Breakfast Stout Breakfast

Each fall the release of the latest batch of Breakfast Stout from Founders Brewing Company is highly anticipated, and the past few years Founders has hosted a Breakfast Stout Breakfast to celebrate. This year I went for the first time, with three friends. It was an exclusive event - only 200 tickets were sold. This year the food was catered by San Chez A Tapas Bistro, which was a change from previous years (I heard the food was so-so in the past).

We arrived right at 10am to join the long line outside, entered, received our special Breakfast Stout mugs, filled them with the delicious double chocolate coffee oatmeal stout, and got in line for our food. The large doors to the outdoor porch were open, as the weather was beautiful. Here's the view inside Founders (before 11am!):

After gathering a muffin, some scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, some potatoes, bread, and samples of three different kinds of hash (including "Bloody Mary"), my breakfast looked like this:

Note the cool mug, and the beginnings of the light brown lacing left on the inside of the mug by the beer as I drank it. Breakfast Stout is black as night, contains 8.3% alcohol, and went really well with the food. It wasn't weird to be drinking it before noon at all. We went back for seconds later, and even though the event was supposed to go until 1pm, they were running out of food by noon when we left. It was a pretty cool experience overall.

Yeah, More Sports

We've failed miserably to maintain the blogs lately (both of us have played a lot of Word Challenge on Facebook, plus school started) and I'm not even going to attempt some grand make-up-for-it blog entry, so I'll just talk about sports some more...

Cupcake update: a few years ago East Carolina was in the midst of a span where they went 3-20. During that time they agreed to be a cupcake on the 2008 schedule of both Virgina Tech and West Virginia. They've improved since then, and beat both teams to start this season. Awesome.

NFL head coaches punt way too much, even on 4th and 1 from the middle of the field. If they go for it and fail, they get blamed. If they punt and still lose, the players get blamed for playing poorly. I've seen thorough statistical studies that show that teams should pretty much go for it on 4th and 1 from almost anywhere on the field. Heck, the Lions were losing by three touchdowns on Sunday and punted from the other team's 40-yard line (that's straight from "How Not To Try But Still Look Like You Are"). Now I boo every time I see coaches do this - I saw good chunks of around 3 games this past week, and I had to boo at least 4 or 5 times. Some high school teams never punt, but even the TV announcers usually side with punting in almost every situation. Boo on them too.

Not to jump the gun, but the Yankees are now in 4th place in their division and could be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs in less than a week. The Tigers have more hope than that, but really they don't so I need to be excited about something. It should be interesting to see how the Cubs manage not to win the World Series again too.

Saturday's lineup: Michigan - Notre Dame at 3:30 and then USC - Ohio State at 8:00. I don't say it often, but "Go Bucks!"

Michael Phelps is still not necessarily the greatest Olympian of all time.