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The Session #91 – Forgotten Friday: My First Belgian

September 5, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(I missed the last few Sessions due to travel and exhaustion and illness, but I’m back! This month’s topic is “My First Belgian” hosted by Breandán and Elisa over at Belgian Smaak.)

Occasionally, the many moving parts of my writing life line up in a perfect row, like some rare celestial event where arcane energies mingle and a portal to other worlds opens very briefly. As the Session falls on a day I had other writing plans, I can feel the gears of my mind click and sync, suddenly whirring together as one as the clutch reengages. I typically write “Forgotten Friday” posts about places and items that have been lost in plain sight, but today, I’m using the literal definition of my favorite nostalgic infinitive: “to forget.”

This month’s topic asks me to recall the first Belgian beer I ever managed to sneak down my gullet. The problem is, no matter how far I stretch my brain, how many stories I pull from the depths of my hippocampus, how many bottles and labels I recall on the selves of the dozens of fridges of my life, I cannot remember my first Belgian beer. I can remember the first beer; it was a Boddingtons Pub Ale, at the dinner table with my parents, around 7th grade. Although, photo evidence says I probably drank a bit earlier than that (thanks, Dad), that’s my first fermented memory, the first time I remember drinking beer.

I also remember thinking it tasted like bitter instant oatmeal that someone had added way too much water to, followed by a quick internal question, “why would anyone want to drink this stuff?”

Don't judge, it was the 80s in England. Just look at that red table.

Don’t judge, it was the 80s in England. Just look at that red table and white leather couch.

If I had to guess, my first was probably one of the big boy Belgian beers: Duvel, Hoegaarden, maybe even a stray bottle of Delirium Tremens left to age in the back of our family fridge after a party. It’s possible, in all its wasted decadence, that my first Belgian was Trappist; my mom would often keep a bottle of Chimay Red on hand during the holiday season, for reasons I don’t quite understand, because neither she nor my dad drank it. But I cant’ say for sure. It’s a black void in my mental vault, one of those things I never built a place for in my memory palace, that will probably be forever lost in the deep dark ocean of my memories.

I’ll confess; I probably don’t remember because I’ve never taken to Belgian beer. I’ve homebrewed it, tried countless styles and brands, forced my tongue into a steel-cage death match with funky fermentation, hoping to one day emerge bloody but victorious, the Champion of Brussels. While I’ve gotten in a few good punches, I’m still likely to brace myself before taking a sip of saison, clench my jaw when quaffing a quad. I appreciate the artistry and heritage of many Belgian breweries, but something in the bready unmistakable yeast character of Belgian beer is antithetical to what my taste buds want.

While that may seem tragic (and trust me, for years I was convinced there was a fundamental flaw in my mouth), it has allowed me to finally accept a reality a lot of modern beer enthusiasts forget, try to dance around to avoid appearing unlearned or inexperienced: it’s OK to not like a certain style of beer. It’s OK to not like super hoppy, high ABV imperial IPAs. It’s OK if you find the salty sour of a gose a bit too much for your particular preferences. It’s OK to say, “I have tried this, and it is not for me.”

The only thing you’re obligated to do is appreciate that someone else, somewhere, probably does like that style. Maybe likes it so much they’re known to throw “favorite” in front of it whenever it comes up in conversation. You don’t have to like a beer, but always keep in mind: your not liking it doesn’t make it bad. Subjective bad and objective bad are wildly different beasts. If you’re into beer enough to have opinions (and don’t just enjoy it as a drink), it’s on you to be able to acknowledge when a beer is well made but not to your tastes, verses poorly made, and not up to the quality standards of excellent beer.

Memory is tied to taste, and I was hoping that sipping on some Belgian beer would cause a chemical cascade of mnemonic flashes. But it didn’t. It just reminded me of all the ways I’ve tried to force myself to like a style because of faux cultural pressure and personally manufactured expectation, and how, when looking at it in hindsight, that seems like a very silly thing.

hsredskyatnight

Beer Review: Dogfish Head Noble Rot

April 19, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

The Earth’s breath swept through the stones as long interred guests howled in disapproval of our gathering. It was a late winter 8 A.M., everything floating in lifeless grey, nothing bragging about the joy of life except for a few bouquets of violet anemones that were propped up next to a sign that read, plainly, “Matthew Leonard Cole.” Leafless skeletal hands reached into the ashen cloud-cover, like some mischievous undertaker had come in the night and flipped all the trees upside down.

Roots above, blossoms below.

The priest, a stranger to us but not this town, stood stoically in his freshly dry-cleaned robes, performing his never ending duty with that bible like Sisyphus with that rock. A red silk bookmark hung from the pages of the holy text, tongue wagging in the winter wind, holding a place of reminder, of memory, of last rites.

Well practiced but unfamiliar, the priest stumbled through an exaltation of Matthew’s life: his myriad but inconsistent successes, his tragically short but intense relationships, the nothing and something and everything he left behind. He did the best he could, having received the scribbled pages of notes from friends and family only hours before, to make Matthew seem like a person who would be missed after this small crowd dispersed.

The priest read and read – those canon phrases buried in Pslam; valleys and walking and shadows and death – monotone to match the grey, somber to match the cold.

My mind wandered, drunk on loss and beer from the night before, and I had a hard time understanding the religion that filled my ears. His words seemed familiar, like I’d heard them before, like I knew their shape and structure, but it felt like I was listening to someone try to explain a complex idea in a language I didn’t know. Or at the very least couldn’t remember.

The few people who had shown I knew through Matt or Matt knew through me – a conclave of our combined social lives. Some had come far unexpectedly, others had come short, full well expecting. They hunched, coats like clerical robes covering sadness, the morning mist gathering on then rolling off waterproof fabric like tears. I counted nine. Nine to remember twenty seven. One for every three years.

Finally, the priest stopped communing and looked at me.

“I believe Katherine has a few words to say.”

I had hoped he’d forgotten, that the idea of this eulogy had slipped away in the midst of the verses, had been carried off by the holy spirit. I fumbled in my pocket for a square of white, my memories of Matt condensed into eight point five by eleven. I unfolded it carefully, reminding myself that he would be doing this for me were roles opposite; were I horizontal and he vertical.

I stared down at the crease in the sheet, one line a little longer than the other, meeting perfectly in the middle.

“Matt asked me to speak for him, but I’m worried that I can’t. I only knew him as a sister and a poor one at that. Many of you – his friends, cell-mates, fellow-trouble makers – might have known him better. But because I share blood, the responsibility falls to me to remember how he was and who he was, when he was.”

The Times New Roman on the paper blurred, deformed and refracted through the water in my eyes. I said I wouldn’t. Didn’t think I could. I folded the paper along the cross and put it away.

“I had prepared something, but it won’t do. It’s too sterile, too formal. Matt isn’t an anecdote, isn’t a punch line to some bad gallows humor. Well he wasn’t, at least.”

Several that had been staring down at the coffin looked up to me now.

“Death baffles me. What does it mean to go away? To disappear from the places you used to be? To leave a house, a car, a life that is full of your things but is empty of you? If our words still appear on paper, if our voices still echo in memory, do we ever really leave? I think Matt is still with me, still in the spaces around me, in all that air that we think is nothing, in the poems and photographs, still lingering like an eternal radio transmission.”

The wind threw a left hook, a massive gust that toppled the sign with Matt’s name, blew the purple blossoms across the graveyard’s tombstone teeth. A few errant strands of blond whipped across and stung my face, self-flagellation for a sister who’d in recent years misplaced her piety.

“And when we go, does our dignity flee? Does it run from this life, this planet, like a scared child in the face of a pillaging army? Or does it persist, angry that it has been dethroned by something as inevitable as death? The Egyptians buried their dead with gold and jewels and all those beautiful things that defined worth and value. I’d like to think we bury Matt today with all the love and spirit he brought to the world. I’d like to think we bury him beautifully, bury him with all kinds of otherworldly riches…

…but I wonder. Death equalizes and strips. The body decays even when encased in gold. Is it possible for a corpse to be regal? Is it possible to nobly rot?”

044

“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?”
― Daniele Varè

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