alcohol

No chardonnay for you, zombies!!

My Fellow Inebriates,

No matter what we like to think, the little people run the show around here. This makes my days much more wholesome than I’d prefer. It also means a lot of random and scary things happen to me. You never know—I could get sealed up in a fluffy pink purse for days, freaking out, and no one would help me.

It’s all about imagination, though. For four- and five-year-old girls it’s a pink and purple world, all unicorns and birthday parties and singing ponies. They love to make wishes. In fact, they’ll wish on anything: dandelion seeds, birthday candles, the moon—and lately the bay leaf in the soup. These monkeys will fight to get that bay leaf, because they believe it has magical powers. It’s a damn good thing no one’s grooming them to be albino hunters, because they have enough savagery to be good at it.

So last night the five-year-old emerged from the evening scrap with the coveted bay leaf. With 24 days to go until Santa comes, I figured she’d wish for presents or a big Christmas tree or maybe a trip to Walmart to buy some giant blow-up snowman or something. But she didn’t. Instead little Cindy-Lou Who said: “My wish is for Granny to come back so she can be here for Christmas.”

OMG. See, here’s the thing. Granny is dead. She died almost a month ago. So if Granny did come back she’d be, well, a zombie. My parents should really have explained that to their well-meaning little girl, don’t you think? They should have said, “Hey now, don’t go wishing for Granny to come back from the dead. We have to keep the dead dead. Otherwise they become the undead. The only way Granny can come back is as a zombie, and you don’t want that. Do you, kiddo?”

Just that simple! A five-year-old could totally understand that! But instead my parents just kept letting her make that scary wish on the bay leaf. I’m a tiny bit embarrassed to tell you…I’m actually terrified it will come true.

And I am freaking scared of zombies!!

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Granny. She was a person who understood bears, and she would sometimes split a bottle of chardonnay with me, although if we’re being honest she usually got most of it. It’s comforting to think she’s at some wine bar in the sky, but my fervent little human friends have seeded a more sinister idea now—that Granny will come lurching back from the dead looking for us. OMG!

The first order of business, then, is to eliminate the white wine, because ZG (Zombie Granny) would come looking for that first. Luckily (in this case at least) we don’t carry much inventory at LB HQ, but we do have one gorgeous bottle of California Cult Classics chardonnay tucked away. OMG, chardonnay! That would be ZG’s absolute favorite. So we obviously have to drink it so it’s not here, tempting the undead.

DUCHY ORIGINALS ORGANIC OLD RUBY ALE

My Fellow Inebriates,

Others have reviewed this nice organic ale much more thoughtfully than I, and even taken their own pictures. My mum bought it because it was $3.50 and she didn’t feel like using her debit card “to bootleg for animals.”

The label and marketing remind me a bit of Marks & Spencer; the bottle has that generic big-corporate-entity feel to it, like the beer you can buy at Trader Joe’s or Costco in the States. It’s not totally evil though—the beer is organically produced on land administered by Prince Charles as part of a charity project now 20 years strong.

I was a charity bear once, so I’m gladdened to know some of the profits get skimmed off to help people in need. And just as cool, OLD RUBY ALE is produced sustainably. Even a hedonistic bear with an apocalyptic bent can appreciate that no one’s raping the land to create beer.

It’s also nice to know that if I get a head-splitting hangover from OLD RUBY ALE it’s because I drank enough to get thoroughly shitfaced—not because of chemical additives.

But how does it taste?

My tastebuds are Canadian, so essentially they’re ADHD tastebuds—they need beer to crackle and fizz and spark in the mouth like so much microscopic bubble wrap. I can’t crack a beer without automatically anticipating fizz. So when our bottle of OLD RUBY ALE opened not with a burst but a sigh, I sighed also. But I still wanted to drink it very badly. I had some bad-ass DTs to manage or at least get down to a dull roar.

The low carbonation was less disappointing than you’d think. After all, a lot of Canadian swill needs to be hyper-carbonated to mask its offensive flavor, so you have to hand it to a less fizzy beer like OLD RUBY ALE for strutting its stuff without that effervescent crutch.

It had a lovely auburn color in the glass. It wafted malt and slight breadiness in nice harmony. First sips hinted initially at bitterness but morphed into sweetness—a bit simple on the palate. It felt thin in the mouth and, while never offensive, failed somehow to deliver much beyond those first impressions. And, of course, it was flat.