beer

THIRSTY BEAVER AMBER ALE

My Fellow Inebriates,

After ripping into our gifts, packing our tummies and killing our brain cells (or “cell,” as my mum refers to my neurological supply), we’re left with a lull in which to contemplate other things besides seasonal shopping mayhem and gluttony.

It’s amazing how much crazy shit happens in a 365-day space. The magnitude-9 earthquake in Japan; Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gadafi, and Kim Jong-il all toast this year; floods and natural disasters; political movements both violent and nonviolent; economic bailouts; scandalous document dumps; surreptitious bomb-grade uranium shipments—how do we make sense of it all?

It’s true that current events generally just confuse me and my little brain cell. So I thought I’d google what the Internet considered most important in 2011.

And check it out—solidly in CBC’s top 10 stories: Angry beaver roams through N.W.T. town.

According to Jason Mercredi, who filmed the animal holding up a main street, “He’s pissed.” Witnesses said the beaver was the size of a dog, zigzagging through people’s lawns and confronting their dogs with a wild, hissing noise.

What the hell is a beaver anyway? These wet, nasty-looking things were the basis of the Canadian fur trade and still grace the back of the five-cent coin. Sexual parlance, explicably or not, happily incorporates the beaver, as do literary magazines, sporting organizations and youth groups.

Basically beavers are not bad things, unless they are romping through your town scaring the pets. Emblematic on a broad spectrum, the beaver represents the ideal dichotomy of wholesomeness/debauchery.

Which leads me to THIRSTY BEAVER AMBER ALE (Tree Brewing). Admittedly it’s been a long time since I had some of this lovely dark amber nectar, but that rampaging beaver reminded me of it.

THIRSTY BEAVER is crisply carbonated, with a nice layer of foam that doesn’t dissipate immediately. Caramel and nut aromas float gently to the nose. The taste is malty with neither excessive sweetness nor bitterness, an easy drinker that quenches thirst but makes you pause to explore its character. While it’s less hoppy than some amber ales, it still asserts itself as a serious beer contender and would be welcome in my fridge again.

And with a classy name like THIRSTY BEAVER, how could such a beer disappoint? No wonder it’s Tree Brewing’s top seller.

With enough THIRSTY BEAVER in me, current events become meaningless, as do New Year’s resolutions. Isn’t that a wonderful way to end the year?

O’DOUL’S—What to do with crack

My Fellow Inebriates,

peopleofwalmart.com

My mum swears she saw ass crack in Walmart today as she was leaving with the stroller, the kids and the groceries. Right before that she’d witnessed giant, pendulous bosoms lolling out of a dirty negligee over in the frozen-foods aisle, a week before darkest winter.

I believe my mother because she’s too humorless to invent an elderly man in a death-metal leather jacket yanking up his ill-fitting jeans to return to proper privacy four inches of rectal spectacle. She said this parting shot from Walmart had kind of made her forget about the half-naked woman buying ice cream.

peopleofwalmart.com

I love fashion diversity, but even more, I love knowing that the People of Walmart are a real phenomenon, not something staged by Walmart haters or, more deviously, by Walmart itself. No, these people actually flock to Walmart every day wearing feathers and leather and tats and animal prints—without coaching or prompting—spilling out of their (perhaps carefully chosen) duds. What a marvelous, organic culture Walmart has spawned.

My mum predicted I would say it called for a toast and unfortunately kiboshed a bottle of wine, lording her opposable thumbs over me. Which leaves me to review a very unworthy beer available at grocery stores everywhere, even in Canada and probably at Walmart.

Calling O’DOUL’S a beer is charity to say the least. O’DOUL’S is an alcohol-free abomination, a <0.5% pretender. Faintly metallic and over-sweet, this wanna-be brew pours light amber-yellow, then rests uneventfully in the glass, wafting chemical aromas and mocking you with its lack of alcohol.

You guys know I find something to like about pretty much everything, provided it has alcohol, so it’s really not fair to beat up O’DOUL’S too much. If you’re pregnant or driving or drying out, maybe it’s a good solution. But it’s hard to tolerate something that taunts you with beer-like qualities but simply isn’t a proper beer. There are a million other fizzy beverages I’d have before I’d crack another O’DOUL’S.

So on the “crack” note, and for consistency’s sake, here’s my recommendation: Use it for enemas.

 

LABATT BLUE

My Fellow Inebriates,

There is a time and a place for mass-market beer. The hockey game, on my couch.

This is where mainstream beer really shines—you can drink it fast with no pretentious tasting pressures, and it gets you nice and gooned. My good friend Jean-Guy recommends starting a case of LABATT BLUE just as Don Cherry starts mouthing off before the hockey game, then stretching it out for the next couple of hours. Perfect. Neither item distracts from the other: beer and hockey synergize into a perfectly anaesthetizing pocket of time.

Jean-Guy has all sort of other ideas about alcohol. He was the dude who first urged me to mix Stolichnaya and Smirnoff in a 50:50 on pointless-feeling days.

I barely know anything about hockey. I’m usually looped before the puck gets dropped. But as a Canadian bear I like to be semi-present for a game once in a while. What I can’t decide about hockey is, Is it emblematic of Canada? Or is it a meathead sport? What does “offside” mean? It seems to mean a couple of different things.

Mostly Don Cherry hurts my eyes with his outfits. Sure, that’s his gimmick, and I do have a soft spot for unusual visuals, but I think most people would prefer him naked to seeing these fashions.

Cherry does explain some of his get-ups. He has worn his pink suit, for instance, to thumb his nose at the left. “I’m wearing pink for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything.” Wow, so cool.

Don Cherry triggers me to drink LABATT BLUE, and fast. This last part is key, because LABATT BLUE has little to recommend it tastewise.

Less visually assaulting

Straw-colored with a quickly dissipating fizz, LABATT BLUE feels empty and light in the mouth, with a bit of a twangy, metallic funk. It has a pleasant crispness that is dependent on its being cold—hence the importance of pounding the case quickly.

As far as macro beers go, LABATT BLUE isn’t the worst, simply because it’s not memorable in any aspect. It’s an entirely appropriate accompaniment to anything mediocre you plan to do.