lager

HELL’S GATE GENUINE PALE ALE—Embrace your inner Walmart Person

My Fellow Inebriates,

If my dad would buy himself a man-purse, perhaps I could ride in it for his liquor store forays. I could steer him away from weird things like FRÜLI and toward items more conducive to drunken oblivion. But despite my dad’s metrosexual penchant for getting frequent haircuts, he’s shown no inclination to buy a man-purse.

He’s mostly trustworthy when he goes liquor shopping. Yesterday he brought home a budget-minded six-pack of HELL’S GATE GENUINE PALE ALE with “crisp, bold flavour” and 5% alcohol. This is a brand past which both my parents have walked many times, expecting bottom-shelf nastiness. But when you’ve brewed your own using hop pellets and drunk the whole supply with minimal complaint, how nasty can any liquor store offering possibly be?

With no pretence of subtlety, HELL’S GATE will set you back $7.99 for six cans. My heart leapt when my dad walked in with them, and I was so grateful that I thought I’d rely on his tasting notes.

“Rough”

This comment seems a little restrained for a beer whose one-color-printed cans contain a golden, slightly hazy ale wafting a honey-like odor commingled with overcooked vegetables. Undisciplined sweetness hits the tongue while malt and hops trip over each other—but over to the side as second-fiddle players. I taste pellets here but I could be wrong, and if the beer is close to freezing it’s forgivable. Heavy carbonation and icy cold are true friends to HELL’S GATE GENUINE PALE ALE—strip away these conditions and its random flavors go berserk, appalling the tastebuds with funky, stewed characteristics conveyed via a medium mouthfeel and a finish that overstays its welcome in the mouth.

“Not smooth or creamy or any of those things”

What I’m really saying is I loved this beer. This is a camping beer—appropriately sweet for breakfast and so discordant in its baseline flavor array that it’s combinable with any food from baked beans to marshmallows. Throw a couple of flats of HELL’S GATE in your beater car, hope like hell it won’t break down before you reach that illegal camping site where you have to dig a hole for your nightsoil, then seek out People of Walmart who may be sharing your free campsite, jiggling their muffintops and chawin’ on jerky as they turn the beach into a giant ashtray. Break out your HELL’S GATE and bask in their approbation at “what you brung”; “lay” around with them and hurl double negatives into the starry sky…ahhhhh!

“It was beside the Cariboo cans”

My dad considers my praise for HELL’S GATE—which he regards as pitched at lager drinkers with a hankering to expand their beer-drinking repertoire (slightly)—overexuberant. Anyone considering it as a lager-to-ale gateway would probably never approach another ale after the GENUINE PALE ALE experiment ended. He may be right.

And there’s no reason you couldn’t take a decent beer on a camping trip. I’ve just never tried it before.

And my offer still stands: If my dad will get himself a man-purse, I’ll be happy to help him make better beer purchases.

ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT—As perplexing as a lightweight Ben Wa ball

Very occasionally my mum and her friends talk about interesting things, which makes me prick up my ears for tidbits that go beyond the ordinary childrearing conversational din. This happened today at the mention of Ben Wa balls, although the context and lead-up eluded me. One minute she and her two buddies were talking about some teacher-student spat; the next they were discussing marble-size balls that one might insert into oneself.

Needing to know more (while remaining deliberately blind to any context involving my mother), I hit the Internet. What on earth are these mysterious Ben Wa balls?

Turns out they have some very respectable medical uses (in which case they usually get renamed “Kegel exercisers”) as well as some hedonistic and even perplexing uses. You definitely need a cavity in which to place them, which makes my research strictly academic.

I know my fellow inebriates are very well informed about a host of subjects and therefore do not need a play-by-play description of how to thrust foreign objects into either nether region and then retrieve them. You all know how to do this, I’m sure. Unlike yours truly, you have healthy orifices that may or may not be receptive. So I can dispense with the obvious, which leaves (maybe arbitrarily) the following:

  • Insert one ball at a time; it’s not a race, people.
  • If a ball slips out in public, look around vapidly and say, “Oh look one of my kid’s bouncy balls—where did that come from? Does anyone have any jacks?” Then, if planning to surreptitiously slip it back in, give it a wash.
  • If a ball doesn’t want to slip out, try jumping around, bearing down, or forcing a sneeze. If you’re fearful they won’t ever come out, consider purchasing a retrieval cord. (Incidentally, this is a good option for rear-entry Ben Wa activity, in which—unlike front-entry Ben Wa activity—balls can go MIA indefinitely.)
  • The heavier the balls, the more likely they are to fall out. Latex ones are lighter than metal—but porous and less easy to clean. Metal ones clean up better but they do set off airport metal detectors.

If you didn’t gather it from the foregoing, or you’ve missed any previous laments about the fact, I do not have an anal cavity. Which means all this information is…a gift. If you find this gift dubious, then here’s a beer review:

ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT, a Spanish one-off purchased by my dad, comes in a slick-looking bottle. The word “inedit” means “never been done before,” an always ominous phrase, especially when the beer in question sports no more than 4.8% alcohol. Nevertheless it comes in a big honking bottle promising a wheat-lager style mix-up with citrus topnotes and coriander supporting notes. This sounded like a decent gamble to my dad when he bought it, and it was in the sense that, as soon as my mum got one taste of it, she handed her half over. Dad got twice the beer he bargained for and probably ten times as much as he wanted. And me—I got swacked out of my head, which is what happens when either of my parents lets some undesirable booze languish on the counter.

What was so objectionable about ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT? It pours hazy and straw-colored with little foam to speak of. Wafting lemon predominantly with yeast and coriander, its stated objective is to pair with “the most exquisite and challenging foods.” These include, per its marketing materials, asparagus. (Do you like “challenging” foods? Do you like foods that make your pee pungent? OMG, what effect would asparagus pee have on Ben Wa balls?)

My dad, even though he gutted it out and eventually finished the whole bottle of ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT, thought it was a pretender—light, watery, and wheaty with some weird, competing fruit notes—like a wannabe Unibroue beer, except not.

I think any beer that offers less than 5% alcohol is suspect. It’s like a lightweight Ben Wa ball that feels really odd going in, but then you forget all about it and it doesn’t have the weight to just drop out on its own, so if you don’t have a retrieval cord, eventually your doctor will find it. That’s exactly what ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT is like.

POWDER MOUNTAIN LAGER—Refreshment for a cruel world

I had a rare ride-along with Miss V today after while her sister was in school. These outings take ages; V likes to examine everything minutely and scatter every dandelion in sight. Nothing escapes her notice.

About halfway home she stopped to watch a centipede being attacked by ten or so ants. Completely beset, the victim struggled to wriggle away from its tormenters, which were presumably trying to incapacitate it, eat it, and/or take it to their queen.

Watching that centipede thrash helplessly from belly to back was pretty gross. I wondered how long the battle would last. Were the ants biting it? Would it eventually pass out in agony or remain unconscious while they vivisected it? The process seemed extraordinarily cruel and drawn out—and for animals with short lifespans, I wondered morbidly, is there a time-dilation effect? Does a day feel like a month to a centipede, being such a large percentage of its lifetime compared to ours? How protracted, then, is its perceived suffering?

V said she hoped the ants would win. She watched intently as the belly-up centipede failed to right itself while the ants went at it mercilessly. There was no help for it.

Only when V remembered she’d been promised a cookie at Save-On Foods did she, still rooting for the ants, acquiesce to leave the inundated creature.

You almost have to have a four-year-old tour guide to notice stuff like this. The insect world teems below us in unfathomable populations. For every ant-on-centipede onslaught above ground there must be trillions below—uncountable insect cruelty and indifference. For every beleaguered arthropod or unenviable piece of spider prey there must be further infinities of predation, pain, and suffering.

I suddenly felt very small and overwhelmed. The whole planet seemed churning with barbarism, mostly going on unnoticed.

OMG!

And the hard reality dawned on me:

If the whole world—universe even—can remain indifferent to the excruciating death throes of one small creature, how can I expect anyone to give me a beer just to assuage a few tremors?

The thought swept me up like a bus full of evolutionary biologists. Not only did I feel very small; I felt very alone.

In a world of impassivity toward suffering, who would even think to give me a beer?

It wouldn’t even have to be a special beer. Whistler Brewing Company’s POWDER MOUNTAIN LAGER, one of the four offerings in its Travel Pack, would do just fine.

Pale straw-gold with bright white foam and firework effervescence (think Pop Rocks), this lager was an unlikely beer in our fridge. My parents never buy lagers except when they’re part of exciting mixer packs, and invariably those lagers get drunk last. But they’re certainly welcome at LBHQ, particularly as Langley enters earth-scorching season and the sun proceeds indifferently to flash-fry earthworms on the ground.

POWDER MOUNTAIN LAGER has a light and slightly hoppy aroma with a touch of background sweetness, all of which is practically unnoticeable amid a refreshing carbonation frenzy. It’s a party in the mouth, this lager, berserk with fizz, but unlike some lagers and particularly some other Whistler Brewing Company products, it has a surprisingly substantial mouthfeel yet finishes cleanly.

There are plenty of unsatisfying lagers on the market offering simple CO2 pyrotechnics as a fill-in for flavor, but POWDER MOUNTAIN LAGER deserves credit for being a bit more. I bet a crisp, icy-cold glass right now would alleviate my anxieties about being a small bear in a big, cold universe, plus it would take care of my DTs.

I did propose this to my mum, who said, unfeelingly:

“Get a grip, LB, it’s 9:00 a.m.”