On today’s show… I’ll be talking about the importance of drinking locally brewed beer. We’ll catch up with the Wit Project.
On the beer calendar for May: (3) The Atlantis Beer Festival in Riverhead. (10) Legacy Brewing Company will be at Bellport Beer & Soda. (12-18) American Craft Beer Week. (17) The B.E.E.R. amateur craftbrewer competition. (19) B.E.E.R. meeting at John Harvard’s.
If you have an event you would like to add to the calendar, just send me an email: donavan at radiobeerhall dot com.
Last week at the B.E.E.R. meeting, a representative from Peak Organic Brewery brought samples and told us about his beer. The beer was just okay. Nothing amazing about this beer. And the beer is brewed in Maine and not on Long Island.
There’s nothing wrong with the beer. It’s even organic, so they are making the moral choice there and organic beer is probably going to be the new craft beer as the microbreweries become national macros and it’s going to get hard to tell what craft beer really is anymore, the organic label might help provide a quality designation that just not being Anheuser-Busch did ten years ago.
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Here’s a simple rule that I would like to embrace for myself and if it resonates with you then give it a try: Drink only locally brewed beer. Which begs, “what is local?” How about this rule of thumb for starters? If a beer has to be trucked more than 100 miles, then don’t drink it unless you are the one doing the trucking.
Trying to convince beer geeks not to drink a beer because it was trucked more than 100 miles is not going to be an easy task. Beer geeks want to taste the next new thing. Since traveling is expensive, the next best thing is to do your own liquid tour of Belgian by heading down to the beer store or the pub and picking out some exotic bottles.
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It’s not just an aesthetic choice; it’s an economic choice, but one that places the good of the community over what is expedient for the individual. A person shouldn’t seek to only maximize quality while minimizing cost to themselves. The moral imperative is to maximize locality even if it costs more. This might seem counter intuitive, but if you look at the whole picture, then it starts to make sense. Almost 70% of the money you spend buying local products from local businesses will go right back into your community. Only a little over 40% of your money will stay in your community if you buy industrial products from corporate chains. The money that stays in your community will make your community richer. You might be spending more of your money on basic items and have less left over for consumer electronics, but your town will have a more interesting local culture and your schools will be better and you’ll know more of your neighbors.
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I’ll mention one more thing. I picked up an excellent book by Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of The Idler a periodical about the idling lifestyle. Tom Hodgkinson has written a few books, namely How to be Idle and the one I purchased titled The Freedom Manifesto. Hodgkinson’s goal “is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.” In short, idling will set you free. You can find more about Tom Hodgkinson and The Idler on his web site (idler.co.uk).
How does idling fit in with brewing beer? That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
Brewing beer is a leisure activity. Technically, when I make beer I am being idle. The prejudice of our time is that idleness is completely passive. This is not the case. Passive idleness is only one part of idleness and not the whole. Active idleness includes any movement of the body that is done for the purpose of pleasure and not for production.
Next time… I’ll tell you about my new home pub.
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I flew down to New Orleans and sampled the brews in the Crescent City. We visit Abita Brewing Company in Abita Springs, Louisiana and the Crescent City Brewhouse on Decatur Street in the French Quarter.
Rich Thatcher is back for part two of our chat about the 
Before moving the beer from the fermenter, I typically pull a sample out and taste it. I want to make sure the beer tastes good before putting it into the keg. I use something called a beer thief for this. Everything that touches the beer must first be cleaned and sanitized with the iodine solution. If the beer passes the taste test, then I rack it to the keg using a racking cane.
A primer on 
Thanks to an invite from our good friend Dudley of Crop Circle Ale, I attended the recent North Fork Craft Beer Fest with Rich. (I have a picture of us somewhere; I’ll find it.)