I am a beer snob. I believe that beer should be consumed for the purpose of enjoying its carefully crafted character and sharing the experience with others who enjoy it as well. I am a friend of Bill's, aka Beer Snob Jr. I take pride in the fact that I introduced him to D's Six Pack Shop and its heavenly beer cave, and I am grateful for him introducing me to Blue Dust and its "No Crap on Tap". Drinking, I mean beer sampling, with Bill has been the inspiration to quite a few of his blogs. When I was his age, we didn't have blogs. We told drinking stories. I'll tell you a few of mine, and what led to my beer snobbery.
When I was in college at PSU, I went to parties and forced down anything that came from a keg and filled a plastic cup. My first four beers were Budweisers. I drank and regurgitated them all in an hour. For two years I drank Natty Ice/Light, Bush, and Budweiser. After the first seven beers, my taste buds were numb to the cheap corn malts from which they were made, but they got the job done, and I stumbled home without ever savoring the experience.
But that all changed one night when someone handed me a bottle of an amber liquid that I loved the moment it started dancing on the front of my tongue. I don't remember how many bottles I drank, but I made sure to save the bottle fearing that I would never find this beer again or remember what it was called. I am proud to say that the beer in question was Yuengling. Yuengling was proof to me that beer didn't have to suck. After that, I started saving bottles of any beer I enjoyed and developed enough of a repertoire to consider myself a young beer snob by the age of 21.
My beer snobbery traveled to England with me my final semester of college. I student taught half the time I was abroad, and drank the other half. The campus bar served Caffrey's Irish Ale, while the local pubs satiated my beer lust with pints of properly poured Guinness with shamrocks shaped in the head. My cooperating teacher gave me a 4- pack of Heineken pint cans at the end of the semester to "share with my mates." Not a bad beer, but I could never get a buzz off it.
After I graduated, I moved to New Mexico to teach on a Navajo Indian Reservation. One Friday, some coworkers took me to my first brew pub called Socorro Springs in the city of Socorro. It was there that I was introduced to the pale ale, and the wood oven pizza. Months later I fell in love with the green chili cheeseburger. I would walk back to New Mexico for one more of those burgers if they called out my name.
I moved to Columbia, MD a year later and bought a book called "America's Best Brews" by Steve Johnson. From it I learned about how beer is made, the difference between an ale and a lager, and how beer shaped our country. I received my beer education from this book, and I refer to it all the time whenever I try a new style of beer and need to know more about it.
It's been ten years since I bought that book, and I can't even county how many different beers I've tried. But every time I think of a good story, I can recall what frothy goodness was in my glass at the time. Like the night my ex-wife decorated our Christmas tree while I sat and drank whatever I pulled out of the Samual Adams holiday mixer in 2006 (oh how I miss the Cranberry Lambic) and told her a fact about my childhood for every dated ornament she pulled my collection. I can go on and on just about that night alone.
I started brewing my own beer this past January. I've made five batches so far, and hope that someday something I create will be an important detail in one of my (or Bill's) future stories.
Cheers.
Beer Snob Sr.
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