Here’s the thing, I am a beer fan, perhaps a beer aficionado. Perhaps, by some counts, I am a beer snob. I guess I am a lazy beer snob. This is nothing against beer, but a deeply consistent desire to have anything involving ingestion remain at its core a hobby. I am not the kind of person that can’t just do something without turning it into work or a project or something like that. So, I am trying really hard to not turn beer into work. (Technically, cigars were work before they were a hobby, but that was all so very long ago.)
Anyway, here I am making beer a project. I don’t really count my Untappd account as work, because I do everything I can to make it not work. Plus, that’s very limited in the amount of words I can use, so that makes it very breezy as far as projects go. Hell, why write another novel when I can just type up several thousand beer reviews?
More to the point, I was at a writer friend’s wedding reception this last weekend, and as the immutable laws of physics would have it, I wound up in the back corner of the room with another writer (and publisher) counting the people at the party we knew. We didn’t need two hands, and I only needed one. I digress. This other writer, he held his beer aloft and announced, “I got the MGD and I am enjoying it. It is very easy to drink.”
“You didn’t get the Lonely Blonde?” the other person I knew asked.
“No,” he said. “I wanted to try something different, and I have to say I am enjoying this. It is very light, easy to drink and it’s not, I don’t know, trying too hard.”
My righteous indignation and lazy beer snob fury may have been showing. Maybe my own glass of Lonely Blonde was shaking in quivering hand. He noticed.
“I know, I know,” he said. “I’ll still go to Surly with you guys, but right now this is the perfect beer.”
This other person I knew at the reception is a wise fellow, a talented wordsmith, with many global experiences under his belt. I had no choice but to listen and consider his judgment. I myself can confess that my travels have brought me to places wherein the bottle of MGD was a blessing to behold amidst the other beverage choices. Let us not forget the very accurate accounts many trustworthy explorers have told of the strange tastes of the Emerald Isle and how an endless supply of Guinness has driven stout Irish drinkers into the arms of Budweiser. Perhaps there are times when you want your beer to be in the background, to provide a slight buzz and a slight fizz and nothing more.
For awhile, Hamms was my camping beer of choice, so maybe that was something like what The Other Person I Knew was talking about. I mean when you are a city kid out in the woods, there is a lot to pay attention to and having your beer be a distraction just doesn’t work. Besides, nobody really wants to sit around the campfire and listen to stories about hops. Really, they don’t. (Except for you Mr. About to Comment on My Post, your friends all LOVE to hear you run down the cold hard facts of hops.)
As for myself, I was drinking the Lonely Blonde, and when we drove the hosted bar out of business, I went straight for the Fat Tire. It was about that time that I got to talk about the new Reptilian book I have in the works. I can’t help but wonder if it was the return of a full-flavored beer that lifted my discourse.
See, no matter what, beer is magic!
