drinking

SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER—not sessionable, and not for wankers

nutrasique.com

I don’t get up early enough to verify this, but apparently the morning ritual around here involves the kids begging for “honey spoons”—spoonfuls of honey that precede breakfast. Any bears who are up at that time have to suffer, watching them gobble up the precious stuff. Even though I don’t really do solid food, honey makes me salivate as all good bears do when they catch sight of a beehive, but in my case it also makes me think of SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER.

I’ve mentioned this elixir before as a good go-to beer that measures favorably against a host of craft-beer variations on the honey brew. I like it, peeps; it’s refreshing and clean-tasting, with just enough weight and a nice long finish.

But beer wankers disagree with me. They disparage it!

What do they dislike about SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER? Well, wankers say it reminds them of high school, that it’s so “macro,” and that it doesn’t taste good warm—i.e., they can’t have a long, drawn-out beer-wanking “session” with it.

I didn’t know what “sessionable” beer was until I read beerbecue’s skewering (ha!) of the term. His contention that “session beer” is a pretentious term elicited 19 comments—more than he likely would have netted had he proposed adopting a Soylent Green policy or suggested we all kill a puppy.

If you’re not familiar with the idea that a <5% ABV qualifies a beer for a “session” during which tasters may sip and consider its qualities without getting thoroughly trashed, check out the article. But for alcoholics like me and probably some of my friends, a word like “sessionable” is utterly meaningless. A beer session for somebody like me goes on until the beer is gone or I pass out. If the beer is COORS LIGHT the process takes a little longer, but it still happens. I only weigh a few ounces, my fellow inebriates, so I don’t emerge from any drinking session unscathed, and nothing—save an abomination like O’DOUL’S—dilutes the eventual drunkenness that is in fact the express purpose of opening a bottle of anything, sessionable or not.

Being a live-and-let-live bear, I don’t mind what terms are bandied about concerning beer. But when the house is dry, I tend to surf the net and read about beer. And what I see is my fave daily beer being trashed by “session” beer drinkers. OMG! They say they wouldn’t have bought it but “it was in the house” (magically) or “someone brought it over” (lucky) or they “thought they’d give it a chance” (decent of them).

Here’s the skinny on SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER. It’s a gorgeous, clear amber with off-white foam and some lacing. The scent is slightly malty with honey up front, an aroma that pays off as this effervescent brew hits the tongue. Generous caramel notes open up as the fizz settles in the mouth with a crisp, quenching mouthfeel and a nice balance between sweet and bitter. The taste lingers satisfyingly, making for an interesting taste experience that categorically differs from most so-called “macro beer” experiences.

Yes, it is a mainstream beer with a reasonable but not bottom-shelf price. It’s refreshing in summer but weighty enough for winter (unusual for a lager)—and therefore ideal for spring and fall too. I totally love SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER.

But supposedly honey itself is almost more awesome. Did you know that honey is a natural antibacterial agent? Scientists are testing its potential to combat hospital-borne strep infections (constantly evolving to be one step ahead of even the most powerful antibiotics) and finding that honey kills off most strep cells. Wow!

Admittedly, I prefer SLEEMAN HONEY BROWN LAGER slightly to honey, which means that if I ever get a strep infection I might be an idiot and make a poultice with beer instead of honey—and end up as bear meat for flesh-eating disease. Wouldn’t that be disgusting? And then it would travel to my brain and turn me into a beer wanker.

 

STRONGBOW APPLE CIDER—An artful use of apples

All kinds of things happened while I was sleeping today. First of all, my dad is changing careers. I had no idea because I never ask him about stuff like that. I should, because how we get paid is pretty relevant to how we buy booze.

My dad is shutting down his business and taking a management job for another company. OMG! This means booze. Doesn’t it? Regular paycheques, a predictable booze budget?

Maybe some celebratory booze right now?

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The next thing that happened: a message for me on Plenty of Fish! Check it out, my fellow inebriates:

hey, 😉 wanna meet up tonight , for a good time 😉 call me 604 4xx 6xxx

I thought nobody was ever going to message me on Plenty of Fish. This woman is lovely and friendly and she wants to meet me tonight. I think I need some advice.

  • Should I wear clothes? All I have is a bow tie. Will that make my nudity more classic? Or more suggestive or Chippendales? Neither, perhaps?
  • Should I tell her I’m an alcoholic or just bring a discreet flask?
  • What does bus fare cost for bears?

And—oh no!—what if she is just messing with me? I decided to answer her note:

I’d love to meet you. You look like a very nice person. Is it okay if I bring a flask with me? (I am a functional alcoholic.) Also, should I wear clothes? Although I usually go nude, I hear it’s cold outside. Perhaps the frigid air would help me detect some anatomical details that have always eluded me. But I wouldn’t want to freak anyone out, haha.

Looking forward to chatting more.

LB

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Another weird thing about today was waking up surrounded by apples with faces. The kids have been augmenting apples with facial features for a contest called Artful Apple. The winner gets a family trip to the Okanagan. There were apples everywhere after the kids were done!

When I looked at them I immediately thought of STRONGBOW APPLE CIDER. Ordinarily I don’t gravitate to cider products unless I’ve exhausted the other alcoholic inventory. They are typically sweet and artificial with little more than a hint of actual fruit.

STRONGBOW is an exception. Tart, crisp, and definitively apply, this 5.3% cider is infinitely more refreshing than would-be competitors boasting flavors such as glacier berry, apple cinnamon, peach (keep going; the list is almost unlimited). What differentiates STRONGBOW is its lack of cloying sugar on the tongue. Clear yellow-gold in the glass and lightly sparkling, STRONGBOW serves up genuine apples—think Macintosh or Granny Smith, and not the rotten ones on the ground but the fresh, shiny ones in the orchard.

Compared to STRONGBOW, other ciders don’t even seem crafted for grown-ups. And looking at the kids’ apple efforts, I almost wonder if they wouldn’t care for a cider. A crappy dealcoholized one! And I’d toast their artful apples with a STRONGBOW.

So I just need my dad to put cider in the budget. He shouldn’t mind prioritizing that right now, right?

Back off, villagers

My Fellow Inebriates,

If you’ve been following me you know that at one time I had a price tag on me for $10, which covered the cost of two bears—one to go home with the customer, its twin to go to charity. Having acquired an irreversible taste for alcohol in the few weeks I lived at the liquor store, I was determined to fall into the first of these categories—that way I would be certain to go home with people purchasing alcohol. Logical, right?

Yet I failed to be fully logical when I chose my purchasers. (Yes, I chose them—I practically jumped at them.) Sure, they were loading their cart up with hooch, but the woman I’d come to know as my mother looked about 11 months pregnant.

She was 10 days past her due date, in fact, and accompanying my soon-to-be dad on a pre-Christmas booze-shopping trip so the house would be stocked for all the guests they expected that holiday. Little did I know, she’d done everything in her power to persuade Miss P to vacate her uterus before the onslaught of Christmas visitors, but Miss P was determined to remain inside. So there my mum was waddling around the liquor store, hoping some exercise might trigger labor.

My mum was painfully resigned to watching houseguests drink constantly for two weeks while she learned to nurse her new baby or—more dire—continued to jump up and down trying to dislodge Miss P sometime before 2006. Shopping for alcohol was the closest she could hope to come to enjoying alcohol.

So it wasn’t very logical of me to wink at them. If I’d known anything about pregnancy/nursing/parenting, I would not have been lured by the nine bottles of wine, the giant Bailey’s bottle, the magnum of champagne or the 25-year-old whiskey in their shopping cart. I would have waited—logically—for an alcoholic to buy me: someone with obvious jitters, for instance. Not a gravid woman and her clean-cut husband.

But I did wink at them, and next thing you know, they adopted me.

I was reminded of this by a comment from Emily (The Waiting—highly recommended), who, with eight weeks to go until her baby arrives, has already endured months of abstinence from alcohol and is having a very typical pregnant craving (which I have apparently been exacerbating) for BEER. Beer, people! As my mother can corroborate, pregnancy often brings on BAD-ASS cravings for beer, even among women who don’t ordinarily like it. My mother’s been through two full summers pregnant, and in each case she would have sold her soul for a beer.

And there’s almost nothing that makes society more hopping mad than the idea of a pregnant woman drinking.

Even if she’d collected a dozen authoritative medical papers asserting that one drink could not harm a third-trimester fetus, my mother would not have indulged.

Did she have the occasional sip from my dad’s glass? Sure. But only occasionally, and not in public. Because society vilifies women who drink while pregnant. That is, after it patronizes them with zero-tolerance doctrines about fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

Take the geezer handing out wine samples at the liquor store the day I was purchased. This man saw my mum heaving herself along near his table and PREEMPTIVELY called out to her: “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t give you a sample. I have very strong feelings about pregnant women and alcohol.”

My mum almost smacked him.

First of all, she didn’t want any of his f#cking Dixie-cup plonk.

Second, she hadn’t bellied up to his table so much as filled the entire store with her behemoth tummy. There was no hiding that tummy, and the last thing she had the slightest inclination to do was let fifty other shoppers watch her damage her baby by drinking a thimbleful of cheap pinot noir.

Third, she’d abstained from alcohol for nine months already. And guess what? She’d had a glass of wine on a couple of occasions before discovering her pregnancy, and her doctor had reassured her thoroughly that it was no big deal.

Fourth, it was no one’s effing business.

I was already in the cart at that point and I started getting frightened. Not only had I foolishly chosen family-type people who probably wouldn’t restock their liquor cabinet after Christmas; I was going home with a freaking enraged woman! I clung to the bottles, quivering.

My mother has remembered that old guy’s self-righteous and unsolicited remark verbatim for six years. Rarely has anything antagonized her so much.

Pregnancy is a unique condition in that society tends to put a collective stake in it. Whether they’re grabbing the belly uninvited, advising the gravid what to eat—or denouncing women for simply craving beer—people overstep boundaries around pregnant women. Get knocked up and you become public property.

It’s well established that alcohol and pregnancy don’t mix. Alcohol crosses the placental barrier, causing central nervous system damage, and is the leading cause of intellectual disability in the westernized world. What is not well established is the amount of alcohol that can harm a fetus.

Any OBGYN, unless he/she is a crackpot, will reassure a pregnant patient that the couple of drinks she might have had between conception and implantation cannot affect the fetus, and that fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is caused by excessive drinking during pregnancy, not by one drink. The problem is that scientists don’t know exactly what constitutes excessive drinking. There are too many variables to ascertain a cut-off, so doctors advise pregnant patients to avoid alcohol altogether.

There's a world of difference between heavy consumption and moderate consumption. Source: Wikipedia

Society has done a good job shaming women who don’t adopt the zero-tolerance doctrine. The handful of times my mum took a sip of my dad’s beer during her pregnancies, she did so very surreptitiously, knowing judgment was everywhere. Intellectually she knew one sip was fine, but she couldn’t feel good about doing it—and not because of logical health concerns but because she didn’t feel like being condemned.

Despite my expressed awe of women who eschew alcohol, my mother didn’t find it to be a constant hardship. It’s the sort of responsible commitment parents make, and continue to make, over a lifetime. A commitment made from parent to child, within a family.

Which is to say it has nothing to do with the idiot doling out vinegary pinot sips at the liquor store.

Sure, he might argue, it takes a village to raise a child, and he was just being a good villager.

But the thing about the village model is this:

The village is IN YOUR FACE from conception to birth, and then it fucks off. Yes, it royally fucks off and leaves parents to their own devices, trying to figure out parenthood with precious little village wisdom to help. The village is in your face if you want to prevent pregnancy, it’s in your face if you don’t want to continue being pregnant, and it’s in your face if you, pregnant, decide to take a half-glass of champagne during a wedding toast. The village is like an asshole backseat driver that only gives a shit about your child until it surpasses eight pounds.

Statistically a lot of women make bad choices about alcohol during pregnancy. But they make plenty of other bad choices, too, yet the magnifying glass remains stubbornly on their bellies instead of addressing the socioeconomic concerns that lead pregnant women to engage in reckless behavior.

I’m just a bear, and a drunken one at that, and I’ve meandered again. Emily asked me to recommend something for after Bebe comes. I’m going to say Guinness: low alcohol, B vitamins, and an incredibly satisfying sipper (the beer-review wankers would say “sessionable”). I’m not going to say Emily should have a Guinness right now because I’m not a doctor and I have no business dispensing advice. But I bet her doctor would say it’s all right.

After all, doctors used to prescribe Guinness to pregnant women.