We’re so used to seeing top ten lists of the ten best of whatever that a list of the worst always seems like a fresh look. Joey Redner, who writes for the Tampa Bay Times, in a recent column listed his choices for the world’s worst beers. Like any such list, it will never find universal agreement, but that’s okay. There are a number of truly horrible beer on his list. I’m not sure it’s fair to include a non-alcoholic beer — which he awards the top spot — as without the alcohol I’m not sure it actually qualifies as beer.

Here’s his list.

1. Busch NA
2. Camo Genuine Ale
3. Chapeau Exotic
4. Hurricane High Gravity Lager
5. Bootie U95
6. Winter Park Beer
7. Cave Creek Chili Beer
8. Sleeman Clear Lager
9. Milwaukee’s Best
10. Coors Aspen Edge

Frankly, I’d put Corona and Heineken on the list for sheer popularity vs. lack of taste (not to mention being frequently lightstruck). And I suppose the entire exercise begs the question as to whether bad and bland are one and the same or distinctively different enough. Should the merely bland and inoffensive be considered bad or must a beer be particularly and specifically ill-conceived, badly executed or so obviously lacking in graces to be considered one of the worst?

Today is the 58th birthday of Daniel Bradford. Daniel is the publisher of All About Beer magazine. He’s been involved in the beer world for many a year, from the early days of GABF to the Brewers Association of America, which recently merged with the Association of Brewers to become the Brewers Association. Join me in wishing Daniel a happy birthday.

Daniel Bradford at the far left, with Amy Dalton in between Jim Koch and Rick Lyke, at a Boston Beer Brunch during GABF a few years ago.

Daniel with Julie Johnson Bradford with Amy Dalton at last year’s Craft Brewers Conference in Austin, Texas.

Today is the 29+11th birthday of Amy Dalton. Amy is the Advertising Manager for All About Beer magazine. As evidenced by the fact that none of the photos below feature Amy alone, she’s a consummate people person. A veteran of the newspaper industry, she’s been selling ads to the beer world now for several years and, hopefully, has grown to appreciate the quirks and oddities of most of us in the beer community. Join me in wishing Amy a very happy birthday.

At the reception before the World Cup Gala Awards Dinner, with Tomme Arthur, a few nights ago at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference.

Amy in between Jim Koch and Rick Lyke, along with Daniel Bradford at the far left, at a Boston Beer Brunch during GABF a few years ago.

All About Beer publishers Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson Bradford with Amy at last year’s Craft Brewers Conference in Austin, Texas.

In a story related to the news that craft beer growth was up 12% last year over the previous year, the southeast region of the country — including the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina — showed sales growth of almost 32%, the highest percentage in the nation. The sales figures used are from five types of retail locations: grocery stores, drug stores, convenience stores, big box retailers (warehouse stores, club stores, etc.), and liquor stores. The data was complied by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) for a presentation to the Brewers Association last week.

Another interesting tidbit: seasonal beers are now the best-selling segment of beer, having eclipsed that of Pale Ale, which previously held the top spot.

Here are the geographic areas listed by their growth rate:

1. Southeast = 31.6%
2. Great Lakes = 28.1%
3. Mid-South = 25.6%
4. Plains = 20.8%
5. Northeast = 19.1%
6. South Central = 16.5%
7. California = 13.7%
8. West = 7.2%

 
Some additional observations.

1. Notice that there are seven states where beer cannot be purchased at grocery stores and the like.

2. What happened to Hawaii and Alaska?

3. Three of the regions showed growth of more than 25%

4. Only one region, the West (excluding California) was below 10% which suggests that craft beer is growing virtually everywhere and is not limited to small pockets of the country.

I got an interesting sounding recipe in a press release today from Houston’s Saint Arnold Brewery. The recipe is for an appetizer called Fried Beer. Now, if you know me, you already know I’ll eat anything fried. There isn’t anything fried that isn’t improved by the process, at least in my opinion. My favorite sandwich is a Monte Cristo; a ham, turkey and cheese sandwich that’s battered and deep-fried. Yum. So this recipe has my name written all over it.

From the press release:

Saint Arnold Brewing Company may not be advertising in this weekend’s Big Game, but it is hoping to win the battle for buzz with an out-of-the-bottle innovation: Saint Arnold Fried Beer. Saint Arnold Brewing Company is the oldest craft brewery in Texas.

Developed by Houstonian Matt Schlabach and his team, the Carnies, Saint Arnold Fried Beer was the winning recipe in Saint Arnold’s One Pot Showdown this past weekend. Made with Saint Arnold Winter Stout, Saint Arnold Fried Beer is a delicious finger food that would make a great addition to any Super Party. Second place went to the Guzzlin’ Gourmets for their “Amberized Green Chili,” with the Backyard Militia’s “Brown Ale Pumpkin Soup,” taking third.

“Saint Arnold is proud to contribute to the growing understanding that beer is a great complement to food and can be a terrific ingredient as well,” said Brock Wagner, founder of Saint Arnold Brewing. “We may not have a Texas team to cheer for this year, but we sure can show our friends in New York and New England how to throw a great party.”

A total of 30 teams participated in the first annual cooking contest. Every recipe had to include Saint Arnold beer as an ingredient and each had to be cooked in a single pot in the Saint Arnold parking lot. The event raised $1,800 for Meals on Wheels.

The recipe is listed below:

Saint Arnold Fried Beer

Recipe by the Carnies, winners of the First Annual Saint Arnold One Pot Showdown.

Ingredients

• 2 Sticks of Butter
• 1 Cup White Sugar
• ¼ Cup Pale Malt Syrup
• ¼ Cup St. Arnold’s Winter Stout
• 1 Egg
• 1 Tsp. Vanilla
• 2 Cups Flour (+ additional for rolling)
• 1 Tsp. Salt
• 1 Tsp. Cinnamon
• ¼ Tsp. Nutmeg
• ½ Tsp Baking Soda
• ½ Tsp. Baking Powder
• 1-1/2 Cups Oats
• ¾ Cup Chocolate Chips & Butterscotch Chips (Any Ratio of the two totaling ¾ cup, i.e. 3/8 cup each)

 

To make the dough

1. Begin by creaming the sugar and butter together with a mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy.
2. Turn off the mixer and then add in the malt syrup, stout, egg, and vanilla. Mix until incorporated.
3. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda and baking powder.
4. While the mixer is going, alternate adding the flour and oats to the butter/sugar mixture and mix until everything is incorporated.
5. On low speed or by hand, mix in the chips until thoroughly incorporated.
6. Chill cookie in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

To make the batter

1. With a fork or whisk, mix all the dry ingredients until thoroughly incorporated.
2. Add the beer and beaten egg and mix until no large lumps appear. The mixture will have some pea-sized lumps in it but should have nothing bigger.
3. Adjust the amount of beer as necessary to achieve a consistency of thin pudding or pancake batter.
4. Allow batter to sit for 10 minutes before using.

Putting it all together

1. Take chilled cookie dough and form into a disc a little less than 2 inches in diameter and about ½ an inch thick.
2. Roll in flour until completely covered and dust off the excess.
3. Dip discs into beer batter and cover completely. Remove with a fork or slotted spoon to drain the excess batter. Be sure that the dough is completely covered by batter.
4. Fry in 375˚ F peanut or canola oil for 3 minutes or until golden brown and delicious.

Saint Arnold’s owner, Brock Wagner, in he tasting area of his Houston brewery. My family made the trek there after the Craft Brewers Conference in Austin last year.

To continue the impromptu beer label theme to today’s posts, here are the mock-ups for new labels for five of Boscos regular beers, which I got last week along with the new brewery pictures my friend Chuck sent me. I think they’re pretty cool looking. I like the simple retro look to them. They remind me of vintage travel posters from the 1920-30s. What do you think?

Apparently, there won’t be any Southern Baptists attending the Highland Vineyard Church of Louisville, Kentucky any time soon, as we’ve recently learned that some of them are literally afraid of beer. That’s because Highland Vineyard’s pastor, Robert Pitman, has been holding “Sunday Nights on Tap” services, which are held at Flanagan’s Ale House, a local Irish-style pub with a great beer selection and pub food.

As Pastor Pitman tells it, in a recent Louisville Courier-Journal article:

“I think there’s a lot of people that want to get close to God, but they don’t connect with the church today,” said Robert Pitman, Highland Vineyard’s lead pastor. “Maybe they either just have never been or they’ve been and had bad experiences, but it just doesn’t seem to connect with them.”

Last Sunday the church held the second of its Sunday Nights on Tap at Flanagan’s. Like the first, it drew about 35-40 people ranging in age from early 20s to late 50s. The events start out with live music — some original, some covers — followed by a message from Pitman and time to hang out and socialize.

For now, the church will be holding these beer bar revivals only once a month, but if successful, who knows? It’s nice to see not every religion is against beer. I certainly know plenty of religious beer-drinkers, but a church that embraces it and even makes it a part of their worship? Now that warms the soul like a good barleywine-style ale.

Boscos, the small brewpub chain with locations in Tennessee and Arkansas, has completed work on their new production brewery in Memphis. The first batch of beer was brewed December 31 of last year by my friend Chuck Skypeck, who also sent along a few photos of the new facility. If you’re like me, you can’t get enough pictures of brewing equipment.

The outside of Boscos new production brewery, where the headquarters were moved about a year ago. The building itself is curved to follow the distinctive path of the road in a part of Memphis south of downtown currently going through a resurgence. It used to be a meat packaging plant with some elements they needed already in place and the rest they remodeled, keeping a number of the retro industrial architectural elements intact, like green tiled walls and chrome swinging doors.

Head brewer Mike Campbell, formerly with Tractor Brewing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who’s been on hand to help build the brewery since the beginning.

The production brewery will be used primarily for off-premise sales of growlers and kegs, which is not permitted from their brewpubs under Tennessee law, and also to provide beer for additional Boscos that will not have their own breweries. The first of these, in Cool Springs, Tennessee (south of Nashville), is slated to open this spring. They’ll also begin distributing their beer to a select number of area restaurants.

If you’re a beer lover, I imagine Mississippi must not be the best place to live. During the last thirty years, while most of the rest of the country was discovering craft beer with wild abandon, less than a half-dozen microbreweries or brewpubs have opened. Of those, only two are left. And one of those, Kershenstine Diamond, is a contract brewery that makes their beer elsewhere in the Midwest. So that leaves just one brewery currently brewing in the entire state.

That brewery, Lazy Magnolia, is located in Kiln, Mississippi, which perhaps more famous as the hometown of Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. They have also recently become the first brewery in the state to produce bottled beer with the release of their Southern Pecan, a nut brown ale, in six-packs. In fact, it’s the first time since Prohibition that bottled beer has been brewed and bottled in Mississippi. From an article in a local newspaper, the Clarion Ledger: There’s just one issue. “They’re having problems keeping up with demand. They’ve got people really wanting the product,” distributor Frank Drennan of Capital City Beverages said. “On the bottling, they’re in the learning process. They’re trying to make sure they’re doing it correctly.” Lazy Magnolia brewmaster and co-founder Leslie Henderson said bigger fermentation tanks will arrive in April. They will triple the brewery’s output to more than 30,000 gallons a month. By mid year, she hopes to be bottling 5,000 cases a month, up from about 700 now. “We knew all along if we were successful, we would have to bottle. We decided to do draft only at first to see if there was a market. By the time we started bottling, the demand for it was so crazy we could not keep up,” Henderson, a chemical engineer from the Winston County area, said.

The brewery sits alongside the airport runway in Kiln, a Hurricane Katrina-ravaged town of 2,000 on the Gulf Coast. The company’s warehouse building is nondescript to the point of invisibility, the kind of place you pass three times before realizing it’s occupied.

But two of the beers crafted there took podium finishes at the 2006 Beer World Cup. Lazy Magnolia’s brands hold cult status with shaggy young men and middle-aged lawyers in dim roadside bars throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Henderson plans to expand to Tennessee and south Louisiana this year.

I’m sure it will be some time before we see this beer in California, but I certainly applaud their efforts in being a pioneer in their own state. Well done.

The only explanation I can come up with for this is that Baptists must live in some kind of parallel universe. According to today’s Baptist Press, Baptists in Texas, and presumably everywhere else, are mobilizing their forces to protest a grave new threat to their youth. What horror could possibly be the cause of this dire situation that threatens not only their very way of life, but the very lives of their children? Apparently the theme park in Arlington, near Dallas/Fort Worth, Six Flags Over Texas, has applied for — gasp — a liquor license in order to sell beer at certain locations in the park.

Now I don’t want to make light of someone else’s cherished beliefs, but listen to what the Baptist Press is reporting:

“Do we really want to send our youth groups — our church youth groups — to places where alcohol is served?” local Christian leader Linda Rosebury asked in an interview with KCBI-FM, the radio station of Criswell College in Dallas.

Do you mean the world? Because the last time I checked alcohol could pretty much be found anywhere you look. Have they heretofore been living in some Utopian fantasyland where there is no alcohol, like Iran? Can they really be saying anywhere that alcohol might be found is a dangerous place? Yes, apparently.

The sale of beer, Rosebury said, threatens the park’s image as a safe place for families.

So the real world, where beer is sold each and every day, is unsafe? If so, why are those families still there? Do people really walk around, see some heathen drinking a beer, and decide that it’s no longer a safe place? I’m pretty sure that you could live right next door to someone who drinks and still feel perfectly safe. In fact, my own next-door neighbor no longer drinks, and I believe he doesn’t feel that I’m a threat by virtue of my proximity to him in any way, shape or form.

You can even get a beer at Disneyland, and if they can pull it off and maintain their annoyingly hypocritical squeaky clean image, why not Six Flags? Perhaps Disneyland is not part of the Baptist parallel world?

I realize I’m probably being insensitive, but I can’t help myself. I find this sort of nonsense so patently ridiculous that I can’t really take it seriously. If you don’t want your child to even “see” a beer, don’t let him go to Six Flags, make him a shut-in. Shield him from every imagined horror you perceive out there in the world. I’m sure he’ll turn into a terrific young man or woman, with no problems whatsoever. I would personally never abuse my own kids in that way, but I’m not about to tell you how to raise your children.

As of January 8, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) has gotten 600 phonecalls and twelve letters of protest regarding Six Flags ability to sell beer to adults. On February 17, state officials will decide whether or not to hold a public hearing on their application and the Baptist Church is trying to get enough of its members to complain so that they’ll have the hearing.

Some of the current complainers are urging the TABC to “conduct an alcohol impact study to determine the threat to public safety.” Isn’t beer sold enough other places in the universe, including many other theme parks, that we can figure out with reasonable certainty what the impact would be? It would be zero, of course.

The people from Six Flags, naturally, have “pledged that such sales would be handled responsibly and would safeguard guest safety,” just like every other public place that serves such legal beverages as beer. In their own defense, Six Flags also offered the following.

Noting the park’s pledge to offer quality guest services, John Bement, Six Flags in-park services senior vice president, told the Southern Baptist TEXAN, “For quite some time, many of our guests have requested beer as an option while dining or visiting the park. In fact, several of the parks in the Six Flags system already provide such amenities and have done so successfully and responsibly for many years.”

How utterly reasonable. I’m sure that will mollify the faithful. Hardly, an attorney from the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention spells out exactly how to lodge a protest, and even offers some helpful legal arguments that one can use in their complaint.

Heaven forbid anyone with a different view of the world might want to go to Six Flags. Apparently this is their world, the rest of us just drink in it.

I confess at the outset that this story has nothing to do with beer, but is about bourbon … sort of. But it is also about the assault on alcohol — and to some extent civil liberty — a subject I find myself writing about more and more these days, so that’s why I decided to write this. I certainly didn’t set out to make the neo-prohibitionists my cause célèbre, but I find that few things get me as worked up and angry than people whose sole mission appears to be telling the rest of us how to live. I guess that makes me an anti-control freak, or something.

At any rate, the story involved a St. Petersburg, Florida man named Evan Preston who local authorities have dubbed the “Woodstock Santa.” He’s been given this epithet by local authorities, and especially city council member Bill Foster, who hopes to stop Preston from giving gifts to the homeless. Now lest I paint Foster as a complete Scrooge, he’s apparently okay with giving them blankets or a warm bowl of soup. What he doesn’t like is that Foster gives the homeless what they really want: booze. The eccentric Evan Preston (at left in the long gray beard), age 72, owns a well-known jewelry and art store and has in the past helped the local community raise money for a variety of causes by donating artwork.

He’s apparently helped his town’s Make-A-Wish Foundation and also nearby Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue. Four years ago, he decided he wanted to do something for St. Petersburg’s growing homeless population that congregate around the downtown Williams Park, near his business. So for a few years now, he and several friends and colleagues pass out 100 bottles of bourbon and cigars to the homeless.

Here, let’s pick up the story from Tampa’s Creative Loafing website:

“At first, I thought it would be interesting to give out a six-pack and a cigar,” he says over a glass of homemade sangria in his kitchen. “When I saw the excitement in their faces, it was inspirational.”

After a few outings to various homeless enclaves around the city, he says, St. Pete’s homeless began to recognize him. When he pulled up in his Bentley, they would run at him, jump on the car and hug him tightly.

Preston became the homeless’ Santa Claus, a 6-foot-2 bearded Samaritan in a T-shirt and jeans who gave all the good street men and women what they really wanted for Christmas.

“Last time, a man came up and said, ‘Thank you, this is so much better than a warm blanket,’” he recalls. “It’s shocking how much everybody loves it.”

“There is no motive to what we do,” he says. “It’s a gesture of goodwill.”

Well, you just know something like that will not be permitted for very long, not without somebody trying to put a stop to it. And right on cue, Foster is appalled that someone might give alcohol to alcoholics. Part of his reasoning is that alcohol is what put them on the street in the first place. While that may be true in some cases, he really doesn’t know that with any certainty whatsoever. But the idea that not giving a homeless person that alcohol is somehow going to cure them or make their life any better seems ridiculous at best, and uncharitable and obnoxiously self-righteous at worst.

Apparently there’s already a local ordinance in force that prohibits passing out alcohol in public parks — which seems weird enough, why would that be a problem? — but the code does not apply to city streets or right of ways, a loophole that Foster is trying to close. He’s sent a memo to the mayor and other city council members urging them to make it illegal to hand out alcohol in essentially any public space. If you want to give your neighbor a bottle of wine this Christmas, you better be careful not to hand it to him on the sidewalk. Stay on your own property if you don’t want to break the law. Apparently it doesn’t matter that alcohol is legal for adults and giving gifts is likewise not a crime, but don’t put those two things together in Florida. Yeah, that seems reasonable.

In the memo Foster claims “Mr. Preston is an affront to every business owner and resident of the downtown area, and should not be a welcomed figure in St. Petersburg.” An affront? An affront is a “deliberate act or display of disrespect,” an “intentional slight.” I don’t know who Bill Foster thinks he is, but he obviously believes people should be bowing and scraping to his delusions of grandeur. Can he really have convinced himself that Preston is giving the homeless booze to personally offend him? This is a difference of opinion at best. I don’t see how it’s the business of government to regulate where citizens can commit a legal act like gift-giving? Foster may not like what Preston’s doing but in a free society that should be the end of it. But Bill Foster apparently believes a free society is only one where people do what he likes, and apparently he’s not even the only nut job on the city council.

“Is that really the best gift you can give somebody sleeping outside—bourbon?” said Rene Flowers. “I don’t know what a bottle of bourbon goes for these days, but I’m sure that would buy some soap, a small washrag, maybe a comb, some coffee, maybe a nice, hot meal.”

Where exactly would a homeless person use a washrag and soap exactly since they probably don’t have a bathtub for them to use there in Williams Park? And while a nice dinner does sound good, why does Flowers think that private citizens have to confine their charity to what she thinks is appropriate? For all their posturing, the homeless problem itself is never addressed by the city council, only that a private citizen shouldn’t be allowed to give them a little comfort from time to time at his own expense. It really doesn’t matter if you or anyone else thinks giving alcohol to a homeless person is a bad idea, in a free society any private citizen is and ought to be allowed to choose both the scope and nature of his charity. They should be applauding the fact that’s he’s doing something, anything. But from the response of the city council, they don’t seem overly concerned about the homeless people themselves. The very fact that there is such a homeless problem in this medium-sized town (the population is just under 250,000) suggests that whatever the city council is doing, if anything, it has not alleviated the situation or the conditions that caused these people to become homeless in the first place. Maybe it’s the guilt over their own failures that makes them lash out over someone merely trying to provide a little solace and comfort to someone whose life is, I can only assume, complicated and difficult, to say the least. But please, let’s stop attacking alcohol already, shall we? I’d like to get back to talking about beer again, thank you very much.

If you want to hear more about this, a local Tampa television, Tampa Bay 10, station did a report that’s online. Also, a Los Angeles radio station recently did an interview with Evander Preston which you can listen to online.
 

One of my favorite things about the internet, is how cyclical and serpentine it can be. You can start out somewhere and if you follow enough tangents — something I can’t frankly help — you end up in new and wonderful places or, at a minimum, at a place you either didn’t expect to find or didn’t know was out there. I find a lot of the things I write about by happy accident. One thing leads to another and before I know it I’ve stumbled yet again on something I think worth writing about myself. A good example of this is some new laws in North Carolina that took effect December 1. I learned of these new laws through a blog, The Agitator, which I found at another blog, Coffee and Diapers, which is a parenting blog that picked up on my earlier post about Mothers For Social Drinking (which I also originally found by accident).

At any rate, the original story came from a television station in the Raleigh-Durham area, WRAL Channel 5, which is a place I actually lived for several years. I used to be, in the early 1980s, a record buyer for a large chain of stores headquartered in Durham, North Carolina and lived in both Durham and later Chapel Hill. Having grown up in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania, being in the south was a real eye-opener, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, some forty new state laws went into effect at the beginning of December and their story addressed a few of them. They started out with the alcohol-related ones for whatever reason and there’s a couple of doozies. The first one that caught my attention I’m not really against per se, but I think it’s illustrative of how oddly people think about alcohol. From the WRAL story:

One law bans devices known as “alcohol inhalers,” which convert liquor into a mist that can be inhaled by the user. Lawmakers were concerned that the devices, which were assembled and distributed by a Greensboro company, were being marketed to underage drinkers.

Okay, to be clear, I think this sounds like a bad idea and it goes against my personal philosophies on the moderate enjoyment of alcohol and also because I’ve never been a fan of anything that has to enter my body through my nose. I knew plenty of people in the 1980s who disagreed with my personal nasal entry ban (my rhinoprohibition), but I never begrudged them their day in the snow. So okay, somebody figured out a way to snort alcohol. I wouldn’t do it myself, and I can’t understand why anyone else would want to either. But here’s what I really don’t get. “Lawmakers were concerned (my emphasis) that the devices were being marketed to underage drinkers.” Huh? So they decided that an ostensibly legal product should be made illegal precisely because minors might try to buy it. Let me put that another way. As an adult, I can no longer buy a (previously) legal product because law enforcement cannot effectively keep people (minors in this case) from illegally obtaining it. So effectively because they can’t stop underage use of this product, they’re willing to take away every adult’s right to buy it. Please tell me how that makes any sense whatsoever? That is about as ridiculous a justification for making something illegal as I’ve ever heard. Fast food is marketed to kids and demonstrably terrible for their health, yet I don’t see these same lawmakers rushing to ban Big Macs, Whoppers or happy meals. Soda is even worse, yet schools allow soft drink companies to put soda vending machines in schools. Apparently, that’s okay too. I guess it’s okay for our kids to be fat and toothless but heaven forbid they might even consider snorting a mist of alcohol despite the fact that it’s already against the law for them to do so. Just the possibility of that — there do not appear to be any actual facts of underage use — makes them locate their spines to “protect the children” and take one more step toward making their state fit only for children. How noble. How absurd.

But the one that got The Agitator worked up — and I can certainly see why — is this one:

Also, as of Saturday, people can lose their driver’s licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.

Lloyd said that’s not excessive.

“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” he said. “Breaking the law is breaking the law.”

As Radley Balko at the Agitator put it:

I know what you’re thinking. Surely authorities would never barge into someone’s home and arrest them for allowing their 18, 19, or 20-year-old son or daughter to have a beer, right?

Well, you’d think. But then, if you’d told me police might come to the home of a minor’s parents at 4 am, wake the entire family, then give the girl a breath test to see if she had been drinking at a party held hours earlier, I’d have been dubious, too.

But it’s happened. Never underestimate the absurd lengths to which the zero tolerance crowd will go to keep your kid stone-cold sober.

The link above is to an ALCU story from Michigan where apparently they’re the only state — for now, at least —where it’s “illegal for young adults and minors who are not driving to refuse a breathalyzer test when the police do not have a search warrant. Those who refuse to take tests in Michigan are guilty of a civil infraction and must pay a $100 fine.” under Mich. Comp. Laws § 436.1703(6).

And there was at least one instance that you can just see being repeated both there and in North Carolina, as well.

Ashley Berden was 18 years old when she attended a party at a friend’s house to celebrate her graduation from Swan Valley High School. After she left the party, Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had forgotten. They then came to Berden’s house at 4:00 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test. The police did not have a warrant but they informed her that would be violating the law if she refused the test. The test registered a .00% blood-alcohol level, indicating that Berden had not been drinking.

Pretty scary stuff. Especially when you consider that in societies where parents are allowed to raise their own children as they see fit, there is a much lower incidence of abuse later in life. But this new North Carolina law will make any parent who gives their own son or daughter even a taste of beer or wine to educate them a criminal. In effect, the state of North Carolina has decreed they can do a better job of raising your children than you can. Naturally, the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving sees the world in stark black and white whereas the rest of us can see all the shades of gray that parenting really entails. Because it seems to me that they really believe they can do a better job of raising my child than I can. They seem to have all the answers and really believe they know best. In their world an adult is no longer an adult but must live in a world where anything unsafe for children is no longer allowed for adults, either. In their world, a parent has little or no control over how and what they can teach their children about the world. That’s what zero-tolerance really means. It means tolerating only one way of life over all others. That’s as scary a world as I can imagine, a world that is the very opposite of free.