What Summer Beer’s All About
posted on 18 June 2009 by danHere’s what summer beer’s really all about:
There’s an Australian in my house. A few years ago, my fiancé lived with her in Costa Rica, both of them working for a Peace-Corp-ish program, chopping down jungle pathways, dancing with locals, the like (you haven’t seen sexy until you’ve seen the picture of my fiancé holding a machete, a wary Costa Rican hovering in the background). Now, the Australian is on a sort of world tour of similar programs; she’s kicking it off with a six week stay at our house. Which is pretty cool. It’s like having an ambassador-in-residence. I’m learning all sorts about the other end of the world - mostly tidbits like how they have 30 different words for drunk and refer to spaghetti bolognese as “spag-bog”. Which language idiosyncrasies tickle me immeasurably.
The relevance to dT’s humble little blog here being that she’s pretty willing to reinforce the whole stereotype of the hard-drinking Aussie (see above-mentioned 30 words). She’s never heard of the majority of our humble American craft brigade and she’s more than agreeable to some consistent experimentation. New night, new beer - or two or three new beers. So, last night, I came home from our beer tasting and found her 4 in to a 6 of Brooklyn Summer. Here she is: sitting on my back deck, eyes closed and head-nodding to some sweet, lilting down-under music.
Brooklyn makes good beer. Hailing from Wiliamsburg, that uber-hipster neighborhood in the eponymous NY borough, the brewery boasts a 20-year history of quality offerings and the Summer lives up to the catalogue. What with its light body and that bready, feisty yeasts, it perfectly satisfies the promise a summer beer implies: refreshing, easygoing, backporch drinkin’. After how many summer beers now? it’s this one that finally ropes in that oft-tongue-tipped analogy: this beer’s refreshing - and with the same doughy quality - as the last drops of vodka sauce mopped up by the last bite of a dinner roll.
But that’s not really what summer beer’s all about.
What all summer beer’s about, has nothing to do with the profile, or the brewery’s history; a summer beer’s about the moment between analysis and judgment, moments such as this: titling back the bottle on my backporch, jawing with my Australian boarder, listening to music and to crickets, cool whispers of an early summer breeze shushing in the air. She plays a song. I play a song. Time kind slides by into the night and it gets later, but we don’t notice.
“You’ve never heard of this band,” she tells me. “Nobody in Australia, really, heard about this band yet.” The song is nice and simple and relaxing. If there’s such a thing as man-at-rest, it would describe me just now, the Brooklyn Summer cocked and pouring between my lips and everything serene as the music drifts. The day seems weeks away and the winter, years, at least. My heart, languid and easy, th-thumps in drowsy rhythm, a gentle syncopation with that puh-limp… plimp of raindrops from the roof into the gutter.
“It’s a nice song,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says and nods. “Yeah, it is.” We sip our beers. There’s nothing left to say; nothing’s left in need of explanation. We aren’t an Australian and an American, here. We’re two people laid out on the backporch and everything is nice.
dJp
Tags: backporch drinkin, Brooklyn, summer beer
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)