San Diego County beers by the numbers

*

From the 2010 World Beer Cup held in Chicago in which 642 breweries from 44 countries and 47 U.S. States entered 3,330 separate beers for 97 categories.

11 and 21... the number of County breweries winning medals and the number of medals those breweries won.

10%... the percentage of County breweries out of American breweries winning medals (204)

8 and 10... the number of medals won by County breweries over those of respected craft brew states, Oregon and Colorado, respectively.

5 and 14... the number of medals won by County breweries over the countries of Germany and Belgium, respectively.

Ballast Point Brewing Company which won 3 gold medals was named small brewing company of the year succeeding 2008 winner Port Brewing Company of Solano Beach.

It's settled. San Diego County is the craft/microbrew capital of the planet and it's not really even close.

Honorable Mentions: Our ancestral hometown of Placentia, California, picked up two gold medals. In the Experimental Beer category, the 100% Brett Autumn Maple and in the Belgian-Style Flanders/Oud Bruin or Oud Red Ale, the Oude Tart courtesy The Bruery.

Shocker: No medals for Stone Brewery of Escondido.

A full rundown of Cup winners, here.


* That's Jack White President and founder of Ballast Point Brewing Co. holding aloft a pint of his Big Eye India Pale Ale.

Guatay Christian Fellowship Update

The GCF is still technically under cease and desist orders from the County for practicing their 1st amendment right to peaceably assemble and worship as the building in which the 50-member GCF congregates is zoned for a bar instead of a church and knowing that is certainly a disastrous tactic by which to attack the Fellowship, it appears the County has resorted to harrassment in the form of site inspections, instead.

(For some background on this whole fiasco, click here)

The church resumed services at the building Aug. 10, but four days later a county inspection found unsafe wiring and lighting, an improperly installed furnace and water heater and an unsafe doorway, according to a letter to the church from Senior Deputy County Counsel Eliot Alazraki. Those violations, and many others, create fire and safety hazards, Alazraki said.

My god… not an unsafe doorway!

Church attorney Peter Lepiscopo said he believed the county used “heavy-handed tactics”

The church has been meeting at members' homes since the county inspection. Pastor Stan Peterson said he did not believe the violations were major and hoped to return to the building within a month or so

In our line of work, what the County is finding is akin to “underway restrictives” which if looked for long and hard enough, one will find.

Pastor Stan advised the congregation two Sundays ago when we were out there to not get angry at the County… “….they aren’t stupid, they just do stupid stuff sometimes”.

We respect the admonition but its becoming more and more difficult to bestow any grace upon the County when they have had ample opportunity to pull their head out of their ass and politely drop the whole matter but rather continue to fight a petty and nettlesome rear-guard action when they know they don’t have a legal, ethical or common sensical leg upon which to stand.

Hey, Eliot Alazraki... Yeah, Johnny's on the phone... he says, "hi"

Story here

Just a little more equal than others, we suppose Pt. II

After the County of San Diego bent over backwards to accommodate the influx of people seeking gay marriages on Tuesday, they do not appear to be quite as flexible with their own employees who, for religious purposes, have refused to perform gay wedding ceremonies.

County Clerk, Greg Smith, reneged on his previous word when he told employees they would not have to perform these ceremonies if they objected on religious grounds. Turns out, the volume of people seeking gay marriage licenses trumped any one person’s religious beliefs as the clerks were told they would have to perform the ceremonies or seek reassignment within the office or elsewhere in the county.

No agenda or politics here…. Please move along.