Lagunitas IPA

Tonight, my wife and I went out to use a gift card she had received from her boss for a local restaurant, and I rekindled my love affair with a beer I haven’t had in quite some time; Lagunitas IPA.  If you are unfamiliar with this San Francisco area based brewery, now is the prefect time to become addicted to one greatest west coast breweries ever!  Started back in 1993, Lagunitas Brewery is the brainchild of several friends who all descended upon Petaluma, California to fulfill a lifelong desire to make their own beer.  And their result is one of the greatest and most sought after groups of beers in the nation.  Lagunaitas’ style is making supercharged ales.  Their beers are loaded with hops and malts but are balanced and smooth. 

So, as we were out for dinner tonight, I was running through my usual internal debate about what beer to have with dinner, when I noticed a new beer to the list that I realized, I haven’t had in almost a year.  The debate was over and I went for the Lagunitas IPA.  I truly love this beer but I really think that the beer brewing geniuses at Lagunitas put it the best; “ruthlessly delicious…homicidally hopped for drinking enjoyment.”

Make sure, if you ever see any (ANY) Lagunitas beer on a beer store’s shelf or in a bar or restaurant, order it up immediately and enjoy your newest obsession in the world of adult beverages.  Now, I am back to another one, and hopefully you get to one soon.

Naked Breasts & Champagne

I recently published an article via Examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com/article/naked-breasts-champagne) that I feel is perfectly fitting for the biggest party of the year that is right around the corner; New Year's Eve!  Enjoy.

No, you didn’t read this wrong. Before the world was used to traditional
Champagne flutes that are used every New Years Eve, every birth, every promotion and in every strip club, the world was used to drinking out of a glass that had a more voluptuous nature to them. Or at least they thought it had a voluptuous nature to it.

The rumor had it that the original coupe glasses were molded after Marie
Antoniette’s (Queen of France in the late 1700s) left breast so that she could have her court toast to her good health. The truth is that this glass goes back further than Marie
Antoniette but the fiction is much more intriguing then the fact. But how did something as interesting and sexy as creating a glass for Champagne molded after a monarch’s left naked breast make it’s way into the world’s rumor mill? Easy, it’s partially true (shocking that history misconstrued a partial truth as fact).

Let me explain. Marie Antoniette was a bit of a unique woman with a strong belief in a back-to-nature view of life and made her subjects follow suit. In doing so, Marie actually had milk bowls fashioned from her left breast and it is from here that the story was most likely twisted up with the Champagne coupe.

Marie was a touch kinky. Truly she was. Her milk bowls were fashioned (most likely as supportive as Victoria’s Secret but nowhere near as comfortable) to be part of her “Pleasure Dairy” which was when her and her subjects ran around pretending to be milkmaids. They would frolic around, churn butter, dispense milk and dance in her rustically designed chateau in Versailles.

It was this act, along with her widely known obsession with the sexual practicings of Venus and Bacchus, that most likely caused the confusion of the history of this great glass. Although the truth isn’t as interesting as the myth, give me the myth any day of the week as sex generally trumps truth. So raise a coupe glass and enjoy the myth.