Brews You Can Use
This might be a 2009 first: Drinking while writing BYCU. I used to do it regularly. Truth revealed: in the early days, BYCU was normally written after a few hours at the drinking club or, at a minimum, a few hours of front porch drinking. After I felt sufficiently steeled, I'd lumber downstairs with my last beer of the evening and crank out the next morning's post. I haven't done that lately, and even last night, I merely cracked open a single bottle of Smithwick's, a most-righteous and rich beer from Ireland. It's expensive stuff, but packs a pretty good wallop. I first tried it three years after a TDE reader gave me a six-pack of it. Since then, I've drunk it off-and-on. I'd rank it in my Top Ten of favorite beers.
Another friend and TDE reader sent me an article about one drinker's Top Ten beers. Great beginning: "The only New Year's resolution that I've managed to keep is to drink more beer."
I wish I'd thought of that resolution, especially since I've only heard of one of his Top Ten, and it's a beer that I have to sneak for fear of allegations of homosexuality from my virile circle of acquaintances: the Lindemans Framboise. I can't drink it straight, but two ounces mixed into 20 ounces of a wheat beer? Hoodoggy, it's excellent. Our local brewpub offers the concoction, and it's my favorite. (Ten best beers article: Via Lew Rockwell.)
If you want to see a lot of good beer talk, Google "Ten Best Beers." You'll get a lot of interesting articles, like this list of top beer names (unfortunately, I can't pronounce a few of them).
If I had to rank my Top Ten beers of all time, I wouldn't. Tastes change. When I was 20, my list would've looked something like this:
*Red White and Blue
*Busch
*Pabst
*Whatever My Dad Has in His Fridge
*Generic Beer
*Hamms
*Stroh's
*Pretty Much Anything On This List
*Half Glasses (sans cigarette butts . . . I'm not a pig) on Tables After Getting Cut Off
*Old Milwaukee (probably my favorite beer at this time)
Twenty years later, my list looks something like this:
*Smithwick's
*Oberon
*Pabst (stands the test of time)
*Miller Genuine Draft (not "64," which is wretched)
*Paper Pilsner
*Alpena Wheat Ale
*Leinenkugels
*Anchor Steam
*Blue Moon
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It appears Charles Coloumbe has begun writing for Taki. The topic class: "Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms." Let's hope they make this a regular feature. Coloumbe is perhaps the best little-known Catholic writer I've ran across in the past five years. He strikes me as a tad eccentric at points, but erudite and polished.