Session #15

April 30, 2008

How did it all start for you?

At 15, working in the yard, my dad asks: Want a beer? Heineken. The green glass. The musty taste. Even if it isn’t good now, it felt good then. The thrill of drinking an import. It came from another country. What is more exotic than that idea: it came from elsewhere. When you are 15, elsewhere is where you would like to be.

At 16, underage drinking. Moosehead. Why Moosehead? In the words of Bluto, why not? Canadian (to a Miami kid, that seemed exotic). A moose on the bottle. You could buy a t-shirt, too, with the moose on it. All early drinking that is good is based on either being drunk or the exotic. We got drunk on Bud. I felt exotic with Moosehead. No one else knew what it was. No one but me. My earliest impressions of beer: this is something you don’t know about, but I do. That feeling will carry over until today.

In Gainesville, in grad school. a beer called Dead Guy. Rogue. It tasted better. It looked better. Was it better? There were few choices in Gainesville back then. We also had Tucher. Rogue won out. I no longer drink Rogue.

But are any of these the moments when it started? Was it the trip to The Map Room in Chicago when I tasted Duchess? Was it the homebrew club meeting in Micanopy CBD took me to? Was it when I moved to Michigan and tasted Bell’s? Was it when I entered the world of Belgian beer via Chimay? Is commonality my moment? Experiencing what everyone before me had experienced? “There’s a beer called Westmalle….Wow.” Yeah. We know. Did I follow in the footsteps, as the Buddhist saying goes?

Maybe there isn’t one moment when it started. This obsession has grown with me. It inches up on me. It slowly absorbs me. And all of this process has been going on for a long time now. Even last year, after we moved to Missouri, I discovered online shopping, and what was already a take over my life obsession got worse. West Coast beers. East Coast beers. What was not available is now available….for a price I usually am willing to pay. The year before we moved, I convinced my wife to take our honeymoon in Belgium. Was that the moment?

Every trip we take, I pack just enough to bring back bombers in the suitcase. When someone mentions a place they are from or have been to, I say: “Such and such beer is from there.” When someone tries to relate to me and speaks of a beer I find inadequate (like a friend of the family relating having Fat Tire on tap and how great that was), I keep my snooty mouth shut. There is no one moment. There are moments. And the moments continue as each year I learn and taste more.

A moment? Or many moments. Piles of moments. Gatherings of moments, as Bruno Latour might say. These moments continue here, in this space, on the Web, in this post, as words gather, and memories and thoughts and desires for that beer I still have not tried accumulate….

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