beer and that piece of paper

All those ‘yellow’ beers, we beer snobs call them lawnmower beers (the kind of beer you down a can or two of on a hot summer day of mowing the lawn), taste alike to me. I generally buy whatever is cheaper at the grocery store, though I’ll pay twenty cents more, but not more than that, for a six pack of tall boys for Old Style, just because of that supposed Chicago connection. And even though Milwaukee’s Best is sometimes the cheapest beer of them all I never touch it. If you blindfolded me, I am sure I couldn’t tell the difference, but it just sounds so cheap.

But those beers did have their images. Stroh’s was a hippie beer in Champaign while PBR was a redneck beer. I think Stroh’s still exists somewhere. When it first came out it claimed to be Fire Brewed, whatever that meant, but they don’t claim that anymore though I don’t know if they have changed their brewing process. Actually there are only two or three lawnmower breweries (most of them owned by furriners) anymore and they own all the brand names and I think when they run out of Stroh’s cans they just start bringing the PBR cans under the hose. 

PBR is now a big hipster beer. Whoever brews it knows that if they advertised it with hot young bodies at the beach, the hipsters would leave it in droves, because then it would no longer be their underground ironic beer, so they don’t.

Are there any hipsters in Cheboygan? Actually with your close trimmed beard and your PBR drinking, I suppose you could be taken for an aging hipster, rather than a crazy old coot. I don’t know if that is a step up though.

Back in the day I kind of liked the diversity of lawnmower beers. There were the standards, and then there were beers like Hamms and Blatz, all those cool old beers. Anymore there are only two or three brands on the beer shelf, and the rest is taken up by the Lite beers which kids these days think is beer, and even worse, all those soda pop concoctions like hard lemonade. Kids these days, no damn good.

But the other part of shelf is taken up by the craft beers. I love them. Back in the day I liked the lawnmower beers okay, but it seemed like they could have more taste. When I could afford it I would get those foreign beers and they were better, though like you said, they were just watered down versions of what the furriners drank.

But anymore I am a craft beer guy. They are more expensive, but they have so much more taste that it is worth it. In a bar or a restaurant I will always drink craft beer, but at home I drink some lawnmower beer. Once the craft guys go to easy hauling cans rather than bottles I may never touch a lawnmower again.

The founding fathers drank whiskey, not beer. Back since biblical times people had been drinking wine and beer because, as you said, the water was no good, but they were very weak, with only enough alcohol to kill the germs. Whiskey was the man’s drink, because it was so much easier to transport, and so easy to make out of that all that corn you had grown and after feeding the animals it was just sitting around. The Germans were the ones who drank beer, and who ever liked the Germans?

As a man who has spent years bartending and who imbibes a bit himself, I have to say that the theory that you build up a tolerance after drinking a lot of beer and seldom get drunk is the purest malarkey I have ever heard.

After all this beer talk, how boring to return to politics, especially the especially boring constitution. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it, it does give us some ground rules to fight over so that we don’t start shoving the gunpowder into our muskets, but it is mainly about how we interpret it, and like the bible, I think you can make it say whatever you wanted it too. I don’t think it is a sacred document written by god while all the founders were passed out.

If they found a long lost diary where the founders wrote that all they meant in the second amendment was that there could be militias, and they certainly didn’t mean for everybody in the country to be packing heat, especially if the heat two hundred years hence consisted of weapons way more powerful than anything they ever dreamed of, and they hoped that nobody ever interpreted it that way, and as a matter of fact they were going to rewrite it but first they had to make a whiskey run, but then you know how those whiskey runs go, you pull out the cork just to make sure that this is a good purchase and the next thing you know it is morning.

If they found that document I am sure you would say, “What a bunch of hooey.”