By Bill Grotto

Bike Winner: Mark Minnich
Born: Ohio but raised in south Florida since he was 7
First Bike: Honda 90 when he was 15 years old, he paid $519 for it!
How long riding: 52 years
Occupation: Retired Air Conditioning and Refrigeration tech by day and bartender by night…for 32 years!!

I tried to reach Mark a few times via email and phone but he wasn’t budging. I introduced myself and told him that out of the thousands and thousands of entries for the Twisted Tea Dragger, built by our friends at Flat Broke Chops n Rods and Cycle Source magazine, that he was the lucky winner. I mean it’s not like I told him I was a prince from Nigeria that inherited a vast sum of money but in order to access the money, I needed his bank information in order to share it with him!

With all the scams out there these days I can’t blame him for being skeptical. The last message I left was “Hey man you won this bike and if we don’t hear from you we are going to have to pick another winner at random.” BOOM! That was all it took to get him to return the call! When he told me he heard about the sweepstakes by picking up a copy of Thunder Roads Florida Magazine at Earl’s Hideaway I was just about as ecstatic as he was because both are great supporters of Twisted Tea.

You see we have these people out there called “sweepers” and their main goal in life is to enter as many sweepstakes as possible in the hopes of winning something…anything…even if they don’t care what it is! There are even websites dedicated to this unscrupulous past time that list all the sweepstakes out there. Once we had a guy win a bike from us and he didn’t even ride. Told us he planned on selling the bike as soon as he got it. It’s a free country and that guy won the bike fair and square but when he told us his intentions, I asked the guys up in the finance department if we could offer a cash option which we did…post haste!

Mark lives up in the Space Coast of Florida with his lady of 17 years Dee. In fact, she was the one who grabbed the magazine and prompted him to fill it out so you know she’s gonna get to ride with him whenever she says so! (And fellas, isn’t that always the case??)

Congratulations Mark and Dee and we’ll see you on the road!