I am in my mid-thirties.
While this may imply many assumptions about me, including but not restricted to homeownership (no), avocados (yes), my taste in artisanal things that don’t need to be artisanal (naturally), and how I treat my pets (like gods among mortals), what I want to address here is specifically how I prefer my media.
And that would be in list form.
You see, us Millennials did not come of age with the newspaper and the periodical. They existed for our parents, and while as ambitious teens we might have fancied ourselves as avid readers of classy publications, any pretenses were quickly swept aside by five minutes on BuzzFeed.
“Russia Invades Ukraine” – Boring.
“Top 10 Ways Russia Invades Ukraine, #7 will BLOW YOUR MIND” – Yes please.
I mean, I already know that Russia invaded Ukraine. But wait, you mean to tell me there are top ten ways? What does that even mean? What are these ways? Did I know everything about the conflict after all? Is tank on there? Do countries still use tanks? And how did you rank these ways? What is #1? Is this “top” as in “most effective”? And how will #7 blow my mind? There are so many questions that only clicking on this link and reading this list will answer!
And so you see, we are conditioned to not only want lists, but to expect that all things can and should be listed in some sort of order lest we fail to make sense of hierarchy in the world around us.
And that brings me to beer.
When I turned twenty-one (and not a day earlier!), I wanted to find the best beer. There were the blue-chip imports, tried and true heavyweights like Stella and Guinness, but this was also an age where craft breweries were beginning to explode, and my expectation was that craft beer would lead me to the best beer.
Of course, in my early twenties, I didn’t know anything about beer. My college friends, who were a fancy bunch, preferred Fat Tire and Blue Moon, which we insisted were superior to the likes of Natty and Milwaukee’s Best. Personally, I drifted towards hefeweizens and Belgian styles, because I was still practically a child who wanted my beer to taste like cloves and zest.
Though, before a best beer could be determined, you had to make a list. So I began with what I knew:
1. Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat
2. Pyramid Apricot Ale (probably)
3. Blue Moon (orange slice mandatory)
4. Guinness, because c’mon man, I have culture!
5. …Red Stripe?
6. Lost Coast Downtown Brown! Yeah Baby!
I quickly ran into an obvious problem: before you make a list, you have to determine criteria for who can be on that list. For instance, can you judge IPAs and Pilsners on the same list, when one seeks a clean, crisp malt flavor and the other seeks a floral, pungent bitterness? Is it cheating if your Imperial Stout is infused with chocolate and blueberries when compared to an Imperial Stout that is infused with austerity?
Touché, beer. Touché. Alterations must be made to the methodology.
Hefs and Wheat
1. Leinenkugel’s
2. Blue Moon
3. Pyramid Hef
Stouts and Porters
1. Guinness
2. Tatonka Stout
3. Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout
Lagers
1. North Coast Scrimshaw
2. Red Stripe
3. …Heineken?
And so on and so forth.
As I grew a little older and a lot more experienced, I started to get into IPAs. I despised them when I first started drinking beer, but there was a moment when a switch flipped in my brain. It was on a tour of Deschutes Brewing Co. in Bend, Oregon when the tour guide allowed us to thrust our hands into a barrel of hop and smell them. So I did, and suddenly, that putrid bitterness in my beer brain turned into a pleasant floral aroma.
So I started making my IPA list, something like:
IPAs
1. Lagunitas Hop Stoopid
2. Deschutes IPA
3. … maybe Stone IPA?
4. Lagunitas IPA
5. Sierra Nevada Torpedo?
6. Do I even know IPAs at this point, having liked them for two days?
At some point later, someone once said, “Hey, bro, have you had Pliny the Younger? It’s the best beer in the world.” And since they said it with authority, I believed them. So I waited in line for two hours in Santa Rosa during the month of its release, and drank a glass of Pliny (the Younger).
It was pretty good. Maybe it should go on the list. Or should I separate singles from doubles?
IPA
1. Deschutes Fresh Squeezed
2. Stone IPA
3. Lagunitas IPA
4. Bear Republic Racer 5
Double IPA
1. Pliny the Elder
2. Hop Stoopid
3. Dust Bowl Therapist
Triple IPA
1. Pliny the Younger
Wait, what even is a triple IPA?
But hey, now that I’m at Russian River, how about I try Consecration, Supplication, Beatification, Fornication, Recreation, and whatever else they have. And so I had to begin a new list: Sours.
Sours
1. Consecration
2. Supplication
3. Masturbation
4. Flagellation
Then I lived in Texas, and in Texas I was introduced to Jester King. Like Russian River, Jester King did sours, but their sours weren’t aged in wine barrels, they were aged in barns with horse hooves and pig giblets. And they were great! But then my list had to expand into lists:
No-Nonsense Sours
1. Consecration
2. That weird Jester King one
3. Supplication
Funky Farmhouse Saisons
1. That weird Jester King one
2. That other weird Jester King one
Barrel-Aged Fancy Sours
1. Bourbon Aged Sour Stout
2. Tequila Barrel Surprise
3. This one tastes like chocolate for some reason
And then I went back up to Bend to visit Deschutes, but someone in the know said, “No, don’t drink Deschutes, there are better breweries here. Have you had Boneyard? What about Crux Fermentation Project?” And so I had Boneyard and Crux, and they were really good. Changes had to be made.
IPAs
1. That Crux West Coast IPA (cascade and centennial hops)
2. That other Crux West Coast IPA (mosaic hops)
3. The third Crux Hazy IPA (dry-hopped single origin)
4. The Deschutes Wheat Stout IPL… wait, which list is this?
5. Boneyard IPA (no, not that one, the better one)
6. Oh shit, I forgot about Fresh Squeezed.
7. Do Lagunitas or Stone even belong here anymore?
8. What is eight? Is that a number? Am I a number?
And then I met my wife, who was more of a beer expert than I could ever hope to be, and she said, “Have you been to Modern Times?” and I said no. What about “Cascade?” and I said no.
So we went to Modern Times. And Cascade. And The Bruey. And Belching Beaver, and Santa Clara Valley (RIP), and Drake’s, and Wildcard (RIP), and Fall River, and Woody’s, and Dust Bowl, and Urban Roots, and Berryessa, and Hen House, and Good Life, and just in case, we retried Deschutes and Sierra Nevada and Stone and Russian River, and we buy some Dogfish Head and Firestone Walker, but what about Alvarado Street, or Sudwerk, or Fieldwork, or Device, or Full Circle, or Tioga-Sequoia, or New Glory…
…and… and…
…and somewhere in a random town in Nowhere, California, a brewery just recently opened beckons to us from across the street. “Come, weary pilsgrims! Try our dry-hopped Double India Pale Doppelbock. We call it Hoppelbockbock, but that’s more of a working title. You can only find it here!” And, as we wipe the sweat of summer off our brow, we enter.
“With whom do we have the honor of speaking?” I say.
“Only a humble alepostle, but of a brewmaster whose greatness is unmatched.”
“Do you distribute?”
“No, and our crowler machine is broken.”
The bartender pours us ten ounces into a tulip glass. I inhale the fragrance, and as I take a sip, a single tear falls from my eye.
It’s the best beer I’ve ever had.
I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore. I am broken.
“I hoppel you’ll be bock for more!”
Days later: “Hey, what was that brewery we went to?”
“The one with the matte cans with skulls?”
“No, the other one.”
“I dunno, I forgot. Damned good beer though.”
Structure has collapsed into rubble.
My lists are jumbled messes resembling a conspiracy theorists brainstorm wall of lunacy.
I am no closer to finding the Top Ten Pilsners than I am to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict.
An Islay Scotch Ale sits in my wine fridge. I fear it.
The liquor store selection mocks me with an endless variety of things I’ve never heard of, cans and bottles with humor and wit, multiplying faster than I can reasonably consume.
All that analysis: floral overtones, smoothness, hop/malt balance, it all gets suffocated by the sheer amount of excellence in an insatiable craft. And like the Super Bowl Halftime Show, it only gets bigger, and louder, and more elaborate, and there is no stopping it.
How do I fathom a world in which I can’t manage a hierarchy? How can I make sense of this? How can I make sense of anything?
I look at the jumbled lists of my life, these pillars of identity and meaning cracking and buckling:
Favorite Symphonies
1. Dvorak 7
2. Shostakovich 4
3. Doesn’t it depend on my mood though?
4. Mahler 6
Best States
1. California, of course
2. But Oregon is nice too
3. I mean, Colorado has the Rockies
4. Honestly I enjoyed living in Texas
Favorite Color
1. Blue
2. But red is nicer in the sky
3. And green is pleasant in a field
4. And purple is bold and takes no prisoners
5. Does this matter?
6. Does any of this matter?
Top Causes of World War I
1. Emergent Nationalism
2. Entangled Alliances
3. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
4. But was war inevitable without the assassination?
Best Ways to Cook Fish
1. Baked at 375 for 15 minutes
1. But skillet with oil is good too.
1. Breaded and deep-fried?
4. In a microwave.
Best Ways to Cook Archduke Franz Ferdinand
1. Baked at 375 for 15 minutes
1. But skillet with oil is good too.
1. Breaded and deep-fried?
4. In a microwave.
And in that paralysis of an impossible analysis, looking over the lists of my life, I am defeated. Hierarchy has no meaning. Beer has destroyed my ability to make sense of the world around me. If I can’t place things in some sort of order, how do I understand them? How do I evaluate them? How do I conquer them with the precision of my criteria? If I can’t analyze them and compare them with each other, what can I do?
…just… just enjoy them?
Life is hard.
I’ve lost faith in my ability to think clearly.
My head spins with the past, present, and future. And sometimes with nothing at all.
I am tired.
I go to a friend’s house. He opens a beer for me.
“Spaten?” I ask.
“Yeah. German import. Nothing fancy.”
“My mom used to drink Spaten when I was growing up.” I take a sip.
“How’s it taste?”
“…Wonderful.”
Doctor Quack 