How German Beer Came to the Carolinas: A True Story

This is a great story that I was lucky enough to report for my column in this week's Weekly Surge.

IMPORTING A TASTE OF DEUTSCHLAND

By Colin Burch
For Weekly Surge
When Werner Hoppe helped build the Georgetown Steel Mill in 1969, the crates of equipment from Germany often held a special reminder of home. The good-hearted workers in Germany stashed German wine or beer into the shipment, he said.

But then, one day, the United States government did what it does best. It stole the joy of Hoppe and other Germans working on the mill. Customs agents discovered that alcohol was arriving in the equipment crates, and said, in so many words, "You can't do that."

So Werner Hoppe went down to the customs office and found out about the procedures for importing alcohol into the U.S. Soon, the native of Cologne, Germany, decided to set up his own import business in Georgetown.

W.H. Company started with German wine, and eventually added beers including Bitburger Pils, Maisel's Weisse, and more, even some English brews. He continued working with the Georgetown steel mill until 1975, when he went into the import business full-time.

His son, Andy Hoppe, a tennis coach at Carolina Forest High School and Georgetown native, said it took some effort on his father's part to get the company off the ground. "It was a lot of hard work at first, trying to learn how alcohol is bought and sold in this country," he said.

But Werner Hoppe figured it out. He got his own warehouse in Georgetown and trucks for distribution. He had distributors up and down the East coast, Andy Hoppe said. When the orders for German imports became big enough, the exporters were able to deliver directly to the distributors, so the warehouse and the trucks were no longer necessary. Werner Hoppe was able to run the import business from his home.

Werner Hoppe has scaled back his operations in recent years. He stopped carrying wine 15 years ago. More recently, he returned the rights to sell Bitburger to the brewery back in Germany. In a technical sense, he still oversees Bitburger's import into North Carolina, but he is no longer involved with the marketing.

Today, W.H. Company imports only Maisel's Weisse in two varieties, the original which includes yeast, and the filtered version called Kristallklar, which was hailed by the late beer expert Michael Jackson as one of the best beers in the world. And W.H. Company only brings Maisel's Weisse into two states, working with Southern Wine and Spirits in South Carolina, and two distributors in North Carolina: Highland Distribution Co. and Mutual Distribution Co., said Andy Hoppe.

So if you drink Maisel's Weisse in the Carolinas, thank Werner Hoppe.

Still speaking with a strong German accent, he scaled back his import operation because he wanted to do other things at this stage in his life. He recently wrote a book, "Justice Comes After Death," which is available at Horst Gasthaus in North Myrtle Beach and River Room in Georgetown, where the purchase of the book comes with a free Maisel's Weisse glass. The book is also available at My Sister's Books in Pawleys Island, at which a book-signing is tentatively scheduled for January 15.

Despite his new endeavors, Werner Hoppe didn't sound like he wants to stop with the two Maisel's Weisse brews. He said a Maisel's Weisse sister brewery has a lager that he'll probably add to his imports.

Andy Hoppe said he'll eventually take over the business.

I asked him what he and his father think about the big American domestic beers. "We tend to avoid those whenever possible," he said with a laugh.

HAPPY NEW BEER

I'm taking a couple of weeks off. Let's keep all the Surge readers out of the slammer - don't drive after you've been drinking, and have a Happy New Year.

- Contact Colin Burch - the Beerman - at beerpour@yahoo.com.

How German Beer Came to the Carolinas: A True Story

This is a great story that I was lucky enough to report for my column in this week's Weekly Surge.

IMPORTING A TASTE OF DEUTSCHLAND

By Colin Burch
For Weekly Surge

When Werner Hoppe helped build the Georgetown Steel Mill in 1969, the crates of equipment from Germany often held a special reminder of home. The good-hearted workers in Germany stashed German wine or beer into the shipment, he said.

But then, one day, the United States government did what it does best. It stole the joy of Hoppe and other Germans working on the mill. Customs agents discovered that alcohol was arriving in the equipment crates, and said, in so many words, "You can't do that."

So Werner Hoppe went down to the customs office and found out about the procedures for importing alcohol into the U.S. Soon, the native of Cologne, Germany, decided to set up his own import business in Georgetown.

W.H. Company started with German wine, and eventually added beers including Bitburger Pils, Maisel's Weisse, and more, even some English brews. He continued working with the Georgetown steel mill until 1975, when he went into the import business full-time.

His son, Andy Hoppe, a tennis coach at Carolina Forest High School and Georgetown native, said it took some effort on his father's part to get the company off the ground. "It was a lot of hard work at first, trying to learn how alcohol is bought and sold in this country," he said.

But Werner Hoppe figured it out. He got his own warehouse in Georgetown and trucks for distribution. He had distributors up and down the East coast, Andy Hoppe said. When the orders for German imports became big enough, the exporters were able to deliver directly to the distributors, so the warehouse and the trucks were no longer necessary. Werner Hoppe was able to run the import business from his home.

Werner Hoppe has scaled back his operations in recent years. He stopped carrying wine 15 years ago. More recently, he returned the rights to sell Bitburger to the brewery back in Germany. In a technical sense, he still oversees Bitburger's import into North Carolina, but he is no longer involved with the marketing.

Today, W.H. Company imports only Maisel's Weisse in two varieties, the original which includes yeast, and the filtered version called Kristallklar, which was hailed by the late beer expert Michael Jackson as one of the best beers in the world. And W.H. Company only brings Maisel's Weisse into two states, working with Southern Wine and Spirits in South Carolina, and two distributors in North Carolina: Highland Distribution Co. and Mutual Distribution Co., said Andy Hoppe.

So if you drink Maisel's Weisse in the Carolinas, thank Werner Hoppe.

Still speaking with a strong German accent, he scaled back his import operation because he wanted to do other things at this stage in his life. He recently wrote a book, "Justice Comes After Death," which is available at Horst Gasthaus in North Myrtle Beach and River Room in Georgetown, where the purchase of the book comes with a free Maisel's Weisse glass. The book is also available at My Sister's Books in Pawleys Island, at which a book-signing is tentatively scheduled for January 15.

Despite his new endeavors, Werner Hoppe didn't sound like he wants to stop with the two Maisel's Weisse brews. He said a Maisel's Weisse sister brewery has a lager that he'll probably add to his imports.

Andy Hoppe said he'll eventually take over the business.

I asked him what he and his father think about the big American domestic beers. "We tend to avoid those whenever possible," he said with a laugh.

HAPPY NEW BEER

I'm taking a couple of weeks off. Let's keep all the Surge readers out of the slammer - don't drive after you've been drinking, and have a Happy New Year.

- Contact Colin Burch - the Beerman - at beerpour@yahoo.com.

Keep your freedom: how spiritual seekers avoid traps

Almost all cult leaders and Christians who manipulate place a high emphasis on being "led by the Lord."... In the first century those who thought that personal revelation was an authority above Scriptures were called Gnostics.... We must ever guard ourselves against the words and pet phrases that hint of superior spirituality.... When we divide life into snug "spiritual" and "nonspiritual" compartments, we are thinking heretically and may blindly accept a cultic view of life.

-- Harold Bussell, in his book By Hook or By Crook: How Cults Lure Christians

Privacy versus student health, campus safety

Today's Wall Street Journal includes an article entitled "Bucking Privacy Concerns, Cornell Acts as Watchdog."

The Virginia Tech shootings have moved campus safety to the top of university administrators' priorities.

Is Cornell creating a safe environment, or an environment of busy-bodies? Maybe a little of both, but there's not doubt the new approach has helped some students. Here are some excerpts from the article:

For 19 years as a custodian at Cornell University, Sue Welch has been taking out the garbage and mopping the floors of residence halls. Recently, she added a new responsibility: trying to prevent student suicide.

Ms. Welch noticed during a recent semester that she was repeatedly having to clean up after a particular student's apparent bouts of nausea, and told her supervisor she feared the young woman had an eating disorder. The supervisor told the residence-hall director, who encouraged the student to go to the university health center. Counselors there arranged for her to get treatment for bulimia nervosa. Ms. Welch credits the training sessions that she and other custodians attended on how to spot students with mental-health problems....

[Cornell University's] "alert team" of administrators, campus police and counselors meets weekly to compare notes on signs of student emotional problems. People across campus, from librarians to handymen, are trained to recognize potentially dangerous behavior. And starting this year, Cornell is taking advantage of a rarely used legal exception to student-privacy rights: It is assuming students are dependents of their parents, allowing the school to inform parents of concerns without students' permission....

By 2002, the executive director of Cornell's health center, Janet Corson-Rikert, began making mental health a communitywide responsibility. The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School had shocked educators into recognizing the danger of failing to spot troubled students. Like most colleges, Cornell was starting to see more students enrolled with severe mental-health problems, as reduced stigma and improved medications allowed more of them to reach college. The counseling center was often overwhelmed with demand for appointments.

Dr. Corson-Rikert asked Dr. [Timothy] Marchell [director of mental-health initiatives] and others to build a network to train people to notice problems and give them ways to report them, while still respecting student privacy. An advisory council on mental-health strategies made up of Cornell staff, faculty and student leaders had its first meeting in early 2004, and members had a realization: In school post-mortems after tragedies, "each person knew pieces of the story but no one saw the whole picture," says Dr. Marchell. "If they had shared the information, maybe we could have intervened."

Dr. Marchell spoke with several suicide-prevention organizations, who pointed the school to a surprising model: the Air Force.

In the 1990s, the service decided to try to reduce suicides by airmen and studied each case for warning signs. They learned to look at behavior changes, discipline problems and poor performance ratings as possible indicators of depression. Four-star generals began to talk publicly about mental illness and encourage all service members to watch for warning signs. Each member of the Air Force is now given training in detecting depression and other mental disorders. The Air Force's protocol is one of few suicide-prevention programs proven effective: The average annual suicide rate dropped by a third, from 13.5 per 100,000 people to 9.9.

Science, brain, mind & metaphysics

I'm reading a book that argues aggressively against the validity of the field of neurophilosophy. Excerpts from the introduction:

"The name 'neurophilosophy' itself, and the hyphenated expression 'mind/brain', are both part of the propaganda, intended to suggest the closest, intimate connection between neuroscience and philosophy....

"It is not physiology which drives this philosophical orthodoxy, but metaphysics, the idea that the findings of the sciences are now providing answers to the questions raised by metaphysics, providing a definitive statement as to what there really (ultimately) is....

"Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. The error which promotes the orthodoxy is, in an important respect, very simple and basic: it is to suppose that 'what anything is' is identical (in the very strongest sense) with 'what it is made of'."

- from Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) by Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester

NBC's 'Life'

Here's what L.A. Times TV critic Mary McNamara said about NBC's 'Life':

NBC's new show about Charlie Crews, a cop sprung after 12 years in the pen for a frame job, is the best new show of the season. Balancing Zen and vengeful rage, Crews (Damian Lewis) is the most interesting quirky cop since Columbo.

I couldn't say it better and briefer than McNamara, but I'll add a paragraph of my own:

I'm drawn to this show because Damian Lewis does a thoroughly convincing job of portraying a peculiar character who (1) genuinely appreciates every little thing in life following his time in prison, and (2) seeks a religio-philosophical path to balance a barely visible but driving anger.



Ratings haven't been great, but there's good news.

"The action-fantasy 'Chuck' and the crime drama 'Life' have both received full-season orders, despite less-than-stellar ratings," reported the Contra Costa Times.

Give the ratings a bump. Catch up at NBC.com/Life and then tune in when the holidays -- and hopefully the writers' strike -- are over.

Drink mead; Hrothgar does

Have you every tried mead before?

Mead is a fermented-honey beverage, usually with a few other things thrown in.

If you've ever actually read the ancient warrior-and-monster poem of Beowulf -- surely better than the movie currently in theaters -- you know that the king Hrothgar builds a "mead hall" early in the story.

I recently tried some home-made mead, interviewed its maker, and wrote about it for the Weekly Surge in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Check out the column here: http://www.weeklysurge.com/beer.html

It includes a link that tell you how to make your own mead.

Just in time for Beowulf: Mead!

Have you every tried mead before?

Mead is a fermented-honey beverage, usually with a few other things thrown in.

If you've ever read the ancient warrior-and-monster poem of Beowulf -- surely better than the movie currently in theaters -- you know that the king Hrothgar builds a "mead hall" early in the story.

I recently tried some home-made mead, interviewed the woman who made it, and wrote about it for the Weekly Surge in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Check out the column here: http://www.weeklysurge.com/beer.html

It includes some links that tell you how to make your own mead!

cheers,
Colin

Who really speaks the truth

"Only mystics, clowns and artists, in my experience, speak the truth..."
- Malcolm Muggeridge




Macolm Muggeridge as a gargoyle, from The Gargoyle: The Journal of the Malcolm Muggeridge Society

What Mitt Romney should have said

Here's the speech Mitt Romney should have given regarding his Mormon beliefs:

Good morning, and thanks for coming out today.

I've been encouraged to suggest a comparison between myself and John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic president.

After all, many Americans wondered what it would mean to have a Catholic president, just as many Americans today are concerned about the implications of having me as their first Mormon president.

I am not, however, going to take that approach today.

I'm simply going to point out what happened the last time we elected a born-again Baptist president.

Remember the hostages in Iran?

How about very long lines at the gas pump?

So if you think evangelical beliefs are so important, ask yourself: What was so great about Jimmy Carter?

Excuse me, I'm going to sneeze -- muh... muh... muh... MikeHuckabee!

Pardon me. Please rest assured that I am an American as well as a Mormon, and I will always do what is in the best interests of our nation.

Thank you, and may God bless America.