LT Saloon

U.S. Examines Whether Blackwater Tried Bribery

Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis died in a shooting involving Blackwater Worldwide.

Eros Hoagland for The New York Times

Written by Mark Mazzetti and James Risen for the NYT

WASHINGTON (NY Times)— The Justice Department is investigating whether officials of Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining the firm’s security work in Iraq after a deadly shooting episode in 2007, according to current and former government officials.

LINK

The Technical Edge: At home water testing

“Serving the technical side of homebrewing”

By Kai, for braukaiser.com

Water composition is important for brewing and many brewers either send their water to a lab for analysis or build brewing water from scratch using very soft (e.g. reverse osmosis water) and salts. It is, however, also possible to test brewing water at home. The precision and amount of detail of such a water test does not match that of a professional analysis, but it is sufficient to estimate the residual alkalinity of the brewing water with an acceptable accuracy. At home water testing also allows regular testing of a water source in order to detect seasonal changes which may warrant a more precise professional analysis.

LINK

Brew Biz: Werts and All

…and a “Where Are They Now” Brewer Profile: Todd Hicks

By Ken Carman

Perdido Vineyards
22100 County Road 47
Perdido, Alabama 36562
(251) 937-9463
http://www.perdidovineyards.com
Owner: Jim Eddins

I’ve known Todd Hicks for many years and through quite a few phoenix like rebirths. The first time I met Todd he was brewing at McGuires in Pensacola with Steve Fried. Since then he has brewed at the various rebirths of a brewpub in downtown Mobile, Alabama. It’s been Cannon, Hurricane; amongst other incarnations.

Can a brewpub be Buddhist in nature? If they used milk in a Milk Stout would the brewer wind up being reincarnated as a cockroach under foot for punishment?

Todd has been involved in almost every attempt to start a brewpub west of Tallahassee, east of Mississippi. Todd took Santa Rosa in Fort Walton from a brewpub that sometimes hooked up a Bud or Miller keg; claiming it as their own, to a brewpub that had one of the finest red ales I’ve ever had, and one of the strangest owners. Marketing “Death Cigarettes?” Luckily that brand name went about as far as where it was first placed: in the movie “Waterworld;” a multi-million dollar, four time nominated for a “Razzie” award including worst picture, worst actor, worst director and worst supporting actor, fiasco.

Santa Rosa may have gone the way of Death Cigarettes, but Todd “the immortal” lives on. You have to admire his stick-to-it-tive-ness and his ability to find ways to continue to perfect his craft. His last brewmaster job was at the now folded Hurricane in Mobile. I had a feeling it wouldn’t last. The menu alone was so sparse and unimaginative I could tell the owner didn’t seem all that serious. The brew business: and more specifically the brewpub business, in this area has always been a bit rocky, with McGuires being pretty much the sole survivor for many, many miles in any direction.

I could go on and provide a long list of achievements and where he has been, but this isn’t just about what Todd was, but where he is now and what his plans are.

So while Todd looks for investors to, yet again, reopen the old downtown Mobile location, he has also been providing his talents to a winery in Perdido, Alabama: about 50 miles north of Mobile, just off of I-65, on the east side of the interstate. Hard to miss. About the only thing at the exit.
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Alabama bill aims to help brewpubs through deregulation

Ben Self, head of quality control at Good People Brewing Co. in Birmingham, draws a sample of the brewer’s Snakehandler Double Indian Pale Ale. (Michael Tomberlin/Birmingham News)

Written by Michael Tomberlin for The Birmingham News

The beer advocacy group that brought higher-alcohol craft beers to Alabama is now looking to release breweries and brewpubs from red tape and what it considers outdated laws that stymie the industry in the state.

The group, Free the Hops, is pushing the Brewery Modernization Act, which has been introduced in the Alabama House of Representatives. A similar bill is planned for introduction in the Alabama Senate.

The goal is to inject common sense into the laws that apply to breweries and brewpubs across the state, according to Free the Hops’ president, Stuart Carter. “Why are breweries and brewpubs under different legislation? At the end of the day, they both manufacture beer.”

Dan Roberts, head of legislative issues for the group, said the Alabama Brewpub Act from 18 years ago has not led to the expansion of breweries inside restaurants that many hoped for because the law made it difficult for brewpubs to find an approved location and to make a profit. For instance, brewpubs are limited to opening in historic buildings and other narrowly defined locations.

Today, only Birmingham and Huntsville have open, operating breweries. Several brewpubs that opened under the current law have closed, including some in Birmingham, Mobile and Auburn.
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Book Review: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

A Book Review by Joyce Lovelace

I recently read “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski. What a wonderful book. OK – it was about a boy and his dog(s). A boy, his family and their dogs, who they raised with affection and respect for their intelligence and heart. Set in farm country – what more could I ask.
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The Loss of Heart’s Ease

HERD ABOUT IT?

by Ana Grarian

From: “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” NY Times Magazine Sunday Jan 31, 2010 “There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” (Glenn) Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” Read on -- There is more »« Okay, fold it up now

Kew Gardens and Hops

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Richmond
Surrey TW9 3AB
UK

And…

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Wakehurst Place
Ardingly
West Sussex RH17 6TN
UK

Quotes from Kew Gardens’ site regarding their mission: saving hops that might otherwise go extinct…
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A Report on Young’s Kew from England

Written by hywel

(For hywelsbiglog.files.wordpress.com)

THE Bethnal Green Food Center has been useful lately. Over the last few weeks, they’ve sold more bottle conditioned British ales than I knew existed. Here is my most recent purchase. A £1.99 pence bottle of Young’s Kew Gold.

This is the same Young’s that brought us Special London Ale and Luxury Double Chocolate Stout. And part of the same Wells & Young’s behind Banana Bread Beer and Bombardier Satanic Mills. As such, hopes are high and the bottle looks very familiar.

Why do I like bottle conditioned ales? Who wants yeast floating around in their drink? Simple. It turbo-charges the flavour, and it’s divisive. And that makes for interesting comments at the end of this post.

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Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti

One of the best, and funniest, responses to crazy-coot Pat Robertson’s dingbat allegation that Haitians made a pact with the devil (see video below) comes by way of the Letters to the Editor section of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and was written by Lily Coyle of Minneapolis.

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

President Scott ‘W.’ Brown in 2012?

“A couple of things are striking about the pro-[Scott] Brown spending. It’s always entertaining to watch someone self-described as an independent, political free operator getting so much support from national conservative groups. And it’s especially entertaining given that while many of these groups support ideological purges from their party, Brown is … a liberal, according political scientist Boris Shor. He is in fact more liberal than Dede Scozzafava, the unfortunate, erstwhile GOP nominee in the special House election in New York a few months back. Shor writes:

‘Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country.’”
– Robert Schlesinger, “Scott Brown Benefits From Late National Republican Money,” US News, Jan. 17, 2010.