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"FacebookPinterest\n\n  Ben Conniff of Luke's Lobster goes on a (responsible, work-related) bender\n\nFacebookPinterestMaineMenrubric.gif\n\nUnlike Fashion Week, which celebrates everything I don't understand, New York Craft Beer Week pays homage to barley and hops\u2014my twin idols. Last Saturday I got to unite the loves of my life by serving lobster rolls at Get Real NY, a beer festival with eighty ales on cask. From noon to 8 p.m., Chris and I stayed on our feet, churning out shrimp and lobster rolls for about 1,200 hungry beer hounds and tipping back our share of cask tastings ourselves. (Don't worry, we had a designated driver.) It was an exhausting day, and Chris was barely able to stand as he washed dishes in the aftermath.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Rather than listen to my body and stumble home, I packed up and headed to Greenpoint for a six-bar beer crawl with my roommates. Beyond the cool events, that is the crux of Beer Week: special deals at eighty-five bars around the city, enticing you to explore neighborhoods you'd never go to, meet new people, and sip beers you've only imagined. But for me, it's a delicate balancing act: It's not easy to work like a horse and drink like, well, a horse.\n\nLast year Beer Week began two weeks before the scheduled opening of our first restaurant. I was hustling seven days a week, scrubbing floors and painting, fighting with the Department of Buildings, studying to get my food-protection certificate so I'd actually be qualified to run the place, praying that all our equipment and supplies would arrive on time, and hiring and training an entire staff (and myself). Yet somehow I also found myself at bars on Staten Island, in the Bronx, in Astoria, and on the Upper West Side.\n\nWhen I imagine the energy it took to stumble around Williamsburg at 4 a.m. one night and be at work at nine the next morning, I don't know how this was able to open on October 1.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nHow did I do this year? Not quite as aggressive as last. But not too shabby, either. I spent Thursday of Beer Week drinking rare beers with Rob Todd, the owner of Allagash, Maine's finest Belgian brewery, at one of my favorite beer bars, Rattle 'N' Hum. After a few tastes of the Avanc\u00E9 , the Belgian strong ale from Allagash infused with tart raspberries, the bar's owner, Pat, had to steady me on my way out the door. Friday morning was not my happiest day at the office, but I did juggle a big workload with a couple of bar stops in south Park Slope that night. I'm still swallowing the eighty-hour workweek along with my suds. But there was one difference from last year. That Sunday morning, after my fourteen-hour beer-a-thon, I stayed in bed."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/maine-men-beer-week>