Make our love and talent manifest

Th'usband and I are just back from Fort Collins, CO, where we visited family and toured the New Belgium Brewery. If you live in NBB's mostly west-of-the-Mississippi distribution area, you are probably already familiar with Fat Tire, their flagship brew, and perhaps even with a bit of their story. It's a pretty inspiring one, particularly if you like it when conventional wisdom about the values and priorities that undergird a successful business turn out to be wrong. Just fifteen years after a talented couple of homebrewers took their beer to market and the resolve to "Make our love and talent manifest" to heart, New Belgium has grown to be the nation's 3rd largest craft brewery and 9th largest brewery overall. I particularly enjoyed learning about the ingenious ways they've made the brewing process more efficient and environmentally sustainable--from laying out the pipes to foster heat exchange between cool city water headed towards the brew kettles and the hot wort coming of them, to using methane captured in their own water treatment facility to offset their consumption of wind energy--and walking around in a space where the twin powers of form and function beautifully combine. I brewed a Fat Tire clone today, and will raise a glass in a proper salute a couple of months from now.

you can get paid for that, you know

Wow. I really, really need to market myself better. Just got word from my friend J about Sweet Deliverance, a new business piggybacking on the CSA boom.

[A quick aside to all those editors who passed on my CSA diary pitch, apparently unconvinced that CSAs were poised to be the next Tickle Me Elmo: I told you so.]

Here's the deal. You sign up for a CSA share. Heck, sign up for the Mega Combo Share, which includes weekly fresh-from-the-farm vegetables, fruit, eggs, and flowers. You can afford it, you New Yorker, you . . . and that's the part that I really have to learn, because while it might cross my mind to offer a service like this, it would never occur to me that anyone would pay for it.

Now start writing checks. The first one for $925 is for the farmers. The subsequent $250 per week is for your own private chef to pick up your produce for you, wash the mesclun mix and make a vinaigrette, whip together a strawberry rhubarb cobbler, and deliver it to your door. Later it will be baba ganouj and pasta sauce, but it will still be $250. I have a hard time imagining that someone of your means eats too many family-style dinners at home, but it could be a nice change of pace. And you'll feel virtuous--not just on account of all that organic goodness coursing through your veins, but because you'll be providing an income for a chef who might otherwise be cooking 100 covers a night at $10/hour to pay off her culinary school debt.

The funny thing is that this whole national food moment we're in is about shortening the distance from the farm to the table, and here this woman comes with her enterprising little self so that you can have your cake and keep your oven clean, too.

God bless you, Chef Kelly Geary. I really hope it works.