At least, a year's worth of beer columns. Figuring that I write them every month, and this is only the thirteenth column, I must have only been writing them for a year. Conveniently, I refuse to be convinced otherwise.
Within that year, I've tried to convey to my rabid audience a respect and love for the beverage known as beer. I've tried to teach my readers the history and the culture of beer. Why else would I have written such long-winded accounts of America's experiences with beer? Why else would I persist in pointing readers towards the reference section in what has proved a futile attempt to get them to buy books and educate themselves?
In my experience, there's only one thing that can make a beer more enjoyable than excessive hops, and that's knowing something about the beer. Even better than knowing something about the beer you're drinking, which functions only as a conversation starter, is knowing something about the beers other people are drinking, because that gives you fodder for insults. There's something sophomorically satisfying about seeing the big dumb football jock standing at the end of the bar drinking an Amstel Light, and knowing that it's a beer designed by a marketing team to appeal to women. There's something mind-numbingly fascinating about hearing the groups of Frat boys standing next to you talking about how wasted they're getting from drinking a beer as strong as Guinness, while you know that Guiness is really only slightly more than 3% alcohol, about the same as most of the American mega-labels.
Compared to knowing about your own beverage, tidbits like that are invaluable. Knowing the history of what you're drinking, or most other random beer trivia only serves to scare people, especially female people, away. Apparently when people ask what you're drinking they really just want to know what you're drinking. They don't want to know the history of how the IPA was designed to withstand long voyages to India. If they manage to sit through that, they really don't want to know that Carlsberg is from the company that first isolated yeast, and hence has it's name as part of the scientific name for lager yeasts. They don't care that there's about 12,000 bottles of Bass Ale on the ocean floor inside the Titanic. They really start edging away nervously when conversation drifts towards how Pasteurization was invented not so that boxes of milk could immortalize Louis Pasteur, but because Louis was trying to give the French a competitive edge against the Germans in the brewing industry.
Yet, all of these are things that I've wasted crucial brain cells remembering, so that I could impart them at inopportune times to Goats beer readers.
Over the year I've also made inroads at the Peculier Pub. Despite my attempts here to convince you that I drink a variety of beer, tasting them so I know what's good and what isn't, and testing them so I can impart my expert opinion to my readers, I don't. When I go to the Pub, I drink Weihenstephaner. Always. I thought I was drinking a fair amount of it when Tommy, the owner of the Peculier Pub, gave me a case of Weihenstephaner glasses. I thought that Jon and I were good customers when Tommy put the Goats URL on the menu, as a reference to find out more about the pub. I was pretty sure I was downing it appropriately when Tommy put it on tap for me. I realized things had finally gone too far, when I was sitting at the pub on a Wednesday, and met the New York distributor for Weihenstephaner. Meeting him was nice, but not too momentous until he mentioned to Tommy that the Pub was the best Weihenstephaner customer in the state. Drinking a beer often enough to keep it on tap in a bar is nice. Drinking enough of that beer to make that bar the best customer of that beer in an entire state, is almost horrifying. To numb the pain, I had another one.
I also got the business card of the distributor. I figured I may be able to skip the middleman that way.
If I had a point in mind when I started this, it was to reflect on all that's happened over the past year, and to impart the lessons learned during that time.
Reading over what's here so far, though, all I can come up with is this: If you drink too much Weihenstephaner in a bar, don't talk to strangers about trivia.
I can only hope that that will mean more to someone else than it does to me.
I'll be surprised to get mail.
-- phillip karlsson, brew guru
april 01, 1999