an old friend

The haze you see at the bottom right of the photo would be a tendril of the mists of nostalgia. Although as is so often the case with beer, the object of the nostalgia has dimmed somewhat. All I know for sure is that during some period of the 1990s I entertained a powerful affection for Rolling Rock, which back then, before it was acquired by Annheuser Busch, was what passed for an independent beer. My dear friend Pete McCallum tells me that I referred to it as being "as crisp as a lettuce" back when I still had my descriptive faculties. Now, I find that despite my best intentions to sample some of the thousands of microbrews on offer in every liquor store (Old Sturdy Bastard? Rancid? Turkey Tom's Thanksgiving Ale? I am making these up, but just barely) I continually default to the American beer I like best. And it still has much to recommend it, although read the reviews (there were 700 of them on the one beer site I looked at) and I really shouldn't. It's apparently not all that. Beer snobs are less coherent and more aggressive than wine snobs, as you'd expect, and even the clerk down at the off licence looks at me with a kind of pity when I ask for a six pack, and they bring it, somewhat pointedly, in a hand-me-down sixpack from a more excitingly artisinal brand. But two of these chaps slide down grateful after a day of metroing, bussing, swinging (the kind you do in a park, obviously. And not that sort of park, either) and vacuuming. You cannot fiddle with the label, as it is printed on, so all of your attention is focussed on the light, slighly melony dryness of the palate. And yes, it remains as crisp as a lettuce, particularly in the steamy bathroom at 6pm with Siena splashing happily in the tub, and labour's end within sight.