Tag: Sports & A Beer

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Sports & A Beer – The Transfer Portal

When Deion Sanders moved to coaching the University of Colorado, he touched off a massive amount of player movement, most prominently out from last year’s football team into what is now called the transfer portal.

Now I am all for Name and Likeness deals and college players getting paid (and maybe coaches not getting paid more than 10 college professors) but this wholesale switching from college team to college team just seems even further from the collegiate ideal than before.

Why not just have a football minor league with academies for younger players? That way players can learn about agents and handling money and life after sports.

But I digress from the topic at hand. I think that a portal can be good but it does need to have some guardrails. A coach can’t push someone into a portal and neither should a player move into it just because he was passed over for a starting position.

I thought of this in connection with beer because brewers leave breweries to work at a different brewery or start their own. I saw Kevin Davey who was at Wayfinder who now is under the Heater Allen umbrella. Iam McCall from Riip Beer in the South, South Bay is going on to his own place. They are using the brewer portal to start freah.

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Sports & A Beer – Another New Jersey

Not talking about the state but rather the state of multiple jerseys in sports. Every team seems to have a home jersey, a road jersey, a third jersey for home or away, a themed jersey just for one season, then the process starts again next year.

Digression – Maybe the way to stop tanking is to force teams in the bottom five to wear only two styles all year.

I follow the Timbers and Thorns of Portland and Dear God, it is a design rollercoaster from weird dusty pinks to punk Shakespeare when the best uniforms are almost always the most simple. Now, that is not to say a refresh isn’t warranted or that creativity should be stifled but more does not always correlate to better. Don’t get me started on the Oregon Duck football jerseys. Why highlighter yellow? And with advertisers added onto it, things can get squeezed in with bad results.

Maybe this is the old man, back in my day coming out but, my vote is for a standard every year home and away pair and them have one alternate that changes year by year. It’s hard enough to keep track of players and also keep track of which jersey is from what year.

Now your job is to find a branded extension set of beers and decide if they really need them all, or which one is your favorite in a group. Find a bunch of Sculpins or Torpedos or Hopnosis and really check if more is better.

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In the Tap Lines for May 2023

It has been a colder than usual spring here in L.A., heck the whole West Coast. No joke but it snowed in Portland on April 1st. Let’s dive into a month of beer fun with shorts on.

~ e-visits to (3) breweries from the upcoming Firestone Walker Invitational

~ special featured reviews of whatever is new in my ‘fridge

~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 Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to Doctor Dante

~ Sports & A Beer returns with the proliferation of team jerseys

~ 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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Sports & A Beer – Tanking

To be a commissioner for a major sports league probably requires spending an inordinate amount of time to stop teams from tanking.

Tanking being that decision to either trade away or not play your best players in order to get a high draft pick after the season. The poster child of tanking were the Philadelphia 76ers about six years ago who re-imagined tanking as “the process”.

My beloved but hard to watch Portland Trailblazers have pressed the tank button the last two years and the Dallas Mavericks head coach came out and said they were not going for a win, were actively trying to avoid the playoffs which they mathematically could have reached.

To properly tank you have to avoid that Mavericks path. You cannot publicly acknowledge the tank. You just silently do it. Otherwise, karma will more than likely come for you. By karma, I mean the league office with fines.

You can debate the morality of tanking but until you have a real negative consequence such as relegation to a lower league, there is no stick nor enough of a carrot in expanded playoffs to not do it.

For beer to pair with this not so savory part of sports, see if you can find one of two beers, both related to consensus NBA pick #1 this year, Victor Wembanyama…

  1. Something from the R&D brewer from Figueroa Mountain – Victor Novak.
  2. A French Saison to match Wembanyama’s nationality.

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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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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.