Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [50]
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When I returned home I took a walk in 1980s downtown Boulder and visited one of my local beer bars. As I entered I silently chuckled to myself, wondering what kind of mischief I could get myself into. “I’d like a ‘Goose the Moose,’ please,” I announced—an 80–20 blend of Moosehead Lager and Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barleywine Ale.
Or how about a “Red Velvet,” a combination of Lindeman’s (cherry) Kriek and Boulder Stout?
For light beer drinkers who are considering the adventure of microbrewed beer and the sensual pleasure of hops, I’d suggest trying an Anchor Liberty Ale or other microbrewed India pale ale with a light beer and mix to suit a developing taste. Call it “Pursuit of Hoppiness.”
The Lyons Brewery Depot in Sunol burnt down soon after my visit. With the support of California microbrewers Judy rebuilt in a nearby town, but the spirit of the place seemed to have faded away after her retirement from the bar business. Judy embodied the passion of microbrewery beer and what it meant to brewers, the beer drinker and those who sell it. In the late 1980s, hers was one of a handful of bars in the entire United States with a passion for microbrewed beer. She helped pioneer the thousands that have followed.
SECTION TWO
Microbrewed: The World
Introduction
I LOVE MY HOME, my wife, my friends, my garden and homebrew, but to travel and discover new places, new perspectives and new beers is my longest-running and most sustained passion. I recall the first month after I graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in Nuclear Engineering. On a whim, I packed one bag and headed west from New Jersey, where I grew up, and landed in Boulder, Colorado. That was in 1972.
One year later, still restless, I quit my meaningless job, packed my backpack, stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked thousands of miles for 10 weeks, all on $300. Yes, even in those days I had a stash of homebrew awaiting my return.
For the next eight years I lucked into a job teaching children for nine months of the year. The other three months I traveled. The adventure was endless. My first sojourn off the continent of North America took me to Bali and the Fiji Islands for nine weeks, with $500 cash in my pocket. Palm toddy and Fiji homebrew emerged as memorable and unanticipated experiences.
I have not been able to arrest my addiction to adventure, nor do I care to. I have traveled to all 50 United States many times over and have had the privilege of being a guest in more than 60 foreign countries, many a dozen or more times.
Traveling is either in your blood or not. For me it is not only an exercise in patience and observation, but a means of discovering and understanding the true nature of human beings and the dynamics of the world we live in.
Beer seems to always be one important aspect of my travels these days. But I do not travel for the beer. I travel to encounter people and the environment they inhabit, observe their behavior and consider how and why everything fits together in all of its initially apparent inconsistency. Beer becomes a thread, but it is only a part of the bigger picture of why we do the things we do.
Beer has taken mankind to many places. One way I see America is through the world of beer. It is one way in which I see my friends, my home, myself. Certainly there are other ways in which I interpret my world that are as or even more meaningful, but beer is one of them.
Beer is quite meaningless taken out of the context of our lifestyle. It is void of any interest whatsoever without the culture of people and an appreciation of flavor and diversity. Tasteless, pale, fizzy beer presented for mass consumption, brewed with little passion and with no cultural context, becomes a meaningless drag in and of itself.
The adventure is really about life. Beer adds an element of pleasure accessible to virtually