At this year's Craft Brewers Conference, the keynote address included a video entitled "I am a craft brewer."

For all you homebrewers out there, you are craft brewers too. Some of the extremely talented folks over at HomebrewTalk.com made a similar video.

And just for the record....I am a home brewer.

Goodbye Cindy. You will be missed.
--------
When I come to the end of the road
and the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room.
Why cry for a soul set free?

Miss me a while...but not too long
and not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that we once shared
Miss me....but let me go

For this is a journey that we all must take
And all must go alone
It's all a part of the master's plan
A step on the road to home

When you are lonely and sick at heart
go to a place we've known
Remember not me, but the seeds I've sown
Then bury your sorrows beneath a tree
Rejoice with me, for I can now see...
Miss me....but let me go.
- C. C.

I want you to picture this scene.

Imagine that you work for a local lawn mowing and landscaping service. You drive a pickup truck that tows a trailer that holds the lawnmowers and other gear you use. Imagine that the truck that pulls this trailer has no working brakes, so whenever you park, you use a piece of 4x6 wood to block the wheels from moving.

Now imagine your doing a job at roughly noon on Wednesday. The house your working at is on a street that has a fairly decent downhill grade. Now imagine that as your driving your nice shiny professional grade ZTR mower up onto the trailer, the truck rocks so much that it overcomes the pitifully inadequate stopping force of the block of wood at takes off downhill, careening down the street with nobody at the controls. You hurriedly throw the mower into reverse, getting off of the now rapidly moving deathtrap trailer as it passes diagonally through a yard, bounces off a tree and comes to rest about a foot from another house. You very sheepishly knock on the front door of the house that was almost destroyed and prepare to apologize in very broken english.

Now, given that scenario, I don't think that most people would want to begin the conversation with the following:

(with a great big smile on your face) "Hi meester....I sorry I hit house with truck."

Wouldn't you feel that something was missing from that sentence? Like the word "almost" perhaps? As in "Hi meester...I sorry I almost hit house with truck"

If he had only added that vital missing word, the conversation would have gone much differently than it actually did.

The large oak tree on the south side of my house is now my new best friend, because without it, that truck probably would have ended up in my son's bedroom. I have nicknamed him GBT (the Great Barrier Tree) and given him two pints of homebrewed Smoked Porter as a thank you.

I missed the beginning of the Saturnalia Festival at the New Albanian Brewing Company/Rich O's Public House, but I still managed to get there in time for a real treat.

La Chouffe's N'Ice Chouffe


followed by a nice glass of NABC Hoptimus.

Just the thing I needed after an afternoon of X-mas shopping. And for those of you out there not quite done yet with your shopping yet, I have a request. Please...for the love of all that's holy...quit blocking the fucking aisle trying to decide if little Jimmy really needs that 14th Thomas the Train DVD and move to the side.....otherwise, I just might have to go postal and lay waste to all those around me with meat cleaver. And I won't feel a damn bit bad about it. I'm just about sure I can get a court to call it justifiable homicide.

No beer last night, but I felt the need to comment on a trend I'm seeing. I'm an avid homebrewer of mostly decent beer, and it seems to me that this hobby is having an explosion of popularity lately.

The local homebrew club I belong to seems to be getting new members at every meeting. A new homebrew supply shop (Cellar on the Square) has opened relatively recently in Corydon, Indiana. A co-worker has recently started to homebrew as well, and a couple more are interested.

So, to all you home brewers out there, I salute you. Brew on! and show the world that we need not live and die drinking the mass produced lowest common denominator swill being churned out by the mega-brewers of the world.

hmmm....more than a year since I posted anything here. I should be able to think of something worth writing about and that I want to share with the world at large. The former is very easy; the latter is much more difficult.

Maybe I should just start posting what beers I drink each day and see how long it takes the people that know me to hold an intervention in my living room.

Last nights drink was Mad River Brewing's Jamaica Sunset West Indies Pale Ale. Don't judge this beer by the 5th grader level artwork on the bottle. It's better than that.

And for all you hop head fanatics out there, today is the beginning of the Luplin Land Harvest Hopcoming at Rich O's Public House/New Albanian Brewing Company in New Albany, Indiana, which happens to be one of the best damn beer bars in America.