beer

Long Live Henry Weinhard

A.B. Kelly · August 19, 2021 · Musings · alcohol, bad beer, beer, cheap beer, drinking, good beer, Henry Weinhard · No Comments

Henry Weinhard is no more.

Pour one out.

So long, Henry, we hardly knew ya!

Except for me. I knew Henry very, very well.

For those who don’t know, Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve is a beer. If you aren’t familiar with their beer, you might recognize their sodas and root beers. It’s the good shit way down at the end of the soda aisle. None of that A&W bullshit. Six-packs only, bottles only.

Ironic, considering the beer was at the other end of the beer aisle. Hack, a six-pack of their root beer might cost the same as a twelve-pack of their beer.

Private Reserve got me through most of my twenties. While not my only go-to beer, it was part of the regular rotation. True, twentysomethings aren’t generally known to be concerned with the quality of beer. Bang for the buck was my maxim, so a steady supply of the Bud Lights and MGDs of the world were on order. And that was the good stuff.

Never was a fan of Coors, which totally cuts against my west coast bias. Then again, I started drinking after they had nationwide distribution. Hard to believe it was a forbidden fruit, the In n’ Out of its day. If they remade Smokey and the Bandit today, he’d be smuggling double doubles.

Scratch that. The dumbass voters in my state passed a proposition to make bacon as difficult to come by in California as Coors was in 1970s Georgia. If that isn’t call for a reboot, I don’t know what is. They’re hungry in Fontana and there’s grease in Texarkana.

I also drank quality beer when I could get it on sale. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Sam Adams Boston Lager. Microbrews, too. Nothing like a liter of Marzen from the local German-themed sausage restaurant, half-price on Thirsty Thursday or College Night or whatever the fuck night it was.

Speaking of which, I recently looked up the Oktoberfest numbers in Munich, as it’s one of my dream destinations. In 2019, they had 6.3 million visitors and sold 7.3 million liters of beer. Am I the only one thinking there’s a lot of people not carrying their weight? That’s less than 1.2 per person. At a festival that pretty much exists only for drinking beer.

Regardless, even if I drank my fair share of PBR, I knew what beer was supposed to taste like.

Enter Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve. Flavor-wise, it was closer to Sierra Nevada, while price-wise, it was a Budweiser. Even in my twenties, I knew a perfect combination when I saw it.

You know those trendline graphs with individual plot points scattered around the average line? For instance, they’ll have percent of a state’s 2020 vote for Biden on the y-axis and COVID vaccination rate on the x-axis with an upward diagonal showing the average. We’d expect a state that voted 70-30 for Biden should have a 90% vaccination rate. But then there are the outliers, like New Hampshire, where Biden only took 52% of the vote but they’re, like, the most vaccinated state.

If you were to plot beers with price and quality on the axes, you’d see a similar trend. The higher the price, the better it tastes. Henry Weinhard’s would be the New Hampshire in that example. Priced down by PBR, quality up by Sam Adams.

Yes, I had these conversations while drunk in my twenties. I also once, while drunk in the red light district, opined that whatever the prostitutes were charging, it was above the quilibrium price for a Tuesday night in Sydney, because damn if there wasn’t a surplus of hookers on that strip of land.

Some of y’all get drunk and get in fights. I sing karaoke and discuss social sciences.

I don’t remember outgrowing Weinhard’s. There was never a time I proclaimed it no longer a go-to, but I certainly bought it less. Maybe I didn’t find myself strolling down that end of the aisle as often opting for craft six-packs instead of piss-water thirty-packs. But every once in a while, I’d see a Weinhard’s and have fond memories. If there was room in the fridge, maybe I’d buy a twelver as a palate cleanser. And every time I’d say, “Yeah, that’s still solid.” Then I’d forget about it for another eighteen months.

Not so with my other twenties go-to beer, Rolling Rock. I remember it being cheap and crisp. Then they were bought out by Anheuser-Busch, which promptly raised the price to be more in line with the craft brews. And I swear they changed the flavor, too. Maybe it’s psychosomatic and the $9.99 six-back doesn’t taste as good as it did at $5.99.

But man, over the past decade, every time I’ve tried a Rolling Rock, I’m flabbergasted I ever liked it. It barely even tastes like beer. It’s like bitter seltzer water. Whether that can be blamed on aging taste buds or Budweiser, I don’t know. Probably both. I also might have been duped by fun commercials, a distinctive bottle, and their fascination with the number 33.

Earlier this summer, while preparing libations for Camptathalon, I passed by the Henry’s and I equivocated. I didn’t want to be the asshole who brought lousy beer camping. One of the other guys busts out Miller High Life once every few years. It would be one thing if he sat in the proverbial corner and kept it to himself, but instead he always throws down with a “You know you want to see if it holds up.” To which I want to reply that Miller High Life never held any elevated position to which it might still “hold up” to. If he’d brought an MGD, maybe we could talk.

Incidentally, we all have fond memories of MGD. We have looked for it. It doesn’t exist anymore.

As for the High Life he brought camping. We all agreed it sucked and he had to finish the case by himself.

So I was gambling with the twelve-pack of Weinhard’s. If it was lousy, the most I’d be able to pawn off is one per person.

The other campers’ reaction started the same as with Miller High Life: “Whoa, you brought Henry Weinhard’s?” But instead of segueing to “What the fuck were you thinking?”, the next line was along the lines of “Where the fuck did you find Weinhard’s?” As we talked about drinking it in our younger days, almost to a man, their reaction was the same as mine. The perfect intersection of price and quality. Everybody grabbed one. Willingly, unlike the High Life.

The verdict? It holds up. Bright, crisp, a little bit malty. Not “good” beer, but nothing you have to chase with an entire bottle of whiskey. Beforehand. If I had to choose between a Weinhard’s and a Sam Adams, I’d go Boston all the way. But up against every beer in its own price range, give me a Henry’s.

Although not anymore. Of course, right after I rediscover this gem of a cheap beer, they yank it from me. Did I mention it was bought out by Coors before being shut down? I can think of at least two other beers that Coors could stop producing instead of Weinhard’s. One is the champagne of beers and the other is the silver bullet.

One Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve remained when I returned from Camptathalon. Now I’m faced with a dilemma. Like a Death Row inmate ordering his last meal, I know that the next time I drink a Weinhard’s will be the last time I drink a Weinhard’s. I ought to wait for a special occasion, a solemn occurrence.

But I shouldn’t wait too long.

After all, it’s a cheap beer. Those don’t tend to age well.

Stop Calling Hazy Beers IPAs

A.B. Kelly · July 6, 2021 · Musings · alcohol, beer, craft beer, food & drink, IPA · No Comments

That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Thanks for reading my blog.

Okay, okay. I’ll expound a little.

The latest beer craze has been Hazy IPAs. They’re, as you might guess, hazy in color. Opaque. Like Metamucil on a cloudy day. So the name of it totally fits.

Except for the fact that it’s not an IPA.

IPA, for those who don’t know, stands for India Pale Ale. It originally got this designation because it was the beer English sailors took on the long trek to India. In order to avoid spoilage, they put a shit-ton of hops in it. Medieval preservatives. Hence the hop-forward flavor profile of your typical IPA. Except not hazies.

When you remember that the I stands for India, the extra classifications sound silly. An IIPA is an Imperial India Pale Ale. Kinda redundant. When else were the Brits going to India? By the time India gained it’s independence, the Suez Canal existed, making the extra hops unnecessary. To say nothing of refrigeration.

A Double IPA? Triple? Is there more than one India? The British were known for fomenting differences between the various religions and ethnicities on the subcontinent, so maybe you could have a Triple India, but they wouldn’t all be drinking the same beer. And at least one of the three wouldn’t drink beer.

Maybe the Double and the Triple IPAs were extra hopped for multiple trips to and from? But couldn’t they refill their keg in between trips? In reality, the double and triple just refers to the extra level of douchiness of the hipsters who drink that swill. Maybe the D doesn’t really stand for Double, after all. You can go to a barbecue with a Triple Douchbag IPA, even if there isn’t a beer in sight.

In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not a huge fan of IPAs. Unfortunately, this means the selection of beers I could buy over the past decade was sparse. In a typical liquor store, the IPA section took up about seventy percent. Twenty percent went to the piss-water, your Budweisers and Pabsts, remnants of my father’s and grandfather’s era when they didn’t know beer was supposed to have flavor, leaving maybe ten percent of the shelf space for the Pales and the Browns and the Reds and the Stouts and the Pilsners and the Wheats.

Actually, fuck the Wheats. If I have to add fruit, it ain’t a beer.

By the time I was of legal drinking age, my grandpa was dead and my dad was an alcoholic. So I never really got a chance to sit and have a brewski with them. I wonder how they would have reacted if I busted out a Sierra Nevada Pale, or even a Newcastle Brown. Would they have oohed and aahed at the brave new world I’d opened for them? Or would they have wondered why my generation had to go fuck something up as simple and wonderful as beer? Kinda like I do when a Millennial waxes lyrical about his 100 IBU IPA.

IBU stands for International Bitterness Unit. The bitterness comes from the hops and the closer it gets to triple-digits, the more it tastes and feels like cotton. Budweiser and its ilk have IBUs in the single digits. Creamy ales and brown ales are in the low double-digits. The major microbrews, like Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada, are in the thirties range, which I also call the happy range.

Hazies, on the other hand, have IBUs in the twenties or the teens. I’ve seen some as low as ten, maybe eight. That’s porter territory, no residual bitterness whatsoever. Calling a Hazy an IPA is like calling yourself an international coffee company but basing yourself on froo-froo caramel Frappuccinos and having baristas who look at the customer funny when they just want some fucking coffee, is that too fucking hard to do?

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Hazy IPA is more or less on the opposite end of the beer spectrum from a standard IPA. Opposite side of the Earth, even, since they were once called New England IPA and nothing says India like Boston.

The hazy people claim that it’s still an IPA because of the amount of hops they put in it. But they put the hops in at the end of the process, after the boil, so (and they’ll admit this), the hoppiness doesn’t become infused into the flavor. A genuine IPA is like percolated coffee or a French Press, whereas a Hazy IPA is instant coffee being stirred into hot water.

It’s the equivalent of sprinkling a little garlic powder over your store-bought pasta sauce instead of cooking up chopped garlic in the oil before adding the sauce. You can call both of them garlic sauce, but they’re not going to taste the same. The Hazy IPAs end up more citrusy and, with tasting notes similar to a sauvignon blanc. “Hints of pineapple,” “Mango forward.” Who would have guessed hops had nuance when you don’t boil the shit out of them? Maybe that cottony bitterness is a defense mechanism, like when a lobster thrown into already boiling water ends up tasting like shit. Maybe nobody outside of 18th-century sailors and douchebag hipsters was ever supposed to pretend to like overly hoppy beer. The first because they were out at sea for six months straight and any port’ll do. The latter because, ugh, you’re so bourgeois if he has to explain it to you.

Restaurants are even worse than liquor stores. Twenty taps? Ten IPAs, two DIPAs, a triple, and an Imperial. Plus maybe a Double Imperial. It’s maybe gotten a little bit better, with porters coming back into vogue recently. Plus hazies which, I hope I’m establishing, aren’t IPAs. But it’s still rough. I was recently at two different eateries in Yosemite. Each had three taps, two of which were IPAs, but different IPAs. The third tap was either Coors Light or Michelob Ultra. I guess I’ll have a Sprite.

Disneyland was the same. California Adventure, really, because Disney has somehow decided to only offer alcohol at one of its parks. One of their stands had a wheat, a pilsner, an IPA, a double IPA, and a hazy IPA.

Good thing I’ve learned that hazies aren’t IPAs, because I wasn’t in the mood for a pilsner.

I think hazies took on the IPA moniker because of this very oversaturation. If you wanted your beer to hit the market in 2015, it must have the word “India” in the flavor. Like how in 2010, if you wanted to make a new movie or TV show, it had to feature zombies.

I assume a handful of hipsters realized belatedly that they didn’t like the taste, but didn’t know they could order . Here’s how I imagine the conversation went:

“Hey bartender, do you have any beers that don’t taste like ass?”

“I’ve got plenty. What flavor?”

“Anything that doesn’t taste like someone swiped a cotton-flavored brillo pad across my tonsils.”

“Not a hops fan, huh? Maybe you’d like a malty amber ale?”

“An Amber IPA?”

“It’s not an IPA.”

“I must have an IPA or I’ll be laughed out of the bar.”

“Let me get this straight. You want an IPA, but you don’t like hop flavors?”

“It’s not that I dislike hops. It’s just certain kinds. Like Galaxy and Cascade and Mosaic. Oh, and I’ve also ruled out Saaz and Sterling and Simcoe. Better avoid all the “s” hops. Do you have a type of hop that doesn’t taste like ass?”

Bartender, fiddling with the new beer that he can’t seem to move, “Here, try this. It’s an IPA, but it’s hazy.”

The classification hurts in both directions, though. Mythical dude-bro aside, most IPA fans don’t really like hazies. I took a flight with an IPA fan who ordered a hazy because the menu said IPA. He thought it was terrible. He almost sent it back, but I took it from him and, although it wouldn’t have been my top choice, I’d take it over a shitty-ass IPA any day.

I can’t be the only person who avoided hazies for a long while due to their designation. I know I was in the minority in my IPA-aversion, but I can’t be the only person. Furthermore, I should’ve been the target audience for a beer that tastes nothing like an IPA. You were never going to win over my airplane friend, you’re only going to make him distrust real IPAs from said brand.

The glut of IPAs in all their forms seems to be hurting the beer industry in general. The Total Wine by my house used to be roughly 40% beer. Now it’s closer to 25%. Some of that space has been taken up by the new kids on the block, those ciders and seltzers, but even including all of those drinks on the beer shelves, they’ve still lost market share.

My guess is we’re losing out on the next generation of beer drinkers. It’s not exactly “entry level,” and if it’s the only beer you can find, you’re not going to enter. Let’s say I decided I wanted my first beer at Yosemite, and my only three options were two IPAs and a Michelob Ultra. Let’s say, to give it that old college try, I sample all three. Two taste like cotton and the third like water. Guess I’ll stick to whiskey.

Here’s a thought: Call them Hazy Ales. Seems easy enough, distinct and descriptive. Nary an India in sight.

You’re welcome, Beer Industry. You know where to send my residuals.

Drinks on Friday

A.B. Kelly · January 23, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · aging, alcohol, beer, curling, drinking, drinks with friends, food & drink, getting older, happy hour · No Comments

I went out for some drinks last Friday night.

That’s it. End of story.

Oh, you want more?

At my age, that could pretty much be a post by itself. What was once so mundane as to be rote now requires a notarized writ of release, followed by a full physical and psychiatric evaluation.

But at least I get to spend the rest of the weekend patting myself on the back. Which isn’t easy to do with a goddamned hangover. Does anyone have any Advil?

It’s not like I’ve become a complete recluse. I’ll have a beer before bed sometimes. Our household made it through not one, but two bottles of Booze Nog in December. Scratch that, I just checked the fridge and we only made it through one and a half bottles. Maybe by the end of February we’ll find the promised land.

The kitchen table isn’t the only place I drink. Wife and I are pretty good at coordinating calendars to allow one of us to escape for an evening once in a great while. Just never together at the same time, as that would necessitate a second mortgage to pay for a babysitter.

Yes, thirty-year-old me, I have to plan and coordinate my drinking endeavors weeks in advance. Yes, even if it’s just happy hour. You got something to say to me? Guess what? You’re also going to have gout in the future. Enjoy your shellfish while you can, motherfucker!

I usually meet a particular friend for drinks after work once a month or so. Back when we were single, we met a few times a week. We’d have a couple pitchers of beer on a regular day, maybe add a third or a fourth on a Friday or a Monday. The first Monday of the NFL season was often brutal because they do a double header. That’s seven hours of football. Do you know how much Bud Light one must consume to stay glued to a barstool for seven hours of football?

Sure, we could’ve taken a breather. Only watched one game. Maybe jog around the block during commercial breaks. But that’s heathen quitter talk.

Occasionally, a text would emerge from one of our phones around 6:30 the next morning to the tune of, “Upon further reflection, perhaps those last two pitchers of beer weren’t strictly necessary.”

The first four pitchers weren’t mentioned.

But that was then. This is now.

Now we meet once a month, assuming we can fit it into our schedules. We both work 7:00-3:00 jobs, so we meet up at 3:30, have two beers, a firm handshake, and we’re on our merry ways.

Two beers, I said. Not two pitchers. But you wouldn’t know it, the way my body feels the next day.

To be fair, the beer I drink now tends to be of higher alcohol content than the old stuff. Since I drink less often, I might as well enjoy it. The goal is no longer to gorge myself on as much liquid as possible. The goal isn’t to merge with the barstool over the course of an evening.

So in terms of alcohol content, my per-beer average is up. But I only tell myself that when I’m standing in awe of my lack of tolerance.

I used to scoff at those BAC charts that tell you how many drinks you can have based on your weight. For instance, I’m 220ish pounds, so it tells me that if I have three beers in an hour, I’ll be impaired. At my fifth beer, I’m inebriated. That used to be a joke to me. Who is wasted after only five beers? Lightweight!

Hey, I just had to double-check those BAC numbers. Did you know that there are some BAC charts with a designation beyond “Legally Intoxicated” at .08? They list “Possible Death” starting at .30. I mean, that’s good to know, but it seems odd to put on the chart. Presumably, I’m looking at this chart to see if I can drive a car. So I’m probably in the .06-.10 range. Who the hell is checking their BAC when they’re in the .30 range? Can they even read at that point? I think the BAC people just put that in as a challenge.

One year at Camptathalon, we had a Breathalyzer. Don’t ask. We decided against making a competition of it. Sure, the primary competition most floated was a “guess your BAC” game, which shouldn’t be too dangerous. But a bunch of dudes, miles from civilization, trying to compete for the “best” result on a Breathalyzer is rife with problems.

“What’s that? A point-three is potential death? Hold my beer. (And grab me the Everclear.)”

Fortunately I don’t have to worry about possible death. Every chart I’ve seen ends at ten drinks in one hour, at which point my 220-pound ass is only blowing a .16. Possible death doesn’t show up as an option unless you’re under 100 pounds and have eight drinks in an hour. And really, if you’re a grown dude that’s less than a hundred pounds, you might need something to take the edge off.

So I met my friend for a few happy hour beers at around 3:30. I had two pints of beer (sixteen ounces, not those imperial 20-ouncers) followed by a “small” beer, which I assume to be in the 8-10 ounce range. We said our goodbyes and I was off to my next adventure around 5:30.

That next adventure was “Curling Night in America,” one of the worst ways to watch a curling match. It’s a program that NBC runs where they film some non-competitive games between the United States and some hand-selected teams that we invite over because we know we can beat them. You won’t see U.S. vs Canada or U.S. vs. Sweden. Instead, you’ll see Japan and Australia and Italy. Not places known for their curling prowess.

As if blowouts aren’t enough reason to avoid a sporting event, these things are also pre-recorded. The curling matches they’re showing now took place last August. We could totally look up the results if we wanted to. But we don’t, because they’re pointless exhibition games.

I know, who’s ever heard of NBC showing tape-delayed Olympic sports, huh? But “Curling Night in America” is even worse than, say, the Miracle on Ice or, I don’t know, every single Olympics broadcast EVER. Seriously NBC? It’s one thing when the Olympics are on the other side of the world and going on live when we’re all asleep, but the 2016 Olympics were in fucking Brazil, and you still tape-delayed most of them.

But “Curling Night in America” is even worse because it’s edited to fit into a two-hour block. So they’ll randomly skip an entire end of curling, the equivalent of an inning in baseball. So imagine you’re watching the World Series game. They go to commercial after the second out in the first inning and when they come back it’s the bottom of the third. And the score is 3-2, but they don’t bother telling you how the runs were scored. That’s “Curling Night in America.”

It gets even worse at the end of each broadcast, because you know precisely when the game is going to end. They try to build suspense, going to commercial right before the final shot of an end, a make-or-break rock that might tie up the game and force an extra, sudden-death end. Will he make it? Will she miss by an inch? Oh, so enticing.

But then you look at the clock. If it’s 8:35, they’re going to make the shot. If it’s 8:50, we’re coming back from this commercial break to see a miss and be done with it. How lame. That’s why sports are supposed to be broadcast live. If you know ahead of time that the pitcher is only going to throw one more pitch, it takes some of the joy of it. The NFL doesn’t say “Any Given Sunday.. except not this Sunday.”

But “Curling Night in America” works as a good recruiting tool for my curling club. The other people in the bar don’t know we’re exaggerating the oohs and ahhs. So once or twice a month a bunch of us head out to a local cantina and make a ruckus.

That’s where I was headed after my two-and-a-half beers last Friday night.

But first I had to stop for a coffee.

This was hardly the first time I caffeinated in between drinking sessions. On one Friday night when I was a new teacher. I went to happy hour, then hit Starbucks on the way back to school to announce the football game, then went back out to re-buzz after the game. Then it was back to coffee in the morning. I swallowed the cat to catch the bird. I swallowed the bird to catch the spider. I swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I swallowed the fly because cocaine is too fucking expensive.

That’s what that song is about, right?

Of course, back then, I wasn’t drinking the coffee to my buzz. Far from it. I might have been trying to mask it. Or I might’ve just wanted a coffee. Whereas this time, I was thinking, “Holy crap, I’ve already has a few beers and now I’m going out to get more beers and it’s almost my bedtime. Where can I find some meth?”

Unfortunately, I had to settle for coffee. With cream.

Not milk, mind you. Full fucking cream. I could’ve suckled up to a cow and not noticed much difference. I never get cream. I’m a black coffee guy. But I wanted more calories in my stomach. I wanted more volume in my stomach. If I could’ve ordered a coffee milkshake, I would have.

The hipster batistas were giving me the “gee I wonder why you’re getting coffee” look. Then, as if I wasn’t feeling old already, they asked what I was doing this fine Friday evening. I told them where I was headed. Each one blinked back.

“You know,” I explained, “the pub over on J Street.”

The blinks continued.

How the hell have they not heard of this place? It’s been there for… well, I don’t know how long it’s been there. But I’ve been going there a good twenty years. It was the hip, cool place to hang out after work when I was a restaurant server. Back in… the last century.

Holy crap! Do you mean to tell me the skeevy, decrepit bar filled with septuagenarians that my grandpa went to in 1980 didn’t start as a skeevy, decrepit bar filled with septuagenarians? Was the wrong side of the tracks, at some point, the RIGHT side of the tracks? Hmmm…

This might explain why people keep throwing their hips out at our Learn-to-Curls.

After I power through the large half-coffee-half-cream, spilling a bit for good measure as if the nose-ring-clad, twenty-something baristas hadn’t rolled their eyes at “grandpa” quite enough already, I was on my way to what might as well have been Howard Cunningham’s Leopard Lodge.

Where I promptly ordered a full plate of fish n’ chips. Can’t be too safe.

I also ordered a beer. When I handed over my card, the bartender asked if he should keep the tab open. I told him to keep it open. Mainly out of habit, but partly because it feels so wrong to limit myself. After all, the night was still young, at least according to the clock on the wall and not my internal clock. But maybe the pre-recorded curling match will feature a surprising come from behind and I’ll buy a round for the whole bar. Perhaps being in a bar that I frequented at 28 will make me feel 28 again. Who knows, I could have five more beers and Uber home in the wee hours of the morning.

And then get the look on Wife’s face in the morning when we’re have to come back downtown to get my car, which will probably have a parking ticket by then.

Aw, who was I kidding? I knew exactly how many more beers I was going to have and I had enough cash to pay for it. Sure enough, when I bought that second beer, tummy full of deep-fried breading n’ chips, I closed out the tab.

Then the moment the curling match came back from its final commercial break and the Japanese failed to send it to an extra end, as we knew they would, I beelined it for my car to head home. It was 9:00. I was exhausted!

Then came the harrowing drive home. Hoo-wee. A fog had settled on the land. Only it wasn’t fog. It was dark. I think they call it nighttime? Glare from car headlights blinded me. And it’s hard to recite the alphabet backward, even if I’m sober.

I was practicing all the lines I would tell the cop while I dutifully put my hands at the ten and two positions, except when they were prying open my droopy eyes.

But I also did the math in my head. I ordered my first drink at 3:30. It was now 9:15. I had consumed four-and-a-half beers.

Let’s give me the benefit of the doubt. The beers at the first place were strong, so maybe it’s the equivalent of three of the 4.5% beers mentioned on the BAC chart. And I think the English pub was pouring imperial pints. So maybe those two beers were closer to three.

Still, that’s six beers over a course of six hours. One beer per hour. Okay, the Fuller’s ESB is a whopping 5.5%, so let me be manly and up that number all the way to Shit, I’m going to be bold and round up to seven. Seven full beers!

Let’s put aside the fact that I used to do seven beers in an hour. Not that I’m proud of seven beers in an hour, but hell, even the 100-pound dude would still be marginally alive at that point. Seven beers in an hour, according to the chart, would put me at a .11. Back in the 1970s, that would’ve been barely above legally drunk.

But this time, I didn’t have those seven beers in an hour. I had them in six. The BAC chart says I burn off .015 BAC, or one drink, per hour. So even if I had drank them all in one hour, I would’ve burned off .09 of that .11. Notwithstanding the fish n’ chips, coffee, and cream.

That .02 is also the number the chart gives me for drinking one beer in an hour. Which makes sense, since I’ve effectively had one per hour, with only a slight addendum. Some charts are nice enough to say that, at .02, driving ability might be impaired. Of course, those ones put everything on the chart as “possibly impaired.” They’re trying to make a point.

The more honest ones don’t list the possibly impaired until .04. Because the first thing the cop’s going to do is smell your breath. And the .02 probably ain’t gonna show up.

If a cop had pulled me over that fine evening, I would’ve told him to take me into the drunk tank and he would’ve thought I was just trying to play the “fugue state” game from Breaking Bad.

“Sorry, sir. All you’ve had tonight is fish n’ chips.”

Like I’m Beavis and Butthead in the episode where they get non-alcoholic beer.

“You’re not drunk. You’re just a dumbass.”

I couldn’t agree more, Ozzifer.

Whiskey Tango Family

A.B. Kelly · September 6, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · Baby Boomers, bad beer, beer, child rearing, extended family, family, shopping, visiting family, white trash · No Comments

I’m pretty fortunate when it comes to my extended family.

Not because they’re particularly helpful. Or empathetic. Or normal.

No, I’m fortunate because they live 400 miles away. Which means they’re close enough to visit for a weekend without wasting a day traveling each direction, but far enough away that I don’t have to see them very often.

I used to visit my family more often. Back then, I was single and in my twenties and my nieces were cute little kids and Southwest ran some really good fares.

Nowadays, I’ve got a five-year old daughter and a lot of shit going on that really makes it a hassle-and-a-half to get on a plane. Oh, and Southwest ain’t as cheap as it once was. Plus those rat bastards charge full-price for said five-year old even though her butt takes up, at a maximum, forty percent of that seat. AND I’ve stopped eating on Southwest since they switched from yummy peanuts to salt-lick pretzels.

And the TSA is a pain in the ass. And driving takes that full day I mentioned. And… umm… the lunar cycle? Help me out here. My mom is asking about next month.

I’ve managed to whittle it down to just two or three visits to the extended family per year. And I’ve started to notice that, with an additional distance between visits, a similar distance has grown between me and my family. Such that, whenever I’m forced to interact, I spend a good portion of my time wondering how the fuck we are related.

Part of it is generational, as the driving forces of my family have always been the baby boomers. So when the cooler is filled with a shit-ton of some tiny-ass water bottles that contain more plastic than water, such that I have to make a genuine decision between hydration and killing the planet, I chalk it up to the baby boomers being hellbent on ensuring that the earth doesn’t survive past their generation. After all, they’ve been told that the world belonged to them from the moment they were born.

But my generation ain’t lining up to change things, either. I’m the only one who moved away. Everyone else stayed behind. Some of my cousins still live with their parents at 40 years old. The others have ventured a whopping two or three miles away from their childhood bedroom!

One of my cousins has a daughter who is six weeks younger than my daughter. I suggested we hold a joint family party somewhere in between, so that we could separate our requisite “crazy family party” from the “kids’ party.” She wouldn’t hear it! The birthday party has to include both family and friends, and must be as close to the cousin’s actual birthday as possible. The result is a “joint” birthday party that takes place six weeks after my daughter’s birthday, at which her cousin is getting twice as many presents.

And yeah, my daughter got a whole bunch of presents six weeks earlier, but that’s a hard concept to describe to a five-year old. So instead I just tell my daughter that all of those presents are shitty 99-cent store presents (more on that later) that we’re going to throw away as soon as we get home. Okay, I don’t tell her the last part, but I have yet to have her ever ask about any of the shit she’s gotten in the orgiastic bacchanal of two five-year olds simultaneously opening forty presents.

Full disclosure, I used to fucking hate the “family” birthday parties, where the child whose birthday it is ranks about twentieth on the list of reasons for the get-together. Reason number one is always showing off the house/cleaning skills/culinary skills.

One year I went to my room for two hours and nobody noticed. The boomers were all just there to see each other. None of that has changed. At this year’s party, the two birthday girls had to get out of the pool to blow out candles because, dammit, some old farts wanted cake before they left.

But it’s not just about birthday parties. It’s the whole shebang. Why do none of them have interest in anything slightly above banal? I only live 400 miles away. How am I so much less parochial? And, if they raised me, when the hell did they all become so god-damned Whiskey Tango?

To wit:

Beer. Last time I visited my family for a shindig, there were two beer options available: Bud Light and Corona. I tweeted about it, but wasn’t too bothered. The party hosted by boomers, so it was expected. All of their beer tastes were developed in 1960, when all beer came from Milwaukee or St. Louis. For them, Michelob is a “premium craft.” Heck, I should be impressed they’ve “branched out” to Corona, even if it goes against my core belief that nothing that is supposed to have fruit added should be classified as beer.

Yes, Blue Moon, I’m looking in your direction.

But the child’s birthday party was hosted by Gen Xers, not Boomers. They are world travelers, and I have personally traveled to Australia and Scotland together, and I know she’s aware of craft beers. So I opened the cooler with baited breath. I was greeted with… Coors Light. I moved it out of the way, dug underneath and came up with another Coors Light. I opened the other side of the cooler, looking for the secret compartment with craft bee. Heck, I’d take a Michelob at this point. All I found was another sea of silver.

So I grabbed an iced tea instead. At least it wasn’t sweetened.

Maybe I should have…

BYOB. When we were leaving my mom’s house to go to the party, my mom’s husband asked me to pick out a bottle of wine or two. He said that my cousin never had good wine. I don’t think my mom’s husband’s wine is all that great, either. I live near multiple wine regions. Nothing in Southern California comes close. So if someone who drinks crappy wine says that the wine at this party will be crappy, then I better just plan on drinking beer.

Oops.

So I grabbed a bottle of wine for him. When we got to the party, I felt a little awkward bringing it in. Honestly, who brings their own booze to a non-BYOB party? So fucking tacky. Can I put my car up on blocks in your front yard, too?

Even worse, it was white wine, so it had to go in the host’s refrigerator. Because the cooler’s filled with Coors Light, naturally. Nothing’s so classy as walking in the front door and saying, “Hey, can you move some shit out of your refrigerator so I can put my mediocre wine in there since your wine sucks ass?”

Then again, had I known about the Coors Light situation, I would’ve been sneaking a six-pack in the refrigerator behind the wine.

Is it to late for Amazon drone delivery?

Shopping. At one point, we had to get a couple of things at the grocery store. Mainly, we had to pack the birthday present we brought for the cousin. If we tried to wrap it before we left, the TSA would have undone all our efforts.

My mom also wanted to provide fruit for the party. It’s BYOF, too. So off to the grocery store we went.

My mom didn’t ask what we needed. So when I appeared in the same checkout line as her with a gift bag, a card, and one package of colored tissue paper, she blinked and said, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you were getting. We could have gone to the 99-cent store if you wanted.”

Ugh. The 99-fucking-cent store. Both my and my wife’s mothers frequent that place. Neither mother is miserly nor in danger of running out of a pension anytime soon. But goddamn it if that 99-cent crap isn’t going to find a spot on their shelves.

It’s like they took all of those “Thrift” ideals that their Great Depression-era parents taught them, but only understood part of it. Thrift means both not overspending for things you need, but also not buying a bunch of unnecessary crap. But the Baby Boomers want all the crap, they just don’t want to pay for it. This becomes an issue because every time my mom sees my daughter, she’s giving her crap. It’s all ephemeral, not meant to be any more meaningful in the grand context than a passing bowel movement. Of course, each 99-cent piece of crap gets added to all of the other 99-cent pieces of crap and our house is overflowing like a backed-up toilet.

Meanwhile, while my mom’s chastising me for paying full price on a birthday card, she’s purchasing one of those pre-cut, pre-arranged fruit platters. Costs about eight bucks for maybe two bucks worth of fruit. With more plastic than a 3-ounce water bottle.

But just make sure you’re making the most from your “toys made of lead” budget.

Now let’s get out of here and enjoy the Southern California traffic.

Traffic. My mom doesn’t trust traffic apps. How does Google know, she asks, if there’s about to be an accident on a route? Fair enough, although I actually wouldn’t put it past Google to have an algorithm that knows where and when future accidents will occur.

But when she picked us up from the airport at 6:00 and we wanted to make a baseball game by 7:00, I told her in no uncertain terms that we were taking the route Google told us to take.

Of course, Google doesn’t assume you’ll stay in the slow lane for the ENTIRE fucking route. And sure, this is in Southern California. so all of the lanes are slow, but the slow lane is especially slow. Every mile, an onramp deposits ten new cars into the lane, who promptly merge in front of us, then slow down even more in order to pull into the second lane, from whence they speed up by twenty MPH or so. And my mom is pretty much eternally going five MPH, except for the times she’s at a complete stop for all of these mergers.

“And see?” she says when we get to the game twenty minutes later than Google said we would. “Google doesn’t know how to account for this Southern California traffic.”

I wonder what Google would say is the dominant flavor in…

Churros. We met my niece for breakfast at a pretty good establishment in San Diego County called the Breakfast Republic. Solid food. I’ve eaten there a couple of times, but this was the first time I’d eaten at this particular location.

They have lots of scrumptious variations of Eggs Benedict and pancakes. My niece is a vegetarian, so she wasn’t interested in the crab cake bennie I got. She got Churro Pancakes. She gave us each a bite. Pretty yummy. Actual chunks of churro in there, and a dominant flavor of cinnamon.

Which my mom found odd. “Huh,” she says. “I wouldn’t expect that for a churro. Do you taste, I don’t know, kind of… cinnamon in there?”

Um, yeah? What the hell does she think a churro tastes like? What does she think that brown powder that they roll the dough in when it’s done cooking? Cumin?

Oh well, at least she wasn’t offensive or anything…

Pride. After breakfast, my niece was heading off to a Pride parade. She wore a rainbow shirt that said Pride on it. At first, my mom seemed oblivious, but the conversation eventually went there.

She seemed okay at first. Nothing overly offensive. She asked if my niece’s boyfriend was going to go to the parade. My niece said probably not. It’s not that he’s opposed to gay pride, he just doesn’t really want to hang out with a bunch of sweaty dudes with asscheeks hanging out. Totally get that. I’ve never understood how, in order to support LGBTQ rights, you need to oppose basic hygiene. Is there any way I can believe in marriage equality without getting a sunburnt schlong?

That being said, does my niece’s boyfriend realize that it isn’t just dudes letting their asscheeks hang out? Nothing like a gay pride parade to bring out all the heterosexual labias. It’s Mardi Gras, only without the beads and the necessity to fly to New Orleans.

But I digress. The reason I brought this all up was my mom’s response. She agreed with the boyfriend. Sort of. In typical Baby Boomer and/or white trash and/or general out-of-touchness, she started with, I shit you not, “I’m not a homophobe, but…”

Prepare the eyeroll.

“I just don’t want to see it.”

Okay, not quite what niece’s boyfriend was saying.

My mom went on to say there’s a gay couple on a soap opera she watches. She just fast forwards whenever they start kissing. It bothers her.

Um, what exactly does she think the “phob” part of homophobia means. If I say I’m not afraid of snakes, I just don’t want to see one because it makes me uncomfortable, guess what? It means I’m afraid of snakes.

But my mom adds the coup de grace.

“I don’t have any problem with them doing what they do. Just… do it behind closed doors or something.”

Spoken like a true non-homophobe.

Seriously, how did I come from this family?

I don’t know.

Just pass me the Coors Light.

BEER! (Part III)

A.B. Kelly · September 10, 2018 · Musings · alcohol, beer, drinking, Fat Tire, food & drink, good beer, Innis and Gunn, Red Trolley · No Comments

Okay, so I’ve just spent two posts about the beers I don’t like. So what, you may ask, DO I like in my beer? Well, I’m glad ya asked.

Truthfully, my flavor profile has changed a few times in my life, and are in a bit of a flux right now, too. Perhaps this is why I don’t understand the continuance of the decades-old trends discussed in the previous posts. Then again, I’ve always tended to be along a somewhat tight variance. Browns and reds and pales. Somewhere in the middle of the hoppy vs. malty spectrum. I love me some balance.

Of course, in a begrudging nod to the IPA-philes, over the past few years, my preferred beer has gone farther up the bitterness scale. For a while, I was all about the Amber and Scotch Ales. Alaskan Amber, Kilt Lifter, Nutty Brewnette, Old Chub. Even Newcastle was an occasional go-to in a pinch. The benefit of Newcastle is its ubiquity. Even a bar that only carried the standards is likely to have Newcastle.

Fat Tire was my favorite beer for five years or more. And clearly I wasn’t the only one, because it’s the beer that put New Belgium on the map. The brand barely existed at the turn of the century, but as of now, it’s ranked #11 by volume, just behind powerhouse no-longer-microbreweries Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada. And yeah, I know they’re really pushing their Voodoo Daddy IPA these days, but all of that is on the strength of their flagship.

I’ll still drink Fat Tire. Sometimes I have no choice. When I’m visiting family, it’s the only one they can remember that I drink, as they try desperately to avoid saying “Flat Tire.” I don’t know why it’s such a difficult pronunciation. I know a flat tire is a thing, but it’s not like Fat is some obscure word. Yet every baby boomer I encounter asks me if I want one of those “Fla.. uh.. Fe-ua… Feat Tires?”

But Fat Tire tastes a bit too sweet for me these days. The nutty and caramely and malty beers that I drank for the majority of my thirties just aren’t doing it for me these days. I never liked stouts and porters, because they’re too sweet, and something clicked in me in the past year, making most browns exhibit the same syrupy consistency. Maybe it’s just a hundred degrees in summer kind of thing, or maybe my brain is subconsciously telling my tongue that hops are here to stay, so I’d better get used to it. Now a Fat Tire tastes like a Frappuccino to me. Or an iced coffee when they put all that syrupy crap into it. No, Starbucks barista, I don’t want fucking “room” in my iced coffee. Just black coffee and ice. Someone ordering an actual coffee at your coffee business shouldn’t make you so damned twitchy.

One fun brew I found many moons ago was Innis and Gunn. On my second trip to Scotland, we asked for a local beer. The waiter described something that we couldn’t understand, because he was speaking Scottish, which bears absolutely no resemblance to English. We nodded our approval and received one of the most wonderful concoctions ever invented. It’s aged in Scotch barrels. But there’s more to it than that, because after tasting Innis and Gunn, I tried a number of other beers that claim such a distinction and none of them have the smooth toffee flavor of Innis and Gunn. I’ve even, since then, tried some other Innis and Gunn flavors, including their rum-aged and Irish whickey-aged. None of them have that je ne sais pas of the original.

When we got back to America, we looked everywhere for Innis and Gunn. At the time, New York was the only place in the United States that carried it, and that seemed a bit far of a drive. But who said we had to purchase it in the United States? Vancouver’s only a fifteen-hour drive! My friend hit the Great North the following summer and brought back a case. Two summers later, I made the trek. The employee at the state-owned liquor store looked at me strangely when I wanted 30 bottles of something they usually sell by the single. But when I flashed the real-live, legitimate, international-standard American dollars, they were willing to do just what I said.

Just kidding. I think I paid with credit card. And I probably insulted the guy when I asked what it cost in “real money.” The guy selling joints in Nelson Park, however, was happy enough to take American cash.

We continued to check the Innis and Gunn website, plotting their progress on a map like they were the Allied army advancing against the Kaiser. First they were spotted in Washington, then Oregon. We went to the city walls waiting to cheer the liberating army as it came within sight. When my wife texted me a picture from the local Total Wine, I knew that life would never be the same.

Then again, at $14 for a 4-pack, the I&G is still going to be reserved for special occasions.

My IBU preference has been creeping up recently. The forties taste fine to me now. Although I suppose that’s where I started. The first beer I was actually able to get through being a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Then I avoided it fro a while, but it’s back in my favored wheelhouse. I can even tolerate beers into the sixties. When I was in Denver recently, I drank quite a few Dale’s Pale Ales, with an IBU of 65. It was fine. But I might’ve been suffering from altitude sickness.

But my favorites of late seem to be reds. Reds tend to add a bit of hoppiness to the typical maltiness of a brown. You know, like what hops were originally meant to do. There’s one here in Northern California called Heretic Evil Twin. The “evil twin” comes from the combination of the two flavors. If you’re a malt fan, the hop is the evil twin; if you’re a hop fan, it’s the malt. And they’re both in there. It’s a solid brew, with an IBU of 45, right in “the middle,” so to speak. But I think it’s ainly available in Northern California, so sorry if I got your hopes up. If you read on, you’ll see I’m right there with you on the torture. .

Let’s talk about Karl Strauss Red Trolley. It’s available everywhere, right? Its crispy nuance makes it my current favorite beer. It’s not that you can taste all the flavors, like in Heretic, but it’s also not all one flavor. Somehow it has an IBU below Fat Tire, which I consider bullshit because it’s definitely not as sweet. Of course now, after a decade of indoctrinating us that IBU is the be-all and end-all of a beer flavorness quotient, they’re saying it’s an incomplete measure. Now they try to distinguish between hazy and juicy and, I don’t know, fluffy IPAs? And New England IPAs, which are basically the same as West Coast Pale Ales. There are also Northwest Pales. It gets really confusing when you need an eight-directional compass just to figure out what the hell you’re drinking.

Or grapefruit. Don’t get me started on grapefruit. How very fitting that Ballast Point would be bought out by Coors.

Although the Grapefruit Sculpin works as a good transition into my most recent beer find. While in San Diego, my hotel bar had a local beer called Coconut Contender. This intrigued me, because I like coconut. Have I mentioned that I like coconut before? And that I worry they are on the cusp of jumping the palm tree shark? I think I have.

Coconut in beer isn’t a new thing. Coconut porters have existed for a while. I’ve had a few of them, and they’re okay in extremely limited quantities. Porters are sweet, coconut is sweet, so what you’re left with is the equivalent of adding caramel syrup to a white chocolate mocha, which is something I’m surprised Starbucks hasn’t done yet. Hell, I had some sort of Iced Vanilla Bean drink there a couple weeks ago, and I can still feel the granules of sugar coursing through my body. Dammit, Barista, I ordered a coffee frappuccino, not a caramel frappuccino. Repeat after me, barista! Coffee! What the fuck is wrong with just serving me the goddamn product you’re supposed to be known for! Y

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Coconut Contender. What intrigued me about this particular beer was that it was not listed as a coconut porter, but a coconut IPA. So instead of using the sweetness of the coconut to augment the sweetness of a porter, they’re going to counteract the bitterness of the… hmmm…. Why, that sounds brilliant!

Of course, they’ve done this with other flavors. That grapefruit crap is the most famous, but I’ve seen orange and tangerine and raspberry IPAs. But most of those others are tart more than sweet. Plus, did I mention that I like coconut? So I asked for a pint. The bartender asked if I wanted a taste of it first. Maybe he’s had customers that were hoping for a coconut porter and were disappointed by a beer with nuance. I was ninety percent sure I didn’t need a taster of it, that I would drink the whole damn thing. But if I’m about to order sixteen ounces and I can get the seventeenth ounce for free, I’m taking that bargain.

Even better when I discovered it was 21 ounces for the price of 20.

Verdict? It was as sublime as I expected. The coconut was in the background, as was the hoppiness. I didn’t wince from the sweet or chew the bitter. No need to drink five gulps of water to remoisten my palate. (Remoisten my palatte sounds like a dirty book that might be written by the OTHER Tony Kelly, the one who forces Amazon searches for my book to a second page. Go ahead and check, I won’t hold it against you).

I could definitely see myself drinking more of those Coconut Contenders. For instance, I saw myself drinking it again the next night. And the night after that. After all, I was at the hotel for a week-long conference. Unfortunately, the rat bastard behind the bar must have recognized me the rest of the week, because he never gave me that free taster again. Then again, he did “accidentally” pour the wrong drink once, and then gave me the correct pour in a take-home cup. Tip your waitstaff, people!

So of course, the first thing I did when i got home was to hit the local liquor stores to get me some Coconut Contender at home.

BevMo? Nope. Total Wine? Nada.

Dammit, this Coconut IPA is not to be found anywhere in the Sacramento area. Or at least anywhere in the whopping TWO liquor stores I looked in. So I decided to google Coconut IPA. I found that the one I had in San Diego wasn’t the only one. There are at least three currently being brewed. And Total Wine stocked precisely zero of them. Didn’t double-check back at BevMo for the other two, but I’m not holding my breath.

According to one beer review, it’s the “New taste of summer.” I totally, totally agree. But at participating locations, only.

Oh Life, why must you mock me so?

BEER! (Part II)

A.B. Kelly · September 7, 2018 · Musings · alcohol, bad beer, beer, drinking, food & drink, good beer, IBU, India Pale Ale, IPA, Lagunitas · 3 Comments

Welcome back to Part Two. In Part One, I talked about Coors Light and the rest of its ilk, remnants of an older time that somehow persist in a world of much better options.

Today, I’ll talk about one of those better options that I don’t necessarily feel is a better option. Watch out, hipsters.

If you’ll recall what started this retrospective, I was visiting a new person’s house and he offered me a Coors Light. I declined. Except that Coors Light wasn’t the only thing he had available. He also offered me an IPA. Ugh.

And hey, hipsters? The fact that someone would have only two options of beer, one of which is an IPA and the other of which is Coors Light, should tell you all you need to know about how fancy your brillo-pad of a beer really is.

Now here’s where I know I part from true beer snobs. At their best, India Pale Ales are tolerable. At their worst? Pass me the Coors Light. Or better yet, I’ll just take some water.

Fortunately, in this particular case, it was Lagunitas, which is one of the most tolerable IPAs. In fact, their original IPA wouldn’t even be considered an IPA by today’s standards. It would be like Ronald Reagan in the modern GOP, or JFK trying to make it past two primaries in the 2020 Democratic party. It only has an IBU in the mid-40s. Nowadays if your IPA doesn’t have an IBU above 60, you might as well call it a lager.

For those who don’t know, IBU stands for International Bittering Unit. It measures the amount of hops in the flavor. Hops are those things that smell like really nasty marijuana. When they’re put in the beer, they help offset the sweet, caramelly flavor that comes from the malted barley. So a stout, which has the same bitterness as a bold chocolate milk, will have an IBU below 10. Ambers and browns usually range in the 20s, although some of the “nuttier” ones will be as low as ten. Twenty years ago, when Lagunitas was one of the few IPAs out there, a red or a pale ale was in the thirties and above forty was reserved for an India Pale. These days, if you’re not flirting with triple-digits, the millennials will only roll their pierced eyebrow at you.

India Pale Ales are supposed to have more bitterness because, historically, hops were used as a preservative, so the extra hops would keep the beer from spoiling on those long cruises from England to India. Note it was for preservation, not taste. Because, and me out here, hops taste like crap. They do. I know you there in the back, currently scraping a filmy layer of skin off the top of your arid mouth can’t admit it without worrying you’d have to shave your beard as penance, but it is not at all refreshing. It tastes like you’re drinking cotton. It’s dry, it’s scratchy. And last time I checked, you’re not supposed to consume cotton. Especially cotton that smells like dank weed that’s been left in the bong for a fortnight.

Hey, I think that might be the first combination of “bong” and “fortnight” in the same sentence in the history of the English language. Unless you’re talking about the video game.

On the West Coast, Lagunitas was one of the forebears of the IPA craze. As if on a dare, they started proudicing Double and Triple and Imperial IPAs, pushing that IBU up into the triple digits, just waiting for someone to have the balls to say it tasted crappy, but groupthink’s a hell of a drug. Just ask the Nazis. It’s ironic that Labunitas once had the balssiest IPA, and now their IPA is so tame. It barely even registers as a straight Pale these days. For comparison, Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues (a fun Colorado brewery that comes up with names like Old Chub and Mama’s Yellow Pilsner) has an IBU of 65. Their IPA has a bittering factor of 70, almost double that of Lagunitas.

New Belgium’s IPAs range from 50 to 70. They also have Hemp IPAs. Did I mention dank weed?

And IPAs are just the start. Now breweries have Imperial IPAs, Double IPAs, Triple IPAs, and, I don’t know, a-vine-of-hops-shoved-directly-up-your-ass ale. IBUs of 80 or 90, even triple digits, are starting to become the norm. Colorado and California breweries are now coming out with hemp IPAs. Hell, if it’s gonna taste like headache-inspiring weed, they might as well go to the source. I can only imagine that straight-up marijuana IPAs are on the horizon out here.

And I know I’m in the minority here. The reason I know this is because every brewery or taphouse I go to has a shit-ton of IPAs and their ilk. You’ll have maybe one red or one amber, but not both, one pilsner, and then seventeen beers with IBUs ranging from 65 to 120. Hey, this one has notes of citrus and that one has a whiffs of cotton-swabbed asshole. Oh, and Coors Light is tap #20.

Clearly the market has decided something that is not my cup of Indian tea. A friend of a friend started a brewery. He has a similar taste profile to mine, and was tired of seeing the same varietals at every brewery. He wanted to show what could be done with some of the forgotten flavors. A nutty brown versus a hoppy brown. A light or a dark lager.

But the substantial majority of the customers who came in had one request: more varieties of IPA. So now when I go in there, I’m relegated to my one option, but at least I can commiserate with the brewer.

And I cancross my fingers and hope that more brewers are like he and I. We’re all just waiting for this trend to end. Putting a whole bunch of recipes on the shelf, ready for the moment when hipsters and millennials grow enough balls to admit that the IPA trend has gone too far. Every culinary movement has a backlash at the end, right?

But dammit, I’ve been waiting for this particular pendulum to swing back for a decade now. And my liver ain’t getting any younger.

I know, I know. I don’t like mass-produced beers and I don’t like IPAs. What the hell do I like? Check back on Monday to find out.

BEER! (Part I)

A.B. Kelly · September 5, 2018 · Musings · alcohol, bad beer, beer, coors light · 4 Comments

AKA The stuff that doesn’t require fruit added to it.

I’m looking at you, Shock Top and Hefeweizen and Corona.

AKA Just because it’s from Europe doesn’t make it fancier than Budweiser

I’m looking at you, Stella Artois and Heineken.

AKA Don’t even get me started on that piss water that is…

No, you know what? Get me started on that. I’m starting right the fuck there.

A few weeks ago, wife and I were playing nice with the parents of one of my daughter’s “friends,”AKA the only one at her daycare that she seems to remember doing anything with on any given day, even though her teacher (AKA babysitter) swears she is a veritable roamer.

So we take child over to friend’s house for a playdate (AKA running around screaming at the top of their longs), and of course because child is four and we are the helicopter generation, we stay to engage with the parents. It is my firm belief that this did not happen when I was growing up. If my mother and/or father (let’s be honest, mother) took me to a friend’s house to play, I have to imagine she then high-tailed it to… I don’t know, a bar? The Club? Did Bunko exist in the mid-1970s? She probably just went back home to clean, which is probably what wife and I should have done, because I swear there used to be a floor at my house before we had a four-year old whirling dirvish.

Anyway, we showed up and released the kraken that was our two daughters. The other father turned to me and asked if I wanted a beer.

Of course I want a beer. What the hell kind of question is that? Without thinking, I started to respond.

“Yeeeeee-uhhhhh.”

But at this point, halfway through my affirmative response, I saw what was in his hand, which froze my answer in it tracks. Beads of sweat dripping down a dull grey label across a distinctive brown bottle. I’m sure the holder of said bottle considered the label to be bright silver, but it was a dull grey. Screaming red cursive script across a recessed image of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a Coors Light. A C-minus. The Silver Mother-fucking Bullet.

And no, I didn’t here any Jerry Reed music playing. Even worse, Burt Reynolds was nowhere to be seen.

“Yeeeee-ah, no thanks,” I finished my answer. “I’m driving.”

“Aren’t you guys staying?”

“Right. I meant I’m going to be driving. Not tonight. Maybe some time in the future. Better not let any of that one-percent Alcohol-By-Volume elixer touch my lips.”

Before you ask, I didn’t bother to check if the mountains were blue or mauve or fuchsia or chartreuse or whatever-the-fuck color it’s supposed to be to denote that the beer is ready to be consumed. I don’t think it’s a color that occurs in nature, because Coors Light is never drinkable. Note that the label is only supposed to change color when it gets cold. Coors Light really pushes the whole “cold” thing. I mean, I guess if you can’t really talk about the flavor, you might as well extoll the virtues of modern refrigeration technology.

But some people swear by the C-minus. And surprisingly, not all of them live in trailer parks. I know people that fit the description. Each of the last two years at Camptathalon, both of the new attendees prefer it to other beers. One of them has no desire to drink anything else. The rest of us show up to camp with a variety of lagers and ales of all variety. Pale, red, amber, black, India. You name it. John rolled up with 30 cans of Silver Bullet. The rest of us mix and match what we brought with what others brought. Communism at its finest. But John wanted none of the ten other varieties, which was fine because none of us wanted to partake of his.

This year, the new Camptathalon attendee brought the real stuff. Coors “Banquet” Beer. The… um, tan bullet? At least this year’s attendee was capable of drinking non-Golden-based beers. Although maybe that’s not the best for the rest of us. Communism at its worst. The root cause of the 1991 Soviet coup was people bringing Coors but drinking your Karl Strauss was the root cause of the 1991 coup.

Speaking of non-light Coors, they’re really pushing that whole “banquet” moniker these days. Check out this sign from a show at Red Rocks:

Then again, if you’re only a quarter less than a well-known IPA, you better pull out that “banquet” bullshit.

My cousin also swears by the stuff. As does, clearly, the father of my daughter’s friend. And Burt Reynolds, obvs.

But the Bandit had an excuse. It was the 1970s. Back then, there weren’t a lot of options for beer. We’re talking about a time period where Budweiser and Miller were the good stuff, because they were being compared to the likes of Milwaukee’s Best and Schlitz. I’ve never actually had Schlitz, but I have had the Beast, and I suppose if my only options were variances of that swill, then maybe I’d be willing to smuggle some of that “beer from Texarkana.”

But it’s the 21st Century now, all of those laws that forced beers to stay in one region have been long rescinded. So if they’re thirsty in Atlanta, not only can they have Coors, but they can have Sierra Nevada and Yuengling and Leinenkugil. To say nothing of Stella and Newcastle and Bass and Smithwicks. Which means they’d have to be pretty fucking thirsty in Atlanta to want to drink Coors. Actually, maybe that’s the point. Since Coors is pretty much water, maybe it quenches your thirst more.

In Sacramento, we recently had one of our original microbrews close down. Some people were surprised. Rubicon Brewing Company had its restaurant and brewery open since the late 1980s. At one point in the mid-to-late nineties, it was a solid business, almost a Sacramento institution. Even as late as 2010, their Monkey Knife Fight was readily available at most regional restaurants and stores.

But I wasn’t too surprised. Because Monkey Knife Fight wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really all that good either. In the mid-1990s, it was a solid drinking option. But back then, most places only had a few beers on tap. And who the hell knew what a red ale was, anyway? But by 2017,Rubicon really didn’t have anything that could compete with the quantity and quality of beer you can get pretty much anywhere. Sacramento now has four or five other breweries just in the downtown area, to say nothing of those taphouses where you can get twenty different flavors from twenty different breweries, with a rotating list that’ll give you twenty brand new options when you come in a fortnight later. In that sort of crowded market, a Rubicon couldn’t do anything to distinguish themselves, and if you can’t compete with quality or quantity, you aren’t going to last.

Which makes me wonder how the Big Three are still in business. Hopefully it’s not for long.

Want to know what else I don’t like? Follow me to Part II.

Juan Valdez was a Hack

A.B. Kelly · December 13, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · alcohol, beer, caffeine, coffee, drinking, food & drink, wine · 2 Comments

I’ve been a wine snob for almost as long as I’ve been drinking alcohol.

I come by it naturally, living in Northern California. There are probably more than 200 wineries within a couple hours’ drive. In my early twenties, even most of the wineries in Napa were free or had a very small tasting fee that went toward the purchase of wine. Until five years ago, Sonoma County was almost entirely free, and even today, most of the wineries in Amador County are free. Amador is closer to my house and even if they’re ignored by the greater zeitgeist, I will put their wines in the Pepsi Challenge against Napa Valley any day of the week.

At these wineries, you can do side-by-side tastings of different varietals. Sometimes you can taste the same varietals from different years. You learn what you like and don’t like pretty quickly. Or, if not, you at least get a decent buzz.

If you pay a little extra (or join the club), you can taste the good shit. The reserves at some wineries aren’t much different than their standard swill, but at other places, there’s a marked difference. Sometimes a run-of-the-mill winery, or a mass producer that you wouldn’t expect to have anything special, like Gallo or Beringer, make some pretty decent $40 wines.

Who knows, maybe Charles Shaw even makes a Twenty Buck Chuck.

In addition to a geographical inclination toward wine snobbery, I spent a good portion of my twenties waiting tables in a nice restaurant. There I learned the difference between truly upper-end wines and the rest. Just as I will put Amador against Napa, there are a ton of excellent substitutes for the Opus Ones and Silver Oaks of the world. I can’t tell you how often I encouraged a customer who wanted something like Silver Oak to try Rodney Strong Symmetry. They loved the change and the $20 they saved was usually redirected to my tip.

But don’t ever suggest any replacement for somebody that wants Opus One. They’ll be none too happy, and it won’t help your tip. I’ve personally never tried Opus One. A lot of people will give their curious server a swig of their specialty wine. One time, when a customer brought in wine from 1974 and I told him that was the year I was born, he refused to let me leave until I had a drink. It was very smooth. Like, almost water smooth. If he had kept it in his cellar another year, it might’ve been water.

But nobody ever lets their server take a sip of Opus One. So I can only assume it tastes like shit. Bitter, sour-grapes, shit.

The biggest secret weapon in my arsenal for anybody that was undecided was Treana Red, a tiny imprint of a small winery in the totally unknown wine region (unless you’ve seen “Sideways”) of Paso Robles. You wouldn’t expect Treana to be good. It calls itself a “red blend,” which brings to mind the horrors of Carlo Rossi jugs and Franzia boxes. But to say no customer complained after I suggested it doesn’t go far enough. Every customer I ever suggested it to thanked me and wondered how such an excellent wine could be so reasonably priced and unknown.

Seriously, go find a bottle of Treana Red. You can probably order one for less than $40 if your state doesn’t suck. Tell ’em The Wombat sent ya. They won’t know what the fuck that means, but it’ll be funny.

While my destiny as cork dork was determined by location, my evolution into a beer snob took an alternate route. For the latter part of my single years, I was a Happy Hour Hound. Needing to be sober and somewhat white-eyed, not to mention ready to teach, by 7:00 in the morning, if I decided to get blotto on a particular evening, or every particular evening, it had to be before 7:00 PM. And the best, cheapest way to get to that particular nirvana is to drink whatever swill is coming out of the middle tap. Did I know about microbrews and IBUs and ABV? Sure. If I drank a beer out at dinner, it would’ve been a Fat Tire or a Sierra Nevada or a Sam Adams. If I was grabbing a six-pack on the way home, it would follow a similar pattern.

But if I was sitting at a bar trying to get drunk, then it’s “Pass the Bud Light.”

There was a point in time I could distinguish between Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light. I was doing a “blind taste test” put on by the Miller Lite girls at a baseball game. I knew which was which right away, so I picked their brand to get better swag. She didn’t believe me. We tried it again. I was right again. She was still skeptical. Whatever, lady, just give me my light-up beads.

When I moved in with my wife, my commute extended to fifty miles. I need to be awake by 5:00 to be out of the house by 5:45. That doesn’t leave a lot of hangover time. I also have a child. The number of beers I drink on a typical day, week, or month seems infinitesimal compared to a decade ago. Drinking alcohol on a weeknight is a rarity. As a result, on those Fridays and Saturdays where I feel like imbibing, my tolerance is virtually non-existent. Two beers, sixteen hours after I woke up, and I can’t even make it through my one half-hour of grown-up television.

Oh well, at least that episode of Dora the Explorer was especially scintillating.

A six-pack in the fridge will now last me a few weeks, not halfway through a Friday night. And if I’m only having one or two beers, I ain’t wasting them on shit.

It was a casual process, but I remember a moment last year when I met a friend for happy hour before going to a baseball game. I was three good beers in when I got to the game, which happened to be celebrating that most ubiquitous of all minor league promotions, Thirsty Thursday. I figured since I was already three beers in, I could probably switch to shit beer. After all, even Jesus said to drink the good wine before the crappy wine, then you won’t notice it as much.

Maybe wine, Jesus, but not beer. Holy crap, that was the most horrible thing I ever drank. Then I did the unthinkable: I paid for a $9 Sierra Nevada instead of the $1 Bud Light. The 30-year old inside me cringed.

But I make more money and drink less beer than the 30-year old me. So it’s quality over quantity now.

Then again, I’m not the best example of a beer snob, because I don’t like any of the hipster beer movements sweeping every microbrewery in town. Or the fact that every town has a microbrewery now. But that’s probably a story for another time.

What I’m here to talk about today is a third bit of liquid snobbery that I didn’t even know was possible, much less that it applied to me, until recently.

My name is the Wombat. And I am a coffee snob.

Did you know that there are still people in the world that drink Yuban?

Hoo-boy, there are some crappy coffees out there. I guess I kind of knew they were out there. The coffee aisle at the grocery store is full of them. In fact, now that I mention it, the part of the coffee aisle that I actually shop from is a small portion at the very end. I assumed the rest of the aisle was taken up by, I don’t know, tea and powdered creamer. Maybe filters. But I’ve seen an awful lot of Sanka in my peripheral vision en route to the cereal.

The coffee snob started innocently enough. There’s a hipster in my department who brought in a tea kettle and a pour over kit. We have a fifteen-minute brunch between first and second period, during which we can heat enough water for two people to have a freshly-crafted brew. A couple others can brew theirs during their prep period right before or after, and the pour over spot became the modern-day equivalent of ye olde water cooler. Could we have gone standard coffee maker? Sure, but then we’d come in, pour our cup, and lose the sense of community that comes with the slow, agonizing second-half of the pour over process. Seriously, I bet an opium-molasses hybrid would strain faster than the last few drops going through the waterlogged grounds.

Hold on for a moment while I go patent Opium Molasses.

Unofficially, the “Pour Over Club” brings coffee whenever we’re running low, but it’s pure communism once the goods have been procured. Somebody might be milking the process, but as a general rule, we all need the caffeine enough that we’ll make sure there’s enough coffee. One day, nobody remembered that we ran out the day before and we had to go without. The next day, our prep area looked like this:

coffee

This is when I started to realize I was a bit of a snob. Somebody brought in Lavazza. Sounded interesting. Italian name, so it MUST be good. Turns out I wasn’t much of a fan. I figured it was just a taste thing, like an IPA, which I don’t care for but I know many beer enthusiasts love. Still, I struggled through it, because it was the only thing present and even the ugliest hooker in the whorehouse can service some needs.

Six months later, I accidentally brought some more Lavazza in. It was on sale, and I thought, “Italian name, so it MUST be good.” Maybe a little more caffeine would’ve helped me remember. The next day, two of my co-workers had brought in replacements. Turns out I wasn’t the only one that thought it was subpar. It’s not terrible, just not that great. So we kept it as a backup for the next time we ran out. It lasted most of the semester.

But one day I came in, to my horror, to discover a giant vat of Folgers waiting for me. I thought it was a joke. “Who the fuck brought Folgers?” I demanded of everybody in my department. A few of my fellow teachers don’t really drink coffee, and when they do, they sully it with flavored creamer. I started my accusations there. They all denied it. I went in backward order of who I assumed to be the most kindred coffee spirit. By the time I made it to the other snob, I thought for sure someone had lied. Except the final interogatee admitted that yes, he was the culprit. It was leftover from some function he had gone to over the weekend. One of those get-togethers where they have a huge urn full of drudge. His wife asked if we might use it at work and it was either that or throw it out. He figured, “why not?”

I thought my derision would indicate “why not,” but that wasn’t even the biggest factor. A few days later, he brewed it once to prove a point. Even the non-regulars, with their Irish Creme creamer, took a few sips and opted out. The entire thirty-ounce tub sat patiently at the back of the area until the end of the year before we dumped it. There had been a day or two with no coffee available, yet we still didn’t bust into the red vat of mediocrity. Better to go dry for the day. The headache I have on the way home will remind me to stop off and buy some more coffee.

Incidentally, after we mocked the creamer-user enough, he tried some of our coffee black. It wasn’t the bitter crap he had assumed it to be. A week or two later, he admitted that he was now drinking black coffee at home. And now that he was drinking it black, he couldn’t do the Maxwell House. But the good news was that the money being saved on creamer could go toward buying better coffee.

It’s amazing how, once you actually start tasting the coffee, you want coffee with taste. A good portion of the industry hopes you never discover that coffee can taste good.

Fortunately for me, my snobbery seems to be coming at a perfect time. There’s been a resurgence (or maybe just a surgence) of good coffee shops of late. I wouldn’t have believed it five years ago, when the common narrative was that Starbucks pushing everyone out of business. As much as I love me some gingerbread latte, Starbucks isn’t a coffee business. At best, it’s an espresso business, although with all of the specialty Frappuccinos coming out, even that moniker is faltering. Notice how few of the mermaids, dragons, and Christmas trees have coffee as their base flavor? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ordered the coffee frappuccino and had to send it back when they gave me a caramel one. “Oh sorry, we’re not used to people ordering coffee flavor.”

I’ve settled on ordering an espresso Frappuccino. They’ll give me an off look, but at least the order will be right. Or better yet, I’ll just get a Javiva at Peet’s.

But I feel like the “as sweet as possible” trend is reversing. Competitors are returning to what we now call “drip coffee,” aka coffee. The mom and pop shops have been replaced with hipster locales where they don’t crinkle their nose after I say “no cream or sugar.” Single origin, French press, Clover, and the pour over are becoming increasingly common. And don’t get me started on the wonderful things they are all doing with cold brew.

My favorite spot in this new trend is Philz Coffee in the Bay Area. Their motto is “One Cup at a Time,” and every single coffee they serve is a pour over. They have about fifteen varietals, each with tasting notes, and you can even blend more than one varietal into a single cup of coffee. After you order it, they grind the beans and “brew it” right there in front of you. When it is handed to you, there is a layer of bubbles on the top, and if you slap that lid on before you have slurped up some of those bubbles, the barista might have a nervous breakdown. How cool is that? They want you to sample the cup of coffee like it’s a bottle of wine. The entryway to snobbery is open and widening.

Unlike beer, where my preferences are very specific, I’m not particular about the coffee varietals. Dark roast, medium roast, light roast. All are fine, especially if the brewer knows that dark roast need not be the consistency of crude oil. Guatemalan? Honduran? Kona Blend and all of its attendant controversies? Sure.

Even decaf.

I’m just kidding. Decaf is a demon-spawn cocktail filtered through the devil’s own anus. Non-alcoholic beer is bad enough, but I can at least get my head around people who want to avoid alcohol. There is no reason on the planet that someone should opt to avoid the wonder that is caffeine.

And I’m not going to lie and say that I can actually taste all of those “notes of” that the descriptors say. Wine? Yeah, I can definitely sense the grapefruit in a sauvignon blanc. With zinfandel, I know I prefer a peppery one over a jammy one. But when the coffee says it tastes of hazelnut and cardamom, I’m just going to have to trust them. Even the very basic flavors or “fruity” or “nutty” doesn’t come through on my palate. I’m skeptical it’s on anybody’s. I wonder what temperature it needs to be at to get that flavor.

Whoever heard of “fruity coffee,” anyway?

But that’s okay. I’ve come to discover that there is only one flavor profile I need my coffee to have. It’s a flavor that might be a rarity in the coffee world but, thankfully, is becoming easier to find.

That flavor is: good.