beer (go back »)

I hang up items I purchase from ebay in my cubicle at work.  One item that gets a lot of comments is a metal Koehler Beer sign with two little clocks that show opening and closing times.  People from northeast PA and northeast Ohio come in and tell me they remember Koehler.  My dad worked at a Youngstown steel mill and bought Koehler because it was cheap.  He used to store it in our cellar.  Kept it cold.  My mom was the daughter of an alcoholic and didn't like the sight of beer in the refrigerator.

I get worked up about what's happened to beer.  Beer was a symbol of the American working class.  When you ordered a beer instead of scotch and soda, you were telling everyone at that establishment that you worked for a living, that you weren't yuppie scum.

Beer used to be a symbol of community pride, like it still is in Germany.  From Koehler's of Erie to Dixie of New Orleans to Walter's of Eau Claire to Rolling Rock of Latrobe, you drank local.  You drank local even if the beer sort of sucked, like Iron City of Pittsburgh.

Alas, the yuppie scum and corporate America couldn't allow us to hang on to the last vestige of working-class identity. No, they had to fuck up beer, too.  Put chocolate and Framboise and fucking kumquats in the brew.  Give it a European theme, like Hefeweizen or Pils.  Give it an ironic smart-ass name.  Make it high art instead of a simple pleasure.  Make it appealing to the sipping dilettante snobs. Most importantly, sell it for $10, $12, $15 for a six-pack.

I don't like high art in beer.  I don't like a thousand choices in beer.  I don't want to sniff and sip beer.  I like to swig and guzzle my beer.  I want a "Koehler collar" foam mustache.  And I want to pick up a 12-pack without having to skip the cable bill.  I want to drink something that goes well with the smell of cigarette smoke and Old Spice, not something that makes me smell like a girl.  No metrosexual chick microbrew for me.

I went to Ralph's Square Diner in Worcester, MA and they still served Narragansett Ale from Cranston, Rhode Island.  I couldn't believe it.  A diner with cheap local beer.  No gimmicks.  No pomegranate garnish.  They didn't even take credit cards and the ATM machine was out of order.  So I just dished out grimy folded American dollars for cold amber American beer in a regular glass on a hot August day.  It was, as the credit card commercial goes, priceless.

I prefer Genessee Cream Ale but can't find it in the Seattle area, except at some Korean-owned happy grocery shop in Renton.  I find it odd that Fred Meyer sells beer from China, Thailand, Belgium, and India but can't manage to import a cream ale from New York but some dude who probably drank Soju as a teen-ager in Seoul can find a way to stock his mom-and-pop grocery store with my favorite brew.  Anyway, I also crave O'Keefe and Old Vienna ales, formerly made by Carling in Canada, but they're long gone. 

So, when I cut the lawn and lose the battle with the brambles and it's hotter than July and a Cosmo or Tini won't cut it, I do the unpatriotic thing and buy Mexican beer.  Mexicans still make no-bullshit, affordable beer.  I guess it's because Mexicans still work for a living.