A Girl's Point of Brew

I set out on this adventure with my dear friend Holly Hefeweizen to learn more about beer and life and share this information with all who are willing to read.  Along the way more of life has happened than beer.  Just to name a few things, I have gotten married (we eloped in May), had our wedding reception in August, celebrated my 1 year anniversary as a professional (job to not be named to protect said job), and moved my new husband to a different state so he can start graduate school.  One might ask, well those sound like some outstanding occassions to have some excellent beer.  Yes, infact I have had some pretty amazing beers all since my last blog, but sitting down and typing about them has not been a possibility until now.

But . . . This is a new year with new possiblities, a different schedule, and a multitude of beer to taste and blog about.  I do have a current back-log of posts I have started and for some reason or another have not posted.  Those will come first in order to finish out my thoughts from previous beers and truly get my fresh start!!  A palate cleansing, if you will.  I vow to have a post visible for those that may still be hanging in there every 1-2 weeks.  I am hoping that having this in writting will keep my feet to the fire on this one and keep me posting.  After all, I truly miss this and truly enjoy sharing my thoughts about the good, the bad, and the tasty of the Beer world!

CHEERS TO THE NEW YEAR!!

The Kitchn proposes these beers as most likely to contain something for anybody at a party:

by Holly

I just finished Skyping with Abbey Ale. I miss her sooo much.

We had beers, of course, and I had this one that described itself thusly:

I’ve been raised by a wide variety of people who taught me to appreciate a wide variety of art, but I proclaim: if I experience your art/beer for less time than it takes me to read your artist’s/brewer’s statement about what on earth your art/beer means, then the product is worthless. Art With a Capital “A” should transcend language. (I know I have at least one reader with a degree from an art college. Feel free to defend your peers if you feel so moved. You can also just call me a hayseed from northeast Mississippi, but that will only dissolve into my claiming that it’s the pot calling the kettle very pedestrian and not at all a statement about poor women’s tools. Or, alternately, the pot calling the kettle some term that further highlights the inherent racism, classism, and sexism underlying most of modern language. You get my point. You could have been finished with this paragraph 40 seconds ago.)

This is why I write about beer within the context that I experienced it. Yep, there were existential oak, cranberry, and jasmine notes, and I get that there was a hell of a lot of thinking and trouble that went into the product. But but the beer’s process of creation wasn’t half as memorable to me as drinking beer with Abbey Ale via Skype. Abbey Ale, by the way, reports being somewhat won over by the last paragraph, so I’ll chime in. Down with soulless corporate apathy, absolutely. But perhaps, up with a wider view of beer and its role in the world.

by Holly

I have drunk a beer that costs $3 for a 6-pack of 12 ounce cans. That’s less than a nickel per ounce, and as a comparison, Budweiser runs a shade over a dime an ounce. Class. Eee.

Hermione Hefeweizen and Irving IPA invited me out for Mediterranean food and then over to their house. Post falafel (“Mediterranean hush puppies,” Hermione declared), they realized that they were out of beer at home. The only gettin’ place between the restaurant and their place is a Walgreens.

Your Walgreens may not sell beer at all. It probably operates under the assumption that if you come in for prescription medication, acetaminophen, or a heated argument with the pharmacy tech about how many packages of Sudafed you bought in the last month*, you probably need plenty of clear fluids and nothing that further damages your liver. But lots of Walgreens stores want to give you an opportunity to buy beer and cheap wine, healthy choices be damned.

The Walgreens beer selection is limited, but it includes what appears to be Walgreens’ house brand, Big Flats. This Walgreens had already sold out of its cold Big Flats for the evening. Of the three people standing in the check-out line, we had four tepid Big Flats 6-packs among us. Popular stuff!

(“Shouldn’t that wheel be connected to something, like a mill, and not just rolling free down the river?” asks Irving IPA.)

After the cans spent some time in the freezer, Hermione and Irving took big swigs of their Big Flats. They swiftly and simultaneously had the same reaction: “This is lake beer!” Irving’s family has a lovely cabin at Pickwick, the lake that, along with dirt-cheap hydroelectric power, resulted from the New Deal-era damming of the Tennessee River. Irving and Hermione have spent many happy weekends marinating in summer lake water with cans of low-ABV suds floating nearby in foam koozies.

I wish I could report such a warm reaction. Big Flats isn’t a bad beer, but it’s about as flavorful as an unsalted cracker. I don’t think I’ll ask for it again unless I encounter mitigating circumstances, like the possibility of drifting beside a party barge parked at a sandbar in July.

;

*If you are that guy, get thee to rehab. Or an allergist, depending.

by Holly

Saturday I “toured” the Independence Brewery with a handful of my fellow professional do-gooders. Top 5 day, no doubt about it.

The reason why it was a top 5 day needs some explanation.

I confess: I started writing this blog while I was unemployed. The day I both signed up for unemployment benefits and started a beer blog—even though I had been planning for both for months—felt like a manifestation of an embarrassing stereotype of millenium middle-class life. But here I am, three weeks into a satisfying gig, and still writing about beer and the people around me who enjoy it. Life is pretty great for me most of the time.

When I moved to Austin, I joined a Meetup of social workers. I freaking love social workers. Social workers do hard, valuable work.  You probably guessed that.  But we also tend to have messed-up, dark senses of humor. I tell stories and jokes with my colleagues that hinge on suicide threats, depravity, addiction, and other dark matter—as punch lines! It clearly depresses the hell out of everyone else. Life can be terrible, and a social worker will help you figure out how to access your resources and strengths to move in a generally less terrible direction. But a person can’t daily fight abuse, murder, and overwhelming poverty without being able to laugh in its face. Thus our cripplingly twisted jokes.

Anyway. I freaking love social workers. This Meetup has, in addition to introducing me to some fantastic colleagues, introduced me to some really wonderful eating and drinking establishments in Austin. We’ve had happy hour at Abel’s on the Lake, an open air joint that sits right on Lake Travis. We’ve eaten at East Side Kings, a food trailer that originated from Paul Qui, the most recent winner of Top Chef. But Saturday we met at Independence Brewery for their monthly community tour.

Tour is the wrong word for this event. It’s a two-hour beer festival in Independence’s parking lot. Buy a pint glass for $6, get it filled three times with some locally brewed craft beer. Families were their with their babies and dogs. People from my Mississippi hometown were there. A band was there. It was one of the most wonderful afternoons of my life to date.

Beer.  Social workers.  The combination is unbeatable.

I’m a fan of the Independence Bootlegger Brown. It’s definitely in the running for my  drink anytime beer. Browns in general are a lovely creation: not so dark as to scare off the stout-leery, but malty enough to wrap your tongue up in a perfect beer envelope. The the Bootlegger Brown is a fine example. I hope the next time I drink it, its environs are half as satisfying as drinking it in its own backyard.