God wants us to be happy ~ Beer
A high-school chum, storm-bound in DC due to the recent blizzard, posted this image on my Facebook timeline.
Of course, it tickled me like foam on my mustache. But it also jogged loose a memory.
I can’t believe it was over a decade ago. Another friend was in New Orleans while I manned the fort during a dreary Vancouver March. It’s a singularly moist, grey and cold month, March in Vancouver. Sometimes a several-days-long hint of summer makes a foray into March which, rather than the reprieve it might otherwise be, only makes the return of cold wet seem all the more, well, cold and wet.
My friend had been opining to me — prisoner of cold clammy dreary dungeonous Vancouver — about it being hot. Damn hot. Too damn hot! I sucked up my petulant jealousy, warmed my fingers by hand washing the dishes, and tapped out an insider’s tip on an insidiously delightful local brew going by the exquisite name, “Blackened Voodoo Lager”. She wrote back.
off to the jazz fest today.
And the next day.
i think i might learn to actually like it.
Hmmmmm…. an intervention was obviously required. So, after dirtying enough dishes to clean, I set my still soapy hands to keyboard and let her know what lager is all about.
Tonic for a very hot day: ice cold (and I mean just shy of turning to slush) lager. Careful :: not too fast!
Stouts and ales are for people who live in cold, miserable places like Vancouver. They are chummy, hearth-side beers, the shepherd’s pies of beverages. Now tell me, how appealing is the thought of shepherd’s pie in that Louisiana heat?
Wine? Wine is a parasol. Fine for moderate days — delicate flower of intoxicants — it wilts in the heat, and bruises in extreme cold. Wine is for people with air conditioners.
Lager cuts to the chase. It is a bag of ice to the back of your neck, a bracing offshore breeze that raises goose bumps. If there were no Popsicles, Southerners would let their children drink lager.
Surefire pathway to hangover: a clawfoot tub of ice generously displaced by bottles of lager + temperatures in the ‘sweating in the shade’ zone.
Antidote: a boiling vat of crawfish, corn cobs and potatoes. Taken with lager, of course.