Like any other blogger I’m overjoyed to have followers, and I don’t know how many it will take for me to stop getting excited about each new one. If I’m not semi-comatose, watching a violent TV show with my dad, or modeling earrings and barrettes for the kids, I try to make sure I visit each one. I like to get a sense of the people (animals? koalas? frogs?) checking out the site. And if someone digs the antics chronicled in this space, chances are I’ll get a kick out of their posts too.
But today I’m taking a little departure from the usual paean to drunkenness. I want to address several new followers whose own blogs center around their battles with alcoholism, and often mention spirituality, whether holistic or referencing a personal savior.
I guess I’m a little perplexed at attracting followers of this nature. It reminds me somewhat of past followers (who’ve joined but not left) whose own blogs are dedicated to right-wing politics, country music, romance novels, creationism, etc., and who might find their interests lampooned at LBHQ with some frequency. And while these aforementioned subjects are all fair game in my liquor-drizzled world, I feel a guilty twinge at the idea that people struggling with alcohol might have, when they hit the Follow button, thought Liquorstore Bear was concerned with addiction and recovery in any responsible or mature sense.
Regular readers know this, and for all I know, my new readers realize it as well. But I don’t want to be a dick and ignore the elephant in the room—alcoholism. Everybody at LBHQ recognizes alcoholism to be a very real and serious social problem. None of the humans at the house engage in heavy drinking, which is why the booze reviews here are thinly spread between specious astrological advice, apocalyptic predictions, Walmart pictures, and randomness.
The terms “alcoholic” and “alcoholism” are generally used facetiously, following the house philosophy that anything you can think of between A and Z is worth a laugh. A litmus test in our house might be this cartoon:
If you can laugh at it, you’re safe here.
But if a focus on alcohol plus attempted humor minimizing the gravity of alcohol abuse/addiction puts you, as a reader, in a negative headspace, please un-follow.
By the same token you’re very welcome to stay. As mentioned, you may well know exactly what you’re here for, and it’s not my business to say you shouldn’t be here. I like having you here, and it’s up to you. Our world is full of booze—in advertising, movies, restaurants, public places—and I’d be an idiot to think this little site could tip someone over the edge.
So I just wanted to make sure you really wanted to be here. Kay?
My Fellow Inebriates,
I was shattered when Christine left our house this morning. By which I mean, when I woke up hours after she’d gone and realized the fact, I felt betrayed. Not by Christine, who can do no wrong. (Christine arrived at our house yesterday afternoon with her special canvas bag containing two fine whiskies, two unique craft beers, and an outstanding Shiraz she’d been cellaring since 2003.) Christine is beyond reproach.
But I felt sort of let down by my parents, who didn’t bother to shake me awake to say good-bye. I actually meant to stow away with Christine this morning in the canvas bag. Although it was still occupied by two bottles of Scotch, it had a compartment I could have slipped into if I weren’t comatose at the time of her departure. Evidently my parents couldn’t entertain Christine until I finished sleeping off last night’s alcohol; I didn’t even get a chance to pant after her booze or press my nose against the window.
Why are my parents so boring? I can’t imagine why anyone visits them at all. What a testament to their dullness that any visitors they do get must bring alcohol to make the visit tolerable. (Come to think of it…well, it’s kind of a wash. If my parents were more interesting they would get more visitors, but the visitors wouldn’t need to get hammered to endure their company.) But still, last night was pretty cool.
First out of the canvas bag was HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH SPECIAL RESERVE (18). Translated as “black oil,” OLA DUBH is so named for its “gloopy and viscous” mouthfeel. It is “the first ale to be aged in malt whisky casks from a named distillery and, with traceable casks and numbered bottles, the first with genuine provenance.” Christine found this 8% brew at a specialty liquor store in Olympic Village where it commanded $8 for its Highland Park–cask aging. Short glasses seemed fitting, so the humans poured it three ways (I gadded about between the three glasses, ending up with the lion’s share).
“Black oil” is not a misnomer. In the glass OLA DUBH is thick, oily, and darker than Coca Cola. Harviestoun compares its appearance to that of “used motor oil,” but I don’t know of any automotive waste that exudes such symphonic waves of dark chocolate, espresso, sherry, and peat. This breathtaking aroma is but a prelude to an exquisite cascade of malty, smoky, leathery toffee-tinged gloriousness—enveloping the palate and winding up with a soulfully bitter cocoa finish. Prickling the tongue with gentle carbonation, OLA DUBH is a rhapsodic hybrid of whisky and beer, warming and mellow yet curiously tingly on the palate. Sweeter than a stout and infinitely more complex, OLA DUBH wrenches a forbidden word from even the most hardened and obdurate taster—the taster who has sworn never to utter the word—yes, against his will and without resistance, my dad said it: OLA DUBH is sessionable.
Because if you could—if you possibly could—you would want to draw your experience with OLA DUBH out over several hours. With its glass-clinging, massive body and absolutely subjugating intensity, this beer takes over your mind; it controls you; it OWNS you.
After everyone drank their two fingers of OLA DUBH, there was no way we could immediately sample another beer. It wouldn’t have been fair. So everyone sipped Carmenere while my mother concocted one of her meals seemingly designed to bother and disconcert everyone’s palate, and together those incongruous new tastes helped arrest everyone’s pining for the OLA DUBH.
In all honesty—although this may be the sort of creeping determinism my furry head cooked up to cope with the emptiness of the OLA DUBH bottle—I doubt you could drink such a viscous beer all evening. At least humans probably wouldn’t want to. But we bears have some crazy stomach enzymes. 😉
Liquorstore Bear 