Truth be told, they’ve been a pain in the ass since day one. And that “day one” dates all the way back to 1999.  First, it was a joyous pain…. It was the Stone 3rd Anniversary Open House.  Our good friend Vince Marsaglia, stoked about the fact that we’d started to raise some nice money for charity at the Anniversary celebrations, and being the kind of guy who loves to pitch in and loves to cook, offered up his serious skills.  And what did he settle on?  Onion Rings!  The Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Rings were born. We didn’t charge anything for them.  We’d gone from asking for a voluntary donation for charity at the 1st Anniversary, to $5 at the 2nd Anniversary.  I’m really struggling to recall here, but I think we raised it again at the 3rd Anniversary to somewhere in the $7 range.  We’ve got a record of that detail in a filebox somewhere, but I don’t want to go dig through all that stuff right now.  The bottom line is that we were a little concerned about the increase in price, and the idea of offering attendees a free perk to get a little food in their stomachs seemed like a great idea. They were an instant hit.  The line was long and nonstop all through the fest. Vince and his helpers worked like crazy all day, ran out, and ended up covered head to toe in batter.  Vince was grinning the whole time. Before reading this, you might have understandably guessed that the Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Rings were a Stone invention.  They were not.  Credit goes entirely to Vince. The next year Vince made even more onion rings.  They were so popular that the line was again 30-50 people deep the entire day, they again worked like crazy, eventually ran out again, and Vince and team were covered in even more batter at the end of the day. Vince has not missed leading the Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Ring team during the Stone Anniversary Celebrations since.  That counts up to NINE years he’s been doing it.  Each year he’s prepped and brought more onions, we’ve made his tent area bigger, and we’ve added additional fryer capacity.  And each year the legend of them, and the line, has continued to grow. So a couple of years ago as we were leading up to opening the Stone World Bistro & Gardens, we knew that the sought after Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Rings were a ‘must’ on the menu. That’s when the real trouble started. TO BE CONTINUED….Part 2 -GK