Confessions of a two-drink weakling
There’s this early issue of the Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men
Colossus: Kitty’s grown so much while I was… away. I know I feel the same for her as I once did, but does she? How can I expose her to the possibility of such pain? … I’m riding a monster’s nostrils. I should really concentrate.
Shadowcat: I loved Colossus once. I would have given my life for him. Then he gave his for all of us. How do I feel about him now? Ah, this is so complicated! [Pause] I should really pay attention.
Wolverine: … I really like beer.
It is ludicrous for me to even presume to write something about alcohol. I can’t drink red wine at all. I get a hangover from a friggin’ look at a bottle of Chardonnay. Two glasses of pretty much anything alcoholic is all it takes for me to lose all sense of my legs below the knee. Oh, I can still walk, but it’s oddly like floating over a chasm. Don’t look down!
I have been gifted with the opportunity over the last few years, through no merit of my own, I might add, to taste some stunning wines. My palate has, in fact, developed. I’ve learned to smell and taste things–things!–in wine. I’ve learned to like bubbly, at least when it’s Prosecco, or Sumac Ridge‘s incomparable Stellar’s Jay Brut. I’ve had crazy mad crushes on Wild Goose Autumn Gold, not to mention pretty much everything Tinhorn Creek has ever made, and all Iniskillin‘s lovely, complex ice wines.
The wine has been great. It has been an unbelievable experience to explore an area about which I knew absolutely nothing. (Current knowledge now equals nothing minus one.) But there are days when the upshot of all this exploration and delight boils down to this: I really like beer.
Some of you may not know this, but Canada’s liquor laws are not those of the U.S. Our grocery stores don’t have a booze aisle. Seriously. A thing some of us do when we go South is go into food stores just to look at the booze aisle! “Wowww,” we say. “You can buy wine and Pop-tarts under the same roof!”
When I was growing up in Alberta, you see, all booze came from government liquor stores. These were dour concrete blocks, laid out with all the breezy savoir faire of a maximum security prison on the verge of emergency lockdown, and you couldn’t go into them until you were of age, unless you lived in a small town and your dad was one of the bigtime regulars, if you know what I mean, in which case they pretended not to see you.
Nowadays, Alberta has deregulated to the point where there are liquor stores everywhere! In your Christmas tree! Under your front porch! In a kiosk in your doctor’s office next door to the room where you are giving birth! They have buy ten, get a free one keg cards! And daycares that dispense sippy cups in brown paper bags to your kiddies! It’s crazy, I tell you!
But even in Big Sky Country, the groceries still don’t have a booze aisle, and so the tragic, profit-deprived big food purveyors do the next best thing, by putting an adjunct building full of beer and wine in their parking lots. To me, these look like those little hut-sized “temporary” classrooms they put outside of schools in the Seventies, all whilst blithely assuring everyone that these would be gone once the school got Expanded One Day.
(I should mention that I’m stone cold sober as I type these words, despite the above rambling.)
Anyway. One day in Calgary at the Superstore not-really-temporary booze shack, the nine year old supervisor of the store turned me on to Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Beer. I did not know it at the time, but this fellow was not only a proud graduate of the Brown Bag Sippy Cup Daycare, he was the Booze Cupid of my world.
According to brewer Dougal Sharp (Whom I’ve met! Again, through no merit of my own! Unless you count having adequate table manners!) the discovery of the oak-aged beer process was an accident. But soon enough, they started doing it on purpose. And selling it to me. And maybe you!
Oh, this beer! It has this nutty, Scotchy, caramelly, utterly numtastic flavor. The limited edition Highland Cask has apricot notes and takes forever to drink, if only because I spend thirty minutes squeaking in ecstasy between sips.
My tragic problem, and your gain, is this: even now, with the tasting and learning and palatting, I live a rather sedate, early-to-bed, early-to-rise, almost monastic lifestyle, with comparatively few liquor-themed indulgences. I simply cannot drink enough to keep these guys in haggis. My six beer a year habit won’t do the trick, people!
All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that I am sincerely hoping a few of you might enjoy picking up the slack. Don’t do it for Dougal. Don’t do it for me, or even Wolverine. Do it for yourself.
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Booze Cupid. Hee!
And he can only go back to Mount Olympus once he’s put 100 people together with their favorite drink!
Mmm, beer. I’ll keep an eye out for it. Matt and I like Session and Fat Tire and I just found a brilliant hard cider called… Wandering Aegus or something like that. It’s fantastic.
A good cider is a thing of beauty!
Not available at Whole Foods, possibly not in Texas at all because apparently Texas has complicated import regs around beer (so the also nine year old guy stocking the beer told me).
Of course the reputation of Texas is such that none of us are surprised when your nine year olds drink beer.