The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the cruelest of the year. A country isn't really worthy of the name until it has a National Day Of Feasting, (and a beer and an airline, according to Frank Zappa) but I feel like a good feast, especially a winter-ish one, could really do with a National Week Of Hibernation subsequently. But we all have our roles to play in the national ant colony, and so we waddled back to our jobs, office chairs protesting perhaps more loudly than we ourselves did at the morning's alarm. My role at Thanksgiving, however, was considerably more enjoyable: Bringer Of The Beer. Here's how that went.

Craft brews have officially tipped in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. Most bars and restaurants now feature at least one tap dedicated to interesting beers, and brew-focused establishments seem to be springing up everywhere, to the delight of the hop head.

The following Froth column was originally scheduled to run last week but got sucked into a worm hole. Pardon any time related ambiguity.  

Congratulations to those of you who are now able to read this after having been gracefully ushered back into the 19th[strikethrough] 21st century by our benevolent dictators at CL&P. There's a scene in Gladiator where Djimon Hounsou's character sees the Roman coliseum for the first time and says "I did not know men were capable of such things." I imagine that's a little what it's like to use an oven or turn on the lights after a dozen days whose rhythms were controlled by the Sun's rise and fall; writing notes on the back of a wooden shovel with a lump of coal by candle light, that kind of thing. The long nights of the winter can now once again be banished by the sorcery of compact fluorescent bulbs, but some elements of the wintertide are to be embraced, like seasonal brews.