Back to Work. No Travel Planned.

May was a busy month. Not only did I set a new record for blogging but I traveled a lot. I was away from home 16 days and 13 nights. But more than just 13 nights in May— which isn't all that crazy; I've had worse in the past— it's that I had another 9 nights at the end of April beforehand. Altogether I've been at home less than 50% over the past 6 weeks... and it seems like I've been at my desk, working, less than one-third.

This week I'm sitting at a desk all week— well, all four days after the holiday— and it feels strange. Worse, I've got nothing planned. 😨 No trips are on the books 'til September. 😱 Oh, I've got intentions. I intend to go somewhere over the Juneteenth weekend, around July 4, and likely some time in August, too. None of those notions have coalesced into bookings yet. So for the foreseeable future all I've got is working at my desk 5 days a week, more or less. How... mind-numbing.

Southwest Status: More than Halfway There

With my travel this past week I'm more than halfway to renewing my elite statuses with Southwest. For A-List Preferred I'm actually well over halfway now, with almost 59,000 points vs. 70,000 needed for requalification. For Companion Pass I'm at 76k out of 135k. The bar on CP is higher this year than in the past. But I've got a plan to make it— I think.

Why do I care? I pursue these statuses because they make a material difference. I travel a lot, and Southwest works as an airline for a lot of the places I want to go. With A+ status I get perks like early boarding so I don't have to play the check-in-exactly-24-hours-ahead game with Southwest (technically my boarding order is reserved 36 hours in advance, well before virtually anybody else gets to check in) and free in-flight wifi. The wifi is nominally worth $8 per flight. I wouldn't buy it for $8 a flight but I would if it were... I dunno, maybe $5? With as much as I travel that's easily worth $100 right there. And even that's a small perk compared to A+ giving me a 2x multiplier on redeemable points earned. That's worth hundreds a year. There are other perks, too.

The value of Companion Pass is all the virtually free trips I get to bring Hawk on. The way CP works is when I'm flying— whether it's on cash or points— my companion gets to join me at a nominal cost. Last year I used it 14 times (14 one-way trips). This year I've used it 8 times already and hope to hit at least 14 again. The value of CP— when we're traveling frequently— is in the thousands.

Beer Tasting: Fat Tire versus... Fat Tire!

A few months ago New Belgium Brewing announced a change the packaging of its signature beer, Fat Tire— and changed the recipe, too. That caught my attention because in this Beer Tasting project I've been running for over a year now Fat Tire has steadily edged out the competition in amber ales, one of my go-to categories, rising to a position among my top few beers overall. Would this change make it better— or worse?

Worse is definitely a possibility. We older kids remember the New Coke debacle of the 1980s. Coca-Cola saw that it was losing some taste tests to Pepsi and thought it had to reformulate its main brand. The result was disastrous. Coke drinkers hated the new flavor despite a big-dollar advertising campaign with celebrities like Bill Cosby telling us how amazingly better it was. (Maybe the taste was better for disguising roofies.) Coke had to quickly backtrack and introduce "Coke Classic", which they restored to the original branding later when New Coke was put to quiet death.

Anyway, New Belgium announced this change a few months ago, but there must have been a lot of older product still in the sales channel as it wasn't until recently that I saw the newer packing in stores. I picked some up the other day, after having purposefully saved a few bottles of the older recipe, to give them a head-to-head taste test.



Right away I noticed that the new Fat Tire has a lighter hue. With the beers poured into glasses (photo above) you can see the new Fat Tire has a lighter yellow color, vs. the older recipe's more amber hue. The new formulation has a lighter colored head, too.

Taste differences are small but noticeable. The older Fat Tire recipe has a stronger flavor; the newer Fat Tire is just a touch sweeter and richer. Drinking them alone (without food) I definitely liked the new Fat Tire a little better. But would that preference hold up with food?

It turns out the taste differences hold up with food as well as without. I drank the beers with a pizza dinner. Rich food like a meaty pizza is what amber ales are meant for! I thought maybe the older recipe's slightly more sour hops would help it stand up better to the umami, fats, and salt of pizza, but the sweeter new recipe continued to hold its own. It tasted better with rich food because it maintained its sweetness as a gentle counterpoint to the food's flavors, enabling both the pizza and the beer to shine throughout the meal.

Winner: (new) Fat Tire!