ISSUE 34, HOME BREW, Part 6: First Beer
First Beer
Sometime in 1967, when I was either 15 or 16 years old and playing keyboards in a Top 40 cover band in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. I drank my first beer, a Budweiser from a bandmates basement refrigerator. Its bitterness did not sit well with me. I had an innocent mouth. But I had seen my dad drink Miller High Life in the summers, particularly when eating steamed crabs. He kept a six pack of Michelob beside his teak bar in case guests came during the weekends. Yes, I grew up in the age of corporate beer when vast corporations (not so vast as today) controlled what appeared on the grocery store shelves and gets poured at the tap of the local tavern. Lager ruled. Since I lived in the Washington, D. C. metro area you could go to select stores near Dupont Circle and find German and Czech imports (not Hieneken). Lots of our neighbords in Rockville and Gaithersburg MD were connected with the diplomatic community in D.C. American beer did not rate among this crowd. My first foreign beer was Dinkel Acker, served by the parents of one of my Rockville High School friends. The depth of flavor was shocking. Yet again I was not use to the bitterness of the brew.
When I went to college [College of William and Mary] in 1969, I first encountered people who made cheapness the #1 disideratum in their drinking. Virginia had laws that required persons my age to consume 3.2 beer, but any intelligent teenager could find a crossroads store in the vicinity of Williamsburg who would sell anything, no questions asked. I learned to hate Schlitz, Stroh’s and National Bo at that time. I graduated in 1973 and spent a year in Dublin, taking a graduate degree at Trinity College Dublin. I learned to drink Guiness Stout, and then half way through the year the first strike at the brewery in decades took place. I drank English mass market ale instead.
I returned to the U. S. for graduate school and stopped drinking beer, cultivating wine instead. There was an excellent wine store on 55th street in Hyde Park, Chicago. I had a full time job, a salary, and wasn’t married so decided to devote a year to tasting my way through the regions, styles, and vintages. It was something that taught me a great deal about wine. There were entire years in the 1970s and early 1980s when I did not consumer a single beer.
In 1990 I had at a friend’s house an Anchor Steam Beer. I thought it “interesting.” In 1997 when the Palmetto Brewing Company opened in Charleston (I was living in S.C. at this juncture) I had the beer and made the point of ordering it when it was on the menu. But I can’t say I became an entire convert to the microbrewery revolution until after 2000. I confess that I am something of a classicist. Classic formulations of porter, ale, beer, IPA I’m down with. But fruit flavored beers, sours, triple strength, barrel flavored strike me as affectation.
My wife is the great beer drinker in our family. She likes the bitter.