Welfareloser's Blog

so i was standing in the twits’ doorway, admiring the new artwork i finally gotten around to hanging on all the walls (pictures posted tomorrow… because it completely rocks. i pimped their cribs!) i moved their old toddler art – finding nemo cel art, the winnie the pooh wall hanging that started its life at evilgremlin’s crib quilt, buzz lightyear posters – to monkeybeef’s room (and he is impressed!) to make room for about a 25 year accumulation of star wars art in their room – a darth maul poster, a special edition teaser poster of young anakin walking on tatooine, followed by a vader-shaped shadow, a darth vader helmet-and-flames poster i ate many, many cheezits to get the boxtops for, the 4 original episode 4 posters my mom got them on ebay and mounted on foamboard for them, and of course the original empire strikes back (spazmonkey) and return of the jedi (dramaqueen) bedsheets from the 80s. we were commenting on the awesomeness of it all, when posterspositiverolemodel came up behind me and, after grabbing my ass, told me to try the beer he had in his hand, and guess what it was.

i ran. not because of the beer, but because, as i was saying goodnight to the twits, dramaqueen decided to start up a long-running argument between the two of us:

DQ: pwincess weia is NAWT a jedi!
me: dude, i am so freakin tired of this particular argument-
DQ: she uses a GUN, not a lightsaber, and she can’t force on the bad guys.
me: i can settle this one right now, i just got a book… you stay right here.
DQ: she’s not a hero!

i ran down two flights of stairs to grab book two of a trilogy i just bought yesterday, the dark nest trilogy, with the cover art serving as proof of leia’s jedihood. i ran back up, pushed past a husband still howling with laughter at me (not so hard that he couldn’t make another grab for my ass), and tossed the book on the twits’ mattress. spazmonkey and dramaqueen were wide-eyed and impressed.

SM: WHOA! look how she has a blue lightsaber!
me: that’s right. you know why? because IN YOUR FACE!

so anyway. the twits thus delighted with princess leia’s new status as a hero (and trying desperately to read the 400-page novel to themselves as a bedtime story,) i tried the beer. i sniffed it several times first, because the aroma of this mystery dark-brown beer was absolutely amazing. it was a thick, sweet, complex caramel smell of country molasses – not that blackstrap shit, but the deep amber syrup you can still find in some rural markets (there’s a particlarly good local source of it here, from lynneville, ia) that tastes more like fresh caramel than like candy cigarrettes that some asshole actually tried to light. repeatedly.

so i tasted it, and it was awesome. i finally had to give up on what it could be, because there was no way it hell it was any of our recent brews – two meads, two light beers, two lambics. this beer tasted like it smelled, with heavy undercurrents of pronounced yet mellow maltiness, a slight, almost ill-fitting tartness.

me: what is it?
PRM: so the cap said… coffee ’96.
me: no SHIT? dude, it doesn’t even taste like coffee anymore. this is the kind of beer sam adams can put in an 8.5 oz cobalt bottle and charge like $12 a bottle for because it’s “rare” and “complex,” and “aged 12 years.”
PRM: it’s pretty good.
me: o my god; i rock!

see, this is a beer i brewed before i was even actually legal to drink (and guess what: according to the law of that state at that time, it was legal for me to brew it, so NYEAH! you didn’t even just catch me admitting to somethig illegal!) and it spent the first 8 years of its life on this planet tasting like brewed cat piss (which, i imagine, is what most 8-year-old-boys, a demographic not renowned for its personal hygiene, would all taste like, too). we hadn’t tasted it at all for at least 4 years, but there was still half a case of it stashed in our fledgling-but-gorgeous honest-to-god beer cellar, a labor of love as we build it together (okay, mostly, it’s a labor of laziness. there are just… other things we’d rather be doing.) and now, suddenly, it’s GOOD. like, REALLY good.

so, like i said, i totally rock. it may occasionally take me a decade or so, but i CAN polish a turd enought that it actually changes into gold. witness my alchemy!