4 posts tagged “beer”

Man, this is a terrible thing I need to get off my chest here people.

I'm a bit of a beer snob, I guess.  I like beer a lot.  A LOT.  I happen to have a palate (mostly the nose, really) that can discern a wide range of subtle flavors, and so in a lot of comestible-related areas, I'm a bit--well, not a snob, really, because I really don't have the money for that, and besides I grew up, like all good Southern girls, on fried chicken and greens, and like all good New Mexican girls on 3-for-a-dollar greasy chorizo tacos (my mouth, it waters).  But beer snobbery is relatively affordable, and I like it.  I like it a lot.

That's not the confession, not yet.  See, my husband has no palate and no sense of smell at all.  He seriously cannot tell why Fat Tire is good--he can tell it tastes stronger than the cheap shit he drinks, but that's all it tastes like to him is just strong.  He likes it alright, but he feels the money for good beer is wasted on him since he can't get all the good stuff out of it.  So, he buys cheap beer.

And it started like this, see.  I discovered that his cheap beer was an excellent cooking medium.  My beer is often too strong for whatever I'm cooking and overwhelms any other flavors (not always--sometimes a strong beer is exactly what's needed--I guess I should say I cook with beer a lot, mainly because we can't usually afford decent wine), but his beer works wonders.  I started cooking with it a lot.  And of course, sometimes you have half a can left over and...

This is the confession.  I really like Pabst Blue Ribbon.  I can't tell if I really like it like it or if it just brings back sweat-soaked memories of all the time I spent at punk shows at Jay's Upstairs, that venerable den of perdition, that fire hazard where once my face was shoved right up into Mike Watt's crotch.  You can see why I would wax nostalgic over something like that.

I drank a lot of PBR at Jay's in those days.  It was sort of the house beer at Jay's, and indeed it was probably the favorite beer of all on our campus.  When you got a shot of Jagermeister* at Jay's (and one of my favorite things about Jay's, aside from the music, was that they had Jagermeister** on tap), you got a chaser of PBR***. 

Drinking that illicit half-can the other night, I was instantly transported back to Mike Watt's crotch, man.  I could hear the Fireballs of Freedom and the Volumen playing, feel the thick fog of secondhand smoke giving me cancer, admire once again the completely shitty lighting, smell the bathrooms.  Ah. 

And suddenly I find myself drinking PBR.  Even though I have Guinness and Alaskan Amber (not to mention gin!) in the house.  WTFF?  Dude.  I am so ashamed.

*which is totally a sipping liqueur

**yes, I remain opposed to the umlaut.

***"yeah, since the day I left Milwaukee...been making the bars lots of big money and helping white people dance"

P.S.  If you ever see me in the liquor store buying Jag, stage an intervention, please.

What is the best beer on planet Earth? 
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.

As Dr. Seuss would say, "Come now, come now, you don't have to be so dumb now."  Everybody knows the answer is Guinness. 

The question then would be better put:  What is the second best beer on planet Earth?  That's a difficult question.  But, really, while I have marked preferences for Fat Tire and Alaskan Amber and Sapporo, any beer drunk with friends (yes, even Schmidt's, you asshole) is pretty much OK by me.  Just please, for the love of Mike, no Budweiser.

Also, Guinness does not taste like Vegemite. 

So, today we moseyed out to the garden to see what was happening.  I had just barely got more or less caught up on the last big batch of harvesting, the one we did just prior to the first frost.  Lo and behold, what did we find today?  About 10 more pounds (say, 5 kg or so) of zucchini!  Joy!  It's not as if we had enough zucchini already stockpiled to last us the rest of the year.  I have had my Crock-Pots (both of them) working all day.  I just chop things up, stuff them in there with some basil and olive oil, and call it ratatouille or something.  Then I cool it, package it, and freeze it.  I have no idea how well ratatouille and pseudo-ratatouille freezes, but I guess we'll find out.  Fortunately, my husband will eat damn near anything.  (We also harvested peppers, various herbs, green beans, pattypan squash, a melon, and a bunch of cucumbers today.  The eggplant for the ratatouille came from the farmer's market.  We have some eggplant, but not a lot.  I think I told some of you that my son dumped a chocolate milkshake on my eggplant seedlings way back in spring, thereby killing most of them, so I had to start the eggplant from seed outdoors, and that didn't really allow it enough of a season.  Anyway.)

My husband then did the only sensible thing.  He went to the garage and got the axe and he gave the zucchini 40 whacks.  Two of our four zucchini plants are now dead, hacked to bits mercilessly by my aggrieved, tired-of-freakin-zucchini husband.  He also killed the cucumbers, but they weren't doing too great since the frost anyway.

Also, this may seem like an odd question, but does anyone out there need some dill seed?  We apparently planted way too much dill.  I will have dill seed to last me several years.  I always think dill plants look so festive, and so I think my zeal for their ferny prettiness ran away with me.  I have sworn not to plant so much, but everybody in my house knows that is not a vow I will keep.  I have a weakness for planting too much. 

Now, a couple of totally unrelated, random notes because I'm drinking and I get a little random when I'm drinking.  First, I REALLY freakin wish my gmail didn't put SPAM recipes every time I look at my spam folder.  I understand why it's happening--the spam/SPAM connection, I get it.  But, man, the recipe today for "Vineyard SPAM salad" that involves combining SPAM, grapes, peapods and onions--no, no way.  That's some sick shit.  If I wasn't drinking, maybe I could handle it, but as it is, I'm totally going to barf.  Jesus.

And then this.  Um, so this guy is, like, smart?  Right?  So, how the hell did it take him so long to figure this out?  I figured this out ages ago.  I have argued about this shit with every economist I have ever known, and you can't convince them.  And yet it is so obvious.  I used to worry sometimes in my old philosophy seminars that the point I was about to make was so obvious to everyone else in the room that they would roll their eyes at me, and that worry often kept me from making the point at all; I mean, if it was obvious to me, then it must be obvious to everyone, right?  Seems like sound thinking.  Only, I discovered eventually that it wasn't true.  Most people had not, in fact, thought of it before.  So, maybe I should have written Alan Greenspan a long letter some years back, patiently tutoring him in some facts of life that are crazy obvious to the rest of us.  I guess that's the problem with basing everything you know about life on the work of Ayn Rand.

I just have a quick question for Andy Partridge:

Really, Andy, why not go for the big reduction in the price of beer?  If you're going to solicit God anyway, it doesn't hurt to ask for the price of beer, especially Guinness, to go down, does it?  Are you worried that he might think that was one request too many and thus veto the entire package? 

Because it seems like God, being omnipotent and shit, would have the power of the line veto.  If he were inclined, he could grant us world peace and still make Guinness fecking expensive--or maybe he would give us both.  Think how much happier the world would be if the joy and harmony embodied by a pint of black-and-tan were affordable to all.

What could it hurt, really?  Go for it, Andy.