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July 2, 2012
Beer Diary:
Show Some Independence And Drink Craft Beer
Down with the tyranny of shit beer!by Eddie Glick
Our great country's birthday is right around the corner, and most Americans agree the best way to celebrate such a momentous occasion is with explosions, barbeque, and beer. As for explosions, even though I've always been more of a sparklers and snakes man, with extreme dry conditions continuing to grip the Midwest, I think I'll pass on the lighting of fireworks this year, lest an errant spark start another Peshtigo and Chicago fire rolled into one unholy conflagration.
And BBQ, well, it being a few billion fucking degrees outside this week, I'd rather just hunker down in the basement and eat cold leftover oatmeal than turn into a human cinder standing in front of a grill, even if it was brimming with brats, burgers, hotdogs, and other delicious and sundry meats. (I suppose you could just throw a couple steaks out onto the blacktop and broil ’em that way, but then you've got raccoons, skunks, coyotes, cougars, and roadkill-scavenging slack-jawed yokels to worry about.)
So that just leaves beer. And as we all know, there's rarely a time that beer isn't appropriate. But for the birthday celebration of America, you've gotta drink American beer. That certainly doesn't include any South African beer (Miller), any Belgian beer (Anheuser-Busch), any piss-water Heineken, or shitty, shitty, SHITTY Corona. Budweiser the Great American Lager? I wouldn't drink that swill with Benedict Arnold's traitorous gob.
The beer that best represents the brash idealism and independent spirit of our nation's founding fathers is American craft beer.
The beer that best represents the brash idealism and independent spirit of our nation's founding fathers is American craft beer. So tonight after work, roll over to the nearest brew pub and grab a couple of growlers to celebrate the Fourth. Because we ain't just celebrating freedom from the tyranny of unelected queens and despots, we're revelling in an American beer renaissance that is a freedom from the tyranny of shit beer. No more must we suffer under the yoke of the likes of Bud Light. Thanks to American craft brewers, now we don't have to hunt (at least very hard) for drinkable beer in our nation's taverns, restaurants, and stores.And if you want to get your independence really on, you can take it one step further and home brew on the Fourth. Boil up a batch of wort, crack a home brew, and commune with our founding fathers, many of whom were home brewers. Thomas Jefferson personally designed the brewing facilities at Monticello (although it was his wife, Martha, who was the real brewing talent, and, apparently, a bit of a hophead), and George Washington had his own recipe for his beloved porter. Ben Franklin crafted a recipe for spruce beer, since hops were of short supply due to a bunch of dickheads on the other side of the Atlantic. And speaking of Franklin, we can wrap this article up with that most famous of quotes from him:
"Fuck the tyranny of shit beer and everything those assholes stand for."
(Hey, if you're going to mindlessly use an apocryphal Ben Franklin quote, you might as well make it really apocryphal.)