Wearing Thin: Brew Week: A good excuse to remember all those beer tales
By Terry Smith
July 14, 2008
In honor of Ohio Brew Week, which takes place in Athens all this week, here’s a column dedicated to beer.
I will begin each blurb with a brand of beer that triggers a particular memory. I will try very hard not to glorify the intoxicating effects of beer or the often inglorious after-effects. I will do this by using the time-honored code of beer drinkers (“having a beer” means having two or three; “having two or three” means consuming the equivalent of Dow Lake).
• Schlitz. In the ’60s, I’m sure Schlitz was the most popular beer in America. I know this because while riding in the backseat of our family’s Olds Vista Cruiser station wagon, on vacation, I’d often kill the time by surveying litter along the highways. Discarded Schlitz cans covered nearly every square inch of the highway berm in most of the states we drove through. The only exception was the Deep South, where Dixie and Jax cans competed with the Schlitz cans.
Of course, the most interesting aspect of this memory is just the fact that so many Americans drank beer while driving back in those days (and so many slobs littered without thinking twice about it).
(Incidentally, I just read that after decades of unavailability, Schlitz, in its original formula, is being brewed and sold.)
• Stroh’s. The first beer I ever drank, and beer has never tasted the same. It’s odd, but I can remember the taste of those first beers — so intense, so unique — and wish beer still tasted like that. If I were to drink a Stroh’s today, I’m sure it would taste like flavored water (like most other standard domestic beers).
I didn’t drink much in junior high or high school — maybe four or five times tops — but those times were so excessive that after each time, I swore it off forever. Which explains why I didn’t drink much in high school.
The first drinking experience occurred when Skip, a Vietnam vet who lived in our neighborhood (whom we worshipped because he played “Funk 49” on his electric guitar just like Joe Walsh), bought a couple cases of beer and drove my three friends and me to a deserted house in rural Summit County. We drank two or three beers (gulping, not sipping), and then Skip took us back home, where he marched us around the subdivision, as if we were recruits in boot camp (except for the falling-down part).
• Blatz. (This was Blatz back before the beer label was acquired by the G. Heileman Brewing Company.) In high school, my friends and I were invited to a birthday party for a preacher’s daughter we knew. Somehow, we finagled somebody’s older brother to buy us a case of Blatz, but we had a problem. We didn’t have driver’s licenses yet, and my dad was driving us to the party. So I came up with the idea of wrapping the case of Blatz like a birthday present, and doing a Trojan horse caper. It worked like a charm, even when Dad asked what was in the box. We just said it was a little rock wrapped up as a gag gift.
• Homemade British beer. I need to be careful in telling this story because it comes pretty close to deserving an “R” rating. (But it is about homemade beer, which qualifies this column for Brew Week content.)
During a summer break from college, I had a lousy job selling children’s encyclopedias door to door. One of my co-workers was a married British-Indian girl from Wales on a solo “work holiday” in the States (in retrospect, I think it was more of a sex holiday).
One night, this girl (well, actually, she was an older woman, 24 to my 19) invited me back to her rental house in Akron, near Akron U., to try out her homebrew. I went with her, had a few glasses of warm bitter beer (pretty darned good), and then sat down with her as she was flipping through a magazine. Startled, I realized it contained mainly full-frontal photos of naked men.
I was still a bit naïve about girls at the time (this was after my freshman year at OU), and it never occurred to me that she might have been hinting at anything. I just thought she had an academic interest in naked men. (A few years later, thinking about it, I whacked myself in the forehead, and realized, what a complete tool I was.)
In any event, her roommate came home around then, and the spell was broken. I mean, it would have been broken if I had any concept of what was going on.
• Tech Beer. This is one of the el-cheapo beers that the old Mary Johnson’s bar (now Tony’s) used to sell, for 40 cents a bottle. My student friends and I, in the spirit of exploration, used to hang out in Mary Johnson’s, despite the fact that it was solidly a “townie bar.” We were into country music and what we took to be the honky-tonk lifestyle, and MJ’s had the best country jukebox that I’ve ever seen or heard, before or since.
We danced to Merle, Loretta and Conway with the regulars, got drunk, and watched a few fights. At the time, that was a great way to kill the time before heading over to Swanky’s for that legendary bar’s standard late-night debauchery.
• Colt 45 (aka Skunk Piss). Old Baker Center’s Frontier Room – that bastion of collegiate intellectualism – featured “Colt 45 Night” every Monday and Wednesday night, where they sold the high-octane stuff for 50 cents a can.
I can remember many a study night that was interrupted permanently by a side-trip to the Frontier Room for “just one or two Colts.” Hours later, around 2:30 a.m., we’d roll home, our unopened books still in our arms.
I’m just guessing, but I suspect that Colt 45 had something to do with that “D” I got in “The History of Journalism.”
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