BetterBeerBlog

Normally, Hopinions is a collaborative effort between myself and Mario, blogger of Brewed for Thought. We take turns picking a topic, writing about it and then hosting the collaborative post on our respective blogs. For the past few years, this format has been successful. With the exception of a few posts where we seem to bicker within the post itself, the process has gone swimmingly.

Swimmingly, until now.

Mario has decided to put his foot down and not write about the topic I choose. The topic? The End of History, a whopping 55% ABV beer brewed by Scotland’s own Brew Dog. Mario has very strong opinions about this beer and about Brew Dog that he unfortunately refuses to share on his blog.

Hopinions, though, is not about airing “dirty laundry”, so-to-speak. This has always been, and will continue to be, a place for collaboration. Having had the downtime yesterday to let the situation sink in, I came up with an idea.

The Birth of the “End”

I have a homebrewed Russian Imperial Stout that I’ve aged on a bourbon soaked oak spiral that is about 1.5 years old now. I brewed this beer, developed a label for it and gave it away as Christmas presents last year. While I still have a handful of bottles left over, I have about 1/4th to 1/3rd of a 5-gallon keg of this beer left. I have decided to take this beer and run it through the freeze concentration process Brew Dog uses to make their incredibly high alcohol beers. I would then bottle the resulting beer and wrap it in a koozie of my own visage and give it away to the first person to donate $100 to the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA).

I have decided to name this beer End of Hopistory.

Thinking about it further, I felt that this was a lot of trouble for a $100 donation. So I have decided to expand the idea to try and raise as much awareness and money as I can for the LFA. So why the LFA? And what is lupus? According the to the LFA website:

Lupus is a chronic, autoimmune disease that can damage any part of the body (skin, joints, and/or organs inside the body). Chronic means that the signs and symptoms tend to last longer than six weeks and often for many years. In lupus, something goes wrong with your immune system, which is the part of the body that fights off viruses, bacteria, and germs (”foreign invaders,” like the flu). Normally our immune system produces proteins called antibodies that protect the body from these invaders. Autoimmune means your immune system cannot tell the difference between these foreign invaders and your body’s healthy tissues (”auto” means “self”) and creates autoantibodies that attack and destroy healthy tissue. These autoantibodies cause inflammation, pain, and damage in various parts of the body.

Someone close to my family has lupus and this effort is for her and the thousands of other people living with lupus. There are many causes in the world that are important and urgent to many people; this is mine and I’m hoping you can help me.

Can I get a helping hand?

So here’s the plan: I want to raise money to support this cause. I am still working out the details as to how I will be raising the money. Mario has suggested a raffle. I’ve been looking into silent auctions and how to do this online. Is online even the best way to do so? The last time I helped to raise money for a cause, I was selling candy bars out of Ziplock bags. So I am looking for ideas that are fairly easy to implement.

I am also looking for people to help with incentives. This is what I have to offer so far:

• End of Hopistory homebrew
• Tentatively planned 3-day/2-night stay in Windsor, CA (Santa Rosa is a quick, 10 minute drive south of Windsor)
• A bottle of Tactical Nuclear Penguin or Sink the Bismarck, both graciously donated by Brew Dog

So if any brewery, brewpub or business is willing to donate other incentives to sweeten the pot, I would greatly appreciate it. I also would greatly appreciate a company with philanthropic designs to fully match, dollar-for-dollar, whatever I am able to raise. I would even be happy for partial matches.

As ideas solidify and details become set, I will be setting up a page for this fundraiser. It will be a way for people to keep track of my efforts and of the incentives that will hopefully come our way. August has shaped up to be a very busy month for me but I will be looking to launch this campaign in the next, few weeks.

So I guess the next question is, does anyone have a freezer I can use?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:49 am and is filed under Craft Beer, Homebrew, Hopinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.