This morning I saw that @BuffaloRach had tweeted to us and Kegworks:

What’s the best way to clean a growler?

“Great!” I thought. “I can answer it on the blog today!” And then, of course, Kegworks answered first. Thanks, guys. I guess you’re not the winner of Buffalo’s small company Social Madness challenge for nothing. Even so! I’m going to answer it anyway, dammit.

Keep me clean!

The most important thing to do after you finish a growler is to rinse it out with water. Chances are you’re busy, and you just finished a growler so you’ve had at least some beer. Don’t leave it for later. Give it a rinse and get most of the beer out of there before mold takes root. Then, if you have a bottle brush then by all means use it, but a vigorous shaking with water and dish soap inside, followed by rinsing it completely, will do you well.

Now then, let’s talk about fracking. No, I’m not trying to bring up how you should really watch the Battlestar Galactica reboot if you haven’t (although you definitely should), and I wouldn’t hold it against you if you thought that because I was very confused for about five minutes of an NPR interview a few years back. No, fracking is a method of extracting petroleum or natural gas from the ground by injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals to break apart rocks.

You probably knew that already, because it’s a very contentious issue and so everyone’s talking about it. Here’s the thing: when you inject water and chemicals into the ground, some of that can get into the groundwater. Numerous studies have been done about the environmental impacts of fracking, and they don’t always agree: of course, the ones that say “it’s fine!” later turn out to say that because of pressure from the oil industry.

Fracking is bad. And here’s why this ties in to us: beer is mostly water. The water in our beer, while filtered, comes from the same place your tap water does. And when you can, I don’t know, light your goddamn tap water on fire, that’s bad. So this Saturday at Mister Goodbar there’s an event called Save Our Beer! Learn about fracking and drink good beer from CBW and Flying Bison made with NYS tapwater: what’s not to like?

Speaking of, this is batch 42!

I came across an interesting article about Kickstarter projects this week, with plenty of data points about what, where and why projects are proposed and succeed. Some interesting bits that stood out to me: only 50% of funded projects get more than 110% of what they asked for (our project was 116% funded). Also, the longer the project is open the less likely it is to be funded: 35% for a 30 day project vs 29% for a 60, using a $10,000 project. We were $15,000 open for 42 days, because we love Douglas Adams. Seriously, that was our deciding factor. I said “how many days should we go for?” and Rudy said “42” and it was the end of the discussion.

Be sure to scroll to the end of the article for an infographic.

Time to end on some good news! You may have heard about the repeal of the state tax exemptions for small NYS breweries a few months ago. Essentially, out of state breweries complained about the exemption and so small NYS breweries — like, say, us — would no longer be exempt from paying certain taxes. It got a little heated, so we largely stayed out of it.

However! The state has decided to, well, repeal the repeal I guess. Cutting out the double negatives, it means that small local breweries like Community Beer Works will continue to have a tax exemption. We are thrilled the state has made this pro-business move, and thank Governor Cuomo and the state legislature.

Now then, time to make and drink some beer.