A while back, I was invited to speak to a class at USF's St. Pete campus about music journalism.
As if there were such a thing.
I'm not a very good public speaker, so I did what I usually do for these types of things, which is mumble some shit about how I'm not a very good public speaker, and immediately move on to the question-and-answer part of the presentation. It works for everyone involved, I think — I don't have to look like an idiot, and the members of the audience don't have to sit through a bunch of crap they might not want to know before they get to tell me what they do want to know.
Mostly, they want to know two things: how I got my job, and how they can get my job.
This particular crowd was no exception, though I did get tossed more interesting, oddball and specific questions than usual. The one that really struck me came from a young woman who looked like she couldn't have been older than 16; she wanted to know why a majority of the pieces I'd written lately mentioned beer.
I laughed, partially because the question caught me off guard, but mostly because I'd had two cold lagers to steady my nerves before the class, and gave a reply that was positively Hemingway-esque in its concision:
"I like beer."
That young woman's observation dependably returns to me whenever I get an e-mail from a stranger saying he or she would like to get a beer with me sometime, or whenever a local band I want to interview suggests that we get together over a couple of beers, or whenever a club owner offers me a few free beers in exchange for stopping by (and, presumably, writing nice things about) his or her place.
Apparently, everybody knows that I like beer.
There are worse things to be known for — despotism, for instance, or being the central character in an urban legend that also stars a gerbil. It's still occasionally disconcerting, however, to realize that the one facet of my personality about which complete strangers are completely certain is my abiding love for an addictive and debilitating liquid.
And it's not just strangers. Longtime friends, too, are content to view that relatively minor trait as one of the load-bearing supports of my character. I've gotten beer — and I don't mean people have bought me a few beers, I mean, like, a case of Miller High Life with one of those little sticky-backed bows on it — for virtually every one of my birthdays since I turned 17.
Except this year, that is.
I turned 34 on Saturday, and I didn't get beer for my birthday.
I got a ticket to the Florida Brewers Guild's annual BeerFest, which is like getting all the beer.
The FBG is a statewide non-profit organization that promotes the Florida brewing industry. The Guild is involved in everything from modernizing alcohol-regulation laws to educating interested parties in the beer-brewing process. By far its highest-profile endeavor, though, is BeerFest. It's a five-hour tasting marathon held at Centro Ybor that features multiple beers from more than 20 breweries, and attracts a huge throng split fairly evenly between serious hops-and-barley aficionados, folks who just really enjoy tasty beers, and binge-drinking yahoos.
To be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to go. I've cut back fairly impressively on my drinking, on the advice of a trained mental-health professional and an editor who'd really hate to have to kill me. But my friends shelled out for the ticket, and it was a seriously beautiful day. (Plus, I'd spent the day before stalking hugely popular British fey-pop outfit Coldplay as the group shot a video in St. Petersburg, and felt more than a little like a 17-year-old girl; an afternoon of tasting drinks with names like Mad Bavarian and Annihilator would do my masculinity a world of good.) So we trekked across the Howard Frankland to Ybor City, queued up in a line already frighteningly long half an hour before the 2 p.m. opening, got our wristbands and our teeny little commemorative glasses, and proceeded to taste our way from Seventh Avenue to Ninth Avenue, and back again.
The Irish Red from Jacksonville's Cellar Grille brewery was exquisite; so were the Shipyard Brewing Company's India Pale Ale (all the way from Portland, Maine) and the Sarasota Brewing Company's Sequoia Amber Lager. The fruitier and more exotic beers, like Jolly Pumpkin's Belgian Ales and Central Florida Homebrewers' Wit Biers, put me off. Some folks did more smelling than tasting; some folks misused words like "yeasty" and "palate" in hilarious failed attempts to sound knowledgeable; some folks didn't realize that wearing a shirt with a joke about beer on it to a beer festival is exactly as bad as wearing a band's shirt to one of that same band's concerts.
The afternoon passed in leisurely fashion, and for us more or less ended when the Yuengling Brewing Company kiosk — one of the few booths whose pourers filled one's glass all the way up, and didn't care how many times one came back — ran out of beer. Most folks, however, kept on tasting until the 7 p.m. cutoff, some searching frantically to find those brewers' stands still pouring.
I'd had my fill long before then, though I sipped a last stout from McGuire's Irish Pub & Brewery as we watched the beer snobs sneering as some yahoos staggered a bit, which only a few of them did. The beer snobs hadn't been there to get drunk; they'd come because their love for beer was something like obsession. I hadn't come to get drunk either, really; I'd come because it seemed like an interesting thing to do on my birthday, and there were all kinds of free drinks I hadn't had before.
I was somewhere in the middle.
I just like beer.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.