My Sixteenth Entry - Anchor Brewing Co.'s Anchor Steam Beer

I attended the University of Texas from 1981 to 1988. (I was not a seven-year undergraduate, as much as I would have liked to have been. This was four years in the Plan II program, then three years at the U.T. School of Law.)

In those seven years, I attended just about all of the home football games, a ton of baseball games, and almost no basketball games (weirdly, there was this kind of negative mojo about going to a game at the Frank Erwin Center, which felt like the Astrodome of basketball, too comfortable, too much at a remove from the floor, echoey and cavernous).

Going to Texas football games was one of the reasons you go to Texas - parties before the game, drinking rum-and-cokes during the game made with the booze hidden in my father's Barnoculars, and then parties after the game at frat houses and backyards.  In retrospect, I don't know how I avoided a public intoxication arrest or chronic alcoholism from all the drinking we did during the golden years of the 18-year-old drinking age.

I went to many of the road football games too, including several of the annual Texas-Oklahoma games at the Cotton Bowl, and the two Cotton Bowl games that Texas played during my time there.

The Cotton Bowl games were always tough for us because the winter winds would collect in the stadium and freeze the cold metal bench seats.  So you just had to drink to stay warm - given the choice between the Texas phenomenon of hot Dr Pepper (I don't drink coffee) and my secret flask of Schnapps, the choice was pretty easy.

I don't remember much about the 1982 Cotton Bowl against Alabama, but I have vivid memories of the  really cold January 1, 1984 Cotton Bowl when Texas had the chance to win the national championship, but lost 10-9 to Georgia. I had smuggled bottles of cheap champagne into the stadium (down each sleeve of my winter parka) and we were going to open one each time Texas scored a touchdown. As the score indicates, they never did. We drank the champagne anyway, and then went to a local indoor bar to watch Nebraska win the national championship by upsetting Miami.

The Texas-OU games were always way more enjoyable than the bowl games, if for no other reason than the weather was almost always perfect, and the State Fair was in session.  (By contrast, going to the January bowl game required you to walk through the deserted and creepy fairgrounds in a really dodgy part of Dallas after parking your car on someone's front yard - like going to some kind of post-apocalyptic gathering of the tribes.) You would get your Fletcher's Corny Dog, a cup of beer, and some nachos, and find your way to the student section with your friends, glaring at the OU students.

(By the way - I have a distinct memory that there used to be a regular fight in downtown Dallas between OU and Texas fans.  And by fight, I mean a real physical fight with arrests and furniture thrown out of hotel windows and . . . well, you get the picture. And that in the 1980s, Dallas had enough of it and started blasting the fans with fire hoses to clear the streets. But literally no one I tell this to remembers that. Weird.)

Anyway, the Texas-OU game was always a treat because of the extreme enthusiasm of the respective sides.  The seats are distributed evenly between the schools, so that half of the stadium is red and half is orange.  Each set of fans do their yells (Boomer Sooner for OU; Texas Fight for UT), the bands try to drown each other out, and the Texas fight song ends with "OU sucks!" for this one game. And win or lose, you would leave the stadium and enjoy the rest of the day at the State Fair.

So, when my friend Jerry sent me an email telling me that Texas-OU tickets were available for sale to non-season ticket holders - apparently unusual and reflecting the lukewarm enthusiasm for this year's team - I jumped at the chance to take my wife and son to the game for the first time.

I am not kidding about the first time.  My wife is also a UT alum, but not a football fan. By her account, she went to one game during her undergraduate and law school years. She had never been to the Texas-OU game, and I think never to the State Fair either.

And she still hasn't been.  As the date approached, she told me that she had a commitment in Philadelphia for the weekend and couldn't go. So Josh invited his friend Connor to go in her stead.

On the Friday afternoon before the game, I left work early and went home to get the boys. We loaded up the Highlander and ventured north, Josh behind the wheel during the beginning of rush hour.  He has been doing a lot more driving, getting ready for his license exam this spring, and he was excited about tackling the crowded freeways.

Thirty minutes later, he was ready to give up the wheel.  So I told him to park downtown and I would show him a cool trick.  We traded seats and I got on the HOV lane on I-45 North.  Instead of sitting in the main lanes, moving at about 3 mph, we were dashing down the dedicated lane for carpoolers.

"You see, boys?" I said with the pomposity of a dad teaching young men Important Lessons of Life.  "Those poor fools are going to be there for hours, while we bypass the clogs and get out of town.  The reason this lane works is because you can't get on except from downtown and you can't get off for the next fifteen miles or so."

I started making fun of the cars in the freeway, singing my victory song, full of Schadenfreude and self-satisfaction.

Until I remembered that I had not remembered the tickets to the game.

Fifteen miles or so later, I u-turned back south and went home to get the tickets, passing through downtown and catching the remnants of Friday's rush hour going south.

We arrived in Dallas about midnight.
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On the way, we stopped for dinner. Because I was behind the wheel, I got to choose.  And I chose the Waffle House.

My mother will tell you that the first place our family ate at when we arrived in Texas in 1973 was a Waffle House right next to the motel we were staying at in Lewisville until our house was ready. The motel was terrible - lots of ants - but the Waffle House was just fine.

For some reason, however, we didn't eat there much after that. When we ate out in my teen years, it was Bonanza or Friendly's or even IHOP, but not the Waffle House. It did not have a family-friendly vibe.

I ate there occasionally in college, and then took about a fifteen-year break. On the road to Arkansas, it was never an option for my wife and kids, probably because of the same truck-stop, not family-friendly feeling.

The next time I ate there, however, was memorable enough to change my attitude. Josh and I had attended the funeral at sea of my good friend and saxophone teacher, Ed Sullivan.

Not that Ed Sullivan - this man was a lifelong resident of Houston, a cranky old man at times, but a true friend with a heart of gold.  He taught me saxophone for about five or six years, charging me ten dollars a lesson for thirty minutes, and he drove to my house. He taught music because he liked to help people and enjoyed the company.  After the lesson, we would sip drinks and talk about old Houston - he knew everybody and had amazing stories about Houston and Galveston.  He lived to his late 80s and passed away about four years ago with grace and bravery after a long life well spent.

After he passed away, his friends chartered a boat and we went out to the bay in Galveston and dropped his cremated remains overboard while playing his music.  Josh and I attended, wearing black suits and sunglasses.  He was moved by the ceremony, having known Ed all of his life.

We left the group after the boat docked, and started the drive home. I was hungry and so was Josh, so I looked for a place where we could get some comfort food.

And there was the Waffle House. Josh and I got out in our formal wear, with sunglasses on, and entered the restaurant. The waitress was kind, probably intuiting that we had just attended a funeral, but what was odd about the experience was that no one else really noticed. The Waffle House did not judge and did not discriminate. Underdressed or overdressed, everyone was welcome.

Josh and I had waffles and talked about Ed and felt kind of cool in our FBI attire.  It's a nice memory.

Connor and J-Man and chocolate chip waffles

So when I wanted to eat somewhere on Friday night, and I saw the Waffle House sign, that's where we went.  And despite my son's misgivings - he has not gotten old enough yet to be nostalgic for old good times - the food was just fine, the waitress was funny and pleasant, and the vibe was funky and unique.

Eating in a Waffle House is sui generis - when I told the waitress we were on our way to Dallas (200 miles to go at 8:30 p.m.), the cook turned away from the griddle to look at us and he smiled.  You don't get that at McDonalds.
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When we got to Dallas, we stayed at the Hyatt DFW.  I liked it: it was a nice hotel with easy access to a train that took us the next day to the Bachman Road station where a waiting shuttle took us directly to Fair Park and the game.

The four amigos

When we got there, we met up with my friend Jerry and his family.  A quick visit to Big Tex, and then we went looking for breakfast.

The traditional breakfast at Texas-OU?  Two corny dogs and (for me this year) a fresh lemonade.

Breakfast of champions.

It's game time!

We chatted for awhile with Jerry and his wife, Lori, both of whom I love dearly, and then we were off to the game, taking our seats in the upper corner of the stadium.




(By the way, note the guy next to Josh in the rain poncho. He was super-intense throughout the game and even as the weather cleared - and it did not rain on us at all - he never took the poncho off. He was one of those guys, I think, with all of his tools on pegboards in his garage, and a strict deed restriction enforcer. You know the type.)



We enjoyed the game - Texas had its chances, but kept making silly mistakes and, after a furious comeback in the fourth quarter, closing it to four points, couldn't make a stop to get the ball back until it was too late.

I can tell that Josh is now getting more enamored with the college lifestyle. He's a watchful kid, quiet and smart, absorbing everything going on around him. I can see a new maturity developing in so many aspects of his life, and I couldn't be prouder of him.

After the game, we got funnel cake and the traditional turkey leg:

Then a quick ride in the Skyway back to the other side of the park, and back to the hotel.

I had a great time.  Josh and Connor are great company, and I'm looking forward to more of these football weekends.


(And maybe we can get my wife to come out next time, although, to her credit, she did get a genuine Philly cheesesteak here while she was there.)

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This week's beer is one that I've been wanting to try for awhile - Anchor Steam beer from San Francisco, California.  This is a California Common beer, also known as a "steam" beer, brewed in one of the first craft microbreweries in the country.  Although there has been an Anchor Steam beer around since 1896, the current version was first brewed in 1971 by Frederick Louis "Fritz" Maytag, who had purchased the brewery in 1965 after it had developed a reputation for sour beer, and who turned it around with artisanal, sanitary brewing techniques.

(c) JDurfee99

The "steam" in the name of this beer allegedly comes from a unique element in their brewing process:

Anchor Steam Beer derives its unusual name from the 19th century when “steam” was a nickname for beer brewed on the West Coast of America under primitive conditions and without ice. While the origin of the name remains shrouded in mystery, it likely relates to the original practice of fermenting the beer on San Francisco’s rooftops in a cool climate. In lieu of ice, the foggy night air naturally cooled the fermenting beer, creating steam off the warm open pans.

Good ol' Wikipedia suggests another explanation:

It is also possible that the name or brewing process derive from Dampfbier (literally steam beer), a traditional German beer that was also fermented at unusually high temperatures and that may have been known to 19th-century American brewers, many of whom were of German descent; Dampfbier is an ale, however, not a lager. 

Anchor Steam describes its ingredients as "a blend of pale and caramel malts, fermentation with lager yeast at warmer ale temperatures in shallow open-air fermenters, and gentle carbonation in our cellars through an all-natural process called kräusening."

What is "kräusening"? Good ol' Wikipedia tells us:

Kräusening is a conditioning method in which fermenting wort is added to the finished beer. The active yeast will restart fermentation in the finished beer, and so introduce fresh carbon dioxide; the conditioning tank will be then sealed so that the carbon dioxide is dissolved into the beer producing a lively "condition" or level of carbonation.

In other words, the beer goes through a second fermentation after the beer is initially done, kind of like folding egg whites into a cake batter to lighten it up before it's baked.

And I can taste the second fermentation in the Anchor Steam. The beer is super-light and has a fizzier mouthfeel than other beers. It also has just enough hoppiness to keep it from drifting towards being too sweetly malty.  I guess there's some psychology working here - the fizzier and lighter the beer, the more it makes you think of the drink as a carbonated barley soda instead of a beer with substance and gravity. So to combat that, you add just enough hops to bitter it up and slow you down, but not so much that the hops kill off the light drinkable mouthfeel.

The hops give a good balance here. Anchor Steam uses Northern Brewer hops that, coincidentally, Beer Advocate calls "[a] strong fragrant hop with a rich rough-hewn flavor and aroma, ideal for steam-style beers and ales" with a "unique mint-like evergreen flavor."

Could I taste the evergreen (which seems like a good choice for a Northern California beer)? I guess I could, just from the back of my throat. The beer was not flavor-forward like aggressive craft brews can be - as I got to the bottom of the pint glass, it was mostly the caramel malt I was detecting. Not terribly complex, but easy drinking.

The bottle design was pretty literal. A anchor, some hops, some barley, and the name of the beer on a red ribbon with the advisory, "Brewed in San Francisco since 1896." But when you look at the label on the neck of the beer, there's a bunch of tiny type providing the tasting notes, history and salesmanship that can help you pass the time as you contemplate the bottle you're drinking from.

Better than last week's Yeti Imperial Stout?  Of the two, I'd probably want to drink another Anchor Steam, so it wins the belt. Plus, there's so much history on this beer, I really enjoyed the experience. Drinking and learning - maybe this could be a new educational technique for our schools.  It's how I got into law school, after all.

See you next week.

My Fifteenth Entry - Great Divide Brewing Co.'s Yeti Imperial Stout

I'm baaaack.

Not sure if there's anyone left in the room after my five month break, but sometimes the muse is there ... and then sometimes it goes on vacation for awhile.  If you're there, thanks for sticking with me.  If you're not, well, you're not.

Lots of stuff happened while I was gone.  As Mickey the Escaped Convict says to Pee-wee Herman towards the end of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, my summer was "action-packed!"

Let's review, shall we?

*    My daughter graduated from high school in Reliant Stadium with about six hundred other kids.  She and her boyfriend (who she's still dating long-distance) were radiant and I couldn't have been prouder.  You want a picture?  Nope - no family pictures on this blog. Hope you're not offended, but over the summer, I got religion again on family privacy. Speaking twice on social media will do that to a man, which may be why I walked away from the blog for awhile.  You can't be too careful.

In August, we moved her into college.  It was pretty cool - we schlepped a room full of stuff into an old-fashioned jail cell dorm room and dressed it up.  Before long, it was actually kind of livable, with rugs on the concrete floor, framed art on the walls, and a tension-rod curtain over her open closet.

When we were done, she couldn't have wanted us out of there more quickly.  And weirdly, my wife was ready to go too.  I kept waiting for the Hallmark moment - tears, hugs, the culmination of 18 years of child-rearing - but everyone was so tired, and so on edge from the various and sundry small irritations that come with this kind of move that we were ready to go.  And so we went.  And about 24 hours later, my wife started crying. I didn't cry for about another day after that.  My son . . . I don't know when he cried - he hasn't told me yet.  (Update: My son read this and assured me that he has not cried.  Yet.)

She's doing great at Anonymous U.  She joined a sorority, has made many new friends, and allegedly made good grades on her first round of tests.  The weird part about it for me is that she's there and we're here and it's alright.  We love her, we miss her, and we find we're doing a lot more mom-and-dad dinners and shows and stuff now that she's gone.  (If you're reading this, honey, skip the last part of that sentence. Daddy didn't mean it - it's just blog humor.)

*    I spoke at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association (TDCAA) Civil Law Seminar in May on the ethics of social media (killed), the State Bar of Texas's Suing and Defending Governmental Entities Government Law Boot Camp in July on open government (killed), the TDCAA Annual Meeting in September on ethics of social media (killed again), and the DA's Office later in September on HIPAA (tough room).  If you haven't gathered it from this, I kind of teach a lot - it must be some kind of pathological need to impress and be approved, or just a need to take a day off from work and hang out with smart people at legal conferences in nice hotels.  They keep asking, so I keep doing it.

The Boot Camp gig was kind of funny because I was scheduled to speak in Austin at 9:00 a.m., but I didn't want to miss my regular Tuesday night poker game.  So . . . I played until about 11:30, got in my car, and drove to Austin.  Arrived at the Sheridan in downtown Austin at about 2:30 and checked in. (BTW: I highly recommend checking into a hotel in the middle of night, at least once in your life: the desk clerk and the bellman were what you would expect at 2:30 a.m. - a little dodgy and a little punchy from sleep deprivation (or maybe that was me).)  The clerk told me that my room might be empty, or it might be occupied.  "I can't tell - the computer's sending me mixed signals," he said.

So he sent me up to the room at 2:45 a.m. with the bellguy, who knocked on the door and then let himself into the room while I waited in the hall.

You know what Darrell Royal once said about the forward pass?  "There are three things that could happen, two of which are bad."  The same could be said about walking into a hotel room at 2:45 in the morning, except the ratio is probably closer to nine things that could happen, eight of which are bad, seven of which involve angry, semi-clad hotel room occupants.

End result?  I lucked into the one good thing - the room turned out to be empty - so I got about five hours sleep and then spoke for one hour at 9:00 a.m. (and killed, as noted above).

Nice surprise: I won TDCAA's Civil Practitioner of the Year this year at the Civil Law Seminar. Nice plaque, really nice comments from people I hugely respect.  Thanks, TDCAA!

Fortunately, I only have one speaking gig left this year - open government at the TDCAA Elected Prosecutors' Conference in December.  It's a good gig because its a chance to impress my boss, who attends the conference.  As long as I kill - which I almost always do.


*    We travelled a lot this summer.  Went to Carmel twice - once to drop my son off at a golf camp there, and once to pick him up and vacation in Big Sur.  We whale-watched, drove around Monterey Bay, and enjoyed the best view on Earth.  This is not hyperbole - from the Hyatt Highlands in Carmel, where we stayed, here's the view.

(And this doesn't even capture thirty percent of the panoramic view of the Pacific Coast you get in person.  The blues, the rocks, the whitecaps, the endless horizon.  To give you a sense of what this view was worth, there was a property for sale across the street from the hotel about 150 feet below the view you see here.  1250 square feet - 2.5 million dollars. And if I could afford it, I'd be there right now.  That's how awesome that view was.)

We did not play Pebble Beach (my game is not worth $500 per round), but we lunched at the restaurant on the 18th green. After lunch, my son and I went down to the green to take a picture.

Nice, right?  It gets better.  While we're there, this guy asks my son to take a picture of him and his girlfriend.  Notice the fence in the foreground: that's the dividing line between the $500 a round golfers and the rest of us.  Strictly enforced - like, we'll kick you off the course, and out of town if you jump that ankle-high fence.  (I know this because they made me take my Pebble Beach souvenir hat off while dining inside the clubhouse.  It's that kind of place.)

As Josh sets up, the guy jumps the fence, dragging his girlfriend with him.  She's mortified, and the bystanders nearby are scandalized.  He then drops to a knee and asks her to marry him.  I look at Josh and he starts taking pictures.  I don't know if the pictures turned out - she said yes, the guy thanked Josh, and they disappeared into the nearby hotel - but it was pretty remarkable.

Me and a friend in Monterey.

The other thing that was really great: in Carmel in July, the high temperature was in the 70s.  Kind of the perfect place.  Of the various places I've been, it was the hardest to leave.

My first selfie, with some kid on the Monterey Peninsula. 

*   We also spent some time in Galveston with my family - it was a wonderful time, very relaxing - and Lisa and I went to New York for a quick weekend to see some shows on American Airlines' dime (they lost my luggage last year during my visit to Tokyo to see my brother and his family, and they gave me a travel voucher to compensate me - nice if you can get it).

But the second-best trip I took was to Las Vegas with some of my poker buddies to watch one of our crew play in a World Series of Poker event (and play some events ourselves). We stayed at the Rio - my buddies Bert, Wojo, Rick, and Bill - and I played cards from Wednesday through Saturday.  Did not cash in any of the tournaments - my best finish was 81st out of 796 in a deep-stack tournament - but I learned a great deal and came back to Houston a better player.  Since coming back, I've won two of my Tuesday tournaments and finished close to the money in several others.

I'm all in.

Plus, I got my Heisenberg on.  The cool thing about playing cards in Vegas is that you can be whoever you want to be. Here, I was trying on the Vegas lizard look.  It didn't work, but it was fun being someone else for awhile.

There's a rule about poker: however interesting you think your bad-beat story is . . . it's not.  So I won't regale you with the various and extremely boring ways my dominant hands got beat just as I was going to cash in the tournament.  If you want to hear those stories, you'll just have to ask me in person.

Rick and I also played the Wynn golf course - cheaper than Pebble Beach, and we had a caddy (first time for me).  Beautiful course, hot as hell.  I played lousy, but Rick was great company and I fully appreciated the weird dissonance of playing on lush grass in the middle of the Strip.  (Weird but true story: because his vision is quickly deteriorating, Steve Wynn himself does not play on his own course except to hit a few balls now and then down the first fairway.  Who knew that it's actually possible to be sympathetic for a billionaire?)

All told, a great trip - much love to my understanding wife, who let me go (and did not blink when I told her how much I'd lost).

*   Finally, we had some great visitors.  My Aunt Vicki and Uncle Bill visited from New York and helped me assemble a new gas grill (it didn't blow up, despite my best efforts).  I will return the favor next year - visiting, that is, not building cooking equipment.

I also got to hang out with two of my law school buddies here in Houston when they came to town for the LSU-Wisconsin game.  I took them to the Last Concert Cafe for lunch (they were impressed by the fact that the waiter brought me my regular meal without my ordering it), the Saint Arnold's brewery for a few tasty brews, and then to an Astros game.  As much as I love my friends here in Houston, it's special to reconnect with those guys.  It's like taking a time machine back to 1987 - easy and unconditional friendship based on sharing a really difficult but fulfilling experience. It's not like we were in the Army together, but the next closest thing I can think of.

I'm sure there some other stuff that we did this summer that I'm forgetting, but I reserve the right to supplement my briefing (this is an old appellate lawyer saw).  Suffice to say, this has been a great year, even if I let the blog languish for a little bit.

Sorry!
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This week's beer is the Great Divide Brewing Co.'s Yeti Imperial Stout.  Josh picked it out for me.

In fact, he's probably the reason I'm writing again.  He's the hardest kid in the world to impress, but after a dentist appointment today, we came home and he told me, out of the blue, "Dad, I read your blog today.  It's pretty good.  You should do more of it."

I was floored.

He went on: "I'm going to get a beer for you right now.  Get to work!"

I had thought about writing in the blog again when we went to Galveston this summer.  I brought three beers with me and planned on drinking them and writing about them while I relaxed in the beach house.  But it didn't happen.  In fact, I don't think I drank any beer at all that week - my sister mixed super-potent margaritas and left me in an alcoholic daze for much of the time as we played cards and built sand castles on the beach.

When we got back, I kept going out to the garage and looking at the 36 remaining beers. The number of beers left was kind of daunting, and I was beginning to worry that the beers were not going to be fresh (a legitimate concern that I promise to address in some future blog entry).  With so much going on in my life, I found it hard to set aside the time to write.

But when your hard-to-impress son tells you he likes what you write . . . that's a motivator.

So here's the story about this beer.  Great Divide Brewing Co. is a craft brewery based in Denver, Colorado,  celebrating its twenty-year anniversary this year.  They work out of a converted dairy processing plant and brew 9 year-round beers and 12 seasonals.  They brew with a green philosophy which I like and which is consistent, I think, with the craft brewery ethos.

I like the bottle - simple brown and tan colors, a profile of the mysterious Yeti in the foreground of the logo, and some pretty cool hype:

Yeti Imperial Stout is an onslaught of the senses.  It starts with big, roasty malt flavor that gives way to rich caramel and toffee notes.  YETI gets its bold hop character from an enormous quantity of American hops.  It weighs in at a hefty 75 IBUs.

What does "Imperial" signify?  It's short for Russian Imperial and good ol' Wikipedia tells us that it is "a strong dark beer or stout in the style that was brewed in the 18th century by Thrale's brewery in London, England for export to the court of Catherine II of Russia."  According to Beer Advocate, this is the "king of stouts" with "high alcohol by volume," "plenty of malt character," and "huge roasted, chocolate, and burnt malt flavors."


No kidding.  Yeti has an ABV of 9.5% - enough to give you that warm-all-over feeling as you imbibe.  It's a classic stout, dark chocolate with a nice caramelly finish, very smooth and drinkable.  Taking a long sniff in the pint glass, the roasted malts take over, along with an alcoholic vaporousness.

I liked it, and so do others: according to Great Divide's website, Yeti is Number 36 on Beer Advocate's Top 100 Beers on Earth list.  I'm sure that Catherine II would have liked it too.

Is it the best of the 50 beers?  Heck, it's been so long since I've written this blog, I don't even remember what the champ is.  So Yeti Imperial Stout - you take the belt!

As for me, am I back?  Yep, for as long as the muse is here and the beers are in the fridge. Thanks for your patience and welcome back!

My Fourteenth Entry - Flying Dog Brewery's Raging Bitch IPA

Some odds and ends this week as I recover from a pretty bad cold . . .
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A recurring dream:

I receive a letter from my law school.  "A recent audit has uncovered a discrepancy in your transcript," it begins.  I learn that I am three hours short of the required credits for a diploma, and my law license has been suspended, pending the completion of the course credit.

So I go back to law school, but for some reason, I cannot bring myself to finish the coursework.  I don't fail the one class I need to pass - I am, after all, a licensed lawyer - but instead, I just get a series of incompletes, always dropping the class shortly before the drop deadline, then taking the class again the next semester, then dropping the class again, and so on, ad infinitum.

As the cycle continues, I live alone in a small apartment in Austin, wondering why I can't resume my old life . . . 

Okay, it's not Count Floyd scary, but this seems to be what passes for nightmares in my fiftieth year.

I used to be pretty good at interpreting dreams, but this one stumps me. Am I worried about life after retirement? Is this a metaphor for purgatory? (Eternal law school as penance for my sins?)

I'm tempted to order my law school transcript to count the hours, but what if the dream turns out to be true?

I think I'll wait for the audit and hope for the best.

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Two Mondays ago, I went with my friend and co-worker Brian to Spec's Downtown and got the Divine Reserve No. 14. A friend of mine at Saint Arnold Brewery told me the Saturday before release day that the beer would be available at Spec's that Monday when it opened at 10:00 a.m.

"So if I get there at 10, I'll get some?" I asked.

"No, you'll be too late," he said.  "The line starts forming at about 8:00."

I wasn't going to wait in line for two hours on a workday, so I decided to get there at about 9:40 and take my chances. When we got there, there was no line out of the store. When we went inside, however, the line stretched the length of the store and then back into the deli section.  I pegged the line at about 150 people.

So we waited with the other Saint Arnold enthusiasts.

It wasn't so bad. I've noticed that people in lines are not nearly as antsy as they used to be now that everyone has a smart phone. Looking up the line, I could see that there was little conversation, just a series of heads canted at forty-five degree angles towards the screens of their phones, thumbs skittering over their virtual keyboards.

I tried to avoid joining this virtual waiting room, keeping my phone in my pocket. Instead, I chatted with Brian and admired the fine cheeses on display where we were standing, wondering how they sell the esoteric varieties before they go bad. (After all, how many wheels of high-end Muenster cheeses do downtown Houstonians eat? Apparently, more than you'd think.)

At 10:00, the line started to move. I learned that the first guy in line - who had been waiting there since six in the morning - got a case of Divine Reserve No. 14, and a gift card for the brewery's new restaurant. The rest of us were limited to two six packs and two bombers.

A side note. Maybe it's just me, but there sure seems to be a nostalgic vibe in Saint Arnold's various marketing strategies that takes me back to my dissolute youth. Their goofy and charming tie-dye Bentley is a throwback to John Lennon's Rolls-Royce; the line to wait for the Divine Reserve reminded me of the days I would stand in a parking lot for hours waiting to buy Rolling Stones tickets; and the bombers evoked the drink-it-all-before-it-goes-flat large bottles of Miller High Life in the convenience stores on the wet side of the county line.

I'm sure there's a artisanal explanation for why they like to bottle some of their beers in bombers, but for me, when I see a bomber, I am instantly transported into a brightly-lit Seven-Eleven standing in front of the refrigerator case with three guys, each of us in three-quarter sleeve concert t-shirts, buying bombers at the tender age of eighteen and then piling back into our piece-of-junk car and driving out to a city park to drink and listen to Zeppelin eight-tracks and celebrate our new-found maturity.

Hmm.

Now that I think of it, the bomber bottle actually may be my Proustian madeleine and I'll now write a remembrance of growing up in Seventies Texas.

(Or not, since it's basically already been done.)

Anyway, as Brian and I approached the front of the line, we saw Brock Wagner, one of the founders of Saint Arnold, happily shaking hands and chatting up the line. I like Brock - close readers of this blog may have figured out that I play basketball against him many Saturdays, and that he has given me some valuable insights into the brewing and tasting process. He's also about my height, a good sport, and a relentlessly annoying rebounder after his missed shots. We play about even, mostly because I offset his speed and athleticism with my sheer bulk.

He's a fortunate guy, doing something he loves and making money doing it, but I don't ascribe his success to luck. From what I've learned, he had a solid business plan, he grew the business at the right pace, he manages the company and its employees with exactly the right combination of authority and deference to creativity, and he is a relentless marketer. His being at the Spec's at 10:00 a.m. on a Monday morning to greet his faithful says a lot about his work ethic.

So I got to the front of the line and Brian and I each got the maximum allotment. We went back to the courthouse to resume our day, and I did not sample the beer until much later.

Did I like it? Let's put it this way: if it was one of the Fifty Beers, it would now be holding the belt. It's sneaky-alcoholic at a 10 percent ABV, but it doesn't hit you that hard. Nice spice, the expected citrus finish, smooth drinker. Worth the wait.

Congratulations, Brock!

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I am debating whether to go to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker this year. Not the big $10,000 buy-in tournament, but one of the smaller tournaments with a much smaller buy-in.

I was originally planning on playing in the Senior Tournament this year, but it fell on the same weekend (June 6) as my daughter's high school graduation, and since I love my daughter, deferring my debut in that tournament was an easy decision.

(Unless you ask my friend Bert, who remains convinced that I should have blown off the graduation and went with him to Vegas. He argued, "She's going to college. That's the graduation that counts. She won't miss you. C'mon!")

There are other tournaments throughout the month, however, and making the trip is just a matter of setting aside three or four days and reserving a room and using a voucher I've got from AA.

My poker skills have improved lately, now that I am playing regularly with a group of guys in Bellaire who take the game both seriously and in good fun at the same time. I'll make a decision soon and report back, but I am leaning towards . . . going.

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Speaking of Las Vegas, one of the great books about that strange and miraculous town is Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I first read in high school after seeing some of his pieces in the Rolling Stones I read in the Lewisville Public Library. I am second to few in my admiration of Thompson's writing style and moxie - a terrifying combination of sheer recklessness, utter self-confidence, and loving contempt for his targets of disdain. I so wanted to be Hunter Thompson when I was a kid.

Integral to the Thompson mystique was the work of his illustrator, the great Ralph Steadman. Steadman's pictures were the perfect companion to understanding Thompson's stream-of-consciousness writing. If you're not familiar with his work, there's a documentary about Steadman that you should check out.

I owned three or four Steadman t-shirts in my dissolute youth that left people thinking that I was deeply impaired just by my wearing them. At right, you can see my favorite of those shirts. I wore that shirt out during the late-Seventies and lost it during one of my college moves. I bought another one about four years ago and I don't wear it enough, mainly because I live in the suburbs and I don't want to scare the straights.

I bring up Steadman and Thompson because this week's beer is the Flying Dog Brewery's Raging Bitch Belgian-Style IPA from Frederick, Maryland, and the label is by Ralph Steadman, depicting ... well, a raging bitch. If you are not acquainted with Steadman's work, this is a pretty good introduction - the dog on the label is frigging demented, an animal you do not want to encounter unleashed in your neighborhood.

The tasting note (I guess) is by Steadman:

Two inflammatory words… one wild drink. Nectar imprisoned in a bottle. Let it out. It is cruel to keep a wild animal locked up. Uncap it. Release it . . . . Stand back!! Wallow in its golden glow in a glass beneath a white foaming head. Remember, enjoying a RAGING BITCH, unleashed, untamed, unbridled - and in heat - is pure GONZO!!

(Quick explanation: Josh picked this out, but didn't take his usual picture. As such, the beer in the glass was already half-gone when I realized we hadn't taken the picture yet. So this is what's left as I sit here typing in my office.)

You can see from what remains of the beer that there was a substantial head. The flavor is a classic IPA, 8.3 percent ABV, aggressively hopped, with a wheat-citrus taste and some honey aromas in the glass. I liked it just fine. Not enough to prevail over last week's Black Chocolate Stout, but it's definitely worth drinking.

And yeah, the Steadman label is a gimmick, but for this one of the Fifty Beers, it was a gimmick that hit close to home.

After I'm done here, I'm going to put on my Heart of Gonzo shirt and finish the pint glass in the backyard, listening to this song, trying to remember what it felt like to drink a bomber of Miller High Life in a parking lot, pushing my hair out of my eyes, laughing at sophomoric guy jokes, and fantasizing about my own trip by convertible into Las Vegas with my attorney, Dr. Gonzo, chasing the American Dream through the end of the Seventies:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101; to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . .

 Man, I wish I could write like that.

My Thirteenth Entry - Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout

My daughter recently decided where she's going to college. She's been assigned a dorm and a roommate, and we're trying to pull together the hundred different things you have to get done before she leaves in the fall.

As I've watched my daughter cheerfully prepare, I've been thinking of this 2011 Suburu ad which broke my heart the first time I saw it:

The ad hit home then (and still resonates today) because I was that dad, and my daughter was that daughter, and after she got her license, I watched her disappear down the road with the same feeling of helplessness the dad in the commercial has.

For me, that day started with a trip with my daughter to Pasadena shortly after her sixteenth birthday for her final driver's test.  We rode together to the Department of Public Safety, got there and checked in, then returned to the car and pulled into a queue to wait our turn for the test.

I waited in the car with her, gave her some last-minute pointers, and then got out and stood on the sidewalk, watching.  Eventually, a trooper got into the car with her and they drove off.  I watched the car disappear around the corner of an adjoining street and hoped that she would do well.

She returned to view about five minutes later, pulling into the DPS parking lot and approaching the parallel parking poles. There's an urban legend that you can pass everything else in the driving test, but if you hit the curb or either of the poles during your parallel parking test, you instantly fail and have to try again another day.  I don't know if that's true, but I'd heard it enough that I held my breath while I watched her try.

She eased back into towards the slot, turned, and turned again, and stopped.  She wasn't perfect - she ended up about nine inches from the curb - but she passed. I exhaled.

After she got her temporary license, I got into the driver's seat, and we drove to our insurer's office to get her added onto our policies. After that was done, we drove home.

I pulled into the driveway.  Looking down at her phone, she said, "Katelyn wants to celebrate."

"Sure," I said. "Let's tell Mom, and then we can all get some lunch."

"No, Dad. Just me and Katelyn."

"Oh," I said.

We got out of the car, she got in the driver's seat, and I leaned over (just like in the commercial) and told her to be careful. She smiled, backed out into the street, and then zipped off, this tiny mercurial girl  enveloped by glass and metal and combusting gasoline, a thousand terrible things waiting to happen out there, not even wearing a helmet.

It's been a while since then. She's now about to go to college, she has a boyfriend and a regular part-time job, and to the objective observer, she's a full-fledged adult woman.

But in my eyes . . . she is still the tiny mercurial girl that I watched that winter afternoon, driving off into the world, oblivious to the dangers of the world, a gleeful smile on her face, and I am the proud, loving, and helpless dad in the driveway, hoping for the best.

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The boy she is dating, a tall handsome blond kid with a good sense of humor, is on the swim team at their school and will be attending UT in the fall.

As it happens, I was a tall blond kid with a good sense of humor who was on the swim team in high school and attended UT.  That's what worries me: I know exactly what this kid is thinking, and if it involves my daughter, I want to roll her up in bubble wrap and get a possessive pit bull to stand guard over her.

He came by one day as I was in my home office and introduced himself.

I asked him which strokes he swam. Backstroke and freestyle, he replied.

As this conversation was proceeding, I was engaged in my own conversation with myself, playing out the various lines of questioning, trying to decide what would work the best.  This is something that some of us lawyers are particularly good at because we're always evaluating where the next question is going, and where the next answer will take us, and editing on the fly.

In this case, I was trying to decide between the tough-guy Don't Break My Daughter's Heart or I'll Snap Your Neck persona or the slightly nicer We're All Buddies Here, But Seriously, Don't Break My Daughter's Heart or I'll Snap Your Neck persona. I liked this kid, so I went with the latter approach.

"I was on the swim team too," I said.  "My PR on the 50 free was 23.6."  (Actually, I don't know if that's true - it was something like that, but my recollection of my true personal best time fluctuates from 23.4 seconds to 24.6 seconds, depending on how desperate I am to impress.)

He nodded and we talked swimming for awhile. I showed him a picture of me on the team.

Me in 1981: second from the left, top row.

"You had a lot more hair back then," he said.

"Uh, yeah."  I started rethinking my We're All Buddies approach.

My daughter stood in the doorway, knowing what I was thinking.  "Daddy, he's not here to talk to you. Let's go!"

We shook hands and he left. Since then, I've beat him in chess and water basketball, and he declared that I was "way cooler" than he thought I was when he saw my badge from work.  Although I kind of recognized the backhanded nature of that comment ("way cooler" than what?), and my daughter told me that she thinks he let me win those games, I choose to believe that the old lion still has some teeth.

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On an actual beer topic, next week Saint Arnold Brewery releases its Divine Reserve No. 14. When and where the bottles will turn up is a mystery, however.

The Divine Reserves are Saint Arnold's one-off limited release specialty beers, and over time, getting a six-pack or a bomber has become its own event, a scavenger hunt for beer aficionados. The smart hunters use Twitter with the hashtag #DR14 and wait for the word to get out about when a shipment arrives nearby. Here's a good article about the search process in the Chronicle.

My co-worker Brian and I will be monitoring the availability of the beer and if the conditions are right, we may just dash out of court proceedings to get a couple of six-packs on Monday morning. When we do get some, I'll do a special review.

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One other thing. Last Saturday was Record Store Day, so I went to Cactus Records near Shepherd and 59 to see what was up. The ad said that there would be live music, and that they would be serving Saint Arnold Santo, and there were supposed to be some deals. So, being the cheapskate I am, I seized the opportunity.

Although I get most of my music these days online, I think I was inclined this year to go to Record Store Day because (1) I have a love/hate relationship with Internet stores (I think we're slouching towards total depersonalization of commerce, which is bad for society); and (2) I wanted to relive my old college days in Austin, when the local record stores would have their once-a-year super-sales and you could get a new LP for $3.99 or less. We'd brave the crowds and pick the store clean. I remember loading up in my first such sale in the basement store at Dobie Mall, getting Brian Eno's Before and After Science, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's self-titled debut, and a compilation record that included Adam Ant and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

(Did I say that I went to college in the Eighties? And now you know.)

I visited Cactus last Saturday after playing basketball. I had changed my shirt, but I still had the post-workout funk and I hoped to be in and out, maybe with a cold one and a couple of CDs. I lucked into a pretty good parking spot and ambled in, no line at the door, about 1:00 p.m.

When I walked in, I saw a poster for the Ry Cooder Live in San Francisco CD and immediately started jonesing for that record. (Ry Cooder is the world's greatest slide guitarist, and he was doing worldbeat explorations decades before Paul Simon and David Byrne did.) I found the CD in a rack, costing probably about six dollars more than I would have paid on Amazon, but I was in the spirit of the day, so I picked it up.

I also found a used CD of Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club in 1963, one of the greatest soul concerts of all time (only James Brown Live at the Apollo might be better, but that depends on what your mood is). I hadn't listened to it in twenty years, so I grabbed it too.

I then found myself at the end of a line that appeared to be something related to Record Store Day with about twenty-five people. So I got into it. Shortly afterwards, I turned to two guys who were behind me in line as we approached the tables and I asked them what I was in line for.

"Um, this is the line for the Record Store Day merch."

"Uh-huh. What merch?"

"The stuff they're selling today, sir." (Throughout the conversation, one of the guys kept calling me "sir" even though he looked to be about thirty-five. The other guy just looked at me as if I was slightly demented.)

I looked at the tables, but all I saw were some t-shirts and some small picture disks.

"What are they selling?" I asked.

The guy I was talking to got excited. "Well, we were at Vinal Edge [editor's note: that's the correct spelling, by the way] before here and we got a Devo concert disk from 1977. The cover is excellent."

"Any CDs?"

(I later found out that this one question marked me as a fogey more than my graying hair, my growing middle, and my total lack of style.)

He paused. "Um, they have the new Pixies CD, sir." The other guy rolled his eyes.

I finally got to the table, where an impatient clerk asked me what I wanted. I saw a box of vinyl records behind him, but nothing was displayed, no labels, no poster. Apparently, you were supposed to know what they might have and that was the fun of Record Store Day - knowing to ask for a special release and, by chance, maybe actually getting it.

I asked about the only special release I knew about. "Do you have the Devo record?"

"Which one? Max's Kansas City or 'Gates of Steel'?"

"Um, both?"

He turned around and pulled Devo Live at Max's Kansas City - November 15, 1977 from a box on the floor. From a different box, he pulled out a gray vinyl 7-inch single with Devo performing "Gates of Steel" on one side and the Flaming Lips performing it on the other side.

"Anything else?"

I couldn't think of anything to say, so I shook my head, took the records, and moved down the line to the next table.  There I saw a David Bowie picture disk, a single of the song "1984." It looked cool, so I asked the next clerk for one.

"That's the last one," she said, smiling. I took it.

Time to pay. I looked for the cash register. There was a line disappearing around the corner into another room. I went into the other room.  The line snaked around the room, about 150 people.

Now what? I had two CDs, and three apparently rare vinyl records, and I was going to have to wait about an hour to pay for them. Or I could leave, knowing that I didn't have a working vinyl record player anyway, no loss to me.

I looked at the Devo LP. The guys were walking through Manhattan in their uniforms with stockings over their heads. A label said, "Limited to 2000 - Liner Notes by Gerald V. Casale." Only 2000 in the whole world, and I had one of them! How could I leave it behind? And the last David Bowie picture disk?

(In retrospect, I now realize I was acting like this guy.)

I got in line. We moved at a stately pace around the room, and I struck up a conversation with the guy behind me. He was holding a couple of LPs by bands I did not recognize. We talked about our hauls and then he said something that made me feel really, really old.

"Look at all of these CDs!" he said, gesturing towards the racks and laughing. "I don't know anyone who buys CDs anymore. I get all of my music on Spotify. This is old technology." He drew out the word "ooooooold" as he said it.

I chuckled and nodded in agreement, slowly shifting my Sam Cooke and Ry Cooder CDs behind the Devo LP.

We eventually got to the cash register, stopping midway as we passed a guy pouring cups of Santo, which was cold and refreshing, particularly since I was still in my basketball gear and hadn't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. Beer: lunch of champions.

And now I own these vinyl records. And now I have to decide whether to buy a record player, and whether I should break the seal on these special releases, or hold them as collector's items. I'm not sure I get the fetish of vinyl, but I have a closet full of old LPs that haven't been listened to in decades. Maybe it's time to dust them off and see what I've been missing.

And on Record Store Day next year, maybe I'll know what to ask for.

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This week's beer is the Black Chocolate Stout from the Brooklyn Brewery.  If you remember from my discussion of the history of IPAs, stouts used to be what beer was, a product of the "kilning" of barley malts in ovens to stop germination. Because kilns were not terribly sophisticated back in the day, the malts often turned very dark and passed along that color and taste to the finished product.

(c) JDurfee99

I was not a fan of stouts when I started this blog. I have now come to appreciate their special gifts, however, and the Black Chocolate Stout is a great example of what stouts have to offer: a sweet pungency, like dark chocolate or molasses, with a warm alcohol finish.

This is a beer that begs to be paired with cured meats and cheeses. I almost want to go to a Renaissance Festival and buy a smoked turkey leg to gnaw on while I drink this. I want to grow a thick beard and bushy eyebrows and wear hand-tanned animal pelts and . . . well, you get the idea.

According to the always-helpful tasting note on the label:

In the last century, British brewers made strong stouts for the Czar's Court. They were called Imperial Stouts. Our Black Chocolate Stout, brewed once yearly for the winter season, achieves a chocolate aroma and flavor through the artful blending of six varieties of black, chocolate, and roasted malts.

(c) JDurfee99

Yep - the chocolate is here in the taste, the look and the aroma. At 10 percent ABV, I'm also feeling it as I drink it. It doesn't leave the funky thick aftertaste you get from some stouts either - I don't feel like I've just swallowed a tablespoon of Hershey's Dark Cocoa.

I like this beer. In fact, I like it enough to make it our new champ. So long, Lenny's Bittersweet - you had a great run, but there's a new big dog in the house.

In fact, as I stand in line on Monday for the Divine Reserve No. 14 at Spec's, I might very well pick up another bottle or two of the Black Chocolate Stout as well as a whole salami to bite into as I drink it in the parking lot. (That's a joke, by the way, if my boss is reading this: I don't actually eat salami during office hours.)

See you soon!

My Twelfth Entry - Rahr & Sons Texas Red Amber Lager

All right, I'd like to say a little bit about my band here.

We're not your ordinary group of instrumentalists.

Everybody here one time or another was putting people in prison.

This song is about a murder case that happened a few years back.

Every woo-oord is true.  It's a documented fact.

            - Introduction to "Don't Say Nothing 'Til the Lawyer Come," David Mitcham

I'd like to say a little bit about my band here.

In 1995, two things happened that changed the direction of my life: then-District Attorney Johnny Holmes asked me to leave the Appellate Division and be his General Counsel, and Bill Delmore, the guy I replaced, asked me to replace the keyboardist in his band, Death by Injection.

How could I have said no?

In the nineteen years since then, I've played nearly a hundred shows with Death by Injection. I've played on three different keyboards (a Yamaha SY-22, a Yamaha SY-35, and a Korg SV-1), and I've learned all the words to the three songs I sing with the band ("Start Me Up"; "For Your Love"; and my original song, "Witness Stand.") We've played gigs in tuxedos and gigs in swim trunks. We've played in front of hundreds at Splashtown, the Galveston Sandcastle competition, and the Italian Festival, and we've played for less than five people at the Continental Club and other hole-in-the-wall bars. We've played outside at golf courses, inside of residential homes, at Rice University, at political fundraisers for both parties, in my own backyard for my wife's birthday, and at church bazaars (where we try very hard to remember not to sing the dirty parts of our Rolling Stones covers). For about a year, we changed our name to the Convictions and then we changed it back (potential clients kept passing on the Convictions and asking whatever happened to Death by Injection).

The five guys I play with in DBI - Doug O'Brien, David Mitcham, Glenn Gotschall, Hal Kennedy, and Bill Delmore - are my brothers in arms, my mates.  They are endlessly patient with my efforts, letting me noodle around the best I can, as long as I somehow remember to pound out the chords to "Louie, Louie," "Wooly Bully," "Hang On Sloopy," and the keyboard solos in "Centerfold" and "Pipeline."

I have learned that band chemistry can be volatile and that success is based as much on compatibility as it is on talent. In this respect, our band is remarkably stable and balanced. We have some characters, but no jerks. We argue, we mope, we make bad jokes about each other, but we still enjoy making music together. Having been through nineteen years of practice, some good gigs and some really, really terrible gigs with them, all I know is that I love, trust and respect each of them like my family. No matter what happens - boos, arguments on stage, complaints about the volume by blue-haired society women at the Westin Galleria - we still have each others' backs. That's why our band works.

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Although we are pretty much a cover band, we did make our mark on posterity in 2001 when we recorded a CD of original songs called Down at the Courthouse (which you can find on iTunes and CDBaby). My song "Witness Stand" is the fifth track on the CD, featuring my basso profundo growl about the travails of testifying in a criminal case. 

The melody to "Witness Stand" came to me in a dream: I was watching a woman with her back to me (it might have been Lisa) swaying slowly next to an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner of a Florida beachside bar and the melody was something I'd never heard before.

I woke up, ran to my keyboard and tried to remember the chords.  In thirty seconds, I had it: Bbm7, Eb7, resolving to an F.  I wrote the lyrics that morning and we recorded the song that night.  It sounds like what it is - a crude blues with a pretty neat bass line - but it is one of the four works of original art of which I am most proud.

Here's a performance of the song that my daughter and I taped in 2002 (she was seven years old, so cut her some slack on the shaky camera, and I am a big goose, so cut me some slack on my lack of charisma - I reserve all of my stage flair for when I sing "Start Me Up"):

Why all this about the band?  It's because we're playing a gig at the St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church at 8200 Roos Street in Sharpstown from 11 to 1 on Sunday, May 4.  We'll take your requests from the set list - heck, if you buy us a beer, we'll even let you sing with the band.

How can you say no to an offer like that?

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The other three works of original art of which I am most proud?

(1)  A kind of dirty haiku I sent to my wife that only two legal scholars like us could fully appreciate:

Her (cite) form is great.
His briefs are packed with content.
It's appellate love.

(2)  My Dishonorable Mention entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in 1982, in which the competition was to write the first line to the worst novel ever written.  My nearly-winning opening line:

In the city of lost souls that was Los Angeles, the silvery halo glittering above Kitty Gillis's head blinked out a neon message to every two-bit grifter and pimp in sight: "I'm alone, I'm from Kansas, and I'm a virgin."

I still hope to write the rest of that novel someday.

(3)  An insult poem I wrote to a defense lawyer who made a snide remark about one of our Appellate Division lawyers who had used poetry in her motion to extend time to write a brief.  At that time, I was also in the Appellate Division and we were all greatly offended.  I decided to fight fire with fire, and I sent the commentator this poem:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
I think that I also shall never see
A more pusillanimous jerk than you.

In my old age, I think I'd now be honored to get a poem like that from someone.

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This week's beer is from Rahr & Sons Brewing in Fort Worth.  It's the Texas Red Amber Lager and it's pretty good.

(c) JDurfee99

Rahr & Sons is coming up on their tenth anniversary, having been founded by Fritz Rahr and his wife Erin in 2004, shortly after his graduation from TCU.  On the bottle, Rahr claims a brewmaster lineage going back to his great-great-grandfather in 1847.  I love these origin stories because they say so much about the motivation and the passion of the people who start these breweries.

Drinking craft brews has opened my eyes to how much of this kind of small-bore artistry is out there in other fields.  It's the same with small mom-and-pop restaurants, food trucks, butchers, and artists. They do it because they love the work - if success follows, great, but it's not what got them into the business in the first place.  Now that I think about it, there are some lawyers who are like that.

The Texas Red bottle is old school: a pen-and-ink drawing of two men on horses guiding a herd of Longhorns. The tasting notes are kind of helpful:

(c) JDurfee99

This amber lager is a tip-of-the-hat to our home state. It's got a balanced flavor with notes of caramel and a sound malt character that's perfectly balanced with just a bit of hops. Super-smooth and very drinkable, this is a beer just for Texans.  (And anybody who wishes they were one.)

I concur with the drinkability comment: this is a smooth, almost non-hopped beer that goes down fast (and its 5% ABV keeps it from hitting too hard). I think I drank it in about four minutes. I also liked the color of the beer: it had a rich reddish-brown glint that gave the beer an attractive glow in my pint glass.

I'm not sure it beat Lenny's Bittersweet - this is a really good beer that I could drink all day, but it's not very complex, and thus not as interesting as some of the other Fifty Beers. I liked it a lot, but it's not enough to dethrone the champ.

Till next week, this song should hold you over.  Cheers!

My Eleventh Entry - Independence Brewing Co.'s Stash IPA

After careful deliberation, I have decided to reveal where I was last weekend.

I was in New Orleans for . . . Wrestlemania XXX.

I hope you do not think less of me for this.  Or for the fact that this is my fourth Wrestlemania.

I've been to two Wrestlemanias in Houston:  Wrestlemania 17, which featured a match between "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and the Rock; and Wrestlemania 25, which featured a match between the Undertaker (Houston's own Mark Calaway) and "The Heartbreak Kid" Shawn Michaels.  I went to Wrestlemania 26 in Phoenix for the return match between the Undertaker and Michaels, and now New Orleans for the matches involving Triple H, Bryan "Daniel Bryan" Danielson, Dave "The Animal" Batista, and Randy "The Legend Killer" Orton.

It's hard to explain why I like this stuff.  I've never been a mark, which is the term wrestlers use for the people who actually believe the storylines.  (I love the carny talk in the wrestling business, by the way.  My favorite: if you're a wrestler who "shoots" (tells the truth) about the business instead of "working" (conning) the marks, then you have broken kayfabe (the Omertà of wrestling).)

My first memory about wrestling, in fact, is based on my youthful skepticism about the reality of wrestling.  I was working as a garbageman for the City of Lewisville's Parks and Recreation Department during the summer after my freshman year in college.

It was a great job - we rode around in a flatbed truck emptying out oil drum trashcans in the city parks, which were filled with beer cans, rotting fish guts at the lake parks, and all kinds of weird stuff thrown away during summer weekends in the pavilions.  Work days started at 7:00 a.m., and we took a lunch hour at 11:00 a.m. and spent it playing three-on-three basketball in the parking lot of the truck yard on a nine-foot extremely dunkable rim nailed to an upright railroad tie, and then, in the hot summer afternoons, after most of the trash had been emptied, we drove around Lewisville on park maintenance jobs, but mostly goofing off until quitting time. Sitting around in the picnic areas, we talked about the things you talk about when you're young and have all the time in the world.

One day, the conversation turned to wrestling.  One of the full-time guys (the guys who worked year-round instead of the summer guys like me) announced that he had been to the Sportatorium in Dallas to see the rasslin' show and he went on about the moves he had seen.  This guy - Eddie - looked like a smaller version of Moses Malone: he had huge hands and thick arms from the manual labor he did while working for the city.

"That stuff's bull****," I said.  (I swore a lot more back then than I do now.)

He turned to look at me.  I was about 6-2 and 180 pounds in those days, still wiry from my time as a varsity swimmer in high school and in really good shape from the hours of basketball I played at college and during the summer lunch breaks.

"I call bull**** on that stuff, Eddie," I repeated.

He grinned.  "You think it's fake?"

"Yep.  Iron claw, my ***."  (That was the Von Erich family's submission move, a big hand clutching the top of his opponent's head and jamming a digit into his temple.)

He moved closer.  "You think this is fake?"  He quickly reached over, put his big hand on my head, and squeezed, his approximation of the Von Erich iron claw.  It turns out that the iron claw really hurts when applied by someone who's mad enough and strong enough. Eddie was both.

The guys separated us, laughing at me.  Eddie grinned again and walked away, point proven.

My lesson for that day: live and let live.  If Eddie wanted to believe that wrestling was real, who was I to ruin his fun, especially if it was going to result in a thumb to my temple?

(These days, I try to remember that when I talk politics and other fraught topics with my relatives.  Life is too short to antagonize the ones you love, and while they might not be able to apply a painful wrestling hold to you, the guilt they can inflict after you've hurt their feelings burns just as deeply.)

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After Eddie taught me the power of belief, I watched wrestling a little more closely.  I began to appreciate the psychology being applied, the manipulation of feeling, the cultivation of trust and the suspension of disbelief.  There was something primal about how conflicts arose and were resolved - always with words and action, the strong often losing to the clever even in physical confrontations.  There was something for everyone to relate to.

Plus, it was just fun to watch.

As the years passed, I learned that there were others like me out there.  Smart marks, they call us.  People who recall the Boesch shows in Houston fondly, who remember the touring stars like Ric Flair, Bruno Sammartino, Harley Race.  We don't usually advertise our affection for this rogue sport, but we're also not apologetic about it.  Live and let live, we say - let us enjoy what we enjoy.

Juan

This year, I went to Wrestlemania with my friend Juan (an IT professional) and his friend Xavier (a radiologist and Rice MBA student). We arrived in New Orleans on Friday and did the touristy things: beignets at Cafe Du Monde, the Audubon Aquarium, the Harrah's Casino.

Xavier

By a weird coincidence, my wife and her partners were in town for a convention taking place the same weekend.  They were staying at the Ritz Carlton . . . so, I bid Juan and Xavier a good night at the hotel I had booked for the three of us, and I decamped to my wife's hotel and we had dinner at one of Emeril's restaurants in the French Quarter.

Juan with Mr. Wonderful and the Dragon

The next day, Juan, Xavier and I went to WWE Fan Axxess (WWE likes to spell things phonetically for reasons that I guess are all too clear).  The lines were long for meet-and-greets with the wrestlers, but Juan persevered and got to have his picture taken with Larry "Mr. Wonderful" Zybysko, the Wild Samoans, Lanny "The Genius" Poffo, and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat (whose real name, Richard Blood, is as good a wrestling name in my opinion as his kayfabe name).  I bought a t-shirt and just enjoyed the people-watching.

After a quick dinner at the Ritz club room (the only way to live), we went to the Hall of Fame induction at the Smoothie King Arena.  WWE inducted the female wrestler Lita (now an aspiring punk rock singer), Mr. T (who headlined the first two Wrestlemanias), Jake "The Snake" Roberts (whose heartfelt story of addiction and redemption was marred by a boob in the audience who asked him where his snake was), Scott "Razor Ramon" Hall (another recovering addict whose gimmick - a Tony Montana-type tough guy - had uncomfortably racist overtones that most of his fans try to ignore), Carlos Colon (a Puerto Rican wrestler and promoter with several sons in the business), and the Ultimate Warrior.

Warrior bears special mention because he passed away yesterday, two days after his special weekend.   He traded the back end of his life for the fame and fortune he acquired in his youth, a trade too many wrestlers make.  If there is a real reason to be contemptuous of wrestling, this is it - it's too hard on the men and women who perform 300 nights a year on the road, taking hits in fake fights that would put professional football players on the DL for months.  I am sorry for him and I am sorry for his family, and, as I do with professional football, I hope things get better for the performers who sacrifice so much for our entertainment, but I have no reason to believe that they will in either sport.
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On Sunday, we went to the big show at the Superdome. I won't go blow-by-blow through the show - suffice to say, it was great fun, with lots of surprise endings to the matches, and a communal sense of enjoyment being amidst 75,000 other unapologetic wrestling fans.

The highlight of the show was when the Undertaker lost, for the first time in 21 years, to former MMA star Brock Lesnar.  When the final bell rung, there was an incredible hush in the stadium as we all digested the significance of this entirely predetermined outcome. Some people cried, some people left the building in disgust, some people just shook their heads - none of them believed it to be a real fight, but their feelings were still real and heartfelt.

You may think this whole thing is silly.  Sometimes, I do too.  But who am I to judge how these wrestling fans truly feel?  If they're happy, if they're sad, if they're outraged: the common factor is that they feel.  That's what fascinates me about wrestling to this day and it's why I really had a great time this weekend in New Orleans.

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Before I go over this week's entry from the Fifty Beers, I want to make a note about the beer that kept popping up this weekend wherever we went in NOLA: Abita, a craft brewery 30 miles north of New Orleans.  I had two Abitas with my meals: an Amber and a Strawberry Harvest.

The Amber was good - smooth, not super-hoppy, pulled from a tap into a plastic glass.  I'd drink it again with my jambalaya.

The Strawberry Harvest on the other hand . . . it was like they had dissolved a strawberry fruit chew into an otherwise decent Amber.  Awful.

A piece of advice to the Abita Brewery: pass on the fruit in the beer concept.  If I want to put some strawberry juice into my beer, I'll do it myself (but I won't, and you shouldn't either).

(c) JDurfee99

(c) JDurfee99

This week's beer review will be short and sweet, mainly because there's not much to write about.  It's the Stash IPA by the Independence Brewing Co. in Austin.  Lots of hops - according to their webpage, it's a "dank, resinous and enlightening hop trip" (resin, enlighten, "Stash" - what do you think they're alluding to here?)

I liked it as much as the various IPAs I've sampled so far.  I drank it with a plate of fajitas tonight, and it held up to the strong Tex-Mex flavors.  The only downside: by the end of the drink, my tongue felt like I had been licking a pine tree. Resinous indeed.

Better than Bittersweet Lenny's, our current champ? Not by a long shot.  But I wouldn't mind drinking it again if I was at Chuy's in Austin.

Till next week, keep your iron claw to yourself.  (And Bert: congratulations on your new grandchild. He is starting life out way ahead of the game to have you in his life.)