Pleonastic Ephemera

1.11.2004 posted by William 13:09 link

Some guy was supposed to come look at my room at 1:00 today, and he hasn't shown up yet. I hope finding someone to take this room doesn't become a real chore. It's tiny, cold, dark, and constructed of thin, fake walls -- who wouldn't snap up such a deal right away?? I'll be posting my ad again on Craigslist today. See if you can spot it. The Brooklyn Brewery tour is a brilliant piece of marketing. We got to the building out near the Williamsburg riverfront, and they said, "The tours are free, just wait here until they call. Oh, and you have to buy tokens for beer: $3 for 1, $5 for 2." So we bought some tokens and had a beer, all excited to see how they magically convert wheat into something you'd want to drink. The guy convened the tour, walked the group into a room with some metal machinery, and announced, "This is the only stop on the tour." He explained the very uneventful history of the Brooklyn Brewery (here's an interesting tidbit: it was founded in 1987) and then pointed at each metal vat and glossed over what went on inside it. The best thing I learned was the certain beers, like the Brooklyn Saison, are not filtered, which makes them look cloudy, but also allows them to retain a full complement of your daily Vitamin B. These beers make excellent day drinkers because alcohol tends to deplete your body's Vitamin B supply, making you fatigued and irritable. So if you want to drink without falling asleep afterwards, stick to the unfiltered. After the "tour," we took our tokens (they also gave us one for free for "taking" the "tour") and bought some more beer. (I highly recommend the Saison, by the way: the vitamins and minerals dance on your taste-buds.) They beauty of this from a marketing standpoint is that even though the tour was a joke, I imagine most people, like me, would still kind of recommend it because it didn't cost anything and they give you a free beer. And the brewery itself is a nice place to drink beer. They have picnic tables set up inside and a pool table and so it's like a large, bright, friendly bar. Just go earlier than the 4:00 tour, because they started yelling at us to leave so they could close up the building at 5:00, which resulted in us having to chug some fine-tasting beer that would have been better savored slowly. Philistines. Today's culture is a visit to the Met. I wonder what kind of beer they serve.