Monday, March 15 2010
Pennsylvania Days
Cradle to the Nation, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: Virtue, Liberty and Independence
I love visiting Pennsylvania: good folks, great scenery, some fantastic places to eat and drink and if you can't have a good time there, it's your own fault. Plus, there's a town there named Vandergrift, I have distant cousins there and my pal David from LD Carlson lives there.
The opportunity came up for me to attend the Wineries Unlimited trade show, and I was able to combine it with a lecture for Jason at Keystone Brewing, and a chance to talk to some of our retail partners there. After a few hitches (did you know that Air Canada is completely comfortable kicking you out of a seat you've paid extra for? Neither did I) I touched down and got busy. First stop was some customer visits in the area. We were swinging by Trenton New Jersey and had a chance to stop in to see Joe Blair at Princeton Homebrew. It's been seven or eight years since I've had a chance to talk to him, and he's a unique sort of cat, old-school brewer, proud carrier-on of hippie traditions of living lightly on the earth and doing very weird things, like brewing beer with solar energy.
Joe Blair and his giant magnifying glass. Giant ants, beware!
In the picture above, Joe is showing his solar brewing engine. It's the lens from out of a junked projection TV. It's a clear piece of acrylic with a fresnel pattern on it, which focuses light the same way a lighthouse lens would, but it weighs ounces instead of tonnes. If you look closely at the board Joe is holding in the focus of the beam, it's on fire!
Burn baby, burn!
If you look even more closely at the first picture, you'll see scars on the cinder block weighting down the cart--Joe burnt a groove right into the block with his system. Holy mother of magnifying glasses! If you'd like to see his system in action, check out a video of it on Youtube. And if you're in Trenton, be sure to drop in on Joe because there are a lot less interesting ways to spend your time than talking to someone with so many varied interests and ideas.
After that it was trade-show time. We did the booth thing, I talked to a lot of customers, some of our current retailers and worked over the prospects pretty hard (okay, I chatted amiably. What do you want me to say in front of my bosses?) I even got asked for my autograph!
Bobby, David, Geno and Brian manning the booth. Lousy picture my fault.
Jason Harris from Keystone put on a bang-up event, with speakers ranging from university arborists lecturing on cider apples, trees and pruning, to grape importers talking about varietals and cuttings and even me, talking about wine kits.
The Keystone Corps. Lousy picture due to bad lighting.I had a pretty good night, I think, despite AV problems that had me doing my first five slides from memory (didn't miss anything, so that was fine in the end) and had some great questions from the audience. I also ran into Kiev and Betsy from Winemaker Magazine, there covering the event and the trade show. Betsy made me promise not to use the picture I took of her, so here it is:
Kiev and Betsy. Lousy picture because they're funny looking.
Next day it was all trade-show hi-jinks. As usual the first day of every show is quiet, but that gave me a chance to cruise the floor and visit all the other booths to see what's cooking. I dropped in on my pal Peter Brehm to commiserate about grape pricing and supply (old grape guys always do that) and caught up on how the vines are looking. I also saw the folks from MacDay labels, and a raft of others. You hang around long enough in this industry and you know everyone. There was lots of other cool stuff to see at the show, including a barrel cleaning setup that I now lust for: rather than using a spray ball, it uses a 360 degree spray head that mechanically removes scaling and goo.
Fine, I'm a geek for this stuff. I also want the glass display barrels so I can see my wine when I visit it.
One more really nifty thing about the tradeshow: Ray 'Boom-Boom' Mancini slugged me. Not really hard, because I'm still here, just for a photo op!
He always looked bigger in the ring
I'm a fan of Ray's. A guy my size usually follows the heavyweights, but Ray is a rare bird: lots of talent, scored a title early, and retired before the sport took his wits from him. Boxing isn't always kind to its best: I've got a friend with chronic traumatic encephalopathy from too many shots to the head, but Ray is sharp, funny and knows how to work a crowd. And work he did, selling his new wine, 'Southpaw'. Mancino means 'left-handed' in Italian, so that seems a natural name. A California Cab made in Ohio, it's a pretty darn good bottle, jokes about it being a 'knockout' aside. A nice little brush with fame, and a fun end to a great week.
Next up, I've got to get moving! Product descriptions to write, reports to finish and those darned instructions won't write themselves. Back to the jute mill.
| Posted by Tim of the North AT 8:08PM | 0 Comments |  |
Post A Comment |  |
 |