If you enjoy drinking beer as I do, it's a real blessing to live in the Pacific Northwest, which has many hundreds of small breweries. Washington State also has the second largest number of wineries in the country, and probably ranks in the top two or three in total number of marijuana dispensaries. You want intoxicants? You've come to the right state. Washington is also the largest producer of hops in the country by far. Washington's hops get dried or pelletized and shipped to breweries all over the world. But not all of them. Some of them are used fresh to make fresh hops beers, something that can only be had for a short period of time. Like right now. Over a hundred years ago, the Seattle area grew most of the country's hops, in places like Kent and Puyallup, just southeast of the city. In the early 1880's, hops blight destroyed most of the European hops crop, and Western Washington became one of the world's major hop growing areas. But ten years later, aphid...

About five days ago, I read on Smoking Monkey Pizza's Facebook page that they were issuing a challenge. Eat an entire fourteen inch "Scorpion Ghost" pizza within 25 minutes, you'll get the pizza free, and they'll throw in some gelato as the prize. The Scorpion Ghost pizza is topped with Trinidad Scorpion peppers, ghost peppers, habanero peppers, and the marinara sauce is infused with cayenne, hot pepper flakes, and Tabasco. I'm a pretty good real estate agent. But I'm a great pizza eater. About 33 years ago, The Broadway Merchants association on Seattle's Capitol Hill sponsored a bunch of eating contests as part of their street festival. I ate an entire sixteen inch pizza then in four minutes and thirty seconds, so it seemed to me that even if I've slowed down with age, twenty five minutes seemed generous. What I didn't account for was how quite hot it was. Dang! But I did it, yesterday. Ate the whole thing in fourteen minutes. It was painful,...