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Oakes Weekly - January 18, 2007

I NEED BEER

January 18, 2007
Kowloon, HONG KONG -

Damnit, I need more beer. I mean, I’ve barely left Vancouver in the past several months and I’m going insane. Check that. I’m going fucking insane.

Yeah, I know it was stupid to make my one trip away to Cuba. But I was trying not to think like a beer geek all the time. It’s hard, you know. I wake up and check the stupid Ratebeer forums. I come home from work and check the stupid Ratebeer forums. Most of my friends are beer geeks. Most of my emails come from beer geeks. Or breweries. I get lots of those emails, too. Not quite as much as spam for medicines, porn and penis enlargement treatments, but I get a lot of email from breweries. But I had to go to Cuba because that place is a timewarp. Lots of people go there – not so much Americans but everyone else – but they don’t get outside the tourist resorts. Most of the people I work with who’ve been to Cuba don’t use words like “timewarp” or “bizarroworld” or “What the fuck was that?” to describe their experiences there. I do. And it will all go to pot when Fidel dies. Which he probably already has. So maybe the going to pot will have to wait until somebody actually admits that El Jefe has gone the way of his fucked-up ideologies. Maybe they won’t. Maybe he’ll be like Elvis and never quite die. I tell you it would be way cooler to have a Fidel sighting at the Taco Bell in Texarkana than an Elvis sighting.

But yeah, I had to go to Cuba and see the real country while I still could. But beerwise, it’s costing me. Vacations are expensive so I’ve had to curtail my usual regime of monthly-or-more travel south of the border. This means I’m basically stuck with my local beer selection.

And this is has made me realize what a hopeless beer geek I am. A man simply cannot live on Blaugies, Dupont, Traquair, Orval, Rodenbach, St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout, big brewery German pilsners and hefeweizens, Fuller’s, and stale IPAs alone. OK, there’s a great IPA and Imperial Stout at a local brewpub right now, too, but seriously, I need some selection.

I remember as a student being happy with half that. Of course, as a student I could only afford about two beers a week so there wasn’t much danger of burning out on anything.

But man, I need some fresh beer. I need to rediscover bold beer. I need some new ideas in my glass.

It’s going to be funny. I know this. Over this same stretch of limited access to beer, I have not bought very much music and my downloading capabilities have been thwarted by an upgrade to my security system. Whatever. If I were technical enough to get what I wanted out of my computer I’d probably be buying a new one every year and I can’t afford that. I’m such a luddite now.

Point is, I’d also been doing the same with food. Stupid, huh? Well I went out this weekend and busted loose. Lots of new tunes. Some really cool food, too. I promptly donated the bag of food to the Skytrain gods, but I managed to get the tunes home. And it is good.

So you see, when I bust loose with the beer, it could get ugly. I could spend way too much money. I could find myself in a really good beer bar and go completely apeshit, kind of like those student days when I’d come home for the summer and take my first paycheque to the Archer Ale House and spend most of it in one big night of stupidity.

But man, do I need beer. A new brewpub has opened in Washington State that has a mild. I haven’t had a mild in eons. The last one was probably GABF 2005. So yeah, I’m thinking a 3 ½ hour drive for a mild isn’t such a bad plan. God help me if I hear about a micro in Idaho doing a rauchbier. Screw that, God help me if I hear about a Sri Lankan grocery store in Surrey with a bottle of Lion NA. Or a potlatch out in the valley with some sort of traditional fish cider. I’d be all over that.

Oh sure, I could trade. But that costs money. And then the stupid government steals my beer. Assholes. I could trade for Canadian beer. I fail to see why I’d do that. At least until DDC starts bottling, anyway.

Times is bleak.

Seriously.

I need some more freakin’ beer. Now, damnit.

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