Difficult Snobbery

There's a pair of pubs in St. Louis that are both called Growler's - though they're not similar architecturally, they do share a menu and they both have an awesome beer club, probably one of the best in the nation. It may be hard to believe, but there are people who go out and rate these sorts of things. They tend to be fun people who die young.

Cirrhosis of the liver aside, one of the best things about the Growlers beer club is that it gives you a reason to test beers like Staropramen, Framboise, or Pabst Blue Ribbon, none of which a normal human being would ever deign to drink.

So while I don't often go to Growlers anymore, I *do* occasionally find reason to drink a beer or two - but not the bad ones. I've finally reached the age where I realize that Bud Light is kind of skunky even at its peak. And I've never liked Miller Light, because that gives me the runs.

As an aside, if you haven't heard me tell the story of the Keystone Light that Berney, Pratik and I had in our apartment on Delmar for 5 months: we bought a case for a Halloween party, which was not as well-attended an affair as we'd hoped. So we were left with about a dozen beers, which we would occasionally grab one of as we walked past. Eventually, October became March, and one of us - Berney, I think - realized that Keystone Light tasted exactly the same after five months out in the kitchen as it did new. So we did the only responsible thing we could, which was to wait until the evening and start chucking cans at the dumpster of the apartment complex behind us.

In theory, it's not hard to be a beer snob - there really are some very good beers out there. Most of the Sam Adams stuff is a great value, O'Fallon brewery makes a delicious pumpkin ale, Boulevard has an absolutely outstanding series of bottle-conditioned ales called the Smokestack series that are so alcohol-heavy they should be served in a brandy snifter. They do this through a process called bottle conditioning, which is pretty neat stuff.

The real problem comes in modern society - you can always ask the waiter what a good wine would be with your duck confit; ask him what a good beer would be, and he'll give you a look that says, "None, you boozehound."

So, I've been secretly collecting bottlecaps from the beers that I've had. A Czech brew here, an Anheuser-Busch product there, maybe a cap from something Scottish when I thought nobody was looking. And last weekend I finally got my crap together, took the glass out of a picture frame, and mounted 48 of them - nearly all unique - to that sucker and hung it in my bathroom. You can find a photo of it on my deviantart page, here:
http://shapu.deviantart.com/gallery/#_browse

Honestly, I'm pretty proud, whether that makes me a boozehound or not. And I can remember almost all of those beers and ciders that are represented on that thing. I have quite a few more, but my next project is the wine bottles that Kirsten and I have also been draining over the years. That'll give me a chance to work on some other beers that I've been meaning to try anyway.

By the way, something dark and malty would go well with duck - a nut brown or an IPA, perhaps. Don't go too sweet (meaning no Guinness, sorry), or you'll overpower the fattiness of the bird.