Beer Review: 2 Below by New Belgium

A Winter Warmer by the makers of Fat Tire, this ale is a little lighter than some of the other seasonals that I've been sampling lately. There's a little spiciness to it, with a twinge of pear or apple, a little bit of a bite, but sweet overall. Would go well with some traditional holiday side dishes like squash or stuffing. I'd buy a 6 pack of 2 Below.

Seasonal Beer Review: Avery Brewing Old Jubilation Ale

8% ABV! Drink it slowly! Pours with a big, frothy head, chocolate colored, heavy, creamy. Mmmmm. Slight hoppiness, overtones of coffee and chocolate. "Toasted" character to it. As a fan of the darkies, I'd give this puppy an 8 out of 10 on the IGB scale.

Seasonal Beer Review: Anchor Steam Special Ale

I'm not sure if this would be classified as a porter or a stout, but it's definitely dark. I held it up to the light and nothing, I mean nothing shone through! Very malty, with a bitter aftertaste and something else that I couldn't quite identify, cloves maybe. Medium thick/heavy and a 5.5% ABV. One that I'd try again, if only to try to sleuth out the flavorings!

Seasonal Beer Review: Boulevard Nutcracker Ale

Pretty solid, nice balance between hops and malt. Not much of a head, but very drinkable. Hazy coppery color, unidentifiable spiciness. I wouldn't be adverse to a six pack of this one.

Beer Review: Powderhound Winter Ale

Before today I had never heard of Powderhound or the Big Sky Brewing Company which brews it although I had heard of Moose Drool. Powderhound pours thick, with a towering head that just never went away. In fact, when I poured the rest of the bottle in, the beer I was pouring just made a hole in the thick creamy head that was left. After the first taste I was surprised that it wasn't a lager, since there was some similarity to other winter lagers that I had tried. There seemed to be a teeny bit of lemon and spices, but nothing definite. Good solid winter ale.

Unions and Unionization

Under current law, if 30% of employees in a bargaining unit sign a petition, or "authorization card" requesting unionization, then the petition goes to the National Labor Relations Board, which orders a secret ballot election. If 50% or more sign, then the employer can waive the election.

Under a proposed law, the secret election is bypassed if more than 50% sign the card, with elections still held for signatures totalling 30 - 50%.

Opponents of the bill take the position that a secret ballot is necessary to prevent coercion by union organizers, while proponents claim that the current system allows for coercion by the employer, including mandatory anti-union meetings and firings of pro-union employees.

Many employers have already taken pro-active measures, prohibiting their employees from speaking to union organizers, claiming that any conversation could be interpreted as inviting union organizing and recruiting.

Personally I'm no fan of unions, but if the majority of employees want union representation, employers should be prevented from punishing them or putting up roadblocks in their way. I find it much more likely that employers rather than union organizers would employ scare tactics and put roadblocks in the way of unionization. After all, before a union is in existance, the employer has all the power as well as the means and motive to forcefully dissuade employees from organizing.

Bottom line: don't believe everything that you hear about this bill.

The Hovel (Nobody Would Ever Live In THAT Dump)

Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-head single mom who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, never opening it again. Not even once.

“The Hovel” is located on the corner of 17^th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, highest per capita gay population and highest percentage of police compared to total population. More homosexuals per square foot than San Francisco and more cops per wise guy than in New York. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location…if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill, a gyro joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.

I’ve lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney Nebraska, and before that, six months in Sidney Nebraska after moving here from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I had a reason for coming to Nebraska, got talked into coming to Lincoln and I’m still here due to inertia, or momentum, I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.

It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a block to the north. So, I muse, what should I do? How about blowing my brains out? The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to kill some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I’m not opening that thing again! As I thought up and contemplated idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.

So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now.

Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, assistant store director in a local grocery store chain, but I needed the income from the second job too. It would have been convenient to keep that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I had sold my soul (cheap) and become a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which originally stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t at all a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (which made it all better, right?); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions; we called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180 ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could access at any time by calling the toll-free number. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 (U.S.) from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to call it the “ASDC Continuum”. On one side were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were offering them. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they just couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. They were stupid. The people who we sold to were right in the middle. Stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort.

For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes doing political polling or surveys, but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at peddling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of a long and complicated spiel “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased.

It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.

So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was a meat cutter named Dennis, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job. Dennis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was Ba Nguyen Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. Ba could often be found walking up and down 27^th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills. One time he left some food cooking on the stove and it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-head woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church convinced him that homosexuality was a sin, but he still felt gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows (while they were closed). One day I came home to find them handcuffed and spread-eagled across the hood of a police car, with the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the Native American woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.

I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. Until one day the water was cut off. I came back late one Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning there was still no water, so I bathed and shaved using some bottled water that I had in the fridge. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, everyone that is except for me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment.

Beer Review: Michelob Winter's Bourbon Cask Ale

Holy cask! This was a most pleasant surprise! Michelob & Budweiser specialty brews tend to be (in my not-so-humble opinion) craft beers with training wheeks ion them. In other words, a great introduction for Bud and Michelob drinkers to "real" craft beer styles like Pale Ale, marzen and Dunkelweizen. My first thought when I took my first sip was "Whoa...they put some freakin' bourbon in this bottle with the beer!" On further sipping, I found what I describe as a cream soda-like taste. The color is a clear ruby red, not much of a head, but a unique, exciting taste. I give this baby a 7.5 on a scale of ten. AB recommends pairing it with seafood or clam chowder, which I will definitely try at a later date. This stuff is good!

Religion and Politics

Recently I was contacted via Facebook by an old friend. This friend had been my room mate about 20 years ago, was the best man at my first wedding and married our other room mate, a woman who I lived with when I first moved to Nebraska back in 1980. He quickly figured out that my religion was significantly different than his and also found out that my politics were quite different than his as well. In response to a post that I made about a political statement that he made, he asked if I "worshipped Obama too". He followed this up with some pointed questions about mt faith and politics. Shortly thereafter he "unfriended" me from Facebook. Apparently he didn't want to contaminate his computer with any words or thoughts from the pagan liberal out here in Nebraska!

Don't get me wrong, people can believe whatever they want, but do you really want to limit your friendships to people who are exactly like you?

Seasonal Beer Review: Schell Snowstorm

I tried a Schell variety pack a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised. Their winter seasonal offering, Snowstorm didn't let me down eitehr. A dark reddish-brown porter, it has hints of rye and chocolate in the mix, very little hoppiness and a very strong malt base. Heart, without being too heavy. 5.8% ABV. I'd recommend this one to anyone who likes the stouts and porters.

Winter Ghosts

Knowing

Without Knowledge

Grasping

The Winter Wind

Ghostly

Journeys Begin

Look Back

At Tomorrow

Seasonal Beer Review: Leinie's Fireside Nut Brown

I've long been a Leinenkugel fan, and at one time had my refrigerator full of various styles of Leinie's, as well as regularly partaking of pints (or even pitchers) of Leinie's Red at O'Rourke's. I tried the new seasonal Fireside Nut rown with some anticipation, but suffered a bit of a letdown. FNB was serviceable, but nothing spectacular. It's billed as a malty lager, but I detected a medium-strong hoppiness and thought the maltiness was understated. A bit thinner than I would have expected from the dark brown color and caramel head. Despite my less tha nglowing review, I'd still give it a 6 out of 10, and it would not be out of place at a holiday turkey dinner.

Beer Review: Sam Adams Longshot - Cranberry Wit

Every year Sam Adams conducts a home brew contest, with three winners, one of whom is an employee. One of the 2008 winners was Cranberry Wit. I had reviewed this one before when I first purchased the Longshot six-pack, but I wanted try it again right after tasting & reviewing the Cranberry Lambic. The Wit like the Lambic pairs well with poultry, but there are some differences. First off, there is no redness at all in the color of the beer or the head. The taste of the cranberries is a lot less noticable than the Lambic, and the taste is similar to the Blackberry Witbier that was part of the Summer Styles package. Probably more acceptable to the casual beer drinker, whereas the Cranberry Lambic is for the more adventurous.

Beer Review: Sam Adams Cranberry Lambic

"Lambic" is a Belgian style of beer that uses wild yeast strains and a combination of about 70% barley malt & 30% wheat. Cranberry Lambic is part of the Winter Classics holiday variety pack. The appearance is cloudy and a reddish-yellow color, kind of like a hefeweizen or unfiltered wheat, with a thick cranberry-red head. The taste is very wheaty and the cranberries definitely dominate. It supposedly has some maple syrup mixed in, but I couldn't taste it myself. There's a slightly sour aftertaste that the Sam Adams website says is due to the wild yeast fermentation, but to me tastes similar to unsweetened fruit juice. I had this brew with chicken cooked in the crockpot and stuffing on the side and found it a perfect pairing. A fine beer to complement your Thanksgiving dinner.

Vacation!

Vacation isn't over yet, and it's been the longest consequetive stretch of time off since I was hospitilized about 3 years ago, but I have really gotten used to the idea of not going to work every day.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a grueling, hard physical labor type of job, I have a boss who doesn't micromanage me, I (mostly) get along with the people that I work with, and it takes me about 5 minutes to get to work in the morning!

But it's still work.

In the eleven days of my vacation, I spent a lot of time writing, took a seven-hour hike through Wilderness Park, saw two awesome blues concerts, took road trips to Lawrence Kansas to perform a wedding and to St. Louis Missouri to hear a lecture from author and spiritual teacher Christopher Penczak, and sampled a lot of beer. I slept in when I wanted to, saw the sunrise when I wanted to and watched the movie Second Hand Lions at the recommendation of a co-worker. I got a lot of great pictures at all of these activities.

Unfortunately, I need the income from my job to be able to afford to do these things, and maybe after a few months the retirement life would be less exciting.

As for now, I'm going to enjoy the last two days of my time off!

The Origins of Thanksgiving

In 1776 Christopher Columbus discovered Plymouth Rock, subsequently buying Manhattan from the redcoats for $24 worth of beads, trinkets and a cherry tree. Not long afterward, the evil white man corrupted the Indians by giving them blankets infested with cranberries. A great feast was called for, but the Indians couldn't eat ham due to kosher requirements, so they had to substitute turkey. At the conclusion of the feast Captain John Smith, whose name the Indian holy man Wattalodbul had prophesied would be used for all time as a pseudonym, called for all area merchants to construct giant balloons and parade them about and to rise at dawn to begin shopping for gifts to mark the birth of Christ.

Beer Review: Empyrean FestivAle & Limited Offering "Bagget"

Not everything that Empyrean brews gets bottled. FestivAle is the winter seasonal offering that I tried yesterday at their downtown Lazlo's restaurant. I'd call it an IPA India Pale Ale, although it's not described as such on their website. 6 1/2 % alcohol content, citrussy aftertaste and the typical IPA emphasis on hops, with a higher bitterness number (47) than anything else Empyrean has to offer. Nice sippin' ale.

The second ale that I tried was one of their limited offerings. I think that they called it a "baggett", although I could not find any reference to a "baggett" ale anywhere. Nontheless, it was brewed with what they said was a huge amount of honey, giving it a mead-like taste, which i couldn't just, since I've never tasted mead! That being said, it wasn't overly sweet as I had been lead to expect, but smooth and refreshing with just a hint of sweetness from the honey. Easily a "lawnmower" beer.

Sam Adams Winter Lager

A return engagement: Winter Lager comes back to the Winter Classics variety pack!

Not much of a head, and what little there was dissipated quickly. The color is a coppery brown, there's a hint (but alas, no more than a hint) of cinnamon, and a bit more of a hint of orange. Malty taste similar to Octoberfest, no bitterness at all.

This is a lager that would be great on tap during the winter months.