Beer & Me

Have you ever done this? You order a beer then find yourself wondering, “what’s a beer?” Not what is beer but what does this particular restaurant/bar/pub consider to be A beer?

Too many establishments will pop the top on a bottle and unceremoniously plop it in front of you without even bothering to offer a glass. (This happened to me the other day a Chilis - my first experience with the national chain and very likely my last.) Other restaurants will present their beer in stylized glasses that couldn’t hold more than 6 ounces while charging you the same that the brewpub down the street does for a full and proper pint. Finally there are the good guys who offer their beer in style specific glasses and present a full serving.

But this is all left entirely up to the establishment. There are no laws here in the US like those in England and Europe protecting the beer drinking consumer. In those countries beer servings are standardized and enforced. Here in the US a pint of beer is not necessarily the proper US pint of 16 ounces but any amount of beer served in a glass.

Change may be coming at least to Oregon. There lawmakers are considering legislation that would at least inspect servings that are being sold as pints to make sure that they actually are pints. Even though there will apparently be no real consequences for failing to serve a full pint it’s a start.

It is shocking but videos do not lie – especially videos posted on YouTube, right?

OK, so it was a gaffe but where did it come from? Does John McCain have a secret plan against American beer? Is he using his wife’s connections at Anheuser-Busch to push forward plans to sell another American beer maker into foreign hands? How deep does this go? I mean, is this eighteenth amendment kind of stuff?

It is scary territory, indeed. Any politician who can make a statement like this, however unintentionally, should be given a hard second look. Were you considering voting for McCain? Do you like beer? Maybe you should reconsider that vote!

As the smoking ban slowly creeps into every corner of the Western world smokers and bar owners have to find ways to offset its impact. The most popular solution and one of which I’m particularly fond is the beer garden. Here in southeast Missouri the ban hasn’t hit yet although a lot of restaurants and bars voluntarily restrict smoking. Consequently there are only two beer gardens in town and they both happen to be at dive bars and I don’t go that often. (I don’t mind the dive-y-ness of dives; I do mind that they typically carry only the bud-miller-coors selection.) So, though I’m philosophically opposed to the smoking ban, I will appreciate when its inevitable arrival brings with it the chance that better beer bars in town will build their own beer gardens.

One of my favorite subjects to rail against is ridiculous liquor laws that inhibit ordinary commerce and creativity. Case in point: A California brewer who happens to make his beer in Weed, CA decided to call his brew Weed and to add the titillating slogan “Try Legal Weed” to his bottle caps. Using the current prohibition against marijuana use in the US, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms has decided that this slogan is just too much. Let’s set aside for the moment that nothing this brewer has done is specifically illegal; he brewed a beer legally, he advertised it legally and, under the auspices of the First Amendment, he labeled it legally. But in spite of all of that the feds are still coming down on him.

OK, so “Try Legal Weed” might not be the cleverest of promotional campaigns but come on, G-Man! We all get it. No one really things that this beer contains drugs nor do they think that this is an endorsement of illegal activity. It’s a little joke!