vinyl cOHvers: Thanksgiving Triple Treat

The holidays can sometimes make you want to shout

Thanksgiving week can be considered something of an F-week: family, friends, (Black) Friday, and of course, food.  In some cases, it will be a bit too much, and stretchy pants will be appreciated by many after chowing down on the usual holiday eatings.

With that in mind, I figured I'd break a bit from the food posts and get back to a post on another favorite hobby of mine in vinyl record collecting. Ever since my spouse bought me a turntable for a present a few years back, it's been a slow but steady Katy-bar-the-door in collecting records for the both of us.

My previous focus had been on specific local albums and the history behind them (including my last post in April on The Dulcimer Alliance and Lima, Ohio's Great Black Swamp Dulcimer Festival.) With so many more records in hand since then, I'm going with a sampler platter approach for future posts, where you can have a gander of three albums with some local Ohio roots, including some of the liner notes (often the best things about older records) and some general impressions. I also jazzed up the linked videos containing the selected songs as well with visuals and historical factoids.

Just Another Flight (of tasty) Beer: JAFB Wooster Brewery (Wooster, OH)

JAFB Wooster is Cleveland Browns territory for certain, but it also
is the home for some respectably tasty, award-winning beers

A recent trip pursuing one of our new favorite pastimes for my spouse and I (antique hunting) brought us to the US-30 corridor right where it intersects with I-71 towards Cleveland. The hunting proved to be pretty good as we dug up some fairly unique finds at decent prices, and these ventures into unexplored (for us, anyway) parts of the state finished up in Wooster, a town of roughly 25,000 people named after Revolutionary War general David Wooster.

We had thoughts of dropping by the town's lone brewery, JAFB Wooster, after our day's hunting was over provided we weren't too tuckered out. However, the shopkeeper of the last antique store erased any doubts in our mind, as she gave her thumbs up to going and was more than happy to give us driving directions to their taproom, located just to the east of the main downtown area.

One thing that stood out immediately to us was the unique name of this brewery, and it was one of our first inquiries after we ordered our beer. As we found out from one of the bartenders that day, it came from struggle that JAFB brewmaster Paul Fryman had in finding a name for his new enterprise. A colleague of Fryman, perhaps in a little bit of exasperation over the delay, stated that the venture was "just another f______ brewery" (you can probably guess what word that starts with "f" was used.) That phrase inspired the acronym that became the name of his brewery, which opened its taproom doors to the public in 2012.