79 Beers to Go

Apparently most of my updating is taking place in my professional responsibility class now.  This time, though, its appropriate enough.  So, you may know that my cause de jure for these last couple of months has been to dispel the notion that any and all alcohol consumption is problematic.  By in large, most media outlets like to look at alcohol problems through two lenses: either having a drinking problem is the result of the number of drinks drank in a week or the amount of consecutive days one goes drinking at least one drink.  Both these approaches, I think, are pretty idiotic.  With this in mind, I flipped through my professional responsibility book to find a section on Alcohol and Substance Abuse in the Legal Profession.  It starts talk about the widespread problems of alcohol abuse in the legal field and how alcohol abuse might speak against someone's fitness to practice.  But color me surprised when I read the   Association of American Law Schools' definition of alcohol abuse: using alcohol "in a manner that does physical, psychological or emotional harm to yourself and/or others."  This, my friends, is a reasonable, and workable, definition of alcohol abuse.  Bigger picture stuff, guys, bigger picture stuff.  It's amazing to me that an organization representing perhaps the most unreasonable institutions on earth would be the one to proffer a definition of alcohol abuse I can get behind, but there it is.  With that said, let's discussing my drinking (none of which has done physical, psychological or emotional harm to myself and/or others).

Unfortunately we once again have to take a trip to almost a week about.  Tuesday, due to the magic of the mystery cases, I drank an Erdinger Hefe-Weizen Dark and a Black Toad Dark Ale on my couch.  Erdinger = pretty good.  Black Toad?  Not so much.  One of my biggest pet peeves in terms of beer drinking is people referring to beers solely by their color, as in, "I only like light beers," or, "I'm in the mood for a dark beer."  Unless you have that color/taste mix up that LSD users report, you don't taste the color of the beer.  The color can be indicative of the taste, but even then, that's only sometimes.  Saying something like is almost akin to saying, "I don't like orange paintings," but somehow that makes more conceptual sense than judging a beer solely by color.  So with that pet peeve in mind, it breaks my heart that both of the beers I drank use "dark" as their primary descriptive term.  In the Erdinger case its pretty excusable, given that it already tells you its a Hefe-Weizen and you could imagine that a "dark" version of that would be maltier, but just Dark Ale?  That tells me nothing!  Let's be real here Black Toad! (2)

Wednesday was another mix pack mash up.  I drank a Leipziger Gose, Anderson Valley Hop Ottin' IPA, Erdinger Hefe-Weizen Dark, and Lindeman's Peche Lambic all on the couch.  Nothing too much to report here, except maybe that I don't like Lambics all that much.  To each his own though! (4)

Thursday I actually left my apartment!  Went to a Nick Kroll comedy special taping at the Music Hall of Williamsburg where I drank 2 Sierra Nevadas.  So leaving the house is fun, but also expensive.  While I copped the tickets for free, buying my two beers, plus two beers for a friend, ended up costing more than a whole case of Park Slope mixed beers.  When I got home I had a Roscoe's Hop House Pale Ale which was really good. (3)

Friday, in a weird turn of events, I only had one beer, a Hebrew Lenny's R.I.P.A. which is a phenomenal imperial IPA. (1)

Saturday was a pretty big drinking day.  Liz and I decided to make the most of the fleeting fall weather and take a walk around Cobble Hill.  So we walked the three miles down there, but instead of spending the afternoon walking around stores and junk, we found ourselves planted at Strong Place for about three hours.  Here's how this happened.  I've talked in the past about those awesome Brokelyn Beer coupons I have.  Bought a book of 25 coupons for free beers from bars around Brooklyn for $25 about a year ago. The goal of this coupon book is to get people into beer bars they wouldn't generally go to and to stay and spend money after the first free beer.  Well normally Liz and I have gone for the free beer and left without getting suckered into spending money.  Well, on Saturday we got sucked.  Strong place is awesome.  They have about 20 taps on hand are pretty reasonably priced (for example, a Smuttynose Barleywine went for 5 bucks).  To top it off, we had about the friendliest waitress on earth.  Here's a trick that serves can use to get me to stay for more drinks: give me samples of beers I haven't had without me asking for them.  So after I have my first/free beer there (a delicious Allagash Curieux, a Belgian Triple) Liz and I get an unprompted tasting of some cider (which Liz ordered) and a Jasmine IPA which was super delicious.  So clearly I have to stay now.  I order a flight of four four ounce beers (which I'm counted as one beer).  In this flight was an Allagash Odyssey (a bourbon aged Belgian ale), a Smuttynose Barleywine, an Elysian Jasmine IPA (super delicious, could really taste the jasmine but not in an overpowering way), and a McNeill's Oatmeal Stout.  After this I ordered a can of Oskar Blue's Gubna, an imperial IPA I've been wanting to try, but buying it at the beer distributors it still costs 5 bucks a can.  Well, they had it at a bar for 6 so I jumped on the opportunity.  Then we went home!

You might think that would be it for me for the day, but you'd be wrong.  That night I went over to my friends' place for a TV party and drank two Negro Modelos and a Brooklyn Pennant bringing me to six beers total for the day!

Total Beers: 921
Where I Should Be: 887.671