An Ode To The Hops On My Palate

Outside my front door, Winter sluggishly treads the canvas, making one last feeble attempt at the roundhouse it never pulled off this year.  Snow spits onto the tundra beyond the porch steps, wails as it holds onto the tip of some dormant bluegrass beside it and then disappears.  From an environmental standpoint, that hulking subaquatic maelstrom we call El Niño should concern me.  The summers have either been scorching (turning the yard into a Martian vista) or soggy (dumping a sub-continental deluge into the sponge which once served for topsoil).  This year the bean counters say we’re getting heat…a lot of it.  And that’s fine. I like hot weather.  Hot weather means an open pool and a round of golf.  Hot weather means watching my “Banana Mania” shoulders—as Crayola would call them—transform into a “Raw Sienna.”  Hot weather means sitting on the deck swing, listing to Red Wanting Blue, and taking a slow draw on a robusto.

Hot weather also means hops.

Go to my profile in the Indiana on Tap “About” page, and read the now two-year-old “favorite beer style” label under my name.  Porter.  That’s how I got started.  That’s how everybody gets started. After years—maybe decades—of the macro stuff, I finally took that first chance, and I tried a pale.  It was terrible.  Too many hops…too much bite.  Who drinks this shit?  I retreated, and Miller High Life Light soothed me as it got me through a long summer some six or seven years ago.  Then I took a chance again on a Bad Elmer’s Porter, and suddenly I had my new favorite beer.  Suddenly, I joined the craft community.

The transition months are the hardest.  Switching over from that flavored water I once called beer to the local stuff tests you.  At the liquor store I was safe.  Elmer was always there.  So was Dirty Helen, and Wee Mac showed up not long after…Wee Mac—probably one of the greatest transition beers ever created.  I bought kegs of the stuff, and when I found myself sitting at some far away bar facing nothing but hops on the tap handles, Wee Mac and Elmer had trained me to take the risk.  I don’t know the exact moment I turned into a hop-lover…it’s not really the same as a first kiss, a first lay, or the first time driving alone (yes, driving alone the first time and losing your virginity are pretty much on an even plank).  I vaguely remember reaching for my trusty six of Elmer, and watching as my hand slid to Helios instead.  Weeks later, it moved another five inches to the right and latched onto Dragonfly.

Last summer that keg of Wee Mac became a keg of Osiris, and last fall, every time I found a Lift-Off, a Hare Trigger, a Rooftop, or a Zombie Dust I ordered it up.  This winter, I coveted my hops.  In a season which celebrates the dark and the sweet, I hoarded the golden and the sharp.  When I had to pass on Winterfest, the “Jane Eyre Moment”—that wistful, pained longing for something tangible yet just out of reach—never happened.  But cut me off from the summer event?  That’s an anguish rivaling Edmund Dantes’ 16 years in the Chateu d’if.

Mine is an important story, anecdotally speaking, in the craft beer world.  They say there’s a “saturation” coming.  They say the market is going to hit a tipping point.  They say there’s going to be too many craft beers and not enough drinkers.  They have been saying that for three years…they’re still saying it…and they’re still wrong.

Wrong because every so often someone like me—middle-aged, a long-time macro drinker—switches and never goes back.  Wrong because those middle-aged converts eventually bring their spouses into the fold (spouses who often become more daring beer tasters than their other half).  Wrong because among young people—the ones who are still going to be alive in fifty years—they’re ALL drinking that stuff.  Wrong because the hold-outs—the ones who just can’t quite savor the full-bodied feel of an IPA washing down the back of the gullet—won’t be here in another generation or two.

That’s it.  That’s all the macros have, and they can run all the Super Bowl ads they want, rope in the Peyton Mannings, buy out all the Goose Islands, and set up all the “shadow craft” companies they can think of.  They are Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.  Craft beer is the Beatles, laying down the tracks to the Sgt. Pepper album.

And the renewing west winds, which Shelly praised almost two centuries ago, come again.  And summer follows.  And hops…lots of hops…will be the bounty on my table.

“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”