Originally from Massachusetts, Thomas Garwood was working in a brewery and playing music with buddies when one of them introduced him to his future wife, Ashlee House, a Utahn. Garwood moved to The Beehive, and the two married a little over four years ago.
Sharing a love for specialty drinks, Garwood and House began experimenting with ginger beer recipes until they found the perfect one. And while ginger beer itself is nothing new in Utah, their use of real and organic juice is uncommon.
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They saw a potential business venture and started Garwood’s Ginger Beer in the fall of 2014.
Originally receiving feedback only from friends, Garwood participated at the US Bartender’s Guild, where the couple had their first opportunity to share the drink with more people. Receiving only positive comments, Garwood and House expanded their small business to something greater and now sell their golden ginger beer at the Downtown Farmers Market, Park Silly Sunday Market and at various locations throughout the state.
Photos courtesy of Thomas Garwood
If you're not a fan of beer, celebrate International Beer Day with Utah's other favorite beverage: root beer.
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The Mandate Press is holding its semi-annual Prints and Pints Art Show, where 20 artists will work in 2 colors to realize 1 unifying theme.
That theme is NSFW, as in, Not Safe For Work, the universally ignored warning on questionable emails, websites and other juicy digital communications. According to the show’s curators: “Each artist’s work reflects what they think is simply not safe for work.”
If that doesn’t intrigue you enough, Proper Brewing will be pouring, so bring ID.
Exhibit opens Friday, Aug. 5, 7 p.m.
1077 South Main St., SLC
At meetings this week to address a public safety emergency on 500 West and Rio Grande, participants uttered some memorable quotes:
“We had to step over three piles of human excrement as we walked north on 500 West,” Rio Grande District business owner (Btw, you can’t unsee that.)
“Law enforcement is having a hard time nationwide right now. What I see in Salt Lake City is huge support from citizens… I don’t want to get choked up about it… Even when people are frustrated we get their support. It means a ton to us—so thank you.” — Salt Lake City Police Lt. Andrew Oblad after being grilled on the ineffectiveness of police patrols in Pioneer Park area.
“The west side of Salt Lake City is not an appropriate location for a new facility,” Mayor Ben McAdams in answer to a citizen’s concern that the west side will bear the brunt of the relocation of homeless shelters. (West siders, write that down.)
“In Salt Lake, our hearts are big and our hands are big. No, that’s not right.” Mayor McAdams realizing he just inadvertently taken a jibe at Donald Trump. “I mean our hearts are big and our hands are generous! That’s it.” (Ben got it right the first time at the second meeting.)
As Salt Lake City and County move forward with long-term solutions to homelessness, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams says the homeless situation in the Rio Grande District has become a public-safety and health emergency that the county will spend $1 million in the next month to solve.
In two meetings this week, McAdams fielded tough questions from residents and business owners in the troubled Rio Grande District between 200 South and 400 South along 500 West and Rio Grande Avenue, where they say homeless related crime and drug dealing has never been worse.
McAdams says the city and the county are working on a short-term plan to deal with the 300-plus people who local businesses complain have turned Pioneer Park into a refugee camp, the sidewalks into bathrooms and street corners and downtown Trax trains into drug dealers’ offices.
The county will put $1 million toward a short-term solution and a joint city-county plan for law enforcement and addiction services will be issued in three weeks. Beyond that McAdams offered no details.
Citizens at the meetings met McAdams’ assurances with skepticism and dark jokes about 500 West being renamed “500 Worst” and Pioneer Park, “Pioneer Campground.”
“It’s an absolute war zone for people who live and work here,” one business owner told McAdams. And that situation deteriorates even further after 1 a.m. when police patrols cease, and, as one neighbor put it, “the crazy stuff starts.”
“We are acutely aware of the challenges in the Rio Grande District,” McAdams said. “We are going to have to have a strategy to make [a solution] happen. We will have more on that in coming weeks—weeks not months.”
When repeatedly pressed on when the the emergency strategy would be in place, McAdam said, “Wait for three weeks.”
What seems obvious, however, is that the $1-million emergency plan, like several initiatives in the Rio Grande District over the years will most likely fail. McAdams, himself, admits the difficulty in controlling the drug trade, even short term, because dealers can only be taken off the street for three or four hours before they are released again because of the county’s over-crowded jail. And more drug “mules” pop up in their places.
Lieutenant Andrew Oblad told the Pioneer Park Coalition meeting, “I’ve got really good cops working really hard to take care of your concerns. But I don’t have a magic solution.”
Meanwhile, mid-term and long-term solutions to homelessness in the county are moving forward and two new group homes, that will disperse homeless to different parts of the city, should be announced by September. When asked about the situation, homeless activist Pamela Atkins, said: ”I think we are seeing real change, but I think we need to see more immediate real change.”
Peter Tidwell, the culinary mind behind The Mighty Baker in Provo, won first place on an episode of Food Network’s “Cake Wars” Monday night. Tidwell took home a grand prize of $10,000.
The episode’s theme was the popular X-box video game “Halo.” Tidwell, a BYU alum, and his assistant competed in three rounds of creating “Halo”-inspired cakes to impress judges Ron-Ben Israel, Waylynn Lucas and guest judge Larry Hyrb, Microsoft’s director of programming.
In addition to earning the title of “Cake Wars” champion and heading home with a hefty cash prize, Tidwell and his cake creation were also featured at the 2016 Halo World Championships in Los Angeles.
Tidwell’s winning cake was a chocolate brownie pound cake with an Italian buttercream. He is selling this flavor cake by-the-slice at his Provo storefront.
The Mighty Baker is located at 50 E 500 N in Provo.
images courtesy Wagner Family of Wine
Spencer’s for Steaks and Chops is hosting another private wine dinner partnering with Francis Fecteau, proprietor of Libation, and the Wagner Family of Wine, a family-owned Napa wine company. The dinner will be held on Friday, August 26th at 6:30. The cost of the event is $70 for food and $40 for the wine pairing. Seats are limited, so call 801-238-4748 or visit spencersforsteaksandchops.com to RSVP to the event.
The four-course dinner includes wine pairings from the Wagner Family of Wine, including the Emmolo, Mer Soleil, Red Schooner, and Caymus label wines.
Here is the menu for the evening:
Spencer’s for Steaks and Chops
225 South West Temple
Friday, August 26th – 6:30
$70 for food
$40 for wine pairing
Call it the Donald Trump trickle-down freak-out.
A study by the Utah Foundation found that a majority of Utah voters rated crime at 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale of the state’s problems and among the top 10 concerns for 2016.
BUT crime rates in Utah have steadily declined since 1995. Utah Foundation cites statistics from the FBI and the Utah Department of Public Safety that find that violent crime have dropped in Utah 34 percent, compared to a national decrease of 45 percent.
“It makes sense that people are concerned about crime, particularly violent crime. While violent crime has been trending down for years you still see spikes, like July 2016 having the most homicides in one month since 2007,” says Shawn Teigen, Research Director at Utah Foundation. But he says, “There are still a lot of priorities that rank higher for Utahns, like healthcare, air quality, and education.”
In short, you can crawl out from under your bed and start demanding better schools, air and healthcare.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Restaurants and barkeeps are being driven crazy by a Utah DABC bureaucracy snafu. But the DABC says everything is awesome. (BTW, SNAFU is an archaic term, but I’ve brought it back because it so perfectly evokes Utah’s liquor situation—Google it.)
On July 5, the DABC fired up new inventory tracking software system. (Try to stay awake, it gets better).
Brand-spankin’-new DABC spokesman Terry Wood confirmed that things, as they say in the computer world, went south. The problem he says was that the code in the program could not list all the digits in the product ID (SKU) for the products.
The bottom line, in non-wonk language, is that shipments of liquor, wine and beer could not be delivered or picked up by restaurants and bars because digital paperwork could not be generated.
Here’s what a half-dozen bar and restaurant managers told me: (Note: They did not want their names or businesses attached to their information because the DABC is notoriously vindictive when criticized—kinda like Donald Trump.)
“What happens in that kind of situation is that our ability to serve our guests is hindered,” says one beverage director. Because menus had to be changed and guests were disappointed when some regularly served wines weren’t available—not to mention the wasted time of managers futilely trying to pick up orders, “We lost revenue.”
“I could see my order at the club store,” he says. “But the computer couldn’t generate an order, so I couldn’t pick it up.”
If you recall, Gov. Gary Herbert is committed to running DABC on a business basis—a monopoly business.
But Wood, remember he’s just a DABC spokesman, says DABC managers told him the bar owners were “exaggerating” the problem. “[The new software] did have some problems,” Wood says. “The public would never have noticed. There may be special-order restaurants that had a problem—one or two, but nothing that stuck out.”
Because of Utah’s byzantine liquor laws, “special orders” aren’t what you think. Because the state’s inventory no longer has the variety and depth it had under former DABC premium-wine chief Brent Clifford, many liquor buyers have had to establish regular, on-going “special orders” to meet customer demand.
A DABC retail manager says the software reports, for instance, that a store has 16 bottles of a product, when in reality it has none. Employees find it as frustrating as liquor license holders and DABC HQ is not sympathetic, the manager says.
“IT people have been putting a lot of overtime in due to the problems,” says a DABC employee. “The system is not very user friendly. It should have been tested more before implemented. In fact I wonder why they decided on this system.”
When a bar owner was informed that no problems “ stuck out” with the system, he replied, “Really? Oh, really—no problem?” then laughed ruefully.
The software launch was preceded by test runs and a help line was provided,” Wood says. But restaurant and bar buyers say they were told that the system had not been tested. And, they wonder why—if the system had been tested—why was the failure a surprise that took more than a month to fix.
Current status, Wood says, is that the system is “90-plus percent” fixed. “It’s basically working now.”
But liquor and wine buyers say that’s news to them. The beverage manager says, “No one can tell me where my wine is! I need real-world information. This is a haze that hurts business.”
