“Want a sip?”
My very first taste of beer was given to me by my dad. I was about 14 years old. We were standing in the driveway of our house near Luck, Wisconsin. It was a warm summer day. The can of beer he offered me was half fun and it was not very cold. “Do you want a sip?” I wasn’t really curious, but decided to try. It tasted awful! I remember saying it was ‘yucky’. Bear in mind that there were many brands of cheap beer sold in Wisconsin in the 1970s. My dad was not a connoisseur of beer and I am sure he bought the cheap stuff. It could have been Old Milwaukee, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, Old Style, Hamms, or Miller High Life. Just the mention of those names brings back memories of ‘piss beer’! I found an article on the internet discussing some of these brands: ‘Old American Beers‘.
Beer Party
My next encounter with beer happened a year or so later. My sister and I had just left a Polk County 4-H meeting in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. She was two years older than me and I was not old enough to drive. Instead of going straight home after the meeting, she said we were stopping at a beer party held on some dirt road. I protested. I fumed at the party. I told my sister I would tell on her when we got home. True to my word, I tattle told on my sister. I don’t know if she got in trouble, or not. I don’t think that incident affected our sibling relationship.
“Is That Paul?”
I did not drink much beer throughout my high school years. Instead, my friends and girlfriends would buy ‘bottom shelf’ wine (Boones Farm, Strawberry Hill) at the liquor store and go driving the back roads of Polk County. We would find a wooded lot or cemetery, put an 8-track in the player, and rock out on our air guitars. Very rarely did I go to a teenage party where there was drinking and smoking. One exception was a party at a gravel pit during ‘Senior Skip Day’ at Luck High School in June, 1979. I was to afraid to skip the day, but after leaving around 3:30pm, I drove to the gravel pit and made a rare appearance and drank some beer.
College
I attended a few keggers in college in the early 1980s. Alcohol did not pique my interest. I saw it brought out so much bad behavior in others that I didn’t want to have it do the same to me. I do remember one party outside my dorm building while at Stout in Menomonie, Wisconsin. I drank so much that I tried to stumble back to my room on the 3rd floor. However, I only made it to the 2nd floor before I had to find a stall in the bathroom. Spent the next 30 minutes with my head in the toilet barfing my guts out.
Black Out
When I drink alcohol, it is a balancing act between feeling good and nausea. Hangovers are no stranger to me and I’ve had my share of vomiting due to a night of overindulging. There is only one case where I could have possibly backed out. What I really think happened was that I got so tired that I just remember waking up.
In 1982, a fellow student at Control Data Institute was having a party across town in St. Paul. I didn’t have my car at the time, so I took a metro bus. We sent hours at his apartment drinking beer. At some point I did not feel well and went outside. It was dark. I thought a walk would do me good. So I wandered. Then threw up on the side of a house. Wandered some more. Got lost. I ended up being so tired and cold that I went up to a porch, used a welcome mat as a blanket and fell asleep. A few hours later I woke up and realized I had to get home. Never in my life had something like this happened. I walked down a few blocks to the bus stop and got a ride back to my apartment.
Anheuser-Busch
Moving to the St. Louis, Missouri area in 1987 allowed me to get a better understanding of how beer is made. Anheuser-Busch brewery is located in the city of St. Louis right next to the Mississippi River. I’ve done the ‘brew tour’ three times. It is a guided tour of the facilities where the beer in made in vats and canned. The last time I did the tour was with my wife, Elaine, in 2017 for her birthday. At the end of the tour you can have free samples of different flavors of beer.
Up until 2016, Anheuser owned the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. So in ‘Busch Stadium’, the only beer product sold was theirs. The stadium was only a mile or so from the brewery in downtown St. Louis. that same year, Anheuser-Busch was sold to a Begium company called InBev. The general public has not noticed any significant differences in the beer products since the buy-out, but there was obviously a lot of internal company restructuring that cost many local St. Louis workers their jobs.
Home Brew
Even though I have no interest in doing it, there happened to be many co-workers in the past few decades who decided to brew beer in their home. Because they were excited to show off their product and I was interested in sampling, I got to taste unique flavors (some that were rather disgusting, though!)
Brands and Types
I typically drink pale or amber lager. Never anything with ‘light’ on the label. I do not hang out in bars so I rarely drink from the tap. But I will drink a beer with lunch or dinner when eating out. Brands I gravitate toward today are Fat Tire, Blue Moon, Heineken, Michelob, Leinenkugel. I will buy a 6-pack of India Ale once in a while at the liquor store, or a craft beer flavor I have never tried before. There is a beer bar in Chesterfield, Missouri called iTap. They serve regular beer, but specialize in dozens of IPA on tap. A couple of times my wife and I were there to try out ‘flights’ just to sample various flavors.
Some of my ancestors came to the U. S. from Denmark. My wife and I were in Elk Horn, Iowa researching info on the Koch family, which is near where they lived in the first half of the 1900s. We stopped to eat Danish dishes at the Danish Inn. I had my first taste of Carlsberg beer (Pilsner and Elephant). It is definitely toward the top of my list of favorite lagers.
Elaine’s Trip to Germany
It was my wife who took the trip with family a few years ago. She had not been a beer drinker most of her life. She almost never drank any of the brands I bought. Her trip to Germany changed that. She learned she had a taste for dark beer, such as chocolate milk stout. She liked her beer bitter and dark. I don’t. At least our different tastes in beer keeps us out of each others stash!
Melvin Brewing Company
The growth of the micro-brewery in the U.S. over the past few years has exploded. In fact, one is being built a few miles from where I live in Eureka, Missouri. Melvin Brewing Company is based out of Wyoming. They will be creating sour mash on site and shipping it to stores in the U. S. and a few overseas. I have a YouTube Playlist with a couple of videos I created when the company first came into town.
Conclusion
I continue to try different brands of beer. But I don’t buy it for refreshment such as at the end of a long day of yard work. If I am at an outdoor community event such as a street party, I’ll buy a cup or two because it is part of the social aspect of the event. I’ve mostly given up carbonated drinks. I probably only have 5-6 cans of soda each year. My go-to drink in the evening is rum on the rocks. Sorry, beer!