Membership has its benefits…

Join Free The Hops and you’ll get a t-shirt, a free copy of All About Beer magazine (while supplies last) with a card for a discounted subscription, and the privilege of attending FTH membership functions.

A taste of what you’re missing…

Founder’s Breakfast Stout defies all traditional classifications. Its label informs the drinker that it is a “Double Chocolate Coffee Oatmeal Stout.” What divine nectar dripping from heaven could this be? At 8.3% ABV, few Alabamians know.

The taste is even richer and fuller than the aroma would lead you to believe, with mouth-coating flavors of delicate fruit (strawberries, maraschino cherry), sweetened mocha java, dark-roasted espresso, dark chocolate, fudge brownies and cereal notes.

Currently ranked at number 6 on BeerAdvocate.com’s Top 100 beers in the world.

A message from the President…

As I’m sure you have all heard, we’ll be meeting with some legislators on Wednesday, August 17th at 7:00pm in the 2nd floor meeting room of Birmingham Beverage. You’ll find details on the website. As I already requested in my last email, please reply and let me know if you can be there so we can get a ballpark headcount. If you’ve already replied, I have you counted.

On the subject of talking to legislators, I would like to emphasize how vital our fundraising efforts are. We anticipate needing to pay a lobbyist to coordinate our political strategy and contacts with legislators. They don’t work for free. The very first line in our fundraising offense is Free The Hops Membership. For only $25, you get a t-shirt, a copy of All About Beer magazine, and the privilege of attending FTH Membership events. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and your money is an investment in the campaign for better beer in Alabama. So if you haven’t already, please go to www.freethehops.org/join.php and sign up. You won’t regret it.

Speaking of fundraising, tickets are now on sale for American Beer: a bockumentary, which will be shown at WorkPlay on Wednesday, August 31st at 8:00pm. I’m confident the show will sell out, so get ‘em while you can at WorkPlay.com. All proceeds from ticket sales go to benefit FTH.

Also, please note that FTH is now an Amazon.com Associate. That means we put a little search box on our website (go ahead, take a look… it’s on the left side of the page, towards the bottom) and we get a small percentage of any purchase made through that box. It doesn’t cost you any more than your Amazon purchases normally would. The only difference is that you can help liberate beer in Alabama just by starting all your Amazon purchases at www.freethehops.org. So please, when you’re finally ready to buy that 60 inch plasma TV, buy it from Amazon using the search box on the FTH website.  It might make the difference in whether you can one day buy Samichlaus at Vulcan.

You may have noticed a couple of small changes to our website. The page formerly known as “Promotional Material” is now “FTH Gear” and we’ve added a page called “Printed Materials.” On the Gear page, you’ll find images of all the products we have in our CafePress shop, as well as our value t-shirt (included with membership). Buying the Gear is another way to support FTH, and it’s a good way to advertise our cause and start conversations.

The Printed Materials page provides download links for several PDFs of stuff you can print out yourself to help spread the word. I’d especially like to mention the flyer, which I originally mentioned in the June newsletter. We need everyone’s help in distributing the flyer so that everyone in the state knows about FTH. But we’d like to have an organized, coordinated effort. So, even if you’ve already downloaded the flyer, please check the Printed Materials page of the website for details on how we’d like to go about distributing these flyers, including the use of databases on our Yahoo! Group.

One final note. We hope to be able to conduct some beer tastings around the state at retailers who already host wine tastings for their customers. The main focus of these tastings will be introducing new people to specialty beer. If this interests you and you’d like to help, please let me know.

Free Beer!