June 2010

This is one of the beers that came in the New Belgium Folly Pack, and of the four beers in the pack, this one is definitely my favorite. It's a dark, sweet, malt beer, not too heavy, and though it's not a session beer, it's a reasonable 5.6 ABV%, which means if you're having friends over for a barbecue, you can have a couple or three over the course of the evening. Note, by the way that this is a Belgian style ale; it's a bit lighter than a traditional Belgian ale (Try New Belgium's Abbey Ale for a beer that's closer to the Belgian monastic brewing tradition). New Belgium is not kidding when they call it an "Enlightened Black Ale." That's a very good description.

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This is the first New Belgium beer I ever tried, and their flagship brew. New Belgium's Fat Tire is one of those beers that's reliably good, though I'm still hoping to try it on tap. When founding Brewmaster Jeff Lebesch began New Belgium, he was inspired by a bike trip through Belgium to create Belgian style ales, and Fat Tire, named after the bike he rode, was one of his first two brews. Jeff expected his second brew, the Abbey Ale would be the "Big" ale in terms of making his mark, but it's Fat Tire that's become one of the most widely recognized craft brews in America—in no small part due to the fabulous label art showing a Fat Tire cruisingbike, deftly created by watercolorist Ann Fitch.

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I'm more likely to turn my nose up to a drinking game than indulge in it. Most drinking games are at best an excuse to do something you were going to do anyway and at worst an ill-advised collection of bad ideas that will almost certainly result in porcelain worship. Really, the majority of drinking games are just logical conclusions of bad drinking behavior. Take beer pong, for instance. It's a game that takes the inherently vile experience of chugging cheap pilsner and makes it somehow more disgusting by adding a dirty table, a wet ping pong ball and the hands of drunk strangers. People ought not to drink cheap pilsner anyway, but beer pong just makes it worse. Movie drinking games are only marginally less stupid. Sure, taking a shot every time Character X says Catchphrase Y will get you drunk pretty fast, but this seems like a classic case of the whole diminishing the parts. This game both distracts from the movie by reducing it to the search for a single component of it, as well as distracting from the (potential) pleasures of drinking. If you want to do shots, then just do shots. The game seems both unnecessary and less fun than it ought to be. But there is one drinking game I'm willing to endorse: Shot Roulette.

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People love telling myths about alcohol. I don't know what it is about the stuff, but it's the subject of more tall tales than perhaps any other substance on the planet. Every long-time bartender has some entirely fictional story about how the Margarita was invented by a lovelorn Mexican poet who named it after the woman he could never have, or how Jack Daniels whiskey is the result of an epic Civil War era odyssey that nearly ended in the destruction of the original recipe for bourbon. It's easy to get dragged into these stories, perhaps because we want to believe there's something special about the things we drink. I suppose that's why the lies concocted about absinthe in the late 19th century persist into the modern day. What was once a smear campaign designed to scare people away from The Green Fairy transformed into the granddaddy of all psychedelic legends. It's almost too bad that none of it is true.

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