Cheap drinks

Have you ever asked someone what their favorite food was and then became disappointed? Maybe it was on a date and she ordered the most basic thing on the menu. It absolutely breaks your heart. When you live in Portland, you live in a land of pure imagination. Vegan dog treats. Crochet co-ops. Goat yoga. It is as if Willy Wonka's factory was smack dab in Portland, Oregon. With 58 breweries in metro Portland, I could have any beer I wanted. I could have double IPAs, goses, sours, bruins...just about anything. If I brought home a 6 pack of Budweiser, was I some how betraying the craft beer cause?

While living in Boston, Massachusetts, I frequented a British pub called the Banshee. After a few Carlsbergs on an early Saturday morning watching Premier League soccer. After talking about the Liverpool game we were watching, I noticed we was drinking a Budweiser. What?! There's no shortage of Guinness at this pub, along with Bass or Harp. Has this man lost his mind? So I ask him, "why Bud?" He takes another pull and in his Irish brogue he goes, "because it's the same no matter where you are in the world." Irish profundity at it's best.

Let's talk about American Adjunct Lager. It almost sounds as if it's a Franken-food, like a meat by-product. According to Randy Mosher in Tasting Beer, corn and rice adjunct beers date back to 1540 in the Americas but it was popularized in the 1800s. If rice or corn is in the recipe, it's an adjunct and as the quantity of rice and corn goes up the price goes down. Legally in the United States, a beer can be as much as 50% "adjunct." Adjunct beers are drier and there is a slight malty taste to it, if there's corn then there will be a sweeter taste to it. If rice is used as an adjunct, then you'll notice a crisper taste to it. The uninitiated will confuse the Bohemian and German pilsner styles with American adjuncts because they have a similar flavor, but the true difference are the ingredients used.

Really, I think the heart of the matter is the Alcohol by Volume (ABV) level: 3.8-5%. American adjuncts are "sipping" beers wherein you can have 6 without really feeling it the next morning. The average ABV of an India Pale Ale is around 4-7%. I've seen some IPAs redline around 7.5% ABV before breaking into the Double IPA division. Most people have memories of parents or grandparents always having a "domestic" in tow. Note, sometimes I use the term domestic to refer to a macrobrewery such as Anheuser-Busch or Labatt if you live close enough to the Canadian border.

I grew up in a rural area of Western New York. Explaining craft beer to people from there would be explaining the Internet to the Pilgrims. However in the modest town of Batavia, New York lies an oasis for curious drinkers, Angotti's. It is a Batavian institution! They offered a wide range of offerings and even home brewing equipment. This was my first foray into the craft beer world. I remember spending my paltry wages in that store to at the very least to be that guy who has had that beer before.  Throughout my time as an undergraduate, I would travel to stores like Angotti's or Consumer Beverage to find that drink that I haven't had before. Almost as if it was a game! While my roommates played beer pong with Busch, I was playing with Sam Adams. I was Robert DeNiro in Deer Hunter and I was playing with 3 bullets! I would never sully my palate with an adjunct.

That was until I decided to put down the Xbox controller and head to the bars to meet the acquaintance of fellow binge drinkers of a different gender. Trolling for puntang, whichever terminology you like. If you want to be cool, drink craft beers in a bar circa 2008. If you want to be poor, drink craft beers in a bar circa 2008. That's where I knew I had to change the way I thought about my tact. What you drink should fit when your drinking. There's a reason why Coronas are beach beers, you can sit and drink a bunch of them throughout the day without getting super drunk. You're not going to a tailgate and shotgunning a schwarzbier. No, you're going to do that with a Labatt because you'll be sleeping in the bleachers pissing yourself before the first quarter ends and not at halftime which is culturally acceptable.

No, I hear you beer snob. Never Trump and Never Bud. You're too good to enjoy the carnal pleasure of responsible day drinking and you want to throw it all way for the guise of vanity. No, I get it - you have a brand. Well friend, I have a solution for you, the session IPA.  The lore of the session india pale ale stems from the British tradition of session drinking. Colloquially, it's referred to day drinking. You know how those Brits are all prim and proper. It's not butt sex, it's rear penetration. Like any government, Her Majesty's Revenue Service taxes by the gravity of the beer. Gravity is the rough calculation of how much alcohol will end up in the finalized product. So, higher gravity beers will have a higher alcohol content and therefore will be taxed more. So, for the layman a session IPA is the Bud Light of the IPA family. Cyril Higgenbotham can wander into the pub for lunch and have his Ploughman's lunch and if he wanted to make a day of it, he could stay in that pub and stay there until his missus drags his ass home Andy Capp style. Over the past 5 years, there's been a deluge of session IPAs, the most ubiquitous being Founders All Day IPA. You can't go wrong with those sassy suds. But, if you were like me, here's a list of other session IPAs from Rate Beer.

Regardless of your stature in life, your drink should reflect your activity. You shouldn't wear a suit to the beach and you shouldn't drink double IPAs if you plan growing roots in your barstool. Last night I drank a 6 pack of Iron City and had a couple of glasses of water in between and I woke up chipper and ready to hash out this article. Later, while watching the Timbers game I can partake a few stronger drinks and then switch it up to Miller Lite and just coast on that buzz until I wake up to watch soccer. There's nothing wrong with drinking a cheap beer from time to time. No one is judging and if they are, to hell with them.

 Smart people plan ahead and drink responsibly. You're smart, aren't you?

A Change of the Season

The days are getting longer. The relentless rains of Portland are subsiding to yield cherry blossoms.  Denizens of the Pacific Northwest are beginning to emerge from the 7 months of torrential rain but this is nothing really new. After living in Buffalo, I was changing out the precipitation type, but it almost seemed worth it. Springtime anywhere signifies a stark change from the winter of our discontent.

Yesterday I received an email in my inbox. The domain name, A Drunken Production, is up for renewal. This is the second rendition of A Drunken Production. The first was hosted by SquareSpace at http://adrunk.squarespace.com and I used Facebook to promote it. It was almost monthly where I would put out my drunk thought du mois. Rarely did I provide my takes on the drinks I drank nor the places I visited. It was a pure stream-of-conscious writing. Have a couple of pops and pour my heart out about my thoughts on drinking culture. I even designed a logo and made t-shirts. I've handed them out to friends and family.

I was laying it all out there for the world to see. Friends and family met the page with praise and concern. Many lauded it. Not to toot my own horn, but I would put it out there for the world to see. Despite the words I used to paint a picture, many people saw things that may or not have been there. It all depends on our relationship with drinking. People who grew up with people who dealt with alcohol issues were concerned about my writing. They may have seen the early workings of their own loved ones devolving into an alcoholic stupor. During 2014 and 2015, that may have been the case. I was using Untappd a lot. Every time I checked in a beer, a badge would appear on my Facebook page and Twitter. The frequency of which may have been alarming to loved ones. Now looking back over the material, I would have been concerned for a friend who wrote that. The written form and the spoken form are two different animals. If the person reading the article who did not partake in the event may not understand the situations that led up to that point and the circumstance itself. Perhaps the onus was on me to further develop my idea. To let the reader know that I may have dove down to the depths of the sea but I had a scuba tank and a harpoon.

The second iteration of A Drunken Production was born from the ashes of the SquareSpace domain. I already had t-shirts for the love of Christ! But, if you're following the chronology, A Drunken Production v.1 went from March 2014 to March 2015. It wasn't until May 2016 where I decided to put the fingers to keys and pen A Drunken Production v2.0. What happened? Well, there plenty of writing but not the financial backing to pay for a domain. When I first came to Portland, I was staying on a friend's couch. I spent about 3 weeks on that couch and a lot of it was spent traveling around Portland drinking then coming back and punching out some words. But the one-time payment of $12.99 meant a six pack of craft beer or a 12 pack of cheap domestic. Either way, I felt those funds were better allocated to the pickled pursuit of exploration. I've explored southwest Portland, every hop and barley.

After a 7 month stint at a call center, I decided to throw caution in the air to apply to a software company as a temporary employee. Normally, I was used to making impulsive and rash decisions. I was used to eating a daily ration of 2 hot dogs from 7-Eleven and drinking a 6 pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching Netflix or some other sad pursuit. However, that was under the auspices of a stable 40 hour per week job. Dating was a thing but when you don't have living room furniture, it's hard to connote stability. Without a car or normal benchmarks of a stable human being, I embraced my situation. I gained resolve through the debauchery. Every day I woke up hung over from drinking more and more PBR and playing video games until the last possible moment before legitimately performing my job became a game. Even more so during the summer time. Thus my blog.

Creativity is one of those odd things that never be explained. It was through my drunken, debaucherous capers where I could draw upon to tell interesting tales. May 2016 marked the beginning of a stable period for me. I gained meaningful employment in March 2016 and I was able to think of things beyond things like where the next meal was coming from. Through March and May of 2016, I was able to have a monthly surplus. A friend of mine needed a place to crash and there was an additional $200 coming into my bottom line. A savings account sprouted from that and I was able to save for a car. Things kicked off from there.

So throughout 2016, I tried to regale the masses with drunken stories but the thing was...things have changed. I was able to eat regular meals. I was able to go to the Cheerful Bullpen or any other local bar and drink a night's worth of beer and not worry if bills were going to be paid. Maybe that's where I lost my edge. By no means had I given up the fight, but I lost my punch. I wasn't raging from Friday until Monday morning.

So here we are in 2017. Stability has set in and my domain renewal is due. I'm truly wondering what the next step is. Is there a third stanza to this song? Perhaps the next iteration of A Drunken Production will shine the light of someone drinking in his 30s? I'm also working on another project, Redefining Form, where I spit my hot takes on soccer, rugby and the world of fitness.

As I write this, I don't know how to proceed. I want to be the purveyor of soccer knowledge. I have been following the game for so long. Also, I want to maintain the DrunkenProduction life. So you tell me. Perhaps if A Drunken Production had more of a flow...a raison d'etre. I don't know what my readers want.  Please email me at adrunkenproduction.com and tell me your thoughts. What do you want to see? More raw beats or my thoughts about the actual beer?