A Good Day at the Brewery

There were all kinds of fun things happening at Anheuser-Busch today! A couple of the guys planned a winter olympics party and made the boss move of borrowing the slushie machine from the tour center and filling it with watermelon Natty Rush.

There was some beer pong.

Pretty much at the exact same time there was a Chinese New Year lion dance going on up on the 8th floor.

Newbies often think this is a dragon but they are wrong/dumb.

It was chasing away evils spirits, bringing good luck, typical lion stuff.

In China lions like to eat lettuce.

Four of us bonded wheeling a really heavy slushie machine down the streets of Soulard back to the visitor center.

I gotta say it was a good day.

A Mardi Gras Carjacking

We finally ran out of friends that live in Soulard, so we didn't have a house party to go to when Mardi Gras rolled around. We booked an all inclusive thing at Big Daddy's Bar & Grill instead.

The food was pretty bleh but anything tastes good after a few hurricanes.

The thing was Fireball whiskey sponsored so there was a lot of swag floating around.

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Matt likes shiny things.

When you party with the Schaeffers you often end up in the emergency room. Remember when Lydia ruined Halloween?

So Zoe had her mom come to pick her up and her mom found a place next to the brewery to park. Well some crackhead came by and tried a couple of the door handles, when they didn't open said crackhead bashed one of the car windows in. He entered the vehicle, punched Zoe in the face, and then tried to drive the car away. Being a crackhead who clearly sucks at his life really really hard, he proceeded to crash the car into multiple nearby vehicles and got pulled out of the car and stomped.  And the day was saved! 

Zoe took an ambulance to Barnes-Jewish Hospital where a doctor confirmed our worst fears: Zoe was now in the later stages of punched-face syndrome. Then the doctor sent her home. The end.

A Field Trip to Granite City

Anheuser-Busch has a lot of breweries across the country because they brew a lot of beer. A lot of that beer goes to nearby distribution centers where it's stored while it waits to be loaded onto trucks and shipped to a store near you. My job is to build different tools and reports that show data about how fast the trucks are being loaded, how many mistakes are made while loading, etcetera, etcetera.

Since I'm doing so much work involving the distribution centers I thought it would be good to go visit the nearest one over in Granite City, IL. GRAN as we call it is the busiest of the distribution centers and handles a lot of the craft beer as well so the truck loads leaving here are the most complicated.

The Cold Room is where we store the keg beer because it needs to be kept refrigerated as it is not pasteurized.

Import keg beer on the other hand is pasteurized so that it can survive its boaty journey to America.

I'm always sad when I think about how much beer has to be thrown away. Beer that has passed its freshness date or stuff that gets damaged in shipping is marked as "dump beer" and gets shipped to a company that dumps the beer and recycles the packaging. I just learned that when A-B dumps beer it gets a refund on the excise taxes paid to the federal government. Very interesting.

I got to take home a case of fancy Goose Island Noel that was still good it just was out of season.

Best field trip ever.

Soulard Onesie Bar Crawl

What's even more fun than bar hopping in Soulard? Bar hopping in Soulard while dressed in an animal onesie.

It took the girls about 10 minutes before they met another pair wearing the exact same thing. Awkward!

Zoe took some good pictures and videos for her Snapagram or whatever the kids are doing these days.

Wearing a onesie was a perfect way to conceal a quart of rum I had tied around my neck with some ribbon. A scout is thrifty, after all.

Underground Fuzzball

By happy coincidence I sit near my buddy Jay at work. He's a member of a corkball club, which is sort of like a St. Louis-centric version of a baseball home run derby played with a baseball the size of a golf ball.

If that's not surprising enough in the winter they play fuzzball, which is another St. Louis game that as far as I understand has the same rules but it's played with a tennis ball that's had the fuzz burned off.

He invited me to the South Broadway Athletic Club to check it out.

They had these batting cage-like tunnels made out of netting to play in.

I thought it was just going to be a bunch of inebriated dudes farting around, like my own kickball games at Tower Grove Park. These guys, though, were pretty serious. Some of them were former minor league baseball players.

Any game where you need a blowtorch is pretty cool.