Article Contributed on: 12/14/2007 1:27:35 PM
It's simple. I blame my father.
When I was in college at Fort Lewis in Durango, my beer of choice was Olympia. It came in 11-ounce bottles (called Stubbies) and was packaged in a little cardboard box. For $5 you got 12 beers. One of the best parts about it, was that each cap had a little puzzle on it. It was one of those puzzles where pictures and symbols made up words. That was always great fun.
Olympia was super carbonated and tasted a little skunky. By no means was it a good beer. It was a cheap beer and it had some novelty to it, which is why that was about all we drank for years. Sadly, the Olympia brewery closed in 2003, but some people are trying to get the
brewery to open again.
I fondly remember one sunny afternoon sitting on the picnic table of the 7th street house in Durango waiting for my friends to come back from the liquor store with some beers. They asked what I wanted and I said, "Surprise me." They returned with a bottle of Old Peculiar. I don't remember why, but I thought it tasted horrible. My how things have changed.
Fast forward to Christmas of that year. After all the presents had been opened, there was one hiding in the back of the tree. It was so big, it was wrapped in a white garbage bag! My father, in his best attempt to act surprised, said, "My, what's that present back there?" This little scenario happened every year, by the way.
I crawled back there and dragged the huge package out and opened it. There were two 5-gallon plastic buckets with all sorts of tubes and other odd-looking things. "It's a homebrew kit. Now you can make your own beer!" my dad explained. "Not till you're 21," my mother added. Now my 21st birthday was only a month away, so I talked my dad into making beer that would be ready to drink by the time I was old enough to drink it. Although to pacify my mom's concerns, our first batch was actually non-alcoholic root beer.
So from that point on, watery domestic beer just didn't cut it for me anymore. I read about all these different beer styles and wanted to make and drink them all. Fortunately for me, Durango had and still has, a thriving local microbrewing scene, where I could try all sorts of new beer styles.
Now, one last thing. Since we are lucky to live in the Napa Valley of Beer, there are quite a few of us "beer snobs" in Denver. But don't worry, if it's beer we'll drink it. We might complain about its crappy, domestic watery nature, but when push comes to shove, if that's all there is to drink, we'll probably drink it.
Coming Up: There are two beers I want to try next. One is Tommyknocker's Cocoa Porter and the other, inspired by nostalgia, is Full Sale's Session Lager. So, once I get my hands on those, I'll post something.