Category: Monthly Features

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A Book & A Beer – The Napoleon of Crime by Ben MacIntyre

Fiction sometimes echoes facts and such is the case with James Moriarty, arch nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. He was partially based on an American gentleman thief named Adam Worth. And his story is told in The Napoleon of Crime by Ben MacIntyre.

From faking his own death in the Civil War to London, Paris, New York and Johannesburg, Adam Worth live a full life despite not making it to 57 years old. He stole diamonds, money, pickpocketed and ran a gambling den but is most famous for s more spur of the theft of the famous Gainsborough painting, The Duchess of Devonshire.

With each chapter you wonder who else can be stuffed into his man’s adventure. The Pinkertons, Scotland Yard, Pierpont Morgan, criminal nicknames galore and Sherlock Holmes. The face you see on the book jacket provided the idea for Moriarty. Now famous as the ultimate arch nemesis. But he was a gentleman through and through. Barely resorting to violence and always striving and always spending his ill gotten gains as fast as he took them.

It is a fast paced book with a lot of twists and turns, highs and lows and a lot of transatlantic boat travel.

To beer pair with this historical tale, I would suggest selecting beers that say they are on style but really are something else. A good example being Widmee Hefeweizen which is actually a really good wheat beer. Or perhaps there is a DIPA that is a really a Triple IPA.

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Sports & A Beer – Caps and Aprons

I was going to talk about climate change and how that would affect attendance at sporting events but decided to tackle a far sexier topic. Player salaries.

I am A-OK with players fleecing team owners (especially if they donate some of it to charity). But the arcane rules and breaking the spirit but not letter of the law is a bit crazy now.

I got started on this because July 1st is Bobby Bonilla Day. Every July 1st until 2034, The New York Mets Baseball Club pays him 1.1 Million Dollars. Not bad to just pay that, you might say, except for the fact that Mr. Bonilla has been retired since 2002.

And once that contract finally expires, the Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Club will start paying Shohei Ohtani north of 65 Million a year whether or not he is playing for them or anyone. Deferred payments.

Not to pick on my least favorite sport of baseball. My Chelsea FC is addicted to 10 year contracts simply to skirt yearly wage bill limits set by the Premiere League in Britain. Also, just this year, my Portland Trailblazers made the final payment to a player who hadn’t ever suited up for them in a trade so long ago there was considerably less gray hairs on my head.

Every league is trying to promote parity even while some owners are parsimonious to the Nth degree. See Colorado Rockies and Sterling era Los Angeles Clippers.

No matter what salary caps you put into place or tax aprons you add, there will be a math guru finding a way around it. So how about let the owners pay what they want and if they hit a tax threshold, put that money into the local schools or homeless shelters or food banks.

For a beer, you can go one of two ways. You can buy something barrel-aged and exclusive or you can find bargain gems. Either way, I want you to fill out a six-pack roster within a budget of $50.

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A Podcast & A Beer – Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare

Do not shy away from Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare because despite the lengthy name this is a simple podcast premise. 

Produced by Jane Marie, of “This American Life”, and Joanna Solotaroff, of “2 Dope Queens”, Finally! are half-hour episodes that follow a day in the life of a wide swath of American women. From people who sing or skydive.  Catch cats or catch the final moments of life.  These are portraits of people and what they do and it is quite affecting.

Your beer choice is just as straightforward.  Find a beer brewed by a woman or a brewery owned by a woman and have one of their beers.  Preferably a simple, straightforward beer style such as a porter or an amber to match the simplicity of the show.

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The Firkin for June 2024

Are building landlords the biggest problem for breweries now and is it more of a problem in higher cost Los Angeles?

When an industry reeling a bit and breweries closing, the first suspects through the door are ingredient and labor costs and / or shrinking customer base.  The former pushes raising the cost of a pint and the latter scares you away from doing that so as not to lose more customers.

But rarely is the cost of the physical space invoked. Is it not an issue?

As I write this, there is an empty apartment in the building next door.  My building has had extended periods without a tenant in one of the four units because my landlord is quite rigorous in her selection process but throughout the fair city of Glendale there is plenty with a capital P office space, plenty of business space in one of the many with a capital M condominiums in town and even quite regular space open at the fancy Americana mall.

It seems a math question of possible future returns vs steady now money.  But the value of a current tenant does not seem to have risen very much if at all while the allure of some dream tenant walking in and paying double as far-fetched as it may or may not be seems to be in vogue.

I do not know how pervasive it is in the Los Angeles rental market for breweries but I have seen it mentioned a fair bit and I saw it play out with the beloved Sunset Beer Co. which was intentionally priced out of their space.  Even though literally across the street was a new and very empty development that was mostly graffiti.  

How does a landlord see that and go, now is the time to look for higher paying tenants? Do they have the cash reserves to pay for a building not getting rented out?  

I know that the stereotype of a landlord is not great even though I have a great one and others do as well.  That perception should lead to landlords differentiating themselves by being really good.  By selecting a business that they can have for the long term and work with so that BOTH succeed.  Why is that not the norm?

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A Podcast & A Beer – The Curious History of Your Home

You reach into a drawer and pull a fork out.  Common place.  No big deal.  But did you know that the Catholic Church at one point banned the use of them?  Obviously fork use leads to sin.  That is just one fact from The Curious History of Your Home hosted by domestic historian Ruth Goodman.

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This is just a cool and fast paced jaunt through history via things in your home like the dishwasher or your cat and it is super fun and weird to see the evolution of wallpaper or coffee. Or specific to this blog, the May 27th episode about beer!

To pair with this podcast, you can go one of a couple routes.  You could go historical beers.  Find a Scotch Ale or a Witbier.  Or you could go further down the rabbit hole and pair a beer to each specific episode.  Gardening could you lead to a beer with say lavender or strawberry or other small garden items.

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Sports & A Beer – NIL

Name, image and likeness.  To universities and coaches, it is a bit of a curse word.  To the NCAA as a whole?  A lot more swear words.  But how will college sports really be changed by this?  Probably won’t know until a few years and college classes have gone through but I have a guess and it involves a power switch.

That switch was from coach to player.  It is on full display here in Los Angeles with LeBron James and Anthony Davis as much in charge of head coach as the front office.  It is seen in the transfer portal where athletes head out of town if they don’t play or get to play in the style they want.

This will expand, in my opinion, to those college athletes who will find that they have levers of power to pull and will start to pull them.  Who will stand in the way of a 19 year old combo guard who is making local commercials really well and whose draft stock is rising?

Not the college who has a marquee name to use as a draw. Not a coach who is on the hot seat. Not a NCAA administrator who needs to keep both happy.  Of course keeping the worker down is endemic in the US so all will keep trying to push the athlete down but they might soon find that they cannot.

Pivoting to beer, the closest analog to a NIL is IP and how breweries skirt lawsuits with beer names and labels.  Who will gain the upper hand there?  So go find a beer with a movie reference or a product reference on it.  How does name and likeness translate in the realm of beer labels?

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A Book & A Beer – The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

This one is a recommendation from my Mom and when I went to check it out from the Glendale library, I was a bit startled by how many pages it was.  Around 575.  But there are short books that are slogs and doorstops that breeze by and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles glides by like a Studebaker on the highway.

It tells the tale of Emmet and Billy Watson.  Two brothers in the middle of the country going on a trip to find their mom who left them many years previously.  Other characters come in and out like the Duchess and Wooly, Sally and 

This was a pleasant enough book but all the characters seemed very soap opera thin. You had the noble leader, the stalwart gal, the wise younger brother, the wild card and the dim but lovable character. The crazy thing that I though of was the book reminded me of the later Back to the Future movies where everything got very broad and you could see where a scene was going to go from miles away. So if a safe needed to be cracked you knew the wild card would fly off the handle, and the preternaturally smart kid would figure out the combination.

But the end of the book threw me for a loop. I did not see that level of casual disregard to happen.

Anyway for beer the obvious way to go would be to Google the Lincoln Highway route and see which breweries are close that route and have those ready. I would add that finding some Bay Area beers would be a good choice too since the end destination is San Francisco. Maybe a Pliny the Elder would do for the wise kid.

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Sports & A Beer – Drafting a QB1

The NFL draft and all its many rounds and players is done and now we wait for the season to start and to see which of the plethora of Quarterbacks taken in the Top 10 alone will fare.  Which will play and show promise, which will hold the clipboard (or is it iPad now?) and which will pull a Zach Wilson and flame out real hard and get called out by his owner.

Bear in mind that the offensive coordinator and the receiving corps are integral to any QBs success and some of these passers will not get either and will be harder to grade because of it.  Some will not be able to scale up to the speed of the NFL. And despite more and more mental and physical tests and all sorts of AI and computer modeling, no one is any closer to predicting success.

But I will go out on a limb and give a few guesses as to who will make a mark and who might have trouble….

Good Spots

Caleb Williams the No. 1 pick is walking into a team with two big wide receiver additions in Keenan Allen and Rome Odunze to go with DJ Moore and lowered expectations from past QBs make this a great spot to to land.

J.J. McCarthy in Minnesota also inherits a strong receiving and tight end corp and will not need to put the team on his back. Just needs to get that pigskin to the playmakers.

Drake Maye in New England is following some really mediocre quarterbacks so has a really low bar to clear for success and since the Patriots have a new coach and are clearly rebuilding this can be a learning year.

Bad Spots

Michael Penix in Atlanta. Why the Falcons selected any QB after backing up a Brinks truck for Kirk Cousins is way beyond me. Then the GM says that Penix will be groomed to take over wheb Cousins contract is done in FIVE YEARS.

Jayden Daniels is the new Commanders QB and I don’t know which direction the entire team is going so I fear Daniels will be running for his life.

For beer, see if you can find a brewery from each of those five cities or you can just go get Kansas City beer since Patrick Mahomes is the ne plus ultra of quarterbacks.

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A Podcast & A Beer – Into the Tardis

The 15th Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, made a memorable entry and then followed up with goblins at Christmas and is set for his first full season of adventures starting this month.  But if you need more Doctor Who, the place to go for a prolific amount of content is Big Finish which produces audio stories of all the Doctors.  Want more Paul McGann than just one TV movie and cameos?  They have some. Looking for more Christopher Eccleston?  They have it.

Up until now, you had to buy it but there is now a podcast version which will give you a taste of the danger and whimsey just minus the visual effects.  Into the Tardis is hosted by Colin Baker and it also includes little snippets of behind the scenes info.

For an ale accompaniment, I would suggest the easy route if finding some British beers either from Britain like Samuel Smith’s for instance or if you can find that rare American made mild or bitter, go for that. If you wanted to dig deeper, try to get some Scottish beer (just not Brewdog) to honor the heritage and accent of past Doctors and the current one. More American would be Single Hill’s Partner in Time IPA.

Or if you into that sort of thing, there are quite a few blue hued beers. Great Notion is one purveyor of non beer colored beers.

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The Firkin for April 2024

Whenever economic figures for craft beer are powerpointed and then later dissected, it always seems to be in a tone of grimness.

Maybe people thought the high flying double digit days were never going to cool or that another alcoholic beverage would ever possibly have its time in the sun.

But that somber news story is exactly that, a story, one of many. And the side of the story that I wish would be focused on more is that of the sheer amount of breweries in the United States now.

The number is close to 10K. And that is amazing. Who would have thought back on 2000 or 2010 that there would be that many. Remember that back in the 80’s that there were barely any and the regional players were on life support. Even if this is the plateau, that is such a turn around.

Yes, closures may soon outpace openings but even so 10K! I have one taproom that I can walk to and three breweries that are super short drives to.

It may not be confetti in the air but this is still a good time for craft beer fans.