The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Ten Ninety Brewing Co., Glenview

Welcome to stop #2 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Ten Ninety Brewing Co., 1025 Waukegan Rd., Glenview, Ill.
Train line: Metra Milwaukee District North, Glenview station.
Time from Chicago (Union Station): 38 minutes, zone D
Distance from station: 700 m

A trio of bros formed Ten Ninety in 2012 and moved to Glenview in 2016. They specialize in Imperial-style beers, but they have a full line to go with their full kitchen.

From left to right, I tried the Jackman Bear, 4.7%, brown ale; Masshole, 6.7%, New England IPA; Angry Dragon, 6.1%, American pale; and Brut, 5.5%, IPA.

I liked the Angry Dragon best. It had grapefruit and caramel notes with a long finish. The Jackman Bear tasted like what Newcastle Brown Ale wishes it were. The Masshole was a solid New England IPA with orange and treacle notes and a long finish. I'm not sure I liked the Brut IPA at all; it had a bitterness that tasted more like lemon peel than citra hops.

As for the vibe, it's a suburban restaurant-brewpub. If I lived in Glenview, I might stop in once in a while...but Glenview House is just three blocks away.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Many, unavoidable
Serves food? Full kitchen
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? No

Macushla Brewing, Glenview

Welcome to my new project: Brews and Choos. Off and on over the next year, I'm going to visit 98 breweries and distilleries that are within about 1.5 km of rail lines around Chicago. Some of them are right downtown; others require a 100-minute schlep to a neighboring state.

I'll post reviews and visit notes in chronological order. For a list organized by train line, check out the explanation page.

Here's the first stop.

Brewery: Macushla Brewing, 1516 E. Lake Ave., Glenview, Ill.
Train line: Metra Milwaukee District North, Glenview station.
Time from Chicago (Union Station): 38 minutes, zone D
Distance from station: 1.3 km

"Macushla" means "my pulse, my lifeblood, my darling" in Gaelic. Mike and Megan Welch founded the brewpub in 2015 in Mike's home town of Glenview, Ill. Unfortunately, Mike died in 2016, and Megan now runs the brewery on her own.

I had a 4-beer sampler from their current line-up: Easy Sipsa, a 4.1% 20 IBU session IPA; Ring of Fire, 5.2%, 41 IBUs, Scottish IPA; Chalk Eater, 7.2%, 55 IBUs, IPA; and The Hammer, 9.75%, 20 IBUs, Scotch ale.

They were all pretty good. The Easy Sipsa lived up to its name; the Chalk Eater hit me with a full dose of hops and alcohol. The Hammer, despite its strength, tasted sweet and malty, with notes of pear and maple. They don't serve pints of that one; sip it slowly.

I also liked the vibe. The place is small and cozy, with a modest patio (complete with igloo). They have pretzels and small pizzas in the bar, and an arrangement with Hackney's next door if you want something more substantial.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? 2, unavoidable
Serves food? Snacks; full kitchen next door
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Yes

Fastest JFK-to-LHR flight since the Concorde

British Airways flight 112 arrived at 4:47 this morning at Heathrow, having made the trip from New York in an astonishing 4 hours, 56 minutes:

Virgin Atlantic wasn’t far behind British Airways, though. VS4 from New York JFK to London Heathrow was scheduled to depart at exactly the same time. The flight was operated by an A350-1000, and that plane completed the flight in just 4hr57min. It ended up arriving at the gate at Heathrow at 5:05AM, a full 1hr25min ahead of schedule.

Tail winds on both flights were as high as 425 km/h, and the planes reached maximum [ground] speeds of over 1,325 km/h.

It should be noted that this was not the fastest trans-Atlantic trip since Concorde, or even last night:

Aer Lingus flew from Boston to Dublin in a flight time of 4hr49min, which is actually not that impressive when you consider that the flight is nearly 800 km shorter (however, the 747 has a faster cruising speed than the A330).

It's still impressive.

Research weekend

I've got an idea for a new series of posts that I'm researching this weekend. Nothing may come of it, but the research itself should be fun.

Stay tuned.

Balmy day in Antarctica

The frozen continent hit its all-time-warmest temperature yesterday:

Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 18°C was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history.

The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50 years, temperatures have surged a staggering 3°C in response to Earth’s swiftly warming climate. Around 87 percent of glaciers along the peninsula’s west coast have retreated in that time, the majority doing so at an accelerated pace since 2008.

The WMO notes that cracks in the Pine Island Glacier “have been growing rapidly” in the past several days, according to satellite imagery.

Additional extreme warmth is likely in the Antarctic Peninsula in the coming days. Temperatures some 22–28°C above normal are predicted by some models.

Oh dear.

Calm down, folks

Yes, the Democratic Party had a bad week. But those of us paying attention knew we would.

Now, I couldn't have predicted the unconscionable fuck-up (no other word for it) perpetrated on the national party by its Iowa subsidiary. In future, I hope Iowa's quirky, exclusionary method of selecting delegates either goes away entirely or gets moved so late in the year that no one cares anymore. Or simply that no one cares anymore, full stop. The idiots running the IDP deserve nothing better for at least two election cycles.

But despite this week's stumbles, I believe that our party will take both houses of Congress and the White House in November. The revulsion that people feel throughout the country at the President and the Republican trolls supporting him bodes well for a correction back to previous norms. And I think that at least three of the five "moderate" Republican trolls in the Senate who voted for acquittal will get turfed out of office. Plus, we are well on our way to winning even more state legislatures, which brings the possibility of undoing the damage that radical Republican trolls have done to the states in the last 10 years. (Not to mention, the census and reapportionment.)

Of course I could be wrong; no one knows the future. I'm just not losing sleep over it.

I'm not buying into the punditry's rending of garments. We still have to select about 99% of our delegates for the July convention; we know the President will loose what remaining shackles he had on his behavior, increasing the center's revulsion of him; and we also know that people have built up antibodies against the massive disinformation campaign that Republican trolls have run since 2015. We also have strong evidence that Monday's "lower-than-expected" turnout (actually about the same as 2016) and lack of a clear winner came not from voter indifference in general, but from voters being generally OK with all of the Democratic candidates.

That disinformation campaign will get much, much worse over the next seven months, of course. Our job is to sit tight, refute the bullshit that needs refuting, and pull a Reagan on the rest of the crap ("There you go again."). People know most of what the President and other Republican trolls say is utter nonsense. Let's not lose our minds over it.

In other words: you know the problem with mud-wrestling with a pig? You both get covered in shit, but the pig likes it. So let it be with those guys.

And let's not get all bent out of shape about one Rasmussen poll that shows the President's approval rating is 49% and "going up." It's not. The actual poll of polls shows a squiggle around 43% consistently since September. Since January 2017, Trump has had less approval from voters than any other president who got re-elected. Consistently.

We had a bad week. So what. We've got 39 more to go before November 3rd.

So, David Brooks: chill out. Monica Bauerlein: keep cool. EJ Dionne: rock on.

We have the facts, and we have the law. We don't need to pound the table—or worse, hide under it.

In other news...

The week keeps getting more fun:

For the next 9 months, I'm considering changing the official style of this blog to refer to "Republican trolls" whenever the party comes up. Because at this point, they're really the party of nihilistic trolls. And we have actual problems that need solving.

Three strikes against impeachment

Welp, the Senate has acquitted President Trump almost entirely along party lines, as everyone knew it would. Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) crossed the aisle to vote for conviction. Here's a roundup of the news in the last few hours:

About yesterday:

  • The Washington Post has an annotated SOTU.
  • Alexandra Petri clutched every pearl she owned, "and also the pearls of strangers, and some oysters that may contain pearls in the future" after Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped up her copy of the SOTU.
  • NBC called the address Trump's "victory lap." Oh no, NBC; he's got more lapping in him.

In other news:

And it's snowing.

My Facebook live-posting last night

You'll just have to imagine the context for all of these comments I posted on my Facebook feed last night. At least I put them in chronological order:

  • Watching the State of the Union with the sound off, and PBS closed captions. And a big martini.—at Agami Contemporary Sushi.
  • I don't know if I can do this. I thought without the sound my skin wouldn't crawl as much. But the words could have come from the Politburo. And Mike Pence is so creepy.
  • OK, I need a non-trivial truthful statement. Just one. Please.
  • If all these groups have record employment, how come everyone feels poor? Maybe because having 3 jobs doesn't feel great?
  • Yeah, you kicked 7 of those 10 million off food stamps. Not a win.
  • Juan F'ing Guaidó? Wow. Talk about a stopped clock being right twice a day. Except Trump actually prefers Maduro, so...
  • Watching him without hearing him, you get a real sense of the insincerity. Go back and watch when everyone was applauding Guaidó. What a weird affect Trump had.
  • "Failing government school?" STFU you illiterate dullard.
  • Interesting how he's only using the stage-left (Republican side) teleprompter.
  • "We will never let socialism destroy American healthcare!" Obviously, because you're happy with capitalism doing it first.
  • Free healthcare to illegal aliens, oh my! (SOTU live vomiting post #2)
  • And there goes the Medal of Freedom. Which Melania just happened to have in her pocket. To place on a man who has done more to destroy political comity in this country than anyone else. I really didn't think anything about this SOTU could shock me. I was wrong.
  • Second martini delivered. Thank you, sir.
  • OMG. He's pulling a Willie Horton in the SOTU.
  • OMG. He's pulling a second... Third... How many Willie Hortons can one bring into one speech? We get it: you hate brown people. Move on.
  • What's this weird shoulder thing he's doing?
  • 187 Federal judges. Remember that. 187. About a quarter of them.
  • Wow. That was an epic take-down of the Establishment Clause.
  • Emotional frisson right now: watching SOTU with closed captions and Agami's sound system is playing "Shake It Off."
  • WTF "our warfighters?"
  • Wow. You brought SFC Williams home from a deployment so you could turn the SOTU into a reality-television special. Of course you did.
  • "The beautiful, beautiful, Alamo." There's no basement in the President's knowledge!

At this point, two martinis in, I stopped posting. At least I didn't start sobbing.

More ridiculousness in the world

Did someone get trapped in a closed time loop on Sunday? Did I? Because this week just brought all kinds of insanity:

Well, one of those is good news...