House of Guinness - Netflix Series

House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It's 1868 in Dublin Ireland and Guinness is a thriving operation brewing zillions of gallons of beer, putting it in barrels and shipping it all over Ireland and England. The old man dies and his kids have to pick up the slack. Only one of them has the will and ability to do so, the others are variations of flaky rich kids. Most of the show is about the contortions they go through to maintain their façade of 'respectability' in Victorian high society. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized they were just playing the Victorian version of political correctness. Now, thanks to the internet, everyone can play. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.

The show has all the regular drama you might expect from a Netflix show about rich Victorians along with some fabulous sets. Talk about the divide between the rich and the poor, the Victorians had it in spades. It also has some bits of history and if you look a little deeper, trains.

Ireland has just endured a famine, and there are hard feelings about that.

Guinness Trademark

The Trinity College harp, also known as "Brian Boru's harp", is a medieval musical instrument on display in the long room at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. It is an early Irish harp or wire-strung cláirseach. It is dated to the 14th or 15th century and, along with the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp, is the oldest of three surviving medieval harps from the region. The harp was used as a model for the coat of arms of Ireland and for the trade-mark of Guinness stout. - Wikipedia

Brian Boru (c. 941 – 1014) was the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. - Wikipedia

The Train within a Train & the Railway Built for Beer - Guinness Brewery Railways
Train of Thought

Somewhere around the late 19th century the brewery was expanded to 50 acres and a narrow gauge railway was laid down to serve the plant.

Guinness Brewery, Dublin. William Spence
Model Trains & Planes Channel Steam Trains too

The business about having a carriage that allowed the narrow-gauge engine to run on standard width tracks might be unique. Someone thought it was worth building a live steam model.

Miller Lite, Coors Light & Blue Moon Big Game Commercial | The High Stak...

Miller Lite, Coors Light & Blue Moon Big Game Commercial | The High Stakes Beer Ad (Extended)
Miller Lite

Saw this ad while I was watching the Portland Trail Blazers beat the snot out of the Houston Rockets last night. Thought it was pretty entertaining. Damian Lillard scored 71 points, which is more than half of what his team scored. It is a new personal record for him.

Bottles or Cans?

Coors Beer Bottles & Cans

I've been drinking beer this summer. You can get it in cans or bottles, though you don't always get a choice. Sometimes the store only has your favorite brand in one or the other so unless you are persnickety and are willing to travel to another store, you take what they have.

But which one is better? Cans are lighter, they chill faster, and are more likely to be recycled. Sure bottles can be dumped in the recycling bin, but do they actually get recycled? Last I heard the recycling folks had accumulated a big pile of glass but nobody wanted it, so they eventually gave up and sent it to the landfill. 

Aluminum has a higher intrinsic value than glass so even in states that don't have bottle deposit laws, you seldom see cans by the side of the road. Scrappers are out there picking them up and hauling them to the scrap metal dealers to get cash money they can use to buy more beer.

The lighter weight of cans means the delivery trucks can be a little more efficient so they burn less fuel for the amount of beer they deliver, though I suspect the amount of fuel saved only makes a difference when aggregated over a nationwide fleet of trucks.

Bottles are easier to drain. To get the last little sip of beer out of a can you have to tilt your head back so far you are in danger of falling over backwards. I don't have that problem with bottles.

I could pour the beer out of the can into a glass, but now I have to wash the glass. I have a dishwashing machine (the term dishwasher is ambiguous. Is it a person or a machine?) so that is not an onerous task, but it does use energy to run the machine and heat the water. It is a new fangled machine that takes like three hours to wash a load of dishes, but it is supposed to be energy efficient.

Glass containers, bottle or glass, hold more heat (or cold) than aluminum does, so the beer doesn't warm up as fast, but that's not really a problem for me because I finish that first beer in a matter of minutes and the second one doesn't take much longer. After that, well, you need to factor in things like ambient air temperature, relative humidity and how entertaining or tedious your fellows are.

Being as I am lazy, I prefer bottles. No washing glasses, no straining my neck, no fooling with beer koozzies, no chasing empty cans that the wind has blown off the table. Unless it's hurricane season but I don't drink outside when we get hurricane force winds.

Beer

We went by Hank's the other day and I noticed their beer display has gotten a little out of hand.

Click on the picture for to embiggen. This is just one side. I tried to fool Autostitch by cropping the edges of the photos so there would be more similar material along the edges of the photos. I was hoping I could get it to go around the end and show both sides of this island, but it did not work. "No matching pictures found" it says.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.