Bull & Bush offering tableside whole-hop infusions with any of its beers – Denver Restaurants and Dining – Cafe Society

This is a pretty cool concept I reckon! I’ve had single hop beers and fresh hop beers and beers that have gone through some type of randall hop infuser, but using a french press and being able to determine how much hop punch you get is pretty damned cool.

 

Bull & Bush offering tableside whole-hop infusions with any of its beers – Denver Restaurants and Dining – Cafe Society.

 

Till next time, keep the music turned up loud.

 

Luke

Chief Distortion Officer

Andy Gould – Band Manager, Wine Lover

I came across this great interview with my friend Andy Gould, manager of Rob Zombie and previously artists as diverse as Guns n Roses, Lionel Richie and Morrisey.

I met Andy earlier this year, he’s a good friend of Rick Sales (Slayer’s Manager). I invited Rick, Andy and some other friends of theirs to come to a special luncheon we had going at Rockford Wines. It was a great day, Andy is such a natural story teller, he had the rest of the guests at the lunch eating up his every word with stories of the music business. A few days later we were at the Soundwaves festival in Adelaide, watching Rob Zombie’s show and Andy grabbed my arm and said “Follow me.” We go out into the crowd and up into the front of house sound booth to watch the rest of the show, which is a great vantage point to watch a band. I really got to take in the whole Zombie performance and Rob puts on quite a spectacular show, with lighting, video and on-stage theatrics. The highlight for me though was later on Andy introduced me to Rob and John 5, great guys. We all ended up heading out to a strip club later that night, which made for a memorable evening indeed. Andy is a real wine lover, as you’ll hear in this interview and I hope to work with him in the future on a Zombie wine project.

Until next time, keep your horns raised!

Luke

Chief Distortion Officer

Ten thousand fists

Disturbed is a band I’ve been aware of for a long time, since they hit in the late 90’s really. I liked some of their songs and knew of their bigger hits but didn’t have any of their albums nor had I seen them live. I really didn’t know a great deal about them until in April I got an email from the touring company that was bringing them out to Australia requesting if they could come out to the winery and take a tour and try our wines. The guys from the touring company knew I was a big metal fan so they thought it would be cool for all concerned. Through several emails and phone calls with the band’s manager I met up with David Draiman and Dan Donegan, plus David’s fiancee and others for a lunch at a local restaurant and we then went on to the winery for tastings. David is real wine lover and also quite a foodie from what I could gather and the band obviously enjoyed seeing what the place they were touring in had to offer. The guys very kindly invited me to come to the show the next night and hang out, which I definitely said yes to.

I arrived at the arena a little earlier than the band, but was warmly welcomed by Jason their head of security who’d also come out to the winery the day before. I had full access to the arena and just hung out and watched the support bands. On a side note, the main support act was Trivium who I’ve been a big fan of since their Crusade album and I was really stoked to meet Corey and Mat and have a quick chat. Mat has a great food blog as well, it’s worth checking out.

Disturbed put on a great show, lots of pyro, lots of energy, the crowd was really into it and the band sounded great live. Here is a pretty good quality video from the show that also happens to be my favourite Disturbed song.

Afterwards I got to hang out with the guys in the dressing room area, drink some wine and hear some road stories. I’m not certain why but I had decided to bring along a couple of bottles of one of my home-brewed beers as well as some wine. Dan was particularly curious about it and even though it’s a good beer, one that I was pretty proud of, I was a little sheepish for him to try it. He polished off both bottles and loved it! The beer itself was a pretty simple English style summer ale, brewed with all Maris Otter malt and Kent Goldings hops and he kept giving it to everyone to try and told me several times how much he liked it. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks later I get a text message from Dan, saying he wants to get in touch and talk about doing something with the beer. He was so impressed by it that he is keen to work together on producing and releasing a beer sometime in the future. It still blows my mind to think about that, I’m this unknown guy from the Barossa Valley, not a professional brewer, but I guess I’m smart enough to say “Yeah, sure we can do that, it’ll be awesome!”. On reflection I guess my passion for it and my knowledge gained from the wine industry came across to Dan and to be quite honest he was the one guy of all the band that I felt an instant connection to. Sometimes you just meet people and you know that person will be a friend for life.

So, watch this space. I predict exciting and big things to come from this, hopefully in the not to distant future. If you have any suggestions or ideas for a beer that would best represent Disturbed or if you think you have the perfect name for the beer please let me know in the comment section.

Don’t mention Slayer on the first date

Getting a product to market is quite a difficult process really, everybody thinks that once you have made your new product that creating interest and then getting it to those people is easy. Throughout the creation process we have gone through with our Slayer wine, foremost in my mind was not branding or actually having the wine made, that to me was the easy part relatively speaking. The biggest challenge is in actually getting a wine made in Australia to Europe and the USA and then making that wine available so people will hopefully buy it. America is a great place, home to some of my favourite bands but they do make it rather difficult to distribute alcoholic beverages. Wine cannot be sold directly to consumers, there is the three tier system that is in place to allow for control of alcoholic beverage sales. Our business model is based on selling direct to the consumer, which in Australia is a straight forward process but requires a bit of outside the box thinking in the USA. Enter wine fulfilment companies. They allow wine producers and retailers to get their products to end consumers through mail order or online sales.

Just like on a first date where you don’t want your date to think your the guy in this video, I’ve discovered that mentiong the band on first contact produces some interesting results. Over the past few weeks I have been sending emails to several companies that seem to offer the services we require and I have had mixed results. I’ve been listening to metal for so long, going to shows and now that I’ve met a number of my metal heroes it is just “normal” to me. I sometimes forget that there is a good possibility that not everyone else thinks the same way and that some people may have a rather negative view toward this band and indeed heavy metal and rock music and its so called evil lyrics and imagery. I’m still surprised when people I know have never heard of Slayer, that it is so far outside their own experiences that they truly have no comprehension of what they are or represent. It should be no real suprise to me then that some companies will look at our project as crazy and want nothing to do with it, but I think the smart ones, the right ones will recognise the opportunity as we do. It is just another aspect of this whole journey that makes it fascinating and exciting.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks because hopefully I will have an new company logo to show everyone or at least a good prototype. i’ll be posting it and I encourage everyone to give their feedback and opinions. Till then, stay metal and horns up!

Luke

Chief Distortion Officer