[Mike Nolan]

Restaurants are a high risk operation, even franchise operations for major brands like McDonalds can fail, independent restaurants, even a small chain, are even more prone to fail.

One of my professors and I did some studying of this when I was in grad school. We found that among non-franchise restaurants, fewer than 20% of them lasted as long as 5 years, and half were gone within 18 months.

There's a building near us that has been at least 5 different restaurants in the past 22 years. Most lasted 2-3 years, even the most recent attempt, a second location for one of the most popular restaurants in Lincoln, recently closed after a 4-5 year run. I think it's just a bad location. The building size and configuration may also be a problem, it's big enough that it requires a lot of covers in a day to break even.

I'm not a beer drinker, either, so it's kind of funny that for several years I was developing software for beer distributors. There's a brewpub/restaurant near us that is a second location for the place I got the spent grain from, we go there a few times a year. My older son really likes their beer cheese soup, several times he's ordered a gallon or more of it frozen and takes it back to Pittsburgh. They do some interesting breads with their spent grain, but my wife's favorite thing on their menu is the lavash pizza. Now that we've found a place to get good lavash, that'll limit the number of times we go back.

The liquor industry would go broke if it had to depend on me, and with my wife's garlic problems and low carb diet, there aren't very many local restaurants we go to on a regular basis, either. We do some fast food takeout, burgers, pizza and fried chicken mostly.

We've spent the night in South Bend a number of times when driving back and forth between Lincoln and Pittsburgh. Haven't done enough exploring of it to get away from the I-80 corridor, which may also be where a lot of the college/tourist crowd goes, so we don't know where the locals eat.

[Mike Nolan]

Peter Reinhart has a number of recipes for spent grain breads in his whole grains book. About 10 years ago I called one of the local brewpubs and got a 5 gallon bucket of spent grain from them. (They usually just give it to local farmers to feed pigs, though they do use some of it in the bread they bring to the table and in some of the sandwiches they serve.)

I tried several spent grain bread recipes, but I think the most successful recipe I made was a variant on bran muffins. I think all the barley made for a sweet muffin. See Spent Grain Muffins

I did discover that since spent grain has a lot of hulls, sometimes it gets a bit chewy with stuff stuck between your teeth, almost like eating a bread with caraway in it. I took some of the spent grain, dried it in the oven and then ran it through the food processor to chop it up a bit, that made for a softer less toothsome bread, but it would take a lot of time to do that with a large quantity of spent grain and I don't know how long it would last after being dried. You can also run it through the food processor while its still damp, but it gets kind of messy to clean up.

From discussions I've had with others who bake with spent grains, depending on what kind of grains they're using in their beers, there's quite a bit of variability in the taste and texture of the breads made with spent grains.

Interestingly enough, there was no 'beery' flavor to any of the breads I made.

Beer makers also use a lot of different types of yeast in their beers, the local home-brew supply store must have two dozen yeast varieties, and that's just a small selection of what's available online. I don't know what impact different varieties of yeast would have on making bread, that could be a subject for a lot of experimentation.

I can't help you on using bread to make beer.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think a course in statistics was required of the journalism majors at Northwestern when I went there. I was an engineering major, I took lots of courses in math, mostly things like calculus and differential equations, but I did take one course in probability theory as an undergrad and then several course in social science research methodology and statistics in grad school.

Of the various articles I've read based on the recent JAMA article, this one appears to be fairly well balanced:
Eggs and Cholesterol

[Mike Nolan]

I went back and updated the past quizzes so that most of them should have follow-ups appear in the forums. That bumped all the current topics down, so I bumped a few of them back up to the top.

[Mike Nolan]

I wish my wife liked either barley or lentil, I can't make a soup with either one in it. (Many lentil soup recipes also call for garlic, but that's something I can deal with.)

[Mike Nolan]

I've pretty much stopped making cornbread with wheat flour, we like the gluten-free one better.

[Mike Nolan]

Steak, potato and mushrooms here tonight, plus some 5 bean salad.

[Mike Nolan]

If you didn't dunk them in butter and coat them with sugar, that would explain why your husband didn't think they were sweet enough.

When I make the KAF donut muffin recipe, I don't butter them but I do pop them in a bag with some sugar while they're still warm and shake it.

[Mike Nolan]

Some people start maple syrup businesses after they retire, others start food blogs. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

We have ceiling can lights in several places, as the bulbs need replacing I've been replacing them with LED bulbs. Some of the fixtures are on dimmers, so I have to use dimmable bulbs there.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in grad school I took several courses on statistics for researchers, proving causality is difficult in the laboratory and nearly impossible in the real world.

[Mike Nolan]

I just wonder if ramping up the production is going to have to change your marketing methods. It's one thing to sell a small amount of syrup, it might be something else to sell enough to make enough to live on.

I spent several years advising small businesses when I was in grad school, ramping up production and sales were major issues for a number of businesses that I worked with. With one, the challenge was convincing the owner to go from owner/salesman to owner/manager and actually hire a sales staff.

[Mike Nolan]

It looks like comments to quizzes are going in the Forums now. I don't think I"ll go back and try to fix the earlier quizzes, but future quizzes will all have followups in the Forums, so I've set up a special category for them.

The quiz question itself gets messed up in the Forums, I don't know if I can prevent that, though I did fix it for today's quiz, but at least the link worked.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Have you thought about how you're going to market your product when you have enough to sell?

There's a Wisconsin maple syrup producer who makes the circuit of the midwest/great plains farmer's markets in the summer, going as far west as Denver. He usually is in Lincoln around the 4th of July, we get an email from him every spring letting us know when he'll be in the area.

We're planning to be in the Valley Forge PA area for a convention this summer, but that's still 450-500 miles from Vermont. Otherwise, I'd love to come visit and see your setup, although right now is probably the best time to visit a maple sugar facility. There were a few small groves of sugar maples near where I grew up in NW Illinois, and one or two of the farmers would tap them. You could smell their sugar shacks in operation from several miles away. And these were really small operations.

[Mike Nolan]

It appears any comments to today's quiz will appear under the quiz but not in the forums (unlike comments to blog posts), which means they aren't as visible as I'd like them to be. I don't know if this is a conflict between two plugins (bbpress and wp-quiz) that might be resolvable or just the way it works.

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