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For the Bar Tonight

As Radical as Its Eponym

Sam Adams' newest beer is illegal in 15 states. And not because it uses the word "fag" in its advertising or anything sinister like that.

Utopias is described as a “barrel-aged extreme beer” and has a multiyear-long brewing process, Forbes reports. The 2019 brew is a blend of Sam Adams' earlier extreme beers, which have reportedly been aged in wooden bourbon casks.

According to Forbes, Sam Adams' only brewed 77 wooden casks of Utopias, which the outlet describes as having “distinct vanilla notes and subtle nutty and elegant dark fruit aromas.” The beer also claims to have an ABV (alcohol by volume) of 28 percent, significantly higher than the average beer (which is usually lower than 10 percent).

Auberon

A lot has changed since the period that Waugh on Wine covers. The British mass market is no longer in the grip of a “depraved” taste for semi-sweet wine. The drinkers he has in mind when he refers solecistically to “the hoi polloi” do not exhibit a “passion for filth” by favouring cheap Teutonic gut-rot. Pink champagne is easy to find, and Chianti is no longer the preserve of nurses hosting dinners in fifth-floor flatshares in Fulham. A large proportion of the most sought-after French wines now end up in Chinese cellars. The globalization of demand has stretched prices. When Waugh complains about the cost of 1982's most rarefied clarets, he proposes as an alternative Château Léoville-Las Cases at £9 a bottle; anyone thinking of laying down its 2018 counterpart will have to find around twenty-five times that amount.

Depressed Drinking

Amen to these observations. The nauseating sight of country music today is a larger indictment of our culture in general.

The characters who currently populate American pop culture, and the audiences that applaud them, and the executives that produce them, expose a culture that is hollowed out of its humanity– tragically unable to distinguish between music that moves the spirit and the jingles that make disposable products seem more appealing on television. Worse yet, they don't even seem to care.

New Podcast

Modern Drunkard Magazine. I haven't listened to it yet but will shortly.

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