I'm a beer snob. I have been for as long as I can remember. Sure, I drank the watery swill so often found at high school parties with gusto in my teenage years, but it wasn't because I liked it. There were a few unfortunate years in college preceding my 21st birthday (and my first legal entry into the local brewpub) that involved a lot of expired pudding, Canadian whiskey, ramen noodles, and malt liquor, but those years are easy to forget. I'm not ashamed, we had to depend upon others to get us alcohol, and that's what they were drinking. I knew it wasn't good, but you've gotta do what you've gotta do.
The first good beer I remember having was in Germany in 1995. I was there on a class trip. Our mission was to learn about German culture and to try out our German language skills. As it turns out, the language skills were just enough to embarrass ourselves, and the culture we experienced was life-changing. At age sixteen we were set loose upon several German metropolises. We were allowed to have a beer with our meals, if offered or culturally appropriate, but no more. Needless to say, the trust placed in us by our teachers and parents was dramatically and constantly betrayed.
I've only been drunk off of the sickeningly sweet liqueurs Apfelkorn and Blue Curaçao once, and it was in Rothenburg ob Der Tauber, a small touristy medieval fortress town in Southern Germany. In that same town we found ourselves in a pizza place late at night where it was rumoured one could purchase giant glasses of beer. We ate the pizza and drank German lager from very tall glasses, but I noticed that the locals were drinking a darker colored beer. In my drunken haze, I decided to order one of those as well. "Ein großes dunkles Bier bitte." I might have said, slurring my already pathetic pronunciation. It came in a large mug, with a foamy head. It was brown, it was slightly sweet and malty, and it was unlike anything I had come across before.
I wouldn't purposefully drink beer like that now. My tastes have moved to the much more dry and bitter end of the beer spectrum, but that's not the point. I learned that day that there are other options; there is something better out there, if you're willing to go out and find it. That moment was the beginning of a lifelong passionate infatuation with fermentation.
In my quest for knowledge I've done everything from tapping birch trees for sap beer to growing and malting my own barley. I've had a lot of failure and a lot of success. It's almost always been fun and more importantly, it's put me in touch with an ancient and wonderful human tradition. Fermenting liquids used to be done as a matter of survival: Beer provided a (mostly) bacteria free method of hydration, the calories contained within provided a small amount of sustenance, and I'd like to think the alcohol made life more tolerable. And, if you were lucky or skilled, the resulting product probably even tasted good.
Fast forward a few millennia: drinking water is safe and plentiful, and we have way too many calories available to us at all times of the day. What's left? Taste and enjoyment.
I think that's enough.
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