drinking

ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE

My morning child abuse (abuse by children, if you haven’t been following) came with a reminder that today is a special day. I truly wouldn’t have remembered if Miss P hadn’t bounced around all morning about it—today is the day we defer to a soil-dwelling rodent on questions of climate. It’s Groundhog Day, my fellow inebriates, which means the creature will give us an opportunity today to either laugh off global warming or get up in arms about it.

Of course there’s a multiplicity of prognosticating vermin throughout North America. With a six-year lifespan, you can bet Punxsutawney Phil isn’t the original Punxsutawney Phil—unless Chuck Testa did an unusually good job reanimating him. Groundhogs mate like crazy between March and April, producing two to six young at a time, so there’s always a fresh supply for—given the media resources that get dedicated to the annual event—what must be the deadest day ever for actual news.

Cheesy Canadiana and/or Americana always make me feel like a beer, and with Miss P safely off to grade one, I decided to crack an ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE. The cans had appeared in our fridge following a rare visit from (even rarer) friends of my parents—a “slumming it” product that I would certainly buy to take to someone’s house if I didn’t necessarily care about retaining their respect, or if I thought maybe I could trade up to something better in their fridge.

Everything about the pour suggests mass-produced domestic beer—hockey beer, if you will. The color is aggressively orange, the head loose and half-hearted. In terms of smell this amber ale doesn’t give much away; you have to just take the plunge and taste it.

And much the way my on-again-off-again-mostly-off girlfriend Dolly describes an evening with me, ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE is pretty much a waste of time. It’s ordinary: tangy but sweet and thin with insufficient malt—the sort of brew that reinforces a general sense of unmet expectations and thereby propels the drinker toward more serious alcohol earlier in the day than planned. I do therefore recommend it for non-daytime imbibers as a method of jumping the mental hurdle into “Why not?” territory.

As I started a second can, I wondered if Dolly would be interested in Groundhog Day simply because of her fur fetish. Plenty of people share her proclivities, and with Valentine’s Day looming, they are probably stirring in their burrows much like Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie.

Social stigma hinders fur fetishists even more than it does daytime drinkers. According to my sources, “furries” fall into five categories, none of which dovetail too well with mainstream mores.

  • Fursuiters (those who like to dress up)
  • Otherkins (those who believe they are animal in spirit)
  • Furries (those who enjoy roleplay)
  • Furverts (those with fur fetishes plus every subset you can think of)
  • Trans-species (those who physically alter themselves to resemble kindred animals)

It was sweet of Dolly to cross the line into full-on bestiality with me, but I have to realize it’s over, and there are enough other bears in the house to give her whatever it is she needs without subjecting her to the odor of rancid beer. Drinking ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE is my way of accepting Dolly’s rejection.

We all slum it sometimes, whether it be with Malibu or Alexander Keith’s. Dolly slummed it with me, but I think that was the bottom for her. And I don’t want to say anything mean about her. I really doubt she’d get that interested in a groundhog, even if it could predict the weather (which would be amazing given that the weather channel can’t).

So what happened anyway with North America’s groundhogs? Did they see their shadows?

According to the three most closely watched of these psychic vermin, spring is coming. So get out the hay fever meds, brush up on your climate-related conversation, and (Dad) take the Christmas tree down. Spring is sprung and love is in the air (unless you’re me).

How safe is that drink? Lift-off drinks…and their scary side

My Fellow Inebriates,

My dad drinks rocket-fuel coffee for breakfast. I’m talking five espresso shots in a mug with honey every morning, after which he asks himself if he should switch to decaf.

I usually miss this ritual because I don’t get up until later, but last night I didn’t manage to drag myself to bed and instead passed out on the couch, which made me easy prey for the kids, who pounced on me in the morning.

After an hour of their abuse I realized how exhausted I was—how mangy and straggly, how lacking in energy. My dad’s nuclear-strength coffee suddenly looked good, and what bear can resist honey?

Holy f&*#^*# crap, people!! What kind of voltage is my dad administering to himself? I needed a freaking defibrillator after drinking his coffee, and now I’m wondering if my dad isn’t secretly super-human.

Among all the mental fireworks, a lightbulb went off in my head—I could drink a lot more alcohol if I ingested caffeine along with it. With a caffeine boost I wouldn’t pass out so easily and I could take my alcoholism to a whole new level.

It’s not a new idea, of course. Combining uppers and downers is a way of life for many people, some of them deeply psychotic. A range of alcoholic products appeal to this niche market (as well as teenagers) by combining booze with ingredients such as caffeine, taurine, and guarana. Phusion Projects served up this magical combo for several years in its Four Loko product until it was banned in several states, prompting the company to rejig the recipe and ditch the stimulants. The FDA sent a warning letter to three other companies adding caffeine to booze, citing the beverages as a “public health concern.” Health Canada is even more emphatic about the dangers of combining alcohol and caffeine.

I feel deeply psychotic myself after sampling my dad’s coffee, and drinking alcohol strikes me as a natural curative. What’s the problem?

  • According to the FDA, “caffeine can mask some of the sensory cues individuals might normally rely on to determine their level of intoxication.” Cues such as passing out.
  • Teenagers comprise a huge market for energy drinks and gravitate naturally to the alcoholic variety when they’re loitering in the liquor store parking lot looking for someone to boot for them.
  • Last year 16 Canadians were hospitalized due to heart palpitations, seizures, and strokes brought on by energy drinks. Of the 79 adverse reaction reports filed, half were deemed serious and four life-threatening, plus there were two deaths. Nine cases involved alcohol, but which cases and what the impact of the combination was hasn’t been reported.
  • A Dalhousie University study shows that when students combine energy drinks and alcohol, they double their alcohol intake. Wow! That’s exactly the effect I was looking for when the lightbulb flashed this morning and my one or two neurons decided booze and stimulants were better than Fred and Ginger. Health Canada says no, LB, no!

It’s probably a good thing these combo drinks are off the market, because I would go ahead and drink them in massive quantities, and my little furry body would probably disintegrate.

Paul Chiasson, The Canadian Press

But in the certifiable absence of common sense, what’s to prevent me from buying some Red Bull and mixing it with alcohol? “Good taste,” says my mum, whose car window was once smashed by a hooligan who pitched a Red Bull at it from a moving vehicle. Pregnant and emotional, she stood wailing on the sidewalk beside the shattered glass, vowing hatred against Red Bull simply because the perp was long gone and she had no other target for her outrage.

Could I order the recipe at a bar?

It depends where you live. Some states have banned drinks like the Jägerbomb (Jägermeister and Red Bull), as have some areas of Australia. Canada classifies Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar as foods and Jägermeister as alcohol, warning against the upper/downer mixture, but ultimately it’s up to the consumer—who usually turns out to be a young party animal whose cerebral cortex hasn’t developed the capacity for sober second thought. These are totally my people! But I don’t want to steer anybody toward bad choices. Personally, I don’t enjoy impulse control at all, so don’t heed my ideas. Here I defer to the government and advise picking either the energy drink or the booze.

You know which one I’ll pick.

CUTTHROAT PALE ALE—Arrrr!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Ordinarily I’d say you can’t watch too much Star Trek, but then you have bears like my friend Scary, who’s logged at least 10,000 hours watching every Trek iteration in addition to Stargate, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda plus every single other sci-fi program that every got green-lit for production. You could say Scary got sucked into another reality.

Scary used to lead a charmed life. Before his humans had kids they used to go to work every day. They’d leave Scary watching the Space Channel on a 50-inch plasma all day. They didn’t want him to be bored.

Then they had kids and suddenly the TV fell under new orders: Elmo, Sesame Street and Barney took over the screen, leaving Scary to wallow in his sudden secondary status and his sci-fi withdrawal. Feeling neglected, he became bitter, resentful, jaded. He became a dick.

With only his science fiction memories, Scary retreated into a dark world of apocalyptic fantasy and excessive snacking.

I invited him to join me in sampling Tree Brewing’s CUTTHROAT PALE ALE with me but he was too busy watching YouTube videos consisting of open sky shot in people’s backyards with some distorted (sometimes obviously modulated) audio behind—i.e., the strange sounds of 2012 that have gone viral recently.

Luckily, the lovely Christine and my somewhat less lovely parents were there to open the CUTTHROAT bottles.

I’d recently tasted THIRSTY BEAVER AMBER ALE, a delightful but more mainstream offering from Tree Brewing, so I was buzzing with anticipation and the usual alcoholic jitters. I realized I didn’t miss Scary’s company; with his End-of-Days mentality and general paranoia, he’s not the sort of guy you should take along on any sort of mind-altering odyssey. Although in lots of ways I share his fascination with the apocalypse, I don’t think it’s going to swoop in on a seven-headed dragon the way he does. Plus there was more beer for me and the humans without him.

Poured into the glass, CUTTHROAT PALE ALE is golden orange with a foamy head that dissipates quickly. Right away the aroma is intriguing: malty and grassy with suggestions of caramel and buttered bread. So the actual first sip is disconcerting—instead of the mellow, malty flavor I’d expect from a pale ale, CUTTHROAT jabs you with hops and an aggressive carbonation level that actually challenges the palate to reconcile its one-two-punchiness with the delectably gentle malt promised to the nose.

It’s kind of fisty that way really. Everything olfactory tells you you’re in for a soft, caramel-tinged sipper, and then CUTTHROAT yanks your arm up behind your back and says very threateningly, “Bend over!”

Because it’s really much more of a bitter than a pale ale. The hoppy profile would appeal tremendously to IPA fans as well as classic bitter drinkers. After a quick adjustment of expectations the hops are in fact delightfully clean and fresh, not to mention perfectly appropriate for the fizz level.

The finish is very dry and long. At first my impression was OMG, what was that? but halfway through the bottle I was smitten with CUTTHROAT and couldn’t possibly begrudge its take-no-prisoners assault on my tastebuds. It’s a fantastically violent beer that, in all honesty, Scary probably couldn’t have handled.

As Christine said approvingly, “It is called CUTTHROAT, after all.”