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Like Dave, and maybe with a little guidance from Sam, I’m looking forward to getting to know steak better. For us, that meant picking up some ribeyes and tossing them on the grill for the season’s first cookout. I’ve been grill-deprived for the past few years, so I sat back and watched our friend S take charge. His steak philosophy was essentialist: buy the best cuts you can find (he found them at Van’s Fairway), and eat them rare. The results were persuasive.

I’m picking up a grill this weekend, so I can start working out my own steak philosophy. Pragmatic sirloin, corn-fed, gas grill, and a quick marinade? Or fundamentalist porterhouse, grass-fed, charcoal, with only a rub of salt and pepper? While I’m a pragmatist at most things, I think I may be a steak fundamentalist.

Thanks to Ed for the kind mention on his blog, which is as close to big media as we may ever get. Close observers notice from his Sleeping Giant Brewing Co. hat that Ed’s a crypto-Helenan.

Speaking of beer, Ed drew my attention to the brewing feud between a St. Louis liquor distributor and Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co. When I lived in Billings, some friends and I dropped by George and Jay’s unassuming warehouse brewery–back when they were still building their taphouse bar–and they treated us to a short tour and brewing lesson. These are excellent Montana microbrewers who view beer as a celebration of local ingredients:

Milled under the Cretaceous Rims of the Eagle Sandstone – A paleo beach in Montana!
Brewed from waters of the Yellowstone River – the last free and wild river.
Fermented in the shadows of the majestic Breartooth Mountains.

Who doesn’t love a poetic geochemist brewer?

Well the David Sherman Corporation, purveyors of Everclear grain alcohol and Rebel Yell whiskey, does not share George and Jay’s appreciation for the unique Yellowstone river landscape. According to David Sherman, Yellowstone Bourbon was developed in 1854 by Kentuckian J.B. Dant; it’s name came from one of Dant’s salesmen who visited Yellowstone Park in its inaugural year of 1872: “He had the idea that if the name Yellowstone were put on a bottle of good whiskey, chances were good that the folks out West would buy it, and since the park was receiving publicity, the name would stick in everybody’s mind.” I can’t tell if the “folks out West” buy much Yellowstone Bourbon, and I haven’t seen it in many bars here.

Trademark law is more complicated than it should be because each case depends on a particular court’s view of what may or may not confuse consumers, which is hard to predict. Unfortunately, this uncertainty drives many bigger firms to threaten smaller ones, because judges see a plaintiff’s diligence in enforcing a trademark as evidence of the brand’s value. While the article notes several examples of Montanans successfully standing their intangible ground (Montana Knits of Dillon beat Claude Montana, and the Golden Nugget of Troy beat Las Vegas’s Golden Nugget), the costs of a trademark infringement lawsuit often force the little guy to give up his brand. In the end the dynamics of trademark law probably lead to overprotection of brand names in circumstances when no reasonable consumer would be confused.

If Yellowstone Brewing can’t afford to defend the lawsuit, it would be nice to see someone take up their cause pro bono, or for a public interest group or law school clinic to jump in. That may sound strange, but clear and evenhanded enforcement of intellectual property law benefits the public as much as robust real property law; there are all sorts of nonprofit conservation groups that champion the property rights of the small landowner–how about the intellectual property rights of the small brandowner?

We knew when we found piles of deer scat in our small fenced yard that we would have trouble eating food from our garden before the deer did. I saw a family of three deer on the way to the supermarket a while ago. And last week, as I walked home from work, two fully grown does stared me down from the middle of the sidewalk, one block from our house in the middle of Helena.

According to a recent New York Times article (reg. req.), there are 50 times more deer in America–25 to 30 million of them–than there were a century ago:

Across the country, deer cause 1.5 million traffic accidents, $1.1 billion in vehicle damage and 150 deaths a year, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va. The highest populations occur where guns are banned.

“Back in the early 1970’s, Princeton banned the discharge of firearms, and deer-car collisions went up 600 percent,” said Susan Martka, a wildlife biologist for New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Now the gardeners are getting even–they’re hiring sharpshooters and bowhunters to protect their greens. Do they make gardening aprons in blaze orange?

A few months ago some friends took us on a drive out of town to the shores of Hauser Lake on the Missouri. The destination was a classic Montana roadhouse, and in the late winter dark beyond the bar service lights illuminated pleasure boat docks. We blew through the smoke and the din of video poker machines and entered a glassed door to a small sanctuary on the north end of the building. This place had a story behind it: Cody Smith, a young Californian who was introduced to the restaurant business at his uncle’s place in the Madison Valley, and later came to the Lakeside Resort for a year-round clientele.

The timbered walls gave way to a quiet whitewashed gallery of food-themed prints, and about eight tables topped with linen. A pleasant server presented us with our table, and a short menu and wine list. The selection of entrees were what you might find at the kind of supper club you’d expect on the county road we took–chicken, salmon, lamb–but the preparations were inspired, eclectic, even delicate. I can just remember the calamari, and salmon in broth (tomato?). I also remember looking forward to exploring the rest of the menu in future visits, maybe when summer came around and the lakeside deck at the end of the dining room opened.

But before I made it back to Hauser Lake, Smith left and the Lakeside returned to a tavern. I wasn’t too surprised, since it was all so unlikely to begin with: an inventive and ambitious chef, dedicated to great ingredients and paired with a room with a view, serving year-round at a summer season lakeside bar fifteen minutes outside of Helena. Still, at a roadhouse on some county road far from the resort towns, another Cody Smith will come along. Let me know if you find him.