Brewzzi is one of those restaurants that looks like the entire thing was built from the remnants of a copper steam locomotive and the circa-1800’s train station that housed it.
Add the shiny copper brew system behind the plate glass windows, and it’s the quintessential steampunk man cave.
Tequila and I aren’t good friends.
I never really cared for it that much, and it usually just makes me ill. But other people love it, and from the recent explosion of tequila bars (one at Epcot, no less), it seems that high quality tequilas are starting to become the in thing. I, however, will be sticking with beer.
There’s a little known musical genre I’m fond of called Chopped and Screwed. It’s a method of remixing wherein the track, usually hip hop or R&B, is slowed down dramatically and cut in (or ‘Chopped’) on itself, allowing key notes or phrases to be repeated.
Take, for example, Alexander O’Neal’s If You Were Here Tonight. Listen to the original, then to the Chopped and Screwed version. This will give you an idea of the genre.
I think it was on my first trip to Due South, taking a tour with my lovely wife, that we had out first taste of Mexican Standoff. This might have been their first iteration, because the brew was just a few steps away from being straight hot sauce.
Literally, drinking it was like being that German guy at the end of Raders of the Lost Ark. Apparently, the first time the beer was brewed, they threw the entire chili pepper, seeds and all, into the brew not thinking too much about it.
The Manzanita tree is a medium sized evergreen known for their small, twisty branches and orange-red color. If you’ve ever seen the twisty branches at a wedding, those are manzanita branches. They also have grape-sized berries that are commonly made into ciders, used as sweetners, or eaten straight.
They’re indigenous to the west coast of the U.S. and as far east as Texas. There’s also a small grove of them along the shores of Lost Creek Lake near Medford, Oregon. The lake was created in 1977 along with the opening of what is now the William Jess Dam. A wide variety of activities make the lake popular with the outdoor crowd.
Props to Tampa Bay Brewing for the most interesting backronym name for a beer. If the sexy, dentally-challenged individual on the label was any clue, today’s beer is clearly made for a P.I.M.P. (Porter, 9.5% ABV).
It is starting to get a little nuts out there in Florida Craft Beer land. There are a lot of breweries that are doing great things on an incredibly small scale, some are doing lackluster things statewide, and there’s a huge number of breweries to choose from inbetween.
One of those breweries that are doing absoluely mindblowing things on a small scale is Central 28, based in DeBary. Being close to Daytona Beach and the I-4 corridor, they currently can and distribute, but within a small footprint.
Time for a ghost story.
Cassadaga is a small unincorporated community not too far from Daytona Beach. But whereas Daytona is NASCAR, bikers, and Spring Break, Cassadega is known more for tarot cards and palm readers.
