We’ve no beef with practitioners of the oldest profession — it’s the second oldest we worry about. Middlemen.
Middlemen lie to you. Exploit your weakness. They tax your tea, charge overhead, and tell you only they can talk to god. They — in a word — blow. Which is why we don’t buy cheese at Trader Joe’s, don’t ever get spices at the supermarket, avoid gourmet stores for anything we could get at a health food store’s bulk bins, and why we plan on telling our (future) offspring to never… ever… pay someone else to score them drugs.
You know who agrees with us? Sierra Nevada. The West Coast king of hops is leading by example with their new brew, Hoptimum, an imperial IPA brewed with a mouthful of whole cone hops grown by them and only them on their vast Chico estate. Given the ratcheting up of hop prices, this is a smart business move, a little like drilling for oil in your own borders, but we appreciate it as more for than just a dollar-and-cents move. Total. Control. DIY. Drink it yourself…
Can these guys grow? Granted, we’ve never sown our own whole cone hops to compare but from where we sit (on our asses, on the porch, watching the sunlight refract through this wispy redheaded wonder tonic while filming a blog video that involves Alex’s glasses upside down and burning sage) they grow just fine. It’s a satisfyingly fat, olive-green bottle on our laps and when we lasso the neck to pop its top with a chef’s knife it’s almost as if we shrank and we’re holding a normal-sized Sierra Nevada Pale Ale that feels bigger. Head is ‘whatever,’ colors just fine. But the smell is siiiick. Stinging sweet red swizzle stick lit on fire and doused in holy water. A well-groomed skunk, slicked with garden musk. We lick the skunk; it licks back. Whether it’s the extrajudicial knowledge that this is god damn grade A, homegrown brewery produce we’re drinking here, or just good hops, this floral juice is sweeter and spicier than we can ever remember any other Sierra Nevada, even other anniversary ales from Chico, tasting. Now, if only we can cut out this pesky middleman of a bottle in our way, and drink standing in their garden.
Dairy Pairy: Nettle Meadow Kunik, a goat and cow goo from upstate New York
Soundtrack: Robedoor, “Exploited”
Actually it’s much smarter than drilling for oil in our own borders. Since our oil industry is not nationalized, any oil will drill here is sold on the international market at market rate and would not affect the price of oil. Also, we have already drilled all of the easy oil and the oil we have left is very expensive to get to. It’s a shame we can’t power our cars with beer. We’ll have to power ourselves>our bikes with it instead