Today’s infographic is a spoof of the Seven Stages of Man, which is detailed in a famous monologue in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. Created by Dario Suveljak, from Croatia, who called his version 7 Bottles in the Life of the Average Man. It begins with “H2O drinks,” proceeds through “Real-Man drinks,” ending up with “Placebo drinks.” Beer, not surprisingly, represents “Adult man.”
CLick here to see the chart full size.
Our 58th Session should be a fun one. Our host, Phil Hardy from Beersay, is apparently hoping for an old-fashioned Christmas this year, and at the top of his list is Charles Dickens’ immortal classic A Christmas Carol. Hardy is attempting to merge the two, which, as Dickens himself said of the goal of his novella in the preface. “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.” We should all aspire to such heights. The basic idea, which by now you must have guessed, is to write about the beers of Christmas past, present and future, or as Hardy tells it in his announcement post, A Dickens of a Topic for December 2011:
A Christmas Carol
The idea for me was based loosely around the visits of three ghosts to Ebenezer Scrooge, but relayed in a post about the beers of Christmas past, present and future.
What did you drink during Christmas holidays of old, have you plans for anything exciting this year and is there something you’d really like to do one day, perhaps when the kids have flown the nest?
Do you have your own interpretation, was Scrooge perhaps a beer geek?
Or maybe it’s all one day. What will you drink Christmas morning, Christmas afternoon and what will you top off the holiday with that evening?
Just a few examples there, but the idea was to keep the topic as open as possible to allow you free rein to write about a subject with a seasonal twist in whatever way the title grabs you.
My own favorite interpretation of A Christmas Carol is the Bill Murray film Scrooged, which I watch each year without fail, tearing up at the end … every … single … time. There, now you now; I’m a sentimental old fool.
Acid rain. Drug addiction. International terrorism. Freeway killers. Now more than ever, it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas. Don’t miss Charles Dickens immortal classic; Scrooge. Your life might just depend on it…
Or maybe not, but just to be sure, why not write your Dickensian blog post anyway, and post it up on Friday, December 2.
Our 57th Session brings us into the confessional, courtesy of our host, Steve Lamond, from Beers I’ve Known, who magnanimously agreed to fill in for the recently pilfered Pete Brown. Stephanos — Steve’s alter ego — has chosen the topic Beery Confessions: Guilty Secrets/Guilty Pleasure Beer, which he describes as follows:
One of the things I most enjoy about blogs and personal writing in general is the ability to have a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way. So I’d like to know your beery guilty secrets. Did you have a particularly embarrassing first beer (in the same way that some people purchase an atrocious song as their first record) or perhaps there’s still a beer you return to even though you know you shouldn’t? Or maybe you don’t subscribe to the baloney about feeling guilty about beers and drink anything anyway?
You’re also welcome to write about bad drinking experiences you’ve had as a result of your own indulgence or times when you’ve been completely wrong about a beer but not yet confessed to anyone that you’ve changed your mind.
Its fairly wide open, take your pick. Variety is the spice of life as they say (and I hope there’s more than 57 of them…)
Since Stephanos says he likes discovering personal things about his fellow beer bloggers, getting “a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way,” I’ll recount my own, vaguely embarrassing first taste of not beer, close in a way, but actually “Near Beer,” non-alcoholic beer that was, believe it or not, aimed at kids when I still was one. In fact, my mother bought me some when I was around twelve and my friends and I tried it one day. It was so bad it’s a wonder I ever tried beer again.
I wish I remembered more details about it. I thought the can was silver in color, but I also remember bright colors. Of course, this was the early 1970s so bright colors were everywhere. I’ve written about this before, though I thought I’d remembered more details than I can now, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. Back in November of 2006 I participated for the third, and final time, in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a great exercise for writers. Every November for over a decade, it challenges writers to complete a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That works out to 1,667 words a day, every day.
That year, I wrote Under the Table, A Fictional Memoir of Growing Up With Beer, the first draft of which is still online. As far as I know, the only people to actually read it were my mother-in-law and Shaun O’Sullivan, from 21st Amendment, who was sick for a good portion of that November in 2006 and needed something to do. The story was a mostly true account of 24 episodes in my life, from the first memories of my parents drinking beer — I grew up with an alcoholic, psychotic stepfather — to my own adventures drinking in New York City in my late teens and early twenties. I chose 24 chapters because that’s a case, and each chapter starts with a particular beer remembered from my childhood as a starting point for my admittedly self-indulgent reminiscences.
Chapter 7, Not So Close, ends with the time my friends and I first tried the truly awful Near Beer.
This was also the same time that I first tried near beer. I don’t remember why my mother bought it for me, but it was in the basement refrigerator with the rest of the real alcohol. Perhaps she was afraid that my stepfather’s influence might turn me into an alcoholic, too, who knows? But some friends and I tried it one afternoon when I was in my early teens, probably around twelve or so. It was truly awful, as I remember it, and I wasn’t the only one. We all hated it. If this was what beer tasted like, I didn’t understand why adults seemed to drink so much of it. But it did seem like so many other aspects of the life I’d imagined for myself. It was as close to beer as my life was to being normal, not even close.
Happily, I didn’t give up on beer and found that it was much better than that first near experience. I continued drinking the somewhat bland regional lagers available in 1970s Eastern Pennsylvania. They offered not much in the way of variety but in retrospect were more varied than beer became in the following decade when consolidation, mergers and takeovers gave us “The Big 3,” with little else to drink. But after joining the Army Band out of high school, I was stationed in New York City. For a musician, the city was a great place to be at that time. It offered endless places to see live music. Although I liked rock & roll, I was a bigger fan of jazz, especially big band. And there was some terrific places to see jazz, a number of them in the village. There were even these private loft clubs in some warehouse district that I couldn’t find today if my life depended on it, but we knew people who knew people and thus had the address to some of these unmarked jazz clubs. Many of the jazz clubs in New York were selling beers like Guinness, Bass and Pilsner Urquell, beers utterly different than anything we had back home. That’s actually the genesis of my own love affair with beer and was also detailed in Chapter 23 of Under the Table, Jazz in the Dark.
But the confession part of that story is that although I began to learn more and more about beer, and tried as many different ones as we encountered, I continued to drink the familiar regional lagers and even the mainstream national brands when nothing else was available. I hadn’t yet become the annoying beer snob that I am today, when I’ll politely decline a beer if there isn’t anything I deem worthy of drinking at that moment. So there was a good decade where I drank craft beer whenever I could, but wasn’t too fussy when offered something not as tasty. I regret putting social considerations ahead of my taste buds. Of course, I wasn’t as curmudgeonly then, either, and probably had more friends. Is there a connection? Probably.
And one final confession:
Our 46th Session is hosted by Mike R. Lynch of Burgers and Brews. For his topic, he chose “An Unexpected Discovery: Finding Great Beer in the Last Place You’d Look,” or as he describes it:
I recently drove out to Colorado for a concert, and realized this was a perfect opportunity to stop at as many “beer destinations” as I could. I researched, plotted routes, looked at maps, and generally planned the entire trip around beer. What I was surprised to find was that despite all the amazing stops I planned, one of the best beer experiences of the trip was completely accidental. I found great beer in the last place I thought to look for it.
Has this happened to you? Maybe you stumbled upon a no-name brewpub somewhere and found the perfect pale ale. Maybe, buried in the back of your local beer store, you found a dusty bottle of rare barleywine. Perhaps a friend turned you on to a beer that changed your mind about a brewery or a style. Write about a beer experience that took you by surprise.
Recently I was asked to write a profile of Michael Jackson for one of the newer beer magazines and that got to me thinking about Michael and his legacy. I first met him at GABF the first time I went to it, in 1992. The book I’d written with a friend of mine, “The Bars of Santa Clara County: A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Silicon Valley,” had just been published, and I treated myself with a trip to Colorado for the festival. That was the beginning of a treasured friendship that lasted many years. But I actually “discovered” — and rather unexpectedly I might add — Jackson’s writing many years before that, when I was living, or rather stationed, in New York City in the late 1970s.
A few years ago, for NaNoWriMo I wrote a semi-fictional memoir of growing up with beer, Under the Table, the rough draft of which is still online.
In chapter 23 (of 24 — it was a case of chapters) entitled Jazz in the Dark, I reminisced about my time playing with an Army band in New York, and how it was during that time that I discovered beer that was different (at least to the kind I’d grown up drinking) while going to jazz clubs in Manhattan. Trying to learn more about these and the other new-found beers we were drinking, I also discovered Michael Jackson’s book, the World Guide to Beer during this same time period.
Here’s an excerpt from Jazz in the Dark:
We went to the big venues, of course, like the Village Vanguard, Sweet Basil, the Knitting Factory, the 55 Bar but smaller ones, too, all over the East Village and the lower east side. And one thing you could count on in those days was that they carried Bass Ale and Guinness. It seems odd to think of both of those beers as new, but they were to me. Both were very different from my usual choices and I loved the way they tasted. Many of the jazz clubs did not have much in the way of food but often had trays of cheese, bread and fruit (usually sliced apples) which went with both Bass and Guinness quite well. It became our standard jazz club diet.
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But while music was the reason I was there, it was the discovery of all this new beer that really made the experience sing. With Bass and Guinness, both beers had fuller flavors and tasted so different from what I was used to that it made me wonder what else was out there that I also didn’t know about.
About that same time, we discovered a bar in the East Village, Brewsky’s Beer Bar. It was a little hole-in-the-wall on 7th Avenue, but it had, for its day, a great selection of imported beers. I think the owner was Ukranian, or something like that, and there were a lot of beers from central and eastern Europe. There were dozens of similar-tasting lagers and pilsners with enchanting labels I couldn’t read. But it was the darker beers that really stood out, simply because they were so different from what I’d grown up drinking. For example, I recall Dortmunder Union vividly as a beer with distinct flavors unlike any other I’d ever tried.
I liked most of what I tried, though at the time I was drawn to the English ales, I think because they tasted so much different to me than what I was used to drinking. I was certainly hooked. I already had a somewhat obsessive love affair going with beer, but to find out that it was so much richer and more varied than I’d realized was something of an epiphany.
I longed to know more about what I was tasting, but there was scant little information available. Happily, that changed one day at the end of another long month. In the military, we were paid twice a month. I set aside about $100, a sizable portion of my paycheck in those days, for what I referred to as spiritual growth, usually books and music. With the Army’s hurry up and wait protocols, we usually arrived at our gigs hours in advance, so there was a lot of down time. I read like a fiend in those days, finishing books every couple of days.
During one of these post-payday trips to a bookstore, I happened upon Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer, which had been published the year before. I almost didn’t pick it up, because the garish gold and green cover had a large Miller ad in the center. But then I spied the red triangle from Bass and flipped through it. Needless to say, I bought it on the spot. Finally, I had some context to what I’d been drinking and was able to organize my head around the various tastes I’d been trying so chaotically.
Looking back, it seems odd that there was so little available information on beer and, compared with today, how truly ignorant I was. And it wasn’t just me. Practically everybody I knew had little or no idea about beer. The regional and national breweries at the time made no effort to educate consumers. Jack MacAuliffe founded New Albion Brewery in California two years before this, but it might as well have been located on the Moon for all the impact it had for me in New York. We had no concept of beer styles. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of where beer color came from, or why so many of the new beers I was trying tasted different whereas most of the beers I knew locally tasted so much the same. I was only vaguely aware that ales and lagers were fundamentally different, but didn’t really understand why.
So Jackson’s book was a great big wallop, a slap in the face, but the good kind. The welcome kind where afterward you say, “thanks, I needed that.” It opened up a whole new world for me, even though it would be several years and a cross-country move before the ideas that took root that year began to flower. But that was the beginning: the first awkward sips that set me on my way. And I have jazz to thank for it.
Coincidentally enough, Michael Jackson was also a jazz lover and years later it was a favorite topic of conversation whenever I saw him.
In the intervening 30+ years since those first unexpected beer experiences when I lived in New York, the journey I started then has led me to one unexpected discovery after another. To the question Mike poses in the Session topic, “has this happened to you?,” I can only say it’s been happening nonstop for over thirty years. It’s that very quality that keeps life fresh year after year as a beer lover. Because I’m not much of a ticker, I have no idea how many different beers I’ve tried over those years, but I imagine it’s a fairly big number. Whatever the amount, it’s certainly been satisfying.
It’s to the point now that I rarely despair, because I usually end up finding good beer in the last place I’d look, and almost every time. Hopefully, that’s a sign of the times but whatever the reason, because I still remember when good beer was a rarity, I treat each discovery as the treasure that it is. Expect the unexpected, that’s my motto.
Monday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale from 1947. The whale may not be white, but it sure seems to play on the story of Moby Dick. Ballantine did a series of diorama ads that featured different stories, some from literature and some from history. I don’t know how many they did, I’ve collected at least a dozen of them, but I’d love to know more definitively what subjects they covered.
Buzzards Bay Brewing in Westport, Massachusetts, may have abandoned their flagship lager, but their creativity is still alive and brewing. Their latest idea is all over the labels of their new India Pale Ale, it’s a serialized mystery story told over twelve different labels, with each one containing a portion of the story. Here’s how they tell it at their new website, Just Beer:
Just beer is proud to reveal a unique collaboration between brewer and author.
“The Case of the IPA” is a hard-boiled detective farce printed chapter by chapter on 12 bottles of a newly released India Pale Ale. Each 22 ounce bottle not only has 22 ounces of brilliantly deduced IPA, but also 1 of the 12 chapters of the story. Each case has 12 bottles, which makes for the entire tale told in a case. And so, the Case of the IPA is indeed a case of the IPA.
Brewer Harry Smith proposed the idea to author Paul Goodchild and they quickly agreed on a format: a noir-ish detective serial. Smith brewed up a batch of hoppy craft brew whilst Goodchild penned the story. It’s a mystery of zany brewers and their intrigues; sure to tickle the ribs and please the belly of any fan of craft beer.
As this is a bottle by bottle mystery, Just Beer reminds all to “please read responsibly.”
You can also read all about it at the Cape Cod Times. And here’s Chapter 1 to whet your appetite and your thirst for more:
