LIQUID DIET - the blog

…but I do know when I’ll be back again.

Tuesday. Late.

As I’ve said here in passing several times, but never fully explained, I’m off to visit my son, Dr. daughter-in-law and new granddaughter Regan in the wilds of Idaho, a journey which is no simple thing.

As far as I know, and admittedly that’s not too far, nobody on the East Coast provides direct service to Boise, so I have a three-hour layover in Denver both coming and going to make this all work out. I can just barely catch the first commuter train out of Wayne at 5:30 tomorrow morning and jump on the Airport line at 30th St. Station so that I can be at the Frontier terminal an hour before takeoff. Since I’m carrying a suitcase full of bee and will have to check it, I figure I can’t cut it any closer than that.

McCall, Idaho, where I’m bound, is two hours north of Boise, adding to the length of the trip and complicating catching a 7:15 flight out of Boise Tuesday morning. It’s a neat little town with a decent brewpub and a really good wine and beer bar, much too isolated for the likes of me, but that’s not my call, now is it.

In addition to the beer I’m lugging and several other bottles I sent out over the weekend, all to celebate my son’s birthday, I’ll be carrying the strangest damned stuff toy I’ve ever seen for Regan (should have photographed it, but it’s all packed away now).

The plan is to post a story or two with photos while I’m there, unless I decide to just drink and party like it was 2007. We’ll see how that goes.

There’s more on all this, plus a photo of my breakfast last Sunday morning, posted as the result of psychological drives I cannot begin to explain, over at Mermaids.

Be careful while I’m gone. I hear there are a lot of familiar faces back in town and that can only mean trouble, with a capital “T.”

Or is that “D?”

Behold, the new automated Victory Growler Filler poised to fill a growler…

My growler! See how delighted by it all young Leah looks?

Now watch, as she pushes all the right buttons….

Was it good for you too?

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the bar, the place that will become known as Ruch’s Corner, Liz is cleaning to a glass…

Note that she is not up to her elbows in soapy water in some ratty old tub behind the bar…

..and we can zoom right in to see the tiny bubbles at work.

Is this a great world, or what?

I was, god help my weak, weak soul, back out at Victory on Saturday afternoon to see all this wonderfulness happening and to accept (appropriate, sadly) abuse from Patrick (I used to have to actually work!) Mullin and the afore-referenced Richard (Still Here After All These Years!) Ruch for not having properly cared for my fine German flip-top growler, being unaware that you could actually remove the rubber gasket on the ceramic “cork” and clean it. Bad Me.

The place was slammed!

All the built-up, desperate needs of the regulars who had spent six weeks in the wastelands were unleashed to the point where all the restaurant tables will filled and there was a line in the foyer and out the front door when I left around 4:30. There were even two little kids being used as doorstops to ease the flow of traffic (would have gotten a photo but my arms were filled with my growler (10 Years Alt) and sixpacks of Storm King and the Alt again to accompany me to Idaho this weekend).

All the bar seats were filled and people were standing at the wall rails and behind seated companions as well. It looks like this renovation thing might have been a really good idea. Who knew?

We did discover one design flaw in the bar setup, however. The seat Ruch had chosen to be his (management has instructed him he must move to the right and most visible side of the bar so he can be seen from a distance by people coming in the new entranceway because, much like they would bring their children to the zoo, many parents used to walk their younger them by his former stool whenever they came in for dinner to point out “that strange old man” to delighted childish giggles, and this new location makes it possible for them to continue that tradition merely by pointing across the room) , was clearly selected with a purpose–for him to be able to see the large television screen mounted over the middle of the bar.

There are two other vintage copper domes from old German brewing tanks installed in the new restaurant aside from the one which hovers over the Brewmaster’s Table. They have been cut in half and placed over either end of the bar and over two booths in the long, narrow family dining section where the old bar use to be. They are neat and eye-catching but, at the bar, the halves are also in the line of sight for roughly eight to ten seats at either end for that big TV screen at the center.

The three potential solutions to the problem: move the current screen out farther from the wall which would make it visible to more, if not all, seats; have Ruch himself move further down to one of the seats without a sight line as a symbolic gesture that it really doesn’t matter all that much, or– his own adamant suggestion (having rejected #2 with a snort and a muttered “I can always go to Earth, Bread & Brewery, you know”)–install two smaller screens beneath the larger one, positioned so they can be seen from the seats under the half-kettle tops.

With Ruch getting crankier and argumentative like this in his declining years, there is talk he will eventually be replaced with a lifelike (it isn’t like it’ll have to move very much, just a upward bent elbow every 30 seconds or so) and vocal (”slow pour” is the only vocabulary required) android as the final step in the Great Renovation. This was always the plan in the long run, but now it might be Sooner rather than Later.

Hey, if they’ll let Joe Meloney truck it up to Sly Fox for a Monday Night Tasting a couple of times a month for old times sake, I think we got a done deal.

Kindly Old Mr. Curtin was at the Beer Yard this afternoon, doing his weekly on-site penance, and managed to escape his confines for a bit and jump on the Fabled Beer Yard Truck and travel with the ineffable Mark Sauerbrey a few miles down Lancaster Avenue to Villanova to the site of the fabulous Maia, a fantastic new (open 7 days as of today) two level (soon-to-be) hot spot with a bakery, cafe & market on the first floor which will offer breafast, lunch and dinner, and a striking, seafood-oriented restaurant upstairs for fancier dinners.

Great wine list and an incredible, I say Incredible beer list, both bottles and draught, the latter being, of course, why the fabled Beer Yard Truck was there in the first place. The big beer cooler on the first level might just make you step back and gasp on first sight.

Had I know I was going, I’d have had my camera, but I didn’t and that’s a shame, because the building offers so many obvious camera angles to shoot from it’s almost sinful. Not to worry, though. I befriended the hell out of everybody in sight, especially managing partner Scott Morrison* and sommelier/manager Melissa Monosoff, who also was just named the official PLCG Sommelier, so she has a lot on her plate. Both were effusive in their commitment to the idea of advancing the idea of good beer with good food.

So rest assured, I will be welcomed back to do the photo thing soon–so long as none of you guys spill the beans about my sordid past. And I must say that, from the kitchen staff to the wait staff, to the gal at the bakery counter to the management types, I was treated with extraordinary cordiality for an unshaven old guy in an ancient shirt and half-ripped shorts who looked like he didn’t belong anywhere in Villanova, much less in a fancy new restaurant.

But maybe that was just because I was seen coming in with Mark. He do be a charmer.

(*No, not that one, he’s still at Dock Street.)

Doing that thing that I do…do…do so well (which is being a good webmaster and news purveyor), I just posted a story at the Beer Yard about the big expansion of Bella Vista Beer Distributors which is coming to a block on S. 11th St. near you next September.

That story focuses on the wholesaler side of the Bella Vista operation, but there’s big changes on the retailer side as well as they, for all practical purposes, triple their space for their combined operations. The retail side, in addition to a clean, modern “supermarket” design, with also offer regular beer classes and presentations and a large “Belgian Room” which, Jordan Fetfatzes promised, will carry every Belgian beer available in the Commonwealth and “be decorated like a Trappist Monastery, with stained glass windows.”

Hey, don’t lots of houses in South Philly have stained glass windows?

More, including photos and actual facts, as things get nearer to reality (reality is coming back into fashion as the Bush Administration drifts toward the dustbin of history).

Scratch travelin’ downtown for that keg of Sprecher Black Bavarian at Memphis Taproom this Friday. Ain’t gonna happen ’cause the brewery can’t get it here at present. Their TV appearance was cool, though, and you can catch it at their website.

Maybe you can checkout the Brandywine Valley Beer Festival at Iron Hill Media on Saturday instead. It’s always one of the region’s best.

Otherwise, I guess you’re just gonna have to celebrate your weekend around the fact that Big Dan and the Dannettes will be back in town and I won’t…

…this one’s right in the wheelhouse of most of you, I’d think.

Here’s the Brewers Association release. If this doesn’t get your juices flowing, well then, shame on you:

American Craft Beer Week (May 12-18), which is celebrated annually, highlights the industry and culture of craft beer. This year, breweries and beer makers will also recognize their collective charitable contributions. For the first time ever, the Brewers Association announced U.S. craft breweries’ charitable contributions, and for 2007 they are estimated to be more than $20 million.

Changed to a weeklong event in 2006, the inaugural American Craft Beer Week was recognized by the U.S. Congress with House Resolution 753. The week has continued to grow with interest and support from beer enthusiasts and the media. In 2007, more than 150 brewers registered their community celebrations at www.AmericanCraftBeerWeek.org.

Also new, SAVOR: An American Craft Beer and Food Experience (May 16-17), will be held to commemorate American Craft Beer Week in Washington DC. The event will showcase craft beer and food pairings with participation from 48 independent craft brewers. SAVOR signifies food and beverage lovers’ increasing interest and knowledge of beer and food pairings.

Can’t you just feel the love?

Iron Hill ups the ante some more in the packaged product area. This beer will be available in 375 ml bottles ($9.00) at all Iron Hill location for consumption on premises or to take out.

The official description:

Crafted from Iron Hill’s own Pig Iron Porter, then aged and finished in a TABASCO® pepper mash oak barrel… the heat and the pepper character mix with the roastiness and subtle chocolate notes of the porter, making this a steak-friendly beer with 5% alcohol that’s sure to be a summertime favorite for its sweet, smoky character and flavorful punch.

And, just in case you were worried that all those reports of bottle releases from General Lafayette were mere rumor:

It all be happenin’, baby.

A liter of beer will cost more than $12 at the Munich Oktoberfest this year.

Somehow, this revelation from the BBC, arrived at after tons and tons of research, I presume, doesn’t seem to me to show things to be much different than they were back in The Day (you know, when my contemporaries and I ran around in animal skins and killed dinosaurs for dinner):

(newser) – Young people intentionally binge on booze and drugs to improve their sex lives, according to new research. A third of European men under the age of 36 and a quarter of women said they drank to increase their chance of sex—and were more likely to engage in unsafe sex when they were high, reports the BBC. Cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana were used to enhance arousal or prolong sex, according to the study published in BMC Public Health.

“Millions now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted,” said the lead researcher. “Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Okay, maybe that “quite specific sexual effects” thing is new. Science has advanced things a bit, I guess, but otherwise, same old same old.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Dubya Chronicles, a small voice crying out against the darkness that has descended upon the nation (254 days and counting until the latest long national nightmare is over) produced by Rob Davis and your humble imbiber, has a beer theme this week. Visit if you dare.