Category: Monthly Features

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A Podcast & A Beer – Let’s Make a Rom-Com

Last month, I listened to comedians trying to come up with a plausible Sci-Fi pilot.  Well, that same team has released (on Valentine’s Day of course), Let’s Make a Rom-Com.

Ryan Beil, Maddy Kelly, and Mark Chavez are appealing as hosts / romance writers and because they are both really trying to write a romantic comedy while simultaneously learning about why and how one clicks makes the podcast really work.

For beer, I would head to chocolate. Chocolate stouts. German chocolate pastry beer. Bottle Logic in Orange County has a plethora of beers like that. Or if you want to dig deeper, pick a past or current relationship and where you “met cute” and pick a beer from that city.

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Sean Suggests for March 2023

This month’s trio is brought to you by the letter S for Spring. Also the letter C for California.

Riip Brewing Solo Triip IPA – 6.8% – “The next adventure in our single hop series focuses on one of the most ubiquitous hops in the world, Mosaic.”

Beachwood / Urban Roots Steely Jam IPA – 7.1% – “A collaboration between Beachwood and Urban Roots, Steely Jam is a hoptacular riffage using sustained chords of Strata, Mosaic and Mosaic Cryo hops.”

HiDef Brewing Spring Reverb – 7.45% – “Barrel aged mixed culture fruited sour with a mild pleasant funk, tart and crisp. Fruited with peach, raspberry and passion fruit.”

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A Book & A Beer – How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

Faux celebrity and fifteen minutes of fame is the underlying theme of How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann and the author goes to some dark and stark places to bring a new perspective to popularity and its side effects.

Here is the GoodReads synopsis, it’s a doozy, “In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina’s love story will shock them all.”

This was a wild book. Just weirdness on every page. The fairy tale aspects didn’t work for me as much as the more reality show aspects. But it sure wasn’t a dull read at all. And I will certainly be on the lookout for future work when wandering in a bookstore.

On to the beer choices, I would try to find beers for each of the women in the group. Maybe something with rose hips or hibiscus for Ashlee. A dark Czech lager for Ruby. A pastry stout for Gretel. A black IPA for Bernice. And for Raina, maybe a beer with the label removed so you don’t know and have to guess.

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In the Tap Lines for March 2023

March, where the national holidays are sparse but a big ol’ beer drinking holiday is smack dab in the middle of the month. Also smack dab is the California Craft Brewers Conference. I will be in Sacramento covering CA Craft from my point of view.

~ e-visits to (3) breweries from around the Golden State

~ special featured reviews of Sacramento brewery beers

~Heads-Up on Los Angeles Beer Events

~ Three suggested beers to buy this month. One light, one medium and one dark

~ A Book & A Beer reads How To Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to Let’s Make a RomCom

~ Sports & A Beer returns for month three with

~ New Beer Releases and Best Beers of the Month

~ I will tap the Firkin and give my no holds barred opinion on the craft beer world.

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The Firkin for February 2023

Am I the only one who feels that the big thing seems slow to arrive. Is the big craft beer trend caught in an airport somewhere?

No new IPA variant is on the horizon. A slight uptick, to my mind, in Triple IPAs but we seem stuck in Cold (IPL or IPA) weather when it comes to the dominant style.

Pastry stouts seem to be reaching an expiration date as you can reliably find then on shelves. We get the yearly pilsner spiel but them and lagers have a low ceiling.

Maybe some adjunct will become the de rigeur ingredient for brewers, I had an excellent blue corn pilsner recently and I could see any number of heirloom agricultural products touching a beer fans nerve.

But as we saunter into the last month of Q1, it seems no change in direction for the good ship craft.

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A Book & A Beer – The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

I do not actively hate books that I read. I may think a writing style is poor, or there is a character that I don’t like but I can usually ferret out a good component of a book.

Yet, I pick up a supposed classic. One that has a new two-part movie coming out and has had multiple movies made from it that is just crap. None of the three titular heroes are worth a damn. They drink and eat, to excess. They are offended and ready to duel at the drop of a hat and they have the money management skills of a toddler.

And yet, they are paragons compared to the complete asshole that is D’Artagnan who tries to have an affair with a married noble, then falls for the female villain while ignoring the servant girl who does everything he asks her to.

There is barely any action really. Mostly horse riding and a little sword play. The villainy is pretty cartoonish and the pacing of the book is painfully dull. I stopped reading two separate times and came back to it thinking that the kernel of a story or a character arc would arrive, but alas, it was not to be.

If you dare to read this mess or another howler of a book, I would recommend finding a beer that you thought was bad from your drinking past or a beer with bad marks on Untappd. The goal being to find out what flaws that the beer has thar are most offensive and if it could be saved.

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Needed or Not? – Mystic Galactic

The bottle of whiskey in the fancy bottle above will set you back $75,000. Why? Because it will be aged in a low altitude orbit above the Earth. The very definition of “space aged”.

But wait, that is not all. You get an NFT, exclusive launch and re-entry parties, a piece of one of the space barrels and a sample bottle so you do not sully the main bottle. If the wooden barrels filled with alcohol do not explode on re-entry, of course.

Part of me wishes that craft beer would bring back the over the moon, wack-a-doodle ideas that cost more than they taste good. Age a beer in a cemetery. Brew a glitter seltzer shandy. Break some rules!

Needed? – Of course not. You can spend that 75k if you want, but you have to spend the same amount on a charity at the same time.

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A Podcast & A Beer – Let’s Make a Sci-Fi

This month the spotlight is on Sci-Fi.

Three Canadian comedians try to create a good sci-fi show, in Let’s Make A Sci-Fi.  Those comedians are Ryan Beil, Maddy Kelly, and Mark Chavez.  It is an eight episode series that follows the ups and the downs of birthing the next cool adventure. 

This podcast ticks a couple boxes off the bat, under 10 episodes so I am waiting for a finish and in the 30 to 40 minute range so I know editing has been done.

Plus this is not just a riff-a-thon. The trio are actually trying with humor as a side dish. Plus it makes you think about why you like certain Sci-Fi and not others. I don’t think I would have made the choices they did and I may not have liked their pilot but the getting there was fun and interesting.

On the craft beer side, I would look for any Ecliptic Brewing beers because they have space and astronomy themed beers that would match plus they have some nice lighter PNW IPAs that would be just right. If not Portland adjacent, I would choose a dark as the sky Czech Dark Lager since that style of beer hides a lighter interior.

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Sports & A Beer – All Star Games

All-Star games in the U.S. have morphed quite a bit in the last few years alone. Who would have thought that there would be flag football played with NFL players or that the NBA would have playground style captains picking teams.

Overall an All-Star game has turned into a weekend of entertainment and not a true celebration of the best players and it has suffered along with awards shows like the Oscars and Grammys with what is the best anyway.

Injuries and just being worn down also play a role. NBA players with a third of their season still in front of them just don’t want to aggravate anything and thus no read defense is played and the NBA finally had to change the rules to a first to this point total rule. The NFL plays after a long season, that is now even longer right after the Super Bowl so no Chiefs or Eagles are going to play.

My idea is to put the game at the start of the season. Have the sportswriters choose the starting line-ups and give the fans and coaches input on reserves. Make it a shortened game and have each team play for a charity with the winning team donating a larger amount. Add in three point shooting or field goal kicking contests to round it out.

This would hype up the coming season and add a little competition back into the event.

On the beer side, choose your beer rating app of choice and find a starting five of the best ranked beers. Saison Dupont. Pliny the Elder. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Those would be on my list.

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The 1st Firkin of 2023

Speak for 11 seconds otherwise Skynet will know that you are inebriated. Confused? Read THIS, then come back.

Now, my first inclination is to think that the creators of this speech recognition software are tooting their horn a little bit too much. I am thinking of early lie detector tests where foolproof claims were made that just could not be backed up. Primarily because body reactions may not be about what you are being asked but what someone is afraid will be learned.

A person could have just gotten a yes to a date proposal, for example, and be really giddy. Maybe as giddy as I get when tipsy. Or they could have been told no and start mumbling. Would that trigger as an alcohol caused speech pattern.

And going back to my happier mood, how does the AI know my baseline? And what if I am particularly happy because my birthday month starts tomorrow? How does that factor in?

As with the lie detector, this inebriation sensor might be good as part of an overall set of proofs, not as a sole one.