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We've already had blood moons and blue moons in recent months but did you know that tonight will see a 'snow' moon grace the skies.
So why is it called the snow moon? Well it's the only full moon of the month and February typically sees the highest average snowfall according to the Met Office.
Another interesting fact is that since the lunar cycle is about 29 days long, February has no full moon once almost every 19 years.
And the Met Office is forecasting clear or mildly cloudy skies for most of the UK this evening, making it a good night to catch a glimpse of the full 'Snow Moon.'


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A recent survey of electrical and lighting contractors demonstrates their importance in the specifying and recommendation of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting products for building projects. According to the survey respondents, contractors are involved in recommending LED lighting more than 70% of the time. Yet, a majority of respondents said they would be interested in receiving more training on product installation, benefits, and layout, showing that despite their involvement in the industry, many contractors still desire LED education. Contractors also indicated that they could sell more effectively if LED lighting manufacturers provided samples, sales brochures, ROI calculations, product application guides for indoor and outdoor usage, comparative pricing, and information regarding tax incentives and rebates. The survey conducted by Energy Smart Marketers, a joint effort between Channel Marketing Group and BtB Marketing Communications, both based in Raleigh, N.C., demonstrates the value of LED manufacturers reaching out to electrical contractors through marketing efforts.
"Contractor responses show that they are interested in more LED product training," says David Gordon, principal, Channel Marketing Group. "The survey indicated that the top three reasons they recommend LEDs are energy savings, longevity, and maintenance savings. This demonstrates that LED manufacturers can influence contractors' lighting and product recommendations through better education and outreach to this group. The survey also showed that contractors prefer to purchase through electrical distributors where they already have a relationship, indicating that LED manufacturers need to consider a channel strategy in concert with their end-user outreach initiatives."
The survey was conducted with 2,100 people from 1,900 different electrical and lighting contracting companies.
"The survey indicates that a majority of the respondents are relying on manufacturers' reps, Web searches, and contractor magazines to learn more about LED fixtures," says George Bournazian, vice president, BtB Marketing Communications. "Respondents' use of Web searches suggests unfamiliarity with LED products and brands, which means manufacturers need to develop an informative Web presence, as well as strong e-marketing and traditional marketing strategies, to gain share of mind and to further increase the acceptance, utilization, and recommendation of LED lighting by contractors."
The complete survey results are available for $199 from the Energy Smart Marketers Web site.

subset: commoncrawl


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You are here
Antioxidants: Top 10 Healthy Foods
Bob Stefko
Researchers at the University of Oslo wanted to know which foods have the highest concentration of antioxidants, the natural chemicals in food that make it healthy and prevent disease, so they tested 1,113 common foods and drinks, from apples to waffles. Their findings: Ounce for ounce, spices, herbs, nuts, and seeds pack the most nutrients. But if we're talking typical serving size, berries (five different kinds) also dominate the top ranks. The most surprising find? Chocolate ice cream rated higher than fruits like honeydew and green grapes! Here, the best 10 foods to eat to "anti" up.
One cup of blackberries contains the most antioxidants of all the berries tested, beating out blueberries, strawberries, cranberries, and raspberries. Plus, one cupful provides half your daily recommended intake of vitamin C.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 62 calories, less than 1g fat, 14g carbohydrates, 7.6g fiber, 2g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Blaine Moats
Just an ounce of walnuts, or 15 to 20 halves, is loaded with antioxidants. They're also cholesterol-free and low in sodium and sugar. Nuts are laden with calories, though, so be mindful of your intake.
Nutrition facts (1 ounce): 185 calories, 18.5g fat (1.7g saturated fat), 4g carbohydrates, 8g fiber, 4g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Baked Apples with Cinnamon and Walnuts
Toast with Walnut and Pear Spread
Broiled Bananas with Walnuts
Scott Little
Bursting with fiber and vitamin C (149 percent of your daily recommended intake!), a cup of sliced strawberries is a cup full of healthy benefits.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 49 calories, 0.5g fat, 11.7g carbohydrates, 3g fiber, 1g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Strawberry, Banana, and Flax Smoothie
Spinach Salad with Strawberries
Yogurt with Almonds and Strawberries
Scott Little
Artichoke Hearts
Add a cup of antioxidant-rich artichoke hearts to your diet.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 70 calories, 0g fat, 11.5g carbohydrates, 4.5g fiber, 2.5g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Brown Rice Salad with Snow Peas, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Artichoke Hearts
Grilled Chicken and Rice Salad
Chicken with Chunky Vegetable Sauce
Lynn Klapperich
One cup of whole cranberries is full of disease-fighting and health-boosting antioxidants.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 51 calories, 0.2g fat, 13.5g carbohydrates, 5g fiber, 1g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Harvest Bran Muffins
Turkey and Cranberry Sandwiches
Indian-Spiced Squash
Blaine Moats
Brewed Coffee
Your morning cup of joe does more than perk you up — it also boosts your health.
Nutrition facts (8 fluid ounces): 18 calories, 2mg sodium
Andy Lyons
Another super-healthy berry to add to your diet. One cup is loaded with vitamin C (54 percent of your daily recommended intake) and antioxidants.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 64 calories, 1g fat, 15g carbohydrates, 8g fiber, 1.5g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Berries with Zabaglione
Berries Vinaigrette with Mascarpone
Fresh Raspberry-Mouse Almond Crumb Cake
Blaine Moats
As if you needed any more reason to take a bite out of that pecan pie. One ounce, or 20 jumbo kernels, of pecans is rich in antioxidants.
Nutrition facts (1 ounce): 196 calories, 20.5g fat (1.7g saturated), 3.9g carbohydrates, 2.7g fiber, 2.6g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Bob Stefko
This superfood is good for your health and can help protect your skin from premature aging.
Nutrition facts (1 cup): 83 calories, 0.5g fat, 21g carbohydrates, 3.5g fiber, 1.1g protein
Try these healthy recipes:
Steven McDonald
Ground Cloves
Just a teaspoon of ground cloves can do wonders for your body. Spice up your meals and boost your health at the same time.
Nutrition facts (1 tablespoon): 21 calories, 1.3g fat (0.4g saturated), 4g carbohydrates, 2.3g fiber, 0.4g protein
Try these healthy recipes:


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Once It's Gone, It's Gone…
We've seen a fantastic response to the Freelance Mac App Bundle over the past week, and thousands of our readers have taken advantage of the awesome deal we put together. If you haven't picked up your copy already, there isn't long left! In 24 hours time, the doors will close and we'll stop accepting any more orders.
Just as a quick reminder, for the next 24 hours, you can get your hands on all the following for the rock-bottom price of $49:
The Apps
We're featuring eight awesome applications that can make your life easier, and more enjoyable, as a freelancer. These are:
- Billings – Powerful time billing and invoicing for anyone (Usually $39.99)
- TextExpander – Save time and keystrokes with frequently used "snippet" abbreviations (Usually $34.95)
- WriteRoom – The best distraction-free writing environment (Usually $24.99)
- Radium – The easiest way to listen to internet radio on Mac (Usually $24.99)
- Arq – Online backup built especially for the Mac (Usually $29)
- LittleSnapper – Build up your own versatile design scrapbook (Usually $29)
- 1Password – Have you ever forgotten a password? Never again (Usually $39.99)
- Alarms – Prioritise and track your daily tasks (Usually $16.80)
Marketplace Resources
In addition to the above apps, we're also throwing in a few fantastic Envato marketplace items:
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And a Free eBook!
Even if the bundle isn't for you, anyone can grab a free copy of Smashing Magazine's Successful Freelancing eBook, worth $9.95, just for sending out a tweet about the bundle! Head over to the bundle page to find out more, and grab your free eBook.
Don't Miss Out! Grab the Bundle Today
This awesome offer will only be available for 24 hours, and we'd hate for you to miss out. After the timer hits zero, you'll never see another offer of this magnitude again – don't be kicking yourself when you realise the bundle is no longer available tomorrow!


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Rowdy Roddy Piper from They Live is one of the great last-minute Halloween costumes, but what if you wanted to be the cheese-dip faces? Kiersten Essenpreis built these fantastic They Live alien faces using basic craft store masks. I would buy one of these bad boys in a heartbeat (but for my morning commute, not Halloween).
[Spotted on Super Punch]


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Diinglisar Wild Cuddle blankets by Teddykompaniet - Tiger
Receive your purchase now, spread the total cost over 6 weekly automatic payments. Interest free!
Hard to pronounce but easy to love, these furry friends are super cute and so very soft and snuggly - ideal cuddle blankets for baby and a beautiful baby gift.
Adorable and wonderfully soft Diinglisar Wild cuddleblankets by Teddykompaniet are the perfect size for little ones to hold. Choose from elephant, lion, giraffe and tiger.
All the stuffed animals from Teddykompaniet are designed in Sweden and are tested for safety (CE and EN71). Only non-toxic dyes and non-toxic plastics are used.
Machine wash 40°


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Real Madrid clinched the Spanish Supercopa with today's victory over Barcelona, but Lionel Messi still did something remarkably Messi-like on this free kick at the end of the first half. Be sure to watch the replay that begins at the 45-second mark to see the way Messi managed to get the ball outside the wall and back inside the goal post. Pretty routine stuff.
Then again, Ronaldo scored this goal, and his team won. The replay on this one shows the incredibly nifty move Ronaldo made to set it up:


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British artist and Formula One race fan Nikki Douthwaite has taken Seurat's pointilism to a whole new level, creating an eight-by-five portrait of Lewis Hamilton out of discarded hole-punch dots. Roughly 250,000 individual pieces went into the work, which Douthwaite finished just before Hamilton drives for an F1 title attempt at the Brazilian Grand Prix this weekend. But why a race car driver? Says Douthwaite: "I was at the British Grand Prix just a couple of days before I graduated and that's when I decided what I would do next. I am a massive Formula 1 fan and I have been since I was a little girl. And I've always supported McLaren." [Telegraph.co.uk]
Portrait Of F1 Star Lewis Hamilton Created From Hole Punch Dots


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Artist description:
From the moors. I'm completely inept when it comes to using photos for ref, so I don't bother even trying usually, but if anyone's interested, I've posted the images I used as a guide on Deviant Art...sorry, I have no idea how to send a link!
Java Draw Created Feb 13, 2010 470 x 338px Unless noted Copyright 2010 Amaluen.
We encourage you to submit a comment and let the artist know what you think of this drawing. Please log in or join to post a comment.
Post a comment
Wow. That looks awesome. Can just feel what it is like there.
Simply the best ♥
It is absolutely beautiful.................................but a little dreary...............favs.
wow .................... how lovely 5 3
Beautiful, somewhat dreamy atmosphere ! Me faves.
really it is original
Beautiful and so realistic. I can imagine myself being there. VERY cool! 5/5 ♥'s
Wow, this is beautiful! I wish i could draw realistic mist like that 5/5 and faves!
great! love it!


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Start the next Body Buster Fitness Bootcamp Franchise in Halifax!
Everyone needs to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle! The demand for this simple, personalized group fitness for men & women in local Halifax neighbourhoods is fun, friendly & effective. Providing your customers with a successful system which allows members to be held accountable on a results proven routine and having the flexibility to make Body Buster Fitness Halifax apart of their lives around their busy lifestyles. While you explore this exciting franchise business opportunity, we will gladly put you in touch with our franchise owners so they can share their success with you.
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Body Buster Fitness has many franchise ownership and management opportunities. Fill out of our online applications, and our franchise team will contact you with more information.
Visit the Body Buster® Franchise Website for more information on this exciting opportunity. (www.BodyBusterFitness.com/franchise)


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Discuss the upcoming Friendly against American Samoa here...
The 20 Man train-on Squad will be announced later today.
Discuss the upcoming Friendly against American Samoa here...
The 20 Man train-on Squad will be announced later today.
Unfortunately it is obvious no Northern Power player will be picked for the 20 man squad.
Crying shame as we have great potential with Pete and Tharmi acorss the back, and Dave up front.
Unfortunaltey for us, we can;'t compete with the other teams in better positions on the ladder. ..... under cover work has potentially shown that the likes of Gough and Smith are under the influence of drugs.
More to come from bias reporters in the future.
Captain for the Blues.
Code:FC : 129 matches 281 runs @ 1.76 650 wickets @ 28.86, S/R of 41.75 Best Bowling of 8 for 57 39 5-wicket innings, 7 10-wicket matches. Test : 12 matches 8 runs @ 0.62 68 wickets @ 27.99, S/R of 40.22 Best Bowling of 5 for 59 4 5-wicket innings, 0 10-wicket matches.
Expect United to dominate the defence.
The Future of International Cricket - Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina, Ravi Bopara, Tim Southee, Ross Taylor, Shahriar Nafees, Raqibul Hasan, Salman Butt, JP Duminy
Proud Supporter of the Bangladeshi Tigers
Ryan ten Doeschate - A Legend in the Making
MSN: firstname.lastname@example.com
Seems like fighting words, again, Ritchie.Originally Posted by Perm
Let's take this outside.
Originally Posted by Perm
Rumour has it that you are a 7 foot 5, 165 kilogram giant goalie.....
I think i'll just slag you on the pitch, hey.
I thank you for a quiet bevy outside, though.
i doubt thatOriginally Posted by Perm
Originally Posted by benchmark00"Straight-Edge means I'm better than you!"
That's right, plus I have an earring which makes me ultra tough. Nothing wrong with some on field "mental disentigration". Anyway back on topic, if I have a good game today then I hope that puts me in contention for the 20 man train on squad.
Why? We have had 3 cleansheets if I remeber correctly. Plus I haven't had to make many saves which says alot for our defenders.Originally Posted by pinchy81
Announce the squad already please, I'm getting nervous
We're waiting for the ISL v CEN game to be simmed because Swell were late with their teamsheet i believe.Originally Posted by Dravid
Squad will hopefully be announced in the next 2 - 4 hours...
Gough to Lead Cricketweb in First Ever International
Island Swell Captain Kev Gough has been named as the First ever Captain of the Cricketweb National Football side by the FA today.
Gough will lead the nation in its First ever international appearance against American Samoa in the coming weeks, whilst Nathan Hoy has been selected as his deputy.
The Squad announced today was sprinkled with players from all sides.. With plenty of competition across the park. Central United dominated selections with 5 players, whilst the major talking point being competition leaders Western Dynamo were only gaining 3 spots.
The Selection Committee telling the large Press contingent that although the national team would be represented by the majority of this squad, there was still and opportunity for players outside the 20 to gain a start with impressive performances in the coming weeks.
The 20 Man Squad is as Follows:
S Jasotharan (Island Swell)
Zac Ritchie (Central United)
Kyle Wright (Southern Stallions)
Darren Dubb-Lynch (Central United)
Brendon Goff (East Coast Fury)
Nico Borcic (Island Swell)
T Loganathan (Northside Power)
Daniel Rai (Western Dynamo)
Tarick Weber (Central United)
Simon Fitzsimmons (East Coast Fury)
Zac Gelman (Central United)
Nathan Hoy (East Coast Fury) (Vice-Captain)
Dave Richards (Island Swell)
G Roberts (Western Dynamo)
Andrew Cloete (Northside Power)
Ash Chaulk (Southern Stallions)
David Kennett (Western Dynamo)
Kev Gough (Island Swell) (Captain)
Nitin Dravid (East Coast Fury)
Daniel Smith (Central United)
Well done to everyone who made the squad. I can't understand how i made TBH, but well its an honour.
The man, the mountain, the Mathews. The greatest all rounder since Keith Miller. (Y)
Jaffna Jets CC (Battrick & FTP)
RIP WCC and CW Cricket
Member of the MSC, JMAS and CVAAS
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While traditional storage vendors jostled for attention as the supplier of the best platform on which to base public or private storage clouds, Amazon Web Services made significant upgrades to its ability to provide storage as a service:
* AWS in August introduced Glacier, a service focused on long-term data retention. Data in Glacier can be stored for as little as 1 cent per GB per month, but access to that data is slow, and there are penalties for deleting it quickly or accessing more than 5 percent of it.
* At the other extreme was AWS's new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance called High I/O, which provides an SSD front-end to the AWS service for applications requiring high-speed, low-latency access to data in the cloud.
* AWS and NetApp partnered to make NetApp storage arrays inside Amazon-certified co-lo centers work with EC2 and S3 services via AWS Direct Connect.


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|Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
|Advanced Linear Algebra
|Three semester hours.
A continuation of MATH 3310. Focuses on more abstract aspects as well as computational aspects. Topics include inner product spaces, spectral theorems, diagonalization, Hermitian matrices, quadratic forms, numerical linear and Jordan canonical. Prerequisite: MATH 3310.
Home - General Information - Student Services -
Academic Undergraduate Regulations -
Undergraduate Degrees - Academic Graduate Regulations -
Graduate Degrees - Course Descriptions - Faculty -
Appendix A - Appendix B - Appendix C - Appendix D


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|Previous Close
|Expire Date
|Day's Range
|0.0500 - 0.0500
|Contract Range
|Open Interest
The third quarter corporate earnings season is looking gloomy and could test a market that has already been rocked by weak economic data and ongoing trade risks. According to FactSet, a number of companies, such as Wynn Resorts Ltd., Macy's Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc., are already trying to temper investors' expectations ahead of the coming earnings season, warning that Q3 results could be lower than analysts had expected, the Wall Street Journal reports. Wall Street analysts have been cutting back earnings expectations for all 11 sectors in the S&P 500 in recent months as well.
Stocks Down Another 1%-Plus as Q4 Blues Continue
We take a look at the 10 biggest and most-popular ETFs for those investors who are new to the leveraged inverse technique.
As the earnings season begins, ETF investors should keep in mind that the upcoming quarterly results may come up short compared to what we have been accustomed to. If the estimate for a decline holds up, it would mark the first time the S&P 500 reported two straight quarters of year-over-year earnings declines in three years.
Stocks enter 2019 surrounded in uncertainty. Consider using these three inverse index ETFs to short the market in January.
Day trading using leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs) is a high-risk undertaking but can return profit due to the volatile nature of the trade structure.
The decade-old U.S. bull market has been threatened by renewed trade fight lately. Investors could ride out the downbeat sentiments through inverse or leveraged inverse ETFs as these products offer big gains in a short span.
With the return of trade war fears, the Wall Street is likely to post losses for the first time in May in seven years. Investors could easily tap the opportune moment by going short on the S&P 500 Index.
Over the past week the majority of the losses in the indices has occurred overnight while the majority of gains have occurred intraday. If you bought the open each of the last five days and sold the close, you would be nicely profitable.
For the fourth day in a row, market players ignore negative news and aggressively buy weakness. Stocks opened lower on more negative talk from China about trade negotiations but the buyers immediately step in and had the S&P 500 in positive territory within 90 minutes.
These four bear-market inverse ETFs will keep you safe when the market drops.
After reaching a peak last week, Wall Street tumbles with the resurfacing of President Donald Trump's tariff threat. Investors seeking to capitalize the bearish market sentiments in a short span could consider any of the following inverse ETFs.
Investors could stash their cash in the following ETFs that offer stability or even profit if market turmoil worsens.
The primary purpose a trader will want to use leveraged ETFs is to amplify his or her returns. Leveraged ETFs will typically carry two or three times the returns of the index, depending on the product. ...
The basis for the big gap-up open Friday morning was news that indexing of China stocks would increase dramatically. While that caught bears by surprise, it isn't news that has legs. It caused some shorts to cover and created anxiety for underinvested bulls but there is a sharp reversal occurring now and the chasers Friday morning are trapped much like the bears at the close on Thursday.
The indices haven't made much progress for a few days now but they have not succumbed to numerous calls for downside. My methodology is to move incrementally which means taking partial profits into strength and buying partial positions on weakness.
Just like an individual stock, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) can be bought and sold freely via an exchange. This dynamic ability gives traders the option to make quick intraday trades to seek a profit. ...
The S&P 500 is rallying to start 2019, but some traders are expressing a different with the ProShares Short S&P500 (SH) , one of the largest and most heavily traded inverse exchange traded funds in the U.S. Rather, the ProShares product is designed to deliver the daily inverse performance of the S&P 500. For example, if the S&P 500 falls by 1% on a particular day, SH should rise by a similar amount.


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Every time I drive through Portola Valley at night I get a glimpse of the old Alpine Inn building all lit up with the neon lights but cars are always parked out front. When the bar closes for the night they usually turn off the neon lights. Occasionally they leave the lights on after they close but I never have my camera with me. Finally, on the way home from celebrating a wonderful Boxing Day evening at the Nuttals I had my camera and the lights were left on and I was able to snap this photo!
Alpine InnBoxing DayCaliforniaChristmasD300sDecemberHDRHigh Dynamic RangeNikkorNikonNikon D300sPhotomatixPhotomatix ProPhotoshopPortola ValleySigncoorsglowinnneonreflectionrossottirossotti'srossottissierra nevadasignssnapple


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Since time immemorial, man has gazed upon the majestic rim of the mighty Grand Canyon and wondered: could I drive my car into that shit and not be dead? One
dumb brave driver has answered the question.
An unidentified 21 year-old in Arizona totally drove his car over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Accidentally, he says. Who are we to judge? They found his wrecked car "200 feet below the rim, lodged against a tree." But that is not even the hardcorest part!
He told responding park rangers that he had extricated himself from the crashed vehicle and climbed up to the rim to seek help.
If only he'd chewed his arm off on the way up, he could have gotten a movie deal.
[AP; photo via Andrew Davidoff/ Flickr]


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Fresh from the Broadway stage, "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is set to make its Knoxville area debut at Oak Ridge Playhouse tonight (Friday).
Fresh from the Broadway stage, "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is set to make its Knoxville area debut at Oak Ridge Playhouse tonight (Friday).
The Christopher Durang comedy with the funny name won the Tony for Best Play in 2013, as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.
But just who are Vanya and Sonia, et al? Middle-aged siblings, Vanya and Sonia enjoy a quiet country life in their childhood home in Bucks County, Pa., although they spend most of their time bickering and complaining. Their serene world is interrupted by the return of their dazzling Hollywood movie star sister Masha and her boy-toy Spike.
Although Durang has borrowed names from characters found in the plays of Anton Chekov, the author does not consider his play a parody. More accurately, it is a hysterical hodgepodge of themes from Chekhov's plays. The story of an impromptu family reunion gone wrong is handled with Durang's comic genius as old resentments flare up and rivalry, regret, and chaos ensue.
Directed by Managing Artistic Director Reggie Law, the cast includes Jim Richardson as Vanya, Kathy Talent as Sonia, Laurel Williams as Masha, Mark Jennings as Spike, Alyse McCamish as Nina, and Robin Vanleigh as Cassandra.
"Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" opens at 8 tonight (Friday), followed by a performance at 8 p.m. Saturday, and a matinee at 2 p.m. Sunday.
Performances continue Thursday, Aug. 28, Friday, Aug. 29, and Saturday, Aug. 30, at 8 p.m., with a final matinee on Sunday, Aug. 31, at 2 p.m.
The show contains mature language.
For more information, log on to www.orplayhouse.com or call (865) 482-9999. Tickets range in price from $16 to $22 depending on performance date. This production is also made possible through support from WUOT 91.9 FM and the Tennessee Arts Commission.


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Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they've been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation.
The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.
Gasparine wasn't much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he'd discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery's motto was "Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People." It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?
Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery's answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine's idea was different. It spoke to Calagione's own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn't be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. "I told him to get a shitload," he remembers. "We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition."
Gasparine, by then, had begun to have second thoughts. No lumbermill he knew had ever cut so much palo santo, and he wasn't sure that any could. Bulnesia sarmientoi is a weedy, willowy tree, sometimes called ironwood. It's difficult to get large boards out of it, and even small ones can dull a saw blade. Wood experts rate a species' hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board. Yellow pine rates around seven hundred, oak twice as high. Palo santo hovers near forty-five hundred—three times as high as rock maple. It's one of the two or three hardest woods in the world.
Gasparine eventually found some Paraguayans willing to fill the order. On one trip, they took him to the forest where the palo santo grew, a twelve-hour bus ride from Asunción followed by a half day's drive into the wilderness. Three rough-looking millworkers had agreed to accompany him, led by a bullet-headed giant named Carlos. At one point, a herd of wild boars crossed the road, but Carlos didn't slow down. He plowed straight over a boar and kept on going.
When they finally arrived, one of the millworkers pulled out a large cooking knife. "He said he was going to prove to me that these were palo-santo trees," Gasparine remembers. " 'We'll cut away the bark and you can smell it!' Then he starts hacking away for five or ten minutes. Nothing. Can't get through the sapwood. So the monster Carlos goes at it. The blade looks like a butter knife in his hand. Nothing." After a while, Carlos turned to one of his sidekicks and sent him back to the truck. When he returned, he was holding a .38-calibre pistol. "Now I'm a little more than freaked out," Gasparine says. Carlos took the pistol, swivelled it toward the tree, and fired a single shot from five feet away. The bullet struck with a dull thud, then fell harmlessly to the ground.
The barrel that Dogfish built is now housed at its main brewery, in Milton, Delaware. It's fifteen feet high and ten feet in diameter, and holds nine thousand gallons. When Calagione took me to see it in August, a pallet of leftover palo santo was stacked nearby. The staves, streaked with a greenish-brown grain, felt disproportionately heavy, as if subject to a stronger gravity—one part wood, one part white dwarf star. The barrel was built by a father-and-son firm in Buffalo, Calagione said, and cost about a hundred and forty thousand dollars—three times the price of the oak barrel beside it. "If Dogfish were a publicly traded company, I'd have been fired for building this," he said.
Calagione is thirty-nine. That day, as on most days, he was wearing flip-flops, cargo pants, and a threadbare T-shirt, and looked about as concerned with liquidity as the customers bellied up at the brewery's bar, drinking free samples. When tour groups visit Dogfish, they're greeted by a quote on the wall from Emerson's essay on self-reliance: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," it begins. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Calagione doesn't seem, at first, to fit this cantankerous creed. His nonconformity is of an agreeable sort: brewing beer, keeping his own hours, living by the shore with his high-school sweetheart and their two children. For a while after college, he did some modelling, and he still looks as if he belonged in, well, a Budweiser commercial. He has a surfer's loose, long-muscled frame and perpetual tan. His chiselled features are set in a squarish head and topped by a thick black ruff. When he talks, his lips twist slightly to the side and his voice comes out low and woolly, like a crooner's at a speakeasy. "Just get a whiff of that wood," he said.
I leaned forward and put my nose to the grain. The barrel was more than a year old, but the wood smelled freshly milled. A sharp, spicy, resinous scent came off it, like incense and mulled wine. To stand up to its aroma, Calagione said, he had filled the barrel with a strong brown beer. It was made with three kinds of hops, five kinds of wheat and barley, a dose of unrefined cane sugar, and a sturdy Scottish ale yeast. It had a creamy head when poured, like a Guinness stout, and contained about twelve per cent alcohol—two and a half times as much as a Budweiser. Calagione called it Palo Santo Marron. It was an extreme beer, he said, but to most people it wouldn't have tasted like beer at all. There were hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood's spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made.
America used to be full of odd beers. In 1873, the country had some four thousand breweries, working in dozens of regional and ethnic styles. Brooklyn alone had nearly fifty. Beer was not only refreshing but nutritious, it was said—a "valuable substitute for vegetables," as a member of the United States Sanitary Commission put it during the Civil War. The lagers brewed by Adolphus Busch and Frederick Pabst were among the best. In 1878, Maureen Ogle notes in her recent book "Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer," Busch's St. Louis Lager took on more than a hundred European beers at a competition in Paris. The lager came home with the gold, causing an "immense sensation," in the words of a reporter from the Times.
Then came Prohibition, followed hard by industrialization. Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it. A generation raised on Coca-Cola had a hard time readjusting to beer's bitterness, and brewers diluted their recipes accordingly. In 1953, Miller High Life was dismissed by one competitor as a beer for "women and beginners." Within a decade, most other beers were just as flavorless.
Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling. In 1965, the United States had a single craft brewery: Anchor Brewing, in San Francisco. Today, there are nearly fifteen hundred. In liquor stores and upscale supermarkets, pumpkin ales and chocolate stouts compete for cooler space with wit beers, weiss beers, and imperial Pilsners. The King of Beers, once served in splendid isolation at many bars, is now surrounded by motley bottles with ridiculous names, like jesters at a Renaissance fair: SkullSplitter, Old Leghumper, Slam Dunkel, Troll Porter, Moose Drool, Power Tool, He'brew, and Ale Mary Full of Taste.
Dogfish is something of a mascot for this unruly movement. In the thirteen years since Calagione founded the brewery, it has gone from being the smallest in the country to the thirty-eighth largest. Calagione makes more beer with at least ten per cent alcohol than any other brewer, and his odd ingredients are often drawn from ancient or obscure beer traditions. The typical Dogfish ale is made with about four times as much grain as an industrial beer (hence its high alcohol content) and about twenty times as much hops (hence its bitterness). It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.
"We are trying to explore the outer edges of what beer can be," Calagione says. But the idea makes even some craft brewers nervous. "I find the term 'extreme beer' irredeemably pejorative," Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, told me recently. "When a brewer says, 'This has more hops in it than anything you've had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,' it's sort of like a chef saying, 'This stew has more salt in it than anything you've ever had—are you man enough to eat it?' "
Dogfish makes some very fine beers, Oliver says. But its reputation has been built on ales like its 120 Minute I.P.A., one of the strongest beers of its kind in the world. I.P.A. stands for India pale ale, an especially hoppy British style first made in the eighteenth century for the long sea voyage to the subcontinent. (Hops are a natural preservative as well as a flavoring.) A typical I.P.A. has six per cent alcohol and forty I.B.U.s—brewers' parlance for international bittering units. Calagione's version has eighteen per cent alcohol and a hundred and twenty I.B.U.s. It's brewed for two hours, with continuous infusions of hops, then fermented with still more hops. "I don't find it pleasant to drink," Oliver says. "I find it unbalanced and shrieking."
Others find it thrilling. "When you're trying to create new brewing techniques and beer styles, you have to have a certain recklessness," Jim Koch, whose Boston Beer Company brews Samuel Adams, and who coined the term "extreme beer," told me. "Sam has that. He's fearless, but he's also got a good palate. He doesn't put stuff into beer that doesn't deserve to be there."
The debate goes back, in one form or another, nearly five hundred years. According to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or Purity Law, of 1516, beer can be made with only three ingredients: water, hops, and barley. (Yeast was left off the list because brewers didn't know it existed; beer was naturally fermented, like sourdough bread.) German brewers still observe a version of the Reinheitsgebot, but Belgian brewers, just across the border, have cheerfully renounced it. Their krieks, wits, lambics, and gueuzes are among the world's most remarkable beers, yet they're often made with fruits or spices, or fortified with sugar, to become as potent as wine.
In America, brewers have long followed the German model: our major industrial breweries were all founded by German-Americans. But Calagione and others have lately wandered over to the Belgian side—and kept on going. "I'd probably be arrested, tarred and feathered, if I stepped off a plane in Berlin," Calagione told me. Extreme brewers have helped turn American brewing into the most influential in the world. But they've also raised a basic question: When does beer cease to be beer?
On my first night in Delaware, I found a manila folder waiting for me at my hotel. It was filled with printouts of an e-mail exchange from earlier that year, between Calagione and a brewer in Finland named Juha Ikonen. Calagione was trying to find ingredients for a rustic juniper-flavored beer known as sahti, which Finnish farmers began making as early as the ninth century. He had tried to get Ikonen to send him whole juniper branches with needles intact, so that he could lay them in the bottom of his brewing vessel. But Ikonen thought the branches might get moldy on the flight over. In the end, they'd settled on juniper berries, hand-picked in Finland two weeks earlier. "Welcome Burk," Calagione had scrawled on the folder. "Tomorrow we are so brewing Sahtea (our version of Sahti). . . . See ya in the Inn Foyer @ 8:30. *Beers in the fridge."
The next morning, Calagione pulled up at the hotel in an old Dodge pickup truck. It looked like something out of "Paper Moon": bulbous fenders, pop-eyed headlamps, red paint weathered nearly to pink. On the tailgate, Calagione had stencilled a line adapted from William Carlos Williams: "So much depends on a red wheelbarrow." He had bought the truck from some firefighters in Rochester, he told me, and used it mostly as a family car. (Later that week, it would make an appearance at a "Touch the Truck!" event for toddlers.) But it was also handy for hauling supplies. In the back were a pitchfork, a large bag of Indian spices, and about twenty gray river rocks, collected by the brewery's maintenance man. What the rocks were for, I'd soon find out.
"Sam is a wonderful showman," Garrett Oliver told me. "He almost conceives the beer around the story. He'll think, Wouldn't it be cool if we carried the beer down the street and everyone put something new into it!" This is partly a matter of clever marketing and partly of a genuine creative temperament. Calagione has written or co-written three books on beer. He designs many of Dogfish's labels and cites Andy Warhol and Coco Chanel as inspirations—"that fusion of commercialism and art." The Emerson quote at the brewery's entrance is both an eloquent mission statement and a reminder, as Calagione told some Dogfish fans when I was there, to "keep on drinking the good shit!"
Like most craft brewers, Calagione came to beer from something else. He grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the middle child of an oral surgeon and the heir to a long line of winemakers. His father and his uncle used to drive to Worcester to meet the trains that brought grapes from California. When they got home, and the juice had been stomped out in the basement, Sam would help bottle it. The process seems to have stripped him of any reverence toward the product. His forefathers worked hard making wine, he recently wrote, "so that I might have the opportunity to produce a superior beverage."
Calagione was a bright student and a scrappy athlete (to keep his weight up for the football team, his father made him eat a cheesesteak every night at ten-thirty). But by the spring of his senior year, at Northfield Mount Hermon prep, he had so many demerits that he was expelled. His offenses were of the usual Animal House variety: flipping a truck on campus; breaking into the skating rink and playing naked hockey; "surfing" on the roof of a Winnebago, going sixty miles per hour down I-91. As a junior, Calagione sometimes waited outside a local liquor store and got customers to buy him a case of beer. Back at school, he hid the bottles in his hockey bag and sold them to other students at a profit. "I remember when I got busted," he told me. "The dean said, 'You think you can make a living doing this?' I didn't have the foresight to say, 'Yeah, maybe someday.' "
He never did graduate from high school, though he went on to earn a bachelor's degree in English, at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania. In 1992, he moved to Manhattan, to take writing classes at Columbia and work toward a Master of Fine Arts. It was there, while waiting tables at Nacho Mama's Burritos in Morningside Heights, that he had his first taste of craft beer. Emboldened by the home-brewing movement, and the success of beers like New Albion, Sierra Nevada, and Samuel Adams, more than two hundred craft breweries had opened in the previous decade, as well as swarms of microbreweries and brewpubs. (A craft brewery, according to the Brewers Association, is one that produces less than two million barrels a year; a microbrewery produces less than fifteen thousand; and a brewpub serves at least a quarter of its beer in house.) Before long, Calagione was brewing beer in his apartment—his first was a sour-cherry ale—and spending his afternoons at the New York Public Library, researching the beer industry.
"I looked around and saw three breweries basically ruling the United States," he told me. All but one per cent of the beer sold in the U.S. was still made by Miller, Coors, and Anheuser-Busch, along with mid-sized and foreign breweries such as Pabst and Heineken. And while craft breweries made wonderful beer, they were mostly focussed on classic German and British styles, such as pale ale and Pilsner. Calagione had something else in mind. "I'd read a copy of Michael Jackson's 'World Guide to Beer,' and I thought, Holy shit! There are people out there making beer with fruit! There are Scottish ales made with heather flowers! Maybe I can make a living making beer that isn't like anything else." It was an opportunity to play David to the beer industry's Goliaths, he says. "It was the same kind of thing that got me kicked out of prep school."
Dogfish Head Brewings and Eats, the pub that Calagione opened in 1995, sits on the main drag of Rehoboth Beach, on Delaware's southern shore. The pub's name comes from a peninsula in Maine where Calagione spent summers as a boy; its location was inspired by his wife, Mariah, who grew up nearby. (She's now co-owner of the brewery and its marketing director.) The property is only four blocks from the ocean, but was long considered snakebit. "Everyone said it was too far from the boardwalk," Calagione says. "This isn't Manhattan. People don't like to walk." Still, he liked the large parking lot and the shambling, open-raftered dining room. And he knew something the locals didn't: Delaware was one of the last eight states in the country without a brewery. Publicity alone, he thought, ought to keep the place afloat for a while. Or at least until he learned to make beer.
As it turned out, there was a reason that Delaware had no breweries like Calagione's. Prohibition had been over for sixty years, but it was still illegal for a pub to bottle and distribute its own beer. Calagione found this out not long after he'd signed the lease. Luckily, Delaware was also very small and very friendly to business. "I literally drove to Dover, asked which one is the House and which is the Senate, and started knocking on doors," he remembers. "They said, 'You want to do what, son? Well, write up a bill!' " Six months later, the governor signed the bill into law. The only hitch had come when Calagione was applying for his liquor license, and one of the commissioners brought up his recent arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. Calagione admitted to the incident—a few weeks earlier, on his way home from a restaurant, he'd run into a parked car and dislocated his shoulder—but added a small correction. The actual infraction was a P.U.I., he said: pedalling under the influence. "Commissioner, I was on a bicycle."
The tavern was a success from the day it opened. The beer took a little longer. Calagione had brewed fewer than ten batches before coming to Delaware, and he rarely used the same recipe twice. "I'd just grab herbs and spices and fruits from the kitchen and throw them in," he says. "I used to think, Oh, it's cool that every batch tastes different. It's like snowflakes!" The pub's brewing equipment consisted of three fifteen-gallon kegs on propane burners, and a rack of modified kegs for fermenting the beer. To keep up with demand, Calagione had to brew two or three times a day, every day; between shifts he slept on a mattress in the cellar. When the beer was ready, he and two employees would don ski goggles and green garbage bags and bottle the beer by hand, with a siphon and mechanical capper. In ten hours they could fill a hundred cases.
"It was a hot ghetto mess," Bryan Selders, Dogfish's lead brewer, remembers. By the time Selders arrived, in 2002, Calagione had jury-rigged some larger kettles out of stainless-steel tanks from a yogurt factory. To reach the cooked barley, or mash, Selders had to climb onto a metal grate twelve feet high and straddle the edge of the boiling kettle—one foot on the grate, the other on the kettle's lid. Once, during a morning production meeting, Selders fell in. "The lid just gave way," he says. The mash in the kettle was hot—around a hundred and fifty degrees—but came only to the tops of his boots. "I went home, took a shower, watched a little Sally Jessy, and came back."
Dogfish was on the verge of bankruptcy for many of those years. More than seven hundred craft breweries opened in the United States between 1995 and 2000, yet their combined market share increased by less than a quarter. Some brewers were too inexperienced to make good beer—a 1996 issue of Consumer Reports found a number of the most expensive brands "flawed and stale-tasting"—others too cynical. Companies like Bad Frog simply contracted other breweries to make beer for them, then slapped on a silly label—in this case, a frog flipping off customers. The industrial breweries, meanwhile, were busy acquiring and buying shares in smaller companies (Celis, Shipyard, Red Hook, Widmer) or creating fake craft beers of their own: Blue Moon, Red Wolf, Eisbock, Elk Mountain. When most of those beers failed, their owners settled for squeezing craft brewers from the other side: paying bar owners and distributors to carry only their products. "It was economic Darwinism," Calagione says. "Supply finally overtook demand."
Dogfish's ragged beginnings were its saving grace, he says. "If we'd bought a turnkey brewhouse for three hundred thousand dollars, I have no doubt in my mind that we would have gone bust." The restaurant paid for the brewery at first, then the brewery grew as the beer improved. By working in small batches, Calagione became an experimental brewer a decade before it was fashionable. He made a medieval gruit with yarrow root and grains of paradise. He made an African tej with bitter gesho bark and raw honey. He made a stout with roasted chicory and St.-John's-wort ("The world's only antidepressant depressant," he called it). While other brewers were dyeing their beer green for St. Patrick's Day, Calagione brewed his with blue-green algae. "It tasted like appetizing pond scum," he says. "The first sip, you were like, 'Wow, that tasted like pond scum. But you know what? I kind of want a second sip.' "
His customers were forgiving, if not always enthusiastic. When Calagione bottled his first twelve-ounce beers for sale in New Jersey, he decided to celebrate with a publicity stunt. He would build a wooden boat and row the beer across Delaware Bay—a distance of eighteen nautical miles. "The idea was handmade beer from a handmade boat," he says. "But I forgot to get press releases out." When he arrived, there were four fans to greet him.
The turning point came in 1999, when Calagione was watching a cooking show on television. The chef, who was making a soup, was saying that several grindings of pepper, added to the pot at different points, would give the dish more flavor than a single dose added at the beginning. Not long afterward, at a Salvation Army store, Calagione came across an old electric football set—the kind with a playing field that vibrates to send miniature players skittering across it. Back at home, he found a five-gallon bucket and drilled some holes in the bottom. He laid a pair of wooden blocks on the football set, put the bucket on the blocks, and strapped the whole thing together with duct tape. ("Pretty high-tech M.I.T. stuff," he says.) Later, when his kettle was boiling, he put hops in the bucket, perched his contraption at a slant above the kettle, and set the game vibrating. Soon, a steady stream of hops was falling through the bucket onto the playing field and sliding into the kettle.
The beer born of that experiment, known as 60 Minute I.P.A., is still Calagione's biggest seller. He calls it a beer geek's idea of a "session beer"—mild enough to be consumed in quantity, but with an unexpected kick. It has the bright, citrusy bouquet of a much hoppier brew, without the bitterness. Wine Enthusiast tasted hints of rose petal, tangerine, orange zest, and nutmeg in it, and rated it a "classic."
The extreme-beer era was under way.
The pub in Rehoboth is now a proper experimental brewery. Although most of Dogfish's beer is made at its large modern facility in Milton, twenty minutes away, Calagione and his staff use the old equipment once a month to try out new recipes. "I need my brewers to be able to blow off steam," he told me, as we were driving to the pub that morning to make the Finnish sahti. If he had to brew the same beer every day, he said, he knew how he'd feel. He cocked his forefinger and put it to his temple.
The experimental beers are served on tap in the pub, at festivals, and at beer dinners that Calagione hosts around the country. Dogfish still doesn't advertise, aside from a few small notices in industry magazines, relying instead on word of mouth from "beer evangelists," as Calagione calls them. Whenever a beer is released, he monitors the chatter on Internet forums like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. If he has a hit, and it's not too expensive to produce (the arctic-cloudberry ale averaged out to about nineteen dollars a snifter), he has Bryan Selders reformulate it for the larger brewery.
Selders arrived about an hour after we did, driving a van filled with sacks of grain. He was wearing what looked like a gas-station attendant's uniform, with his name stitched over one front pocket and the Dogfish logo over the other. His hair was gelled into a miniature Mohawk—more Tintin than Billy Idol—and his eyes, framed by thick black glasses, wore their usual look of ironic bewilderment. Selders, who is thirty-three, was a painter and ska guitarist before he became a brewer. When he and Calagione aren't making beer, they sometimes perform together at the pub as a beer-themed hip-hop duo called the Pain Relievaz (sample lyrics: "You're the barley virgin that my malt mill will deflour"). At work, they maintain an amiably fractious relationship, built on a role reversal of sorts. Selders plays the boss, the beleaguered perfectionist, searching for efficiencies and citing studies from brewing journals; Calagione plays the wayward talent, sloppy but charismatic and, occasionally, inspired. "I'm a little scared of this project, to be honest with you," Selders told me, as he was lugging the grain into the brewhouse. "Sam's ideas . . . the execution doesn't always match the theory."
Every beer is a brewer's invention to some degree—a combination of ingredients that could never be found in nature. A barrel of crushed grapes, left to its own devices, can turn into a crude sort of Beaujolais nouveau. The winemaker's job is mostly to prod the process along. That isn't true of beer. For grain to turn into an ale or lager, it has to be malted, cooked, strained, cooked, strained, fermented in a barrel, and sometimes again in a bottle. "Mother Nature makes wine," Calagione likes to say. "Brewers make beer."
Which isn't to say that beer is any less natural, or less subject to nature's vagaries. One year, a drought in the Dakotas may leave the barley with half its usual starch. The next, a hot summer in the Yakima Valley could turn the hops less bitter. The water in the mash may be hard or soft (Bavarian water is great for dark lagers, not so good for pale ales), the fermentation tanks sealed tight or exposed to the open air. And at the end of the process lies a notoriously finicky organism. All brewing yeasts eventually run out of sugar or self-destruct, poisoning themselves on their own alcohol. Only the hardiest strains—"freaks of nature," Calagione calls them—can produce the most potent beers. Dogfish has its own yeast-propagation lab, but some strains give up too soon, causing what's known as a stuck fermentation. "Our brewery is a hundred people relying on a few billion yeast cells," Calagione says. "Sometimes they outvote us."
There's no reason, given all these variables, that a given beer should always taste the same. We expect a Merlot to change from year to year, crop to crop. Why not a Michelob? Beer has been an industrial commodity for so long that it no longer seems an organic substance. And brewing, in its complexity, allows just enough control to maintain the illusion. If winemakers are Dionysian, brewers have had to become Apollonian. Age will only improve a Bordeaux, winemakers say. Brewers tend to prefer their beer fresh, exactly as they made it. Their skill lies in compensating for nature as much as collaborating with it.
Then again most brewers don't make beer with rocks. When sahti was first brewed, in the Middle Ages, Calagione told me, Finnish farmers used wooden kettles. The wood couldn't be set directly on a fire, so the brewers heated up rocks and threw them into the mash, caramelizing the barley and giving it a smoky flavor. Calagione wanted to use the same method, but he wasn't sure that he had the right material. "I told my maintenance guy to get rocks without a lot of quartz in them," he said. "Otherwise, when they get hot, they'll explode in your face."
The brewhouse was a cinder-block mudroom to the side of the building, with a trio of blackened kettles inside. When Selders had dumped the grain into the mash kettle—three hundred and fifty pounds of malted Pilsner barley and fifty-five pounds of rye—Calagione loaded the rocks from the truck into a wheelbarrow and rolled them into the kitchen. The pub's menu was designed around a wood-fired grill, used to cook burgers, steaks, seafood, and beer-battered pizza. (The beef came from cows fed on the brewery's spent grain.) Calagione strapped on a pair of safety glasses and peered into the oak and hickory embers. "If there are no second-degree burns, I'll call this a success," he said. Then he heaved in a rock, sending up a shower of sparks. "Let me know if they start to explode," he told one of the cooks.
The grain had been cooked to mash by now, and a thick, lacy foam had bubbled to the surface. It was here that A. E. Housman's famous lines—"Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man"—were borne out. When grain is partially sprouted, it builds up enzymes that can break down starch and turn it into sugar. In a living seed, this sugar fuels the plant's growth. In beer, it's digested by yeast, producing alcohol. The foam on the mash was a sign that the enzymes were at work. After an hour or so, the malty liquid, known as wort, would be strained off and cooked again with hops and flavorings. (Malt and hops are the yin and yang of beer: the one sweet, the other bitter.) Once it cooled, the yeast would go in, and the beer would be left to ferment, producing an array of flavor compounds in addition to alcohol: peppery phenols, fruity esters, and so on. "Beer is all about what your yeast is doing," Selders said.
The year before, Selders had taken some wort intended for 60 Minute I.P.A., divided it into four batches, and added a different yeast to each. "They turned into four completely different beers," he said. His favorite was made with a German Kölsch strain, used in the delicate straw-colored ales of Cologne. For the sahti, Calagione had decided on a Hefeweizen strain instead. He had read that Finnish brewers used baker's yeast to make a spicy but slightly chalky beer. The Hefeweizen yeast would provide similar hints of clove and banana, he hoped, "but without the weirdness."
When the mash had been cooking for a while, Selders climbed onto a stool and took a temperature reading: a hundred and fifty-five degrees. "We're ready for the rocks," he said. Calagione grabbed his pitchfork and hurried back to the kitchen. Inside the stove, the rocks were white-hot. A few had burst apart, though not loudly enough to alarm the cooks: the kitchen radio was turned up high, to Bob Dylan braying over a squall of Gypsy violin. Calagione stabbed his pitchfork into the flames and lifted out a rock balanced on the tines. "This is going to be an adventure," he said, dumping it into the wheelbarrow with a clang.
Soon, he and the pub's manager, Jason, were running back and forth between the brewhouse and the stove, carrying rocks in oven mitts or between metal plates. As the rocks plopped into the mash, they sent up jets of steam and glutinous bubbles, until the whole kettle was boiling. Calagione stripped off his mitts, now charred beyond use, and threw them to the ground. His face was bright red and sheened with sweat. "When we do this next year, at the big brewery, we'll use the rocks outside in a small tank," he said. "Then we'll mix that mash in with the rest inside."
Selders rolled his eyes. "Yes . . . it is already done," he said, wiggling his fingers as if casting a spell. Later, when I asked what he thought about Calagione's plan, he shook his head. "Yeah. Not going to happen." But Calagione overheard him. "They didn't want to do continual hopping, either!" he said.
The last stage of the brewing process was the most unorthodox. Traditionally, sahti is flavored with juniper alone, but Calagione wanted something more unusual. After the hops and the juniper berries had been added to the wort, he took the bag of spices from his truck and steeped it in a bucket of hot water. The mixture contained cardamom, coriander, ginger, allspice, rampe leaves, lemongrass, curry powder, and black tea, custom blended for Calagione in India. It would be added at the last moment, he said, so that its volatile flavors wouldn't boil off. The idea was to amplify the already spicy flavors of the juniper berries and the Hefeweizen yeast—to turn the sahti into Sahtea.
Selders walked over to the bucket and crouched down beside it. He took a wooden spoon and trailed it through the inky gunk. "You want to use all of this?" he said. "Because this is a lot of tea, dude."
Calagione nodded, a little sheepishly. "We'll see. We might want to use all of it."
Selders stared at the tea. He lifted a spoonful to his nose and took a cautious sniff. "So you went with curry, huh?"
"Nowhere near as much as I did with coriander and lemongrass."
"My God."
Restraint can have its advantages. A well-made German beer is both tasty and relatively wholesome: in Bavaria, it's considered a foodstuff and included in soldiers' rations. It's unlikely to give you a headache, upset your stomach, or cause an allergic reaction, as the acids and biological amines in Belgian lambics may, and it can have a surprising range of flavors—from sweet Helles to dark Doppelbock to smoky Rauchbier. The strictures of the Reinheitsgebot have helped turn German brewers into the most resourceful and technically capable in the world. By mixing and matching strains of yeast, varieties of hops, and pale or roasted grains, they can produce almost any flavor found in fruit or spice. With three ingredients, they can give the illusion of a dozen.
The same discipline, if not creativity, has helped make Budweiser the most popular beer in the world. Its sheer consistency, across tens of billions of bottles and cans, is a technical marvel, and even the crankiest craft brewers harbor a secret admiration for it. When I was in Belgium recently, I visited the Trappist monastery at Orval, near the French Ardennes. Orval is home to one of the world's great beers: a dry, earthy, multilayered concoction made with brewer's yeast and a wild strain called Brettanomyces. The monastery is circled by sandstone walls like a medieval fortress (it was founded in the twelfth century and rebuilt in the nineteen-twenties), but its brewery is as high tech as any I've seen. From the grain bins in the attic to the onion-domed copper kettles on the middle floors to the fermentation tanks in the basement, the operation is largely gravity-driven and computer-controlled—an android in a monk's robe.
I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. "Budweiser!" he said. "Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!" He smiled. "I know they detest it, but it is quite good." Later, though, when he described the newest beers coming out of Belgium, they sounded a good deal closer to Calagione's. "People would rather pay a little more and have a special product than to pay a lot for a Pilsner and have something banal," he said. "I like Budweiser, but I wouldn't pay two euros for a Budweiser."
Even at Dogfish, the line between high end and low, industrial and craft, can get blurry. As Selders was piping the cooked wort into the fermentation tank that day, he turned to Calagione and me with a grin. "Is everyone excited about Budweiser American Ale?" he said. "It's going to taste great!" Calagione gave him a flat, brooding look. He knew he was being baited. Anheuser-Busch had been advertising its newest product all summer, clearly targeting the craft-beer market. Like other ales, the new beer is brewed at a relatively high temperature with a top-fermenting yeast. It's a little fruitier and more full-flavored than regular Budweiser, which, like all lagers, is brewed at a lower temperature with a bottom-fermenting yeast. In regular Budweiser, the bitterness of the hops is kept "at the threshold of perception," in Garrett Oliver's words. American Ale has more of a bite, thanks to a dose of whole Cascade hops—a craft-brewer favorite—that's added to the beer during a second fermentation.
"Those people know what they're doing," Selders said, goading Calagione. "What, you don't think it's true?"
"I think they can make a technically correct beer. But I don't even want to try it."
"As a brewer, you're obligated to try it."
"To give you some context for why it's so distasteful to me," Calagione said. "At the same time that they're making this relatively hoppy wanna-be craft beer that exists only to confuse the consumer—so that they can be culture vultures—they are running ads that say that the darker a beer is the more impurities it has. It's beer racism."
"Beer racism!"
"You don't see the hypocrisy in that?"
"I see it. But if you are going to take that stance you shouldn't shop at Food Lion, shouldn't go to Borders, shouldn't do any of that stuff."
Calagione shrugged and grabbed a shovel, then climbed into the kettle and began scooping out the spent mash. He liked to frame his business as an epic battle between small, stouthearted brewers and their evil industrial overlords. But his loyalty to craft beer was more in the manner of a guy who has rooted for the underdog all his life. (His own football teams, in junior high and high school, had a combined record of 0–72–2). "Look," he told me later. "I'm not afraid to pay compliments where compliments are due. Anheuser-Busch's quality—if quality is consistency—is second to none. But I'm frustrated that that one beer has been hammered down people's throats. I mean, banana cream pie may be your favorite fucking food. But if you ate banana cream pie every day you would hate it, too."
Every year at the end of the summer, Calagione throws a bocce tournament in Milton, on the brewery's two oyster-shell courts. "Bocce's an Italian thing," he says. "But it's also a sport that you can play without putting down your beer." The tournament culminates in the evening, when a large catapult is rolled out onto the lawn. The catapult was built by Frank Payton, the same maintenance man who found the river rocks for the sahti, and was designed to hurl pumpkins—a fall tradition in Delaware. In this case, it's armed with thirty cans of industrial beer and fired, with a precision born of years of practice, into a gargantuan sculpture of a toilet a hundred yards away. "We tried to throw a keg once," Calagione told me. "But it misfired and knocked down a street lamp."
The event evokes earlier, wackier days, but its anti-establishment vibe can seem a little at odds with the rather large factory beside it. Dogfish now sells about twenty-five million bottles' worth of beer a year. It has almost quadrupled in size since 2004, but still can't meet demand: about a fifth of its orders go unfilled. Calagione's salvaged kettles have been replaced by a state-of-the-art brewery, his ski goggles and garbage bags by an automated bottle-filling line and a three-person microbiology department. (Every beer is tested forty times per batch, including blind tastings in a sensory lab.) When the facility expanded last year, the roof had to be cut open so that a crane could drop in nine new three-story tanks. Well before that, the brewery's wastewater had overwhelmed the town's sewage system: the yeasts in it were outcompeting the bacteria used for waste treatment. The water is now trucked out several times a day and sprayed on local farms.
"Sam is the Adolphus Busch of his generation," the beer historian Maureen Ogle told me. But he has plenty of rivals. Koch's Boston Beer Company, for one, still makes twenty-five times more beer. The Darwinian beer wars of the past decade have tended to leave the best brewers standing. While sales of wine and spirits grew by between two and four per cent last year, craft-beer sales grew by twelve per cent. "Part of what we're seeing is a return to normality," Garrett Oliver told me. "It's weird for a country of three hundred million to have one kind of beer. But we're getting back to what we had before—and unless we go into a deep depression it's never going back."
Oliver, who is forty-six and black, with a trim beard and a resonant voice, has done his best to become the respectable face of craft brewing—its Orson Welles. While Calagione wears jeans and a rumpled shirt even on the "Today" show, Oliver attends almost every event in a jacket and tie. One blazer bears the Brooklyn Brewery logo, woven in steel by the same tailors who stitch crests for the British Royal Family, and his beers have some of the same suavity. "From what I've seen, a lot of people still think of us as kids playing with toys," he told me. "So anything I can do to ennoble beer is worthwhile, whether dressing up the packaging or dressing up for a beer dinner."
For all its success, craft beer has yet to reach the mainstream. Ninety-six per cent of the market—about sixty-seven billion bottles a year—still belongs to non-craft beers and imports. Oliver remembers talking to a brewer at Anheuser-Busch a few years ago, when sales of Michelob had fallen to about a third of a billion bottles a year. "He told me, 'I wish that brand would just die.' And that one beer was the size of the entire American craft-brewing industry." The disparity is partly a function of poor marketing, Ogle argues—craft brewers are still preaching to the converted—and partly of cultural conditioning. Until more Americans wean themselves from ketchup, soda, and other sweet foods, they may never enjoy the taste of hops. "When I talk to people like Sam, I'm constantly amazed at how persuaded they are that everyone drinks craft beer," she says. "If that's true, why are they still sitting at four per cent?"
In a decade's time, Oliver believes, breweries like his could claim a quarter of the market. (Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, predicts something closer to ten per cent in twenty years.) But only if they don't scare people off first. "The whole idea of extreme beer is bad for craft brewing," Oliver says. "It doesn't expand the tent—it shrinks it. If I want someone to taste a beer, and I make it sound outlandish and crazy, there is a certain kind of person who will say, 'Oh, let me try it.' But that is a small audience. It's one that you can build a beer on, but not a movement."
Late one morning, Calagione and I drove to Philadelphia to see an archeological chemist he knows named Patrick McGovern. Calagione looked washed out and a little crotchety—a rare thing—after one too many glasses of grappa the night before. When I mentioned Oliver's misgivings to him, he smirked, as if hearing them for the hundredth time. "Garrett and I are good friends, but we definitely disagree on this," he said. "It's a purist versus populist position. If all of our palates are subjective, who am I and who is Garrett to decide whether there's too much hops in a beer, or whether you should be putting lemongrass or rampe leaves in it? As long as it finds an audience, it's valid."
Extreme beer is a return to normality, too, Calagione believes. It's just the normality of a thousand years ago, or several thousand, rather than a hundred. If the Reinheitsgebot is still the touchstone for most American brewers, Calagione's is a bronze bowl from King Midas' tomb.
The historical Midas was a Phrygian ruler in what is now central Turkey. When he or one of his close relatives was buried, around 730 B.C., the tomb was filled with more than a hundred and fifty drinking vessels—parting toasts to the dead king. By the time they were excavated, in 1957, the liquid inside them had evaporated. But Patrick McGovern, forty years later, was able to analyze some residue from a bowl and identify its chemical content. By matching the compounds to those found in the foods and spices of ancient Turkey, McGovern gradually pieced together the liquid's main ingredients: honey, barley, and grapes, and a yellow substance that was probably saffron. It was a beer, but like none we've ever tasted.
"Beer is a much older concept than the Reinheitsgebot," McGovern told us later, at the University of Pennsylvania. He was sitting at a chipped metal desk in his basement office at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, surrounded by sagging bookshelves and dusty lab equipment: a furnace, a microscale, a spectrometer, a liquid chromatograph. Here and there, chunks of pottery and other artifacts were wrapped in plastic or aluminum foil and stuffed in file drawers or ratty cardboard cases. "You're taking nine thousand years of brewing history and just looking at the last five hundred years of it," he said.
McGovern is a wizardly figure with a long white beard and large glasses that seem to draw his eyes together at the inner corners. He has a quiet but penetrating voice, a sharp wit, and a near total lack of pretension. (When brewing at Dogfish, he has been known to pour himself a chicory stout for breakfast.) He and Calagione first met eight years ago, at a dinner in honor of Michael Jackson, the great British beer writer. McGovern had recently published his findings on King Midas and was hoping to convince someone to make a modern-day replica of the beverage. (Anchor Brewing had done something similar a few years earlier, when it made a beer based on an ancient Sumerian hymn to the beer goddess, Ninkasi.) As it turned out, several brewers took up the challenge and sent beers to his house over the next few months. "Some were pretty good," he says. "But Dogfish Head's was the best."
Midas Touch, as it was later called, has a brilliant rose-gold color—every batch contains about a thousand dollars' worth of saffron—and a thick, honeyed, spicy flavor: a cross between beer, mead, and wine. It has become Dogfish's most decorated drink, winning a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival, another gold at the International Mead Festival, and a silver at the World Beer Cup. "I look at beers like these as an opportunity to drink history," Calagione said. "They're liquid time capsules."
Earlier that summer, he and McGovern had brewed their most recent project: Theobroma, or "food of the gods." It was based on Mayan and Aztec ceremonial drinks, and on residues of the earliest known fermented cacao beverage, found in Honduran pots from between 1400 and 1100 B.C. It contained cocoa nibs, ancho chilies, honey, barley, and annatto seeds. "I kept complaining that it needs more chocolate," McGovern said. "I wanted to make it more reddish, because it was equated with blood and human sacrifice." Calagione laughed, saying, "And I told him, 'O.K., I'll get back to you on that.' "
Beer is less ancient than wine, McGovern went on to say, because it requires more technology: agriculture to grow the grain, fire and kettles to cook it. But, once invented, it quickly spread. "It wasn't just in one part of the world," he said. "It was all over." If wine was rare and therefore aristocratic—it could be made only once a year, when fruit was ripe—beer trickled down to the working class. All you needed was a little malted grain and something bitter to balance its sweetness. Before barley became the grain of choice, brewers used millet and rice. Even after hops were domesticated, around 700 A.D., they threw in wormwood, henbane, cowslip, ivy, mugwort, bog myrtle, elderberry, oak leaf, laurel leaf, autumn crocus, or wild rosemary. Some plants were poisonous, most were not, and they gave the beer an endless variety of flavors.
The Reinheitsgebot, when Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria imposed it in 1516, had less to do with keeping peasants from poisoning themselves—never a great concern of the gentry—than with controlling the hops and barley crops. It made a virtue of trade restrictions. And beer, that great bouillabaisse of an invention, became nearly as predictable as wine.
Extreme brewers are doing their best to help it devolve. This past October, I joined Calagione at the Great American Beer Festival, in Denver, for the première of his Sahtea and Theobroma. The festival was founded in 1982 by a home brewer named Charlie Papazian, when its title still sounded like an oxymoron. "That's a great idea, Charlie," Michael Jackson told Papazian, in so many words. "Only what will you serve for beer?" Twenty-six years later, more than eighteen hundred beers were on tap at the Denver convention center. A vast hangar had been divided into booths for four hundred and thirty breweries, grouped by geographic region. Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller had their usual elaborate stage sets, and most beers followed the classic German and English styles. Still, the night belonged to extreme beer.
Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened, I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator, and the Obamanator. Many were double I.P.A.s that seemed to be competing for the highest I.B.U. rating. But others were faithful re-creations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented from whole cloth. "When you're making an extreme beer, it's like pushing beyond the sound barrier," Jim Koch told me. "All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential." Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. "No, this is NOT a double I.P.A.," a sign beneath the tap read. "Even if you believe in those."
The festival was sold out for the first time. Over the next few days, some twenty-eight thousand attendees would pay fifty dollars for a wristband and a small plastic glass for tasting samples. The outcome was predictable. When the doors were flung open at five-thirty, six thousand people barrelled in and began drinking immediately, in great quantity. They wandered around in Viking horns, jester bells, and hats shaped like foaming steins, their bellies jutting from beer-themed T-shirts. One shirt showed Jesus hoisting a frothy mug with the caption "King of the Brews." To make sure that the noise stayed near the shattering point, a bagpipe ensemble roamed the hall, blasting fanfares at unexpected moments. Whenever there was a lull, some oaf would drop his glass on the concrete floor and the entire assembly—as per tradition—would erupt into an epic whoop.
"It's amazing how well people behave, given how many are here and how much alcohol there is," Bob Pease, the vice-president of the Brewers Association, told me. In his sixteen years at the event, he noted with some pride, no one had been killed or seriously injured. But, then, security was pervasive. Uniformed police, private security guards, and hundreds of volunteers prowled the booths, slicing the wristband off anyone who had overindulged. At one point, late in the evening, after I'd stumbled over a power line (or something), I went up to get a free sample. A guard hustled over to the server and muttered, "Go easy on the pour."
Calagione, for his part, had no time to drink. Going to the Great American Beer Festival with him, a friend of his had told me, is like attending a Star Trek convention with Captain Kirk. Wherever he went, beer geeks and fellow-brewers clustered around, taking pictures, handing him books to sign, or taping his greetings on a handheld recorder. The Dogfish booth was mobbed. While most others had five or ten people in front of them, Calagione's crowd spilled across the concrete till it engulfed the Blue Moon booth across the way. I helped him work the taps for the first half hour, then slipped off with samples of Theobroma and Sahtea.
Like many craft-beer drinkers, I'd started out liking Pilsners and pale ales, and found myself craving more and more hops. The Theobroma managed to satisfy that taste indirectly. It was a lovely amber-colored beer with a hint of bitter chocolate at the beginning and an afterburn of chilies. But despite its ten per cent alcohol, it seemed almost too fainthearted. It was the Sahtea that I loved. For all Selders's concern, the tea and spices in it hovered politely in the background, leaving the yeast to run the show. Cloudy and golden, with a lush flowering of bananas and cloves, it tasted like something a trader might have sipped a century ago, standing in a colonial market in Ceylon, with open baskets of tea and spices all around. It wasn't an extreme beer by any stretch, and it certainly didn't taste Finnish. But it was a time capsule nonetheless.
When the session was over and the booth was packed up, when six thousand drunken revellers had descended on the streets of Denver, and the other Dogfish brewers had followed in search of more beer, Calagione and I walked back to our hotel. "Remember what Patrick was saying that day in his office, about how alcohol affects the brain?" he said. I nodded. McGovern had shown us a paper illustrated with scans of animals' brains. Alcohol's emotional effect is unusually complex, he had said. It starts out as a stimulant and only later, when you've had a lot, becomes a depressant. Calagione laughed. "Does it work that way for you?" he said. "Because it doesn't for me. I never get around to the depressant part." ♦


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Our revision date was August 12. I posted eight scores online on August 11. These did not impact my Handicap Index® - why?
There is a little window of time between the cutoff for scores counting toward the upcoming Handicap Index® and the effective revision date. This window is so that a Handicap Index® can be revised, reports printed and mailed and received by the clubs. For those areas where printed reports are not mailed from New Jersey, the time window is only overnight, thus scores posted to the database up until approximately 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time will count in the handicap revision effective the next day.


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2012 Trafficking in Persons Report - Austria
|United States Department of State
|Publication Date
|19 June 2012
|Cite as
|United States Department of State, 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report - Austria, 19 June 2012, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/4fe30ce537.html [accessed 15 December 2019]
|This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
AUSTRIA (Tier 1)
Austria is a destination and transit country for women, men, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. Victims originate from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some domestic servitude occurs at the hands of foreign diplomats from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa working in Austria. According to a March 2011 study funded by the European Commission, forced labor also occurs in the agricultural, construction, and catering sectors. The forced begging of Roma children and other children from Eastern Europe continues to be a problem. An NGO that works with Nigerian trafficking victims in Austria reports traffickers abuse the legal prostitution and asylum processes to control their victims.
The Government of Austria fully complies with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. During the reporting period the government prosecuted its first forced labor case and significantly increased the number of trafficking victims it identified and referred for care. The government continued its proactive efforts to prevent domestic servitude in diplomatic households, and it identified victims subjected to domestic servitude by diplomats during the year. However, many convicted trafficking offenders continued to receive inadequate sentences of one year or less in prison. There were also reports that the government treated some trafficked children as offenders, particularly in areas outside of Vienna.
Recommendations for Austria: Aggressively prosecute and convict trafficking offenders to ensure that more of them receive sentences that are proportionate to the gravity of the crime; establish a case-based analysis of trafficking cases to help demonstrate vigorous prosecution of trafficking offenders; step up training and outreach efforts to proactively identify trafficking victims among children in prostitution and men working in agriculture, construction, and other sectors where foreign migrants are vulnerable to exploitation; expand the use of systematic procedures to identify indications of trafficking among women in the legalized prostitution sector; establish and formalize a nationwide trafficking identification and referral system, including in reception centers for asylum seekers; and continue to explore ways to increase victims' incentives to cooperate with law enforcement.
In 2011, the Austrian government demonstrated important progress in its anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts, including the first conviction for forced labor. However, courts continued to hand down suspended sentences and penalties of less than one year's imprisonment to trafficking offenders. The government prohibits both sex trafficking and labor trafficking under article 104(a) of the Austrian criminal code, but continued to use primarily article 217, which prohibits the transnational movement of persons for prostitution, to prosecute suspected traffickers. Paragraph 2 of article 217 prohibits the movement of people into Austria for prostitution. Article 104 criminalizes "trafficking for the purpose of slavery" and prescribes penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years in prison. Penalties prescribed in article 104(a) range up to 10 years' imprisonment, while penalties prescribed in article 217 range from six months' to 10 years' imprisonment. These penalties are sufficiently stringent and commensurate with those prescribed for other serious crimes, such as rape.
In March 2011, the government successfully prosecuted its first labor trafficking case when a Serbian woman was sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment for subjecting Romanian women to forced labor in the cleaning sector. In September 2011, the government took an important step towards improving the handling of trafficking cases and increasing the penalties for traffickers when it established a human trafficking division within the Vienna criminal court staffed by a judge dedicated to trafficking cases. The government reportedly prosecuted 65 offenders using articles 217 and 104(a) in 2010 – the most recent year for which comprehensive data were available – which is the same number of offenders prosecuted under these statutes in 2009. Austrian courts convicted 14 offenders in 2010, the majority under article 217, a decrease from the 32 convicted trafficking offenders reported in 2009. Five offenders convicted under article 217 were sentenced to one to five years' imprisonment; one received a suspended sentence and no jail time, and six received partially suspended sentences resulting in jail time of one month to one year. Two offenders convicted under Article 104(a) received suspended sentences and no jail time.
The Council of Europe's Group of Experts on Trafficking (GRETA) September 2011 report on Austria noted the "dissuasiveness of penalties provided in article 104(a)" and urged the government to increase maximum penalties to reflect that trafficking is a serious human rights abuse. According to a media report, a trafficker received a 27-month sentence for the commercial sexual exploitation of a child. A case-based analysis of trafficking cases prosecuted under 217 in 2011 and early 2012 demonstrates that the government used article 217 to convict at least nine human trafficking offenders. In March 2012, a court convicted six Bulgarian nationals under article 217 for subjecting 31 Bulgarian women to forced prostitution or forced begging. The ringleader received a full four-year prison sentence, the others five offenders received sentences of between 12 months' and four years' imprisonment. On April 3, 2012, a court convicted three Serbian nationals under article 217 for subjecting a Serbian woman to forced prostitution in the escort sector. Sentences for these three offenders ranged from 12 months' to two years' imprisonment. In 2011, the government reported it secured one conviction under its slavery law, article 104, which prescribes a minimum ten-year sentence; however, sentencing data was not available for this case. In October 2011, the government, in partnership with NGOs, conducted an anti-trafficking seminar for judges, prosecutors, and other officials. The government also addressed trafficking perpetrated by diplomats posted in Austria, despite challenges that diplomatic immunity posed to the prosecution of these offenders. The government reported that several diplomats left the country in 2011 due to pressure from the Austrian government, which included requiring diplomats suspected of trafficking to renew their diplomatic identification cards every three months. The government did not prosecute any acts of trafficking-related complicity.
The Government of Austria sustained effective partnerships with civil society to assist female victims of trafficking; these partnerships resulted in the identification of a significant number of trafficking victims in 2011. NGOs reported the police improved cooperation, particularly in referring victims to NGOs for the victims' recovery and reflection period. The government, in coordination with NGOs, identified 251 trafficking victims in 2011, compared to 63 identified in 2010. The GRETA report for Austria, however, noted shortcomings in the government's identification of child victims of trafficking. The report noted potential victims of child trafficking are sometimes treated as offenders and arrested for theft, drug trafficking, or prostitution-related offenses. The government's anti-trafficking police unit used a database to track when local law enforcement arrested a child for prostitution in order to check for indications of trafficking. The government's regulation of Austria's sizable, legal, commercial sex sector continued to include weekly health checks for sexually transmitted infections and periodic police checks of registration cards. In 2011, the police began screening women in prostitution for trafficking indicators. Police had at their disposal various manuals on trafficking and victim identification – including a pocket card developed in coordination with NGOs – that listed the main indicators for identifying victims of trafficking. In 2011, the government, in cooperation with an NGO, launched a pilot project in a reception center for asylum seekers to facilitate the identification of trafficking victims. During the reporting period, the government identified 12 victims of domestic servitude in the residences of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African diplomats working in Austria.
The Austrian government continued to fund a specialized anti-trafficking NGO that provided shelter, housing, and services in Vienna to female trafficking victims; victims provided such shelter were not detained involuntarily. The government provided the equivalent of $744,000 to this NGO in 2011, compared with the equivalent of $840,000 in 2010. During the year, the NGO provided counseling, outreach, and other assistance services, including responsible repatriation, to the 251 trafficking victims it identified in cooperation with the police. The government reported it provided foreign victims of trafficking with legal alternatives to their removal through its 2009 Residence and Settlement Act, which listed victims of trafficking as a special category with a right for temporary resident status of at least six months. The government reported that between April and December 2011, it issued 24 temporary residence permits or renewals to trafficking victims. Residence permits are generally granted for a period of one year. In July 2011, via an amendment to the Law on Foreigners, the government granted trafficking victims who hold residence permits access to the Austrian labor market. The government encouraged victims to assist with investigations and prosecutions, though NGOs reported that few victims assisted in prosecution of their traffickers due to fear of retaliation. The government continued to fund the city of Vienna's specialist center for unaccompanied minors, which accommodated approximately 17 child victims of trafficking in 2011, a decrease from the 40 it assisted in 2010. The government reportedly ensured identified victims were not punished for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked.
Austria sustained strong efforts to prevent domestic servitude within diplomatic households, requiring all foreign domestic workers to appear in person at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to receive information on how to get help if they become victims of forced labor. In addition, the government required diplomatic employers of domestic servants to provide evidence of direct salary transfers to accounts held in the domestic servant's name. In July 2011, it enhanced this oversight by requiring domestic workers to obtain their own ATM cards. The government continued its series of school exhibitions to sensitize Austrian youth to sex trafficking and continued to run an anti-trafficking hotline. Austria continued a campaign to encourage tourists and travel agencies to report cases of child sex tourism; it reported it prosecuted three child sex tourists in 2011. The government demonstrated transparency in its anti-trafficking efforts in 2011 by drafting a report on the implementation of its 2009-2011 national action plan, released in March 2012. The government continued to fund courses conducted by an anti-trafficking NGO to sensitize troops prior to their deployment on peacekeeping missions.


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Media and Children
Computer usage in childhood has become common-place, even among toddlers. Yet children pay a price for this alluring entertainment. They spend far less time in face-to-face relationships with others than in the past, and businesses now remark that their young employees are very tech savvy but lack social skills. They also lack hands-on skills, and many schools now hire occupational therapists to help children develop normal hand skills. This lack of "handiness" is also a major problem for engineering firms who find that employees who played with real objects and tinkered with them as children and teens are better problem-solvers than those who did not.
In addition, children in the U.S. between the ages of 8 and 18 now spend over 7 hours per day in front of screens with very little time spent outdoors. This imbalance has a strong impact on children's physical and mental health. Computer games have become a standard part of childhood, with very little attention paid to their negative effects. The Alliance commissioned an analysis of computer games by board member and former technology teacher, Lowell Monke.
Computers have an important role in contemporary life, but in childhood we recommend first things first: real relationships with people and nature, real hands-on activities, and lots of time for child-initiated play and artistic activities.