Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Today in Chicago alcohol regulators from across the country gather at their annual convention: The National Conference of State Liquor Administrators Annual Conference. These are the folks that enthusiastically enforce the remnants of the Three-Tier System of alcohol distribution. It’s either a remarkable coincidence or no coincidence at all that just as this meeting of Three Tier proponents takes place, one of the most concise take downs of the Three Tier System is published by R Street, a free-market think…
Wait! What? The score inflation inside the 100 Point Wine Rating Scale isn’t really inflation after all? How could that be. The defenders of freedom and consumers who hate wine ratings said so. Claire Adamson writing at WineSearcher.com looked at average wine ratings now and then from the WineSearcher’s “own average wine scores, calculated from a range of the world’s most famous critics, and retrofitted them back to the 1990 vintage.” (not entirely sure what this means) What did she…
For those of you who concern yourself with the younger set of drinkers (AKA, “Millennials) one of the best profiles of this demographic group’s relationship with alcoholic beverages has been produced by Nielsen. The take away from Nielsen’s insightful study of generations and their relationship with alcohol is fairly straightforward: Alcohol producers should be focusing on a few key value propositions: authenticity, originality and value. One very interesting thing to take note in this study is the mention that at…
Today marks the finish of the 11th year of publishing FERMENTATION. That’s 11 years, 132 Months, 4,015 days, 96,360 minutes as a blog publisher. I still call myself a blogger rather than a “publisher” or “communicator”. It just seems right. The 2,938 posts that I’ve put up in that time are in fact “posts”, not articles. And I only publish me. So, it’s still a “Blog” However, I’ve not posted nearly as much in the past year as I have…
I have long been a fan of the “Alternative History” genre of literature. Generally it is considered a sub-genre of science fiction, but it really can encompass far more than that. At its most elementary, “Alternative History” literature asks and answers the question, “What if…?” The most common forms of this genre ask readers to consider “what if the South won the Civil War” or “What if the Third Reich prevailed in World War II”? A new filmed version of…
