My father and I agree about a lot of important things: Doctor Who, Arthur C. Clarke’s more obscure novels, and the superiority of puns involving the word ‘mint’ to name just a few.
We don’t always agree about alcohol though. I will always pick a white wine over my father’s red and ever since my first beer, which was a Barking Squirrel at Mikes, I’ve had an appreciation for hops, which my dad hates.
However, since I’m very new to it, my ideas about beer are still fermenting. Like many people, the ancient father figure archetype ingrained in my brain is always standing by the barbecue with a cold one.
So I had a nice Google+ chat with the old man to hear about his favourite brews—complete with totally unwarranted rolling commentary from my mother.
The Summer Beers
I don’t fully understand the need to categorize beers seasonally but my father maintains that it’s better to drink light beers in the summer and dark beers in the fall and winter.
Holsten, Lowenbrau, and Kozel are his choices for light summer beers. They’re smooth, not too bitter, but not too light either, he said. I’d planned to try both Lowenbrau and Kozel but, as I explained to my father, when you drop a beer can against a concrete sidewalk while running across the street, it usually just explodes.
I agree with him about Kozel. It’s light but not too light—refreshing without being boring. Sometimes I find the taste of lighter beers too weak for my liking but not in this case.
I also bring up Brava, the beer that hung around our house all summer.
“It’s an inexpensive, light, cheap summer beer,” my dad explains.
Of course the beers of one summer inevitably lead to the beers of summer’s past. Pretty soon we’re talking about the young beer drinker my father once was, hanging around Windsor in the late 80s, sitting in saunas and unintentionally stealing entire pitchers of beer from certain Belle River restaurants.
I ask if he remembers his first beer. He says he was 17 and doesn’t remember much else.
“He probably got drunk!” my mother interjects. “Do you want to hear about my sip of beer?” she cuts in.
“I had one sip. We were in [your dad’s] neighbor’s sauna. I thought I was going to pass out. It was awful,” she says. “That was in 1987.”
“I was excited. I thought she was going to start drinking beer,” my dad remembers.
“Back then I was much like the hipsters, whatever the hip beer was that’s what we were drinking. So the hip beer back then was Labatt’s Blue . . .” he says.
I attempt explain that that the colloquial understanding of the term ‘hipster’ is ever changing. That word, dad. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
“I was swayed by public opinion and commercialism,” he clarifies.
“Wasn’t so much about the flavour, it was whatever tasted good at the time and I just kind of stuck with it.”
The notion of a micro-brewery was totally foreign to him back then. All beer was from larger breweries and it all cost the same he tells me.
The Winter Beers
He said in the last 10-15 years his taste in beer has become more diverse. He says he picks up whichever labels he doesn’t recognize.
He tells me I need to try Innis & Gunn. “It’s really interesting because after they brew it they store it in whiskey barrels,” he says.
Innis & Gunn is halfway between a light and a dark beer he adds. Waterloo Dark on the other hand, is not halfway at all.
“Oh, that’s one of my favorites” he says when he sees me open the can. And I agree with him there. It’s kind of earthy, richer than the light summer beers I’d tried earlier.
“Almost creamy,” my dad says which is kind of a strange word to apply to beer but I know exactly what he means. This is definitely a beer we can agree on.
