Category: Uncategorized

Admit it – you like Mike Mussina, too.

The New York Times has an article on strategies kids take to get by living in the most expensive city in North America. Funny how it reminds me of something:

Peter Naddeo, a 24-year-old musician, earns $15 an hour working as a temp in Web development in Chelsea, and has perfected the tricky art of stretching lunch into dinner. He moved to New York from Pennsylvania last fall and can barely afford his $80 monthly college loan payments. He listens to a hand-me-down CD player because iPods are out of reach. He pays $600 for a 10-by-10-foot room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has one saving grace: a window that faces east. For lunch, Mr. Naddeo usually orders a $3.50 plate of yellow rice and beans from a Latin American diner on Eighth Avenue, and eats late to ward off hunger pangs. Sometimes he hits up a bar in his neighborhood where a $6 pint comes with a small pizza. Or he relies on friends to feed him.

In the ’80s this was called living through a recession and no one had pals who fed him. Though that isn’t quite true as I recall buying groceries for a roommate who was down to eating carrots only. She was getting a little orange. One pal had a bag of maple leaf cookies that were put out on a plate whenever we came over. No one liked them so it was a cheap way to be hospitable. He was on mini-wage and there was only tea, cookies, cards and hockey of the black and white when we were over there. I do like the line above about a “hand-me-down” CD player. Boo frikkin hoo.

Isn’t this just called being young? Don’t you have to be broke for at least half a decade after school? And where is the New York of Archie Bunker? I blame George Jefferson, movin’ on up and all that. Everyone wants to live like people on TV.

How are your units going?

This really should be labeled as “book review, part one” given I have not hit the half way point in this book, published just this year. But as I have complained long and hard about the absence of a comprehensive US brewing history, I am driven to tap and type, to type and tap. In a nutshell, this book gives me a significant degree more confidence that I am getting a fuller picture than either Smith’s 1999 Beer in America: The Early Years and Ogle’s Ambitious Brew from 2006. Not so strange when you consider the simple fact that Smith stopped at 1840 while Ogle starts about there leaving only a few gaps along the way to the craft beer movement. Neither as as comprehensive as Canada’s pan-alcohol 2003 history by Heron entitled Booze: A Distilled History.

But I am still not yet sure that Mittelman achieves the level of Heron’s completeness given where I am in my reading but at the same time I have some hope. The book has, for example, footnotes for just about each paragraph that indicate some good primary research has been done as well as reliance on a number of secondary sources. And that research is well laid out. There is clearly a focus on the role of taxation due perhaps in part by the ease of access to public records as well as Mittelman’s past work in the area. I like the fact that she deviates from Ogle’s claims as to the independent immigrant will of specific personalities as a key factor in brewing history with some reasonable description of how German immigrants banded together in the 1860s to assist the newly created Federal tax department in creating a policy structure that went a long way to create a continuing regulatory environment sympathetic to their business needs. Which is right? Probably a bit of both and a measure of something else as well.

Maybe it’s wrong for me to want a unified theory or at least a single history on the topic. The three recent works do relatively well together in presenting their visions of American brewing. Mittelman keeps a blog which is interesting but needs more readers to spark it up a bit – and maybe for reasons other than the unfortunate matter Andy mentioned the other day. I will keep reading and maybe follow up with more thoughts as they pop into my head.