Quick Trivial Post

Well, it's no big secret that I'm a big dork. I love beer, I love thinking about beer, and I love beer trivia. And frankly, I love trivia of all kinds. Make that *almost* all kinds.

There's a company out there called "Stump! Trivia" which franchises out questions from a central repository and puts them into the hands of local trivia monkeys across the country. These people sign up often because they like trivia, but more often because they like alcohol and attention, and this is a reasonably easy way of securing cheap access to both.

Case in point, at Cornerstone Tavern in Manhattan, which features unremarkable (but generally inoffensive) food and reasonably attentive waitstaff. And trivia on Wednesdays. Oh right. And $1 Rolling Rock mugs. Recipe for awesome.

There are 13 beers on this table. That cost us $13.

Here's the problem: their trivia monkey sucks. They use Stump! as their source of questions, which means we get nineteen questions and two 10-question sheets over the course of 2.5 excruciating hours. We also get a woman who can't pronounce anything that looks remotely foreign, and who comments that she doesn't have to be smart because she's got a giant rack. I've been three times. Except for the $1 beer, I don't ever think I want to go back.

And I don't have to! We found a better place for bar trivia. Hooray for Drunken Smartass Trivia at Dempsey's Pub. Better questions, better beer, better location, better starting time, slightly higher price, suck it, Cornerstone.

I swear this post was going to be timely.

The following is a reprint, in full, from the Boston Globe's Op/Ed page on July 23, 2011. I was still trying to figure out how to appropriate it for this blog's purposes when its timeliness ran out. So as a next best thing, I'm just re-running it in full, but here's a link. Enjoy.

It wasn't the shuttered state parks that prompted Minnesota’s governor and legislature to resolve a budget impasse. Nor was it the 22,000 furloughed state employees or the disruptions in services for the needy and the disabled. In the end, it was all about the beer.

The Minnesota state government shut down July 1, after Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Republican legislative leaders failed to reach a budget deal. And for days, there was no end in sight. But on July 12, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that hundreds of bars would no longer be able to serve alcohol because state permits were set to expire. With no one on hand to issue new permits, there’d be no beer. The 10,000 places that sell liquor in the state were starting to see a depletion in stock, as inventories cannot be resupplied without a distributor tax stamp. The state had stopped issuing those.

And then, the unthinkable: Brewing giant MillerCoors was told to pull 39 of its brand labels from all shops, bars, and restaurants because it did not process its registration paperwork in time. The registration was set to expire on July 13.

Suddenly, Dayton and GOP lawmakers were willing to make compromises. The final budget deal, not much different from where the parties were before the shutdown, was negotiated less than 36 hours later, on July 15.

Coincidence? Maybe members of Congress, facing a much larger budget problem, should take a breath and have a beer. And thank their lucky stars that they can still have one.

I'm proud of Massachusetts as well for having seen the error of its ways on a new regulation passed last week. It would have required that brewers licensed as farmer-brewers grow 50% of the grains or hops they use to brew with. Without that distinction, Massachusetts brewers would be classified under the Federal rules enacted after prohibition, which mandate a three-tier industry of brewer to distributor to retailer. A brewer can't sell retail directly, so the rules mandate, unless it's a brewpub or a brewery tour, or, as in Massachusetts, a brewer-farmer. Here's the problem: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts doesn't have the field capacity for all of the brewer-farmers to purchase or grow 50% of the grains or hops needed. They just don't. Of course, the brewer-farmers licenses are a LOT cheaper than the regular brewers licenses, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.

So here's to Massachusetts for overturning that ridiculous rule. And here's to the New England Patriots. Football's back, baby.

Illness.

...makes one not wish to drink anything other than gatorade and chicken soup. Sorry.

I do have a bit of a rant, just while I'm at it though. Last week, a bunch of us tried to make a reservation at Sushi Azabu, and while we were rebuffed from the sushi restaurant below, we did have a lovely meal of "Japanese-inspired-Italian" on the ground floor. What threw me most was that our bartender, very meticulously and neatly dressed, poured our beers into stemless wine glasses. Everything else was just-so, but beer in a wine glass, particularly one without a stem? Bullcrap.

Look, I'm not indifferent to the desires of Belgian beer aficionados who demand their beer in a goblet or snifter or some such glass. I've experienced it and I love it too. But when serving a middling Japanese macrolager like Sapporo, put the stemless wineglasses away and give me a pint glass - something I can comfortably hold, that doesn't make me feel like I'm drinking out of a red plastic cup. Frankly, I'd even have preferred the red plastic cup.

H.R. 1161

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) went on record last summer arguing against frivolous House resolutions congratulating sports teams or other trivial business that he calls "terribly frustrating."

So I guess I'm a little peeved that Rep. Chaffetz is sponsoring H.R. 1161, which does nothing but reaffirms laws that are already in place. 1161 "reaffirm[s] state-based alcohol regulation," meaning that the States get to place restrictions on the interstate commerce of alcohol, even in the face of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which puts that power in the hands of Congress.

The NYTimes has an interesting op-ed piece on the subject. I think some of the restrictions are completely asinine. A friend of mine couldn't get Domaine de Canton in Michigan because there was no in-state distributor that had been OK'd by the state liquor board for that purpose. Yeah, like we're all going to go out on ginger-flavored-liqueur-fueled bender and tear up Southeast Michigan, but for the state liquor board holding us all in check. At any rate, it's spring in New Jersey and New York, and I can't get my beloved Oberon, which was the summer tipple of Ann Arbor life. So now I have to drive to Pennsylvania to pick some up. Lame.