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Bavaria in Pictures: Updated

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Roughly the first two weeks of November, I was fortunate enough to be invited along on a press junket to the Bavarian part of Germany along with a dozen colleagues. I took around 2,000 photos and it’s been taking me forever to go through them all. Day one of our trip went up in early December and today I’ve finally gotten up the next day’s photos. I’ll keep updating this post as I get more of the photos up and in the photo gallery.

 

The gang of twelve plus three at the Faust Brauerei in Miltenberg, Germany. From left: Cornelius Faust, me, Lisa Morrison, Johannes Faust, Julie Bradford, Andy Crouch, Peter Reid, Horst Dornbusch, Jeannine Marois, Harry Schumacher, Tony Forder, Candace Alstron, Don Russell, Jason Alstrom and Todd Alstrom.

 

For more photos from my trip Germany, visit Miltenberg Sunday, Miltenberg Monday: Faust Brewery Tour, the Wurzburger Hofbrau, Weyermann Malting and Schlenkerla Tavern in the photo gallery.
 

 

Bell’s in the Wall Street Journal

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I’m trying to catch up a little with interesting items sent in by Bulletin readers. Last week my cable modem went down and it took a few days for the cable company to come out and replace it, so I missed a few days. It continues to amaze me how dependent I am on internet access, far more than the telephone or cable television or even my car. Despite the fact that I was born when Eisenhower was President, it’s hard to remember what it was like before the internet was such a ubiquitous feature of our modern world. I feel naked without my laptop. Anyway, this comes from Doug in Hawaii (thanks Doug) and is the Wall Street Journal article about Larry Bell’s brewery and his distributor fight in Illinois. I saw the original Journal article when it came out, but I don’t have online access to the WSJ. Happily, it was reprinted on the free site Small Biz.

Beyond Bell’s specific travails, the larger issue of franchise laws is discussed. Franchise laws are one of those things that people in the industry are familiar with but which get very little public attention. They should, because by and large franchise laws are not good for small breweries. There, of course, exceptions — good distributors who care and do a god job with smaller breweries. But in my experience I’ve heard far more horror stories about distributor mistreatment of craft brewers than the other way around.

Distributors love franchise laws, of course, because for them, in many cases, they are a legal stranglehold and something of a disincentive for distributors to actually do a good job promoting a particular brand. In some states, Nevada for example, once a brewer signs up with a distributor, no matter how bad a job they do by law they cannot switch distributors without the distributor’s consent (something which is almost never given). My understanding is that franchise laws were originally enacted to protect distributor’s from spending years building a brand in a particular market only to have the brand go to a competitor. But in most states, distributors — which despite their rhetoric are large businesses — have deep pockets to lobby politicians and get favorable legislation to protect their business at the expense of smaller, weaker microbreweries. As the Wall Street Journal touches on, that balance of power is just beginning to shift slightly, but entrenched power tends to hang on far longer than anybody ever expects, so I’m not persuaded things will change for the better anytime soon.

 

Winning Friends Resolution

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For regular Bulletin readers who recall How To Win Friends and Influence People from the beginning of the month, where a South Dakota A-B distributor’s “Contemporary Marketing Coordinator” responded to harsh criticism of one of their products — Rolling Rock — with a textbook example of poor customer relations, has apparently come to a resolution. I received word, not from E-Rokk (the original poster), but from one of his bandmates, Nick Fitt, that the issue had been resolved and he has written up the story of how and why at their Hey Stupid blog. It’s rambling and incoherent at times — Nick’s writing style is reminiscent of someone suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome and an obsessive preoccupation with pornographic imagery — yet pieces of an actual story do peek out from time to time. As far as I can tell, he called the distributor and spoke to Cassie Kimball’s boss, eventually having a conference call with both her boss and that person’s boss, too. Her fate remains vague, though he hints that they told him she “was now hauling skids in the mail room, suffering from many splinters of wood that had been treated with PCP,” whatever that means. In the end, the distributors apparently coughed up some free cases of beer to mollify the situation — Budweiser, not Rolling Rock — and the final paragraphs are spent slobberingly praising “Anheiser Bush” [sic] and their new favorite beer. I’m not sure why, but it all feels a little unsatisfying to me. Considering one of the original complaints was that A-B had sold out by altering E-Rokk’s beloved Rolling Rock, it sure feels like the hey stupid gang do likewise for a few measly cases of free Bud. C’est la vie.

 

Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished

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I confess at the outset that this story has nothing to do with beer, but is about bourbon … sort of. But it is also about the assault on alcohol — and to some extent civil liberty — a subject I find myself writing about more and more these days, so that’s why I decided to write this. I certainly didn’t set out to make the neo-prohibitionists my cause célèbre, but I find that few things get me as worked up and angry than people whose sole mission appears to be telling the rest of us how to live. I guess that makes me an anti-control freak, or something.

At any rate, the story involved a St. Petersburg, Florida man named Evan Preston who local authorities have dubbed the “Woodstock Santa.” He’s been given this epithet by local authorities, and especially city council member Bill Foster, who hopes to stop Preston from giving gifts to the homeless. Now lest I paint Foster as a complete Scrooge, he’s apparently okay with giving them blankets or a warm bowl of soup. What he doesn’t like is that Foster gives the homeless what they really want: booze.

The eccentric Evan Preston (at left in the long gray beard), age 72, owns a well-known jewelry and art store and has in the past helped the local community raise money for a variety of causes by donating artwork.

He’s apparently helped his town’s Make-A-Wish Foundation and also nearby Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue. Four years ago, he decided he wanted to do something for St. Petersburg’s growing homeless population that congregate around the downtown Williams Park, near his business. So for a few years now, he and several friends and colleagues pass out 100 bottles of bourbon and cigars to the homeless.

Here, let’s pick up the story from Tampa’s Creative Loafing website:

“At first, I thought it would be interesting to give out a six-pack and a cigar,” he says over a glass of homemade sangria in his kitchen. “When I saw the excitement in their faces, it was inspirational.”

After a few outings to various homeless enclaves around the city, he says, St. Pete’s homeless began to recognize him. When he pulled up in his Bentley, they would run at him, jump on the car and hug him tightly.

Preston became the homeless’ Santa Claus, a 6-foot-2 bearded Samaritan in a T-shirt and jeans who gave all the good street men and women what they really wanted for Christmas.

“Last time, a man came up and said, ‘Thank you, this is so much better than a warm blanket,'” he recalls. “It’s shocking how much everybody loves it.”

“There is no motive to what we do,” he says. “It’s a gesture of goodwill.”

Well, you just know something like that will not be permitted for very long, not without somebody trying to put a stop to it. And right on cue, Foster is appalled that someone might give alcohol to alcoholics. Part of his reasoning is that alcohol is what put them on the street in the first place. While that may be true in some cases, he really doesn’t know that with any certainty whatsoever. But the idea that not giving a homeless person that alcohol is somehow going to cure them or make their life any better seems ridiculous at best, and uncharitable and obnoxiously self-righteous at worst.

Apparently there’s already a local ordinance in force that prohibits passing out alcohol in public parks — which seems weird enough, why would that be a problem? — but the code does not apply to city streets or right of ways, a loophole that Foster is trying to close. He’s sent a memo to the mayor and other city council members urging them to make it illegal to hand out alcohol in essentially any public space. If you want to give your neighbor a bottle of wine this Christmas, you better be careful not to hand it to him on the sidewalk. Stay on your own property if you don’t want to break the law. Apparently it doesn’t matter that alcohol is legal for adults and giving gifts is likewise not a crime, but don’t put those two things together in Florida. Yeah, that seems reasonable.

In the memo Foster claims “Mr. Preston is an affront to every business owner and resident of the downtown area, and should not be a welcomed figure in St. Petersburg.” An affront? An affront is a “deliberate act or display of disrespect,” an “intentional slight.” I don’t know who Bill Foster thinks he is, but he obviously believes people should be bowing and scraping to his delusions of grandeur. Can he really have convinced himself that Preston is giving the homeless booze to personally offend him? This is a difference of opinion at best. I don’t see how it’s the business of government to regulate where citizens can commit a legal act like gift-giving? Foster may not like what Preston’s doing but in a free society that should be the end of it. But Bill Foster apparently believes a free society is only one where people do what he likes, and apparently he’s not even the only nut job on the city council.

“Is that really the best gift you can give somebody sleeping outside—bourbon?” said Rene Flowers. “I don’t know what a bottle of bourbon goes for these days, but I’m sure that would buy some soap, a small washrag, maybe a comb, some coffee, maybe a nice, hot meal.”

Where exactly would a homeless person use a washrag and soap exactly since they probably don’t have a bathtub for them to use there in Williams Park? And while a nice dinner does sound good, why does Flowers think that private citizens have to confine their charity to what she thinks is appropriate? For all their posturing, the homeless problem itself is never addressed by the city council, only that a private citizen shouldn’t be allowed to give them a little comfort from time to time at his own expense. It really doesn’t matter if you or anyone else thinks giving alcohol to a homeless person is a bad idea, in a free society any private citizen is and ought to be allowed to choose both the scope and nature of his charity. They should be applauding the fact that’s he’s doing something, anything. But from the response of the city council, they don’t seem overly concerned about the homeless people themselves. The very fact that there is such a homeless problem in this medium-sized town (the population is just under 250,000) suggests that whatever the city council is doing, if anything, it has not alleviated the situation or the conditions that caused these people to become homeless in the first place. Maybe it’s the guilt over their own failures that makes them lash out over someone merely trying to provide a little solace and comfort to someone whose life is, I can only assume, complicated and difficult, to say the least. But please, let’s stop attacking alcohol already, shall we? I’d like to get back to talking about beer again, thank you very much.

 

If you want to hear more about this, a local Tampa television, Tampa Bay 10, station did a report that’s online. Also, a Los Angeles radio station recently did an interview with Evander Preston which you can listen to online.
 

Look Away From the Beer

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This interesting tidbit comes by way of the Fermenting Barrel via Tomme Arthur (thanks, Tomme), who knew my little crusading heart would appreciate the inanity of it all. It seems a new ordinance in the southern Utah town of Springville “requires beer displays be erected no closer than 15 feet from a store’s public entrance.” The Utah County Health Department’s Division of Substance Abuse also wanted retailers to keep all “beer 10 feet back from a store’s front windows,” too, but the City Council decided instead to just keep it away from the front doors. According to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, “Richard Nance, substance-abuse division director, said the goal is to try to ensure that children do not get mixed messages about where the community stands on alcohol use.” What exactly is that mixed message he’s so worried about? Seriously, what is it? Anybody know? I mean, despite a huge religious influence in Utah, beer is still legal there, right? So what message is being sent by its proximity to the front door, for chrissakes?

Retailers, however, don’t appear too concerned about the new law — not that there’s much they could probably do anyway. Apparently most stores already keep their beer stock in the back of the store, which is also where most keep the milk, isn’t it? One added benefit, I suppose, is that less beer may be exposed to the light streaming through the front door, which may reduce skunking (hey, I’m looking for the silver lining here).

The Fermenting Barrel‘s take:

Tell me this, are the kids absorbing the alcohol by being in the mere vicinity of a case of beer? Can’t the kids still walk to the back of the store and *gasp* be exposed to beer? Or are the children confined to the front of the store?

In my opinion there’s way worse things kids can be exposed to right at the counter, say…pornography, cigarettes, or even junk food, candy, and soda. Last I checked diabetes was one of the worst epidemics in the US. How does it usually develop? Through obesity caused from a poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. How about going even a little further, what about all the easy access kids have to the crap on TV, the Internet, and movies.

OK, I’m done ranting. You get my point. There’s bigger fish to fry than fretting over kids walking past a case of beer when they walk in a store. Just leave it to Utah to come up with even more insane alcohol laws. As if their laws weren’t already weird enough.

Amen, brother.

 

Harriet’s Beer For Girls

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Harriet Easton, age 19, appears to be one ambitious and entrepreneurially-minded young lass. She’s determined to fill the void created by a continuing drop in UK pub beer sales. “Figures released last month showed beer sales in pubs at their lowest level for 70 years. Seven million fewer pints per day are now being sold, with sales down 49 per cent since they peaked in 1979.” One obvious market being neglected is the female segment. So Easton, a politics student at Newcastle University, spent a year and a half — and £35,000 — on R&D to create a beer especially for women. It’s a “light ale with extract of orange and a modest 4.2 per cent alcohol.” Easton teamed up with a local brewery, Hanby Ales of Wem in Shropshire, to create the curiously named Harry’s Beer, which will be marketed to women beginning Monday at the Salopian Bar in Shrewsbury. On hand will be, Paula Waters, chairman of CAMRA. “Waters said: ‘I applaud the inventive way Harriet has brought this product to market. She’s a sassy and savvy young woman who has recognised there are others just like her who want to drink real ale and retain their femininity.'”

But as far as I can tell, this is not her first attempt. In August of this year there was at least one story about Harriet Easton in the Shropshire Star called These Girls Are For Real. At that time, they reported Easton debuting another beer, this one called Rushing Dolls beer for girls. In that article, Rushing Dolls was described as having “a zest of lime—it’s very light and hoppy.” There Easton was quoted as having created her beer because others were — I just love this expression — too blokey. Hop Talk even did a post about it in September. The lime version was “thought to be the first ever beer for girls” and now the new orange version is being similarly touted, this time by the Publican, who say it’s the “first real ale aimed specifically at women.” This time around, Easton says:

“Real ale has typically and consistently been marketed towards men with names full of cheesy puns and innuendo, and images of buxom wenches serving up frothy jugs,” said the politics student at Newcastle university. “They can keep all that — there’s no need to move on, lads — just move over”.

Still, I can’t help but think of Virginia Slims or pink trains for girls. It seems to me either a woman will develop a taste for beer or she won’t. I know plenty of women who already love craft beer, including my wife, and it didn’t take a specially designed beer for them to like beer. Trying to make one specifically for the ladies seems like a gimmick at best. But if it brings more women into the fold, I suppose that can’t be all bad.
 

Beer & Christianity Redux

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This came to me via Rick Sellers at his Pacific Brew News concerning another poll by ChristiaNet concerning Christian’s attitudes towards beer drinking. I meant to write about this earlier, but it got away from me. The story is about a poll ChristiaNet conducted with their readership, which they state involves twelve million monthly page loads, and they further claim to be the “world’s largest Christian portal.” The question they asked was “[i]s it wrong for a Christian to consume beer?” Now why they singled out beer is still a mystery to me. To justify the question, Bill Cooper, the president of ChristiaNet, says “Christ warns of the results of drunkenness.” But, of course, the question wasn’t “is it wrong for a Christian to consume beer to the point of drunkenness” or to be drunk, it was simply whether it was acceptable to consume any amount of beer. That’s a vastly different question and one which does nothing to examine the “results of drunkenness.” They did a similar poll last year, too, which I wrote about on Christmas Eve, but more about that later.

According to their press release, 5,200 completed the online poll and beer drinking got the thumbs up by a very slim margin, about 51%. A little over a third (38%) did, however, respond that they believed that having a beer was “wrong.” Here is some of their rationale.

They felt that one beer almost always leads to more and then can also lead to alcoholism, “I don’t know anyone that only drinks one beer, they usually drink more to get a buzz and that is wrong. Sometimes they even turn into alcoholics.” Others in this group quoted Proverbs 20:1 which states, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Most felt that all alcohol consumption was wrong, “There just isn’t any good reason to drink alcohol, and it is not like it tastes good.”

Wow, I don’t want to hang out with the person who doesn’t know even one person who can stop at a single beer. Being someone who visits the ChristiaNet website, I would think most — or at least some — of his friends were likely Christians like him. And not one of them could resist the temptation to have a second drink of beer? This guy needs to start hanging out with a new crowd. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve enjoyed one beer at a bar or with my dinner without being unable to stop there and even without turning into an alcoholic. I can’t help but picture that process as a bit like the gentlemanly Dr. Jekyll turning into the unsavory Mr. Hyde. Without trying to make light of alcoholism, is that really how it happens? And why on occasion is getting a buzz so wrong? Or is drinking “beer” to get that buzz what’s wrong here? Having the sacred wine makes it acceptable, does it? I guess I just don’t understand how these people think.

Just over ten percent wondered “about whether or not beer, in particular, was wrong” and at least one respondent was confused “because the Bible only talks about drunkenness with wine and strong drink, not about having only one beer.” What I assume many do not realize is that when the Bible was translated into Greek that there was no exact match for the Hebrew word and “wine” was simply substituted as being the closest word available. There are a number of serious scholars who believe that it is possible that it was actually beer (apparently the Greeks at that time had no word for beer) that Jesus turned the water into and that it may even have been beer that was served at the last supper. How different our world might be today if beer had early on achieved the exalted place in religion that wine did, possibly as the result of a mis-translation.

Last year about this same time, ChristiaNet asked this same question but got very different results. Only 339 people filled out the previous survey, of which 192 — or 57% — thought drinking beer was wrong. Armed with those staggeringly small and unscientific statistics, ChristiaNet proceeded to tell the world that Christians think drinking beer is wrong. I wrote about it a few days after their press release in a post I called Beer & Christianity. I thought it was nonsense then, and I’m not convinced it’s any less so this year, despite the fact that 5,200 people took the poll this year. When you look at how random sampling for polling data is usually done, this type of online poll has none of the features that make it a statistically accurate sample of the general population. Instead, as Rick also points out, the people responding are all people who regularly visit ChristiaNet’s website, most likely evangelical Christians — fanatics, possibly. That already greatly skews any data they collect on this or any subject they might ask their visitors’ opinions about. Of course, you may say, isn’t that obvious? Well, maybe it is, but then why bother with a press release unless you’re trying to convince somebody of something as a result of this poll? I scratched my head over this before and I’m afraid it’s still itchy.

Anyway, in his post, Rick called me a fanatic — which is true, of course — with regard to the agenda of neo-prohibitionists though he has tended to feel that “there’s no way we, as Americans, have anything to worry about with our beer related rights. Now, if there are this many ‘Christians’ in our country who think my beer consumption is flat wrong, it would seem appropriate to assume they wouldn’t mind seeing some form of control on my consumption.” I think that’s correct, and I think it’s also why there is a lot that we should be worried about. That’s precisely why I’m fanatical, because I believe apathy and complacency will ultimately spell doom. And while there are millions of self-avowed Christians who think drinking beer is no mortal sin, those that do seem to be more vocal and shrill about imposing that belief on everybody else.

Many neo-prohibitionist groups are religiously based, and often claim that Christian morals are at odds with alcohol, which suggests to me that fundamentalist Christians have more in common with fundamentalist Muslims than either group might be willing to admit. Both seem to argue that their belief leads them to prohibiting alcohol and both likewise believe that whatever their religion teaches should apply to non-believers and believers alike. Muslims have been more successful in building sovereign nations that use religious law as the law of the land, regardless of an individual’s religion, and under such rule religious freedom is not tolerated. But Christian evangelicals want exactly the same thing: to replace our secular nation — founded on the principle of church and state being separate — with a Christian United States, whose laws are all based on their literal interpretation of the Bible. And whether or not beer would be permitted under such an intolerant society would depend largely on whose interpretation holds sway.

So I see these polls as dangerous, because even though they are based on poor science, most people probably won’t examine that too closely and will accept them at face value. That seems to happen a lot with polling data. You see inaccurate statistics quoted over and over again, oftentimes even after they’ve been discredited. For reasons I can’t explain (perhaps because people trust the media or because in school we’re not taught how to think, only what to think) polls tend to be believed more often than not. In my experience, human nature causes people to want to side with the majority or the winner so polls which report that a majority feel one way or another often have the effect of bringing about that result, especially if it’s close. This is why I hate political election polling and exit polls on election day, because I think they have the effect of swaying voter’s opinions to vote for the leader. And therein lies the danger. Tell people that enough other folks just like them think drinking beer is wrong and they’ll start to believe it, too. One thing you can safely say about all religions is that they don’t encourage independent thought: the whole point of faith is to believe without questioning so it seems to me religiously-based agendas are particularly susceptible to manipulation.

Rick is quite right to question that statistic claiming 38% of Christians “feel that drinking beer [is] wrong.” As he correctly concludes, “it is likely only those with strong enough opinions took the survey. But that too scares me, because it isn’t just the church goers in our country who are more than slightly apathetic — its seems to be the American way these days.” But if ChristiaNet and others with a neo-prohibitionist agenda keep sowing these anti-alcohol seeds with their questionable statistics they may win over enough of the “more than slightly apathetic” to make their proclamation a self-fulfilling prophecy. And trying to play my small part in making sure that doesn’t happen, keeping the neo-prohibitionist wolves at the door so to speak, is what makes me a fanatic. Because allowing an extreme minority to dictate morality and tell you and me we can’t enjoy a beer is not the way a free society should operate. Those with the loudest voices are not supposed to be who wins. So in the hopes of keeping that from happening, I’ll keep shouting in the wilderness until they pry the glass of beer from my cold, dead hand. But let’s try not to let it come to that, shall we? Let’s take this threat seriously. I really don’t want the Pyrrhic victory that forces me to say “I told you so.”

 

New Beer TV Show … Maybe

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A company from Sacramento, California — The Idea Factory — was in town Monday and Tuesday shooting a pilot for a new television show about craft beer. They’ve already done several successful cable shows, and their work can currently be seen on the Garden Channel, the DIY channel and Discovery Health.

The host is brewer Jennifer Talley, who is from Squatter’s Pub in Utah. Idea Factory producer Peter Holmes saw Talley in a video she did for her brewery and thought she’d be a good host, making the show both about brewers (and brewing and beer) and by brewers, which I think may be the first time for a television show. In talking with the producer, their initial pitch will likely be made to the Food Network or similar cable channels. And I think that makes sense, as there is significant time devoted to beer with food in what they filmed already.

They started out with Talley interviewing Shaun O’Sullivan at his 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant. In the afternoon both O’Sullivan and Talley visited Magnolia and sat down to talk with owner Dave McLean over some food and beer. Then on Tuesday they filmed at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa. They filmed at both the new production brewery nearby and at the brewpub. Later Bruce Paton, the beer chef, cooked some food and he sat down with Talley and Russian River owners Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo to talk about the pairings while they enjoyed both the food and beer.

While it’s obviously hard to say too much until it’s been edited, the raw footage I watched seemed pretty good. Everybody I met involved with the production from the producers, the cameramen and make-up all seemed professional and did a great job. Plus, they were all very genuinely nice people. The participants seemed natural on camera and it had the feel of a conversation you’d want to listen in on. The passion that many of us feel for craft beer (and food) comes out pretty easily and this was a good illustration of that principle in action. We all love to talk about beer. The only question remaining: is the rest of America ready to listen?

I wish them luck and it would certainly be great to see a show about craft beer that’s done by people who actually know what they’re talking about. So keep your fingers crossed. I’ll post updates as I learn more, but I imagine this is a long, slow process.
 

For more photos from the beer show tv pilot shoot, visit the photo gallery.
 

North Carolina Targets Parents

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One of my favorite things about the internet, is how cyclical and serpentine it can be. You can start out somewhere and if you follow enough tangents — something I can’t frankly help — you end up in new and wonderful places or, at a minimum, at a place you either didn’t expect to find or didn’t know was out there. I find a lot of the things I write about by happy accident. One thing leads to another and before I know it I’ve stumbled yet again on something I think worth writing about myself. A good example of this is some new laws in North Carolina that took effect December 1. I learned of these new laws through a blog, The Agitator, which I found at another blog, Coffee and Diapers, which is a parenting blog that picked up on my earlier post about Mothers For Social Drinking (which I also originally found by accident).

At any rate, the original story came from a television station in the Raleigh-Durham area, WRAL Channel 5, which is a place I actually lived for several years. I used to be, in the early 1980s, a record buyer for a large chain of stores headquartered in Durham, North Carolina and lived in both Durham and later Chapel Hill. Having grown up in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania, being in the south was a real eye-opener, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, some forty new state laws went into effect at the beginning of December and their story addressed a few of them. They started out with the alcohol-related ones for whatever reason and there’s a couple of doozies. The first one that caught my attention I’m not really against per se, but I think it’s illustrative of how oddly people think about alcohol. From the WRAL story:

One law bans devices known as “alcohol inhalers,” which convert liquor into a mist that can be inhaled by the user. Lawmakers were concerned that the devices, which were assembled and distributed by a Greensboro company, were being marketed to underage drinkers.

Okay, to be clear, I think this sounds like a bad idea and it goes against my personal philosophies on the moderate enjoyment of alcohol and also because I’ve never been a fan of anything that has to enter my body through my nose. I knew plenty of people in the 1980s who disagreed with my personal nasal entry ban (my rhinoprohibition), but I never begrudged them their day in the snow. So okay, somebody figured out a way to snort alcohol. I wouldn’t do it myself, and I can’t understand why anyone else would want to either. But here’s what I really don’t get. “Lawmakers were concerned (my emphasis) that the devices were being marketed to underage drinkers.” Huh? So they decided that an ostensibly legal product should be made illegal precisely because minors might try to buy it. Let me put that another way. As an adult, I can no longer buy a (previously) legal product because law enforcement cannot effectively keep people (minors in this case) from illegally obtaining it. So effectively because they can’t stop underage use of this product, they’re willing to take away every adult’s right to buy it. Please tell me how that makes any sense whatsoever? That is about as ridiculous a justification for making something illegal as I’ve ever heard. Fast food is marketed to kids and demonstrably terrible for their health, yet I don’t see these same lawmakers rushing to ban Big Macs, Whoppers or happy meals. Soda is even worse, yet schools allow soft drink companies to put soda vending machines in schools. Apparently, that’s okay too. I guess it’s okay for our kids to be fat and toothless but heaven forbid they might even consider snorting a mist of alcohol despite the fact that it’s already against the law for them to do so. Just the possibility of that — there do not appear to be any actual facts of underage use — makes them locate their spines to “protect the children” and take one more step toward making their state fit only for children. How noble. How absurd.

But the one that got The Agitator worked up — and I can certainly see why — is this one:

Also, as of Saturday, people can lose their driver’s licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.

Lloyd said that’s not excessive.

“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” he said. “Breaking the law is breaking the law.”

As Radley Balko at the Agitator put it:

I know what you’re thinking. Surely authorities would never barge into someone’s home and arrest them for allowing their 18, 19, or 20-year-old son or daughter to have a beer, right?

Well, you’d think. But then, if you’d told me police might come to the home of a minor’s parents at 4 am, wake the entire family, then give the girl a breath test to see if she had been drinking at a party held hours earlier, I’d have been dubious, too.

But it’s happened. Never underestimate the absurd lengths to which the zero tolerance crowd will go to keep your kid stone-cold sober.

The link above is to an ALCU story from Michigan where apparently they’re the only state — for now, at least —where it’s “illegal for young adults and minors who are not driving to refuse a breathalyzer test when the police do not have a search warrant. Those who refuse to take tests in Michigan are guilty of a civil infraction and must pay a $100 fine.” under Mich. Comp. Laws § 436.1703(6).

And there was at least one instance that you can just see being repeated both there and in North Carolina, as well.

Ashley Berden was 18 years old when she attended a party at a friend’s house to celebrate her graduation from Swan Valley High School. After she left the party, Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had forgotten. They then came to Berden’s house at 4:00 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test. The police did not have a warrant but they informed her that would be violating the law if she refused the test. The test registered a .00% blood-alcohol level, indicating that Berden had not been drinking.

Pretty scary stuff. Especially when you consider that in societies where parents are allowed to raise their own children as they see fit, there is a much lower incidence of abuse later in life. But this new North Carolina law will make any parent who gives their own son or daughter even a taste of beer or wine to educate them a criminal. In effect, the state of North Carolina has decreed they can do a better job of raising your children than you can. Naturally, the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving sees the world in stark black and white whereas the rest of us can see all the shades of gray that parenting really entails. Because it seems to me that they really believe they can do a better job of raising my child than I can. They seem to have all the answers and really believe they know best. In their world an adult is no longer an adult but must live in a world where anything unsafe for children is no longer allowed for adults, either. In their world, a parent has little or no control over how and what they can teach their children about the world. That’s what zero-tolerance really means. It means tolerating only one way of life over all others. That’s as scary a world as I can imagine, a world that is the very opposite of free.

 

Beer Featured at Chef’s Association Dinner

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I got an invitation to attend a Chef’s Association Dinner Monday night at the Cathedral Hill Hotel. It was put on by Bruce Paton, the beer chef, who put it together at the last minute when the person who was originally supposed to do it dropped out unexpectedly. As a result, he put together an impromptu beer dinner, using beers he’d used throughout the previous year’s dinners. It was another really tasty dinner with some terrific beers.

Bruce Paton, the beer chef, and me in a self-portrait after the dinner. Thanks Bruce, for a great dinner.

 

For more photos from this year’s Chef’s Association Beer Dinner, visit the photo gallery.