Ok folks,
I happened to leave my computer in the tap room last night while doing a beer tasting for about 30 people, so I went to the local Walmart and bought a jenky phone charger so that I could write my Sunday email to you via voice-to-text on my little phone.
First world problems, I know, but there’s not a lot of time to write updates when there’s thirsty beer-loving progressive tourists knocking on the door, so please bear with me.
Here’s the update. Last Friday, I found a great DC lawyer/Harvard Law grad who has won private voucher school cases in many other states who I’m confident will help us figure out how get rid of them here in Wisconsin.
And as a reminder for those who haven’t read my missives over the last several weeks, the Minocqua Brewing Company Super Pac plans to sue to get rid of the private school voucher system that is currently bleeding our public schools dry.
Because it’s a Sunday and I didn’t ask him if he’d be ok with me introducing him to 150,000 Wisconsinites/the cheesehead diaspora/concerned wannabe cheeseheads reading this email or on Facebook, I’ll tell you his name next week.
But rest assured, this guy is smart, he knows his stuff, and I’m confident he’ll help us determine the best winning strategy over the course of July so we can get a case together and file it sometime this fall.
Just realize that your donations over the last several weeks allowed us to hire this guy. He isn’t cheap, but he plays to win and believes the 1% shouldn’t take over our country by killing off public schools and dumbing down the middle class, so there’s that.
The other news is that I’m going to be at the Margheritaville Resort in Palm Springs next week serving our new Love Wins Fruited Sour Ale and Choice Wine at the Equality Wine Fest. This is a blowout party to wind down June PRIDE month, and I owe a ton of thanks to my winemaking partners at Equality Vines for including the Minocqua Brewing Company and giving us some much needed exposure on the progressive West Coast.
For your info, Love Wins Fruited Sour Ale has been so popular in our tap room during PRIDE that we decided to make another batch. It should be ready to go in about two weeks and will be available in most of our partner retail stores throughout the Midwest, as well as online for those in states where we can ship beer. By the way, if you live in one of those states, you might as well order some beer from us now, so you’ll have it to celebrate July 4:)
As for Choice Wine, we finally got the permits necessary to import this single vineyard Sauvignon Blanc and Rose of Pinot Noir from Sonoma, California to Wisconsin, so you should be seeing Choice Wine in stores soon.
If you can’t wait, you can always buy it online here
Now, for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs…
Weirdly, I found this graph while trying to convince an old girlfriend to date me again (too much information I know), but it stuck in my brain for the last several days because it reminded me that there’s so much more to life than the basics most of us are mired in from day to day.
According to Maslow, and probably many of you have seen this chart before, the goal to life is “self-actualization,” but there are several building blocks that have to be achieved before we can get there.
When I look at the second building block entitled “Safety and Security,” I marvel at how America used to do so much more to help us achieve that second step in life so that we could elevate ourselves beyond the bare necessities and “move up.”
It’s tough to admit that many other first world countries are providing these bare necessities much better than the US is today, and it’s even tougher to acknowledge that many of our neighbors have been convinced, through fear and misinformation, that this second or maybe third level is probably as good as it’s gonna get for them.
So, my parting words to you, written with thumbs on a phone, are these:
We must demand better from our government, and we must invest in the institutions, like public schools, that lift us all, even the poorest among us, past the bare necessities of life.
Once we do that, and once everyone in America is provided the building blocks to achieve a level of self-esteem and confidence to respect their fellow man, we will once again be that “City on a Hill” that other countries look up to.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with us. Together, we can rediscover American exceptionalism, one beer at a time.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC