I find it funny that breweries tend to go a little more out for Father’s Day then they do for Mother’s Day.Maybe dad wants a massage, too. Maybe Mom wants a beer, too.
That’s not to say that breweries don’t go all out for Mother’s Day, but they tend to do a little bit more for Father’s Day.
Naturally, being a beer drinker and a father, part of me enjoys that combination and I tend to try to get a little something special beer-wise on that day.
It’s one thing to hang out around people that know craft beer. It’s another thing entirely to find somebody who doesn’t know it very well at all but is starting to get into it, then taking them to the deep end and shoving them in with both hands.
In this era of social distancing, we have had to do a lot of new and different activities to celebrate people whose normal celebrations have been interrupted. A perfect example are high school graduations, and to compensate, several people on my block decided to hold a massive graduation party for seniors that live on our street.
Hopefully you have been watching the Sunshine State Happy Hour, our quarantine show that is now going out every Thursday at 6 PM.
During the show’s initial 5 days a week run, I have spoken to a lot of brewers, that have all mentioned everybody started packaging beer more once the quarantine started.The problem with that is finding the actual packaging to fill with said beers.
That has been a surprisingly tall order and there are a lot of breweries, like Gulfstream Brewing in Fort Lauderdale, that had to package beers without any sort of labeling. As a result, the only way you can identify their beers was by the stamp on the bottom of the can. Oddly fun in a weird sort of way.
I love cucumbers.
Actually, my entire family loves cucumbers. In fact, one of my daughter’s favorite snacks is cucumber slices with a tiny bit of salt on top. And whenever I eat cucumber, I cannot help but think of this song:
It is amazing that Florida craft beer has been around long enough to where we can see so many breweries going through a complete rebranding. Almost every major brewery in Florida has done it at this point, and I’ve noticed that rebranding tends to skew a bit towards the minimalist.
I absolutely love it, but I do find it interesting. One of those breweries is Fat Point, and a very astute and helpful reader brought them to my attention by commenting on an article I wrote back in 2015 about their Big Boca Ale (Thank you, Jim!).
Sun Squishy is the greatest name ever.
Which is funny, since I am particularly fond of Clermont, Florida, and yet I had to start by just saying Sun Squishy.
If you are a triathlete in Central Florida, you are probably very familiar with Clermont. If you’re not, Clermont is a wonderful land of huge lakes and big rolling hills that are very, very popular with triathletes. It’s one of the biggest cities in Lake County and maybe 30 minutes from Disney. Continue reading
Naturally, the current quarantine has been horrible for pretty much everybody on this planet and we have a lot of economic recovery do to in the future.
I speak to brewers and influencers, there are two positives that seem to be coming out of the current climate, however. First is delivery, in that a lot of breweries are starting to make deliveries right to your home where they weren’t able to before. Some of those breweries, such as Accomplice Ciderworks out of West Palm, have been very good at getting kegs from breweries that don’t distribute to this area and so I’ve have been able to try brews that I would normally be trying.
The other, and I know that this is a completely shameless self-promotion plug, is the Sunshine State Happy Hour. This is our show currently going live at 6 p.m. Eastern every weekday on our Facebook page with recaps on Youtube.
When I make fun of macro beers, and it’s a particular pasttime of mine, one focus of mine is the inclusion of rice in the malt bill. For a standard recipe like a Pilsner, rice is there to cheapen the total cost and essentially water the beer down.
This is funny, since I like sake, the traditional Japanese ‘rice wine’ whose production is much closer to beer than wine. It’s definitely the perfect, almost required accompaniment for sushi, a favorite in my household.
