The beer quest can be an expensive hobby, and with my funds limited as they are, I decided to seek employment in the world of groceries. My part-time job has paid well, but with it being summer, production at the Baldner Brewery has ground to a halt with work, travel, and hobbies.
Speaking of hobbies, the Mrs. and I went to Houston to pick up two genuine seats from the Astrodome (circa 1965 - 1999). The trip was quick, the Astros were not in town, and so we visited a few areas, ate, and sampled local beers at a pub in Kemah. Kemah sits along the bay and not along the Gulf, and yet it has developed a brand of its own which includes small art markets, seafood places, and pubs and such (marinas, boat sales, and such). I wrote the names of none of the beers I tried down for reasons I will explain later, but there is a growing industry of small craft beer makers along the coast in that area.
With the seats now in the house, we have dedicated ourselves to watching baseball in the cave (it's a catch-all cave, not just a man-cave), drinking refreshingly cold beer and pretending we are back in the Astrodome watching the Astros who, for the most part, are playing much more competitively than in the recent past. So, along with baseball, summer is about beer, and the beer changes dramatically in the summer.
It is said if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. The moron who created the quote was probably overcoming some issue and the self-help book he or she was in made a quip that created that image in his or her mind. Then they went around giving their self-help lectures and used their quick-witted quippy quote to cheer up the downtrodden they were speaking to. Non-sense. If life gives you lemons, make lemon flavored beer and shut up and quit your whining.
Lemon is the citrus of choice in the summer. My own beer for the summer was a "witbier," or white beer. One you commonly drink is Blue Moon which is the exception to the rule with orange as the mainstay of its taste. The witbier I made uses orange peels in its recipe, but that has been the exception. Almost every other beer on the market is a lemon or lemonade added beer. As a general rule, I usually think real men, or real beer drinkers, play a hand that shows they aren't when they put fruit in their beer (or drinks in general). In this case, I have created an exception to the rule called Summer Rules for Consuming an Ale.
So, the next two weeks, Average Guy will feature about four prominent summer ales - two summer pils and two lemon flavored beers. This is added to the previous review of the Sam Adams Summer Ale which features... lemons.
If someone walks up to you and says, "If life gives you lemons, drink lemonade," belt them, and as they fall to the ground, comfort them with a summer ale or pilsner and tell them you are bored with clichés used as psychobabble. Promptly apologize, tell them you are just an average guy and don't need such BS in your life, and quickly leave.
More later, but just writing this made me thirsty.
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