Monthly Archives: August 2015

Peach Tea Smoothie

A smoothie, half consumed, on my coffee table. Half-full? Half-empty? I don't know. It's fully delicious, though.

I miss my Grandpa Steve an awful lot. He laughed a lot, joked a lot, doted completely on my grandmother, and talked to everyone. Man, did he love talking.

He also loved peach tea. Lots. His version was Lipton Instant Peach Iced Tea, and I cannot remember a time I’d go to his house and there wouldn’t be a big pitcher in the fridge. Usually, he’d have to make more, because he and the rest of the family drank a lot of it when we were together.

Peaches in a blender. Tea being poured over them.

Man, I loved that stuff. I don’t know if it was because I really enjoyed it or because my beloved grandfather did so much, but I wanted it all the damn time. Drove my mom batty, because she (perhaps alone) did not like it so much and I asked for her to buy it a lot even when we weren’t visiting those grandparents.… Continue reading →

Readings You Might Have Missed

Food

To Cut Food Waste, Spain’s Solidarity Fridge Supplies Endless Leftovers.
I need this to be a thing I can contribute to, pronto. I always cook far, far too much. And I really hate food waste.

Beer

Waste Not, Want Not: 5 Ways Breweries Recycle Their Waste
I am endlessly fascinated by learning about what different breweries do in dealing with their waste streams. I think because it’s all such simple waste (water, grain, etc), and thus something I can see potential in and have some clue about how to reuse it. And probably because I know there’s some amazing potential for goodies in there.

Science

Building standards aren’t to blame for chilly offices
So what is? Because, at this point, we’ve all ready about how it’s sexism in building standards.… Continue reading →

Announcing The Session: “The Hard Stuff”

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic.

I’ll be hosting September’s Session with folks’ posts going up on Friday the fourth. For this session, I’m asking my fellow beer bloggers two related qustion questions:

  1. What do you want people in beer culture to be talking about that we’re not?
  2. What do you have to say on the topic(s)?

“Beer” is its own subculture at this point. There’s an expected “look” and expected desires. Beer festivals are everywhere. Beer blogs flourish; indeed at this point there’s reasonable sub categories for them. New breweries are popping up at record pace; the US alone has more than 3,000.… Continue reading →

Two Weeks of Links

I didn’t do links last Monday because something more important came up. So this week, instead of one link per section, you can have several! Except in the beer section, because the beer stuff I got these last couple of weeks somehow wasn’t my jam.

Food

Beyond Brothels: Farms And Fisheries Are Frontier Of Human Trafficking When Americans think about modern-day slavery, we typically tend to think of sexual slavery and movies like “Taken”. The reality is that trafficking is as much, if not more, about forced work of a non-sexual nature. Food is often produced under such conditions.

Europe’s Taste For Caviar Is Putting Pressure On A Great Lakes Fish. Lake Superior apparently has really adorable tiny fish that, in turn, have really delicious roe.… Continue reading →

I Do; Maybe I Should Not

CW: Rape, victim-blaming

A tweet saying, "i never stay at any event where men outnumber women because it isn't safe and if anything happens first question will be: what were you doing there #inourshoes."

I have made a substantial portion of my life in traditionally male-dominated spaces. Currently, it’s the beer industry.

Beer, the beverage, is alcoholic. The beer drinker is predominately male (64% of US men vs 29% of US women consume beer2). The beer blogger is exceptionally male (82%3). The beer festival attendee is usually male (>50%4).

In other words, to do that which I love these means going to a lot of these spaces where I will be outnumbered by men, while most of us have been consuming some or a lot of alcohol. And I think about it every time I attend a beer event.

Alcohol is assumed to be a huge factor in sexual assaults. Sure, the National Institutes of Health subgroup, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that alcohol was consumed “by the perpetrator, the victim, or both” in roughly half of all sexual assault cases.… Continue reading →