Well it’s all good stuff but is it good together? Here is Bloody Beer. The people at Short’s also provide plenty to write about, such as this gem. Bloody Beer is beer brewed with tomatoes, with added pepper, celery seed, horseradish and dill. From the description, it looks like the tomatoes are added during brewing but the rest is added after.

Port Brewing LLC recently got its wit caught in a wringer. The beer label depicts a witch being burned at the stake. Various wiccans, pagans, shamans and others were not amused and The New York Times was there to cover it. About a week before Halloween, the Times article quoted an offended person thusly:

“Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.”

To witch which the brewer responded:

We have been accused of inspiring violence against women, and we have been compared to the violence in Darfur. … It has run the gamut from people saying politely, ‘This is offensive to pagans,’ to people saying we are responsible for all that is wrong in the world.

Port seems to be in the process of changing the label. Port’s co-founder said he was “‘totally in favor’ of changing the label and that he and his co-workers had been ‘ignorantly unaware of the mistake’ they had made.”

The brewery explained that, far from being...

This post will start short but is likely to grow long over time. Very long. We will try to show the enormous range of foodstuffs from which wine is produced. With each post we will add to the list, and I predict it will grow way past 50 60. Today we add Peach wine to the list.

1. Avocado wine
2. Banana wine
3. Cantaloupe wine
4. Dandelion wine
5. Elder flower wine
6. Fig wine
7. Gooseberry wine
8. Grape wine
9. Jasmine fruit wine
10. Kiwi wine
11. Linden flower wine
12. Lychee wine
13. Mango wine
14. Mangosteen wine
15. Marionberry wine
16. Onion wine
17. Peach wine. Logan’s View peach wine is made in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania.
18. Pomegranate wine
19. Pear wine
20. Pepper wine
21. Persimmon wine
22. Pineapple wine
23. Rhubarb wine
24. Strawberry wine
25. Tomato wine
26. Watermelon wine

The Brown Family printed their Constitution on this Bourbon label, and the government ratified it late this summer. The main point of the document seems to be keeping the publicly traded company under family control. Barron’s has estimated that “The Brown family owns about 70% of Brown-Forman’s Class A voting shares (BFA).” Six months ago The Wall Street Journal reported:

In an effort to ensure that it remains independent and under family control, liquor maker Brown-Forman Corp. is pushing to get family shareholders more involved in the company. … The effort is among the strongest in a growing number of family-controlled companies trying to better educate and unify family shareholders. … Today, there are 117 living descendants of the founder and 38 widows or spouses, the company says. … Potential suitors could include spirits giants Diageo PLC, Pernod Ricard SA or Bacardi Ltd.

The Sunday Paper explains that Old Forester Bourbon became America’s first bottled bourbon in 1870. George Garvin Brown handwrote a guarantee and his signature on every bottle. Old Forester is named after Dr. William Forrester, a leading doctor in Louisville. It is:

the only bourbon legally produced and sold before, during and after Prohibition. From 1920 to 1933, its distillers held one of only 10 government...

The upcoming Halloween holiday brings to mind candy and costumes and ghosts and ghouls and witches. This year, witches and witchcraft have enjoyed an additional autumnal limelight after tapes surfaced of U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell (R-DE) claiming to have dabbled in witchcraft while in high school. Squished Witch, from Oz Winery of Wamego, Kansas, looks set to capitalize on the shared whimsy of this year’s Halloween and political seasons. The winery describes Squished Witch as a “fruity, semi-sweet Ives Noir based red.” Like Squished Witch, most of the three-dozen wines in the Oz Winery stable boast some obvious connection to the classic film The Wizard of Oz, including I’ve Got You My Pretty, The Lion’s Courage, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Scarecrow, Flying Monkey, and I’m Melting Merlot. The Squished Witch label is home to at least one interesting legal issue. If you were looking for the class/type description and/or alcohol content and weren’t having any luck, note the smallish cursive words “Red Table Wine” nestled in a fold in the land above the fanciful name. I missed them at first, second, and third glance. Oz also has Drunken Munchkin, and it’s rare to have a reference to intoxication on a wine label. The Witch label reminds me that a friend used to...