January 16, 2012
Maybe I should have taken a picture of Yu Yu yesterday when we stopped in to check out this crazy Asian market here in Lexington. Even though crazy Asian markets are hardly a novelty, I feel some regret for not taking a picture the day before I decided to write about the place. After all, I can’t find a picture on Google Images. Even without photograph, I did, however, my social media thing and wrote a review (number 3 for Yu Yu) on Yelp:
Everything I look for in an Asian grocery. Surly owner. Rows of stacked products that I have no idea where to begin. Fish sauce from Vietnam with shrimp in the jar. Fish sauce from Vietnam in a very unpleasant grey color. Tons of dried fish, even in the salty snack section. Meat and fish sitting in boxes in questionable conditions (on this trip, I saw some liver sitting in a box). Boxes of Chinese eggs (in a box!). Freezer after unmarked freezer of who knows how long it’s been frozen fish with names identifiable only in Chinese. If there is durian in there, frozen as well, I didn’t find it on my first trip. Still, a very exciting place to shop at. With so much stuff, I’m sure some is past its prime (as the other two reviewers note).
We already tossed into the garbage the fried tofu we bought. Some things, indeed, were past their prime. Much in the realm of Calvin Trillin’s Register of Frustration and Deprivation, my wife is on an endless search for a pre-fried tofu she is – from somewhere – familiar with and wants again. Apparently, at some point, she had tofu with a certain texture that she insists can only be found in the packages of pre-fried tofu. I, of course, have never heard of such a thing, and I am doubtful that anything fried should be put into a package and sold days or weeks later. But I also have not heard of many things, so I followed along on this adventure. This one package of pre-fried tofu, after opened, did not offer encouraging taste. And we are in no mood for another bout of food poisoning. Of course, I have no idea why we or anyone would buy already fried tofu. I have a cast iron pan. I have oil. I fry tofu all the time. We did get some good initial use of the shrimp sauce we bought, though.
Still, Yu Yu is the kind of crazy ass store I like. I had a not so crazy idea the other day to take leftover roasted chicken and potatoes and make two pizzas out of them. I now consider myself an expert at roasted chicken. I agree with Heston Blumenthal that roasted chicken is the ultimate comfort food to master. You need a brined chicken and about 70 minutes at 450. In other words, it is an easy thing to become expert at, unlike, let’s say, plumbing. I also put a considerable amount of butter under the skin. Butter is my version of bacon. The leftover chicken laid over a garlic cream sauce, and the leftover chicken fat soaked potatoes (potatoes roasted in the same pan as the chicken) placed with anchovy and roasted garlic made for two tasty pizzas. Crazy.
No doubt, at one time, aging beer in whiskey or bourbon barrels sounded crazy. “You are going to do what to those barrels?” Now, it’s the norm. At some point, every beer will be barrel aged for 15 minutes. For some people, $6.50 for a 22 ounce bottle of high quality IPA still sounds crazy. For others, like me, Mongo IPA at $6.50 is a price I will pay anytime. What we think is crazy – like a market or a style – easily becomes the norm. On a personal level. On an institutional level. On a political level. Today’s crazy is tomorrow’s sitcom.
No doubt, to some, it seems crazy to situate a brewpub in the middle of nowhere Vermont. Yet, somehow, people like me end up with the beer if we are lucky. What felt crazy (“I’ll never get that”) now seems fairly normal. Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” offers the typical response to crazy: Who do you think you are? While Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” offers only the sappy “I’m crazy for loving you.” I felt that way, by the way, after finishing five of these Hill Farmsteads. The sixth is still not opened. I may even have muttered “I love you” while finishing the first five off. I was talking to the beer.
I typically feel crazy for the amount of money I spend on beer. I’m trying. I’m really trying. People might groan about $6.50 22 ounce bombers, but I’m usually in it for a lot more than $6.50 on a single purchase or trade. Let’s not forget: I have two kids in daycare, a mortgage, and debt. I’m not a fancy professor for nothing. But such is obsession. What seems crazy in one context (beer) is passion in another. We understand that idea more easily when we discuss politics or sports. Beverages don’t always earn such a register. If I met someone has obsessed with Cocoa-Cola as I am with beer, I’d say, “That guy is crazy.”
Still, I should have taken a picture. No problem since I live here and can always go back for some Japanese salty snacks or some form of fermented fish sauce. Now, if only Yu Yu offered craft beer in the same way it offered dried fish or unmarked frozen meats. If only. We’d really be in business.
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January 3, 2012
I originally sent this to All About Beer last summer for the magazine’s It’s My Round column. I never heard back. So I’ll post it here:
Travels With Daughters
In the tradition of storytelling, there is always a place for telling father daughter stories. These stories might be captured as memories one turns to for comfort, as Paul Simon advises his daughter in the opening verse of “Father and Daughter.” These stories might be told as the moment the relationship is challenged by life transitions, such as Jonathan Raban’s essay, “The Last Father Daughter Road Trip,” which describes taking his child to college. Or we might consider the like- minded tale of Spencer Davis and Steve Martin giving away their daughters in Father of the Bride. Indeed, such stories often revolve around saying good-bye. A daughter moves away to attend college, a daughter gets married, the father is sad. I, on the other hand, think of my relationship with my four year old daughter as one where we are together daily, as nowhere near a parting moment, as joyful, and as partly focused on craft beer.
Famous beer narratives typically do not include children. Pete Brown, Brian Yeager, and even pioneer beer writer Jack Erickson never mention children in their tales of sailing around the world with a keg of IPA, locating the ideal beer bars in America, or discovering beer nationally. When writers do tell family stories, they tell stories of their fathers offering that first beer: while working in the yard, at a ball game, or sitting in front of the television. This, too, is how I was introduced to beer. This is how we often introduce our children to beer. I have introduced my daughter to beer, however, not by giving her a beer to drink (I haven’t; she’s only four), but by sharing a part of my life with her that circulates around my obsession with craft beer. When we travel, we make arrangements to visit a brewpub or brewery. When we take day outings to Cincinnati or Louisville from our home in Lexington (and to St. Louis when we lived in Missouri), we start with a kid activity, have lunch, and do something related to beer (visit a brewpub, go beer shopping). Beer has provided us with a social bond that her princesses or my life as an academic cannot. While beer stories or travel narratives may involve canonical ideas like “the first time” one tried a particular style or a pilgrimage to a famous brewpub or brewery, they don’t yet explore parents bonding with their children over lambics, IPAs, and saisons.
Craft beer, in the last few years, has come to exemplify the family outing, so we shouldn’t be surprised by new stories of fathers and daughters bonding over the craft experience. Brewpubs often have balloons or crayons for our kids when we visit. Even some bars, such as Petaluma Taps in Petaluma, California, have kids’ menus. I remember my daughter ordering kids’ chicken fingers at Falling Rock in Denver. I remember the hostess at Great Dane in Madison handing her a pink balloon. Memories like these are the basis of a new type of story we might start telling about craft beer hunters (like me) and our children. These stories won’t be as grandiose as a “pretext to gain a view of America through the prism of a beer glass,” as Ken Wells writes in Travels with Barley. Instead, the stories may offer us insight into why become excited over something mundane like eating a meal or having a drink and why such excitement means even more to us when our children share the experience as well, even if that sharing is merely being there for the hour or two spent in obsessive pleasure.
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about how I might tell one father daughter story about beer. Since my daughter was born, she has known craft beer. Her first brewpub visit was at two weeks old in State College, Pennsylvania when I convinced my recovering wife that we could finally go out again and have lunch at Otto’s. From there my daughter visited brewpubs as we made our move from Pennsylvania back to Detroit where I, then, lived (Royal Oak Brewery) and on to Missouri (Flat Branch) where we lived for four years. In between, she has played outside of Avery, had lunch at Russian River, ordered ice cream at Bear Republic, taken the tour at New Glarus, sought shelter from a stifling heat at Free State, shared a sandwich at Three Floyds, toured New Belgium, enjoyed dinner at Revolution, and recently watched her nine month old brother knock over an IPA at Lexington Avenue Brewers in Asheville. And there have been many other visits. And there will be more to come.
Our familial stories of traveling are also stories of craft beer. And that is the story I hope to write more completely one day so that I might better understand how an object (beer) helps shape a relationship. We might think that the prototypical father daughter story has long been one of departure (the child goes to college, gets married) because daddy’s little girl has to stop, one day, being daddy’s little girl. The craft beer father daughter story, however, does not have to be a lament or a moment of mourning. In can be a story about the metaphoric travels we make as parents with children and how our travels often involve the need to bond over shared pleasures or experiences. Friends bond over a pint. A father and daughter bond over an experience. True, it’s my experience since I’m the one drinking the beer (for now). I like to think, however, that the modern brewpub offers a chance for a more meaningful story to tell about families than a homogenized trip to Disney World or some other theme park. I like to think that we are telling a unique story about ourselves, our passions, and our time exploring the uniqueness of an idea called craft.
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December 26, 2011
As an academic, my time between December 19 (when grades are due) and January 11 (when classes start again) should be spent catching up on reading, planning for next semester, working on upcoming conference papers, working on my next book, and other related items. Instead, my time is mostly spent trying to catch up on drinking the big ABV beers in my cellar. These are the beers I’ve bought or traded for throughout the year (or even the previous year), and that I have yet to drink because they are too big for summer (though I have done the Inappropriate for the Weather Big Beer Day when we lived in Columbia). Every year I promise myself – around Thanksgiving – that I will get to those barleywines and imperial stouts during the break. And each year, that promise fails. Take tonight for instance: my promise buckles as I open this bottle of Love Buzz, neither a big beer nor one I’ve had for long. It was, however, in the fridge and ready to go.
Or take these beers, opened during our recent North Carolina trip. Nothing old and only a few big. Even the big beers were new. I broke my promise here as well.
I did manage to get one in before the trip. This Terrapin, though, was hardly the oldest of the bunch. I bought it on my last trip to North Carolina. That makes it a rookie among the big beers. Many were passed over as I reached for this one. I panicked. I thought it was ready for the winter promise. It could have hung around a bit longer.
And here are more documented failures. Does that make me a beer liar? Have I broken my own oath to get to these beers? If there is such a thing as beer lying (and in my case, there obviously is), it is marked by over-excitement, novelty, rushing to the new beers and forgetting the old ones. New trading boxes. Travels. Visits. These are moments that enable the beer liar. You could, of course, also call beer lying laziness. Big beers demand attention and time. 12 percent and above should not be done in a short period of time. I, on the other hand, am known for my work ethic, my attention to detail, my ability to plan and be organized. I am not lazy. I’m simply a beer liar. I’ve made these promises, and I can’t keep them. I’m going to try and do better. I’m gong to use January 1st to make a resolution. I still have some time left before classes begin again (though some of that time will be spent in Seattle). There are plenty of bowl games ongoing and up and coming. The NBA is back on TV. I do not need to let myself down this time.
But just so we are clear. If a bottle of Angel’s Share still remains, if an East End Gratitude goes unconsumed, if some of those Danish barleywines are still around, if I still have Abyss left, if all my KBS remains, if my Firestone Walker collection is standing (though I still need 15!), if my Hair of the Dogs are not open, I will say this: I promise to get to them next winter break. I really do. I’m not lying.
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December 20, 2011
This year, the first night of Hanukkah coincides with my 42nd birthday. While that overlap should not have any real significance other than the coincidental overlap of one calendar that moves and one that remains in place, I decided to use the occasion to open my last bottle of Duck Duck Gooze. Thus, the juxtaposition gets more complicated as the Lost Abbey’s cross interferes with our religion’s memory of rebellion. The two images don’t really belong together. But I’m fine with their overlap. That feeling is a rare one: disparate images come together in a positive way.
With rarity, you wait. You might consider rebelling against the two impulses: save, drink right away. Eventually, you have to drink the beer. That’s why it was brewed. The first bottle I opened in September 2009. The second in December 2011. At some point, rarity is not worth waiting for anymore, and you find a reason to celebrate: child’s birth, wedding, book is published, anniversary, birthday. Turning 42 might be such an excuse.
Two years passed between the opening of the first bottle and this one. I seldom think about one beer or one moment of enjoyment in a blog post. Instead, a post turns into a reflection about something other than drinking a beer. So disparate pairing is, indeed, not that rare for my writing. Most times in craft beer discourse online, a beer such as Duck Duck Gooze is treated as a major celebration: hyperbolic review, the big trade that landed it, the big beer tasting where twenty people huddled around the bottle, the boisterous photo posted for all to admire. Even though I’ve participated in such discourse in the past, for right now, I’d rather frame today’s excuse with subtle moments that have far more value and that happened today, the day of turning 42: my daughter being the first to wish me a happy birthday this morning at six a.m., my son taking a nap on me today while I lounged around, my wife making me tacos and a cheese cake for dinner. Little moments cause celebration. The beer frames those moments.
Any beer, of course, could frame such moments. I – or somebody else – merely attributes qualities to this lovely, sour gueze like beer that we believe other items of consumption don’t have as well. What makes drinking such a beer special is not waiting in line for it, belonging to an expensive club to get it, or some other hyped gesture we’ve come to associate with so called rare beers. Instead, there is a combination of taste (let’s face it; it tastes fantastic), the need to have special items exist among what we consume, and the moments we want to think of as special. Consumption is often used to appreciate a moment. We buy school photos of our kids. We buy tickets to events. We buy various things to enjoy other things. Consumption is a metaphoric experience.
Then why sour? Because I’m sour, of course, But also because the complexity of a sour beer helps me (and it only needs to help me and no one else) frame moments I’ve enjoyed and appreciate no matter how banal they might sound. We frame moments such as photographs (and place the images on our walls), rings (graduation or other notable experiences), diplomas (also framed). Why not beer as well? Because the framing is fleeting. When the bottle is finished, so is the framing (the photos remain framed for as long as we want; the beer is consumed in a matter of hours). Then again, when the bottle is finished, we have another excuse to frame the moments anew, with a new bottle, a new pleasure, a new rarity we’ve saved for such a moment.
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December 19, 2011
I’m a curmudgeon. I pride myself on being a curmudgeon. Others are Potable Curmudgeons. But unlike some online writers, like Ding, I’m not a beer curmudgeon. I respect the beer curmudgeon’s knowledge of beer (and you can find such curmudgeons exactly where you can find my own curmudgeon persona – online in various social media spaces). And I want my own curmudgeon knowledge on various things to be respected. But I also find craft beer to be quickly finding itself in a situation all movements that gather momentum after some hiatus or lack of acceptance do: now that things are good, let’s complain about why they are too good. Typically, these complaints come very quickly after some perception of mainstream acceptance is felt: blogging is dead, the Web has too much information, too many people are writing, etc. Take Ding’s number 6 complaint about the supposed myth regarding craft beer:
6. More is always better (number of breweries and number of beers).
The level of growth in the craft industry in the US is simply unsustainable. It’s flooding the market with mediocre and poor beer and shelf space is at a premium more than ever. It also has the effect of leaving old beer on shelves for extended periods of time. A popular fallacy in the US is that this will be a good thing because ‘the market will decide’, and the poorer breweries will be driven out, making the landscape stronger. In reality, good beer is actually losing shelf space to ‘trendy’ beer, and brewers that are making ‘better’ beer are suffering. With close to 900 breweries in planning stages in the US, there’s a really precarious situation brewing, and a bubble about to burst. I think we’re already in a saturated market for GOOD beer.
There is no reason why a country of 300 million consumers cannot support over 2,000 regional breweries and brewpubs. The bubble hasn’t burst. It hasn’t even been formed yet. Where I live, two breweries are NOW opening in town shortly. Just now. This market is nowhere near saturation. When we speak of a craft beer market, we speak of 5% of total sales. 95% of all beer drinkers do not buy craft beer. There are many reasons why – access is one. Knowledge is another. What beers sitting on a shelf often mean – other than market saturation – is consumer knowledge. Consumers don’t yet know what it is that is on the shelf. I know. Ding knows. Others who share our love of craft beer know. But most people don’t know. The other issue is consumption ideology. Many people are prepared to pay $20 for a bottle of wine for the evening and not $20 for a bottle of beer. In some stores, the $20 bottle of beer may sit. The consumer has not yet been ideologically prepared for a $20 bottle of beer purchase. Advertising creates that preparation (but most craft breweries don’t advertise). Sales help does as well. Word of mouth. Restaurants carrying such beers. All of this contributes to a network of meaning that eventually allows a consumer to not think twice about spending as much on beer as he/she might spend on wine or some other bottle of alcohol. A 750 ml bottle of Angel’s Envy bourbon, for instance, costs $45. A 750 ml bottle of Nebraska Brewing Company’s Melange a Trois costs $20. Different drinking experiences, of course. But also, far different costs. Bourbon has an older market and ideological influence on consumption than craft beer does.
Accusations of saturation come from those who know what is or is not on the shelf. For those who know, the market can feel saturated in certain cities. We – the hardcore craft drinkers – are not the main market for craft beer. We can only buy so much, and frankly, we are finicky and want constant change in selection. The average six pack here/six pack there drinker is the focus of retail sales. My neighbor. My father. My colleague at work. They are the market. I’m not ready yet to be a curmudgeon on craft beer availability. Even on those issues that bother me as well – such as the hyperbolic, insane limited releases that drive people to bizarre behaviors – I can’t be a curmudgeon. I enjoy beer too much to settle into such attitudes.
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December 12, 2011
Bacon is the foodie’s ketchup. Chefs: Get over bacon. You are hiding the food and your abilities when you drown everything in bacon Fat and salt. It’s no secret that these are the basis of salivation. Can’t chefs move beyond bacon finally; do they have to succumb to the basic of taste? Does every menu need every dish drenched in it? Even
Top Chef’ and its crew of celebrity want to bes gets it wrong. You don’t always need bacon.
Drenching everything in fat and salt is the McDonald’s strategy. I went to a local
restaurant the other day and three out of four specials were drenched in bacon. The cliche may be “bacon makes everything better,” but what it really means is that the chef is uninspired or doesn’t know much about cooking. Brown bits fried up and poured over food do not make a great dish.
It’s a fine line between something subtle that enhances flavor and something that shows little understanding of flavor. Let me talk about two browns as example. The first, a Double Nut Brown from Kuhnhenn (not pictured…but it did show up via trade in an Atwater growler) and the second, a Cuban Style Espresso from Cigar City. These are two brown ales. The Kuhnhenn, surprisingly, uninspired. The Cigar City shined. This is what Cigar City does best: It takes the basis of a dish (the brown ale) and makes it shine through subtle additions or the suggestion of additions: coffee, sugar, syrup. oatmeal cookie. Cigar City suggests flavor through the brown ale. Bacon doesn’t suggest. It overpowers.
Two things can be the same yet so different. Kuhnhenn and Cigar City are amazing breweries. But brown, that basic color, that base of other flavors and styles, that simple tone that can quickly turn complex, is difficult to master. To master brown, you have to suggest another flavor. Michael Ruhlman, in Soul of a Chef, documents the mastery of the brown sauce. He documents how hard brown is to achieve. Flour. Fat. It becomes brown when treated correctly. We can say that there exists, too, a mastery of the brown beer. Its enhancement is not something as simple as bacon, however, because it is not based on the desire for fat. Its mastery goes beyond something added to the wort. It is the mastery of suggestion. You are eating an oatmeal raisin cookie. No you are not. You are drinking a beer.
Not that I drink a lot of brown beer. But I’ve come to understand Cigar City as the master of brown. “What can brown do for you?” UPS has asked. So much. In this case, those flavors – from a barrel or somewhere else – don’t act like bacon. They are not additives that hide the brown. They take the brown to another level. A barrel, too, can be like bacon. No doubt. But a barrel – when ti doesn’t drown a beer in oak or bourbon – also suggests. It suggests a presence that really isn’t there except in the existence of suggested flavor.
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December 4, 2011
Release events continue to frustrate. People wait. People wait and get less than they wanted or get nothing at all. How can releases not frustrate? Limited production. Lots of hype. Tons of demand. People willing to wait in line all night long (memories of concert tickets when I was a kid). People willing to pay inflated prices when the bottles show up on eBay. We’re victims of our own pleasure. The release day is another kind of release: all that energy, all that excitement, all that thrill. It must be released. You can’t keep it bottled in forever. So you stand in line in the hope of spending a ton of money on a little bit of beer.
Let’s not get to psychoanalytical here. Everyone needs some kind of release. No harm in admitting so. No need to draw innuendos or wink wink say no mores comparing bottle release to that other kind of release. We all have moments of release. Look at all the photos at the end of this post! I needed a release from all these photos. Thus, I blog again. I had photo backup.
I’ve only attended one release event: Dark Lord. And I did that twice. That’s enough for me. If I were driving by a brewery at four a.m., and if I were to happen upon a release, I might park my car and wait in line. And then I’d hope I didn’t have to go to the bathroom and lose my place in line. I’d also hope people kept their distance and didn’t throw up anywhere near me. I’d also hope that if I could use a bathroom, it wouldn’t already be destroyed by someone who didn’t go before they left home or who happened to be driving by at four a.m and stopped to wait in line and didn’t know he should have gone before leaving home because a long line would be in his future.
Other than that chance of coming across a limited release in a town where the two breweries about to open still haven’t opened, I’ll stay home, miss out, or hope someone will trade with me. The recent Pelican Mother of All Storms release was my kind of release: It was a wait all day on the phone release. I’d rather wait on the phone or keep dialing over and over (100 times) to get my limited release than wait in line from four a.m. and still not get beer. If I’m going to be a nerd about all of this (and let’s be honest, I am), I’d rather be a nerd in the comfort of my own home. This is why we have technology like phones: so we can stay at home. Let me order online any day.
I’m still waiting for someone to release me from my big want of Hill Farmstead. If anyone is reading in Vermont, set me up and I’ll send great things your way. Recently, I thought I had two different opportunities to finally be released, but neither came through. I still have a Hill Farmstead pent up feeling inside. It needs a release. Come on. You can do it. Release me.
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November 22, 2011
Speed, media and critical theorist Paul Virilio told us, is the focal point of technology. We live in an age defined by speed. Information moves quickly. Deliverance, as we learned, is the reaction against speed: leave technology behind. The result, as the movie also tells us, is disaster. As Beernews reports, speed was the focal point of the recent The Bruery sale of its membership club.
It only took about nine hours for The Bruery Reserve Society memberships to sell out yesterday. At $295 a pop x 1,000 memberships, that is $295,000 in cash for the little brewery from Placentia.
Speed has been the focal point of Three Floyds ticket sales to Dark Lord Day and its Fifteenth anniversary party. Lost Abbey, too, has experienced the effect of speed. In the beer world, “special release event” has become synonymous with “speed.” Nothing moves faster than the speed of light than beer nerds rushing to buy a one time release. Speed, as well, is experienced at the individual level. A tweet. A blog update. A message board post. We read such ideas and feel the effect of speed: suddenly, we rush to the store or bar to purchase that rare moment of consumption.
Bureaucracy could learn about speed from craft beer. To get new car tags in Kentucky, for instance, I have to show my sales tax receipt from Missouri (which, of course, I cannot find). On the titles to our cars, it reads “paid” under sales tax. Still, I need the receipt. To get the receipt, I need a Missouri form from the Department of Revenue notarized. Then I have to mail that in and pay $12. Of course, this would all be easier with the speed of a device called “the computer.” In the age of the database, we would think one agency could access records from another agency quickly. Databases generate speed of access. We would think that. We would think that speed, in fact, matters. Not for the government.
I felt speed when I moved quickly to acquire The Stoic a few months back. Then I felt slowness as I did not rush to open it until now. I feel speed now as I scan sites that will allow me to buy six bottles of The Abyss. I feel slowness when my attention is turned elsewhere (a turkey brining, a baby who won’t go to sleep, revision requests regarding articles I’ve written, and so on). Then speed takes over again: Did such and such store get any in their online store? I rush to the websites to find out.
Last Friday, I drove through a speed trap on New Circle road, a highway that runs in a – you guessed it – circle around the southern part of Lexington. The highway is meant to speed up travel (it often doesn’t since it runs in a circle). The speed trap, of course, is the wrong approach to speed. You cannot trap it. You can stop that car. You can issue a ticket whose penalty goes to pay for some unknown police department expense. But no one can trap speed. Speed continues on, ticket or no ticket.
I would like to trap Thanksgiving, but I cannot. I would like to trap it and not let it out so that I do not feel the speed of grocery shopping, planning, preparing, cooking, dealing with relatives, etc. when my attention is focused more on the Lions and my ability to purchase six bottles of The Abyss this year. “Speed kills,” an anti-drug message once told us. Not really. It rushes us. Exhilarates us. Thrills us. It makes us be us.
Some beer bloggers blog everyday. They are quick with their ideas and reviews. I blog slowly. Once, at my other blog, I blogged everyday as well. Now, while my ideas, desires, impulses, beer needs are based on speed, my writing in the public space slows.
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November 13, 2011
Lexington is a great place to live, but even in great places to live you sometimes need to get away for the day. Today, we took a needed day trip to Louisville to lunch at Garage Bar and to see if Louisville Beer Store got any of the last two Anchorage beers. I was surprised a month or so ago to find the Wit there and wanted to find the next two offerings. No on the Anchorage (though I still managed to take home a few things), and yes on the pizza at Garage Bar.
Yes and no. Two simple ways of viewing the world. Yes on pizza and lunch in a city 70 miles away. No to the Kentucky law that says you can’t have a beer until 1pm. I tried to say yes this evening to watching The Shining while I write this blog post. My wife said no.
Today, I see that the grocery store chain we shopped at when we lived in Columbia, Missouri is now getting Fantome. Fantome! I want to write “Bastard” on the Facebook page for the Columbia beer group. They are complaining about a late arrival of Celebration even though they can buy Fantome in the same place they buy their eggs? Where else does a grocery store stock Fantome and Cantillon? Our grocery store chain stocks Budweiser. Thus, we shop at the co-op. There is nothing scarier than only having Budweiser as your option if you make a mistake and go to Kroger. The co-op sells Three Floyds. We are not scared to shop there. Yes and no. Our world is one of binaries.
Yes to this, no to that. It is easy enough to provide a list of likes and dislikes. With food, our likes and dislikes dominate most of our experiences. I asked my daughter today what she thought of our lunch. “It was good,” she said. She didn’t say her usual, “I liked the walls.” The walls typically are the measuring stick of her likes when we dine. I can say that the walls at Garage Bar are peeling away. The cracks in white paint make the hipster theme of dining in a garage a bit trendy and cliche at the same time. Yes to some good food. No to the overdone hipster nostalgia.
Yes to this, no to that. It is too easy for me to say yes to not taking a day trip somewhere. I am a homebody. Today is Sunday which means there was football on TV. Yes to that. No to getting to some work I need to do. But sometimes, you say yes to an hour trip for a pizza and a little shopping, and you say no to your inner beast who would rather keep you back.
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November 6, 2011
Hype. What better exemplifies hype in the craft beer world that the one time release? Dark Lord. Black Tuesday. CBS. With CBS, I don’t need to retell the recent story of hoarding, overpricing, limited quantities, etc. These are the details of a larger narrative we know by now. As much as we dislike this story (notice the post release reactions), we keep listening and participating in its telling (notice reactions to the recent Darkness Day). We don’t abandon the story the way we might abandon a bad TV show (such as the unwatchable recent season of The Office). We make this hype story happen again and again, beer season after beer season. We are its characters. Whatever our response to hype is, we’ve told its story with our emotions and actions.
This hyped story, though, does not compare to being on the University of Kentucky JumboTron. Being on the field brings none of the excitement of rushing to the beer store at a certain moment to get the beer before anybody else does. Being on the field does not provide the rush in your gut of waiting in line for hours for the chance to buy a few bottles. Still, it is a hyped moment (“I’m on the field!”) even if it is delivered in a more subtle manner. If you look closely at the image, you’ll see me, the short guy in the middle, being recognized for my participation in Wired. I’m standing on the opposite side of the field, trying to use my phone’s limited camera ability to photograph my image on the screen.
A rare beer. A rare moment. These are both hyped experiences tha\t settle differently with me. I opened the CBS the evening of the day I got to go down to the field. The beer and field experiences are both big screen moments. Waking up at 5 am this morning and writing this post amid the early morning darkness because my kids don’t realize it’s now 5 am is a small screen moment. Our interests in hype fluctuate between big and small screen moments. As much as we make certain beers into big screen moments, and as good as such beers may be, they eventually settle into small screen status when the bottle is empty. The big screen can’t be big screen forever. As Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” I remain big, my tastes remain big. The beer, the JumboTron moment, the 5 am wake up remain small in a relatively short period of time.
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