Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
One morning when I was three or four years old, I was the first in my house to wake up. I spied a cup of apple juice left out from the night before and set to sipping.
It was beer. I spat it out, repulsed and mad as hell.
A few years later, I either snuck or was graciously granted a sip of Sea Dog Blueberry Ale from a relative.
My immediate reaction was, “Wait, beer can be good?”
Beer, coffee and the opposite sex: I’m not sure how we go from hating these things as youngsters to writing columns about them as adults, but I concede that they’re each magnetizing forces from youth to maturity.
When Ben Franklin said, “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” he didn’t begin with “beer and wine and spirits” or simply “alcohol.” Beer is a culturally permeating force, and I’m going to take a stab at explaining why.
It’s the most accessible of alcoholic beverages. There is no way to classify who drinks Sam Adams or Budweiser, Guinness or Geary’s. For every college first-year drinking a Natty Ice on a Friday night, there’s a crazy uncle bringing a 30-rack to a family reunion. For every flannel-donning hipster chugging a PBR, there’s a tough-as-nails biker couple toasting two tallboys at a diner on Route 66. And for every old Englishman sipping a Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout at a pub in Yorkshire, there’s an American 20-something trying to track down their first bottle.
And there’s still room for beer connoisseurs and elitists. There are multi-hundred dollar single bottles to scout out – see Sam Adams’ Utopias, the world’s most alcoholic beer, hovering around 25 percent alcohol by volume – or brews crafted in small batches just once a year.
Wine and spirits, on the other hand, leave a huge gap in the middle: The partiers pounding shots of cheap liquor and concocting shabby mixes with soda or Kool-Aid versus the classy types sipping scotch or tequila in a tumbler with a couple ice cubes. With wine, partiers – again – killing $8 bottles versus extravagant types buying $500 selections at dinner. Yes, I’ve seen one singular person, a college kid, sip liquor delicately, and I’ve met others who defy these stereotypes. Casual cocktail fans do exist, but the disparity between people getting sloshed and snobs nursing their astronomically-priced drinks is huge.
Not so with beer. There’s room for snobbery, but it doesn’t dominate. The person who plunks down $5 for a Dogfish Head at a bar can rib the $1 Bud drinker all they want, but the common denominator remains: They’re drinking beer.
All alcohol-imbued beverages have merit, but beer is the master. There’s a reason Abraham Lincoln said, “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”
Smart fella.
