Beer Stories

Those are some really great stories. I don't have anything nearly that cool. I didn't even start drinking until I was 23, mostly because of religious purposes and fear of becoming an alcoholic. I eventually realized that living in fear is not a good thing.

My friend Brian (see picture), kept telling me I wasn't a man if I could finish a pint. We went to this place together called A.J's Pub and I had some amber colored beer and could only drink about 8 ounces of it. I went home that day and bought a case of Corona's and by the end of that case I was enjoying beer.

I remember some of the most memorable tasting beers. The Mirror Pond Pale Ale by Deschutes was the first beer that blew me away. It is a classic Oregon beer. Deschutes also makes Black Butte Porter which I also loved, and for a long time it was the only beer I drank. I also liked the Terminator Stout from McMenamins. Eventually I got more and more into beers by small and local breweries. The Bridgeport IPA, another classic, is possibly the beer I've drank the most of. I remember the first time I drank Russian River's Pliny the Elder, one of the highest ranked beers of all time. It was very good, very fresh. But my current favorite is from Double Mountain, in Hood River, and is called the Double Mountain IRA. My favorite brewery is Laurelwood Brewery, and their brewery is only 15 blocks from my house. They are consistently amazing and have continually released beers that are top notch, such as the Workhorse IPA, Hop Monkey IPA, Straight Up IPA, Vinter Varmer, Moose & Squirrel Stout, among many others. I've never been disappointed with their beer.

But I don't have any crazy stories. Drinking beer is either a social or a private act but it is one that I take seriously, in some kind of weird way. I don't buy cheap beer if I can avoid it. I enjoy going to the pub and talking about things that are on my mind, projects that I've been working on, religion, politics, life, and other things. It's the ultimate form of conceptual productivity for me. That's one of the reasons why I'm so interested in using the act of drinking beer as an art form, or at least a means of communicating ideas. I've done: Drinking Beer with Friends and Working, Good Beer = Good Times, and I'm currently putting together a collaborative beer-cultural experience called Cultivate. I'm very excited about Cultivate. And now that I think about it, in my Utopian Science Fiction Marathon Night I created a supplemental reader, called Between the Cracks, in which I paired images of people drinking beer together with utopian texts.

Today I opened up my first batch from my first homebrewed beer. It tasted like sugary water beer. It wasn't good. I may have opened it a little early though.

By the way, I changed the look of the blog a little and I've added a "parallel readings" section into the sidebar. That has an interview that I'm in with Cyrus W Smith, a top 100 scifi flicks list from Rotten Tomatoes, and this great reading about slacking off. The slacking off reading is one that I have had my classmates read as part of the assigned readings that compliment our practice in some way. I think my classmates joke now about how I'm "slacking off" if I miss class or something. I also get stuck with all the drinking and beer jokes. Anytime anyone mentions anything about beer everyone in the room looks at me or points at me. It's a little weird. Anyway, I've read some texts about labor and leisure, owning your time, how to not work, and things of that nature, so I thought that an essay about slackerdom is a humurous contribution because slackerdom denies itself the label of leisurely, vacation, relaxing, and anything else that has any sort of ends connected to the activity. I don't think I'm a slacker. Maybe I am though, what do you think Zach?
-ps - Why don't you title your blog posts?