Session # 57

Here is the topic from last minute host Beer’s I Have Known

“One of the things I most enjoy about blogs and personal writing in general is the ability to have a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way. So I’d like to know your beery guilty secrets. Did you have a particularly embarrassing first beer (in the same way that some people purchase an atrocious song as their first record) or perhaps there’s still a beer you return to even though you know you shouldn’t? Or maybe you don’t subscribe to the baloney about feeling guilty about beers and drink anything anyway?

Its fairly wide open, take your pick. Variety is the spice of life as they say (and I hope there’s more than 57 of them…)”

I am going to make a confession that just might lower my craft beer street cred.

I sometimes drink craft beer straight from the bottle.

Yup, I will read an article about proper glassware or how to pour a pint correctly and I feel a tinge of shame because of the bottle sitting next to me. The bottle that I could have easily poured into one of many pint glasses that I have in the cupboard.

I know that the bottle (or the can) is just the conveyance for the beer and to properly enjoy the aroma and to see the beer and listen to it as Fred Eckhardt instructs, I have to pour it into the glass. But after a day of work that includes Los Angeles traffic that is akin to hand to hand combat, I just want to enjoy a beer.

I refuse to drink the industrial water lagers but I empathize with the joy of sitting down with a bottle and just relaxing with a beer. Not caring about putting the beer into the glass, or what the correct type of glass I need, or the proper serving temperature or what food is goes with. Sometimes, I just want a beer and not savor a craft beer. Maybe it is some DNA coding from caveman days.

I have been caught red handed on a few occasions and at first, I would equivocate. Try to explain that the beer was not super aromatic or some other hogwash. Now I just take a long pull and say that I just wanted to have a beer.

This isn’t all the time of course, in fact it is in the minority. And there are some beers that I would never, ever swig straight up. And I will continue to tell people to always drink from the proper glassware with my one guilty caveat being the exception that proves the rule.