Eye of the Hawk, Mendocino Brewing Company

Today I'd like to take a moment to talk about where to invest your money.  All the recent hype centers around Facebook's upcoming IPO and its goal of raising $5 billion.  To justify this amount, the company will have to perform quite strongly in the years to come, prompting many observers to warn it is overvalued.  Of course this is to be expected.  A strong stock price is often coupled with a riskier investment, but just 180 miles north of Menlo Park is a strong performer you can count on.  Mendocino Brewing Company's Eye of the Hawk does very well on the taste bud market, which makes sense considering it's a strong ale.

Have you been working out?

My first experience with strong ale was in a cafe in Switzerland just down the street from the swiss army knife/chocolate shop (really, the top floor is all knives and the basement is all chocolate).  We stopped in to eat the chocolate we had just purchased, but I decided to add a beer to the moment.  I went with a Scottish strong and have ever since associated strong ales with Scotland.  Today, the term pretty much applies to any non-barleywine beer over 7% ABV, but the Scots hold a special place in the heart of the style if only for the fact they bothered to give it cool names rather than just "strong ale."  Names like 90/- (spoken ninety shilling) and Wee Heavy simply have a nice ring to them.  Eye of the Hawk may be brewed 7,000 miles away from the imagined home of its claimed style, but it sure captures to sharpness of England's northern neighbors.  Or at least the sharpness of Alex Salmond.

If you like your beer to have color, this is a good one for you.  Its red-orange tinge is not only good looking, but matches the feathers of the hawk on the label.  How nice!  Your nose warns you before taking a swig that this drink comes with a kick.  The flavor is decidedly malty with a sharpness of alcohol you can't escape.  However, that alcoholic bite does not hang around long enough to hurt you.  If it were a spice, it would be wasabi because it runs in, burns everything it touches and then is gone two seconds later.  Once it's gone, you don't know if you're relieved or sad.  A touch of hoppiness lingers in your mouth after you've swallowed your sip, a little reminiscent of the twigs that make up a bird's nest.  I would call this beer linearly complex, lending itself to pensive pauses for contemplation of the long term experience.

Ultimately, the goal of investing is to ensure a better life for yourself and your family.  If you put a lot of money into this Facebook IPO coming up, you could make it big or you could lose it all.  Investing it all in cases of beer from Mendocino Brewing Company might not make you any money, but it will ensure a better life.  Or maybe it will make you money.  I'm seeing an 8.0% printed on the bottle, which looks pretty good compared to a 1.84% return on ten year government bonds...

That's how it works, right?