Founders Lands in RI, Finally There’s only a few perfect times in one’s life that one can intentionally utter specific sentences in a misleading way and it totally works. For me, one of those times is now: My Wailing Wench is back! Oh how I did miss the Wailing Wench, the Beast Bitter, Wizard’s Winter, and the Dragonslayer Stout! For those of you too young to remember, or for those of you who don’t drink good beer and probably don’t read this article, Middle Ages brewing once graced our state with these delicious brews. It was a golden age, a Renaissance if you will. (See what I did there?) Also among our shelves were the Three Floyds, Dogfish Head, and others that have since evaporated from RI’s selection. I miss them all, but thanks to some visionary beer distributors, these great brews are slowly trickling back to the relief and joy of the craft beer drinking masses. But Lo and Behold, the Middle Ages have returned with their blacksmiths, black knights, and black plagues. Actually, they’re back with a line of delicious brews that many of us have been deprived of. The Wailing Wench in particular, with her wonderful illustrated cleavage, greets us with her screaming hops as we dive headlong towards her bountiful bosom of malty goodness, what was I talking about? How does it taste, you ask? The Wailing Wench is a delicious brew with a bouquet of hop flavors and a sweet body. Insert joke about well-endowed female on label here. No, I’m not lazy. I’ve just done the joke so many times it’s hard to come up with a new twist, unlike the creative twists I could explore with a well-endowed… nevermind. The brew explodes pine and floral notes onto your tongue. I’ve missed this brew oh so much since its departure. Call me clingy, but I never want it to leave again. Though, at 8%, it might be a toxic relationship. Grand Founders Also rolling in on the same train is Founders Brewing from Grand Rapids Michigan. Founders is new to Rhode Island, as far as I know, unless I’m too young to remember, which would be frightening to both me and my parents. Their lineup includes titles such as Red’s Rye IPA, Centennial IPA, and their seasonal, the Double Trouble. I hemmed and hawed about my decision but finally decided on the Rye, what with Rye being a running trend these days. Red’s Rye IPA is another example of a good floral-like IPA that blends with the crisp flavors of rye to create a satisfying and crisp little brew. Now, I’m one to normally shun and shy away from trends, I refer to my rant against White IPA’s last month. But Rye beers and IPA hop profiles seem to have created that perfect blend for a spring or summer beer. It boasts 70 IBUs, and you can taste and smell that right off the bat, then the malty, crisp rye-ness comes in to finish the job and at 6.6%, a few of them might finish you off, too. Founders is a legendary name in craft beer. Between Middle Ages and Founders, who knows, maybe soon the beautiful bliss known as Russian River or Fat Tire will bless our state. I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I can do whatever I can to hold my river. Hayhurst Hurls Personal ‘Out of My League’ A female acquaintance of mine once complained about baseball that “All it is, is a bunch of guys standing around grabbing themselves and spitting for an hour, moving for maybe two seconds, then standing around grabbing themselves and spitting for another hour.” While this characteristic of baseball cannot be denied, there’s a lot more to a good baseball game. A good baseball book, however, needs to go beyond the technical, the wheels within wheels, the guessing and the strategy and the attempts by both teams to reduce chance to an absolute minimum and gain any edge in a game of inches. It needs to explore the characters that make up this oldest and most revered (deservedly or not) of American pastimes. Dirk Hayhurst Dirk Hayhurst’s Out of My League is a good baseball book. Hayhurst, who pitched two seasons in the big leagues for the Padres and Blue Jays, spent most of his career in the minor leagues, and it is this experience that he writes about, exposing the sausage grinder that is Double- and Triple-A. Without varnish and with considerable humor, Hayhurst chronicles the juvenile pranks, macho posturing, Romanesque promiscuity and perversity, selfishness, physical and mental hardship, cruel hazing, abject poverty, and deep, abiding camaraderie that flourishes in the minors. Crappy hotels; brutal travel conditions; horrible food; callous managers; miniscule, indifferent crowds; treatment by ownership that compares unfavorably to medieval serfdom; minor leaguers endure all these, sometimes for their whole careers, for a chance to get to what they call with awestruck reverence ‘The Show.’ But Hayhurst isn’t just documenting minor league life. He is refracting it through his own experience in an attempt to draw a more universal conclusion about what can be gained and what must be sacrificed to a harsh daily grind that offers little hope for advancement and at best fleeting rewards. For Hayhurst, life both within and outside the game is a tough slog. Even giving him the benefit of authorial doubt, it is hard to imagine that he doesn’t exaggerate a little bit in his portrayal of his reality- TV-level-dysfunctional family. Substance abuse, physical disability, denial, depression, and a grandmother who would make Lady Macbeth say “Damn, that woman is f***ed up” are what Hayhurst has to look forward to coming home to in the off-season, along with a meaningless, menial job at Circuit City. Only his girlfriend Bonnie, a saint in music therapist’s clothing, offers him any kind of respite. Bonnie, too, tends to strain credibility. If women half as tolerant, understanding honest and faithful as Bonnie exist, then this is just one more yard in the steadily mounting Everest of evidence that I have been hanging around all the wrong bars and talking to all the wrong women. Still, I suppose she is possible, and she’s made more probable when she finally stands up to Hayhurst near the text’s conclusion, forcing him to look at what he has become and what he will lose if he keeps on the path he’s unconsciously chosen. In more ways than one, Bonnie is Hayhurst’s salvation. Salvation is the operative word, because Hayhurst is one of those more religiously committed athletes. Thankfully, he doesn’t allow this to affect his prose, which is for the most part polished and fluid, and never sanctimonious. Short, episodic chapters bespeak the journalistic apprenticeship he underwent during his playing career, when he wrote a column for a sports periodical, and he can paint a word picture more than competently most of the time. Compression, composite characters, and some rather extended direct quotations suggest that Hayhurst sacrifices some accuracy for the sake of making his point, but it doesn’t really matter in light of the larger project here: tracking Hayhurst’s evolution as a ballplayer and a man. The drama and tension of a life in the minors, where you balance your affection for your teammates against the knowledge that, in order for you to succeed, some of them must fail, make the monster he becomes seem almost inevitable, a man who gives everything to achieve a dream and comes close to losing everything of real value in his life just as that dream is within his grasp. What, the text implicitly asks, would you give up to reach your goal? What would you allow that goal to take from you? Out of My League is Dirk Hayhurst’s highly personal answer, and the book does not fail to redirect these questions back on the reader. Tax Trumping As RI liquor stores continue to suffer losses, legislators & MADD debate tax free days Take a ride down Route 6 in Seekonk and the sign is tough to ignore. Huge red letters just outside one package store proclaim: “No sales tax on alcohol in Mass.” If you live near the state line — and even if you don’t — that 7 percent savings has been attractive for Rhode Islanders who are barraged with high taxes from seemingly everywhere. While nobody keeps officials numbers, just talk with liquor stores owners from Woonsocket to Tiverton and you’ll find their business down significantly during the past year since Massachusetts eliminated the sales tax on package store purchases. The elimination came after the state had put a 6.25 percent on alcohol sales several years ago when it boosted the state sales tax from 5 to 6.25 percent. That caused an uproar from liquor store owners near the New Hampshire border, which has no sales tax on alcohol. It was convincing enough for lawmakers to roll back more than $100 million in revenue they had taken in the year before from the alcohol tax. That same hue and cry has reached Rhode Island lawmakers, who are now considering a tax-free holiday proposal with a twist: five holiday weekends and just for alcohol. Warwick Senator William Walaska submitted a bill last month, at the request of a liquor store owner and lobbyist, that would create tax-free sales periods of a week to 10 days surrounding Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.