{Note from the Online Editor: Beerhouse received the following in an email from one of our subscribers. In the interests of promoting free beer speech and balanced beer debate we have agreed to publish the letter while respecting the author’s wish to remain anonymous. The letter does not necessarily reflect the views of Beerhouse or Beerhouse employees}
Dear Beer Snobs
All that sophistication and it takes a drinker of ‘affordable domestics’ to tell you this: we were never really friends. At best we were passing acquaintances, most likely as I was passing you on my way to kick someone’s ass, and you were headed back to your Bumfluff of the Transcendent Unicorn IPA.
It’s true that we were all in the same boat in college, but you got soft and jumped ship. You traded in your wife beater for a polo neck, and started using phrases like ‘a ballet of hops dancing on a malt stage’. You betrayed your budbrothers, and like a Judas goat you expect us to follow you and your trendy, micro-brewing shepherd.
I say this to you now: Never!
Never will we sacrifice the ability to drunkenly buy vast amounts of fried chicken at 3am because we’ve spent that money on craft beer! Never will we be confused about the contents of the bottle in front of us, or pretend to care about the supposed difference between this bottle of APA and that bottle of IPA! Never will any beer we drink make us feel like we’re licking a skunk’s butt! And never, absolutely never will we talk about beer like we’re discussing a Broadway musical!
You see my dear ex-acquaintance, you’ve missed the point. New And Better has only ever promised you wonders and delivered dog turds. New And Better brought you Enron, the Gulf of Mexico and Batman and Robin. Yes We Can? No. In reality, you can’t.
Average And Boring, on the other hand, is safe. You know where you are when you’re downing your seventh Heineken, and you can feel confident that your beer breath is a known and socially accepted quantity. Drinking craft beer all night might give you a pleasant buzz, or it might have you straining not to explosively shart your pants as you search in vain for the women that have forsaken you and the stench of tripled-hopped fermentation that clings to you like the foul-smelling ghost of good times past.
But we can fight our corners like they’re on opposite sides of the West Bank all night long. The truth is that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. (Except for the last guy with one eye. He’d probably just run away from all the angry blind people.) I’d rather remember the good times, when you ran with the wolves instead of pissing like a puppy.
Remember how we used to shotgun a sixpack each, and then tactically vomit so that we could shotgun the next one quicker? Remember when bottles of beer were just bottles of beer, and we could watch the game without worrying about which particular bottle we were actually drinking? Those were the days when we drank beer without really tasting it, without caring how it was made and without wondering if there was a better beer out there somewhere. Because that, dear Beer Snob, is your fate. You’re stuck in the future, driven by a yearning for that monstrous, Perfect Beer mirage – and forever coming up short.
And us? We’re here, now, kicking back and glugging our affordable domestics with our mates. I’d say you’re welcome, but I’d be lying.
Yours,
An Average Boring Beer Drinker
