Tag: beer

I Am NOT Full of Schlitz

~ Jim Flanigan

Schlitz was once the largest brewer of beer in the USA. By the time I was of legal age to buy beer, Schlitz had changed their ingredients (including the addition of silica gel) and method of brewing. From the top of the US beer world, they slid to become known and reviled as a bargain bin beer to drink if you wanted to get drunk on a budget.

It’s not like Schlitz didn’t try to convince us to drink its swill. They were famous for their “Drink Schlitz or we’ll kill you” commercials.

Yes, that is actress Teri Garr as the waitress incredibly AFTER her classic role in “Young Frankenstein.”

But I’m most impressed by this musical effort from a favorite band of mine to convince us to drink Schlitz.

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Do I Have a Drinking Problem?

~ Jim Flanigan

Here we are halfway through my Twelve Days of Blogging. I’ll let you do the math to figure out how many days that is. I hope you received the gifts you wanted or at least gift receipts along with the crappy ones.

I received this thoughtful gift from my oldest daughter. Now I can go around smelling like I’m stinking drunk even when I’m not.

Examine those soaps a bit closer and you will see this …

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Do They Give Liquor Loans?

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 2 Comments

I’m old enough to recall events back in the day featuring quarter beers. Yep, I remember quarter beer nights where you would get a blast of beer in a small paper cup for 25 cents. But am I so old that a bottle of cognac costs $145,000 these days? This bottle in particular …

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C’mon, I can’t even read the label. It’s a 1762 Gautier Cognac that went for that much at auction. Full story HERE.

So, if a 250+ year old cognac sells for that much, how about a beverage 8 times as old? Specifically, this one …

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New Music for Old Rockers – Oh, Canada Edition

~ Jim Flanigan

In all my rushing around for business travel and then vacation travel, I didn’t want to overlook a review of one of my favorite concerts of all time that I attended last week. I was in St. Louis again last week, ready for some live music, so I hit the Ready Room.

Ready Room

It is an intimate venue that holds 750 general admission concert-goers. But surely Canada’s own Strumbellas would easily sell out a 750 capacity venue. Not so fast. I’m not sure they even wanted to be performing that night. There was a competing event that night that would thin the crowd and shrink ticket prices. With hints like Canada and St. Louis, can you guess the event?

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Vacation Wrap-up

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 1 Comment

My summer vacation is over. Sadly, I never did solve any of the mysteries at the old lake house we stayed at. However, we did have fun there. I took some time to touch nature.

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Rather, nature touched me. And hey, what’s with not shaving when I know I’m going to have my picture taken with a dragonfly on my nose? And what’s with that wild hair from my eyebrow? I wish I had such wild hair on the top of my head. The family pics would look better. Here’s a family pic we took at a science museum in Milwaukee we visited.

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Fear This Beer

~ Jim Flanigan

We finished cleaning out our garage, and the good news is that I found my missing beer!

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My kids didn’t drink it after all. The bad news is that it tastes terrible now. It’s going to take me forever to finish all 13 cans.

By the way, if 13 doughnuts are a baker’s dozen, are 13 beers a brewer’s dozen?

Brew Review #4 – Sam Adams Summer Beers

~ Jim Flanigan

I realized that it is all well and good to review regional Midwest beers in these Brew Reviews because they are delightfully enchanting and humorous to read. But what happens if a reader of this blog outside of the Midwestern USA has their interest in a reviewed regional beer piqued enough by my compelling writing to want to try the beer? That beer may be difficult to find, and the reader may find him or herself disappointed in both the blog post and not being able to find the beer in their locality. Sam Adams is a large brewing entity with beers available nationally, so I decided to try a Sam Adams summer beer which should be more available to our US readers.

As amazing as it sounds, we (which means I was miraculously included) were invited over to a neighbor’s house for a bonfire. A perfect excuse to buy and bring beer! As you may have seem from previous Brew Reviews, I have grown fond of gose beers. I was putting together a mix & match 6 pack when I saw Sam Adams offered this gose beer …

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Brew Review #3 – Wild Sour Blueberry Gose

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 1 Comment

I was getting tired of not being able to find a gose (pronounced like ‘Rosa’ except of course with a G rather than the R) beer, which I will remind you is a German sour, salty beer with little to no hoppiness that I fell in love with as described in my Brew Review #1. After some online sleuthing, I decided to try an actual liquor store this time which turned out to be a brilliant way to find a wide selection of liquor. The Binny’s Beverage Depot website showed numerous gose beers available. Sounds like a simple solution, right? Off to Binny’s except …

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Brew Review #2 – Soft Parade

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 1 Comment

While my first Brew Review involved an actual trip to a brewery in another state, this Brew Review is not that ambitious. I somehow happened to find myself in the liquor aisle of the local grocery store when I went to buy a birthday card for my wife. I (claim to) have no idea how that happened. Since my visit to the 3 Floyds Brewery that I wrote about in my first Brew Review, I have been searching for a local store where I can purchase gose beer, which is a type of German sour, salty beer. Very tasty, but very elusive ’round these parts.

Well, this one was not gose, but it caught my eye …

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Brew Review – 3 Floyds

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 6 Comments

It appears that I may be making the rounds of some local breweries on a regular basis, so why not share my review? Maybe because my readers are all over the world and unlikely to visit a local Chicago area brewery? That’s never stopped me before from writing about stuff that nobody wants to read.

We visited 3 Floyds Brewery in Munster, Indiana, just a few miles southeast of Chicago.

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Is that all full of beer? My friends that I went with certainly hoped so. Me? Not so much. I was the designated driver. Sigh!

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