Jack Curtin’s LIQUID DIET

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Tags: Fun Stuff // 1 Comment »

At least twp PLCB reps, or whoever, were at Stockertown Beverage last night; no beers were seized but orders were given for some beers not to be sold until further notice.

The beat goes on.

Tags: News // Add Comment »

Here’s the story from today’s Daily News.

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I try to do my part, I really do. If it means consuming more beer than I should, albeit Very Good Beer, I am willing to rise to the occasion. Whether I can now rise from the couch is another matter entirely.

In solidarity with oppressed beer geeks, brave and adventuresome publicans, wholesalers in turmoil and the feckless Facebook band that follows in the path of my long-term compatriot in the beer-writing gig (although, as a member of the higher realms, he insists on calling it “drinks” writing), I stand ready to consume more, as much more as is necessary, to make this region clean and free and morally sound again.

Tags: Personal // 3 Comments »

From that talkative Ms. Maida, the latest comment in The Thread That Will Not Die:

Some of the really extra legal beer came back tonight. Some still being debated about. LCE Officers, including LaTorre were rather accommodating about it — truly seem like decent people performing a job that is based on a shitty set of wonkily regulated laws.

Tags: Cafes, Restaurants, Taverns, News, Philly // 1 Comment »

Update: I refer you to Andy Crouch’s question and commentary below and my answer to same.

I never saw this coming, not for a minute.

It surpasseth all understanding that even the most inept bureaucrat would escalate a stupid decision into an everybody-loses vendetta.

Arrogance. It’s the greatest human failing.

This is going to end terribly, no matter how it ends.

And not just for the PLCB. Maybe not for the PLCB at all, comes to that, depending on how the pols decide to roll with it.

But, no matter what transpires going forward, the Philly beer scene is going to suffer.

Frightened big corporate wholesalers. Timid bar owners. Brewers who can sell all the beers they can make anywhere wondering if it’s worth the effort/risk to send them here. Psychotic snoops eager to turn anybody or everybody in.

Absent a complete overhaul of the system, such is what lies ahead.

And a complete overhaul is not going to happen or, very best case scenario, it will take months and years of legal and political haggling.

I have seen the future and it makes me long for the past.

And I wonder how the jackass who started this ball rolling feels tonight.

Tags: Beer, Commentary, Opinion, Personal // 13 Comments »

I’ve accused the Big Guy of tilting at windmills and the like in the past, but we are brothers in the foxhole when war breaks out.

Go sign up.

Tags: Personal // 3 Comments »

Those morons raided Origlio last night.

This is really getting bad.

Tags: News, WTF? // Add Comment »

Distributors getting nervous….

…about freakin’ Duvel.

Panic in the streets, thy name is Pennsylvania.

Tags: WTF? // 1 Comment »

We’ve had an amazing amount of it here with regard to the PLCB raids. This site has had input in the Comments section from some of the area’s top publicans and brewers, we have a running exchange with Leigh Maida, we’ve had the only input from Philadelphia Brewing Company to refute whatever it is that an apparently false “Kenzo” was trying  to say.

I’m pleased about that—how could I not be?—but I’m also feeling a little squeamish about saying it.

Make no mistake about it, local bloggers are eating this up, more hits, more visits, more everything. This is not totally weird. You think TV talking head and newspapers reporters don’t get a thrill when there’s a mass tragedy or really kinky story breaking, that TV weather gals and guys don’t get just a tad sweaty when there’s a major storm on the way or in the house?  Everybody wants to be first, everybody wants to be biggest, never mind that there are people being hurt by what’s happening, income being lost, lives changed.

As I noted a day or two back, I’m knee-deep in a major writing project, so it’s been all I can do to keep up with this story and administer the Comments area. Earlier this evening, I finally got to look around the internet to see where and how it was playing elsewhere. I visited one site where a very well know beer writer had pretty much gotten it all wrong and had been corrected b y a long response from a local blogger, then the site of another very well know writer where the first writer was correcting him for what he’d gotten wrong. And I was about to jump in at both locations and….what?…put up a post that would link back to my site and drive up traffic some more? What’s the point of that?

But, make no mistake again, I’ve done that sort of thing in the past.

The point (and we did have some doubts I was going to get here, didn’t we?) is that we should not allow this energy to slowly dissipate like the interest in last week’s Gotta Have It, Most Important Beer in the World crush.

Perhaps we few—we “select few” in the words of another commenter expressing his guesstimate  of the minuscule number of people who travel to these climes (and, make no mistake about it third and last, to a blogger that’s about as painful as slap upside the head)—might think about finding a way to put it to productive use.

The well-traveled Tom Peters suggests that we might do so by expanding our custom at Memphis/Local 44/Resurrection and that’s a fine idea; maybe we could also organize a regular–monthly, quarterly, even annual—gathering at all three locations as a display of our ongoing disdain for the sort of incompetent foolishness we witnessed last week.

Ms. Leigh herself has spoken, in a comment on this other post,  of some sort of personalized lobbying effort, while expressing doubts that such might be effective. Well, how about we made that an ongoing information project, regularly checking the registered beer lists for errors, to send to legislators or the PLCB itself to try and make the facts…facts?

Those are simplistic concepts just off the top of my head (and, yes, the second seems to accept the system as it now exists to a degree that I am unhappy with), and I won’t have a lot of time to go much deeper for a while yet. Knee-deep, remember? I’m hoping some of you might offer other, better ideas in response to this post.

We have rehashed the current situation over and over now.  Let’s move on and look for constructive ways to put all that energy to work.

Tags: Commentary // 1 Comment »