Moving forward

It has been a while since I posted last, and a lot has happened. It has been a whirlwind few weeks.

To begin with, I was named editor-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student for the fall 2012 semester. I’m really excited for the semester. I’ve put together a great group of young journalists who I’m positive will produce some really quality content.

I won sixth in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program for breaking news writing for my coverage of the Illinois tornadoes, which I wrote about here.

I wrapped up two big feature projects, one about Indiana high school basketball and the other about a local brewing company that is just getting started. Check out the basketball story here, and stay tuned for the brewing story.

I shot the Little 500 for the IDS, an annual event that always is fun to shoot. Check out the video here and here.

In the next few weeks I’ll be moving home to Carbondale for a month before heading back to DC for an internship with Scripps Howard Foundation Wire.

IU Journalism Spring Break to Tampa Bay

Each spring break, the IU School of Journalism sends students all over the world to study media. The sophomore honors class of Ernie Pyle Scholars always are flown to St. Petersburg, Fla. to study at the Poynter Institute and visit the Tampa Bay Times.

It was a great break. Going for weeks without sun in landlocked Bloomington, Ind. can get under your skin. Being by the ocean with the sun on my face and a breeze in my lungs was not just nice but damn healthy.

The journalism was also wonderful. I’ve been reading Poynter blogs, participating in Poynter chats, reading Poynter studies for years, and it was really great to actually make the pilgrimage to see the house that Nelson Poynter built.

The Tampa Bay Times was also a breath of fresh air. We met with Kelley Benham-French and Ben Montgomery on the enterprise desk to talk about Montgomery’s newest opus, “Spectacle”, the story of a community living with the scars of a lynching in northern Florida from 1934. Even down to the silly daily stories about Justin Bieber, it was obvious that the Times takes quality writing very seriously. It was a wonderful place to spend an afternoon.

We also had the opportunity to meet at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium with a photographer, editor and a PR rep from the aquarium about how they worked together to create the Pulitzer-finalist story of Winter the dolphin who has a prosthetic tail.

I could write pages and pages about what we learned. Here are the top lessons from each visit.

THE POYNTER INSTITUTE:

• Don’t trust anything unless you can prove it yourself. In a heated session with Al Thompkins, we engaged in discussions about how to make decisions and how to gather truth in murky situations.
• Truth = Accuracy + Context. This is another tip from Al’s session. After all, something can be accurate, but without providing context then facts can be easily misinterpreted.
• App building is all about focus. We had an exercise with Sara Quinn where we planned out mobile apps for various broad themes. The best way to then create the app was through focusing that theme to something interactive, simple and easily navigable.
• The key to a successful live chat is planning. As part of the journalism school, we ran a Cover It Live chat with recent alumni from the Poynter building. We made a few mistakes, all of which were preventable with just a little more advanced planning.

TAMPA BAY TIMES:

• Have fun with dailies. Like I mentioned above, Justin Bieber visited St. Pete while we were there. The Times covered the ensuing paparazzi spree with a fun, well-written voice. It showed what can be done with a silly daily story.
• What you cut is just as important as what you keep. When we talked with Montgomery, he kept going back to what was edited out. Keeping focused on what the story is about is crucial, otherwise the story gets unnecessarily broad and unreadable.
• If you’re stuck, try writing an award letter. Write a cover letter to an unknown judge to tell them why your story matters and is worth praise. That will help you regain your focus and keep on working.
• Everyone needs to be a jack-of-all-trades. Even with slimming staffs, Times reporters are still encouraged to shoot photos, appear on their broadcast partner, blog, tweet, etc. Having a broad base of skills can never be a bad thing.

CLEARWATER MARINE AQUARIUM:

• Don’t ignore press releases. It may just be a story of a dolphin without a tail, but it may end up being something a lot more powerful if you look at it longer. Winter ultimately ended up being a story of facing impossible odds and inspiration for war veterans and children with prosthetic limbs.
• Throw the PR folks a bone once in a while. If you do cover some of those silly PR stories once in a while, the PR folks are more likely to throw you a damn good story back. It’s a win-win.
• As an editor, make sure someone covers everything. You’ll never know when you may need it later. In this case, the photographers were covering Winter long before the Times reporters got involved. Even before it was a story, there were photographs of the dolphin at all stages of the story.

Reporting the Midwestern tornadoes

Alex Copher and Jerry Goolsby watch as what is left of the Golden Circle in Harrisburg, Ill. is demolished. CHET STRANGE | IDS

HARRISBURG, ILL. — Jesse Raymer was asleep when the sky opened above his bed.

That’s how I began the story I wrote Thursday about tornadoes that killed six in Illinois mid-week.

My family lives in Carbondale, Ill., about an hour from the destruction in Harrisburg. Late Wednesday afternoon, after we’d seen photos and reports coming from the region, photographer Chet Strange and I decided to cover some real breaking news and head south.

We didn’t get in to Carbondale until after midnight and decided to leave before dawn to be in Harrisburg as the first light was coming over the town.

We were tired and groggy, but once the sun rose and we were able to see the destruction, we knew we had a long, long day ahead of us.

Twenty-four hours after the storm, generators whined everywhere. State and county officers patrolled the streets, checking for work permits and looking for looters. Insurance agents were already going door to door to collect claims information and assess damage.

Fiberglass insulation blanketed streets, sidewalks, lawns and porches like fine lace. Broken glass and splintered shards from trees and homes were scattered everywhere. Metal fence posts were bent like wet noodles…

In another area, a whole strip mall had been flattened. A small pond near the Walmart was full of shopping carts and other debris.

A pile of broken wood and brick lay sprawled in a small field just off the highway.

“That used to be a church,” Darlene Goolsby said, surveying the damage  just before dawn.

Darlene Goolsby sifts through the debris of the Golden Circle, a support facility for homebound seniors. CHET STRANGE | IDS

We met Goolsby early in the morning, when she just arrived to her workplace to start cleaning up what was left of her building.

She’s the coordinator of the local Golden Circle office, a group that helps senior citizens get prescriptions, meals and other necessities.

After chatting with her, we headed into town, where we saw block after block of destruction. We talked to families that had lost everything. There were many close calls and even more amazing stories of survival.

The most impressive thing that struck Chet and I was the positive attitude that everyone in the community kept up. From dawn ’till dusk every day, the town, which had been ripped in half, was out helping to recover. Chet summed it up on his blog:

These people weren’t “victims”, as every television truck parked in front of Walmart would tell you, they were stronger than anyone I had seen in a long time.  Every person I talked to told me a different story about people coming together to help each other out, to do their best to work through this terrible situation.  They were doing the only thing they knew how to do, and that is to regroup, rebuild, and move past this tragedy.

On one corner, a family whose trailer was turned into nothing more than a pile of trash, had brought the whole family out to clean up. One of them even brought a smoker and was barbecuing ribs and other delicious smelling food to pass out to the neighborhood. (When everything seems to be going wrong, a good barbecue can put a smile on anyone’s face.)

As a journalist, it was a pretty decent primer in reporting among difficulties. By the end of the day I’d rode in the back of a cop car (a sheriff gave us a ride when we got lost in one neighborhood), printed press badges at a local CVS by uploading them first to Facebook, waded through drainage ditches that probably weren’t the most sanitary, breathed fiberglass as machines ripped through destroyed buildings, was invited into what was left of one man’s home as he packed up his surviving belongings, filed a draft from the lobby of a Super 8 Motel, made edits while driving back to Bloomington, filed again from a Denny’s and survived on a bag of peanuts and a case of water bottles.

I was proud of the work Chet and I accomplished. The design team did great work with the story. Combined with a great story about missing IU student Lauren Spierer and great basketball content, I think this is the best issue of the Daily Student I’ve seen in a long, long time.

After we covered the tornadoes in Illinois, tragedy struck again. This time, Marysville and Henryville, Ind. were decimated by deadly twisters. Mark Felix, Mark Keierleber, Bailey Loosemore and Chet went down toward Louisville to report the damage.

Read their stories here and here. See there photographs here and here. Look at this multimedia piece from Henrysville.

TO DONATE TO THOSE AFFECTED BY THE TORNADOES, GO TO THE AMERICAN RED CROSS. YOU CAN ALSO CALL 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) OR TEXT THE WORD “REDCROSS” TO 90999 TO MAKE A $10 DONATION.

Reporting from a distance

Photo by Rabi Abonour

When I signed on to the Daily Student region desk as a beat reporter, I did so with the knowledge that being a state and national political reporter bound geographically to Bloomington would be difficult.

Oh, how little did I realize just how dificult.

The one constant in political reporting is that trying to get politicians to answer tough questions requires shoe-leather reporting skills. Lesson number one that I learned in Washington, DC with Gannett last summer was that if you can’t get them on the phone, meet them at their office. If you can’t meet them at their office, snag them outside of a committee hearing. If you can’t snag them, walk with them.

That and wear comfortable shoes to accommodate all this walking. Political reporting, after all, is an active sport.

My problem this semester is simply that I’m forced to do the same thing, just without the walking. I’m an hour’s drive away from the Indiana Statehouse, which means I rely on hoping for callbacks (which don’t happen) from legislators or prepared statements that don’t allow for follow-up questions.

But I’ve learned to make due. Localization is always important, but on this beat it is key. When Gov. Mitch Daniels delivered the Republican response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, I couldn’t get Indiana Democratic and Republican reactions to the speech or the rebuttal on deadline. I definitely couldn’t jet off to the campaign trail to get comment from the presidential hopefuls.

So I did what I could, I wrote a daily story about the Obama supporters on campus and how they were getting the campaign moving, specifically with a public viewing of the State of the Union speech.

One of the biggest challenges so far was reporting on the right to work debate that turned into a tempestuous dogfight between union-backed Democrats and the Republican-controlled legislature.

Every day there were new stories to be had in Indianapolis. Protesters flooded the Statehouse, Democrats refused to show up to vote, Republicans railroaded legislation through committee, experts from all sides held press conferences on the steps of the capitol building. It was a political reporter’s dream … if you were in town.

I was stuck in Bloomington, sentenced to following the Twitter feeds of other reporters to be caught up with the latest developments. I relied on reports from the Indianapolis Star to make sure my reporting was accurate.

I made it to Indianapolis once, for the governor’s State of the State speech. Ultimately, the challenge of reporting the right to work debate was, again, one of localization. Trying to make the major issue important to students, many of whom live out-of-state, was the true problem. I tried to remedy the localization problem with as many faces as possible. I talked to union members who were able to put their real frustrations into words.

Just outside the chamber of the Indiana House of Representatives Tuesday night, the noise was deafening.

People were chanting, yelling and screaming against the controversial right-to-work legislation that has been the cause of a democratic walkout in the House last week and yesterday. Whistles pierced the eardrums of everyone present.

Union workers in helmets and jackets decorated with union membership decals held signs that proclaimed slogans such as “We oppose punitive legislation” and “Hoosiers want life lines, not bread lines.”

“This legislation does absolutely nothing to create jobs. It’s nothing but an effort to destroy labor unions,” said Oather Duncan, a member of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers.

Inside the chamber of the House, however, it was nearly impossible to hear them. Only a low murmur echoed from the chamber beyond.

The dull roar of hundreds of protesters chanting “No right to work!” and “Mitch is a liar!” was hard to make out from inside as Gov. Mitch Daniels took to the podium to deliver his annual, and final, State of the State address.

“As it’s my last such chance to express my appreciation for the public service you each perform, and to Hoosiers for hiring me twice so I could try to perform my own, I’ll start with a heartfelt thank you,” Daniels said.

Right to work passed a few weeks ago, so now my biggest struggle is, once again, source relationships. I’ll continue leaving messages, taking statements and localizing stories without the aid of lawmakers as readily available sources.

What kind of beat reporting struggles have you come across? What are the best ways to get around roadblocks on a beat?

New jobs for 2012

I’m happy to announce a few new positions I’ll be taking up for spring and summer 2012.

When I go back to Bloomington after break, I’ll be taking up post as multimedia editor for the IDS. This past semester I was web editor, so I was taking content produced by other desks and putting it online, as well as promoting it through Facebook and Twitter. This semester, I’ll be the one creating multimedia content (videos, slideshows, online interactive packages, etc.)

I’ll also be the Indiana statehouse and national political reporter for the region desk at the IDS. I’m excited to get back to political reporting and will probably spending a little more time in Indianapolis during the spring.

That’s in addition to a weekly beer/alcohol review column I’ll have with WEEKEND, the IDS pop culture and entertainment section that comes out every Thursday.

This summer, I’ll be back in Washington, DC interning for the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire. I’ll be doing more national political and feature writing in the capital, with special attention paid to multimedia productions. Follow the SHFW interns on Twitter here.

Beating Kentucky

The IU vs. Kentucky game was one everyone had talked about for weeks leading up to the big matchup.

The anticipation built up as die-hard fans set up camp to wait for seats the Wednesday before Saturday’s game.

It continued the day of the game as the entire city of Bloomington rang with the buzz of an impending big game.

Then there was the game itself. Hoosiers played well, and ended up being ahead at the half. This garnered a “huh, well how ’bout that” and set up energy going into the second half.

We sunk threes, we played solid defense. With about ten minutes left to play, we were still gaining ground. It looked like Indiana could actually pull it off. I was with a group of photographers and reporters, and with a little more than five minutes left to play, a few of the photographers darted out with their equipment to document the impending celebration.

But Kentucky came back. They tied it up. They pulled ahead by two.

With five seconds left, this happened.

It was phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal.

This is how sports editor Stephanie Kuzydym summed it up:

The final shot arced toward the basket, and time stopped.

As he watched the ball, junior forward Christian Watford kept his right hand in the air.

The fans stood with their hands raised, holding their breath. The five red banners softly swayed.

Then, the sound of pure swish echoed. The golden numbers lit 0.0…

Saturday night brought back the faith that Butler basketball isn’t what the state of Indiana should be known for.

This is Indiana basketball. It’s the five banners. It’s Martha the Mop Lady. It’s the costumes and the candy stripes. It’s the tradition.

After inheriting a program in shambles, Crean had now become the shepherd. At the edge of the court, the coach watched as the floor disappeared beneath a red sea.

Basketball columnist Avi Zaleon wrote this fantastic column about who this win was for.

It was even for Brian Sanderson.

The soft-spoken freshman from Downers Grove, Ill., slept for two or three hours before waking up at 6 a.m. in his Foster Quad dorm room and making the walk up Fee Lane with nothing more than a coat, notebooks and a box of Frosted Flakes.

When Sanderson, who did not grow up an IU fan, arrived at Assembly Hall for his first general admission game, there was no line. He asked an official if he was in the right place. They assured him it was, and he was the first one.

As Branch McCracken Court was flooded at the Assembly Hall, we all rushed to Kirkwood Avenue. And by “we all,” I mean every Hoosier fan in the city flooded the street, closing it off way before police could erect barriers to keep traffic from entering the mob.

Spring photo editor Rabi Abonour shot this video of the ensuing madness.

The evening was phenomenal. I said at the time that the ensuing celebration was 24 years of pent-up Hoosier frustration.

The next day, we at the Daily Student started work on what was sure to be one of the most memorable front pages of the semester.

I think we succeeded.

We all tried to come up with a big headline that did two things. We wanted something that talked about how important this win was in the context of Saturday night. We wanted something that applied to the folks who flooded Assembly Hall and those who stormed Kirkwood. We also wanted to say “IU basketball is finally back” without being to cliché. We went back and forth on different headlines. “JUST HAPPENED.” was a front-runner. We played with “UNBELIEVABLE” for a while too.

Finally we settled on that line from our fight song. The entire celebration was all about the “glory” of this team and of this win and it’s reflection on the memories of “old IU”.

I talked with news design critic Charles Apple about the paper, and he gave a pretty good summary of the content.

What a great way to end the semester. The Hoosiers head to Indianapolis undefeated and ranked at No. 18 today to play Notre Dame at Conseco Fieldhouse.

Family ornaments, family history

Growing up, I remember the weekend after Thanksgiving to be one of the most exciting times of the year. It was that time of year when everything got packed up to make way for the lights, the ribbons, the ornaments, the tinsel and all our other Christmas decorations.

On our mantel are many Santa figurines — my parents give my sister and I each a Santa every year to put on the “Santa Mantel” (it’s very sentimental). In our cabinet are Christmas plates and Christmas mugs and even Christmas silverware.

And then there’s the tree. That hodgepodge phantasmagorical evergreen delight that has everything from traditional Christmas lights and ball ornaments to homemade nativity scenes and novelty lights of cowboy boots and cacti. Each year we end up having so many ornaments we have to branch out. We’re now up to seven trees of varying sizes and themes.

One of my favorites is the antique tree, full of my mother’s and grandmother’s delicate and old ornaments. Thanks to my grandmother’s stellar note-taking, I can get a clear picture of a family history of Christmas dating back to the late 1800s.

Christmas ornaments became popular in the United States during the 1870s and through the 1880s. Like most of our Christmas traditions, the idea of both an evergreen tree and the decorations to match come from Germany, where ornaments first started popping up in the mid-19th century. The oldest Christmas ornaments we have from my great-grandma date to the 1890s on the family farm in rural Wisconsin.

These bells and angels are characteristic of what we have from Grandma’s mother’s childhood. Simple ornaments for a simple family, most likely with a simple tree on the farm. They are old but well-made. They are by no means pristine, but they still are not falling apart like the mass-produced ornaments we have from the 20s-40s. To make up for the solid quality is poor quantity. We have very few ornaments from the turn of the century.

In the 1920s, the family’s ornaments became more ornate and more delicate. We have two ornaments like this one: thin, pink glass wrapped with frilly, ultra-thin wire. The one pictured has a wonderful art deco angel illustration on vinyl.

These are very fragile and very hard to store because of the unruly, precarious wire. They are also as unique as they come. Fresh from the box, I could see this ornament on Gatsby’s tree.

The other set of ornaments that start showing up in the ’20s are these egg ornaments. Most of them are homemade from actual eggs and hold a little baby Jesus. They are ornately decorated and, like the others, very fragile. These are hard to date; my mother has one that she made in the 1970s, but according to my grandmother’s notes the earliest come from the 1920s.

The Great Depression brought some changes to Christmas on the Humphrey family farm, as with the decorations. The ornaments are stronger than in the ’20s, but have less oddity. The Depression-era ornaments pictured below are mass-produced yet spare. This Santa is molded plastic, the first in our collection to be made that way. The boy is extraordinarily thin, much thinner than any of the ornaments from the 1920s. It is very translucent, with paint almost like plastic wrap. We have a pine-cone that is not pictured but is made similarly.

The ’50s mark the start of the mass-production, plastic-filled, commercialized Christmas we see today. Think a Leave it to Beaver Christmas. Now the Fountaines in Bedford, Ind., these are the ornaments of my aunts and uncle. There’s the snowman, which Grandma’s notes say was Aunt Dianne’s favorite — she called it her “popcorn man”. It is plastic and pristine as the day it was molded. Then there’s the Santa Band, still in it’s box with the original price-tag. It was bought from Woolworths — a pinnacle of ’50s commercialization culture — for 56 cents.

Many of the ornaments have messages written right on the ornaments themselves. This angel from 1959 was purchased before my mother was born. Grandma wrote this message on the back.

The ’60s ornaments in the collection are very similar in their mass-production quality. There’s a box that Grandma had taken notes in, but only a handful of those ornaments survive. The box is still around, and is a great piece to have. You can see the handwritten notes up at the top of this post.

That’s about where the cut-off for the “antique tree” ends, but that doesn’t mean that the family ornaments end. We’ve continued to grow the ornament collection over the years and add new, meaningful ornaments every year. That’s one of my favorite things about Christmas: looking at a single tree can tell you so much about a family’s history.

This ornament is from one of my first Christmas mornings, circa 1992.

P.S. – I completely forgot to link to part of the inspiration for this post. Mr. Larry Buchanan, designer extraordinaire and IU Student Media alumnus, created a blog last year for all those awkward ornaments on the family tree. Find it at awkwardornaments.com.

Congratulations to IDSNews!

Just a quick shout-out and congratulations to the everyone involved with the IDS 9/11 site. IU Student Media editors and advisers were at the Associated Collegiate Press national conference where we won many awards — including the trifecta of Pacemakers for our newspaper, magazine and yearbook.

The delegation also came back with a big, shiny trophy for the ACP Best of Show award for a Multimedia Presentation for the big 9/11 site. You can read all about the site on an earlier post of mine here.

We got this awesome news after a late night of breaking news reporting that kept me up till five in the morning. Great to hear our editor-in-chief’s voicemail telling me she was bringing back a big shiny trophy for our hard work back at the start of the semester.

Along with thanking all our folks who helped out, a big shout-out to the runners up. I was in awe by the competition we were up against and the long list of names of student media powerhouses that we were mentioned alongside.

The Argonaut at the University of Idaho put this cool video package together of their campus-wide game of Humans vs. Zombies. Our BigTen rivals to the west, The Daily Illini, entered this cool video about a refurbished WWII bomber. Online powerhouse at the University of North Carolina, The Daily Tar Heel, produced this interactive presentation of first amendment issues. I also really like the Western Kentucky University’s College Heights Herald video of remembering 9/11.

We had some stiff competition, but I think it was our teamwork that made us stand out. We had a story from every single section. We had interactives, video, photos, audio and more. Where one school had one or two features, we had over two dozen. Either way, really good work from everyone involved. Congrats, everyone!

Things that bump in the night

Every fall, when the weather cools down, the leaves change color, and the pumpkin spice lattes make their appearance on campuses everywhere, I get in a certain mood.

It might be the jack-o-lanterns popping up all over Bloomington, it may be the hot cider stands, or it may be fake spider webs and stacks of candy lining aisles at Kroger, but every October I really get into scary movies. Not really the psychological thrillers, but the slasher flicks, the monster movies, the scream-inducing horrors that make you want to keep the nightlight on.

Last fall, I took a course that studied zombies as a barometer for cultural anxiety. In it, we watched zombie movies and studied zombie literature to place them in the span of cultural conscious to answer the questions of why we fear the living dead.

That question of why we fear what we do continues to interest me, and every October I try to convince myself to change my major to supernatural folklore or something where I can explore this further.

In the meantime, however, I have a blog. So here are some quick thoughts on a few of our scariest monsters.

VAMPIRES — Vampires like Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula first received fame at an interesting point in history. We really began fearing aristocratic, well-dressed, smooth-talking, blood-sucking, vampires at a time when society began rejecting the Victorian age of aristocracy. A wealthy count from Eastern Europe suddenly became something to fear, especially when you add fangs and a penchant for human blood.

WEREWOLVES — Across time, one of human kind’s biggest fears is ourselves. Werewolves are a reflection of our own fear that our primal urges and violent behaviors will win out. It’s a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde fear that is pervasive across generations. We fear Lon Chaney Jr. when he unwillingly turns into a wolf, because we are afraid our own desires taking control of us against our free will.

ZOMBIES —  Now I took a whole course on zombies, so I could go on and on about how zombies have represented our cultural fears of the Cold War, sexism, racism, our own unpredictability (like werewolves), and more. But you can also look specifically at what we fear in modern zombie movies, the zombie apocalypse. The apocalypse plays a major role in contemporary zombie lore because of the massive loss of communication. No internet, no cell phones, no TV; that’s what we fear.

Hoosier Hops & Harvest…and homebrew

Along with the JSchool Centennial, this weekend was jam-packed for me. On Saturday after the Centennial meet-and-greet at the IDS, I headed down to Brown County with three friends to tiny Story, Ind. There we covered the Hoosier Hops & Harvest festival. (See the story, photos and video here.)

It was quite fun indeed.

There were 20 small-production breweries, plenty of low-and-slow barbecue, great bluegrass and acoustic music. Fantastic weather. Wonderful location (if you’ve never been to Brown County, you don’t even know). I had six free tastes along with my admission. Here’s my run-down of the brews I tried.

BEE CREEK Clay County Coffee Stout — This brew from Brazil, Ind. is a real nice stout with a strong, bold flavor. It’s included with locally roasted coffee beans, and you can taste it in this stout. The characteristic roasted flavor of the coffee comes out strong, which balances the bitterness of the of the stout with the flavor of a cup of freshly roasted coffee beans.

RIVERTOWN Roebling Porter —Rivertown, out of Cincinnati, makes a whole line of traditional German-style beers. Their Roebling has a tinge of vanilla and espresso, which makes it really stand out. This was definitely one of my favorites of the day. Good things are coming out of the Queen City, I can say that much for sure.

BIG WOODS Busted Knuckle Ale — Big Woods took the cake in my book. The local boys from Nashville, Ind. — just up the road from Story — made a great debut with their Busted Knuckle Ale. Not quite a brown, not quite an amber, just real damn good. They’re just starting off, but with distribution in Nashville and limited in Bloomington, they’re someone to really keep an eye out for.

DOGFISH HEAD/THREE FLOYD’S Poppaskull — Craft beer gurus Dogfish Head from Deleware have partnered up with Three Floyd’s of Munster, Ind. to create Poppaskull, an odd combo of yeast, wheat and spice. By far the most unique, most interesting, but I probably won’t be having it again. Too full of odd spices (nutmeg, citrus, etc.) and too fruity for me. A real yeasty Belgian-style. Not a big fan, but definitely — like most things Dogfish Head does — unique.

POWERHOUSE Diesel Oil Stout — Powerhouse Brewing Company out of Columbus, Ind., makes a pretty snazzy stout with a wicked name. Nothing terribly unique about it, but still a fine stout nonetheless. Plus, it’s local. Which gives it extra points in my book.

OAKEN BARREL Indiana Amber Ale — Oaken Barrel in Indianapolis makes this Hoosier specialty. Great amber color, hoppy aroma, not too bitter, but still has the flavor of hops that makes an amber ale shine.

Speaking of amber ales, I also had an American amber ale this weekend from another brand new brewer in southern Indiana.: me.

I started making beer with a new batch of amber ale that isn’t half bad if I do say so myself. I made it with a Mr. Beer kit, so it’s not the freshest, but it beats some of the things we call beer out there. I’m excited to keep on keepin’ on in the homebrew world. I think next on my agenda is a pumpkin ale for the fall. I’ll give an update on that when it comes to fruition next month.