I fucked up

Monday 17 December 2012 - Filed under Brewing

I fucked up. No one died. Life will go on. No one was shattered by it. The only really victim was myself. So as fuck ups go, I can handle it. But it’s still a fuckup.

I am a beer snob in a serious way. I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t like. This is well-known at the brewery. People bring in all sorts of beer that I hate. I appreciate it. I respect it. I learn from it. But I don’t want to drink it. I make beer myself that I don’t drink. I made a really good lager that was just taking up keg space because I drink ale.

The craft beer revolution was initially the rise of ale in America. Yes, there were exceptions, like Boston Lager, but the main new thing we got out of the craft revolution was really good ale in America. Sierra Nevada is the well-known example and Summit Extra Pale Ale was the beer that brought excellent ale into my home every day.

I am an ale snob. I drink 1 lager for every 1000 ales. I’ve had August Schell a thousand times, almost always against my will and didn’t like it. If Schell Hefeweizen is the best beer on tap, I’m drinking G&T’s.

Add to this the Big 3 who cram lager down our throats constantly. Almost every tap everywhere you go is pale lager beer. The craft revolution is in large part a rejection of pale American lager.

So when I saw Schell post an article about not being listed as craft brewers by the Brewers Association, I was not sympathetic. I thought, “If they were known for making great craft beer it would be obvious and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.” Without too much thought I posted something to the effect of “it’s because you don’t make good craft beer. Make good craft beer”.

A shit storm resulted.

I work at Lucid Brewing. They are the nicest guys in the world. They are friends with every brewer I know. They would never disparage another brewery the way I just had. I realized this when a few hours later I got a very mad tweet from a Schell drinker. And then from a Schell brewer. And then I knew that I had completely fucked up.

Here’s how:

1. Schell does make a lot of craft beer. A lot of people think it is great.
2. Schell is a lot smaller than I thought.
3. The people at Schell are people too.
4. I’m a brewer now and brewers don’t diss each other’s beer.

#1 and #2 were just ignorance. If I wanted to comment on Schell’s craft beer I should have done more research. #3 I just should have known. #4 is something I am new to and struggling with. I hate a lot of beer. I hate sour beers. I hate most porters. There are times I drink a beer and my natural response is “yuck!”.

But every time I taste a beer I don’t like, I assume the person that made it does like it. I’m not saying people are bad at making beer, I’m saying they like to make beer that I don’t like. I never have and never will question the skills of any brewer.

I delete my idiotic Facebook comments so as to not keep fanning flames I never should have started in the first place. Feel free to contact me somewhere else if you want to discuss the actual issue that Jace brought up original in the first place, which I respond to here.

I sincerely apologize to August Schell and the people who like their beer.
Even though my comments are my own, I apologize to Lucid Brewing for their name being brought into this. They had nothing to do with it and, incidentally, they make great beer.

I’m not an asshole. I listen. I learn. I fuckup. I listen again. Thanks for your patience and your friendship and I hope to see you soon.

Cheers,
Michael Koppelman

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-12-17  ::  lolife

New Things

Friday 13 April 2012 - Filed under Journal

When I was young I wanted to be a rock star. Once I wrote in one of my little writing books that someday I’d work with Prince, just him and me, in the recording studio. I never did become a rock star. I did work with Prince, exactly as I predicted. But you’ll recall the ancient Chinese curse: may all your wishes come true!

In 1994 I started a computer bulletin board system (BBS) with some friends. It took off and became Bitstream Underground, a successful and alternative Internet Service Provider in Minneapolis. We sold that company in 2000 and started Clockwork in 2002. Clockwork recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary. We are now a company of 60+ people that is actually the coolest company on the face of the earth (in my opinion, anyway). I’m very proud of the incredible work done by my friends at Clockwork.

In the meantime I’ve fooled around with a lot of interests and hobbies, including astrophysics, ham radio, rocketry, Magic the Gathering and brewing beer.

To roughly recap, I’ve spent 1/3 of my life as a musician and 1/3 of my life as an Internet guy. I’m now on my way to planning the last 1/3 of my professional life and I’m as excited as I’ve ever been.

I am leaving day-to-day operations at Clockwork. I’m still a founder, still an owner, still on the Board and still working to insure our success in any way that I can. I am still involved in certain financial, business and strategic decisions and I intend to be along for the ride, wherever it may lead.

Clockwork is in really good hands. I would, and have, put my life in the hands of Nancy Lyons, Chuck Hermes and Kurtis Koppelman. They are the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life and their work at Clockwork is exceptional. That company is great because of them.

But I’m starting something new. I’m hoping to start a career in the craft beer industry. My ultimate goal is to start a brewery with the same winning ownership team that started Clockwork. You’ll be hearing more from me, lots more, about these new endeavors.

Thank you for your love and support.

Yours truly,
M.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-13  ::  lolife

The House Where The Pain Isn’t

Sunday 8 April 2012 - Filed under Journal

You are laying face down in the mud. The only thought in your head is “I want to die. I want to die.” repeating over and over. If you dig any deeper you only find thoughts that are worse, of guilt, embarrassment, shame, weakness. The only thing that saves you is the litany in your head, keeping everything else out, “I want to die. I want to die”.

Then, after an endless number of days, you open your eye for a moment, like you have other times before, but instead of blinding pain pouring in, you survive. Your eye is open and you survive it. And for a quick second you feel almost normal and it gives you hope. Then the pain pours in and you clench your eyes shut and keep yourself alive by saying, “I want to die. I want to die”.

But those quick seconds come more frequent and last a little longer. They always end with the same pain pouring in, but these moments of almost feeling normal are a memory you cling to. You hear voices and they sound so normal, so happy. You wonder how they can feel that way. It’s hard to remember feeling that way. Just normal, happy, energetic. You can only remember a single method of feeling that way and that is what brought you here. There is being high and there is wanting to die and your life has crumpled into that bipolar reality.

There is mostly pain but over time you slowly build a tiny little world, a little house where the pain isn’t. And the time chanting, “I want to die. I want to die.” gets interrupted by a few moments in this little house where the pain isn’t. From within this house you look out the window at our old life and you try to slowly put it back together.

Then the house gets destroyed. Totally gone, not a trace remaining. Your face down in the mud again and the litany sometimes seems like an option. You think about how many people took that option. When living with something and living without are both too painful to survive. People who would give up their kids, their wives, their every waking moment, gone, sacrificed because it was the better option. It’s one of the saddest things in the world, when living because the next best option.

You are in the mud again and reality gathers around, laughs and points – it’s your fault! You chose this. You are weak and depraved. A pleasure-seeking drug addict. You did this. You earned this. Your bed is ready sir, I believe you made it, enjoy! It permeates everything. It’s in everyone’s eyes. You chose this. You did this. You don’t deserve sympathy. You deserve everything you get.

But there is also kindness. People carry you and help you and look out for you. Mostly you don’t even know it. But when the eye is open and you see, squinting in the brightness of the pain, you see these people who love you, who don’t judge you and who help you over and over, bleeding themselves from the effort.

So you start building the house again. You look through it’s windows and you try to get your life back. And the house keeps getting demolished but you see that you can’t not build this house. Either the Litany of Death wins or The House Where The Pain Isn’t wins. And while the litany has saved you and kept you focused on the cliff’s edge, you don’t want to die. You want to live. You want to be free. You don’t want to wake up in the mud again. You don’t want your house demolished again. You want to open the doors and go live your life again.

You’ve told yourself this before because you thought you were supposed to but you never really believed it. You were still under the influence of the massive gravity of oblivion. Yes, choice is involved. Some troubled part of your soul is looking for something most people never have an inkling of. You knew the risks. You trusted yourself and you proved to be weak. You failed and along the way you lied, regardless of the fine print, and in your stupor you happily burned down a radius of destruction, hurting your friends and yourself. Your experiment exploded and you almost killed yourself and injured your friends but you were too high to notice.

So from the little house where the pain isn’t, there is a window that looks back on that radius of destruction. But you can’t look through it. Your little toothpick house will fall apart if you open that window. It’s not sturdy enough. You can’t fix that radius of destruction if you end up back in the mud. You can only fix it if you look out the other windows, the ones that don’t carry these disastrous burdens of the past.

It’s not denial. It’s not selfishness or a lack of compassion. It’s not being oblivious to the feelings of those around you. It’s a survival instinct. You are trying to stay alive. This is like the first sprout peering above the soil. It’s easy to kill, even through acts of kindness. The sprout does best if you stand back. Sprinkle a little water when it’s dry, pull a few weeds that try to choke it. But mostly just wait.

Sometimes you look at your little house and you think, this isn’t too bad! It seems like you’ve come so far. Other times you feel absolutely ridiculous. What a fuckup you are. How pathetic. Loser.

You take it one morning at a time. The litany had faded away. The house has been holding up. You’ve even taken a few glances through the back window. Maybe you can open it. Maybe you can look at all 360˚’s. Maybe you’ve won and you’re done and you can pay your debts and feel free, alive, unembarrassed, unashamed, full of vigor, full of confidence, happy, healthy, ready to go.

Or maybe you’ll wake up in the mud. Maybe you’ll be right back at the beginning.

Author Unknown

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2012-04-08  ::  lolife

G+

Wednesday 23 November 2011 - Filed under Journal

As you can plainly see, I haven’t been blogging much lately. I still enjoy long(er) form writing and I intend to keep writing on this blog. I’m sure it will continue to emb and flow a bit. My RSS feed is still screwed up, so most people aren’t paying attention anyway! One of these days I’ll get that fixed up. You know the story about the cobbler’s kids having crappy shoes….

I am still sharing my thoughts, though, mainly on Twitter and a little on Google+. You know what to do!

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-11-23  ::  lolife

Mike’s Light Bread Machine Bread

Monday 5 September 2011 - Filed under Journal

• 2 heaping cups white bread flour
• 1 cup wheat flour
• 2 tablespoons dry milk powder
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 teapoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 packet quick rise yeast

I like to mix the honey in 1/2 cup of the water so that it doesn’t sit in one place in the bread machine. My machine says to put dry ingredients first, then oil and honey and then water last. My machine also has a little yeast dispenser so it adds it at the right time. You can just sprinkle the yeast on last if you don’t have that.

In my machine I can make this on the BAKE RAPID setting, which is basically a white setting. You can bake it on the wheat setting, too, or a regular white setting.

As long as you don’t forget the oil, this makes a nice, light loaf that the kids will eat but you’ll like too.

Variations:

You can use olive oil instead of canola oil. It makes the bread more European. You can use butter instead of oil, too. You can also use molasses instead of honey or just use 2 tbsp. sugar. I don’t know how to use liquid milk, but that would be fun to try.

M.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-09-05  ::  lolife

Atheism and Veganism

Friday 3 June 2011 - Filed under Atheism + Religion

I was paging through a Skinny Bitch book. I’d like to have better nutrition and lose some weight. I’m also not opposed to vegetarianism and veganism on culinary or philosophical grounds. So I flipped through and read a few bits.

They immediately pissed me off. I’m paraphrasing here, but they said, meat is gross and disgusting, cow’s milk is for baby cows and coffee is the dumbest thing in the world you could possibly drink.

They didn’t give me a bunch of facts about why this is so (although I’m guessing they do elsewhere in the book). They just piled on a bunch of condescending crap about the kinds of foods I grew up eating. And they fucked with coffee. No one fucks with coffee and lives to tell the tale.

It made me realize how off-putting it can be when people come across that way — self-righteous, condescending and insulting. Atheists are often accused of this and there has been much debate about “framing” and the value therein.

I’ve become a very vocal atheist. The religious notions that people talk about seem absolutely absurd to me. That serious and intelligent people believe bronze-age mythology and speak about God as if he were a certainty just befuddles the hell out of me. There is no doubt in my mind that the supernatural beliefs of all religions are false.

Yet I’m like those Skinny Bitches. I’m attacking a way of life, a family bond, a lifestyle spanning generations and I’m closing the door immediately to really challenging people’s beliefs. They stopped listening because no one likes to listen to self-righteous, condescending assholes discourteously shredding their deeply personal beliefs.

What could the Skinny Bitches have done to not turn me off to their ideas? They could acknowledge that they know my views are important to me and were developed possibly across generations. They could state the facts that make me reach the conclusions instead of ramming their conclusions down my throat. They could say that I don’t need to throw out everything I love, that I can find my own path based on their advice and experience.

I think people should say whatever they want. I’m not telling people like PZ Myers to approach the debate differently. PZ pushes a lot of people off the fence and they appreciate it afterward. That approach works well for the prepared mind.

But we can be more effective with people less sympathetic to our views if we keep them listening and engaged. We can’t do that if they think we are self-righteous assholes. That’s just a no-brainer.

Why do I want to convert people to atheism? Because I think we need all the fact-based reasoning we can get. I’m afraid of the hugely negative impact that religious thinking can and has created. There are people so far gone that they think science is the enemy! We need more people who put reason first. To do that we need to think carefully about how to lead people to the conclusions we’ve reached.

4 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-06-03  ::  lolife

Teachers who made a difference

Tuesday 3 May 2011 - Filed under Journal

It’s National Teacher Appreciation Day. I thought I’d take a moment to remember some great teachers in my life.

Mr. Deseth (Roosevelt Elementary) He was cool. He was also firm but fair.

Mr. Moen (Kelly Elementary) He was funny but took his job seriously and expected you to, too.

Mr. Martin (Schroeder Jr. High School) He made it clear to me that knowing stuff is more fun than not knowing stuff.

Mrs. McCaffery (Schroeder Jr. High School) She taught us all that being a tiny woman does not make you one less bit intimidating. Really big burn-out dudes were afraid of Mrs. McCaffery.

Mr. Fosse (Red River High School) He was an excellent theatre teacher in a way that changed people. He was hilarious, unique, bold, creative and he made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives, including mine.

I could go on but I’ll do this again next year.

I think the teachers I remember are the ones that made me enjoy learning and/or made me learn about life, not just about the subject matter at hand. Being good at math, for example, is certainly a huge benefit to a math teacher. But inspiring kids, being a good example, rewarding creativity, teaching discipline and the other million things that teachers do — those are the skills that make a difference in the world.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-05-03  ::  lolife

Why I don’t follow you

Monday 11 April 2011 - Filed under Computers

Why I don’t follow you:

1. Most of your tweets are @replies.
2. You retweet nice things people say about you.
3. You have one-on-one conversations on the public timeline.
4. You auto-reply to new followers.
5. Your tweet about how awesome you are.
6. You serial tweet real-time events.
7. You filibuster my timeline.
8. You beg for RT’s, diggs, likes, followers.
9. You publicly celebrate every time your follower count can be divided by 100.
10. You’re a name-dropper.

Here’s some examples of things you should never, ever tweet:

@joan we should grab lunch sometime.
RT @lolife is über fucking hot.
Touchdown!
“The 32nd smart thing this speaker just said” #somedumbconference
Only 1023 more followers and I’ll be at 2000 followers!

Why I do follow you:

1. You make me laugh.
2. You make me think.
3. You don’t do the 10 things above.

With that said: tweet whatever the fuck you want. The only major crime is to give a shit what I think!

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-04-11  ::  lolife

The problem is not Free Speech

Monday 4 April 2011 - Filed under Atheism + Religion

The problem is not Free Speech, the problem is extreme, violent action by religious extremists.

PZ sums it up very well:

We live in a world where some Catholics will froth at the mouth and send death-threats and call for people to be fired over insults to a scrap of magic, holy bread; we live in a world where some Muslims will kill random people if someone insults their magic, holy book. That ought to be recognized as the real problem and a call for more criticism, not less, of religion…

Recall that 99.99% of Christians, Muslims and Atheists alike do not provoke each other senselessly. I don’t care what you believe, provided you keep me out of it. I don’t think specific pieces of bread are sacred and I don’t think a collection of pieces of paper with ink on them is sacred. You are not keeping me out of it if you force me, by law or violence, to treat them as sacred. Like I said, I’m not going to desecrate pieces of bread or paper because it’s not how I choose to express myself and I consider it needlessly provocative. I do think it is “valid” protected free speech.

It is untenable if the reaction to extreme speech is violence. There can be no peace if that is the case. The only valid reaction to free speech is more free speech. We must universally condemn violent response to free speech. It’s not the retarded preacher in Florida’s fault that people chose to react with violence. It’s ludicrous and indefensible that people would consider violence an expected or appropriate response.

Focus on the right problem. The problem is not free speech. It’s religious extremism.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-04-04  ::  lolife

Cooperation over competition

Wednesday 26 January 2011 - Filed under Journal + Politics

In another thread I am having a conversation with “carter”, who seems to be a smart and thoughtful person, and a fellow rocketeer, by the look of it. The following is a response to one of his comments that I felt deserved the spotlight of its own post, especially considering how rare I blog these days.

He said, among other things:

I’ll admit there is a sweet spot for taxation and regulation.

How should we figure out where the sweet spot is? This is perhaps my prime problem with the “small government” rhetoric of the Right. It would be lovely if we could set a certain policy, run the experiment and then rewind, use a different policy, run the experiment again, etc. and really truly find out the right amount of taxes and regulation to make for the strongest economy. We can’t do that.

So instead, like astronomers, we have to observe different experiments in action and then try to normalize them somehow and get our insights that way. What are the other experiments? They are the other countries that are also experimenting with varying degrees of taxes and regulations.

The odd part about this is that the US is an anomaly. There is no Westernized country more conservative than us. There are none with lower taxes. When you look at the other thriving economies of the world they all, every one of them, have more taxes and regulation.

The Right likes to point to this and say – see! We are on to something here in the USA! Less taxes and less regulation make for a stronger economy. Unfortunately that is a statistically insignificant sample of one. There are a lot of other factors that have contributed to the strength of the American economy besides the conservatism of the last few decades.

So I’m glad we agree – there is a sweet spot for the level of taxes and regulation. You think we have erred in one direction and me the other. I really try to imagine your view as correct. I do trust people to look after their own best interest. I do see how the government screws some things up.

The reason I end up disagreeing with you is this: homo sapiens rose above the bloody fray of survival of the fittest and started cooperating in larger and larger groups. While the law of the jungle certainly applies, a stronger “law” has led to the great success of our species: cooperation. We all do better when we all do better. I can’t escape this ideology and economists have been unable to prove me wrong. I think we should put our efforts into making government better (for we are the government, after all) rather than trying to dismantle it.

I have written elsewhere on this blog why I think progressive taxation is fair and smart. Moving from taxes to fees is regressive. For certain things, I think it is viable and useful. But our government is so more than a service provider.

I also agree that Amy’s child safety law had ridiculous unintended consequences.

Thanks for the great conversation.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2011-01-26  ::  lolife