Our First Post: Ingenuity and Ingredients

My name is Allen Arthur.  I'm a restaurant manager in NYC who loves food, my girlfriend, and beer. 

That's right.  Beer.  I love beer. 

The problem with that statement is twofold. 

The first problem is "love".  The second problem is "beer".

When people hear you say that you "love" beer, they make assumptions.  Are you a frat guy?  Are you an alcoholic?  Have you ever met another person?  I can, after much soul-searching, assure you: No, no, and yes. . . several.  Also, apparently the line between booze connoisseur and "guy who drinks moonshine with threadbare mittens around an oildrum fire" is even thinner than normal when it comes to beer.  People just seem to think you must not KNOW any better.  That reveals our archaic notions not just of beer, but of alcohol in general.  We are still a conservative nation in many ways, and in few places is this more prevalent than with drinking.  You can see it in our spirits laws, our minimum age, our depiction of drinking on TV and in films.  Drinking is for partying or the easing of demons. 

Tragically, this comes not only from the usual morality patrol, but from the industry as well.  Parent/conservative groups seem to believe we are all alcoholics lying in wait, untrustworthy to moderate our own habits.  Even worse is Big Booze.  These companies insist on shilling the belief that alcohol somehow leads to having tons of friends and beautiful women.  They make men look like doofuses and women like objects who for some reason love doofuses.

So it is easy for me to forgive friends and acquaintances when they don't quite get my beer hobby.  Why WOULDN'T they think it all tastes like swill Budweiser?  Why wouldn't they think I'm chasing what is sold in the commercials?  So, for all us heads, we have to explain.  Somewhere there is a brewery, there are HUNDREDS of breweries and more every day, where an artist sits and carefully calibrates a recipe that will take you back to Thanksgiving dinner, or guide you on a late-night walk through the woods through ingenuity and ingredients alone.  The craft beer explosion in America is no fluke.  People are upset that the thing they love has so many awful connotations around it and with each barrel shipped are hoping to rebelliously change people's minds. 

Thankfully, it seems to be working.  Breweries and craft beers are finally being held to intense quality standards not just by themselves but by ever more discerning and educated consumers.  World-class chefs are cooking and even pairing top-notch dishes with beer.  (Umm . . . gasp.)  All of this has led craft beer to become one of the fastest growing businesses in the country.  The irony is that somwhere in Belgium, there's probably a dude so sick of brewing that he wishes his family had just died in a barley blaze rather than spend another day on a centuries-old brew for the gods.  But, America is rapidly catching up and craft brewers from around the globe are putting out arguably better product than our age-old European institutions.  At least those Belgians are finally getting their props. 

So we are here to say that we love beer.  Unabashed, unashamed, with responsibility and dignity.  We study it.  We learn about it.  We share it with those we love as an expression of ourselves as one might share a song or a joke, and as the brewers themselves have shared it with us.  Our beer family is growing and we should be welcoming them in.  We were welcomed in ourselves one day.  Hopefully, this site will aid in building our community.  It will not be snarky, but a shot might be fired here and there.  Satire is practically guaranteed.  The information will span reviews, interviews, news, and any tangentially-related whatnots that strike my fancy about beer.  Sometimes the content will be advanced and sometimes I will cover basics so that people just learning have a place to start.  Sometimes I will talk about a beer's gravity, or start a debate about color classification, and sometimes my girlfriend will say a beer "tastes like a vomit burp".  But hey, that's beer right.  And we love it.