God Save Me and My 'Old Man Drinks'

Blame it on Mad Men, this taste that I’ve acquired for Manhattans and old fashioneds made with the rye whiskeys Bogart called for by the shot.

Maybe it was a re-reading of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye by the oceanside a few years ago that turned my taste buds on to the pale green summer goddess of goodness that is the gimlet.

Maybe I simply had had my fill with flat, dull tonics bartenders had neutered my Tanqueray with for too many years.

Regardless, it’s time to admit, with pride not shame, that I’m imbiber of what my wife teasingly calls “Old Man Drinks.”

Have No Fear, It’s Hangar 24 Beer

You probably noticed, assuming you are still here, that I’ve taken some extended blogging breaks this year. Where was I?

Well .. I was in rehab.

For bad beer consumption.

Thank heavens, my taste buds were saved by Hangar 24 Brewery, a very generous craft brewer based in Redlands, Calif.

Out of the blue this year, they sent me this ginmorous insulated case of some of their many fine, fine brews for me to sample. See:

And sample, I did. Not a bad one on in the bunch. In fact, one of the tastiest, most consistently good batch of diverse beers from one brewer I’ve every had. Here are some of my faves:

Not Just for Happy Hour Anymore

I’m sorry this photo is so fuzzy … … but Li’l Diva only had time to down one eye-opener before she took it.

Beer is a Many Splendored Thing

Today’s is National Beer Drinking Day.

I swear.

I heard it on the news this morning. They would never report on something this important if it wasn’t true.

Weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, definitely, but never this.

There are many a day I enjoy a Tanqueray and tonic, too.

Sometimes, an icy Bombay Sapphire martini (up with a twist, please) does the trick, but only one – thank you.

In the summer, I dig lazing about with a mojito. Or perhaps, three. What can I say. I like mint.

But beer. Nectar of the gods, in all your hoppy, malty, flavorful incarnations. Thank you for the days. And nights. Not so much the belly, but I forgive you. Love takes work, and if loving you requires working out -- so be it.

So to you, I raise a glass. And you, too, friends – whether we’ve ever clinked glasses and tipped one back together or not.

Cheers!

“They talk of my drinking but never my thirst.”

Looking for a last-minute Father's Day gift for a dad who has an iPhone4 and a thirst for life?

No?

Want to watch me drink a lot of beer while attempting to give a coherent product review?

Still no?

Well, maybe you want to see what My Love looks like dressed like as a St. Pauli Girl beer wench?

Ah – that’s it! Then have I got a video for you.

It has music! Comedy! Graphics! Me and a lot of beer.

Click the link at the end of this sentence to watch the special video I made for DadCentric.com called “When Technology and Alcohol Collide.”

# # #

DONATE TO HELP THING 1 NOW
AND YOUR GIFT WILL BE DOUBLED

If you have yet to give to the Cure JM Foundation’s search to find a cure to Thing 1’s juvenile dermatomyositis, then now is the time.

Why?

Because a friend has come forward with an offer to match every dollar our family raises between now and race day (June 25), up to a total of $3,000.

No one knows what dollar will find the cure. Let’s hope it is yours.

What are you waiting for? Give to Cure JM now!

Come, Drink with Me While We Feed the Hungry

If you are one of my local readers or if you aren’t but you enjoy traveling long distances to chug with total strangers, mark your calendar for 5:30 p.m., Sept. 29.

That’s when I will be among nine area bloggers hosting the “Cans and Cocktails” happy hour at the Chinese Mirch restaurant, 35 Atlantic St., in Stamford. All profits from the event go to The Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County to help feed the needy in our community.

On the wagon? We got that covered, too! Chinese Mirch is also donating 10% of the restaurant's food sales from Monday through Thursday next week to the food bank.

To attend, RSVP by e-mail to stamfordnotes@gmail.com. When you go to the event, bring along a few canned goods or boxes of non-perishable food items (dry pasta, mac and cheese, cereal) to donate to the cause.

Those who attend will be able to imbibe my specially designed “local” potent potable for the happy hour – a nuclear green concoction I have named the “Scofieldtown Park Pollutant.”
What’s a Scofieldtown Park Pollutant? Well, maybe this column I wrote for the local newspaper last year will give you an idea:

Hazy Memories of Scofieldtown Park

We all like to wax romantically about our childhoods, so please indulge me as I rhapsodize about my times at Scofieldtown Park, that dumpy little former dump in North Stamford most suspect as the cause of the pesticide-tainted wells on nearby properties.

First, to the best of my earliest recollection, the place looked decrepit even when it was only a few years old in the late 1970s.

There were a couple of fast-rusting swings and a tall twisting red slide that on a summer day could burn off prepubescent leg hair in a single swoosh. Cemented in the ground was at least one of those monopole grills that no one in their right mind ever uses unless they consider rust a flavor enhancer. And, when the sun reached its apex and the wind blew just so, the park air became rarefied with a fragrance best described as a Metro-North bathroom filled with rotting leaves.

Ah, good times. Good times.

Scofieldtown Park was the place I first hit a real baseball. My Tiny League team practiced weekly on the ball field at the top of the park's hill in the summer of 1977. Rather than wearing batting helmets to protect us from fastballs, it appears it might have been better for us to sport gas masks to save us from breathing in the volatile organic compounds, pesticides and "other inorganics" kicked up in the dust. That's if you can believe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, of course.

I remember being disappointed the day I returned there to find the ball field was gone. Little did I know that it had been abandoned and buried because coaches got tired of hustling their players off for tetanus shots and stitches from the chemical drums and old appliances that kept rising like zombies from under the fill.

This also was the place where I first learned to hit a tennis ball. With our aluminum rackets from the old Springdale Woolworth's in hand, my sister and I often had to wait to get on one of its two courts. When I last visited the park about four years ago, the nets were in place and the courts appeared surprisingly clean and crack-free. Then I got closer and realized the surface was wavier than Conan O'Brien's hair. Did the East Side Clairol plant dump old batches of volumizing hairspray there?

This was also the place I took my preschool-aged children to play once. Just once.

For years, I harbored contempt toward officials who let go to waste what could have been a nice little amenity -- a place for community interaction in an otherwise vast and isolated part of our city. After reading the recent newspaper articles and environmental reports, I'm happy they let Scofieldtown Park get run down so as few people as possible were exposed to its dangers in recent years.

Now our local leaders are scrambling about madly, trying to make amends. They are quickly installing filters in homes and authorizing spending for city water mains, which is good assuming the nearby reservoirs continue to escape the seepage of our past sins. But, I ask, where has this urgency been in the past?

EPA reports about PBCs, pesticides and other toxins on the former landfill site have been filed on several occasions since the 1980s and as recently as 2007. Were city leaders hoping the bad stuff would just magically disappear? Maybe they thought someone at the federal agency had simply forgotten to insert a "not" when a 2001 agency report about toxins at the park said "impacts to nearby groundwater drinking water supply wells are suspected."

All I can say for certain is this: In all the hours I spent at Scofieldtown Park during my childhood, I'm sure the safest activity I ever participated in there might have been an underage keg party.

Technorati Tags: charity,cocktails,alcohol,pollution

Farewell, Sweet Nectar of the Season

Thing 2 spit out the last of it, expelling the hazy liquid with a whooshing rush of haste back into the glass from which it came.

The boy then appeared to do his best to swallow his own face.

When this proved futile (but entertaining), he resorted to more tried and true methods. He yelled at one of us.

“YEEEEEEEEEECH! Mooooom! That’s DIS-GUSSSS-TING!” he said, franticly pawing his lips to alleviate the citrus sting. 

“What? Too sour? I can add more sugar into it.”

Thing 2 didn’t answer because he was too busy attempting to yank his embittered tongue from out of his mouth.

“What happened?” I asked My Love. “Did you mix up a bad batch of lemonade?”

“No. I poured him a glass from the one that was in the refrigerator,” she replied.

“Um, dear … that wasn’t lemonade,” I said. “It was a pitcher of mojitos I made for us to celebrate the last weekend of summer.”

* * *

For more sad finishes, read my stab at a short story that concludes the latest round of writings on Polite Fictions.

Our theme this time: “what happens after a major life event.” Some of the gang’s offerings this summer’s entries are a true hoot. Some are hauntingly poetic. Some are all too recognizable.

Mine, “What Happens After Summers End,” is at least as depressing as an 8-year-old’s backwash in your cocktail.

And you, my friend, what did you accomplish/not accomplish this summer?

Video: Summer, I Pissed You Away by Michael Shelly

The Legend of the Noggin-Numbing Eggnog

Early one winter's eve that first holiday season after we moved into our current home, a neighbor appeared at our front door.

One hand of his held fast to the leash of his basset hound; the other bore what is now my legacy to carry on.

"I bring you some holiday cheer!" announced George, a scholarly gentleman in his late 60s with a snowy Abe Lincoln beard who had lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades. He presented me with his gift, wished me a happy then moved on with his self-appointed rounds.

I closed the door perplexed, partially by having an unexpected visitor on Christmas Eve but mostly by what I now held in my hand.

It appeared to be a repurposed brandy bottle. Inside appeared a liquid whose look and viscosity resembled pancake batter, assuming that, as I learned upon unscrewing the cap and taking a whiff, said batter had been mixed by W.C. Fields and Dean Martin.

While my previous neighbor in Texas and I had on occasion bonded over beers in the rear alley (never fault TV's "King of the Hill" for a lack of suburban Dallas accuracy), this was different. This turned out to be my official rite of passage into our new community: the Yuletide ritual of "The Passing Out Of The Eggnog" which, if not acted upon judiciously by recipients I learned, can quickly devolve into -- yes, Virginia -- "The Passing Out From The Eggnog."

George had been making and sharing his concoction annually since the late 1950s. That’s when he and his roommates at the time became intrigued by a cookbook recipe. When George and his wife moved to Vermont a couple of years ago, they passed down their version of the recipe to some of us at their farewell party; however, succession plans for neighborhood distribution were never discussed.
Encouraged by my wife, who knows of my conflicting desires to want to be the center of attention and to avoid prolonged interaction with people, I have since become The Merry Mixer of Uncool Acres.

My first pass at this new role came last winter. Quarts of milk and cream were emptied, dozens of eggs beaten, and pounds of sugar added even before I had poured the first drops of the rum and brandy.

Ah -- the rum and brandy.

As its imbibers will attest, the effects of this particular eggnog are decidedly warm and, shortly thereafter, inevitably fuzzy.

This, I now know, comes from a nog to non-nog ratio that slightly exceeds 1-to-1. This proportioning explains why one neighbor claimed he kept one of George's bottles in his refrigerator for a year before opening it only to find it unspoiled and even more potent than ever.

Having earlier sampled a quart of my brewing from last December, I confirm the myth. And a slight headache.

Once mixed and bottled, I loaded my sack, harnessed my Labrador retriever and set about the streets to keep the tradition alive. Several people were not home at the time, but when a door opened, I was greeted warmly, and sometimes even with the same perplexed look I gave George several years ago.
As I readied to whip up this season's elixir last week, I became curious about the true origins of this parochial legend and hit the Internet.

Via Google Books, I learned its origins lie in a submission by a Col. C. H. Welch of Tucson, Ariz., for “Wild Moose Milk – A Different Eggnog” that appeared in a mid-century edition of "Adventures in Good Cooking and the Art of Carving" by Duncan Hines, the man who sacrificed his good name to supermarket cake mix everywhere. The ingredients and ratios match George's, though he skipped the "three or four hours" of heating during which one must add the eggs "drop by drop."
"Col. Welch in Tucson must have had servants," George suggested in a recent e-mail to me.
Some other research I did suggests that this may be the same Col. Welch of the U.S. Air Force who was once mixed up in a UFO sighting in the 1950s. Draw your own conclusions.

But even when mixed at room temperature at George instructed, his modified version remains true down to the original's mention that it "keeps indefinitely."

Curiously, though, the instructions for the original concluded, "When serving, the eggnog can be thinned with milk, cream or water."

Thinned?!

Some faint of heart folks would suggest that "can" be replaced with "should under all conceivable circumstances." But not me.

Some legendary holiday beasts should never be slain.

Technorati Tags: holidays,eggnog,food,drink,legends,Christmas,humor