Home (brew) for the holidays (Part II)

Update: Beer Number 1 (“Todd’s Christmas Tea”) is done and ready.  Here’s what some people are saying about the new brew:

“If I paid money for this in a store, I wouldn’t be upset.”

“This is GOOD.” (in a shocked voice)

The packaging needs a little work.

Cheers!

Home (brew) for the Holidays.

Kate and I were recently spent a weekend in Chicago, and while there, we toured the Half Acre Beery Company.  This kicked off a string of emails between myself and my 2 brothers about how we need to open our own brewery.  Mostly this consisted of me saying “We should start a brewery” and Joel and Scott responding with “Agreed” or “Duh” or “Why haven’t we done this already?”  Once we had established that it was in fact a brilliant idea, we mostly just bickered about what to name it.

The idea of starting a brewery is not new.   Ever since we gave up on the idea of starting ScrougeYou.com (an ahead of its time website where you could send coal to a person of your choosing at Christmas time), with the brilliant tagline (courtesy of Craig Neckers): “When instead of saying ‘Merry Christmas’ you want to say ‘You Suck,’” the Neckers brothers’ business plan du jour* has been starting a brewery.

*Every time I see “du jour” on a menu, I always think of this famous exchange from Dumb & Dumber:

Lloyd: What’s the soup du jour?
Waiter: It’s the soup of the day.
Lloyd: Mmm, that does sound good.

So after much debate about the name, 2 weeks ago I kicked off the initial phase of what Scott has dubbed “Silver Lake Brewing and Davenport Sales, LLP” (formerly known as the “Neckers Bros. Brewery”).

This isn’t the first time the Neckers brothers have gotten into home brewing.  I’m using a kit that Kim gave Joel a number of years ago, which he used throughout law school.  Scott’s tried his hand a few times, and in 2008, my then roommate Justin Mast and I made a batch of Russian Imperial Stout that Justin famously named “Fig Brewton” due to the fact that the beer tasted strikingly similar to the once popular snack food.

I picked up a kit from Sicilanos Market here in town, opting for a “Holiday Ale” and set off to brew.

Despite a few minor blips in the process (mostly related to the difficulty in trying to use a hose as a syphon while holding the ends in 2 different buckets that were about 3 feet apart), my return to home brewing was successful.  After 2 weeks of letting my Holiday Ale ferment, last week Kate and I bottled the Neckers Bros. Brewery, err, Silver Lake Brewing’s first batch.

In a week or so we’ll give the Holiday Ale a try, but in the meantime, Scott and I decided to give a 2nd batch a go yesterday, brewing an IPA together.  Now, if we could only get Joel to actually pitch in and help, maybe we could really be the Neckers Brothers Brewery.

(Special thanks to Kate’s sister Emily who gave me another beer kit (the soon-to-be-brewed Kate’s Kolsch) for Christmas.  Check out her new blog here.)

On Men’s Fashion.

Today, Kate and I stopped at the Tangier Outlet Mall on our way home from Ann Arbor (happy birthday, Justin!).  I only made it into 4 stores: Nike, J. Crew, Banana Republic, and Gap.  It would have been 5, but apparently the Big Dog outlet no longer exists.  This was massively disappointing news as there was a Big Dog outlet in this shopping center as recently as 2006.

[As a quick aside: how on earth did Big Dog hang on for so long?  No Fear and the guys who made those awesome two-sided Looney Toones t-shirts went out of business (as far as I know) years ago, but Big Dog persevered...why?]

No, this isn't me. Yes, I did own more than one shirt like this in middle school. Yes, it had the backs of Taz and Bugs on the back of the shirt.

Back to the matter at hand, I realized a few things while shopping today:

Gap has been selling the exact same things for the last 10 years.  I’m not sure how they have an outlet store, since they could legitimately recycle everything in the store (minus the GAP sweatshirts from 1995 that they are still trying to sell) in 6 months and no one would have any idea if they had sold it last year.  I say this not to criticize Gap – because frankly I’m impressed.  They have not had to change at all.

All of the recent trends in men’s fashion are stupid.  Let’s go down a list of what I would describe as becoming “popular” for men in the last 2-3 years.

1.  Graphic T-shirts.  Probably the dumbest item on this list.  Every time you purchase a graphic t, you have to think to yourself “In about 6 months, there are going to be as many people wearing these shirts as there are wearing acid wash jeans.”

2.  Cardigans.  I have no problem with cardigans, they’re just not for me.  I’m not depressed/emo/indie enough.  Please note that by ‘indie’ in that last sentence, I meant “trying to be a punk while dressing preppy.”

3.  Vests.  Every time we see a vest while we’re out, Kate wants me to buy it.  She loves them.  I think they look like you forgot to finish dressing yourself.

4.  Big belt buckles.  While I don’t own any, these I can actually get behind.  Mostly, this item was an excuse to post this picture of Joel.

2 sarsaparillas, coming right up.

Thankfully, men’s fashion by-and-large doesn’t change, meaning I can still get away with single-colored sweaters and t-shirts most of the time — which is a good thing because I can only imagine how my graphic t-vest-cardigan-texas sized belt buckle look is going to go over.

This is a post.

Do I have a picture?