KFBass

Odd, your answer to "who would you fight" is the same as my answer of "who would you most want to get a beer with"

I totally watch that fight by the way.

guelph is the portland of ontario. I literally met one of my now co-workers over a discussion of him saying "where's this beer brewed? oh in town? oh by the two guys sitting at the end of the table? nah i want something more local"....I was the guy at the end of the table and actually brewed the exact batch he was drinking.

We then discussed how itd be a great portlandia sketch.

I'm not a driver but I've been on several tours.

A lot of times, specially in the lower end or younger band era, you ate like shit, and made very little money. Enough to live, but you are sleeping in the van or in the venue, or some friends couches.

But there is this fantastic thing called a Rider. You can specify whatever you want, and go back and forth with the venue about it. Normally this contains things like mic placement, sound needs, electricity, lighting, but it also contains things like a case of bottled water, fruit/veggie tray in the dressing room etc....

You get famous stories of the bands saying "I want a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed" which sounds diva-ish as hell, but really it was just a visual cue that they hadn't read the rider properly, and you should line check everything so somebody doesn't get electrocuted touching the mic, and their guitar at the same time (has happened to me, not great). Or their pyrotechnics explodes or something.

So yeah, you use the rider. If you know you are going to be in a small town, with nothing open when you are done the set, request food and drinks.

Weirdest requests I got from running shows, one was brandy and pineapple juice mixed for the singer. Sounds gross as hell. Another band was clearly very stoned when I took the rider over the phone and got really hung up on orange marmalade being there.

But yeah for the most part riders are super boring "Here's where I want my mics. We need a cabinet at this wattage at this ohms for the bass. Our lighting system runs off this software so you need to be at version 3.2 etc...."

pitch brett, give it a year. brett has this awesome way of changing all esters into normal brett funk.

barrel aging is all by taste. did you buy the barrel freshly emptied (like dumped of whisky then to you at home?) if so, it'll take on flavours fast. they usually progress from "super high boozy bourbon" in a month or so to "vanilla, coconut, and all things nice" after about three months.

That's for a standard bourbon barrel though. 5gal barrels have a higher surface area to beer volume content so they will age faster. Id sample it after a month, then two months and see where you are at. You can always brew another batch of the same base beer and blend to taste.

My own brewey did a 1:5 barrel to base beer blend on our barleywine and won a silver medal. It's all to taste.