alcohol

The dark side of gummy bear hedonism

I got a shock when I looked at my gummy bears this morning.

They were supposed to look happy and plumply saturated with rum.

But instead, they’d turned into goo.

Neither of my two brain cells had remembered my own posts about flavoring vodka with Skittles and Jolly Ranchers, a process in which those candies dissolve uniformly…

I felt sick.

It reminded me of Breaking Bad—meth-peddling thugs get liquefied in an acid bath after messing with the wrong dudes. Only my little bears weren’t thugs, and I was the wrong dude.

The horror.

My head was spinning. Holy shit, I’d done something ghastly to my little compatriots and there was no way they were coming back from it.

What would you do??

I had to get my head on straight.

I visited my friend Blackie Bear, not generally known for sensible advice, but comforting in a bearish way.

If he was shocked about the fate of the gummy bears he didn’t indicate it; he maintained a neutral expression as I poured out the story of their execution.

Blackie is a good listener.

Finally he said, “Bro, you can’t get upset about it. Gummy bears aren’t like us, buddy. They don’t feel. They’re not smart. They’re just…candy. You don’t think those gummy bears chose to dive into the Bacardi, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I gave them a pep talk first. And now they’re dead.”

Blackie was still for a while. Actually, he’s good at staying still. Sometimes he doesn’t move at all for days. He stared at me very hard for a long time before saying:

“Dude. Dude, those bears aren’t bears, they’re just candy. You can’t anthropomorphize them.”

I looked into Blackie’s dark, beady eyes, close-set in his smallish head. He is so cuddly, Blackie Bear. But as I peered at him I was overwhelmed by a troubling thought. Something inescapable rose in me like a scream. Blackie isn’t…he isn’t….Blackie isn’t really…he’s not a real…

He’s not a real psychiatrist. I mean, he doesn’t have any training or anything. I don’t even know where he learned the word “anthropomorphize.”

WHISTLER BREWING COMPANY BEAR PAW HONEY LAGER—Unembarrassing, even if it won’t put hair on your chest

My dad has stopped tucking me in at night.

Now wait, you say. How many adult males tuck little bears into bed at night? Well, my dad for one. At least until last week.

Waiting to be tucked in

I wouldn’t be worried if he hadn’t omitted to do it four nights in a row. One’s not atypical; sometimes he falls asleep on the couch and then drags himself into bed without remembering. I get that. But four nights in a row? WTF, Dad??

So what difference does it make? you well may ask.

On lucky nights I’m too looped to notice. Other nights we’ve just watched something on TV—maybe a crystal meth dealer’s body being liquefied in an acid bath or some similar violent shit—in which case I stare at the wall all night afterwards, traumatized.

Up until last week, my dad used to get me settled for bed with the other bears he likes (plus Fluffy, who’s somehow gotten himself included). He used to make sure we were all comfortable and not too squished, then he’d put a blanket over us.

I’M NOT SAYING HE SINGS ME A LULLABY OR ANYTHING. HE DOESN’T FEEL MY FOREHEAD OR CHECK TO MAKE SURE MY NOSE IS MOIST. HE JUST USED TO TUCK ME IN!!

So what the hell, Dad?

Maybe running his own business lent itself to the sort of maverick mentality that says, I do what I want. Sure I tuck bears into bed—what’s it to you, mofo? And now he’s got this new corporate gig, he’s probably more like, I model and demonstrate best practices to help build accountability. His new coworkers play golf and video games while talking about their stereos.

Perhaps my dad is reassessing the machismo of tucking bears into bed.

But does this mean we’ll be buying more beer? I certainly hope so, and I’d be willing to trade my beddy-byes ritual for an extra case here and there. Perhaps another Whistler Brewing Company Travel Pack would be sufficiently manly for my dad. The four beers it contains are pretty mainstream (PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE being the one weird but good exception) and, while none of them will put a clump of hair on your chest, the collection is solid.

Naturally the BEAR PAW HONEY LAGER has extra appeal. Beer and organic honey make a win-win combo, even if their synergy occurs at only 5% alcohol.

The lager pours a crystal-clear copper with light foam that quickly dissipates. Honey is immediately apparent to the nose along with breadiness and faint hops. Taste follows smell without much surprise, supplying the expected honey along with some caramel notes and minimal hoppiness.

With a light-to-medium mouthfeel and reasonable carbonation, BEAR PAW HONEY LAGER is moderately refreshing but perhaps too sweet to pound endlessly (although I would without complaining). It has an unexpectedly long and dry finish, especially given its tendency to cloy at the front of the palate.

This would be an easy beer to disparage as too commonplace. It’s true the market is inundated with honey brews, but only because honey is such a delightful note to find in one’s beer. I’ve certainly experienced better versions of honey lager, but this one’s not bad at all. It’s certainly nothing for Whistler Brewing Company to be embarrassed of—not that anyone should be embarrassed of anything. Including my dad.

EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA CARMENERE-CABERNET SAUVIGNON (2010)—A fruit supernova of the best kind

My Fellow Inebriates,

There’s no way to know if Fluffy has finally settled down. You may remember, for several weeks after he came to live with us he made a whole bunch of crazy paranormal shit happen—noises, cold spots, clogged toilets, falling toys, leaving the lids off markers. He was totally freaking me out, people, obviously channeling the ghost of his old owner, my deceased granny.

But the creepiest thing about Fluffy is his weird resemblance to my friend Scarybear, who is himself a sociopath, albeit more of the snack-obsessed, openly violent kind. I usually avoid Scary so he can’t fill my furry head with apocalyptic ideas, but every weekend the household bears watch Fringe with my parents, which both feeds Scary’s Armageddon preoccupation and allows him to convey it to me. And because the weekend Fringe ritual is usually accompanied by a glass of wine, whatever End of Days scenario Scary decides to propound that evening gets pumped into my brain cells while they’re flooded with alcohol.

The wine was just finished when Scary mentioned rogue black holes. When you’ve just consumed the last drops of an organic Chilean Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon like EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA (2010), you may well be feeling bereft of something precious and therefore, because nature abhors a vacuum (which my head usually is), susceptible to screwball ideas. Suddenly the 10 million black holes astronomers estimate exist within the Milky Way seemed exceedingly threatening.

Fluffy remained impassive as Scary went on about black holes, the corpses of stars gone supernova, hurtling through our galaxy and pulling everything, even light, into their city-size (that’s minuscule!) maws. Holy crap, I didn’t know which was more terrifying—realizing we’d have no warning if one of these tiny monstrosities caromed through our solar system, or observing a weird-ass golem like Fluffy staring into space while mass destruction was being contemplated.

Not even Scarybear stares into space! As dumb as he is, his eyes register something—some hint of thought if not intelligence. Not Fluffy, though. Look into Fluffy’s eyes and you see nothing—a vast depth of nothing.

So at least we didn’t have to share any wine with him. Intensely dark and substantial, EMILIANA NOVAS GRAN RESERVA Carmenere-Cabernet Sauvignon immediately hits the nose with ripe berries and spice, released from your swirled glass with a heady rush. My mum and I found it a glorious olfactory assault, but my dad was more reserved; it took the wine 20 minutes to seduce him, and by the time it did, we had a fair head start on him.

NOVAS GRAN RESERVA does change markedly over 20 minutes, developing from a fruit orgy to a very structured, sophisticated wine. On the palate it shows firm tannins, excellent balance, and a mouth-filling intensity that lingers well beyond the sip.

EMILIANA has forged a good reputation for sustainable winemaking and a solid belief that organically grown grapes simply make better wine.

But can one drink a wine called NOVAS without thinking of supernovas and their dark legacies? Scary thought not, and weighed in on this unwelcomely, not feeling the least disqualified by his wine abstention to comment. No, indeed, if a rogue black hole headed our way it wouldn’t even need to enter our solar system to perturb the earth’s orbit, stretching it into an extreme ellipse or even detaching us from orbit and whipping it out into cold space. All this could happen very quickly, although there would be some time dilation close to the event horizon.

Scary seemed to relish this idea, Fluffy was completely indifferent to it, and I was freaking scared out of my wits. There was nothing for it but to attempt opening my grandparents’ homemade bottle so I could get thoroughly pissed. But I couldn’t manage it (as usual) and my parents refused to help. One of them said “There, there” and noted that at least the Milky Way’s black holes are mostly in orbit rather than pinging around the galaxy randomly, which was reassuring enough to quell my immediate worry and replace it with the persistent, ongoing one about Fluffy and his eerie agenda.