A lot of you want to know...

A lot of you want to know how we came up with the idea for our HWA Special, which, you can take it from me, is a shoo-in to win the first International Electric Grand Prix, a road rally from Long Beach to San Bernardino for cars powered by alternative energy sources. You won’t miss it among the 60 other entries at Santa Monica College from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday at a festival that marks the end of the first leg of the four-day race. For information, call (818) 565-5519.

Actually, we’ve been in the experimental car business for a long time. It was back in 1979, when gas prices were going up and were going to keep on going up forever (like housing prices in 1989) that we started tinkering in our Culver City garage.

My brother Mort, who had an MBA from Pepperdine, backed out early. “All that era-of-limits, Jerry Brown stuff is bunk,� he said. “Market forces decree that when gasoline gets scarce, we’ll find some way to get more of it, cheaper. Growth is unstoppable.�

And, sure enough, gas prices dropped. But my other brother, Willie Bob, and I didn’t give up.

First we tried electric. We strung flashlight batteries together, but the string had to be so long that when the front end of the car topped Cahuenga Pass, the rear end hadn’t cleared our garage. We tried regular car batteries, but we found out what a lot of other tinkerers have found out: A car with enough batteries to go 100 m.p.h. is too heavy to go more than 30 m.p.h. Plus, you have to plug it in after every trip to the grocery store.

Then we tried solar, but ultraviolet rays coming through the holes in the ozone layer raised blisters on the top of the car .

About this time Mort, who’d gotten a doctorate in environmental metaphysics from UCLA, came back into our lives. “Way to go, guys,� he said. “You’ll be set to cash in when the rest of the economy goes down the tubes.�

“Wait a minute,� we said. “What about all that unstoppable growth?�

“That was then,� Mort said, “and this is later.�

But we weren’t any closer to a technological breakthrough until Willie Bob, who’d dropped out of high school his sophomore year, gave us the solution in a single word: beer.

“Look at how many gas stations there are,� he said. “Then look at how many more liquor stores there are. We’re talking unlimited supply here. And I mean worldwide. Countries barely out of the Stone Age, countries that don’t know Scotch from vodka, countries generations away from a decent margarita--they all make beer.�

So we went back to tinkering, and what do you know? A car that scats like a Ferrari Testarossa and squeezes 350 miles out of a six-pack. For extra octane, I’d recommend Willie Bob’s home brew. And the only by-product of combustion is--you guessed it--water.

That’s the story of the HWA, folks. Hops With Attitude.