beer

ASTROLIQUOR for Feb. 3-9—What the stars say you should drink!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Here’s your booze horoscope:

Everything you need is available, Aries. Strangers feel like friends, and friends feel like family. You’re constantly meeting new contacts, many of whom will soon prove valuable. Somebody might even lend you money if you’re lucky. How should you approach this new social phase? Why, liquor your friends up, and don’t hold back. Offer them equal parts rum, whiskey and vodka, plus orange juice to taste (I suggest “none”).

Taurus, you mustn’t go out in those skidmarked sweatpants. You’re going to meet someone this week—a Virgo or a Capricorn—who won’t appreciate that level of casualness. Consider washing your clothes or visiting the dry cleaner. Burn any items that are absolutely embarrassing. You have a chance to make a good impression. Consider upgrading from Canadian Club to Crown Royal.

You’ll be put to the test at work this week, Gemini, and if you don’t dig deep for your inner confidence, your colleagues will notice your insecurities. Alcohol is the obvious answer, but don’t just choose clear, odorless vodka—choose something flashy and own it. You might work in an environment where employees are allowed to drink Jagerbombs. Do it! But add some Bacardi 151 and cinnamon to make your drink stand out.

It’s difficult for you to forget the past, Cancer, but the next month will be much better if you try. If you can’t arrest your self-recriminating thoughts, drown them in alcohol. I think this will work wonders:

  • 2 oz lime-flavored rum
  • 1 oz Blue Curacao
  • 1/2 oz grenadine
  • 3 oz sweet-and-sour mix
  • Soda water (if you must)

Leo, you’re very irritable this week—so much so that your friends can’t even compliment you without getting their heads snapped off. Unless you can chill out you are destined for a bar fight. What you need is a project. Ignore any groundhogs’ predictions about spring coming early and fix yourself some wintry eggnog:

  • 4 egg yolks (separate them while sober)
  • 1/2 oz cream
  • 1 oz simple syrup
  • 1.5 oz tawny port
  • 3 oz bourbon
  • 7 oz milk

Shake ingredients together with ice, pour into a highball glass and sprinkle with nutmeg (but not too much—the nutmeg high isn’t worth it).

This is a good week for socializing, Virgo. You’ll be positively collecting new friends and acquaintances this week. Enjoy it while it lasts, because your popularity is riding a crescendo, and what goes up must come down. Alcohol will neither help nor hinder, but have some anyway. Why not try something weird, like lychee-flavored liqueur with grapefruit juice?

Libra, you will learn something unbelievable about yourself this week from a female friend or coworker. But you need to be careful; you tend to be tempted by ideas that might not be legal—marinating pot leaves in vodka, for example. If you are going to ignore my sincere advice not to do this, you need to follow instructions very carefully, watch the how-to video, and avoid getting busted.

You’re having some strange ruminations, Scorpio. You’re wondering what it’s all about, whether society can sustain itself in all its modern madness, and what will be left a thousand years from now. Will people still drive cars? Will there be colonies on Mars? How old will people be? Will everyone be naked because of global warming? These are great questions, but you’re having trouble turning them off when you try to sleep at night. So I have three words for you: Kahlua, Bailey’s, and creme de cacao (okay, five words).

Sagittarius, this is a great week to finish projects you’ve started and abandoned. You’ll find all sorts of historical leftovers: cases of Zima, weird liqueurs, discontinued beers. Sit down on your basement floor and start chugging. You can’t leave these items another moment; they might (gasp) expire. Oh…and about the other projects. They can wait until you run out of Zima. Friday brings fun and possibly romance, plus good news about a friend who’s been sick.

You’re not so steady this week, Capricorn. One minute you’re happy and confident, the next whimpering and emotional. The timing is bad! You have a jealous coworker who’s just waiting for you to show weakness so he/she can sabotage you at work. Quick! You need to pull yourself together by combining Red Bull with alcohol, exactly the way I discourage doing elsewhere. How about Red Bull with berry-flavored Bacardi and peach schnapps? Throw some cranberries in for vitamins and fiber—you need a boost.

Aquarius, you need a vacation, even if your coworkers think your brain is on a permanent one. You don’t have any money, though, so you might need to make your holiday less a physical trip than a mental one, and alcohol always helps with that. Still, you need to keep it on the cheap side. Think beer, rum, and coca cola. If it feels a little trailer-park, well, it is, so add some hot sauce and live it up.

Pisces, you’ve worked hard lately to regain your stability, and now your taste for luxury is asserting itself. Put the credit card away! Don’t even think of blowing all your money on a night out. Find another natural homebody and make a drunken evening for yourselves at home. You can do a lot with some vodka and bananas. Right? I mean, it makes a good drink.

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).

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.”