Beer not just for Breakfast anymore

A post from 2012, but it’s still relevant. Though a bit less today as a number of laws have relaxed. And of course at the moment hardly anybody is flying and bars everywhere are being closed. But flash to happier times and the bars are open again…

“Drinking friendly state” the bartender answered my “a civilized state”. This was in response to buying a beer at the airport and being told I could bring it anywhere inside the airport. Wow a state that doesn’t seem to be still yearning for prohibition.

Coming from California where it’s not too bad to Michigan where the state has to wholesale all liquor sold in the state. Drives the prices up a bit but it kills variety. There are three or four kinds of most liquors available but that is a drop in the cocktail glass of what is available in say California. There are liquor stores in CA that sell almost nothing but Tequila. It’s not unusual for a well stocked store to have 30 to a hundred different brands and grades of a given type of liquor. This also impacts things like bitters and other essential cocktail ingredients. Is it possible to have a first class society if you can’t make a first class cocktail (legally).

There are those that would say yes but I’m not so sure. You don’t want a land of drunks but limiting variety doesn’t impact that. You can get cheap liquor in MI, just not a variety of GOOD liquor. A lack of innovation is a lack of innovation.

OK yes you can have a first rate society with out any liquor at all, but it’s an up hill battle.

A interesting side effect is that beer is really good in MI. There is a tone of craft breweries and a lot of home brewers and MI is the state that wrote the bill (not passed) that would have legalized home distilling.

The thing is that folks who like interesting cocktails are also the same kind of people who like interesting beer and interesting wine and good food. So if you have most of those people will find a workaround. They can buy in other states, and do, they can buy in Canada, and do, they can make their own, and do.

So the question is as a state do you want your citizens working their creativity to get around stupid laws or do you want to support them to use that creativity to boost the economy of your state.

On the base level if they are buying outside of your state your loosing money. If they are spending time getting around laws, that shouldn’t exist, they are not spending that time helping your state thrive.

Cowering in Place

Well… Now that I have more time, or actually maybe less time but am stuck at home anyway, I thought maybe I would post some more entries in the Detroit adventure.

So opening this back up after?… A bunch of years I notice that I had some posts started that I never posted so I will finish those also, unless they just seem stupid which is a possibility.

It looks like my last post was in 2014, so OK a lot has happened. We lost our huge old elm tree. The trunk was 5 feet in diameter and it was over 100 years old and Dutch Elm disease took it out in less than a month. We tried a bunch of things but there isn’t really a treatment and while it did cling to a slight vitality for a year or so it finally gave up. Really sad. It was taller than the house (three stories) when the house was built, there are photos. We did refuse to go with the “grind it up and burn it” plan that the first tree place wanted to do and got a place that works with an outfit that planks the wood and sells it to furniture makers. And we got a bunch of the smaller boards and I will make some furniture for the homestead from that wood.

I don’t think I had been brewing a lot by 2014. That changed and I brewed close to 200 gallons a couple of years since. There is a big home and garden tour in the neighborhood and I brew for the after party. And neighbors are good at drinking down the stash so I don’t get too backlogged. We started doing floats/ costumes for the Marche du Nain Rouge. That is postponed/ canceled this year because of the virus But we did everyone but the first two? I think. In a kind of scary foreshadowing this year I was doing a “zombie” running for president and riding a tricycle. I was thinking Mad Max but someone who saw early pictures though more Tim Burton. If you are seeing this you probably get either my Instagram or Facebook feeds so you can see a shot of “Vector the Super Spreader”. I will put up some shots of the final creation. He is just about finished so maybe I will post on the day of the parade (well when it would have been).

We had a monumental fight with the city over street lights, and won! Oh I should jump back a second. I got talked into joining the board of directors of the homeowners association. It was crazy because of a huge mess that I had no idea I was stepping into but the association was in bad shape and just realizing it. That got fixed, I am not taking credit, it took a lot of people doing a LOT of work and I only did a small part of that. We were just about out of the woods when the city decided to lie and then try and cheat their way out RE: our street lights. It’s way too long a topic to deal with in this post but it went on for a year plus and involved lawyers and a bunch of money and threats of RICO violations and well a LOT of trauma. BUT in the end (everyone needs some positives about now) we prevailed. Not as smoothly as we hoped but we did win in the end. It took a HUGE community effort but in the end it worked. This I will take a tiny bit of credit for. There have been at least one other big neighborhood projects that have also worked out and I think a lot has to do with the lighting working out, but I had basically nothing to do with them.

Aislinn is doing a TON of pottery. That also started after my last post. There is a local place Pewabic Pottery, that in certain circles is kind of a Ford of Pottery, though MUCH smaller. Well know and high quality, but in Detroit. So she started taking some classes and has been doing a lot of work there and at home since we have a potters wheel downstairs now!

There is a lot to the pottery story, but maybe later.

The shops have been “expended”. Expanded is really more a capability than space reference. Because I have been doing a lot more building than sound work the shops have expanded there capabilities to match. I did a lot of wood work but limited metal work because I was a “subtractive” only shop. I have a small mill and a small lathe, but I had no ability to weld. Not strictly true but no ability to quality weld. With the bigger Nain Rouge projects welding became a must so the whole metal working part of the shops has become MUCH more capable.

AND food. When we arrived there was really no restaurant I would have brought a guest to in Detroit. Harsh maybe but pretty accurate. So I added to my normal cooking to doing a lot more. I started baking bread pretty regularly. I was already roasting coffee but that ticked up some and brewing went way up. But I also started cooking a lot more meals, and not just your OK meals but meals that reminded us of the kind of places we would have gone to in SF.

Now Detroit has become a foodie location and, before the Virus, there were a ton of places with amazing food you could go to. But I got over the hump and we still eat in well regularly.

Now that everyone is hunkering down (You Fing better be!!!) all of these skills are working out well. We are heading into spring and if I finish up a couple of projects we may be almost self sufficient for a fair amount of time.

Here is hopping anyway.

Stay healthy and keep safe.