Beer-blocked

Last weekend featured a large amount of cross-hemispheric fun, as both myself and Don over at Brew-ha-ha attended beer festivals.

Same time, different time zones!

As we are wont to do, Don and I discussed our mutual impending fests online with much anticipation. Mine was the well-established and ever-expanding Wellington feature, Beervana – a two-day event (Friday and Saturday) with two sessions each day.

Don's was a fairly new affair down on the right side of the Toronto tracks, a cool and crafty shindig dubbed the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival.

Each had their distinct advantages. Don's occurred at the peak of the summer season in Toronto – which meant wandering around outside in the warm sun while consuming beer. Mine could ALMOST have been outside, as it was warm and spring-like here ... but organisers hedged their bets and kept it contained within the large Westpac Trust Stadium's concourse.

Heading into the Beervana fest, –a warm springlike day in
Wellington outside, and many, many fine beers (and food!)
awaiting inside. 

Beervana's advantage:  far more local (and a few Aussie!) craft brewers on hand than the Toronto one, offering up their wild and wonderful takes on traditional beer styles like IPA, Porter, Stout, Lager and Pilsner.  We had no less than 31 brewers' wares on offer, and each one had some new and surprising "purpose brewed" ales just for this fest.

Both festivals of course were outstanding and scored A++, because hey – it's a beer fest! It's fun and there was no end of good food and music to soak up as well.  It was almost as if me and my bro-in-beer-and-fun (Don) were festing in the same place.

The session I attended was almost perfect. There were just a couple of niggling things (stuff that seems to go hand in hand with large fests) that seemed annoying – someone (a stinking, no-good penny-pinching accountant, no doubt) decided this year, we wouldn't get ANY beer tokens to start out with. In previous years our $45 entry fee got us a tasting glass, a guidebook, and 4 or 5 tokens to start the fun. This year – nada. Seems a bit greedy, Beervana guys.

Then nearing the end of the fest, we were practically bums'-rushed out of the fest, with sales of beer tokens stopping a full 45 minutes before the designated end-time of 4 pm ... and then further thug-like bouncer-ish announcements telling us that 3:45 was the last time we could spend ANY tokens we had left. Not quite as user-friendly as before ...

A Beervana volunteer leaps on the first broken glass of the day,
mere moments after the doors opened.
The rube in question who dropped said glass
quickly fled the crime scene in pursuit of another glass.

Really the only two things that seemed a tad absurd at Beervana was to do with patrons' behaviour. I got in the door right as the fest opened, grabbed my gear and bought some tokens, and had my first beer on the go – when some rube walked in and immediately dropped and broke his glass before even filling it once. (OK that was funny more than absurd ... )

What was more absurd was the overall number of numb-nuts guys who seemed completely clueless about breaking Bar Ordering Guidelines: Rule #1 – Don't stand there after you get your beer admiring it, or talking to your pal standing next to you, or taking a photo of said beer. There are at LEAST 38 people behind you waiting their turn. Step lively and get the hell out of the way, dumb-ass!

Considering those were the only two things that weren't 100% positive, Beervana was a pretty decent affair. I tried loads of new beers, cleansed my palate between new-beer tastings with the tried n' true favourites (eg: 8Wired Hopwire, C¡tra, Tutatara Hop Zombie), munched on a few really tasting things, saw some folks I knew, met a few new folks, and had a great time. My homies who run the

Garage Project's booth shone like a giant beacon of beer-laden
hope for the crowd to gather 'round and take solace in.

Garage Project brewery in my 'hood had the best and brightest booth going, and even worked so far outside the box that they were offering up ingeniously refreshing beer-laden treats like the Beer Slushie, and the Beer Jelly.  They also fronted up with a technique wherein they jammed a red-hot poker into a glass of beer for a moment, thereby super-activating the flavours, hops and aromas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wishful thinking becomes happy reality

In my last Blog entry, I mentioned the creative folks down in the StevilStEvil™ Labs R&D Dept. had concocted a nifty app called "Where's My Goddamn Beer?" Well, it seems market testing has proven that a more demure name for said product might prove better ... and now here we have the multi-purpose (but certainly, it's mostly for tracking your beer) device called Tile. Strap one of these babies on things you might be prone to misplace, and you can instantly track the thing using the smart-phone app.

Welcome to a brave new world of never losing your drinks ever again!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Government (weasel) spies and anti-gay commies

NZ PM John Key (right) having some fun with his
new GCSB legislation. Said Key: "It's GOOD to be king!"

Two items in the news these past couple of weeks feature the New Zealand government jack-wagons pushing through a blanket spying legislation deal (GCSB), wherein they give themselves the right to peek at anything you do over the internet or on the phone. (Oh, they also unanimously voted to give themselves another raise).

Meanwhile, not to be outdone as being  relegated to "2nd-

Here's the shirtless wonder next to a horse. The horse was,
of course, standing in a trench, so Putin could appear taller.

place ass-clown on the world stage", shirtless horse-back riding he-man leader of Russia, Vlad Putin (never mind that he's practically a midget), decided to rule against gay rights. In fact, he made being gay against the law. Which of course is even more nonsensical as communism.

It's only a matter of time before anti-weasel-activity-on-the-net group Anonymous takes the NZ Government to school on why it's a really bad idea to make rules up about stuff they have NO idea about. That'll be fun to watch.

Exceptionally funny and smart guy, Stephen Fry,
led one of many demonstations against the
jack-assery of the muscular Russian hobbit.

And thanks to famous gay rights advocates like Stephen Fry and Dan Savage, and loads of other clever people, lots of anti-Putin demonstrations have cropped up ... mocking them, of course, and also demanding that the next Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, be boycotted. And even girl-cotted.

The crosswalk outside the Russian embassy in Sweden was
festooned with the trademark colours of Gay Pride!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But hey it's not all government stupidity in the news – a new super-cute animal is discovered!

Just today in the news, scientists (they MUST be scientists, they have lab coats on and they're holding clip-boards!) found a fuzzy wee creature down in the jungles of Ecuador and Columbia heretofore unknown to lab-coat-clad, clip-board bearing types: the impossibly cute Olinguito!

They're not very big – about .6 meters long, and weighing a bit less than a kilogram. They're nocturnal, and merrily spend their nights leaping about in trees in search of fruit. Scientist Labby McClipboard said they actually had one in captivity back in the '70s, but didn't realise it was a totally different type of creature than the ones he was caged up with. Thankfully neither of the two species fancied each other for lunch, so there was no carnage back then.

Here's a happy, fuzzy, mega-cute Olinguito. All he and his
kind want is to frolic through the trees and
eat some fruit. So let's leave them alone!

One US zoo has already commissioned plush toys of the critter, to sell in aid of raising funds to try and make sure no rat-bastard types rush on down to the Olinguito's habitat to kill, torture, eat, or generally bother them, or to try and spy on them to see what they might be talking about, or to rudely stare and see if they're up to any gay shenanigans.

Not that there's anything WRONG with that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A post-script on the whole beery-themed past couple of weeks

Besides the Beervana fest, Wellington has been positively frothing with tons of other beer-like activity this past fortnight.

There was an amateur brewer's contest, some prize-giving to deserving craft brewers, media types invited to try and concoct weird and wonderful new beers for consideration at the beer fest, and a parallel festival among eaters and drinkers here called Wellington On A Plate ... this one being a "degustation" sort of affair where local food and wines/beers at many Wellington restaurants were paired up and on offer for a good price.

The Fork & Brewer makes its own beer, has an excellent menu, and
features no less than 40 different beers from New Zealand brewers on tap.

The overlapping two fests meant that certain craft beer and brew pubs had some interesting food and beer up for grabs, too. I partook of one at the Fork & Brewer brew pub, as it was Gill's birthday and we thought: "What better than to imbibe in something that's been sort of organised and thought out a bit?" And so, we did.

We also partook in one other Welly On A Plate event, a pinot noir wine tasting at the Museum Hotel. This was an educational and fun tasting of several local (Martinborough mostly) pinots, along with some of the Museum Hotel's excellent and creative tasty appetizers. This of course de-evolved near the end of the session with the organisers fleeing the room, leaving many half-filled bottles of wine on a table for us ... which we swarmed over and finished in less than polite style.

The Museum Hotel itself is worth mentioning, as it is designed as a bit of an art gallery – the lobby features many interesting and wildly eye-catching pieces of art. You can grab a beer or a glass of wine and wander around, taking all the blazing creativity in. Here are a couple of shots in the lobby I took prior to entering the wine tasting room.:

A 3-D Rolling Stones mosaic, with an autographed
guitar, hangs behind a  futuristic looking
motorcycle. For scale, the guitar
is a real one (actual size).

Willie Nelson's portrait occupies a corner
near the bar. It's a huge painting!

Well – that's a blog and a half! As I've already touted Don's "Brew-ha-ha" blog up there, here's where I also mention my brethren and fellow journalist, and mate Glenn Hendry and his excellent blog "Shwa Stories"!

Until next time, I'm still

** PS – As I was re-reading this for blatant screwups, Wellington just got hit by a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 5.2 shortly after ... and a non-stop swarm of them after that. The first one rolled on for a good minute. Its epicentre is the same place as the big one we had a few weeks ago, Seddon, out in the ocean between the North and South islands.

Nothing broken, no injuries or deaths, but the office I'm in shook and rolled pretty hard. Everyone's panicking a fair bit though. First time I actually got under my desk when I saw a building out the window reallllllly sway and wobble!

There'll likely be more shocks. There's one now! More news on FacePlant as events warrant.