The Session #15: How did you get into good beer?

I wrote this back when the topic for this Session was first announced, but with the merger it seems particularly relevant now…

This is the first time I’ve participated in The Session, so I feel like a owe an explanation of the concept to those readers who don’t follow other beer blogs. 

The Session is an exercise in collective blogging.  The host of the month (Boak & Bailey this month) chooses a topic and posts it on their site so that all the other beer bloggers out there can start thinking about it.  Then, on the first Friday of the month, all of the beer bloggers interested in participating post their entries on the given topic on their own sites.  The host collects links to all of the entries and posts them on their site.  Each month The Session is hosted by a different site. 

This month the prompt was:

Continuing the “Beervangelism” theme, we’d like you to write about the moment when you saw the light. At what point did you realise you were a beer lover / geek / enthusiast? What beer(s) triggered the conversion? Did someone help you along your way, or did you come to it yourself?

In short; how did you get into good beer?

So here goes, how I got into good beer:

This topic is an easy one for me because both the “beervangelist” who converted me and my first “good” beer popped into my head immediately. 

I first started drinking good beer in junior year of college, about four years ago.  Before that point, I was open to the idea of drinking beer because I’d always had mostly male friends and some would say masculine interests (a love of Bond movies, a failed attempt to learn to play guitar, a semi-successful stint on a rugby team).  So, there was the influence of all these guys.  Plus, you know, I had an image to keep up — I didn’t want to be the pain-in-the-ass girl who whines if there is no diet coke for mixers. 

And really, the alternatives were pretty pitiful.  Wine?  Too expensive at the time.  I drink it now, and though I’ve moved up in the world beyond Two Buck Chuck, Franzia, and Yellow Tail, I can still only afford mediocre wine.  I can afford great beer though!  It may be while, or forever, before I taste the Sam Adams Utopias, but otherwise, I can pretty much buy what I want beer-wise.  Then there is hard alcohol, which is also expensive, and has a drinkability problem in that I have the alcohol tolerance of a very well behaved 14 year old. 

So, I’m a convert from a non-beer drinker, not from macro-brews, and I’d say my male contingent of friends and my budget prepped me for entering the beer world. 

The only problem was: I didn’t like beer.

Then, two things happened around the same time.  I had my first bottle of Magic Hat #9 and I met my now-friends Dan Morales & Sean Wilson, who began homebrewing. 

First, the Magic Hat #9.  I wish I remembered when and where I first drank it, all I remember now is that it tasted like apricot-y goodness.  Being a fruity beer it was the perfect conversion for a female non-beer drinker who wanted to see the light but just didn’t know where to find it.  I lived in Boston at the time, so Sam Adams, Harpoon, Magic Hat,  Otter Creek, Saranac and the like were on all the shelves and every so often someone would come home with a twelve-pack of Magic Hat bottles instead of 30-rack of PBR, or a handle of Smirnoff.  The first time I actually took one for myself, I was smitten.

And while I don’t remember the circumstances of this introduction, I do remember one episode of drinking Magic Hat #9.  In the grand tradition of American college students, I observed Thirsty Thursday on a regular basis.  This meant trudging through the snow to my friends’ dorm where the social committee would sponsor a keg (my dorm did this as well, but on alternate Fridays), which would spawn mass hysteria among the undergrads as people pummeled each other to reach the free beer before it ran out.  On one of these nights, the keg was Magic Hat #9, so of course I helped myself to a few more servings than I would have if it had been the usual Bud Light. 

Then my cell phone rang, and I realized that it was a someone from the company that would soon be interviewing me for a job.  A mutual friend had introduced us over email so that I could “ask him questions about the company,” i.e. try to distinguish myself from the pack of other soon-to-be-graduates desperate for a job.  I had scheduled an 8pm call because he wanted to talk at the end of his West Coast work day.  I didn’t want to answer it – who knows how badly I’d mess this up if I spoke to him drunk?  But I didn’t want to ignore it either – how bad would it look if I blew off a scheduled phone call?  So, I let it go to voicemail while I decided what to do.  In a moment of confidence that was probably more beer-induced bravery than based in an actual understanding of my capabilities at the moment, I decided to call him back.  I went outside, took a few deep breaths of the winter air and made the call.  In the end, it turned out great.  We were on the phone for over an hour and realized we had the same taste in books, an interest in educational non-profit organizations, and more mutual friends than we had known about.  It also turns out, though I didn’t find this out until I met him later, that he was only 24 years old to my 22 and thus probably would have understood my Thirsty Thursday conundrum if I had explained it at the time (I told him later once we were actually friends).  They even ended up hiring me!  To this day, I’d like to chalk up at least a small piece of the credit for this Victory to the #9 – I’m not usually a great small talker or phone talker and I’d say this was a prime example of beer loosening people’s tongues and bringing them together.  Thanks, Magic Hat!

What I love most about Magic Hat now is that they are so experimental.  Their mix packs always have one of their secret unnamed but numbered batches of beer, which could be just about anything.  In the past they’ve made: A lemon-ginger English Ale, a vanilla porter, a honey chamomile ale, and others I could never even identify.  I finally got to visit their mecca in Burlington this past year when my sister was graduating from nearby Middlebury.  It was a hokey-spooky experience, lots of fun, and the t-shirt I got from them is one of my top 3 favorites, definitely my favorite beer t-shirt.

My sister (left) and me (right) at the Magic Hat brewery.

Hopefully you are still reading this, because if it weren’t for Dan & Sean, I might still be a dabbler in the good beer world and not the full on beer blogging, rare beer hunting, microbrew touring on my scant vacation days person that I now am. 

Dan came back from a year in Japan to shake up the lazy macro-brew and punch drinking habit of us, his friends and dorm-mates.  His first move was founding the now-defunct Mather Brewing Association, a move I ought to copy because it really meant enlisting the rest of us to help with the homebrewing he was going to do anyway.  Sean may have been the most helpful of Dan’s disciples, but what I lacked in experience I like to think I made up for in enthusiasm.  I soon became the official “Assistant Capper”, with ambitions to displace Naupaka as the “Senior Capper”. 

There was a chocolate honey mead that I never got to try but heard that I was better off for it.  And then there was a pumpkin ale which was absolutely delicious. 

Dan’s the sort of perpetually smiley guy that can’t help but share his enthusiasm for whatever it is he’s into next, and Sean’s the opinionated one who will set forth the most logical argument you’ve ever heard on a topic you never thought would ever be worth the trouble.  He loved IPAs, particularly Dogfish Head and Stone, and that at the time I couldn’t stand them.  I guess you can tell from the name of the blog that a lot has changed in the intervening years.  He had a bottle of Arrogant Bastard that I once tried and found disgusting, and then realized after reading the bottle that this is exactly what they expected from me, beer novice that I was.  While their taste and beer wisdom may not have sunk in right away, I doubt I would have come around to good beer, and hoppy beers in particular, as soon as I did if it were not for them.   

So, cheers to Dan & Sean!  I owe them a debt of gratitude but hopefully they’ll each settle for a pint.  Maybe I will have to smuggle some Arrogant Bastard into Japan when I see Dan for the first time in 2 years while visiting Tokyo & Kyoto this summer.  Unfortunately for Sean, who is serving in the military in Afghanistan, I don’t think my beer smuggling skills can outsmart the US Armed Forces, nor do I want to test this assumption.