The first beer I ever drank was a can of Labatt Blue. I was 15 or 16 and stole it from my parent’s fridge. I was alone at the time. Why I chose to drink my first beer all alone, I can’t recall. I was a weird kid.
I ran outside to drink it. Again I don’t know why. If it was to hide this bout of adolescent experimentation from my parents, my intentions were flawed since I chose the driveway to consume it, for the entire neighbourhood to see.
But that’s beside the point. I cracked the top and took this enormous gulp. It was foamy and bitter and watery. Instead of sipping it, like a rational person would, I drank the whole thing in three big gulps, just to get the whole thing over with. I wanted to know what all the fuss over beer was about.
I choked on that beer. I wretched. I threw the can in a ditch and walked back inside with precious little insight into why people would ever willingly drink that swill.
I eventually got used to the taste, but never particularly enjoyed drinking it. Throughout my 20s, I was not so much a beer enthusiast as a drunk enthusiast, since the brands of beer readily available at the time didn’t exactly encourage anything close to “enthusiasm.”
Still, I didn’t know any better that the time. I just assumed the taste of beer was supposed to be endured rather than enjoyed. Thankfully, it’s not like that anymore and it took me until my mid-20s to realize that, no, Sleeman’s Honey Brown is not the premium beer I’d been told it was.
And the teens of today, experimenting with booze for the first time, have no idea how lucky they are. Rather than barfing up their father’s Blue, they’re barfing up Blue Buck. Not that I condone underage drinking, but for better or worse, their options are far greater than having to choke down the watery, tasteless dregs from a Kokanee can.
The best beer-related story I’ve heard in a long time comes from Graham With, Parallel 49 Brewing’s brew master, telling me how he knew he’d “made it” in the industry when he found a discarded empty six-pack of Gypsy Tears lying in a ditch. It’s a beautiful image, in a Bukowski-esque sort of way.
But, at the risk of sounding like a schmaltzy alcoholic, it’s beautiful too that Gypsy Tears exists at all. And in quantities that permit this beer to be consumed and discarded so frivolously. What an age!
I imagine, for absolutely no reason whatsoever except to suit the purposes of this article, that the six-pack of Gypsy Tears was consumed by a two or three teens. And that these kids had no real concept of just how lucky they are that the beer was full of flavour and tasted great to very last drop.
Follow this writer on Twitter @stephensmys. He could use the validation.
