Well HELLO there!!!  What a week, or maybe more...

The new restaurant is open. The test services went well, the opening went better than expected. Its been ugly at times...like throw yourself off a friggin bridge ugly through some of the lunch services, and most of the staff is solid, some are not...but that'll all work itself out i the next couple weeks, the criticism backlash has not begun yet, WIN!  Overall I'm liking the store, I'm digging the crew and I'm feeling pretty positive. Not to say we havent had some hurdles throughout the week.....like a manager going MIA, having to replace 3 others on the fly, a huge event or 2 coming up in 3 weeks at another store. Oiy. What doesnt kill you makes you stronger.....right?!? Lets hope so anyway...

But I did not come here to talk about work...I came here because something Mister said to me the other night and the way he said has been lingering in my melon...so I wanna let it out.

Since leaving The Wizard Mister has been holding down a bar/serving gig he really doesnt particularly care for, but its money.  The idea was for him to do that while he found something else.  He kind of stumbled upon an upstart opportunity as a brewer that on the surface looked promising and intriguing.  Long story short I dont believe it is. And we have gone back & forth about it a few times, I still just see FAIL written all over this thing. His argument is that its experience. Mine is experience at what cost if you & your name are tied to a failure. They want to put him under contract and the terms were just absurd, they have not at this point been able to show him any kind of sales forecasts or estimated revenues and I just generally believe the people doing this are completely in over their head and not in a way that will end in anything positive.  I generally have a pretty good gut about these kinds of things too. But regardless we were talking about this some more because another opportunity came up back in good ol restaurant management and we were adding that option and blah blah blah we came back around to what WE want to be when we grow up....

We and another friend of ours want to open a brewpub. Adding this friend into the mix makes the 3 of us pretty much a brewpub all-star team if I do say so myself. With Mister brewing, me cooking and B running the bar...its the perfect combo, proven at that. And we may have someone interested in financing us as well.  Very preliminary, very very, but we have to start somewhere, right? But the potential for this chance over shadows this FAIL brewery idea. At least to me it does anyway...

Which brought us around to the "experience" aspect of this whole dilemma...my suggestion was to tell them he would test batch their beers at $XXX per batch, outline exactly what they would be getting for their money, when he got the beer as they wanted it he would finalize the recipe and sell it to the for $XXXX or something to that effect. I'm NOT saying to completely ditch them, I AM saying do not hop into bed with them...just make out with them in the parking lot. His counter was blah blah blah commercial brewing experience- but its being contract brewed elsewhere, so I fail to see the relevance of that argument. Then I think I really heard him for the first time. In not so many words what he was basically saying was he was intimidated by the idea of working with beer on such a huge scale.  Like not the product, the equipment. 

So wait...he can make fantabulous beers 5 gallons at a time. And the process doesnt change with the increase in volume...like the principals stay the same, its just a matter of having to do some different things with different equipment but all of this equipment comes with bazillions of manuals and shit like that. So I didnt understand the problem, this, to me, seems a minor inconvenience, but far from an insurmountable one. Pretty minor actually.  So I broke it down a little different...I know how to make a gallon of marinara, which in turn means I can make 5 gallons of marinara pretty easily, which also means I can make 5000 gallons of it given a large enough pot and the ability to figure out how to get it hot and cool it all down. And he looks at me and says I'm an asshole.

I'm an asshole? Why am I an asshole? I'm just pointing out that as intelligent human beings it cant be all that difficult to learn what is necessary to large scale produce beer. No harder than me learning how to use full scale production equipment at my production kitchen...I had no clue what half that shit was or how to use it, now I do because I learned.  With this incredulous look on his face he calls me an asshole again, laughing mind you, and then says something to the effect of "is there anything you think you cant do?!?!? If someone said Mindy build a fucking rocket youd just build a fucking rocket and I have no doubt youd make that fucker fly one way or another!" and I was all like well, yeah?!? I still didnt get it until he said something about my confidence and how if I want to do something I just do it and keep doing it until I figure it out and get good at it, and then I was all like aaaaaaahhhh *DING*. So to me what seemed a minor inconvenience but not really an issue was apparently a larger hurdle for him, and to hear it somewhat trivialized like that was helpful to him...I think, I hope.

I cant even imagine the awesome that would be our bar. I really cant. And that makes it even better. Of course there are a bazillion things to talk about & figure out but none of them insurmountable, all of it important and every bit of it exciting.  But this is the idea that feels right, so we shall see where it goes...it would be my effing dream job!!  And I think the bit of perspective I lent to Mister also helped him realize that he's just as capable as me and can learn how to do what he needs to to have his dream job...win win win! Now if only I had a magic damn wand to bibbity bobbety boo us to when its all real life & not a cloudy mass of undefined ideas.

Moral of the story - sometimes even a HUSBAND can say something brilliant....when more drunk than sober....and when horribly annoyed with his persistent wife ;-)