Sunday, May 20 2012
Quick update: I'm in lovely downtown Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, for the annual LD Carlson conference. This is the 13th year for the retailer get-together and it's the best conference yet. I spent an interesting night meeting up with old friends, making some new ones and checking on quality control for the local beverages.
Speaking of which, one of the beers I enjoy down here is from Great Lakes Brewing, Burning River Pale Ale. It commemorates the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire and burned to the ground.
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| Posted by Tim AT 7:27AM |
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Saturday, May 12 2012
Set facepalm to 'stunned' Facepalm: the physical gesture of placing one's hand flat across one's face or lowering one's face into one's hand or hands. The gesture is found in many cultures as a display of frustration, embarrassment, shock, or surprise.
Last night I went out to see a movie with my wife. She enjoys loud, shout-y, explode-y action-adventure flicks, and while I prefer a well-nuanced dramatic movie about human feelings and emotional growth, but I'm willing to indulge her any time she'll go on a date with me. However, I have a lot of trouble with the movie experience, partly because of theatres themselves: if I want to cram myself into a confined space with bad seats, no legroom, stinky and inconsiderate strangers and horrifyingly dirty bathrooms, I'll book an airline ticket.
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| Posted by Big Angry Tim II: Revenge of the Tim AT 1:00PM |
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Thursday, May 10 2012
Trashy Punk Saint is also the name of my Stooges cover band I love beer. This admission will come as no surprised to people who follow me on Twitter (@WinexpertTim) or on Facebook, where about half of my pictures are of beers I'm currently drinking, planning to drink or have drank.
But really, I love beer. Most guys say that, but I suspect they don't really mean it and are just trying to get beer to go to bed with them. For me it's a deep and meaningful love, one that brought me to homebrewing and the career I have immersed myself in for nearly three decades now. And I not only love beer, I love the culture that surrounds people who love it as much as I do, the craftbrewers and homebrewers who pour their passion into their bottles and kegs, and then share it with everyone around them. I can honestly say I have never met a mean-spirited or selfish homebrewer in my life--the joy that making your own beer brings into your world makes you eager to share it with anyone smart enough to accept a bottle from your eager hands.
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| Posted by Corporationsarepeopletoo AT 3:31PM |
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Saturday, May 5 2012
In their finery!Happy El Día de la Batalla de Puebla!
Typical of a gringo, I used to assume that Cinco de Mayo was either Mexican independence day, or a holiday invented by the makers of Corona beer. I got curious a few years ago and looked it up. The real idea behind the celebration is much more interesting. Wikipedia covers it nicely, but in a nutshell, the whole thing is fascinating. It is a celebration of the Mexican army over the French at the battle of Puebla, in 1862. The two significant points are the fact that the French were considered the finest fighting force of their time (French military prowess jokes aside) and the Mexicans crushed them like bugs.
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| Posted by Tim 'Zaragoza' Vandergrift AT 6:57AM |
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Friday, May 4 2012
Cinco de Mayo is lovely, but for my money there's no better day of celebration than the one created especially for Science Fiction loving geeks. To all my friends and like-minded individuals out there:
He doesn't look a day over 700 Hmm. I wonder what kind of wine they drink in the Empire?
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| Posted by Some Huge Nerd AT 8:49AM |
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Wednesday, April 18 2012
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Have you ever come across what appear to be tiny flakes or crystals in your wine, or in your bag of juice, or at the bottom of a carboy after racking? Did you wonder if the appearance of this deposit meant that the wine was flawed, or that your equipment might be damaged by it, or (worst of all!) that the wine might not be safe to drink?
Gadzooks! Lookit that muck in my wine! There's very good news if you have: the deposit you've seen is wine diamonds, a well-known and well-understood natural phenomenon in winemaking, and one that's been around as long as people have made their own wine--in fact, they have found this residue on wine vessels over ten thousand years old!
Not only is the wine safe to drink, it's going to be delicious, and the crystals themselves are something that most winemakers will have paid for under a different guise (more on that below). But for people not used to seeing any deposit in their bottles, we need to have all the facts.
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| Posted by Diamond Tim Brady AT 3:25PM |
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Saturday, March 31 2012
Dateline: April 1st, Winexpert Product Science Headquarters
Winexpert continues to be first in consumer winemaking innovation! The company that invented the modern wine kit and brought you the world's first premium wine kit (Selection Original), the first Carbon-Neutral wine kit, the Colour-Match wine kit, the first 80-Proof wine kit and many, many others, now brings you the first consumer-produced energy beverage, Blue Boar Winergy™!
Nothing says 'energy' like pigs on the wing! Lynne Sideburns, Chief Product Excitement Officer is elated with the new product launch, noting: "The trend to energy drinks like Red Bull™, Rock Star™ and the like have overwhelmed the specialty refreshment beverage category in the last ten years, but there's never been a way to make your own, until now! And with our exciting array of flavours and styles--Boarberry Blue Blast, Racing Heart Raspberry, Exotic Fruits Jitterjuice, Extreme Elderberry, and Warped White Zinfandel--we have a Blue Boar Energy Beverage for everyone's taste!"
Just don't make a piggy of yourself! "Energy drinks are a godsend," explains Tim Vandergrift, Winexpert's Manager of Conjectural Technology. "Especially if you're trapped in boring meetings, hour after hour while people drone on and on--who can stay awake for that? In fact, I came up with this idea during a meeting, after falling asleep so deeply that I didn't wake up until it was time to start work again! Ha ha, I miss that job."
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| Posted by Hajime Shigatsu AT 6:34PM |
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Thursday, March 22 2012
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An impressive public works project Greetings from the road--the Silk Road, that is. In case you've been looking for me (curse you, moneylenders) I am in China--the city of Chengdu capital of Sichuan province, to be precise. Sichuan is a pretty interesting place--population somewhere north of 80 million, previously most important as an agriculatural area (peaches, sugar cane and grapeseeds!) it is also home to Sichuan cooking, one of the four great cuisines of China, and to Panda bears.
He doesn't do Kung Fu or make noodles, but he's got that bamboo cold But you can find all that out on Wikipedia. The reason I'm here is to work the Wine and Alcohol Trade Show with our partners, the Canadian Export Centre. Winexpert has had some interesting times trying to crack the Chinese market--if you've never tried to import and sell things to mainland China, it's complex and sometimes frustrating. By partnering with a dedicated export company we've gotten some really encouraging results. Not that we're on the top of the heap: I counted hundreds of booths at the pre-show (today) and apparently the full show is much bigger and more crowded. I'm not sure how that's possible, but we're explaining the consumer winemaking concept to folks who are also looking at high-volume commercial imports, some of which are very competitively priced.
But that's okay: we have a secret weapon at our booth: me.
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| Posted by Silk Road Tim AT 12:42AM |
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Thursday, March 1 2012
Here? On the round globey-thingy?
The one question I get asked more than any other is, 'How can I learn more about wine?'. The answer, of course, is by drinking it. Lots and lots of it.
That's often easier said than (safely) done. You can only taste so many different wines by yourself until your house fills up with opened bottles, each missing only an ounce or two. Even if you invite friends over to play, 'Guess That Wine', there's an upper limit to your space, resources or liver capacity, even if you spit each taste. I try to drink a new bottle of wine every night, but even that gets more difficult--I'm too old to finish a bottle a night, my wife rarely has more than a single taste on a school night, and there's only so much vingegar, wine jelly and sauce reductions one can do with leftovers.
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| Posted by Winefestivus Fortherestivus AT 12:32PM |
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Comments
Jorm Wilsson
Posted 4 days ago
Maybe you shouldn't drink wine while trying to buy movie tickets. Maybe they should change the term "whiner" to "winer".
Maybe you should add your real email address and name when commenting on a blog--on the other hand I understand that doing so might get you into trouble with your boss at Diageo.
I don't drink and internet. Jerry Pournelle wrote many years (15, maybe?) that posting while intoxicated is pretty much the dumbest thing your can do on-line. After proving him right a couple of times, I put down the mouse when I pick up a beverage.
Tim