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BEACHCOMBER SUMMER ALE—Enjoy, designated passengers

My Fellow Inebriates,

This week the car decided it no longer wanted my mother driving it. Perhaps it got fed up with her sighs about its eight-cylinder profligacy. Maybe it remembered the sweltering day when she parked it under trees that drooled sap over its windshield. Or finally it just exercised a judgment call on her lack of coolness.

How did the BMW manage to bar my mother—but not my father—from driving it?

Ingeniously. The car has automatic seats, adjustable along half a dozen parameters and then—since no two drivers’ asses are exactly alike—recordable into memory.

bmw seat memory

Jiggle the levers up, down, and around until not just the seat but the mirrors and steering column are positioned exactly as you like them, then hit the “M” button followed by your number (1, 2, or 3). Since Dad’s the primary driver, he took number 1. Mum took number 2, and my friend Scarybear claims he has the number 3 setting “for midnight drives.” Voilá! That crazy car remembers your personal settings, so if somebody else changes them, all you have to do is press your button and your ass is happy again.

Midnight drives indeed. If you ever see something like this driving an oncoming vehicle, hand over your keys.

Midnight drives indeed. If you ever see something like this driving an oncoming vehicle, hand over your keys.

If the BMW itself is smug about its wonderful car seats, Dad is just grateful. Only the BMW provides the support he needs when his lower back hurts. He’ll even go for a long drive just to assuage back pain. Just him and the clever red car.

And even though most of the BMW’s features make Mum roll her eyes, she secretly loves the automatic seats—or at least she did until this week. That’s when the car got fed up with her bullshit comments about preferring “environmentally friendly” vehicles and froze Dad’s seat settings in place.

All very well if Mum were 5’10” like Dad, but she’s practically a Hobbit. If the car could actually achieve Scarybear-appropriate settings, those would be closer to my Mum’s number 2 than Dad’s number 1. Even if the car didn’t maliciously shut her out of its seat-adjusting wonderfulness, it probably just got fatigued going from one extreme to the other and back all the time.

Some men would be happy having the car all to themselves. For Dad it means driving the kids everywhere—swimming lessons, birthday parties, you name it. If we run out of milk, he has to go get it. The same goes for beer.

So what did he get?

beachcomber-case-and-bottle-mockActually, Mum picked beer up before the car decided to take its revenge on her. BEACHCOMBER SUMMER ALE from Vancouver Island Brewery siren-called her from the liquor-store shelf on her last visit, and the car seemed okay about allowing it in the trunk. The car did not, however, point out that she’d accidentally bought a weissbeer; it isn’t quite smart enough to know she wouldn’t have intentionally picked a brew with fruity tasting notes. That, or it just thought “fuck you” and off they went.

For what it is, BEACHCOMBER SUMMER ALE does it well. Cloudy gold and hop-redolent, this unfiltered beer comes across clean and fizzy yet tropical with grapefruit predominating over a basic cereal foundation. It’s crisp and refreshing but not so light that those hops won’t rough you up a little. The fruit doesn’t stray into rotting-orchard territory, but all the same, if you don’t get the fruit-and-beer concept, you probably won’t be too excited about BEACHCOMBER.

I was, of course, excited. Whenever beer is opened, I get excited. And Mum should be excited too, because her next revelation was this, leveled at Dad:

“Ha! Now you are always the designated driver.”

DOAle—Joey Shithead says don’t waste beer

My Fellow Inebriates,

Miss P might be the only kid in grade 2 who knows how to use the word “penultimate” correctly. On this, the Monday of the penultimate week of school, she goes armed with that word-gem and a host of other finicky English facts. She knows, for instance, that to decimate is not to wipe out but to reduce by ten percent. That she doesn’t quite understand “ten percent” does not deter my parents from filling her head with this and other grammatical gobbledygook. They are social misfits, and while they’re high-fiving each other about P’s vocabulary, P is shoving tomatoes into her mouth like a freaking animal because there are, shall we say, educational gaps at LBHQ, and etiquette is one of them.

Meanwhile, V has figured out the best way to expose our little world. “Would you like some alcohol?” she asks, and then cracks up. I’m betting that when Nana & Papa show up this afternoon, the first thing she’ll say is, “Would you like some alcohol?”

DOAleThey will luck out, because Dry Weekdays have mercifully ended and we have a small supply of HERMANN’S DARK LAGER plus a chilled bottle of CUMA TORRONTES. Unfortunately we don’t have any more DOAle, Old Yale Brewing Co.’s contribution to the CBC Music beer band twitter project. The challenge? To mash up a Canadian band name with a beer style under the hashtag #CDNbandbeer. Since May 17, the resulting brews have been hitting liquor store shelves every Friday.

DOAle need hardly be explained to Vancouverites like my parents who’ve sacrificed many an ear cilium attending 120-dB DOA shows. DOA has anchored the Vancouver punk scene since the very late 1970s, with Joey “Shithead” Keithley the steadfast frontman throughout. Attaching the DOA label to beer was a no-brainer for Keithley, who reminisces about the integral role beer played for DOA in an interview with CBC, ending with a stern admonishment not to waste beer.

Joey Shithead says don't waste beer.

Joey Shithead says don’t waste beer.

And waste it we did not, although it sure disappeared quickly. DOAle is a darkly translucent cola-brown ale with a rich tan head. The aroma is rich and malty with generous lashings of espresso, chocolate, and toasty malt. Up front you get coffee on the palate with a sweet but restrained honey backnote and a lengthy bitter finish. The mouthfeel is substantial but crisp. At 5% alcohol it’s crying out for a “sessionable” label from the sort of beer wanker who’d get trampled at a DOA show (don’t look at me, I’d be freaking terrified). This is a very serious beer and in some ways a departure from the copious smashed-up Pilsner empties I associate with DOA, but still a good tribute to a legendary band.

And we still have half a dozen years and a Justin Bieber phase to go before P even thinks of going to see DOA. Will Joey Shithead still be there? Damn likely. But this beer probably won’t, so you should grab some now.

RUSSELL CREAM ALE—Won’t start a fight, or at least stays in the middle

My Fellow Inebriates,

Miss P never had a kindergarten nemesis, but of course Miss V has found hers. If you met V, you’d understand how natural this is. You’d know, after having a meal at the LBHQ table or witnessing bedtime, that V cannot operate without adversaries. She has to live with the ones at home, which means everybody gets along most of the time—but her school nemesis is another story.

PaperCamera Veronica 2012-05-13-11-47-16Take V at the end of a long row of monkey bars. From across the span she sees “H” starting to swing across, bar by bar. This is a logical prompt for V to start from her own side, monkeying her way with characteristic aggression, surely anticipating a clash in the middle and prepared to hang there until Saturday or her nemesis gives up and drops.

In fairness to V, H has been pretty mean to her this year.

In fairness to H, V’s reports are not terribly objective.

According to their teacher, they have a real thing going, and that’s why they sit at opposite sides of the classroom. The teacher does her best to prevent matter meeting antimatter, but she can only do so much, especially when the two seek each other out.

“That’s got to be stressful for the teacher. You should pack a beer for her with V’s homework,” I told my parents, generously thinking of our small stock of RUSSELL CREAM ALE.

What? You think other parents don’t send beer to school with their kids?

russell cream aleYou knew this already, but my parents aren’t that kind of progressive thinker. Oh well—more for us.

RUSSELL CREAM ALE is pretty quintessential—can you say “pretty quintessential”?—for the brew. It pours a clear, deep amber with a soapy-hued head that takes a few minutes to dissipate. Inhale and you get sweet malt and nuts and pronounced breadiness with some floral hops chiming in. The flavor is mild, with the hops pulling their punches until the aftertaste, where they linger with hints of fruit and weeds, providing an effective balance to the initial malty sweetness. The beer sits on your palate politely—kind of a Goldilocks mouthfeel, which obviously passes muster with bears, particularly this one.

Overall, RUSSELL CREAM ALE is nicely balanced although not especially memorable. Just a solid, good-tasting, perfectly standard exemplar of the kind of cream ale your barkeeper might pour you from the tap. In other words—totally non-provoking and non-confrontational—the sort of thing I bet V’s teacher could have used this morning.