18.2% ABV on tap

I’d pretty much avoided BrewDog ever since their inception, assuming they were just some gimmicky Scottish brewery more obsessed with constantly holding claim to the “most alcoholic beer in the world” title above actually crafting great stuff.  Plus, their few bottles were prohibitively expensive around me and they didn’t really get that great of reviews on Beer Advocate.  I couldn’t help noticing that my beloved Stone seemed to have a little international crush on BrewDog though, and the two collaborations they’d done together–Juxtaposition black pilsner and Bashah–had been quite good on tap, I just never cultivated any real interest for BrewDog offerings.

That all changed on a recent trip to DC where I made my first visit to Churchkey, one of the east coast’s finest new beer bars.  The manly 18.2% imperial stout stuck out like a sore thumb on the menu and, with Churchkey selling beers in as small as four ounce pours, I figured, “What the fuck?”

I was blown away.

Tokyo* (the asterisk is important) is flat-out one of the best, most unique stouts I’ve ever had.  This bad boy is not for sissies.  It makes Bourbon County Stout seem as mild as keg beer at a frat party.  Brewed with jasmine and cranberries added in the kettle, dry-hopped after fermentation, and aged for a few weeks on toasted vanilla oak chips, this beer is shockingly complex, flavorful, and sweet.  It’s remarkable that all the flavors I mentioned above actually come through, mixing flawlessly together.  It’s boozy sure, but not the kind of booziness that overwhelms that flavor into one hot mess.

Then again, four ounces was more than enough for me.  For one night.  Confused by lackluster ratings on Beer Advocate, a bit curious whether the few strong ales I’d had at the hotel before tippling Tokyo* had given me a screwy palate, I returned to Churchkey the next night for another four ounces.  Marvelous yet again.  Maybe even more so.  I have no fucking clue what these other online reviewers are thinking.  I really want to get a bottle of this, shit, I now really really want to try Tactical Nuclear Penguin and Sink the Bismarck.  I no longer think these Scottish boys are gimmickmeisters, I’m absolutely certain they are true beer artisans.

A+

Also at Churchkey, I was able to sample BrewDog’s Paradox Isle of Arran (Batch 016).  A 10% stout aged for six months in Single Malt barrels, this one sounded promising–there are so few beers aged in Scotch barrels as opposed to bourbon, at least that make it to the States–but this one didn’t quite stack up for me.  It was flavorful, smokey and roasted, a little earthy and boozy, but ultimately too thin for my liking.  Then again, maple syrup would taste thin after having some glorious Tokyo*.

B+

As a new BrewDog enthusiast, what are their must-try brews I need to seek out?

12% ABV bottled

You know, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I used to think that Founders Brewing Co. was, gasp…overrated.  The first two Founders brews I ever got my grubby little mitts on, oddly enough, happened to be their two most famous brews, Breakfast Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout, long-time Beer Advocate top 20 beers in the world*.  I was psyched to acquire these rare-to-me grown up sodas, so eager to suck ‘em down in all their glory, that when I tried them and didn’t spontaneously combust into knickers, I thought, “Ah, I see, another overrated brewery.”  Don’t get me wrong, I gave both those beers A’s at the time, I simply wasn’t OMFG floored.

So, whereas I tried my first two Founders beers with overly lofty expectations, I’ve tried my last dozen or more Founders efforts expecting nothing special.  But, damn, if those Grands Rapids boys haven’t won me over, and then some.  It started with their wet-hopped Harvest Ale, one of the most eye-opening drinking experience I’ve had in the last 365 days and a beer I’d put near #1 in the uber-hopped beer category.  I already can’t wait for the next release of it.

Every since that Harvest Ale, damn if every Founders beers hasn’t tasted absolutely glorious to me.  From their double and “triple” IPAs, Double Trouble (mind-blowing fresh on tap) and Devil Dancer, to their old ale Curmudgeon**, to countless more of some of the most disparate styles around.  They don’t knock everything out of the park–who does?–but they surely have a better slugging percentage than even a juiced-up Barry Bonds.

I’ve probably tried more different and new-to-me beer from Founders recently than from any other brewery and, now, my expectation levels are appropriate.  I now expect a good to great beer and I always get a good to great beer.  And since they seem to have a never-ending stream of releases, there’s always another Founders beer to try that I haven’t yet.  The only problem being that they don’t distribute in NYC at the moment.  Good thing I got good friends in Virginia, Minnesota, and other places who can hook me up.

My most exciting Founders acquisition of recent was their limited Nemesis release, the first in a new series.  I’d never had a wheatwine before, but as a barleywine nut, I was certain to like this effort.  And I did.  Probably not the most “normal” example of the style, Nemesis 2009 is maple bourbon barrel-aged using bourbon barrels which were once used to age local maple syrup.  The beer poured lighter for me than expected, much lighter than a copper barley wine, more the color of a golden ale of some sort.  The smell is straight boozy, just like I like it, with the flavor a combination of boozy bourbon, vanilla, oak, sweet syrup, and of course wheat.  Surprisingly more drinkable and less syrupy than I expected, this is a truly interesting creation.  I only wish I had another bottle!

A-

Founders Imperial Stout

10.5% ABV bottled

It’s heartening to try a delicious imperial stout that can actually be bought on store shelves!  That isn’t a limited release!  And more things to add exclamation points to!!!  This effort from Founders stacks up with the best of the style, limited release or not.  Amazingly complex and rich, with a mild roasted bitterness and a nice chocolaty booziness on the back end.  This beer is just so silky, I loved to let it dance on my tongue and gargle in the back of my throat.  Arguably the best on-the-shelves, non-barreled stout in the market today.  Though, unfortunately, not my market.  Come on, let’s get Founders in NYC!

A

Founders Porter

6.5% ABV bottled

As I’ve mentioned a lot recently, the porter has become one of my favorite styles, even though I’m still not quite sure what differentiates them from stouts.  Kinda like how I can’t tell a real blond from a bottle blond.  I don’t ask and just enjoy them both.  This is a great effort with another great label–besides making great brews, Founders is in the running for best labels in the biz too and I love their squat little bottles for even more plaudits!  Rich and tingly, a strong-roasted flavor with next-to-no sweetness, smokey and earthy.  Full-bodied yet drinkable, quite enjoyable.  This is a no-frills beer, but there’s nothing wrong with that sometimes.

B+

Now that I’ve fallen in love with Founders, now that it’s become one of my favorite brewers in America, in my mind one of the best in America, I’ve even gone back and tried those two famous beers, Breakfast Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout, with my now acceptable level of Founders expectations, and realized those two are truly glorious beers, some of the best of their styles.

In a world of such scrutiny nowadays, things aren’t overrated or underrated.  They are, for the most part, rated correctly.  It’s you, or me, that simply hasn’t encountered enough of the sample size to know that.  I know that now.  All hail Founders.

*Son of a bitch, why can I still not get a taste of Canadian Breakfast Stout?!?!?!?

**Or another old ale, Black Biscuit, for that matter?!?

“I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize for the events of the night of the 23rd.  I’m not accustomed to drinking alcohol.”  –Max Fischer, “Rushmore”

I woke up near noon, still completely dressed in what I’d worn the previous evening.  Jacket, shoes, jeans with wallet, cell phone, keys still in it, everything.  My head pulsated in pain.  Not surprising considered I’d celebrated my birthday the previous night at Rattle ‘n’ Hum, chasing pints of 13% Bourbon County Stout with shots of Irish whiskey in a perpetual Mobius strip of aggressive drinking.  But even worse than the pain in my head, was the pain in my gut.  What exactly had happened twelve hours previous?  Had I scarfed down too many orders of fried calamari and Buffalo wings?  Yeah, probably, but that wouldn’t cause this kind of pain.  A pain so intense it hurt for me to sit upright and killed when I tried to piss.

Oh right, I’d entered myself in an impromptu gut-punching contest Friday night.

Seems that after drinking steadily from happy hour til midnight, after all the women and responsible men had left my party and the bar, leaving only a quintet of degenerates remaining, someone, probably me, had gotten the wise idea to start a quasi-Fight Club in our little corner and we began exchanging a series of gut punches with each other.  I’d never done something like this before, never even had such a desire to do something like this before, but I’ve never been accused of not having strokes of genius when too lit up to remember them the next day.  And, this gut-punching stroke, did I only barely recall engaging in.

I have a long history of alienating friends, ruining relationships, losing my dignity, and flat out humiliating myself on my birthday.  It’s an annual tradition.  But in this case it seemed like none of the above had occurred.  I spent the day writhing in pain, staying supine, and texting with my friends to recount the night.

How many gut punches had we exchanged I wondered?  About fifteen, recalled Tony.

How hard were we hitting each other?  About 75% our maximum punching power, thought Graig.

And why the fuck weren’t we getting tossed out of the bar for such childish shenanigans?  Because Rattle ‘n’ Hum is the most awesome bar in the world, thought I.  Though, honestly, because my friends were probably racking up a combined grand in drinking tab.  Never let any one tell you that money can’t buy you happiness.  Or the ability to have an impromptu gut-punching contest in a heretofore civilized establishment.

But apparently the night wasn’t completely peaches ‘n’ cream at Rattle ‘n’ Hum.  Sal chipped in that eventually, after about a half hour of gut-punching, some guy, en route to smoke a butt outside, had told us to cut it out.  And apparently, I had told said guy where to stick it.

Oh God!  Who was this man?  A bartender?  A manager?  Hopefully not…the owner!

Typically, I wouldn’t care.  Wealthy Charles Foster Kane wasn’t worried that his beloved newspaper was losing him one million dollars a year because, as he noted, “at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place…in 60 years.”  And I’ve long realized that I can get 86ed from a New York bar this week, and one next week, and one the week after that, and at the rate of fifty-two 86ings per year, I’d have to move to a new drinking town…in 60 years.  But the circumstances were different here because Rattle ‘n’ Hum is my favorite bar in the world.

Now normally I’d just lay low for awhile til my statute of drunken limitations had expired.  But, in this case, that simply wouldn’t work.  You see, just three days later, Rattle ‘n’ Hum was having one of the greatest beer-drinking events in recent memory as the esteemed Tampa brewery Cigar City was coming to town to unleash more than their full lineup of beers.  There’s no fucking way I was going to miss this event.

I consulted with my friends.  Who exactly had I mouthed off to and exactly how mouthy had I gotten?  Was I truly 86ed?  Would I be recognized if and when I returned to the bar?

“You’re not exactly the kind of guy that people forget, Aaron,” noted Graig.  I don’t think that was a compliment.

After fretting all day, I had no choice.  I would have to attend the Cigar City event incognito.

In preparation, I shaved an uneven goatee into my scruff, wore some particularly shabby clothing (which is saying something for me, I normally dress like a hobo), put on a Syracuse cap pulled low as possible over my eyes and sharp eyebrows (my most prominent and memorable features), and even wore my nerdy reading glasses that never leave the house, just to have another thing blocking my face.  Of course, I had to fly solo, I couldn’t risk returning to the scene of the crime with any accomplices.

I felt nervous when I entered the fairly empty bar, especially when I saw the afternoon’s bartender was the very same kind Irish lass we’d had at my birthday.  I couldn’t recall if I’d been offensive to her as well.  I walked with an intentionally unconfident slouch, my head meekly drooping to hide myself further.  I looked down at the bar, never making eye contact, feigning intense nervousness as the bartender approached and slid a menu in front of me.

“What can I getcha, hon?”

My ruse had seemed to work.  She didn’t recognize me from Adam.  (If Adam was the name of one of the countless beer nerds that would be infestating the bar soon enough.  Damn, perhaps I should have stuffed a pillow under my shirt to create a faux-beer gut.  I didn’t need my flat belly giving me away.)

I decided to open my drinking with probably the manliest, not to mention priciest, flight of beers ever assembled, pictured above.  A straight boozy stout quartet of Marshall Zhukov’s Imperial Stout, Hunahpu’s imperial Stout, and their bourbon-barreled counterparts.

Marshall Zhukov’s Imperial Stout

This 11% ABV brew is bursting with distinct flavors of coffee, chocolate, toffee, and molasses.  A rich syrupy mouthfeel and great carbonation, this is an awesome effort.  (A)

Bourbon Barrel Aged Marshall Zhukov’s

I can’t believe I’m saying this, and I’m not sure I’ve ever said this in my entire life as I’ve long stood by the reasoning that awesome beer + bourbon barrel aging = awesomer beer but in this case I thought the incredible booziness here overwhelmed the subtler flavors.  Or maybe I’m just becoming a little pussy in my old age.  I’d love to try this one with a little age on it but even hot and young it’s quite good.  (A-)

Hunahpu’s Mayan Chocolate Imperial Stout

Currently resting at #38 on Beer Advocate’s Top 100 beers on earth after an amazingly meteoric rise, this 11% beer takes a base of Marshall Zhukov’s and ages it on pasillo and ancho peppers as well as vanilla, cinnamon, and cocoa nibs, giving it a nice little spiciness with a surprisingly sweet finish, and making it taste truly like no other imperial stout around.  As a huge fan of Latin spices, I absolutely adored this effort, and, for me, it was my clear stout winner of the day.  (A)

Bourbon Barrel Aged Hunahpu’s

Just like the bourbon-barrel Marshall Zhukov’s I think the intense bourbonness of this effort blocks out the awesome spices and makes it a less complex and enjoyable beer.  Having said that, it’s still quite good.  (A-)

After my first flight, I thought, let’s see, twenty-four total Cigar City beers available, if I keep flighting in out, I could knocked off the full lineup in only six total plate appearances.  Flight #2 coming up!

Creamsicle IPA

This sounded like an intriguing premise, an IPA that tastes just like a Creamsicle, but I doubted the execution was possible.  I was so wrong.  This straight out tastes like a bitter IPA backed by the orange creamy goodness of a popsicle.  Amazingly drinkable and quaffable.  (A-)

Flora IPA

This standard IPA with cedar and lavender added smells like a sack of weed and tastes like a flower garden.  And that’s a compliment.  Absolutely delicious and unique.  (A)

Humider Series Juniper IPA

I’d been floored by Cigar City’s Jai Alai IPA aged on cedar so I was excited to try yet another IPA from their exciting Humidor Series, and this was just as good.  Like drinking a box of wood.  (A)

Brandy Barrel Winter Warmer

I honestly ordered this one just to fill out the foursome, but it absolutely floored me.  The normal Warmer Winter Winter Warmer–an old ale I still hadn’t had at this point so I can’t compare–aged on Laird’s apple brandy, this would end up being my favorite beer of the evening and one of the best beers I’ve had year to date.  Silky, syrupy, and sweet but not cloying, this reminded me of J.W. Lee’s delicious Harvest Ale Calvados, but even boozier and more delicious.  A huge winner.  (A+)

At this point I was getting pretty drunk and began fretting I would soon break into Leonard-Duran gut-punching numero dos.  I really had to focus and say “No mas” as there is surely some demon inside of me that now likes me to get punched in the gut.  I had brought a paperback and had planned to quickly drink my beers with my head ducked into the book, but, ironically, I kept finding myself talking to people over the two hours I was there and even made two new friends.

I now realized that having all six flights was probably out, but I figured I could squeeze in two more.  Unfortunately, their pricey cask selections, of which they had several, were not available in flight form so I had to go with full pours.  The remaining beers I slugged:

Double Cream (cask)

When I prepared my drinking order the night before I’d flagged this 9% strong cream ale as one I was particularly excited to try, but its corn and honey sweetness simply didn’t fully deliver for me and it would go down as the worst (relative term) beer I had for the day.  (B+)

Mango IPA (cask)

This IPA loaded with dry hops, mango acai tea, and a hint of lavender was my third favorite effort of the day.  As it warms the intense mango flavors come through nicely.  Flawless mouthfeel and drinkability.  Amazing.  One of my favorite IPAs of the year.  (A)

Maduro Oatmeal Raisin Cookie

After the mild failure of Brooklyn’s far more ballyhooed attempt at making a straight-up cookie tasting beer I didn’t expect any one could execute in that regard.  I was wrong.  This brown ale does taste just like an oatmeal cookie as the tart raisiness comes through nicely.  (A-/B+)

Cuban Espresso Maduro

Wow, just like the previous beer, this 5.5% brown ale aged on Naviera Coffee Mills #3 Espresso blend with chicory tastes like a flat out iced coffee.  Intense and smoky, simply delicious if you’re a coffee nut.  (A-)

At this point, the major-league beer nerds starting filing in, wielding their note-taking pens like rapiers and setting up their cameras on tripods (tripods!) to take pictures and videos of the scene…and I knew I had to make my exit, stage left, before I caught anything.

I had twelve of the beers, coupled with three others I’d had in the past, meaning I’d tried fifteen of the twenty-four available.  A 0.625 batting average.  Not bad and I hope to some how, some day, try the ones I missed, especially their Peach and Papaya IPAs which just sound phenomenal as well as the standard Warmer Winter.

Oh, and I’m putting myself on a self-imposed one month ban from Rattle ‘n’ Hum.

Drunk Promises

Nothing’s worse than waking up after a night of hard core drinking with that awful, awful feeling.  No, not the feeling of being hungover.  No, this feeling is even worse.  The feeling of recalling a drunken promise you made.

Now, sometimes drunken promises can be between a guy and girl, but usually these promises are made between two or more guys.  Late at night, more like early in the morning, 3 AM or so, when the bar has cleared out, there’s just you and a friend or two, and you guys are shit-faced.

It starts with someone bringing up an innocuous point.

“Yeah, these mojitos are pretty good, but you know where the best mojitos are?  This little Cuban restaurant on Miami Beach.”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Miami.”

“You’ve NEVER been to Miami?!”

“No, but I’ve always wanted to go.”

“That’s it!  We’re all going tomorrow!”

“Yeah!”

“We can borrow my brother’s car.”

“I’ll call in sick for work!”

“Let’s leave by noon.”

“I’m in!”

“I’m in!”

“I’m in!”

You wake up the next morning, hungover, and with a certain existential dread.  Fuck!  Did I really agree to road trip to Miami today?!  I can’t road trip to Miami today.  I don’t want to road trip to Miami today.  I got plans, shit to do.

You spend the whole morning fretting, praying your other drunken promise friends don’t call.  “Hey, Aaron, I’ve picked up the car and I’ll be by in an hour to grab you.”  Because we’re guys, and even when we make drunken promises, promises we’d never make sober, we refuse to break them.  We would have to go to Miami.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t pray that one of our friends breaks the drunken promise to get us off the hook.

However, after years of regretful drunken promises, I’ve finally learned a secret:  no one wants to uphold them.  So I no longer regret drunken promises.  I no longer spend the entire morning after a drunken promise fretting that I may have to do something I don’t want to do.  Drunken promises aren’t really promises.  They are just manly bluster.

Hopsecutioner

7.2% ABV bottled

There’s so many beers I want to try but it’s getting harder and harder to find them.  It’s likewise getting harder and harder to find “noted” breweries I have yet to try.  In a recent trade with The Drunken Polack, he luckily sent me my first beers from a brewery I’d been looking to explore:  Terrapin Beer Co. from Athens, Georgia.  I just love their labels, funny little scenes of terrapins doing stuff best befitting the beer name.  Hopsecutioner is their newly released single IPA–their first ever single IPA, coming on the heels of a successful DIPA release.  Unfortunately, Hopsecutioner is just so-so.  Mild in taste, with only a slight bitterness, I would have sworn this was just a normal pale ale.  Average body, average carbonation, average flavor.  There’s nothing bad about Hopsecutioner, but no there’s no wow factor either.  And in today’s exciting craft beer climate that’s just not quite good enough.

B+

Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout

8.1% ABV bottled

I’d unfortunately missed Terrapin’s much-ballyhooed Depth Charge Espresso stout so I was excited to try this “cousin” of a beer.  And it was pretty good.  Roasted, bitter, very coffee-infused but a little thin.  A well hidden ABV makes this a terrific light stout, though, again, no real wow factor.

So I wasn’t floored by my first two Terrapin beers, but I feel like they got enough “there” to make me curious to try more of their offerings.

B+

AVB unknown, bottled

I Need to Get Paid Now

I’m always looking for easy ways to make money and by “easy” I mean:  getting paid to write shit.  Thus, I was pretty excited when a company called I Need a Paper Now hired me to write term papers and essays for high school and college kids too dumb and lazy to do the work themselves.  Though I personally never cheated in academics–too many dummies around me, who in the heck would I possibly cheat off of?!?–I have no compunction with facilitating other people’s cheating and in fact gladly signed off on a contract they made me peruse which had lines in it such as this:

You must first understand that what we do is the actual homework for college students. Some people think that what we do is dishonest and unethical and with that said, if you too feel this way then we thank you for your interest and we wish you all the best in your writing endeavours (sic). If you think like we think, everyone needs help at some point in time, then please feel free to move one.

Unfortunately, I Need a Paper Now did not make me sign any non-disclosure agreement about how shitty of company they are, and thus, I will now tell you (hoping you got to this entry after Googling something like, “i need paper now legit or moronic shysters???”)

Firstly, I probably should have been leery after seeing INAPN’s shoddily designed website.  And let me tell you, what you’re seeing in the previous sentence’s link is a redesigned and better website.  The website they had when I was hired a few months ago looked like some 1999 Geocities-hosted monstrosity.

I should have also probably been leery considering the guy (or gal?) who e-hired me never used a name of any kind, wrote e-mails like a 14-year-old texts, and frequently misspelled words.

Alas, the pay was good, the workload minimal, the illicitness enticing, and I had no easier way to earn a buck at the time.  Then I got my first assignment, reprinted in full below:

The Final Exam shall be an applied research project. Learners are provided a case, current topic, or actual archived data to diagnose the T & D problem and present a training & development solution. Learners are to use new knowledge gained from this course to prepare a comprehensive training protocol spanning needa particular occupation of the student’s (learner’s) own choosing. Creativity and application of sound training and development principles shall be drawn upon to draft up to 5-single spaced pages professional training and development schematic. Should be done in APA format.

That’s all the info I was provided.  I reread it about fifteen times.  It made no sense to me and I have a very wide breadth of knowledge.  I figured I’d be given assignments like, “What I did during my Martin Luther King Day vacation (500 words)” or “What was the one moment in your life that best exhibits your decision-making abilities? (5 pages, double-spaced)” or “Discuss why Daisy Buchanan was such a fickle cunt in ‘The Great Gatsby (7 pages).”  But this assignment actually seemed kinda hard.  Kinda above my knowledge and pay grade.

I wrote my nameless boss, asking for some further clarification on the assignment so that I might possibly be able to attempt it.  He/she responded, again, reprinted in full below:

Good question!  Here you are:

EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
STRATEGIC TRAINING
NEEDS ASSESSMENT
THEORIES AND PROGRAM DESIGN
TRANSFER OF TRAINING
TRAINING EVALUATION
TRADITIONAL TRAINING METHODS
E-learning and Use of Technology in Training

I didn’t quite understand how that had further elucidated what my assignment actually was, but that didn’t matter any more for I was now able to attempt the assignment.  You see, I now knew I was dealing with a fucking retard.  It’s always exciting when you realize you’re dealing with a fucking retard in any aspect of life because that means that your work performance can not only be at the level of fucking retard, but should be at the level of fucking retard lest you confuse said fucking retard with too much erudition.

I recall having one of those flighty, dykey, pothead English professors back in college who never said anything that made a goddamn lick of sense.  Who always cited Derrida and post-modernism and “the male gaze.”  Who made us deconstruct shit and write poems about Duchamp and often taught the class outside on the quad as we all sat Indian-style (though she would probably have called it Aboriginal-Americans-Disgustingly-Slaughtered-By-Rich-White-Imperialists-style).  I struggled in that English class for the first few weeks until one day I realized, “Oh my god, Professor Miller is a fucking retard!” and “Sitting Indian-style on dirty grass is far less comfortable than sitting in a chair!”

From that point on, any time I got a class assignment, I would simply pour myself a tall cocktail–I drank 7 and 7s at the time because I admired Martin Scorsese and was a poor hick–and then write my papers for her as quick as humanly possible.  Upon finishing, I wouldn’t even go back to reread the assignment or correct any errors.  I didn’t want to make the paper any more lucid than possible.  Not surprisingly, I got all As employing that strategy and became such a superstar in the class that the prof often made me read my weekly essays aloud as my fellow classmates rolled their eyes.

Thus, to attempt my first assignment for the yutzes at I Need a Paper Now, I employed the same strategy.  I excitedly poured myself a snifter of Central Waters Brewhouse Coffee Stout, generously sent to me by The Captain.  A BA top 100 beer from Wisconsin, I never thought I’d get to try and am so glad I did.  Chocolaty and coffee-infused but not too roasted.  A little sweet and silky with kinda a thin mouth.  This is a great beer, but probably not a complete  world-beater.  I’d still seek it out though, and I hope to try some more Central Waters stuff soon.

I drank and drank until that ridiculous assignment actually made sense to me and then I began writing.  I was expected to produce a five page paper and about 45 minutes after I put my fingers to my keyboard I had produced such a paper, chock full of ambiguities and nonsensicals and stupid buzz words.  It was probably the worst thing I had ever written in my life.

Of course, since I was dealing with a fucking retard, not an hour later I received an e-mail from my nameless boss, he simply writing:

“Perfect!”

I was pretty jacked at how easily I had made $95.  You couldn’t quite say I’d made $95 for 45 minutes of work since I’d spent about 15-20 minutes fretting over the stupidity of the question and sending clarification e-mails to my fucking retard boss and had spent another 45 minutes drinking a coffee stout, but still, I’d made a lot of money for the most minor sitting-around-in-my-underwear, TV-still-on, pounding-beers of an effort.  I thought I might like to start writing essays for lazy rich kids full time.

I was told future assignments–depending on length and research necessitated–would pay anywhere from $100 to $1000.  Of course, I decided not to attempt paper #2 until I had been paid for paper #1 and, a month later, I still sit here having not been paid.  I was supposed to be Paypal’ed the money after every assignment I completed, but that $95 never entered my account and the nameless guy or gal boss who had been pulling the strings on me quit responding to my e-mails.  I’m not mad about the minimal effort I put in nor the minimal amount of money I was stiffed, and I’m downright amused at the thought of some poor schnook having turned in the piece of shit essay he paid for and I wrote, but that still doesn’t mean I didn’t feel like wasting another 45 minutes of my time drunkenly punching out another essay, which I again won’t go back to reread and edit, to tell you about a fucking retarded company called I Need a Paper Now, hoping that this very essay will now appear on the first page when any future lazy writers Google search them.

Now…what legitimate company or person wants to pay me some dolla dolla bills to write some shit for them?!

A-

10.3% ABV bottled

How do you remember how good a taste was?  My “normal” friends always wonder how I can recall what beers I liked and what I disliked.  How I can recall that a stout I drank in September of 2007 is better than one I drank in November of 2009.  And, you know, they raise a valid point.  How can one ever remember a purely visceral experience?  For beers, one could review their tasting notes, but I’ll be honest with you, for 99% of us beer reviewers they’re just going to be packed with trite buzzwords scrawled on a cocktail napkin while toasted.  IPAs are “hoppy,” “piny,” and “citrusy.”  Barley wines are “malted,” “caramely,” and “boozy.”  Belgian dubbels and quads have tastes of “candi” and “dark fruits.”  Stouts are “roasted,” “chocolately,” and “coffee-like.”  Yeah, big fucking help.  We’re all frauds.

It would be like trying to explain why some random sexual experience in 2005 was better than some random sexual experience in 2007.  Yet you could probably do that, right?  Because what you’re remembering–what you’re using to “rank” the experiences–is the remembered pleasure you got from it.  So, yeah, I do remember Surly Darkness 2008 as being maybe the sweetest stout I’d ever had in my life but I more remember sitting on my friend’s couch on a cold November night and both of our eyes just popping out of our heads, our jaws dropping to the hardwood, staring at eachother after the first sip and just saying similtaneously, “Is this not the best fucking beer ever?!”

And so, when I tell people Surly Darkness is the best stout I’ve ever had, I’m not telling them that based on side-by-side tastings with every other halfway decent stout I’ve ever had, but rather based on my seemingly clear but probably hazy memory of how I felt that one time I drank that one rare bottle.  An inexact science, sure, something that will always be influenced by the time, place, surroundings, and what happened before, during, and immediately after the experience, but it’s all we got.  And, hey, that bout of great sex you seem to recall having a few years ago probably is better in your memory than it actually was.

Legendary Minnesotan The Captain got me that one rare bottle of Darkness last year and the gracious dude also got me that one rare bottle this year.  I’d heard that this year’s recipe was completely different from last’s–apparently brewmaster Todd didn’t like how sweet his last batch had been–and so I was a little concerned.  The sweetness was what I had liked about last year’s batch, what I felt had set it apart from all the other legendary imperial stouts out there.  So now I had assumed Surly had just gone all status quo and made your typical *BUZZWORDS!* “roasted,” “chocolately,” and “coffee-like” stout.  You know, good, but nothing unique, just throw it on the pile.

I’m glad to report I was quite wrong.  Darkness 2009 smells incredibly hoppy, totally unlike last year (as I recall!).  Honestly, if you were blindfolded and this was put to your face you might guess it a DIPA or a barley wine.  The taste is also a little more hoppy and bitter but that special underlying sweetness is still there.  It’s really blurring the line between what we think of as a stout and perhaps the catchall “strong ale.”  Man, this one drinkable motherfucker.  Most imperial stouts naturally have a drinking “governor” on them if you will and through pure booziness you’re forced to take eye-dropper-sized little sips each time the glass comes to your face.  But not Darkness.  I could chug Darkness and it’s so damn good I struggled mightily to savor each sip.  In my mind, I feel like Darkness 2008 was a hair better–of course even if I had a bottle of 2008 a comparison now would be invalid as it would be aged a year–but Darkness 2009 is still one of a kind and out of this world.  I will continue to call it my favorite stout on planet Earth.

A+

I had warmed up for Darkness with, perhaps, Surly’s polar opposite of a beer Hell (likewise provided by The Captain).  The cool name betrays the very uncool style–helles lager, a kellerbier (aka zwickel bier) technically–and based on the internet geek buzz I was already kinda pissed off at this beer.  Why was the great Surly, makers of boozy masterpieces like Darkness and flavor-packed hybrids such as Furious, Bender, and Cynic wasting my time with such a lame, low ABV (5.1%) style?!

I was so wrong.  I totally expected to hate this, to bitch at Surly for eschewing their high-ABV flavorful beers, but I really dug Hell.  So crisp and refreshing.  Light and grainy.  Bready and sweet.  It’s like the best “shitty” beer I’ve ever had.  That sounds like faint praise I suppose, but Hell is what Bud/Miller/Coors should aspire to.  If I gave this to my macro-swilling chums there’s no way the wouldn’t now realize that Bud/Miller/Coors is adjunct-ingredient garbage.  I’m not sure this style could be rendered any better.  I could drink these all day long and probably would if I live in Minnesota.

B

11% ABV bottled

It’s always exciting when a new brewery penetrates (huh huh, he said “penetrates”) your market and Nectar Ales was no exception.  I still don’t quite understand what’s going on with this brewery despite the fact that they’ve been a California staple for some twenty years.  They seem to be different from but still affiliated with Firestone Walker–the highly acclaimed and still-not-available-in-New York brewery–who seem to own Nectar Ales but not exactly brew Nectar Ales.  (Maybe some smarter cookie can elucidate things for me.)  Any how, Black Xantus was their first ever limited release “big beer” and was much desired…until it was released and became one of the more hotly debated beers of the year.  Pretty much no one thought it was a masterpiece everyone expected it to be, but many still thought it was damn good.  Just as many, however, thought it was swill.  Everyone, though, pretty much agreed it was way overpriced (some $15 in my neck of the woods–though if everyone still bought said “overpriced” beer then it wasn’t overpriced now was it?)

I was still excited to try it, even with tempered expectations, and it certainly didn’t disappoint.  Yet another bourbon barreled Russian Imperial Stout–the style du jour of this era and thank god for that!–this one has your typical buzzword tastes of bourbon, vanilla, dark roasted coffee, and a bitter chocolate finish.  It’s a liitle too boozy, a little too thin on the mouth, and lacking a certain richness, but I still enjoyed it a lot.  I wouldn’t say to rush out to “overpay” for some, but if you see it on tap or want to split a bottle with a hobo, I’d said it’s worth trying.

A-

A few days later at The Pony Bar–which has now passed Rattle ‘n’ Hum on the Hardest NYC Bar At Which To Photograph Taps and Beers list (though dig the artistry in the above shot!)–I had the semi-fortune to get to try Nectar Ales longstanding flagship beer Red Nectar (with it cute-as-a-button hummingbird tap handle).  This may be a craft beer “classic” but like many of the forefathers of the industry, most beers that have been around for twenty years just aren’t going to intrigue a modern palette that much any more.  A nice enough 5.5% amber ale, minimal hops, a little creaminess, incredibly drinkable, easily forgettable, and I’ll probably never have another glass for the rest of my life.  Looking forward to try some other Nectar Ales though.

B-

10.9% ABV bottled

On Geekiness

Now it makes perfect sense to me how the world of comic books and sci-fi and computer games can attract geeks.  Of course they attract geeks.  Geeks are stereotyped as overweight undersexed obsessive loner nerds.  Why wouldn’t they commit their free time to fantasy worlds better than their own?  To worlds where nerds just like them can get bitten by a radioactive spider and are all of the sudden the coolest pajamas-wearing dude in all of the five boroughs.  Where innately knowing how to wield a lightsaber gets your hot sister to want to make out with you just to make Harrison Ford jealous.  Where being a shut-in who is really good at video games affords you the opportunity to play Super Mario Bros. 3 in front of adoring fans.   Geekiness makes sense among fantasy world devotees.  These people aren’t geeks because they follow fantasy.  They follow fantasy worlds because they are geeks.

Then what about sports?  Sports, at first glance, would seem surely less a bastion of geekiness.  I mean, aren’t jocks the ones usually picking on geeks since the beginning of time?  And, any how, everyone likes sports.  And most people played them at one point in their life too.  So how does geekiness infest the sports world?  I would argue here it’s an aspirational thing.  A fantasy world that is actually feasible for real humans to achieve so long as they practice hard and take lots of PEDs.  Sports also attracts nerds because it allows them to implement their honors math skills in a real world setting.

Now, I don’t think most people could possibly understand how beer could be geeky.  I’ve been a beer connoisseur of varying degrees for at least a half decade and I didn’t even fully understand the magnitude of beer geekiness until recently.  I mean, beer is so cool, right?  Beer is what the “bad” kids in school drank under the bleachers while the rest of us were cheering at pep rallies.  Beer is what we fed to girls in college to get them to sleep with us.  And have you seen beer commercials?  Uh, does that look like a geeky time?  Shirtless hunks and gummy-bear-implanted women and a lot of “woohoo-ing” and Spuds McKenzie!  No fucking way is that anything but the antithesis of geekiness.

But, sorry to say, beer culture is just as geeky as Star Trek or comic books or LARPing or baseball card collecting.  Go to any beer tasting or convention or special release party or event where a legendary brewmaster is set to appear and you will be slack-jawed at the geekitude.  The air will be permeated with the stench of dork.  (It smells kinda like inappropriate sweating and unfounded pretentiousness.)  Oh man, could you imagine if craft breweries had commercials depicting the true world of craft beer?  It would’t be hunks and sluts and party animals and Wassssuppping and Clydesdales.  No sir, an accurate craft beer commercial would depict a sausage party with a paucity of pussy and guys with pubic-like beards in too tight of brewery t-shirts proudly wielding their own personal tasting glasses like Minnesota Fats brandished his prize cue while debating the difference between storing their cellared bottles upright or sideways and waiting for Sam Calgione to arrive so they could pester him with arcane questions about yeast strains.  Par-tay!!!!!)

Thinking about how such a seemingly cool thing like beer drinking could have as great a geek quotient as a Half-Life party got me thinking.  Are there geeks in other aspects of life?  Perhaps in all aspects of life?  Are there geeks even in what would seemingly be the most super-cool niches of this world?!

Rock ‘n’ Roll

With drug-addled, chain-smokin’ long-haired men on strobe-lighted stages singing symphonies to the devil while gyrating the armadillos in their trousers in overt sexual manners, rock music has long attracted a committed following from two specific groups.  Reprehensible sluts is one, obviously.  But scratch the surface just a bit and you see that rock also attracts massive geeks.  For whatever reason, gross Matt Pinfield/Lester Bangs/Cameron Crowe types have long loved obsessing over men that are much cooler than them and the minutiae of the music these men create in the spare ten minute refractory periods in between their groupie fivesomes.  Like beer geekdom, a “High Fidelity” like obsession with rock music also involves a lot of hanging out with men men glorious men.  Perhaps the reason John Norris is such a big rock ‘n’ roll geek, come to think about it.

Drugs

Surely there must be hard-core drug geeks that take their love for illegal narcotics to the same highly-critical extremes that we do.  There’s got to be a Coke Advocate website somewhere.  “The pour of my Bolivian Marching Powder from my two gram Ziploc baggy onto my West Elm mirrored coffee table cascaded out in a luxurious white stream akin to Niagara Falls in December…”  There must be a RateMeth too.  “The symetrical crystals had a nice mouthfeel as I swallowed them whole, unable to locate my pipe and a spare sheet of tin foil, no matter how frantically I searched my house…”  And there’s surely the Great American Weed Festival held every year in Boulder or Portland or Madison to honor the year’s best in marijuana releases.  I’m certain of all of this.

Sex

The idea of sex geeks seems paradoxical, impossible even, but I know they must exist too.  Men that go on message boards to scrutinize technique with each other.  Who attend conventions of some sort to trade insider secrets on the state of the art of fucking.  Men with Excel spreadsheets where each sex geek meticulously logs his “wants” and “hads.”  (Had:  twins, GMILF, ginger;  Wants:  Albino, hermaphrodite, circus clown.)  Actually, come to think of it, I may very well be a sex geek.  Moving along…

But even if I am a geek in any other genre, by now beer geekiness must surely be my forte.  And my geek fancy couldn’t help but be tickled by a line of beers that so brazenly holds a mirror up to us.  Aside from last year’s collaboration with Stone, these would be the first beers I had ever had from Mikkeller and, whoa, what a place to start!

Beer Geek Brunch Weasel

10.9% ABV in a 500 mL bottling

I was lucky enough to try this at the wonderful Paradiso in our nation’s capital and so glad I did because this is a stunner of a beer.  From what I understand, Mikkeller doesn’t have their own brewery–in fact, the Mikkeller brewmasters actually have day jobs!–and this was brewed at Nogne O’s brewery.  Brunch Weasel is an asskicker of an oatmeal stout brewed using “the world’s most expensive coffees” (according to Mikkeller it’s around $100/lb) and “from droppings of weasel-like civet cats. The fussy Southeast Asian animals only eat the best and ripest coffee berries. Enzymes in their digestive system help to break down the bean. Workers collect the bean-containing droppings for Civet or Weasel Coffee” (again, according to Mikkeller…uh, are they joking????)  Whatever the case, this cat-shit beer is incredible, frequently residing in the 95-100 range on the BA Top 100*.  One of the most coffee-tasting beers I’ve ever had, yet not in that burnt, unpalatable roasted way a lot of coffee beers unfortunately are.  This has a nice chocolaty sweetness and a good boozy burn.  Much better for waking you up during Sunday brunch than a measly Bellini.

A

Beer Geek Breakfast

7.5% ABV in a 500 mL bottling

Based purely on anecdotal evidence, Breakfast seems to be easier found than Brunch Weasel and, such is life, it’s also not quite as tasty.  Though it’s still solid.  Opened for me with a frothy, latte explosion.  Bitter and muted, oaty and dark chocolaty, I missed the lack of booziness in this one compared to Brunch.  Good, but not worth trampling over a kid in a wheelchair for (Brunch most certainly is worth trampling over a handicap child for.)

I’d passed over Mikkeller beers for far too long–perhaps due to their lofty price tags (about $12-15 for the smallish bottles where I live)–but now I’m most certainly eager to try more of their offerings to see what these crazy Danes have a-brewing.

Looks like there’s a few more from the Beer Geek line, though they appear to be small-batch bottlings only available in Europe.  Darn.

A-/B+

Question of the day:  Where have you seen utter geekiness where you least expected it?

*I should note I have now become almost disenchanted with the BA Top 100.  It has become just too much of a Sisyphean task to tackle it.  Every time I have a Top 100 beer, a new exciting release comes out and meteorically jumps onto the list.  And, then, that same release usually has several similtaneous, even rarer, tap-only iterations (bourbon-barreled, oaked, vanilla beaned, cocoa nibbed) which add two to four more beers onto the Top 100 and all of the sudden you’re not gaining any ground on conquering the Top 100.  And let’s not discuss those times when you finally take down a Top 100 “white whale”–see Veritas 004 which I had last night–only to see that beer become “retired”–which Veritas 004 will almost certainly be in a few weeks or so–and then totally disappear from the list.  It becomes frustrating and I feel like I’ve been stuck in the “had” 65-70 of the Top 100 for the last few months with little traction made.  Which actually makes me happy, because now I’ve decided to just enjoy great beer, may the Top 100 list be damned.  (Unless of course I ever get me hands on some Black Tuesday and then, woohoo!, #1 beer in the world!!!!!!)

Note: 2/3rds of this post comes courtesy of a trade with Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive.

When I get together with my friends DW and Batch, we like nothing more than to set up a blind taste test amongst some hard-hittin’ beers.  There’s no more accurate way to judge, and enjoy, a great beer than with no preconceived notions.  No inner monologue dancing around your head saying stuff like, “I think I kinda hate this beer, but it’s #13 on the Beer Advocate Top 100 so maybe I actually do like it…?????”

For this blind, I’m sure some beer geeks are going to get all up in arms that we pitted an American double stout vs. an American porter vs. a Russian imperial stout.  Blasphemy they’ll say!  He disrespected beer!  They might even start a nerdy discussion about it on the sad BA Forums.  But I’ll argue that it was an apropos matchup.  These styles are virtually the same and in this case, all three beers had near identical ABVs and, more importantly, strongly relied on coffee for their flavor profiles.*

The contenders were the currently #13 beer in the world AleSmith’s Speedway Stout, the #73 beer in the world Deschutes Black Butte XXI, and, just to throw a would-be tomato can into the mix, Pozharnik from Pennichuck Brewing from out in New Hampshire.

We were anxious to throw these down, but we faced one crucial problem:  how to set up a blind tasting when we were the only three people around.  Usually there’s a wife or a girlfriend, a macro-drinking friend, a teetotaling toddler, you can enlist to set up the glasses for tastings but in this case all those kinds of people were shunning us.  Three people born in the 1970s, well-educated, and we couldn’t possibly figure out how to set up a blind to drink ourselves.  Perhaps we were a little toasted too.  And I was most anxious to get on with this tasting as I was getting a firm case of drinking blue balls.

Finally, DW decided he could pull out nine total glasses, label three of them with a 1 on the bottom, three with a 2, and three with a 3, pour the same beer in the same numbered glass, then have Batch mix the glasses up, then have me distribute.  It worked.  May drinking beer never be so hard again.

On with the tasting notes:

Beer #1:  I found this one strongly smelling of soy sauce while all three of us detected a spicy chili pepper scent on the nose, recalling Dogfish Head Theobroma a bit I thought, oddly enough.  I found this one thin in the mouth, and bordering on unpleasant.  I didn’t even want to finish my blind taster glass.

Beer #2:  This was sweeter than #1 and quite flavorful.  I found it, likewise, to be a little thin on the mouth, but it was a very solid effort I enjoyed.

Beer #3:  By far the best of the three, all three of us blind tasters thought it easily won the troika matchup.  Rich in coffee taste and with a silky mouthfeel, toasty, roasty, and chocolaty, I greedily slurped this one up.

And the reveal:

Beer #1:  Black Butte XXI

Beer #2:  Pozharnik

Beer #3:  Speedway Stout**

We were all floored how resoundingly the beautifully wax-dipped Black Butte XXI got its ass kicked.  After the reveal, we still struggled to enjoy it and nearly considered passing the remaining 3/4th of the bottle to a bum outside.  (Respect that BA!)  XXI would be the only of the three bottles we didn’t enjoyably finish.  But, to be fair, it explicitly says on the Black Butte XXI bottle that the beer is best after 10/17/2010, but with such a lofty numerical standing and such rave reviews pretty much to a man at this very second in time, I would have hoped for better.  Nevertheless, I would really like to try another bottle of it exactly 369 days from now and I’ll give it a marginal benefit of the doubt til then.

The little-discussed Pozharnik was also quite a surprise, in the more pleasant surprise direction, and held up quite well in matching the wax-dipped XXI with a plastic plungered bottle.  The victorious Speedway Stout opted for the silver foil-wrapped top, completing the trifecta in what may not have been our greatest blind tasting ever, but was surely our greatest fancily-capped bottle tasting ever.

Black Butte XXI:  B-

Pozharnik:  A-

Speedway Stout:  A

*Commercial descriptions:

Speedway Stout: “A HUGE Imperial Stout that weighs in at an impressive 12% ABV! As if that’s not enough, we added pounds of coffee for a little extra kick.”

Black Butte XXI: “Building on the existing chocolate notes already present in Black Butte Porter, brewers added Theo’s Chocolate cocoa nibs from Seattle,  1000 pounds of Bellatazza’s locally roasted Ethopian and Sumatran coffee, and then aged a portion of it in Stranahan’s Colorado whiskey barrels.”

Pozharnik: “The 2007 Pozharnik is an intensely flavored Russian Imperial Stout infused with espresso that compliments its rich chocolate & roasted malt character.  Pozharnik is guaranteed to warm a winter chill with its 10% ABV and dark fruit (raisin & plum) & vanilla undertones.  Notes of whiskey aromatics are brought on by the aging process in a “single barrel” whiskey cask.”

**Interestingly enough, the only of the three to NOT be barrel-aged.  Though, I’d love to try the barrel-aged version of this one if any one wants to hook a brotha up.

8.5% ABV on cask

The Great RV Trip Non-Debacle 2009

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

No.  We were somewhere around East Stroudsburg, near the Delaware Water Gap, when the vodka began to coarse through us.

No.  That’s not right either.  What is it about besotted road trips that makes every one want to pay homage to the master?  To steal from Hunter S?

I shall start again.

What is it about moving while drinking that makes it so much more enjoyable?  Whether on plane, train, boat, or car (hopefully not while driving) it is such a greater pleasure than to imbibe while static.

We were in a twenty-five-foot-long recreational vehicle, an RV you dope, hurtling down the highway as fast as King Otto could drive without the governor stopping us.  The governor on the car.  Not Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, though he wouldn’t have been thrilled with the activities we were partaking in as we marred his miserable state.

In the back, Cuseman and I sat in the booth across from one another.  Dean, Dean, the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid) lounged on the back bed dispensing homemade pineapple-infused vodka–much more potent than you will ever know–from a two gallon tub.  Atop the bunk bed, the babe of the trip, Epstein slept.

When King Otto suggested we rent an RV for our sojourn to State College, PA to see our beloved Syracuse Orange lose to Penn State, I was a little leery.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I signed up immediately, but I was certainly leery.  Leery about:

• the quality and comfort of a rented RV
• living with four men within the confines of about fifty square feet for forty-eight straight hours
• King Otto’s ability to drive the thing
• not dying from any of the above

One thing I wasn’t leery about:

• actually getting a hilarious story from this most certain debacle of a trip.

I would live on the RV, tailgate with the RV, and hang with likeminded RVers, many of the professional variety, for an entire weekend so that none of my readers ever would have to.  I would be the Bear Grylls of driving, sleeping, relaxing, eating, pissing, and shitting all within the same vehicle.  I was certain I would be incredibly glad to have gone on this trip, and almost certain that I’d never want to do it again by trip’s end.

I have to say, I was so very wrong.

First of all, I was greatly impressed by our Cruise America “standard” rental.  If you’ve never had the fortune–yes, fortune–to ride in an RV, let me briefly explain its interior.  Though it looks no bigger than a utility van or a smallish U-Haul on the outside, inside it’s like a funhouse and you are simply blown away at how much is packed into the thing.  Pure American ingenuity and efficiency.  Above the driver’s cabin–identical to a truck cabin but with access to the back living quarters–a bunk bed big enough to house three heterosexual men that don’t mind incidental contact, three across like sardines.

In the middle of the living quarters, a sitting booth akin to what you’d see at a Denny’s or standard dinner.  A perfect place to play cards, eat fast food, or get tie one on hard while the “dad” of the trip–King Otto in this case–drove.

Loaded up and ready to go, King Otto took the wheel still smarting from layabout Cuseman’s insubordination in loading up and preparing to go in a timely manner (let’s hope the two of them wage a war of words within my comments below–it will truly be hilarious), and we were off.

The drive to State College from New York City is…well, honestly, I have no fucking clue.  I wasn’t paying attention in the least.  Nor really was Cuseman, Epstein, or Dean, Dean, the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid).  It was raining hard, it was dark out, but the back was like a bar where time simply doesn’t matter.  Yeah, sure, like a bar with no TVs, no women, inaudible car radio, and only four customers in it.  But the drinks were free, the cold beers were only an inch away from you at any time, and there was never a line to the pisser.  A bathroom about the size of an airplane lavatory, I should note.

Drinking on road trips is always not just a desire, nor a necessity, but of the utmost importance.  Shit, I’ve been known to risk life, limb, and the tender skin on my palms just to get an open bottle of beer for a ride.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone drinking and driving in the least and I’ve only done it once in my life–no lie–but I condone drinking and passengering with all of my being.

Why it is a crime in America to drink alcohol while not driving a car but while simply sitting in it is extremely baffling to me.  A typical case of America finding solutions to problems that don’t exist and which are really not solutions at all.  (Have a lot of drunk passengers wrecked the cars they weren’t driving?!)  I suppose lawmaking muckety-mucks would say you can’t drink and passenger because, well, because it sets a bad example for the man at the wheel.  Heck, it might even make him downright jealous.  Well shit then, shouldn’t it be illegal to not read while in the passenger seat?  Or do a crossword?  Or play air drums to “Dazed and Confused?”  Or fucking sleep?!  Cause, while I may not be any sort of vehicular safety expert, I know countless people that have successfully driven a car while lit up like a menorah, but I don’t know a single motherfucker that has successfully made it from point A to point B while fast asleep.

And that’s the great thing about having the RV.  With a car, you’re always conscious, always worried about a cop driving by and seeing you opening a cold one, about empties littering the floor, about needing to break the seal too early and slowing down your entire trip.  But all those problems are negated in an RV.  With the curtains closed, no one else on the road could possibly see what mischief we were getting into.  It was our private sanctuary, our own movable speakeasy, for throwing back the hooch with no consequence.  Unless of course King Otto wrecked the car and then we’d face the quite troublesome consequences of seeing what happens to a man who is standing in the back of an RV, chugging a beer, when said RV fishtails into a highway girder.  Perhaps we should wear helmets in the back next time?

Without question, this was the most enjoyable roadtrip I have ever had driving-wise.  On other roadtrips, you’re obsessed with the time while en route.  “How’s are time?”  “We making good time?”  “What time do you think we’ll be in?”  Why?  Well so you can get to the bar and start drinking.  But when the bar is with you, time is of the utmost insignificance.  We could have arrived at 9 PM, midnight, or next year and I wouldn’t have give a damn.  Unless the beer had ran out.

The insignificant time we did arrive ended up being 10:50 PM.  Pulling into the grass rolling hills of a parking lot at 10:50 PM we were floored.  Hundred upon hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of RVs already set up, as far as the eye could see.  There must surely be an RV caste system as we were ordered and then tucked away into a far corner of the lot amidst other smallish rentals and amateur RV enthusiasts.

We immediately grabbed a handful of beers and set out to explore.  To see the real RV pros at work.  We took laps around the ad hoc “streets” of the RV City, our wasted eyes agog like Dorothy in Oz.  We soon learned that the lot opens at 5 PM sharp on Thursday night with a line of RVs already ready to enter and set up, and for the next three days the place becomes like a slapdash wild west mining town, thrown up over night to assure a place’s newest and likewise temporary inhabitants, can find places to grub, drink, gamble, and fuck while finding as much gold as possible.  We were amazed to see impromptu sports pubs, dance clubs, karoake bars, and even gambling venues pieced together through a series of interconnected tents–closer to circus than pup–covering all sorts of tables, furniture, and electronics powered by miles and miles of extension cord connected to satellite dishes and RV generators.  Suffice to say, many if not most of these big time RV “establishments”–for lack of a better word–were larger, more spacious, and had far more eminities and creature comforts than not just my Manhattan apartment but most groggeries in New York City proper.

There’s nothing better than waking up at sunrise on Saturday, walking outside in your sleep clothes, taking a piss in the dewy grass, and immediately popping a beer to shake off the cobwebs, then sparking up the grill, and setting up the Cornhole boards.  (As we all know Cornhole is the greatest outdoor drinking game in the history of the world, and any time I get a chance I play it until my arm falls off, my liver explodes, or, more likely, the cheap wood board shatters.)  We drank and ate burgers and sausage, played Cornhole and Beer Pong until 11:50 AM before hightailing it to the stadium.

There’s not much worth discussing or explaining about the day’s game.  Beaver Stadium may the biggest stadium in America and the third largest in the world, but it’s fairly unspectacular.  You might say, well, Penn State was playing the miserable Syracuse Orange, sure.  And that does justify the fans lack of enthusiasm and propensity for sitting on their hands.  But that doesn’t justify it being an undistinguished Erector Set of a dilipidated sporting venue, nor the school have a shockingly ugly student base.  King Otto, Cuseman, Dean, Dean the Dancing Machine (aka: The Tapdance Kid), and Epstein can back me up on this, the four State fans in front of us were of another species.  A species that surely evolved and survived by not being the fittest, but rather by being so goddamn repulsive no predators possibly wanted to get near these mutants.  Literally slack-jawed with the gummiest mouths you’ve ever seen, acne-riddled skin, hair straight from the bird’s nest wig collection, and the dopiest hick hollers of “Cuuuuuuuuuuum’on, less’go Stuuuuuuuuuu-ate!”  Sickening.  And this is coming from a man that hadn’t showered or even brushed his teeth that morning.  My standards were not exactly high on that misty day.

Of course you can’t drink during the game because the hypocritical NCAA likes to pretend that it has some ethics, so I was forced to swig on Diet Pepsis all game, which I won’t deny were incredibly reasonably priced so yay for that.  After a 28-7 loss, after nearly falling asleep from our three hour lack of alcohol, we jumped back into drinking and exploring the RV scene.  (Marv Albert voice:  “With authority!”)

An expert myself, I am not one to haphazardly praise the drinking prowess of others, thinking most “party” schools to be grossly overrated, most hardcore imbibers hardly able to throw it back, but I can say this:  Penn State fans can drink.  They are one of the finest drinking schools I have ever dealt with.  Good lord, State College on a gameday might be the drinking capital of America.

As a connoisseur of drinking games, I was both intrigued and excited to learn that Cornhole and Beer Pong have pretty much become passe at State College.  Still respected sure, but more in a retro way like, “Ha, isn’t it cute.  We’re playing beer pong!  That game we used to play when we were in junior high!”  Oh no, these ugly Penn State fans have moved on to far more aggressive drinking games.  Games of the highest skill, abilities, and suicidal tendencies.  I learned at least four new drinking games but my two most eye-opening favorites were Dizzy Bat and Speedball, explained as follows:

Dizzy Bat–Take your classic yellow Wiffleball bat, cut the bottom of the handle off it, fill the barrel with an entire can of beer and…CHUG!  After you’ve finished chugging, put the bat on your forehead, bend over, and spin around ten times, then stand up and try to take a swing at the empty beer can as a friend/enemy tosses it at you.  Amazingly, or not considering how awesome America is, there’s actually countless great Youtube videos of this sport.

Speedball–Probably the most dangerous drinking game I’ve ever encountered aside from gloryholing, this game works like this:  Two-versus-two with each team set up on opposite ends of your typical beer pong length table.  Each player has a full can of beer placed in front of him.  One teammate hurls a ping pong ball at one of his opponents’ two cans and, assuming he hits a can, his partner is allowed to begin chugging his beer and chug it as long as he can until the “defending” team is able to retrieve the ping pong ball and lay it smack on the table.  Sounds easy, sure, but here’s the rub:  the player that hurled the ball at the defenders’ beer cans is allowed to chase after the ball and the defenders and use any means necessary–kicking, scratching, blocking, tripping–short of outright tackling, or covering the ball, to prevent the defenders from returning the ball to the table.  Teams go back-and-forth taking alternating shots, game is over when both of a team’s players have drained every last drop of their two cans.  You are guaranteed to be sweaty, tired, filthy, perhaps injured, and certainly wasted after a game of Speedball.  Fans gather around like they are watching a Michael Vick sanctioned canine UFC event.  Not surprisingly, all the players and spectators, are men.

As nightfall came and drinking games became an impossibility, now wasted and worn, we walked around the dark lot getting into trouble and creating memories at the various dance clubs, bars, and various drinking scenes.  Making friends with strangers, watching nationally-televised football games on projection satellite TV screens blasted onto walls and giant RVs, and eventually becoming shit-canned enough to hit on ugly ugly women (photographic evidence destroyed.)  We even managed to get a little illicit gambling done, with Dean, Dean the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid) absolutely mopping up.

I was worn and wasted before even 1 AM, after approximately seventeen straight hour of drinking and twenty-six of the last thirty-three hours with a drink in my hands, I aptly feel asleep that night still clutching a half-drunk brew.

I'm even a legend while I sleep

Th next day, the RV was an absolute pig sty, our toilet not overflowed but filled to the brim, our two gallons of vodka killed, our three bottles of spice rum decimated, and 84 out of 96 cans of cheap beer taken down (OK, who was the slacker here?).  We were most certainly ready to get back to civilization.  Unfortunately, the drive back home to New York through the tumbling hills of nowhere land, where you can’t even find a McDonald’s for hundreds of miles, is a lot more boring when you’re hungover and not drinking.  Oh well, road trips always end poorly.  No one ever says:  “Man, you know what the best part of this road trip was?!  Driving home at the end of it!”

Having said that, I’m pretty sure the five of us are now RV enthusiasts for life.  It’s a lifestyle I think I could get into, the cornerstone of a splendid lost weekend, though I would die an early death if I did it more than once a year.

Though I guess I may have to change my life expectancy:  King Otto’s considering buying an RV.

After having not showered, or defecated, sorry for the too much information, for the entirety of the trip, I had to handle both post-haste upon re-entering Manhattan society.  But I also had to hightail it to Rattle ‘N’ Hum because after drinking garbage macro beer all weekend, I needed some flavorful, weighty, and potent sugary poison in my system, and luckily, my favorite bar was hosting the Gotham Cask Festival, with quite a few notables on tap amongst several dozens specialty casks.

I started things off with Sixpoint’s Hops of Love “IPA 4 Evah” dry-hopped cask beer.  I was quite impressed with this 6.2% offering and found it even better than their well-acclaimed Bengali Tiger.  Hops of Love was made specially for Sixpoint brewer Ian’s wedding and apparently they made far too much, which is our gain!  Our at least mine.  Dry-hopped with cascade and Northern, this is a flawless and complex blend of grapefruit, piny hops, and bitterness all in a slippery smooth little package.  I really enjoyed this luxurious beer which just coddled my throat (A-)

I also tried the official beer of New York City Craft beer week, the NY3, a collaborative effort between Empire State brewers Captain Lawrence, Ithaca, and Southampton, brewed with local honey from each of the three brewers, dry-hopped with Willamette hops among others from Pedersen Farms.  I eagerly anticipated this effort but was a tad let down.  A solid session effort no doubt, kinda like Liquid Gold Lite, but nothing spectacular, and a beer that easily got lost in the shuffle compared to all the legendary, high ABV offerings I had around during the past week (B+)

But I had come specifically to the cask festival at Rattle ‘N’ Hum for one much desired beer, a Beer Advocate Top 100 effort and no doubt George Lucas unapproved, the Imperial Stout Trooper.  A vintage 2006 keg no less!  I found the stout to be a most warm and relaxing imperial that actually tastes far more boozy than it truly is.  Burnt and roasted coffee tastes, a kiss of chocolate, silky and most delicious, though I don’t think it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the all-time legends.  At least on cask.  I hope to snag a bottle this winter.

A-

*Of note, you can still drink at Syracuse’s Carrier Dome, so fuck all you teetotaling heathens.

(Be sure and check out this fun interview Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive did with me)