Beer

It would be great if I could blog about the recent excellence of Duke Basketball. Coming off of a dominating win over Carolina my Duke friends and I were actually imbued with a confidence that hasn't been present since 2004 when we lost to UConn in the National Semifinal. We killed Maryland and seemed to have a legit shot at running the table in the ACC which we haven't done since the Battier years.

And then the Wake and Miami debacles happened, so I'm not going to talk about basketball.

Anyways, I watched the Wake game at a place in Seattle called Taphouse Grill. They are very proud about their selection of draft beer: over 160 regular taps plus 10 rotating seasonal taps. I decided to order a sampler of porters and stouts (winter time!). I had ordered the four beers that come in the sampler when the waiter informed me they might be out of one or two of my selections, so I should probably name some backups. I named two, and all was well.

Except that he came back and informed me that they could only find three out of the six, and could I pick yet another beer. Surprisingly, they actually had beer #7.

I ran into this same issue when I would go to the Brickskellar in DC: their menu has hundreds, if not thousands, of beers, but their refrigerators usually only have about half what their menu promises. I understand that it is hard to keep some things in stock, but why run your business in such a way that continually disappoints your customers? Why not have a more conservative menu (in the Brickskellar's case, maybe only 400 beers) and always have them. And if there are some rarities sitting around why have your wait staff offer them up as specials? Am I missing something here?