Getting State To Pay A Tab No Picnic - Times Union

Virginia turning to hops as potential cash crop - Richmond Times-Dispatch: Ap

Many of the employees who dined on raw bar items, grilled meats, salads, beer and soft drinks were told that Hauer was covering the cost. Lanthier's owner Bob Bellard , who was told the same, has been agitating to get paid, placing numerous calls to the agency and getting nowhere. "I'm trying to close my books for the year," Bellard said. The agency's bill is $3,000, not including tax. Bellard said the person who arranged the event, an administrative assistant, didn't want to accept the tab at the picnic and asked that it be given to Hauer. But Bellard declined, saying he wanted to deal with the woman, who has since been transferred by Hauer. Bellard said he then started asking the woman's replacement, who has since left the agency. The third person to whom he was referred more recently said a purchase order has been put in that will allow the agency to cut a check. Typically, Bellard said, he gets paid the day of the event, or perhaps a few days later. After 28 years running the Grove, he said, the situation with DHSES is "the worst." "I've got bills to pay, like anybody," Bellard said. The picnic, which followed a Citizens Preparedness Training session for DHSES staff, was scheduled with the understanding that Hauer would cover the cost, some insiders say. Several people invited to the event have been reassigned or have left the agency recently. Among the departures: Peter Cutler , Hauer's deputy commissioner for public affairs, who became the first-ever director of communications and special projects for the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., an arm of Empire State Development; James Horton , a former State Police officer who was Hauer's chief of staff until he was transferred to the division's fire unit; and Jim Sherry , Hauer's deputy commissioner for downstate operations, who retired to join Redland Strategies, where former DHSES leader Mike Balboni works. Kristin Devoe , who took Cutler's duties, did not blame the tardy payment of the bill on the changes at the agency. She said Hauer sent a $2,000 check from his personal account to cover the food and beverage portion of the bill on Friday the day after a reporter called with questions about the matter and will send another for the sales tax. The agency will be paying for use of the facility for the meeting, she said. Devoe said the lag was caused because the vendor did not take credit cards, had not itemized the bill and did not include sales tax, giving the agency the state tax-free status. Bellard "is going to be paid," she said. A DHSES employee paid for door prizes and isn't seeking reimbursement from the agency, Devoe said. PEF leader returns The Public Employees Federation ethics review process takes months, and even people found guilty of "major violations of the PEF Code of Ethics" can quickly return to prominence in the union. Consider the case of Edward Lucas , the former president of the division of PEF representing 800 members at the Department of Transportation headquarters in Colonie. According to records obtained by the Times Union , a PEF ethics hearing panel ruled in March that Lucas had to step down as president of Division 177 on Wolf Road. He also had to pay back the unit for unauthorized and undocumented charges and cash advances he took, relinquished a PEF purchase card, and lost the ability to travel at the union's expense. PEF's finance director concluded that Lucas owed PEF $649 for unapproved charges in 2011 and 2012, and $400 for an advance that was supposed to cover his travel costs. However, the ethics panel allowed him to finish his term as a steward, which runs through next July. It also determined that he deserved a chance to redeem himself if the members he serves chose to provide an opportunity. They did just that, voting him in as a delegate in May to serve at the PEF convention in Niagara Falls last week, and as a representative in Los Angeles earlier this summer for an American Federation of Teachers gathering. PEF's central office probably covered his travel costs, PEF veterans say. Jane Briggs , a union spokeswoman, said the administration of President Susan Kent followed the hearing panel's ruling. "The panel removed his right to a purchase card, so he is not entitled to a card; and he does not go on any reimbursable travel in his steward position," she said. Briggs declined to state whether PEF is covering his delegate travel. Former executive board member Charles Kelefant , who filed the complaint against Lucas in 2013, said, "It's been adjudicated it is what it is." It's unclear if those who voted for Lucas as a delegate knew about the ethics violations: The information was contained in confidential hearing panel records. Lucas, a civil engineer paid $73,500 a year by the DOT, has been active with the union for years, even serving as the chief sergeant at arms at conventions. He did not return phone calls. 'John from Brooklyn' When central New Jersey-based comic Rich Vos was needling the audience at the Comedy Works in Albany the evening of Sept. 27, he encountered a couple: "John from Brooklyn" told the comic he was in town visiting "my girl." Amid a series of gags exploiting racial stereotypes, Vos asked John if the tracking bracelet on his ankle detected he had traveled so far afield as Albany. The crack drew laughs. The comedian didn't realize he was talking to state Sen. John Sampson , who's currently under indictment on federal embezzlement charges and faces a trial in February. "Him and his girlfriend were great," Vos told a reporter last week. "I remember they had a great sense of humor. I never asked him what he did for a living." He recalled suggesting Sampson was on probation, and asked him to stay away from his car. "I wonder if he thought I knew who he was, the way I was talking to him," Vos said. After the show, Vos found out who he had been ribbing. The comic, promoting his documentary on iTunes called "Women Aren't Funny," credited Sampson's date as being a good sport. Asked to confirm that Sampson was indeed "John from Brooklyn," a spokeswoman for the former Democratic conference leader said she would check. When she called back, she didn't say yes or no but emphasized that Sampson wanted the Times Union to know he did not put in for a per diem, the $172 per day paid to lawmakers for coming to Albany on official business.



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Hampton man grows key ingredient of beer - New Jersey Herald

Hops - strung up with twine on trellises blanketed with bines bearing the cone-shaped flower - have been growing in Virginia since the 1700s but are now most notably grown in the Pacific Northwest. Former President Thomas Jefferson even grew hops at his estate Monticello estate near Charlottesville and bought large quantities to brew small batches of beer. For many years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports only included Washington state, Oregon and Idaho but the latest numbers include 14 additional states that are growing the bittering flower, according to the Hop Growers of America. By some accounts, craft brewers now use nearly 50 percent of all the hops produced in the U.S., according to the Brewers Association, a Colorado-based trade group for the majority of the nation's more than 3,000 breweries. While industry figures show only 25 acres of hops being grown in Virginia this year - compared with more than 29,000 acres in Washington state - farmers are hopeful the state's industry will grow. "Right now we're laughable to the Northwest. This is a very niche market right now but there's a potential. ... There's a big future out there," said Stan Driver, a 61-year-old horticulturist, who founded the Old Dominion Hops Cooperative and has been growing hops commercially in Nelson County since 2007. The cooperative has nearly 40 grower members, as well as other associate members now interested in growing hops. More than 50 varieties of hops are grown in the U.S. Hope impart different characteristics to beer such as bitterness or citrus flavors. However, a favorable climate and fertile soil are important for commercial hop production - an area of research being discussed at a meeting at Virginia State University later this month.



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LA Galaxy's Alan Gordon drinks a beer with fans after match, delights children | Dirty Tackle - Yahoo Sports

After all this , it still appears theres no end in sight. In yet another video to grace the internet, the pop star chugs a beer, tosses the bottle, and jumps off a bar just as 'Don't Stop Believin' peaks. Should we have seen this coming? How else does someone celebrate picking Ole Miss to upset 'Bama? MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Want stories delivered to you? Make sure you get all of our content by liking the CFB on FOX Facebook page .



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, Comrade Brewing Company , Coors , Crow Hop Brewing , Diebolt Brewing , Dogfish Head , Dry Dock Brewing , Fate Brewing , Former Future Brewing , Funkwerks , Left Hand Brewing , Oskar Blues , Platt Park Brewing Co. , Rock Bottom , Ska Brewing , Station 26 Brewing , Telluride Brewing , The Post , Upslope , Upslope Brewing , Wit's End Brewing Comrades David Lin with his brewerys hardware (Eric Gorski, The Denver Post). The depth and breadth of Colorados brewing scene was on display Saturday at the Great American Beer Festival awards, with medals going to the states largest and most legendary brewer, independent craft brewing trailblazers and, perhaps most notably, an impressive number of small breweries making their festival debuts. In all, Colorado breweries brought home 39 medals, 10 of them gold, in the most wide-open GABF competition ever. The glut of new breweries in the U.S. and increased interest to compete at the prestigious festival prompted organizers to limit entrants to five beers in most cases, leading to unprecedented parity on the podium. At Saturdays ceremony, 234 breweries shared in the medal haul, said Chris Swersey, the competition manager for the Boulder-based Brewers Association, the trade group that stages the annual beer festival and competition. Last year, Colorado breweries won 46 medals; in 2012 the total was 35. The GABF 2014 Large Brewing Company and Large Brewing Company Brewer of the Year award went to AC Golden , part of the MillerCoors corporate family. The brewerys medal winners were brewed exclusively with Colorado ingredients. Colorado Native Amber Lager and Colorado Native Golden Lager won gold and silver, respectively, in the American-style amber lager category. The golden lager will be coming to six packs next spring, part of an expansion of the Colorado Native brand, AC Golden brewer Ben Knutson said. Earlier this year, AC Golden began packaging an India Pale Lager as a Colorado Native beer, but not before removing out-of-state Simcoe hops from the recipe that disqualified it as being a 100 percent local product. Knutson said AC Goldens win demonstrates that Colorado is a great barley-growing state. While AC Golden and Coors have a corner on Colorados small but growing hop market, The only reason Colorado has Colorado hops is AC Golden, Knutson said. We buy 80 percent of the hops and pay a premium. Coors Brewing, which competes separately from AC Golden at GABF, won silver and bronze in the American-style lager or light lager category for Coors Light and Coors Banquet, respectively. Despite independent craft brewers making inroads with their own light lagers, the big boys still rule the category. Miller Light won the gold medal. Station 26 Brewing was among the rookie winners (Eric Gorski, The Denver Post) By our count at least eight new Colorado breweries competing in their first GABFs won medals on Saturday. Thats a seal of approval for the brewing class of 2013/4 as many industry officials worry about questionable quality coming out of start-up breweries potentially harming the craft beer segment as a whole . Comrade Brewing Company owner David Lin, a silver medal for his fresh-hopped IPA draped around his neck, made an important point. The breweries may be new, but look at their brewers, Lin said. Its going to go back to what (Stone Brewing Co.s) Mitch Steele says For Gods sake, hire someone who knows what theyre doing. So we did. Comrade opened this year in Denver with a veteran and decorated brewmaster, Marks Lanham. He won three GABF medals while head brewer at Grand Teton Brewing in Idaho, then moved to well-regarded Boneyard Beer in Oregon, then Barley Browns Brew Pub in Baker, Oregon, which last year won honors as very small brewing company of the year. Consider other medal-winning breweries new to the scene in the past year that employ experienced hands: Station 26 Brewing, which opened in December in Denver , won a bronze in American style cream ale, the domain of the likes of Pabst. Brewer Wayne Waananen was the first head brewer at the SandLot, the tiny Coors incubator that racks up competition medals (including a GABF bronze this weekend in Dortmunder or German-style Oktoberfest). The brewer at Platt Park Brewing Co., Greg Matthews, previously brewed at the Rock Bottom outpost in Boulder County. On Saturday, the months-old brewery took a silver medal in the Vienna-style lager category. The Denver brewery just changed its name last month from Denver Pearl Brewing Co. after Denver Beer Co. and Pabst raised trademark concerns. Former Future Brewings beer is brewed by a microbiologist and former homebrewer and microbiologist (provided by the brewery) Bryan Selders, who mans the kettles at The Post Brewing Co. in Lafayette, previously was head brewer at Delawares famed experimenter Dogfish Head Brewery. Selders brews more to style at The Post and was rewarded Saturday with a silver medal in the American-style or international-style pilsener category for his Howdy Beer. Two veterans of the Colorado-based Rock Bottom chain Scott OHearn and Philip Phifer are behind the beers at the new LowDown Brewery + Kitchen on Broadway just south of downtown Denver . Keeping with that Rock Bottom tradition of brewing traditional styles to guidelines, the new brewery won a silver in Bohemian-style pilsener. But the success was not limited to breweries with professional experience. As is the case at many startups, the head brewer at Former Future Brewing Co. in Denver came straight out of homebrewing. James Howat is also a microbiologist, and his brewery strives to bring a modern twist to old beer styles with a hipster, vintage-vibed taproom . Former Future won bronze in the experimental category for Black Project #1. Dan Diebolt, the head brewer at Denvers family-owned Diebolt Brewing , is also a former homebrewer and oil-and-gas industry veteran in his first professional brewing role. The brewery won silver in American-style brown ale, part of a Colorado sweep of the category that brought gold to Telluride Brewing for Face-Down Brown and bronze to Upslope Brewing for Brown Ale. CODA opened this year month across from the Anschutz medical campus (photo provide by the brewery). Fellow GABF debutante CODA Brewing in Aurora, which won silver in the fruit beer category for a passionfruit beer, is another straight-from-homebrewing story . Brewer Luke Smith previously designed cancer drugs in the CU Department of Pharmacology. Other relatively new breweries that won medals Saturday include FATE Brewing in Boulder, which has a strong reputation for its kolsch beers and won gold with its Laimas Kolsch in the German-style kolsch category; Cannonball Creek Brewing, which followed up on on two silvers in its rookie campaign last year with a gold in American-style black ale for its Black IPA; BRU Handbuilt Ales and Eats won its first GABF medal with a silver in Scotch Ale; and Crow Hop Brewing of Loveland took gold in Irish-style red ale. Among Colorado breweries, Longmont-based Left Hand Brewing brought home the most medals Saturday, tallying three silvers in dark beer categories. The brewery, celebrating its 21st year, won hardware for Black Jack Porter (brown porter category), Smokejumper Smoked Imperial Porter (smoked beer) and its stalwart milk stout (sweet stout or cream stout) Other Colorado craft beer mainstays that made the podium include Boulder-based Avery Brewing (silver in German-style doppelbock or eisbock for The Kaiser), Ska Brewing in Durango (gold for longtime favorite True Blonde in English-style summer ale) and Oskar Blues of Longmont (silver in chocolate beer for Death by Coconut). Dry Dock Brewing in Aurora does not qualify as a veteran yet but the former GABF small brewery of the year took two bronze medals this year for its much-decorated Apricot (American-style fruit beer) and S.S. Minnow Mild Ale (English-style mild ale). Funkwerks, another former small brewery of the year, took gold for its bright pink Raspberry Provincial in Belgian-style fruit beer. Scott Witsoe of Wits End (Denver Post file) For the winning breweries, GABF medals bring added recognition, validation and opportunity. Scott Witsoe of Wits End Brewing is celebrating winning a gold medal with one of his old homebrew recipes Jean-Claude Van Blonde brewed on his tiny one-barrel system in Denver. The same beer won bronze at this springs World Beer Cup. The timing is great for Wits End, which is about to ramp up production on a new seven-barrel system and start distributing its kegs to retail accounts around Denver. The GABF has such notoriety not just in the industry, but because its such a consumer-based event, its just something that in some way validates our brewery, Witsoe said. The marketing power that comes with a GABF medal gets our name out there.



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Colorado breweries finish strong in GABF 2014 competition

By BRUCE A. SCRUTON bscruton@njherald.com HAMPTON -- It was about a year ago that Matt Storch sat down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and his computer to read the news. What caught his eye that September morning makes him now the only commercial grower of hops in Sussex County. "I was fascinated by it," Storch said last week as he stood in his harvested hopyard, barren twine slowly moving in the breeze as it hung from guide wires atop 20-foot tree trunks. "Mostly, I was fascinated by the plant itself." When beer was first made, bitter herbs were used as flavoring and to offset the sweetness of the wort. Hops were among those plants, and it was discovered that when hop blossoms, known as cones, were used, other bacteria in the mixture were killed off, allowing the brewers' yeast -- which produces the alcohol in beer -- to thrive. Without the other bacteria, beer doesn't spoil as fast. In a hopyard, the term used in the United States for the area where hops are grown, only female plants are allowed. Both male and female hop plants produce flowers, but the cones, fruit of the plant, are from female flowers. However, viable seeds in the flowers are undesirable for making beer, so only the female plant is cultivated. After reading that first article, Storch said, "I spent another four hours Googling hops.' I got hooked." Over the fall and early winter, Storch said, the research continued and he learned about major commercial operations in the northwestern U.S. where hundreds of acres of hops are grown. He also ran across agricultural extension services committed to the growing programs and farmers. He also found that growing hops can be labor intensive. "Harvesting equipment for a big operation is pretty expensive. The extent of my agricultural equipment here is a wheelbarrow and a rake," he laughed. He added that his pickup was pressed into service this spring erecting the 20-foot-tall tree trunks that serve as the anchors for the trellis system he had to build. But before that went up, there was a meeting with another new business -- Angry Erik Brewing -- in the late winter. "We talked, and they were interested in getting hold of some local hops," he said. It was their interest that led him to decide on planting a variety of hops known as Chinook. He also decided on two other varieties -- Newport and Cascade. Out of the 40 plants that went in the ground in the spring, about 40 percent produced cones. "I had heard everything from nothing,' to four, five pounds per plant' when I asked what success I would have," he said. When it came time for the harvest, the Chinooks were the best producers -- just what Angry Erik was looking for. "We started picking early one morning and were done by 8," he explained of the day his harvest went to the craft brewer in Lafayette. "About a dozen plants produced cones. We ended with four pounds and took them over to Angry Erik," Storch said. "Within five hours of them coming off the vine, they were part of the brew." That ale, a variation on Angry Erik's popular Hop-N-Awe, will be ready for public sale about Oct. 16. "They are a pretty good micro-nano brewer," he said. "Why can't I be a micro-nano hop farm?" Naming his new operation was easy -- Bentley B was the name of a now-deceased black Labrador he owned. A fireball of a dog, when Storch's children came along, Bentley B became their constant companion, putting up with all the child-handling toddlers can dish out. Hops are known as bines, a type of plant that has downward-pointing bristles helping the plant to cling. A vine, on the other hand, sends out tendrils or suckers that cling to a surface. Simple hemp twine makes a good, one-season support for the bines, once the poles and upper guy wire are in place. Hops also produce best when they grow tallest, so stretching them along a shoulder-high trellis isn't good for the yield. "When they start growing, they take off," Storch said of the hop plants. "In some places, they grow a foot a day. I'm not that lucky, though." Storch, a full-time teacher, said he's got plenty of help in the form of his daughters, Madi, now 10, and Charlotte, 8, who provided labor over the summer. "They were kind of tentative at first, but when they found out they could do the stuff, they just pitched in," the proud father said. And the daughters have begun their own side business, that of hop-balm producers. Hops were known as a medicinal herb before the plant became essential to the beer-making process. The Bentley B Hop Balm is made by extracting the lupulin from Cascade hops and mixing it in beeswax with lanolin and other oils. That process, like most beer/ale making, uses dried hop cones. In major commercial operations, the fresh-picked cones are spread out on a surface in huge drying barns and, at a temperature of about 140 degrees, are dried for a few hours. The drying reduces four pounds of fresh hops to one pound of dried. In the commercial operations, the dried herbs are then compressed into 200-pound bales to be shipped to brewing houses. In the Storch house, the oven-dried herbs are stuffed into plastic bags and put into the home's freezer. The Bentley B hopyard is adjacent to the Paulinskill Trail, and Storch said he spent several hours over the summer talking with walkers and bikers on the trail. "They'd stop to look and some would ask what kind of beans I was growing," he said. "It was fun talking with them and explaining the process." Asked if he had any regrets about becoming a hop farmer, Storch's eyes lit up as he answered: "Oh, my goodness, no. I gotta keep a governor on my ambitions. I still have to be careful of how much all-in' turns out to be." 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Katy Perry chugs beer, jumps off bar in moment of pure bliss | FOX Sports

Here's the volley that gave Donovan the record and Keane his brace...



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