Beer: A Love Story

Back when our parents were warning us about the evil reefer, it was common for us to accuse them of hypocrisy because they drank martinis. They countered that it wasn't the same thing. They said they just enjoyed their martinis, and it wasn't like a drug at all.

I didn't do any accusing, personally. My parents didn't have martinis. Or the occasional glass of wine. Or anything else, except once a year when they'd uncap the fusty old bottle of cheap Taylor sherry and have themselves a little nip. When it came to the proper acquisition of bad habits, my parents were horrible role models.

Nevertheless I soldiered on. I didn't like beer. Not until I went to live in London, where the beer was a whole lot better. That's where I made a study of it, and Guinness in particular. "Tall, dark, and have some," it said on the billboard, and I did. Oh, honey. It was gorgeous. It had a creamy head you could write your initials in and still see them at the bottom of the glass, in case you forgot who you were. Golden curls of goodness roiled and frolicked beneath the foam. Bubbles sidled along the glass like an ever-renewing fountain of yum. It was delicious. And most of all, it solved everything. It filled up all the tiny holes: all the pits and pocks of my muttering soul, all gone smooth again.

We dope-smoking hippies were right: the alcohol really was a drug.

I'm not complaining. This isn't an anti-alcohol screed. I think alcohol is a good thing, until it's not. Our parents (well, maybe your parents) drank to take the edge off. It works. It's good medicine. It gets to be a problem when there are too many edges, and it takes too much medicine to smooth them over. If your soul is shot through with little holes, no amount of alcoholic spackle can be enough. When I came back to America, I located a decent beer--Narragansett Porter--and began taking the edge off at ten in the morning. That would be what some people might have called a red flag, but some of us need more flags than others.

The other thing I came back with was a recurring happy dream. I'd get it once or twice a year. In my dream, I'd take a few steps down from the street into a London cellar pub and have a wonderful local brew and shoot darts with the locals. Then I'd come back into the sunshine (in my dream, London had sunshine), walk another few blocks, and step down into a different pub. And repeat. For thirty years this was my happy place dream.

Meanwhile, I concocted some of my own spackle and began to put my soul back together. I made it out of a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. A little music, a little truth, a little walk in the woods, more than a little time.

I haven't had that happy dream in years. I can walk out my door right now and partake of any of a hundred different local beers in a matter of a few blocks. I'm living the dream in the best beer town in the world. If your soul has a few pits and pocks in it, it will take the edges right off.

But if you don't have too many edges, it will just put a doily of joy under your big tumbler of life.

The Key To Hoppiness

I didn't even like beer until I lived in London. Then I liked the bejeezus out of it. It was purely a quality issue. As a post-adolescent with serious anxiety and maturity issues, I was perfectly willing to submit to an alcoholic oblivion. I just didn't care for beer. But in London, lovely people everywhere served up pints of medicinal Guinness, with a head of fine froth you could finger your initials into, and still read them when the head hit the bottom of the glass. The servers grew ever lovelier by the pint.

When I came back to the states I was horrified to discover that the beer here was every bit as hideous as I had remembered it. The worst of all came from a company with a large number of Clydesdales on staff and they probably produced the product personally. The rest wasn't much better. So I began to make my own beer.

When you make beer, not using an extract but with real grain and real hops, you get some interesting odors. Like that of many cheeses, it only smells good because you know what's coming. One of the steps in making beer is called "sparging the wort," and that was reason enough to do it right there--you could always tell people you needed to get home and sparge your wort. Generally they'd let that comment, and you, go without speculation.

I made several decent batches of beer and bottled them up, but soon after I'd gotten started in the venture, someone in town finally started making decent beer to sell. So I bought it. I put my pot, carboy and bottle-capper away. Then more people made more good beer. My little burg began to be known nationwide as "Beervana."

Which brings us to our annual beer festival here in downtown Portland. That's only six miles away, so we walked there. It seemed prudent. They sell you a little plastic mug and a bunch of tokens, each token good for a "taste"--four would get you the whole glass. We discovered early on that almost all the servers gave you a nice generous taste, certainly more than a quarter mug. Initially, that seemed like a good thing.

Periodically the whole frothing crowd would erupt in spontaneous whooing. All it took was one fellow with a good set of pipes to raise his mug and go "whoooo" and the whole crowd took it over. It was quite the demonstration of democracy in action, like a ballot initiative with everyone signing on. It was sort of inspiring and sort of frightening at the same time. Depending on my mood, it sounded like the song of a summer wind or the malignant battle cry of a sour Confederacy. I feel the same way about ballot initiatives.

Craft beer tends towards colorful names. I peered about the festival, finally focusing on a tap that said something like "Toad Suck Amber." The fact that that sounded pretty good to me should probably have set off an alarm. But by the first dozen "tastes" I had had about the equivalent of five particularly alcoholic beers, and had begun to tilt. Beer is a healthy, natural food, I reasoned, and I rationalized the next dozen tastes with the same logic a dieter uses to load up on salad, saturated in bleu cheese dressing and avocados and crusted over with bacon. I knew I had started with twenty-five tokens, and I tried to approach my condition logically, to do the math, which had become fuzzy. Twenty-five quarter-mugs, let's see. After concentrating for about fifteen minutes, the only thing that was clear to me was that I'd need three more tokens to come up with a whole number. Having a genuine integer to work with seemed important to the calculation.

We walked home, I assume. I have pictures on my camera of things on the way back I don't remember seeing, and can't recognize, but we must have walked home. Because here we are.