Utah isn’t exactly the first place you think of when you talk about beer, but Epic Brewing is doing their best to change that. Hosted by the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, Epic brought out what might have been every beer they have available at the moment.

For me, the highlight was the Big Bad Baptist double stout. It was a big beer (close to 11 percent), but didn’t taste super boozy and had lots of chocolate and sweetness without being overbearing.  We also tried the Hopsolution IPA which was very heavy on the grapefruit side, but still a nice beer.

After the Beer Exchange, we went to Boatyard Brewing, another local Kalamazoo brewery.  They were doing a sort of 40’s prom theme kind of thing, but it came off more as a USO party. We tried a few of their beers, nothing really stood out as super impressive, and the whole vibe of the place seemed a little off.  The people running it were nice enough, but it just didn’t click…I could be convinced to go back, but I don’t think I would ever suggest it.

Kalamazoo Beer Week is a crazy festival that pretty much takes over the whole town to celebrate the wonderfulness of craft beer.

On Tuesday, we went to The Wine Loft and had a beer and cheese pairing with beer from Green Flash.  As expected, the West Coast IPA was the big winner, but the Double Stout paired with an espresso crusted cheese was hands down the best pairing. Afterwards, we walked over to Shakespeare’s for another pairing event, this time featuring Short’s beers and “mini sundaes”. I expected Soft Parade to be the favorite but the Key Lime Pie was surprisingly good, and not nearly as sweet as I expected. The Black Chai was disappointing, it got really muddled up in the finish in a very non appealing way.

On Thursday, I went to what is probably my favorite local brewery at the moment, Tibbs.  Tibbs was releasing their first sour beer, Experimental Sour #001. If there are 998 more of these planned, I’ll be happy to try them all. It hit a very nice balance between tart, sweet, and that little bit of funk that gets you to pay attention.

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In addition to the sour, they were also doing a beer called Espresso Yourself, which was essentially their G’Morning Coffee Stout (which is a super coffee forward beer already) run through a Randall filled with whole coffee beans from local coffee shop Something’s Brewing. We also met Chris and Tom, the brewers from One Well Brewing, a newer brewery out on Portage Road that looks pretty promising. Chris also happens to be a big boardgame nerd, so I can see myself going over there pretty regularly. We finished out the night at Bell’s, with the recently released, always impressive HopSlam.

An interesting collection of short stories, all centered around a common concept that there is a machine, and it can accurately predict the way you are going to die:

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.
The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

The realization that we could now know how we were going to die had changed the world: people became at once less fearful and more afraid. There’s no reason not to go skydiving if you know your sliver of paper says BURIED ALIVE. The realization that these predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise put a damper on things. It made the predictions more sinister –yes, if you were going to be buried alive you weren’t going to be electrocuted in the bathtub, but what if in skydiving you landed in a gravel pit? What if you were buried alive not in dirt but in something else? And would being caught in a collapsing building count as being buried alive? For every possibility the machine closed, it seemed to open several more, with varying degrees of plausibility.

By that time, of course, the machine had been reverse engineered and duplicated, its internal workings being rather simple to construct, given our example. And yes, we found out that its predictions weren’t as straightforward as they seemed upon initial discovery at about the same time as everyone else did. We tested it before announcing it to the world, but testing took time — too much, since we had to wait for people to die. After four years had gone by and three people died as the machine predicted, we shipped it out the door. There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

What’s really surprising about the book is the amount of variety that is presented in the stories. Some are funny, some are heart-wrenching, and some are just plain weird.

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Rank: 3rd
Final score: 83 Points
Giveaway Question: Including the five episode series known as “The Hamster Decides,” the comedy group The Chaser has produced a number of specials satirizing the elections in what country?
Answer: Australia (J wins a hat.)

Our first 80+ score in quite a while, and it only merited a 3rd place finish.

The General Yermolov Cadet School in the southern Russian city of Stavropol is a state-run institution that teaches military and patriotic classes in addition to a normal syllabus. The school allows its pupils to take part in field-training trips, during which they spend a night in a base and undergo physical drills and weapons training. The outings are seen as a treat for students, and those with bad grades are not allowed to go. The school is named after the Russian imperial general Alexei Yermolov and many of its students are from military backgrounds. Photographs by Eduard Korniyenko