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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

Session #88 – “Traditional” Beer Mixes

June 6, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(This post is brought to you by Boak and Bailey, hosts of the 88th Session. Topic? Traditional Beer Mixes.)

No matter how many times I typed it, those pesky quotation mosquitoes swarmed the word traditional. I urged him to show up for the barbecue, have a beer, eat a bratwurst, that it would be a good time, but no, the little conveyers of annoyance just couldn’t leave him alone. Now he has to sit in the bathroom for an hour, scratching and slathering Benadryl gel on all those inflamed lumps, all because I tried to drag him out here against his will.

I can’t in good conscience use the word traditional in a post like this, because I fear, that as a 28 year old American beer drinker, I have no traditions. I’ve got rituals, sure, and more beer related ceremonies and tribal dances than I even remember at this point. But traditions? Those are carved from the wood of a tree with many rings. They’re built from collective societal experience, passed from elder to youth, made up of the fibers that bind demographics and generations together.

The only quasi-traditions I have any experience with exist mewling and hungover on college campuses, but those mixes (cheap orange juice + 40 oz malt liquor; 15 Natural Ice cans + Saturday full of regret) don’t exactly bring much intelligence to the discussion. It also seems like mixing beer became (and remains) popular in England, and a quick survey of my American beer drinking friends shows that nearly none of them mix beer outside of snakebites, shandys, or the one-off experiment.

I’m at an impasse. The road’s closed, possibly due to an overturned Budweiser truck. The bridge is out, and the misappropriation of the local civics budget means it won’t be repaired anytime soon. If I want to get in on this traditions game, I’ll have to take a machete to the cultural thicket and make some of my own, starting right now.

Dogfish Head 60 Minute + Dogfish Head 90 Minute = Dogfish Head 75 Minute

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You may be thinking, “But Oliver, Dogfish Head already brews a beer called 75 Minute, so isn’t this a little redundant?” Yes. But also no. More no than yes.

When the Dogfish Head Brewpub of Gaithersburg, Maryland, rose from the ashes of the old Pat and Mike’s restaurant like an inebriated phoenix, my friends and I mustered all our young courage, donned our hepatological armor, and became regulars. We suddenly had a place to drink that served beer not just “beer,” and found pretty much any excuse to plant ass on bar stool. We’d meet for happy hour, or lunch hour, or just regular hour, to celebrate birthdays, holidays, or just Tuesdays.

As the pub wasn’t exactly walking distance from any of our homes, we’d often want for a driver. Cabs weren’t in the first-job-out-of-college budget. Girlfriends and siblings grew sick of always picking up a troupe of Dogfish infused drunks. We had to adjust how we drank, and thus the 75 minute was born.

By mixing the 6% of 60 minute with the 9% of 90 Minute, you’d, quite logically, finish out with a balance of 7.5%. The mix had all the bitter aggressiveness of the 60 minute, with some of the mellowing charm from the 90, bringing out the best of both beers. You could order one of these on half-price burger night and chew on beer and beef all night. It offered all the flavor of sipping on two beers, with none of the buzzing side effects.

I can’t say we invented it, because local rumor says people were already making this mix at the brewery in Rehoboth, Delaware, but we invented it.

Stone Go To IPA + Stone Ruination IPA = Regular IPA

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It’s rare for me to make blanket statements about a particular thing, because I try to keep an open mind and admit my experience is perpetually limited, but:

I don’t like “session” IPAs.

They taste like a bottled identity crisis, like a brewer started brewing an IPA then second guessed herself, only added half of the malt of the recipe, and then instead of dumping the batch, finished it in a panic. They’re plenty aromatic, but out of the nine or so I’ve tried, the low ABV does not offset the weak finish and lack of body. A low ABV IPA seems fundamentally wrong, and I wonder, every time I see one, why the brewery didn’t brew a style that actually supports low ABV instead of hacking up a perfectly good style of beer to fit a weird marketing niche.

Stone Go To IPA reigns as my least favorite of the versions I’ve tried; it’s sort of sour, sort of crass, like someone who brings an already open, two thirds full bottle of wine to a dinner party. But my solution is easy: to fix it, mix it.

Your neighbors might call the cops if you set off a hop-bomb of this magnitude, but by mixing Stone’s delicious Ruination with their not-so-delicious Go To, you get a surprisingly easy to drink weapon of nasal destruction. The two hop profiles blend surprisingly well, and the spaghetti-noodle malt backbone of the Go To manages to calm the raging of the Ruination. The result is a lot like Stone’s regular IPA, but by mixing, you get two good beers instead of one great one and one lame one.

The universe always finds balance.

Session #86 – Obituary: Beer Journalism

April 4, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Heather Vandenengel of Beer Hobo is hosting the 86th iteration of The Session. This month’s very a propos topic: Beer Journalism. Special thanks to Bryan D. Roth for playing harp to my fiddle on this one. A more thoughtful follow-up on the topic will be posted tomorrow.

ANYTOWN, U.S.A — It is with heavy heart that we must report the passing of Modern Beer Journalism. In a classic example of the wrong place at the wrong time, he was tragically caught in a hail of bad grammar and poor research outside of a beer blog at 9:42 PM, June 23, 2012. He was 18 hours old.

Modern Beer Journalism (or BJ, as he was known to his friends) was born, brimming and spilling, into a world of digital possibility. While many were concerned that being reared and raised by poorly educated rampant optimists might hinder his development, others noted that BJ bore the intellectual hallmarks of beer evangelist Michael Jackson. Some in the industry thought he may, with time, prove a prodigy, a keg of  insight just waiting to be tapped so that all his bubbly wisdom could fill glasses that had been dry and empty for too long. But this world is a cruel place, filled with memes and Buzzfeed quizzes and countless other machinations of time-wasting evil. Because of his low-birth, he was never able to live up to his role model; a bud snipped before we ever got a chance to see what flower might bloom.

BJ started writing at a young age. Much of his work was derivative and trite, focusing on meaningless cultural ephemera and faddish trends du jour. For a period, he wrote nothing but “Top 10 Beers to Drink in Summer” articles, thinking that truly, deeply, passionately, people actually gave a shit about his hastily scrawled dreck. He never seemed able to shake the misogyny that hid deep in his psyche, nor his crippling and honestly depressing lack of self-awareness, probably because he was so drunk all the time. But the fact that he was writing anything at all provoked people into thinking there was potential. His writing was important to the beer and to the people behind the beer. Without the words and stories, the voice of the brewer was like a beautiful ’65 Fender Stratocaster unplugged, unamplified. A few stellar examples of his prose beamed starlight splendor across the internet, and even those outside of the brewed world took note. For a fleeting second, like that moment of beauty before the diaphanous fragility of a soap bubble collides with the hard ground, Modern Beer Journalism burned with vivacious fire.

But like many young people, BJ fell to the intoxicating rush of instant internet gratification. He began hanging out with the curt and oft misunderstood Twitter gang, spending all day retweeting junk, even though he knew it was bad for him. He became obsessed with pointless minutiae; how many hops a brewer could cram into a pint, how much theoretical “imperial” was possible before the beer was akin to paint thinner. His inborn lust for truth was replaced by a lust for attention, attention gained through sloppy, gimmicky novelties and a personality that never flirted with anything beyond the most shallow pools of obvious empiricism. He grew, eventually, to be a shadow of the man he should have been; a cheap facsimile that bore BJs name, but none of the power of his pedigree.

While the police have not released an official statement, many of those close to the family suspect foul play in relation to BJ’s death, and sources tell this reporter that Vani, aka “The Food Babe,” has been detained for questioning. Authorities are also on the lookout for several hundred others masquerading as “writers,”  all of who are suspected of having ties the Facebook Mafia, the blurry Instagram Mob, and other seedy organizations.

BJ is survived by a small group of close colleagues, who, with a lot of work and a little bit of luck, might be able to bring honor to his lost legacy, and make the future of Modern Beer Journalism bright. In place of flowers, please read BJ’s birth announcement (originally reported by Bryan D. Roth) so that we may remember him in a time where we just assumed he’d suck, and hadn’t yet been proved right.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

 

 

Session #84 – Alternative Reviews – Breckenridge Bridge

February 7, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

This is my entry for the 84th Session, hosted by me, on this here blog. The topic: Alternative Reviews. Warning: this contains lots of words (even more than usual).

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David raised his glass quickly but carefully, in one, thoroughly practiced motion. The amber sloshed perilously near spilling, the gyroscope of his wrist and hand the only thing from keeping the bar from a beery bath. “Here’s to life!”

The cry pierced the air above the bar, setting into motion an avalanche of reaction: displeased glares, questioning glances, humorous smirks. Even the drunk karaoke girls stopped to look at David, who by now, was standing on the foot rests of his bar stool like some inebriated half-giant.

Geoff looked at him down the glassy length of his shaker, smiling through his sip.

“It’s good to see you back to your old self.” Geoff said, as he set the glass on the bar. He picked it up again, looking down at the watery ring of condensation kept afloat by the bar’s waxy finish. He set the beer back down halfway on top of the first ring making a tidy two-ring Venn diagram. He turned to David, “Maybe you should slow down. You’ve had a hell of a few weeks.”

David looked back at him, eyes half glazed by the beer that was worming its way through the folds of his brain. “No man, I feel great! Why you gotta be such a cop all the time?” He waved at the bartender, trying to get his attention through the commotion of a Friday night.

“Because I am a cop, idiot.” Geoff had already slipped the car keys from David’s coat pocket into his own. He knew David too well, knew his tiny bladder and even tinier tolerance, and didn’t trust him not to fumble to his truck in three beer’s time, when he was well beyond a reasonable state to be awake, never mind drive. He checked the time on his phone. “Hey, Dave, man, I gotta run. Cathy’s expecting me soon and I’ve got a long shift tomorrow.”

“Aw man! Just one more, come on. COME ON!” David taunted him, holding one fist-defiant index finger near his face, scrunching up his nose and mouth, part demanding, part begging, part unsure he should even have one more himself. Geoff laughed, threw down two twenties, and shook his head. “Not tonight man. Next time. I got your tab though. And your keys. There should be enough there for a cab, too.”

It took another half hour to process that Geoff had meant his car keys; thirty full minutes of crawling around in the stale beer-fog of under bar, looking for any glint of metallic silver of Chevy logo. The beer had done its job, and was still billing hours to the client of insobriety, so David didn’t even entertain being mad at the long-gone Geoff. He smiled at fate, and let the beer decide with infallible drunk wisdom, that the best bet was to walk the eight some miles home, not call a cab.

♦♦♦

055

The late summer air soothed his sing-along-sore throat, Vicks VapoRub on Colorado wind made of purple poppies, peeling pine, and that undeniable smell of coming thunderstorm. David loved August nights in Breckenridge, and for a while, lost in a alcohol-fueled flood of senses and emotion, he didn’t mind his hour long saunter.

He came upon the bridge, an old parker-style in need of paint with rust pocking its metal like acne on a teenagers oily forehead, and could smell the fishy waft from the river below. The crossing marked the halfway point of his trip home, that moment where he was equidistant between bar stool and bed, between drunkenness and sobriety. He took a moment at the center of the bridge to lean out over the rushing, storm-swollen water. Odd detritus lined the bank near one of the concrete supports: several mismatched tires, probably dumped there by Tom from the auto-shop on Lincoln; a soggy, algae stained futon that looked like a reject from an IKEA as-is section; a shopping cart upturned and abandoned at least a mile from its normal home at City Market.

The river passed by without noticing David noticing it, upstream looking exactly like downstream as if it didn’t matter where water began or ended, only that it flowed. If it hadn’t been so late, if he hadn’t been just one beer past buzzed, David might have dangled his legs down over the edge of the bridge and sat there a while, let summer sink into his soul, let the river wash away the night, let the peace of nature remind him how lucky he was to be alive.

As he turned to finish his journey home, some movement near the water caught his eye. A shape, tall and thin, a man down by the bank, near the access road, swaggering in shadow. Then he saw another man, a bigger man, approach from behind, thinking for a moment he heard shouting and crying on the back of the wind. He watched, too far to help, too close to cry out without jeopardizing himself, as the larger shadow slung something out of his pocket and snapped serenity in two with the crack of a cocked hammer colliding with primer.

Had his mind been clear, he would have immediately called Geoff, had the entire Breckenridge Sheriff’s department on the scene in minutes. But panic closed its powerful grip on his mind, and he could do nothing but run. Across the bridge, down a side street, through bushes and under trees. Muscle memory guided his feet, the world passed by, half buzzed by sprint, half buzzed by the the booze still sloshing in his stomach, and he soon found himself on his own front lawn, lungs grabbing desperately into the night for more air.

♦♦♦

074

A viper, two green slits on dark grey, stared at him from across the room. His eyes adjusted slowly like auto-focus on a dying camera lens, regret manifesting behind them like two jack hammers of you-should-know-better. 11:03. Not so bad, given how late (or early) he had slipped into the silky caress of his down comforter after his mad dash home.

He knew he should call Geoff, but was worried he hadn’t really seen what he thought he saw, that Geoff would just laugh him off and tell him he needed to go to AA. Even if David had wanted to talk to him, he couldn’t find his phone, and weight of his eyelids and slouching slurch of his stomach suggested it might not be time to get up anyway. He let his head fall back onto the pillow and watched the snake disappear behind a horizontal curtain of black.

When he woke again, the viper was gone, replaced by two turtles rolling on into infinity. His headache had mellowed into a gentle sluggish fog, like his brain was covered with an entire bottle of Elmers. The hangover had cleared enough, enough at least, for him to sit up without worrying that a fault line might open up on the back of his skull. He dug around in his jean pockets for his phone, not surprised to see more than a few missed calls, mainly from his mother and Geoff, both of whom, he was sure, were checking to make sure he’d made it home in as few pieces as possible. He brushed away the notifications and nudged the phone with his thumb to call Geoff.

It rang four times before being deposited, like some lowly letter, in a voice mail box. “Hey man, it’s Dave. I’m fine, just really, really hungover. This is going to sound weird, but I think I saw someone get shot last night. Like seriously. I was pretty plastered, but I’m going to go check it out. Meet me at the old bridge at ten and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

The sun had long since exited stage West by the time he pulled into a spot by the old deserted fish packing warehouse. From here he could see the silhouette of the bridge like a lattice against the night sky, lights from down in the city giving just enough glow to make the sky look eggplant, not ebony. The night was calm except for the wind that swept down from the north in sporadic, energetic bursts.

David was late, but so was Geoff. Another fifteen minutes disappeared into unrecoverable history with eyes glued to the street that ran into pines on the far side of the bridge, waiting to see a squad car come rolling past the treeline. Another twenty passed and still no squad car, still no Geoff. Sick of waiting, David decided to see if he could find any evidence of what he witnessed almost exactly 24 hours before.

The water chilled the air near the bank, enough for David’s arm hairs to unfurl, stand up straight, like a frightened porcupine. He moved to where he thought he’d seen the shadow scuffle, searching the ground for signs of blood or foot prints or shell casings, using all of his best TV crime drama knowledge.

If anything criminal had gone down in the midnight deep, the river had washed away all evidence. David was sort of happy Geoff hadn’t shown up, and hoped he hadn’t even heard his voice mail. He’d obviously embarrassed himself enough the night before; no need to add this little costly piece of police involvement. He turned back, laughing at himself and his drunken hallucinations when he smelled the unique smoke of a clove cigarette. Before he could trail it to a source, he heard a loud pop, and pinch a stab of pain in his left side. Slick, stinking mud stained the knees of his jeans. His hands felt numb, like he’d slept on them for too long. The river and his vision danced red, then white, then dark.

♦♦♦

064

He heard the beeping first. A whole cacophony of machine generated pings and dings, some high pitched and rhythmic, others low, growly, but random. Despite sending many signals from his brain, his eyelids refused to part, his mouth refused to open, his throat refused to produce sound. He floated, robbed of three of five, only smelling, listening.

David bobbed in the cosmic darkness for what felt like two eternities. He thought he was thinking about things, about philosophy and theology, chatting up Alpha and Omega over a pint of porter, learning all about life before, and after, and now. Voices from across the bar occasionally chimed in with comment, but one stuck in his mind like an echo: “You’re going to be OK.”

Voices outside the bar, muffled voices, some he thought he recognized, others as foreign as a Japanese tourist in Texas, started to become more common. He regained some audibility, mainly in grunts, but enough to signal to the distant disembodied speech that he was there, and should not be ignored.

Eventually Light snuck in, a piercing, awful light, as if he’d just emerged from some dank cave into the brilliance of a Gobi afternoon. Pupils constricted and dappled ceiling tiles formed a landscape, telling David he was lying down, in a building of some kind. A plus. Geoff loomed over him, a huge face hanging like a moon over his bed. “Dave!”

Two weeks later, the grape sized wound near his left kidney had healed sufficiently for David to be discharged. As soon as he was conscious enough to talk, Geoff filled in the hospital-induced blanks. He’d been late to the bridge because the battery on his phone had died, and he hadn’t heard the voice mail. By the time he had arrived, David was already face down near some old tires, blood seeping down into the river like a sanguine tributary. They’d gotten him to the hospital in just enough time to prevent him from bleeding out.

Despite many, many objections from the nurses, doctors, and Geoff himself, despite his near brush with death, David demanded they go out for a celebratory beer. Convincing him like only a best, old friend can, Geoff obliged him. “OK, OK. Just one beer. I guess you deserve it.” At home, David ditched the mint scrubs the doctors had given him since his clothes had been taken as part of the investigation to find the shooter. He threw on a fresh t shirt quickly, already imagining the lager sloshing sultry across his tongue.

He parked his truck and met Geoff by the door. The bar was lively, even for a Friday night, and a group of tipsy college girls were bullying the touch screen on the Karaoke machine. Geoff pulled up a stool, and helped David onto his, worried about disrupting the stitches. David nodded to the bar tender, ordering two ambers, two ruddy wonders poured perfectly into branded shakers. “I think this moment deserves a toast.”

David raised his glass quickly but carefully, in one, thoroughly practiced motion. The amber sloshed perilously near spilling, the gyroscope of his wrist and hand the only thing from keeping the bar from a beery bath. “Here’s to life!”

Session #82: Beery Yarns

December 6, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Steve at Beers I’ve Known is playing host for the 82nd Session, with the topic: Beery Yarns

If you took some sharp scissors to the 28-year-old quilt of my experience, you’d expose hundreds of thousands of potential stories, all dangling from the patchwork cloth as loose threads. Pulling any of them would start me rambling about some ephemeral flash, filling in the fuzziest details as I see fit.

There are many beer-soaked threads woven into the story of my life. Pretty much any random yank of a story string from my college years will include beer (of questionable quality). A lot from high school will, too. Even some of my youngest memories, when I wasn’t even near appropriate drinking age, could be tangentially tied  to beer, either by fatherly proxy or stolen sips in a household that revered instead of reviled the drink.

But in most of those stories, beer was merely a catalyst. A fermented means to an intoxicated end. There are few, until very recently, where beer was the focus, the bar the locus, the enjoyment the onus. But there is one that I still remember vividly. That hasn’t been partially lost to the throbbing regrets of a hangover, or faded too much from the cumulative effects of time.

The story of the first public pint I ever shared with my dad.

While I never got confirmation, I’m pretty sure my father drank a beer in every single Hooters in the contiguous United States. What had started as a hilarious American novelty to a British expat evolved into a habitual attachment. Everywhere we went, we sought out a Hooters. We eschewed decent restaurants for trans fats and orange and white. We drove out of our way just to tick off another town, another state, on the “yep, we’ve been to that Hooters” list.

But despite its specific buxom charm, Hooters constantly annoyed my dad because they wouldn’t serve beer to minors. As he was product of the English pub scene in the 70’s and 80’s, America’s odd puritanical approach to alcohol – and specifically the twenty-one-year-old drinking age law – would set my dad off, sending him into a tangent about how demonizing alcohol eventually leads to abuse of the same, ala the “preacher’s daughter” rule.

He didn’t get it. If a father was there with his son, to guide him (and drive him) what was the harm in a single pint with lunch? Apparently everything, said every American bartender, ever. Still he tried, ordering two beers for himself, trying to slide one to me in a not-so-subtle way, only to get busted by the waitress a few minutes later. We never got kicked out of a bar – he always managed to weasel out of it with his smile and accent – but in our quest to share a pint before I was 21, we certainly ruffled a lot of owl feathers.

It took breaking our Hooters tradition to finally clink father and son glasses. He and I traveled sans mom and sister a lot in pursuit of my young soccer career, so we often found ourselves puttering around unfamiliar locales, pre-Google Maps and other wanderlust supporting applications. Sometimes, we didn’t have hours to track down the nearest avian sanctuary, and instead had to opt for accommodations closer to the hotel.

At the Disney Cup International in Orlando, Florida, trying to weigh the risk of food poisoning from hole-in-the-wall Mexican food and the nearby AppleBees, my dad bought us tickets to the early show at Medieval Times. It wasn’t wholly unexpected for him to do even more unexpected things like this on impulse, and my love of swords and sorcery meant no objection from me. We lined up with the flip flops and cargo shorts of the all-inclusive-package-holders, talking about the goal I’d scored earlier that afternoon as the shadows of the perfectly pruned palms got longer and longer.

Pre-show, in the middle of the main hall and the crowd of vacationer conviviality, hundreds of people swarmed like an agitated hive of drunken wasps. Kids begged parents for plastic crowns, husbands begged wives for impractical swords, wives begged bartenders for large glasses of white wine. Staff, dressed in cheesy facsimile of period attire, guided people to their seats with about as much order and organization as a teenage boy’s bedroom.

My father disappeared into the crowd as I basked in the reflections of gas lamps bouncing off highly polished suits of armor. He returned soon, holding two “golden” goblets, both nearly overflowing with a creamy white head. Boddingtons. He held one out to me while he sipped the head on his to prevent a tragic spill.

So it was there, in the gaudy panache of the anachronistic recreation of a castle, that we finally shared a pint. No cozy tavernesque atmosphere, no friendly neighborhood barkeep, just screaming children overdosing on Disney, their exasperated, sun-burned parents, and enough novelty to put ACME to shame.

And I’ll always remember it. It wasn’t about the where, but the why. It marked a moment where we were equals, able to experience things as two men, not just a father and his boy. It was the culmination to our quest, and we drank deeply from those knock off holy grails.  It was in its own way my personal British Bar Mitzvah, the moment I became a man in my father’s eyes, which were, really, the only eyes that ever mattered.

113

Yep, still have it.

Session #80 – Is Craft Beer a Bubble?

October 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Here is my entry for the eightieth iteration of The Session; this one titled “Is Craft Beer a Bubble?” hosted by It’s Not Just the Alcohol Talking.

session_logo_all_text_300As of late, people in our community have been seen talking in hushed whispers, huddled on bar stools murmuring of pseudo-economics and critical mass, of too many beers in too little space, of inevitable collapse. Their concerns are not unfounded given the current slugfest for shelf space taking place in bottle shops around the country. 2,483 conveyors of craft beer now dot our 50 states; 1,165 brewpubs, 1,221 microbreweries, and 97 regional breweries, all of who only make up ~7% of total American beer consumption. Another ~1500 are slated to open in 2014. That’s nearly 4000 brewers fighting for the precious taste buds of a passionate but overwhelming minority.

Some doomsayers talk of brewers who can’t keep up with demand, who will inevitably brew not-so-good beer. They talk of so many beers that consumers will be paralyzed by the paradox of choice. They talk of craft beer as a bubble; a market that cannot possibly accommodate so many breweries springing to life in this newly fermented renaissance of craft beer.

But a bubble suggests a diaphanous sphere created quickly and filled with air, something of no substance and little direction, likely to burst as soon as it comes into contact with a rough surface or a stiff breeze.

I’m not sure craft beer is a bubble. I think it’s a wave.

When a bubble pops, there’s pretty much nothing left. Poof. Using the traditional model applied to houses, banks, and .COM start-ups, if the perceived economic bubble around craft beer suddenly popped, the market would crash and all the brewers except a big few would go out of business. Only those with the deepest roots (and the most money) would be able to weather the storm. We’d be left in the negative, and would feel the implications of the crash across all sorts of other markets.

In theory.

But despite what some of us want to believe, beer isn’t a necessity. Since the advent of clean, public, potable water, beer has been a luxury good, reserved for those wealthy or thirsty enough to want to buy it. This separates it economically, as its supply and demand aren’t inextricably tied to the rest of our economy. People aren’t going to be underwater on a case of Stone IPA, and even if they were, somehow, because of a quick and dramatic price shift, it’s not exactly going to ruin their credit.

Craft beer lives in its own economic world, only tangentially affecting similar goods like spirits and wine. And that world won’t just pop and go away. But it might crash.

I see the current trend as the peak of a tsunami. It’s headed to shore and picking up momentum as smaller waves join with the larger mass. There are hundreds of surfers riding the top, some little dudes on boogie boards cruising the bottom, some people in boats bracing for impact as the wave slides closer and closer to the sandy beaches.

The wave can’t stay at its peak forever. Eventually, because of gravity and the change in depth, the wave will topple and crash, taking all those surfers and boogie boarders and hapless swimmers with it. Some brewing great beer now may wash up uninjured. Others may be knocking the water out of their ears for weeks as they realize that their microbrewery was just a really expensive hobby. They’ll all be tumbled around in the violent surf. It’ll be impossible to know who survived until the tide pulls the water back out.

As a side effect, the people who were just chilling on the beach will get wet. This flood may bring in a whole new demographic of craft beer drinkers; those who hadn’t even seen the wave coming from the safety of their folding chairs and umbrellas, but now realize that getting wet isn’t such a bad thing. Some of them may even like it.

But when the wave does subside, the water will remain. The little waves who made up the big wave may be gone, or may have joined with other waves as the currents pull them back out to sea to repeat the cycle. Some of the infrastructure on the land might be damaged or destroyed, but overall, everything will be OK. The breweries with the foresight to plan ahead, buy boats, and invest in flood insurance shouldn’t even feel the effects of the crash.

The community may lose some of the variation, but we’ll probably see a tightening and refining of current styles. We may not have 100+ beers from every state, but we might have breweries starting to hyper focus, building their dynasties on the back of a particular style that is of world-class quality.

The net result: less beer but better beer.

The wave may crash, and it may crash soon. It won’t be a sudden thing where you wake up one morning to find out that Congress couldn’t get its shit together and now you have no work to do, it’ll be subtle and drawn out, in a series of openings and closing you may not even hear about. Don’t fear it though, as it probably won’t mean the end of your favorite beer if they’re already brewing right now.

But you may get wet. Don’t forget your towel.

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