We talked about many things on that long car ride to the Northeast Kingdom. We talked about the recent Hurricane Irene and the destruction of The Alchemist's brewpub. We talked about how Disney's Aladdin actually takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. Most importantly (BOO! GET TO THE POINT!), we talked about beer. The specific question I was asked was a simple one: How did I get into craft beer? It's a typical question, but being asked to recall how I got started while strapped in for a ride to one of New England's beer meccas made me realize how incredibly far I'd come from my earliest days of imbibing.
I never had much luck with drinking in High School. Seemed like every time someone "arranged" to get drinks for us, something fell through. The best I ever did was the occasional sip offered from my father and, of course, my first beer... a can of Guinness, replete with the "golfball" nitrogenating widget, snuck from my Pepere's basement (Pepere is French for grandfather, for those of you not refined enough to already know that) when I was but a lad. In my ignorance, I drank it straight from the can, but man did I ever feel cool and bad-assed doing so.
In College, I actually came to believe I didn't like beer. Of course, this is all thanks to the parade of watery and foul adjunct lagers that are so ubiquitous amongst the backwards-red-baseball-cap collegiate crowd. My first night on campus, I tagged along with my randomly assigned roommate to the off-campus apts, where I was promptly handed a lukewarm can of Bud Ice and told to do a waterfall until our host (we'll call him Brozo the Clown) told me to stop. I complied, but within a second, Brozo's phone rang, and my chugging was not allowed to end until I was at least 9 ounces deep. I felt like death and ended up heading back to the residence hall before long. Later that night, I ended up in the room next door playing a card game with new neighbors, loads of laughs, a cute redhead with a lip ring, and shots of straight Vodka. I ask you... WHICH WOULD YOU SPEND THE NEXT FOUR YEARS DRINKING?
Not to spoil the end, but I eventually learned there was good beer out there. REALLY good beer! It's crazy, I know. Bars like The Coat of Arms in Portsmouth, NH and The Barking Dog in Amesbury, MA introduced me to such delicious libations as Berkshire Brewing Company's Coffeehouse Porter and Wells & Young's Brewing Co's McEwan's Scotch Ale. It was probably the idea of having beer "with something in it" that appealed to me then. I liked coffee... maybe coffee beer was a good thing to try! That line of thinking. Before long, I was asking bartenders what other things I could have that were in any way similar to these wonderful, wonderful drinks.
Somewhere in there, I became aware of how much I'd missed thanks to being steered in the wrong direction in my college years. And, still in the early 'oughts, craft beer and microbreweries were becoming a much more common and accessible thing, and made it all the easier to make up for lost time. So I visited the breweries around me, including Berkshire Brewing Company, makers of one of the first beers I ever tried and truly loved. A wonderful bearded man (Whew! Finally found a way to tie beards into this!) we dubbed "Beer Wonka" showed us that they had many, many more delicious styles that, at the time, I had scarcely heard of. After several samples at the brewery, a nearby package store provided all of us with plenty of bombers, Coffeehouse Porter and otherwise, to fill our fridges for weeks to come. It was enough to make me (or a younger, fatter me) want to hug brewery equipment.
So, after a tumultuous start, and after years of our friends guessing "will they or won't they", beer and I got together at last. I canoodled with other early favorites like Theakston's Old Peculier and Abita Brewing Company's Turbodog. I spread out from the darks and found there was more loveliness to be had in beers like Stone Brewing Co's Arrogant Bastard Ale and even something as simple as Long Trail Brewing Company's Hit the Trail. But these were just the earliest of many to come. Fortuitously, I moved in to an apartment quite near a bottle shop with a decent craft selection that held monthly tastings so I could fulfill this new impulse (one craft beer drinkers know all too well), this voice in my head that said: "Hey, I haven't tried that yet!".
It wasn't long after that when I hooked up with some people that did monthly beer tastings of our own to explore further flung creations of craft. From here, I was off like a rocket and actively seeking out new brews rather than just merely being open to stumbling over them. It was these same people that I was in a car with while all these thoughts came flooding back, bringing me in a sort of full circle from the early days of my beer explorations.
Conclusion? Beer trips are good for your brain. In fact, next time, let's talk about some "beer corridors" where you can visit and sample great craft offerings from multiple breweries. I mean, I haven't even gotten into what happened on the trip yet, not to mention one of the most epic burgers since meat first met mouth.
Until then... how did you get into craft beer?
I also think that my first love of craft brew also came from BBC's Coffeehouse Porter. My first beers were Killian's, Guinness and the like. I even remember trying Smuttynose Pumpkin and hating it! Boy was I silly!
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until that visit to the Barking Dog to have several of those Coffeehouse Porters and the above mentioned visit to Beer Wonka that I got hooked.
I'm sure I had some stuff like Killian's, and I actually remember having Bass Ale and Sam's Light and tolerating them... but it wasn't until beers like Coffeehouse that I actually sought out beer.
ReplyDeletePalettes change, too. I remember I used to think Sam Adams Boston Lager was impossibly bitter. Maybe a better example... Harpoon IPA. Also used to think it was super bitter. A few years later, I thought it was too sweet. In fact, my first can of Heady Topper at home was because I wanted something properly bitter after being disappointed from drinking a Harpoon IPA. Not sure if it was just in my head, but I thought it was so sweet that it made my teeth hurt.