Hey, gang! 

Perhaps many of you have noticed a song from '90's Dokken on my song list called the Maze (on the myspace.com/blackdragoninn page).  It's a melancholy tune about negotiating a maze, but as applied to life, and in my case, being still unemployed, 'I'm right back where I started.'  Sure I've developed skills, earned a degree, gotten experience in a host of things, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum, but it doesn't seem to matter.  I've always wanted to be a pilot too, so now that they raised the mandatory retirement age, I have to move on it this year or it seems it will be lost forever.  Add to that my opportunity to start a brewpub and meadery, and it seems with the skills I've developed over the last 20+ years in brewing, that I could engender support out there.  NOT!  Unless my networking here and around the state in person somehow pays off, it won't happen either.  I can't do it alone, and like many of you, I'm from a working class background trying to breakout professionally, but you need a benefactor when you're economically challenged.  The benefactor I seek is a group of investors willing to pony up the capital to work with for producing and marketing my beers and meads.  Again, I can't do it alone.  If I could, I would have already done it.  In the old days, I could have already done it if I sufficiently impressed the Lord under whom I lived with my products after my apprenticeship with the local Brewmeister, or even worked for him... The King would have welcomed a new business that paid taxes.  Today's regulations make it seem we have less freedoms than back then under the feudal system, and you need to be independently wealthy in order to make it happen.  Whatever happened to opportunities in this country to start small with a craft and make its popularity pay for its own growth with a minimum of investment?

The future of the BDI now depends on what happens to me professionally. Will I find any investors willing to help?  Will I find a local Lord (land-owner) who has an idle building for me to develop a brewery/meadery within its walls with an equitable deal for myself to make it worth my while?  If so, the BDI will become very solid as a marketing adjunct to the enterprise.  Without it, the BDI is just a shakey stand that might pay for itself; and in the face of new employment where I won't exactly have earned time off, my availability for it will be at the mercy of said employer.  And if I have to move out-of-state...?  I'd like to do it, but it seems all the circumstances have to be just right:  The planets have to be in perfect alignment with each other and my constellation, along with stellar harmony between galaxies and a favorable wave of dark energy!  Well, it seems that way at times.

One may well ask, why not work for another brewery for now?  Why?  Well, they all seem to want science or botanical degrees, which I don't have, and nobody wants to believe I have talent or experience when I say I do because I've never worked for a brewery before, yet I can make better beer than they can!  And this is why many microbrews suck!  They've all hired scientists and lost the art.  They need artisans, and don't even realize it!  I'm sure the entrepreneurs that started these breweries didn't have scientific degrees at the beginning, if even now; which brings me back to the power of entrepreneurialism.  The market rewards those who make a good product.  But in this business, it takes money to make money; it takes capital to make such products under the circumstances the government wants to get the license to sell it.  Therein lies the rub:  It's not about ability anymore, but politics and money.  Knowledge, therefore, isn't power... MONEY is POWER!  Knowledge just removes one's bliss-of-ignorance to make one sick; sick that you have the inside knowledge and ability to make a great products, i.e., make money, just not the means to do it!

So, I'm right back where I started...