sam adams: octoberfest

I spotted Sam Adams in the licky store today and it was the first sighting I've had this seen - it must have come out some time in the last week or so. Fortunately I had on hand a burrito from anna's taqueria so I decided to have a tasting.

Seasonal beers are great. My gf always complains that our eating has lost its seasonal rhythm. As she explains, we import foods from across the globe to eat them when we want, even when they are wildly out of season where we live or even on our continent... with the effect that we lose touch with a vital aspect of mother earth, which is seasonality (not to mention eating stuff that grows within 100 miles of you).

But beer comes to the rescue, as it so often does. Brewing companies create seasonal beers and then market them according to strict seasonal rules -- whereby you can get octoberfest only in autumn, summer ales only in summer, etc. -- and thereby imposing an artificial naturalness on us that we have otherwise artificially deprived ourselves of from mother earth.

My favorite seasonal beer of the summer was Totally Naked by New Glarus up in WI. That beer is seasonal. Last fall my dad went to buy some and was told "they're not making it anymore." We thought it had been discontinued until the next summer came. :-) Then like the Lady of the Lake, it arose from the waters in beautiful, radiant, nakedness.

I'm not so huge as many people about Sam Adams octoberfest (in my mind it may be the best known seasonal beer in America) but this beer it tough not to like. It tastes good. I spent a year in Germany. I even went to Oktoberfest. Here's proof:

possibly the only photo in existence of me with a beard

I can't say that this beer strikes me as unusually German. It's not a helles, weiss, dunkel weiss, not even a pils. But I taste it and the word "roasted" comes into my head. Meanwhile, it is very easy to drink even for poor souls whose palettes don't prefer that kind of thing. A rare combination that warrants recognition of the coming of fall... and the end of the roasting heat of summer.

the war against crack

i drove down to philly last weekend. i experience mild narcolepsy and on the road i was fighting it. my mint tea didn't seem to be helping.

a couple months ago i quit coffee. i had only been drinking one or two cups a day, but when i quit i noticed that i was sleeping way better, deeper, waking up without that feeling of grogginess that i had grown accustomed to as normal. (unless i had been drinking and then sometimes i felt a bit like ass.) so i was staying off coffee willingly despite the fact that i fucking LOVE coffee.

but on the way down to philly, i was a bit drowsy and i decided that i was not interested in dying. so i got a cup of coffee. it sorta helped. but something about the warmth of coffee soothes me and can make me drowsy (it was for this reason that before i tried quitting coffee i had not believed that it had any cracklike qualities.)

so i got a red bull, which from now on i am going to refer to as CRACK BULL. i've had red bull before, but always with vodka, amid smoke and lights and often already drunk and in a mind-altered kind of mood. this was the first time when i was ever kind of going along in life in a normal way and i cracked open a can of the good 'ole crack bull and drank it. the fact that wired had a one-pager on its cracky ingredients had captured my interest a bit.

boy, that stuff is crack like i didn't know. i was zooming in and out of traffic, pumping up the trance music and confusing the hell out of my shitty automatic transmission in my low-performance geekmobile.

today i made a pot of assam tea and forgot to take the tea leaves out, then i drank pretty much the whole pot. that stuff is pretty cracky too man! i worked for like 6 or 7 hours without eating anything. i had a sort of epiphany when i was jumping around on my mattress and blasting some electronica during a little break: who needs money, when crack bull and cracky assam tea are so cheap? we'll see how i sleep tonight relative to my rich colleagues: that is the acid test.

Getting Grounded

i have found "the cafe" near my new place. this is the sign of having settled into a place (and also that it's a good place). hence i am currently writing from True Grounds, 717 Broadway, Somerville MA in Ball Square.



it takes me about 15 seconds to size up a cafe, and i'm happy to discover that this one is of superlative quality. it's good, real good.

it has old chairs and sofas, and the personality of a place other than a chain. it has good beverages. it has nice people working there, and maybe interesting patrons. it has free wifi, without any bullshit about codes or any such. (although not old school, wifi is a must these days. seriously, could you start a self-respecting cafe and not have wifi? how the fuck could i blog about it if there were no wifi here?)

there is food. i used to think that food was not essential. but i have come to believe that it's a great thing, for multiple reasons. having food lets me eat here and hence work uninterruptedly. also, if i'm going to buy a sandwich somewhere, it's good that it should be here, because then i feel ok about staying to work longer.

areas for improvement: 7am to 9pm is too short on both ends. closing at 7pm on friday is a huge what the fuck.

we're not too far from my first love in a cafe, which was the 1369 cafe in inman square. that joint will always have a place in my heart, though it was a bit small. in arlington, va, there was common grounds on wilson ave, which brought a soul to a fairly soul-less town. chicago had some contenders, but no really great ones. san francisco had lots of cafes that were excellent by every objective standard but had the wrong vibe (like pretty much everything there, to someone from philly).

it's interesting to be back here. when i visited during the years between leaving in 01 and now, i felt alienated by the city, like it was no longer home to me in any sense. but now i feel like it's about as homey is pretty much any place is to me (the presence of other people dear to me being held equal), which maybe is not all that homey but fine.