Wolaver’s Alta Gracia Coffee Porter

Ok, I don’t know what other people are drinking.  On Beer Advocate people are giving this a B.  I thought it was crap.  I LOVE Wolavers and really want to like this beer.  So much so that I tried it twice.  I thought, I must be wrong, maybe my glass was dirty.  So, I bought a second bottle, took 2 sips and poured the rest out.  I am so disappointed.

The beer looks ok, and even smells good.  Coffee Porter, nothing big here.  But the taste?  It is wicked (Vermont slang) off.  There is no noticeable coffee flavour and if they are going for a smoke beer they need to take some lessons from Brew Dog.  It is kinda like the flavour of what rotting compost smells like. ★★★★★

Ok so Alta Gracia, what is that?  It is way more interesting, trust me.

Alta Gracia is a village in the Dominican Republic where a factory pays living wages, radical aye?

According to the New York Times:

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company. For Knights, the factory is a risky proposition, even though it already has orders to make T-shirts and sweatshirts for bookstores at 400 American universities. The question is whether students, alumni and sports fans will be willing to pay $18 for the factory’s T-shirts — the same as premium brands like Nike and Adidas — to sustain the plant and its generous wages.

[...]

Santa Castillo agrees. She and many co-workers toiled at other factories for the minimum wage, currently $147 a month in this country’s free-trade zones, where most apparel factories are located. That amount, worker after worker lamented in interviews for this article, falls woefully short of supporting a family.

The Alta Gracia factory has pledged to pay employees nearly three and a half times the prevailing minimum wage, based on a study done by a workers’ rights group that calculated the living costs for a family of four in the Dominican Republic.

While some critics view the living wage as do-gooder mumbo-jumbo, Ms. Castillo views it as a godsend. In her years earning the minimum wage, she said she felt stuck on a treadmill — never able to advance, often borrowing to buy necessities.

Real living wages?  Now that is something to drink to (not this beer but hey)