The Captain's Chair

The Captain’s Chair is taking a bit of a siesta for a couple weeks.

I’ll be flying down to sunny Playa del Carmen in Mexico this week to get married in what is certain to be the trip of a lifetime for me and my beautiful bride. Well, technically it will be a renewal of our vows, since we took care of the legal stuff this last weekend. But I’m sure I’ll bring back lots of good stories and reviews. And I can already guarantee you that Corona will not taste any better (or worse) in Mexico than it does here.

See you on the other side.

The economy. If anyone hasn’t noticed, the U.S. (and rest of the world) is in for a bumpy ride. It’s going to take some time before we get over the hump and level back out. I’m confident the correction will eventually bring us back to a more sane state of equilibrium, as it always has in the past. But it will be a long road getting there.

The Feds recently announced that we technically started the recession in December 2007. But for some of us, almost an entire year later, it feels like we’ve only just left the station. Gas prices climbed throughout the summer, but did it really stop most of us (especially in the burbs) from driving? I’d argue no. Food prices rose, but did we substitute our favorite brand of ice cream for the generic version? Or cut it out of our grocery list altogether? Probably not. 

It’s only really been in the past quarter that people truly started taking notice of the tumult in the market and dire straits we as a nation find ourselves in (bailout packages, fading auto industry, growing unemployment numbers). Is that the Fed’s fault for being too conservative in communication? A one year lag time on some of our leading financial indicators seems a bit irresponsible. Some might say that if Bernanke were a fire alarm, we’d all be dead. Or, is it more a function of the American public’s general state of blissful ignorance until it hits them personally? After all, as much as we want to blame creditors for faulty lending practices that armed America with cheap financing for real estate, we also played a very significant role in the unprecedented, unsustainable and unrealistic run-up in housing valuations by using our homes as ATMs while we bragged to neighbors at backyard BBQs about our sweet new granite counter tops. I’m not really sure who’s more to blame. Maybe a little of both.

So how does this all relate to beer?

Well, unlike extremely complicated investment vehicles and esoteric financial models explaining the intricacies of REITS, beer is one of those things that isn’t tough to figure out. It’s tangible. It doesn’t pull any punches. It evokes an immediate and real reaction. What you see, smell and taste is what you get. There’s a simple and gratifying transaction that takes place between you and a beer. You sit down, take a nice pull, and you either like it or you don’t. Case closed.

There’s really no leading indicators or account statements in the mail that will tell me how I’m supposed to feel about a particular beer. Maybe that’s why in this uncertain world of ours, I’m trying to take a deep breath and enjoy some of the simpler things in life. And for me, that often includes sipping a well-regarded craft beer while I brew up a nice batch of homebrew. At least that’s one thing I can have some semblance of control over.

If you haven’t noticed, I really like talking about beer. And of course, drinking it and making it too. They often go hand in hand.

I had a conversation with a colleague at work recently about social media, and we came to some conclusions on the differences between “traditional” blogging (as in what I’m doing this very second) and how people interact with other social utilities, like Twitter.

Now, I’m not a big Twitter guy, at least yet. I follow a few people, both in the beer community and professionally. I kind of liken it to the “What Are You Doing Now?” field in Facebook. On Twitter, people provide ongoing updates (in 140 characters or less) on what they’re doing or thinking at that exact moment. These are called “tweets”. And depending on who you’re following, some of them can be pretty insightful, funny, or thought provoking. Others are just random declarations, like “Joe is wondering why pre-heating an oven is necessary when you can just heat it” or “Amy had a bad tuna sandwich for lunch”.

The main difference I can see with Twitter is that over time, you’re potentially exposed to a more comprehensive picture of who that person really is. At least in tiny 140 character sound bites. Blogging, on the other hand, lends itself to a more “vertical” approach where you focus pretty exclusively on the very narrow topic at hand. In my case, my love of beer and homebrewing. Which begs the question, “does beer make up the entirety of who The Captain really is?”.

The answer of course is no. Believe it or not, it’s a fairly small subset of my life. One that I really enjoy and call my primary hobby, but relatively small nonetheless. I also spend between 8-10 hours of my day providing clients strategic PR counsel. I’m getting married in January in Mexico to my wonderful fiance. I play a Martin D-15 and was one of two members of the now defunct Dirty Sheets, local Twin Cities acoustic rock legends (at least in our minds). I’ve spent the past five years completely remodeling my house on my own. I believe that neither Republicans nor Democrats have it all figured out. And I love U of M Gopher hockey. Even that’s a pretty basic synopsis.

So why do I even provide this contemplative soliloquy on social media? I guess after reading Dave’s post on beer blogs he frequents, it got me reflecting on why I even take the time to do this in the first place. The whole premise behind all of it, no matter if it’s blogging, Twitter, wikis, IM, etc. is to foster collaboration, learning, and provide more meaningful connections. And I think this little blogging experiment of mine started a few months ago has helped me do that. I probably wouldn’t know much about cool bars in Manhattan without The Vice Blogger’s hilariously witty and engaging commentary on drinking culture in NYC. Or all the pros and cons on Stone beers out there thanks to The Drunken Polack. Or what’s going on in the local Twin Cities beer scene thanks to MNBeer.com and Brewhound Minneapolis. And I definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed several hard-to-find beers without interacting in the offline world with my beer friends to facilitate a couple trades now and again.

In the end, it’s been a pretty fun experience sharing this stuff with everyone. And I look forward to more tales of homebrew and craft beers for a while to come. Happy Halloween.

Found an interesting site the other day, the beer world’s version of a currency converter…according to The Price of a Pint, you can get a pint of lager for 62 cents in Burma (Myanmar). However, most of us American tourists would need to get a second mortgage to hit happy hour in Norway, as the price for a pint there is $11.73. Not many people could afjord that.

The Vice Blogger recently riffed on a very interesting concept, and one that I am in complete agreement with when it comes to convincing frugal friends to put down their cheap macros and step up to the plate with a superior craft beer. Price Per Alcoholic Percentile, or PPAP. Brilliant. Can’t wait to pull that one out next happy hour. Although, the PPAP ratio is probably equalized during drink specials, so it would only work in the macro’s favor for a few hours out of the day.