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Right now is possibly the best time in history to be a beer drinker. In terms of options and accessibility, it’s never been like this before. Any shmoe over the legal drinking age can walk into a liquor store, grocery store, or even a gas station, and be able to buy great beers that just 20 years ago were almost unobtainable. Anything from the classics we grew up with to exotic boutique beers can turn up anywhere, and even the priciest ones are less than $20 a bottle, most for less than $10, and generally more like $2. Great beers compete for table space with fine wines that cost anywhere from double to 100 times the price.
That should be all good, but the American Craft Beer Revolution in particular has created some road kill. Beer snobs stampeding to bigger and better beers routinely, and zealously trampled all over the stuff that came before, as if it needed to be punished for being so pedestrian. Or maybe they have some other issue with the old “fizzy yellow beer”, but for whatever reason they love to hate the stuff, and do so with unbridled enthusiasm.
I was no different, but at some point I started feeling self conscious about it. The cracks started to show in little ways …
- Depriving company of their preferred beer style because it was beneath me to stock it
- Sitting in cafés in the Caribbean eating local food in the tropical heat with a local fizzy yellow beer that worked perfectly
- Watching the movie Beerfest and wishing any of my beers were chuggable
I couldn’t continue hating this beer.
 A Piton on my table at the Caribbean Pirates café in Castries, St Lucia So yeah, I’m basically familiar with how beer in America dumbed down after prohibition, and as so often happens in unchecked capitalism, a few big players maximized their profits by constraining our choices to what was convenient for them. That was evil and unforgivable, and somebody will burn in Hell over the deal, but when they do, ironically, the product they perfected would be ideal for the occasion. They invented a style, a watered down version of Bohemian Pilsner, that could be reliably turned out in massive quantities at low cost, that was good enough for most people’s taste, and that was occasionally (the horror) a good choice.
I’m hardly going abandon craft beer, and may never again stock my old standard, the venerable Bud. I never could stand Miller Lite, and I think Red Stripe is my least favorite Caribbean beer. Heineken and Corona just perpetuate negative stereotypes about imported beer .
But if I’m at a crab boil, I’ll gladly take a Coors, or if I’m in the mood for a burger at the Bristol Tap, I’m going to wash it down with a pitcher of Bush, because, well, I’m not really sure why, but it works for me. Beer snobs will sometimes use the phrase “lawnmower beer” to rationalize drinking a refreshing beer that would otherwise be beneath them, and there are craft beers that fit this niche, but almost all the fizzy yellow beers fit it quite nicely. Save the craft beer for later.
So I’ve made a sort of peace with the American light lager, and I accept it as a legitimate style, with both good and bad examples, and occasions where I might choose it. I’m bored with the name calling from the high brow crowd, and I’m never going to look down my nose at people that choose light lagers, whatever their motive or rationale. I’ll still be beating the bushes for new and interesting beers, but with a little a little less zeal, and never passing over beers that are too uncool to get written up in Malt Advocate or whatnot.
OK. That’s over. Now please pour me some of that Gouden Carolus Cuvee Van De Keizer. It’s only, like, $10 for a 750ml bottle, and one of the best beverages in the world. That, and it goes great with just about any insanely delicious food.
Tom
For all my readers out there who are anxious for a new posting (play cricket sound effect), I just want to let you know that I’m still here and still intend to post something substantive. Eventually.
Where do successful bloggers get all this time? I guess it’s a priority thing.
Tom
Not so long ago I had a chance to have lunch at an open air café named “Le Select”, along with my wife and some friends of ours. It’s a modest place in a somewhat immodest town (Gustavia, St Barts), with local color, decent food, and a bit of pop-culture history. Turns out that at some time in the past, the place became associated with the Jimmy Buffet song “Cheeseburger in Paradise”, and there’s a sign outside saying so.
 Le Select, Gustavia, St Barts There was no way I was going to eat here and not have a cheeseburger, and so we did, and they were fine. A splash of Matouk’s West Indian Hot Sauce really jacked things up. We also had some great rum punch, paid for it all in euros, spoke junior high student French to the staff, and generally had one of those great, exotic, micro-adventures that make traveling so fun. Because, after all, we were having Cheeseburgers in Paradise, that were good enough for Jimmy Buffet himself, euphorically living the legend. We took pictures and bought the T-shirts and did the whole proper tourist thing.
After I got home, the thing was still stuck in my mind. I downloaded the song and actually listened to it for the first time in 30 years. Turns out there’s a nearby restaurant called Cheeseburger in Paradise that’s licensed by Buffet, and I’m still trying to contrive a reason to go there. I poked around on the restaurant’s site, and found a story about the origin of the Cheeseburger in Paradise, but it didn’t entirely match what I’d learned in St Bart’s.
Turns out, Buffet and crew, after living on junk food for days, really did sail into a Caribbean port and discover a place serving American style cheeseburgers (apparently unusual at the time), and they got all stoked about them and had a legendary time. But is was in Road Town on Tortola, and not in Gustavia after all. The event did become the inspiration for the song, and cheeseburgers became forever linked with Buffet and the Parrothead lifestyle, and the legend was officially born. But not at Le Select.
Darn. My historical adventure just lost all its gas. I felt like a doofus for being taken in so easily, and was unwittingly perpetuating the stereotype of the Stoopid American Tourist. I still had a good time, but not as good as I thought I’d had.
But I thought about all this a bit, and decided maybe the legend was working the way it was supposed to, anyway. Maybe all legends lose their power when they get bogged down with the truth, or at least, facts. I certainly enjoyed being there at the time, and it dredged up old memories from back when the song first came out. I found myself reflecting on the whole Parrothead thing, and thinking maybe these people aren’t idiots after all. The fact that multiple places or people can claim ownership of a legend is probably unavoidable, and may even enhance the legend (think “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane). Besides, in this case, the Cheeseburger was really just a metaphor for life’s simplest pleasures, and might as easily have been an elusive White Castle burger, or even just a chat with a friend or a cool breeze on a hot afternoon. What could matter less where the actual restaurant was, or what it was they ate.
On Buffet’s web site, he lists all the burger joints that had inspired him through life, and he mentions Le Select. Turns out he was actually flipping burgers there the first night they served them, and tourists that saw him thought he was just that washed up (judging by the sign, it must have been 1978). So Buffet had blessed the place after all, and since I was no longer hung up on the details, I feel lucky to have had a chance to go there, and experience the legend, exactly as it was meant to be.
Now off to Loch Ness!
Tom
Why did I start this blog? Some possibilities …
- Because I sometimes wanted to use more than 140 characters to describe something I ended up posting on twitter
- Because there’s some frustrated writer instinct buried in me that needed an outlet (this feels made up)
- I admire many food bloggers and secretly (or not so) wish to become one
- I also admire travel bloggers, and heck, that might be fun too
- Because participating in the Web2.0 cloud has become a standard feature of citizenship in the early 3rd millennium, and I don’t want to be slack
- Because I can (this seems most likely)
So I’m giving it a try, mostly just to see what happens. I’m thinking to post a mixture of personal revelations, editorial essays, life journal entries, and random posts. Once I’ve convinced myself that I’ll really make use of this, I may try to narrow the focus to something more worthwhile. But for now, it’s just an experiment to satisfy my curiosity.
We’ll see what evolves.
Tom
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