9/11/10 Microbrews: Not always better

After dinner we met up with some friends at a local microbrew pub called “Beer City Bar”.  Space wasn’t too thrilled with the location since it was everything he despised and the beer didn’t make up for it.  The beer came in four different styles: dark, light, lighter and green.  The latter was brewed with some type of sea kelp.  Oddly enough, the three that I tried tasted exactly the same: in a word…horrible.  “Fuck! It’s just beer.” I thought to myself.  “How can you screw it up so badly?”

High expectations before I tried it

The beer tasted like chlorophyll gum and all three of them had what the French would describe as a “bouquet de merde”.  I closed my eyes and dreamed of a band of angry Belgians (Do Belgians get angry?) storming into the place and turning shit upside down leaving with the parting threat of “don’t ever try this again unless you figure out how to do it right!”  Space, as my go-to history guy, confirms that on the whole Belgians have not historically been prone to anger; except for King Leopold who would have fucked up beer city bar like he fucked up the Congo.

Seriously, I would have rather consumed a Molson stock Ale that had been left out in the sun for a week.  But the horror didn’t end there and the “Philosophy of Yes” turned on me.  “Do you want to be in a drinking contest?” Asked Space.

“What kind of drinking contest: speed or endurance?” I replied

Space repeated the question.  “Do you want to be in a drinking contest?”  He knew that I was powerless to respond in the negative.  The “Philosophy” had me in its grip.  Mercifully, it was a speed contest; I don’t think I could have handled endurance with the lingering light headedness that I was still feeling from He Huan.

The ladies' contest

Lois, please note the use of glasses thus rendering this a high class event

So there I sat, woefully unprepared and beyond my prime chugging days (I’d actually never had any) with a group of guys who had clearly done this before.  Punishment for the loser was singing in the street in front of the bar, so at the very worst I would lose my pride, get a free beer (which in this case was worth exactly what I paid for it) and sing in the street (something I do anyways).

They handed out straws to even the playing field and deliver the “poison” more directly.  The race was on and didn’t last long, but more importantly, I didn’t lose.  Even more important than that is I didn’t barf.  There were two explanations for my poor performance:

1.      I still felt like I had a piece of glass in my throat.  I hadn’t sought medical attention because it hadn’t killed me yet and I was on vacation so there was no time to waste with hospitals.

2.      We drank beer out of a glass which meant that I couldn’t put a “flow divot” in the can.  The divot is a concept introduced to me by another university friend named Hubcaps, Hubs for short.  He has insisted for years that by making a precisely placed dent near the mouth of a beer can, both the flow rate and taste of the beer are dramatically improved.  He claims the impact of this technique has been proven by fluid dynamicists at MIT but I have yet to find their conclusions published in any reputable peer reviewed journal.

At the table with the pros

 

The guys told me that with a few tweaks to my technique and better straw placement, I too could be a beer glutton.  Oh, to have aspirations!