Time To Kill

So, I'm sitting here in the Frankfurt airport.  Ahh, the joy of International Air travel.....

Ramstein Air Base is about 90 minutes from Frankfurt.  There is a military shuttle bus that departs the base at 0600.  Because it's free, I take it regardless of my flight time, which happens to be 1245 today.

Customs and security are much easier and quicker than the States, so you tend to get to your gate faster than in the USA.  So, I have about three hours to kill (but only about 20 more minutes of free wi-fi!).

Kelley, Mikey and I took a six-day trip to Rome and got back to Germany on Monday.  I'll get some photos up by Saturday.  All-in-all, it was a great trip.  Not very beer-centric, unfortunately, though the ones I tried were pretty good.  Rome is very expensive, however--even more so than Germany.  With the current exchange rate, it's easy to drop at least $60 for a light lunch and well over $100 for dinner.  More on that later.

I wasn't able to make it to the Bischoff brewery this time around.  It's only been about 20 days since I was last in the states.  Six of those were spent being Mr. Mom while my wife was in Turkey.  Six more were spent in Rome.  The remaining eight days just didn't work out schedule-wise, so I'll keep my fingers crossed for early April, when I get back to Germany.

I received a surprisingly high level of response for the "Brewmaster's Reserve" Series about which I previously wrote.  That said, it WILL happen.  I just have to work out the logistics.  I plan on opening the first one up to twenty people, on a first-come, first-served basis.  From there, I will adjust the level up or down, depending on what seems to work best.  I am also toying with the idea of a separate Ladies Only series.  I got this idea from a recent article in "Zymurgy" Magazine about women and the craft beer scene.  Our meetings will be dominated by men, and I fear that women may get marginalized a bit.  Anyway, I'll float that out there and see if the ladies would prefer a "room of their own", so to speak.

Well, I'm almost out of wi-fi time, so I'll cut this short.  See you tomorrow at the Brewery!