I Remember My First Beer
...because I drank it on Saturday night.
I never put in the effort to develop a taste for beer. One mouthful of the stuff and I went no further. Not when there were mixed drinks in the world. Not long into my youthful discovery of alcoholic libation, I discovered white wine, and that was good, too. But beer? Ewgh. Didn’t like the taste. Didn’t like the smell. Didn’t like the smell of dudes who’d been tasting.
This makes me a bad Canadian, I know. Part of it was the sweet tooth, I guess. I needs me at least a trace sugar in my beverage of choice. Efficiency of price to hammeredness didn’t play into my calculations. Even as a young guy, I wasn’t looking to get gloriously blotto. Pleasantly tipsy was my desired state.
What one misses by not being a beer guy is that primal sense of delight in one’s chosen beverage. Wine and liquor are drinks. Beer is your friend. A mighty sense memory of affection and nostalgia accompanies every fizz of a freshly opened can or bottle
Occasionally I read about high-end beers written out of the same sense of connoisseurship I know from wine, and get tempted by the prose. But then there’s that first mouthful, and it’s still beer.
My wife, with whom I share many of the same disinterests, is also not a beer person. About fifteen years ago we read about this great German raspberry beer. Hey, we thought raspberries. Nope, still beer. Neither of us quite finished our halves of the bottle.
So what can you make beer more resemble to induce me to drink not just one entire bottle, but two, and then two-thirds of a third bottle?
Coffee. Make it look and taste like espresso, as does the Mill St. Brewery Coffee Porter, and I’m willing to go a certain distance with you. Only after tasting some homemade ice cream midway through the final bottle did the lack of sweetness hit me and put a stop to my newfound beer-coffee drinking ways.
So the big question: aftereffects. What wins out: the depressant effect of the alcohol, or the caffeine stimulant? The results of my personal science experiment revealed that it makes you sleepy and alert at the same time. Not a good thing.
I guess this makes the Mill Street Coffee Porter an early afternoon beer.