Still not old!

For the first time in 21 years I celebrated my birthday. I’m not telling you how old I am, but I can honestly say, I’m still not 40! Blondelicious did a fantastic job getting it together.  Thursday we went into Warrenville to hit Two Brother’s brewery for some fun. We met up with my college roommate, had some drinks and a great time.  I love visiting breweries. Usually you can get beers there that they don’t distribute. This time was no different. They had a batch of beer they had just tapped that they weren’t bottling. It was pretty dang good, and strong!

Friday Blondelicious threw me a birthday party. My friend D helped out with decorations and even made a quest for me to do. Which was rather entertaining, if not an attempt to embarrass me with stories from my childhood AND having to profess my undying love of Taylor Swift to an entire bar? Don’t ask, I’m not telling! The best part was the cake my wife bought me. It was done up to look like the Necronomicon from the Evil dead/Army of Darkness series.  It was made of red velvet cake with raspberry filling. Very delicious.

Saturday we hit various establishments that give away free stuff to people on their birthday. We also stopped midday to get pierced again. She had her nose pierced and I finally put a ring through my right ear. So that makes 2 new piercings each in the last 3 weeks for the both of us. YAY! We also hit both of the local breweries; Pig Minds Brewing Company and Carlyle Brewing Company. Over the weekend it was brought up multiple times, which is the better brewery. I will say they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Each has beer that is good and each has beer I don’t like. I think it’s just a matter of one’s mood. Saturday night we were just checking in where we were on Facebook when we notice that one of our local favorite singers was performing that night at a bar we both like. So off we went to hear some Jimmy Buffett songs! 

I really have to say that I’m glad I decided to actually celebrate my birthday this year. It was better than I anticipated.

Service really does make a difference.

When you go out to a restaurant or a bar, you expect a certain level of service. In fact tipping is based on the quality of service you received.  In the last couple of weeks we’ve gone out and received varying levels of service. In the span of 5 days we went from some truly horrible service and management to some of the best we’ve ever experienced.

Let’s start with the worst. We went to a local establishment. We were sat by the hostess and then nothing…  After about 10 minutes a waitress came up and asked if anyone had been over to help us. Nope! She said, “You’re not in my area, but what can I get you.” We had her for the rest of our visit. She was busy, her section was full and she was bouncing all over the place, she would come over and check on us, took our food order, brought our food out. There was long waits between her visits to our table, but again, we were not in her section and she had at least 3 large groups. Then again, we never found out who our actual waitress was supposed to be. Normally when an establishment is busy, I relax on my standards of service and this waitress was working her tail off. That’s not why the service was bad. The service was bad because there were 3-4 other waitresses standing around chatting, occasionally checking on one or two of their tables and flirting with one of the bus boys. The manager would come out and not say or do anything. Meanwhile we sat at our table waiting to order drinks and food.  When the manager came around just to touch base with us, like she did with everyone else, I told her my honest opinion on the service. I said our waitress was great, hardworking, but the other girls have been standing around. I went over everything and she really didn’t seem to care. But she did go to “talk to the girls” and from the reaction, I think she blamed our waitress. I ended up leaving our waitress a 20% tip, and a note that she was awesome just so she knew the truth.

Then a couple of days later we go to a different establishment. We were sat immediately and then we had our waitress take our order. If it wasn’t her it was one of the other waitresses that would bring food, clean empties, bus the table. They would check on us. The kicker, this place was even busier than the place that we had horrible service at and they had less staff working. We ended up spending more time and thus money at this place only because we were having a good time.  When the manager touched tables, we had not one complaint.

So any restaurant or bar owners that read this. Remember, it’s not just one waitress that makes the experience; it can be the others that are not even yours. Waiting on drinks and food while watching your other staff stand around doing nothing does not make customers happy, especially if their waitress is running around trying to take care of many large groups.

Stouts and Smartphones

Just a word of warning for all my beer loving friends out there; Smartphones do not like Stouts. Last night I was getting ready to enjoy a freshly poured Breakfast Stout from Founders when somehow I accidently knocked it over onto my phone. GASP! I know, total alcohol abuse! At first I thought everything was okay with my Droid Razzr, it seemed to work just fine. Later in the evening I tried to make some calls, people could hear me, but I could not hear them. Then I tried to charge it, it wouldn't charge. Finally I tried to play some music on it, and it would not play. I gave up!

So folks, heed this warning. If you have Smartphone and you want it's oppinion on beer... They don't like stouts.

E.D.B. vs the childless night.

I use an app on my smartphone called Untappd. It allows you to track the beers you drink and keep quick ratings on whether or not you liked it. Just like any other “checking in” style apps you can earn badges. Last night I earned my 500^th unique beers checked in badge. Okay, over my life span of drinking beer, it’s not that impressive.  The thing is those 500 beers were since I started using this app… just under a year ago.  The journey to getting 500 unique beers is a funny story with a lot of good beers, a ton of bad beers, mostly decent beers, and some pretty god awful beers.

It’s those god awful beers that make for the best stories, and are usually the one that ends up getting me into trouble.  Just this last Saturday, Blondelicious and I lucked into a kid free night as Clone (our youngest son who is a lot like me) was invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. Earlier that day while helping out with a Podcast regarding Beer Snobs vs. Beer Connoisseurs, it was noted that I was only 5 away from my reaching my 500^th beer. Saturday night Blondelicious said we should strive to hit 500, and off we went!

We ended up at one of our local favorite watering holes, Brewsky’s. They had Southern Tier’s Unearthly on tap. I’d never had it, and even though it’s a double IPA (India Pale Ale), and I don’t like IPAs, I ordered it anyways. This was one of the worst IPAs I’ve had. It was so bad I ordered a Jack and Coke to chase it. But for every sip of beer I was taking, I needed a swallow of chaser to get it down. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and slammed the entire pint just to finish it. The bartender and manager both said no one they have had order it has liked it. The only other they had that I didn’t like was Dad’s Little Helper Black IPA… Yes another IPA, but this is a black IPA and I thought it might be better. I was wrong. Not as bad as the first one, but still not a beer I like. So what did I do? Yep, chugged it down and then finished off my Jack and Coke. As I stated I had been drinking earlier and I just chugged 20oz of 9.5% and 6.2% ABV (Alcohol by volume) beers and slammed a 20 oz. jack and coke… in less than 10 minutes. For those that aren’t in the know, your average mass produced beer is usually 4.2 to 4.8% ABV.

Things get really fuzzy there. Then the next thing I recall is being in Blondelicious’ car and her being mad at me.  To paraphrase, “I’m not happy! It’s 8:30pm on a kid free night and you are passing out!” Fortunately I am an experienced drinker. I told her drive to a bar way out of our way so that I could sober up on the drive. We started having a conversation. She was talking about “Topic A” and I was talking about “Topic 2”. All the time I’m giving her driving directions on where to go, so we started arguing because we didn’t understand what the other was talking about, I decided I didn’t want to go to the other bar, so I gave her directions to start heading home. I was tired of arguing and it was just frustration. She didn’t realize that. She did realize we were heading a different way that she knew was wrong. This brought up another communication breakdown. This one, however, resulted in us figuring out what had happened and what went wrong. Everything smoothed out. That is when we went to another favorite bar of ours, Oasis… because I had sobered up enough to stay awake.

So the moral of the story is this my friends, If you have a kid free night, don’t slam really bad beers followed with a whiskey chaser… it just pisses off the wife.