Following ACL Tear, LB Riley Mason Hoping for Long, Pain-Filled Career

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Pittsburgh, PA – After suffering a torn ACL in his first career game, Steelers rookie linebacker Riley Mason expressed hope he could return to the field in time for a lengthy, excruciating career.

“I’m hoping for 8, maybe 10 years. It’ll hurt like hell but I’m getting rich on that second contract,” Mason said as he tenderly flexed his injured leg and drank a shake he claimed definitely wasn’t filled with HGH.

The injury occurred when his teammate, Riggs Rigby, rolled into Mason’s knee. Rigby reportedly got up and asked, “You good?” Mason screamed, so Rigby yelled, “He ain’t good!” and beckoned the training staff.

Mason said he had no hard feelings. “I mean, Rig, he’s torn both biceps, had a concussion, half of his ribs have been broken, and he’s still out there. He’s a role model. No way I could be mad at him.”

Steelers officials were optimistic about Mason’s future. General manager Kevin Colbert said, “Mason’s what we like to call a ‘triple threat.’ That means his athletic starting point is so high he can suffer probably three severe injuries and still plug along at least at a journeyman level.”

While Mason’s outstanding athleticism will help, Colbert indicated performing after an injury eventually becomes a “question of pain management,” which is widely accepted football-speak for, “Can he stop acting like such a wuss and hit someone?”

Steelers officials would like to see Mason back on the field early next season. “That old logic, it takes a year to rehab and another year to feel right after an ACL tear? We don’t buy that any more,” head coach Mike Tomlin said. “I mean, think about how much the doctors do to fix these guys. With Mason, they drilled holes in his knee, cut off a piece of tendon from somewhere else, and threaded it through those holes! You can’t beat that!”

Mason said he was up for a pain-filled career, and was already looking forward to future injuries. “I’d really like to diversify my pain, going forward,” Mason said. “Yeah, everybody blows a knee at some point, but I don’t wanna blow too many. I’d be down with a pec injury, maybe drop a barbell on my chest. Or even a concussion—Wes Welker got like eight of those and kept ticking.”

Welker could not be reached for comment because he’d forgotten where his cell phone was, and by the time he found it he’d forgotten what a cell phone was.

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President Trump’s First Hundred Days: A Timeline

January 20, 2017: President Trump is inaugurated. He gives an unscripted five-hour speech that touches on space flight, Hillary the Loser, and his upcoming reality show, Trump in da House.

February 19, 2017: Trump emerges from a four-week post-inauguration sex party in order to announce his long-awaited plan for a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. His plan centers on freezing the border in order to construct a gigantic ice wall.

February 22, 2017: Trump announces his gun-control policy: You can own and carry any gun you want if you attend a gun-safety course at Trump University. The course involves shooting at cardboard-cutout terrorists for a couple hours, then going home.

February 23, 2017: Trump in da House premieres. It’s just a live feed of Trump yelling at White House staffers.

March 9, 2017: Controversy erupts after an episode of Trump in da House shows Trump saying he plans to use illegal-immigrant labor to build his ice wall. “I told you Mexico would pay for it,” an underwear-clad Trump is seen yelling at a terrified staffer who came to deliver the day’s presidential pants. Further charges of hypocrisy arise when it’s revealed Trump also plans to staff the wall’s defenses with captured immigrants: They’ll have the choice of deportation or joining the newly formed Night’s Watch and protecting the wall.

March 10, 2017: Trump distracts everyone from the ice-wall controversy by insulting John McCain.

March 17, 2017: Trump hosts Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Things start out amicably, but then Trump catches Putin checking out First Lady Melania Trump. An argument breaks out and devolves into Trump and Putin wrestling shirtless on the White House lawn.

March 20, 2017: After three days, the wrestling match ends in a draw. Trump calls Putin a “fantastic competitor” and sends him home with a bottle of Trump-brand vodka, which Putin ditches in an airport trashcan.

March 30, 2017: George R.R. Martin awakens from his winter slumber and complains that Trump totally stole the ice-wall idea from him. In retaliation, Trump orders that Trump in da House replace that night’s episode of Game of Thrones. The American people become angry.

March 31, 2017: Anger recedes as the American people discuss what Melania wore on last night’s episode of Trump in da House.

April 17, 2017: Trump abolishes the IRS and replaces the tax-return deadline with Trump Day. In response to charges that this will bankrupt the country, Trump says, “Wonderful. Bankruptcy is a great business tool.”

April 18, 2017: The United States goes bankrupt.

April 19, 2017: Trump starts liquidating U.S. assets to sell them off to China. “We’re gonna rip China off so bad,” he says. He begins by selling the U.S. Marine Corps to China for $3 million and a promising basketball player.

April 20, 2017: China uses the USMC to invade and annex California. “We didn’t like California that much anyway,” Trump says. “We won that deal.”

April 25, 2017: The Chinese Republic of California pushes east into Nevada and launches an attack on Trump Hotel Las Vegas. With his own business threatened, an apoplectic Trump sells the U.S. Air Force to Mainland China in order to fund his fight against the Chinese Republic of California.

April 27, 2017: Now facing the Marine Corps and Air Force, U.S. Army and Navy commanders beseech Trump to stop selling off the military. Trump responds by selling both branches to Canada. He then demands Canada defend the United States.

April 28, 2017: Canada politely declines.

April 29, 2017: Trump works out a “fantastic deal, a really great deal” with China whereby the remainder of the United States becomes a Chinese territory with Trump as a puppet dictator.

April 30, 2017: Trump in da House begins broadcasting with Chinese subtitles.

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Beer Review: 21st Amendment’s Fireside Chat

Saturday, I picked up a six-pack of 21st Amendment Brewery’s Fireside Chat.

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Beer Packaging:

The beer’s packaging explains Fireside Chat’s name thusly: “Like FDR’s radio addresses, which were a kick in the butt and a hug at the same time, our winter spiced ale is a subtle twist on tradition.”

Kicking someone in the butt while hugging them doesn’t seem like a subtle twist on either butt-kicking or hugging. That’s like being at your daughter’s wedding, pulling a .38 on her instead of walking her down the aisle, and saying, “Just adding my own little flair, honey!”

But the packaging’s cool artwork distracts me from my pedantry:

FIRESIDE CHAT CAN & CARRIER_0

It depicts FDR hanging out fireside, except FDR isn’t giving an inspiring radio address. He’s getting drunk, smoking, and talking to an elf, who’s jammed all the way to the right of the frame as he tries to shrink away from drunken smokestack FDR.

Beer Style:

Writing on the can advertises this beer as a Winter Spiced Ale; a subtitle adds that it is an Ale with Spices Added, which brings up the question of what about the words Spiced Ale needed clarification.

BeerAdvocate meanwhile classifies Fireside Chat as a Winter Warmer, which are “malty sweet offerings [that] tend to be a favorite winter seasonal.” Spiced Winter Warmers, like Fireside Chat, blend “robust ales with mixed spices.” This is called the wassail tradition.

Interestingly, the word wassail derives from an early English toast. You’d hand someone a hearty drink and wassail them, wishing them good health. I’ve never been to England, but if handing someone a liver-corroding calorie bomb and wishing them good health is common practice, then someone who goes two-thirds of a beer review without talking about the specific beer he’s reviewing would fit right in.

The Specific Beer He’s Reviewing:

Fireside Chat’s full, spicy body would make it a great companion to a fire or to a holiday dinner where you want to get drunk and annoy your relatives. It’s malty, but the spices brighten it well. The beer’s 7.9% ABV is well hidden—it doesn’t disintegrate into gin-tasting foulness at the end of a swig. Fireside Chat leaves your tongue tasting spice, your body feeling warm, and your head a little buzzed, which in my opinion covers all the duties of a winter beer.

I was too lazy to build a fire and had no one to chat to, so instead I watched my college football team lose while drinking Fireside Chat. That last part was very enjoyable. Wassail!

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Bladders: Not For a First Date

The prompt: Write about something you would never share with someone on a first date.

The something: I pissed myself in New Orleans.

I have a nickname for my bladder: the coffee filter.

Like water flowing through a coffeemaker, liquids enter my body and exit a short time later, just colored different. It’s tough for me to strike a balance between proper hydration and constant urination. If I drink slightly too much water, or have one too many coffees or beers, then my bladder freaks out and tells me I have to go every 15 minutes.

The problem’s been with me since I was a child. On family vacations, which usually involved long drives, I’d sit in the back seat and hope my last Coke wouldn’t wreck my bladder like the aliens from Independence Day wrecked cities. But it always did. My frequent calls of “Can we stop?” exasperated my parents—my dad would hunch further over the steering wheel and my mom would rock her head back, though they’d quickly reverse those movements to try to preserve my feelings.

As I grew, my bladder didn’t. Today if I order a Maker’s Mark neat it’s as much because I like the taste as because it doesn’t flood my bladder like beer—though of course I pretend it’s entirely because I’m a bourbon-swilling hardass.

I frequent a 180-mile stretch of Virginia highway, and I have the mile markers of its rest areas memorized. My friends are mildly impressed but mostly annoyed when I call out something like: “There’s a good place to piss at exit 291.”

When booking a flight, I’m obsessive about trying to find an aisle seat. My cover story is my size, but it’s more because I’ll probably have to hurtle to the restroom at some point; on my scouting report, “6’2″, 230 pounds” sounds much better than “urinates frequently.” 

Regardless, I never thought my bladder was all that disruptive to my life—until I pissed myself at a bar. New Orleans. Mardi Gras. One bathroom, long line, I lost.

“That got your attention, eh?” said the urologist I went to the following week. He diagnosed me not with a small bladder, nor a coffee filter in place of a bladder, but with an overactive bladder. It often gets overstimulated and thinks it’s full, even if it’s not.

The doctor prescribed me a pill which decreases the frequency slightly and the urgency tremendously. So I still piss a lot, but it’s not as overwhelming. The field of urology is a frequent target for jokes—one I will always try to resist.

Given that I’m sharing my condition with the Internet, maybe it’d be pointless to keep it zipped up on a first date. She’d probably figure it out anyway when she reads my incredibly famous blog when I take a pre-dinner piss, later abandon the table while we wait for our food, and then visit the restroom again after we settle the check. It’s not an easy problem to hide.

But it’s not a terrible one to live with, either. As far as health flaws go, I’ve got that, bad eyesight, and irritable bowel syndrome. All three are manageable; none will kill me, unless I lose my glasses while rushing to a restroom and instead blindly fall into a pit of tigers.

Maybe my date would find my perspective on the coffee filter agreeable. Or maybe she’d wait for me to go to the men’s room and then sneak away from the neurotic mess who convinced her to come to dinner.

The prompt: Write about something you would never share with someone on a second date.

The something: I’M SO GLAD YOU STAYED!

A Party Pizza Parties Too Hard

I really hate partying with Mike, I thought, and then tried to assess how much danger the smoke entering my bedroom posed.

As I clambered off my bed, I could hear Mike, a close friend, snoring down the hall on my couch. The smoke curling around my bedroom door was somehow his fault—after years of partying with him, I had no doubt—but I wasn’t sure whether he’d started the fire by dropping a cigarette or by cooking drunk. I found out the answer when I left my room and saw heavier smoke billowing from the direction of the kitchen.

The smoke was spouting from my oven, which was shut and set to 450 degrees. I advanced toward it like a feral cat approaching an unfamiliar human, then violently slapped the temperature selector back down to 0 degrees, as if the oven hadn’t already been smouldering all night and was actually in danger of exploding RIGHT THEN.

Shoulders slumped, I opened the oven door, coughed my way through a moving wall of smoke, and saw a blackened disc. I imagine it’s what a hubcap would look like after it’d soaked in burning jet fuel for six hours. Still, I immediately recognized the disc’s original form: a pepperoni Totino’s Party Pizza.

Before Mike charred off all of its nutritional value, the Party Pizza had contained 740 calories, more fat than a Whopper, and nearly as much sodium as a full block of Maruchan Ramen Noodles. On the plus side, Party Pizzas cost $1.25 and are excellent for soaking up alcohol. Often when Mike and I hang out, we spend the night drinking beer and telling each other about our problems, and then stuff ourselves with Party Pizzas to ward off hangovers before passing out.

This time, that strategy hadn’t worked too well: I had a moderate hangover and felt like I’d just returned from vacationing in a forest fire. I went into the living room, kicked Mike awake, told him about the smoke and the ruined pizza, and asked him to explain.

“I set it up to cook and I guess I musta sat down on the couch and passed out,” he said.

I wondered why, if he was going to leave the kitchen, he didn’t go into the TV room instead. The living room was virtually empty and had no entertainment options. I asked, “Why’d you come in here?”

“I thought if I went in the TV room and put a movie on I’d fall asleep. And then the pizza would burn.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I told him to help me clean up the pizza.

We were without proper kitchen tools—and even if we’d had tools, I’m not sure which one you’re supposed to use for cleaning up cremated pizza—so we jabbed the burned-pizza disc out of the oven with forks.

Since neither of us had ever held such an item before, we argued over who’d get to destroy it, which was sure to be fun. Mike wanted the right to dispose of the pizza because he “cooked” it, while I insisted him nearly burning down the house voided his pizza opinions.

I won out, and threw the pizza like a Frisbee into my back yard, where it shattered upon hitting the lawn. Something will eat it, I figured. Raccoons will eat anything. But for days, nothing took so much as a bite; apparently raccoons are smart enough to avoid Party Pizzas, even if Mike and I aren’t. I eventually got rid of the remains by running over them with my lawn mower.

As pizzas go, that was a particularly terrible one. Yet pizzas of all quality have spawned elaborate praise:

“The crust, with a two-inch edge, is layered first with mozzarella, then toppings—the excellent spicy, fennel-seed-inflected sausage and peppers, onions, and mushrooms are a classic combo. A superbly rich reduced tomato sauce is ladled on top, and it’s all cooked in a cast-iron pan, which is delivered by the waitress with a valiant hoist.”

—food writer Shauna Lyon on one restaurant’s Chicago-style pizza

“[T]here came a day when you let it slip off your hands and spin free in the air, and it returned to you the way you had always hoped it would, perfectly round, ready to slap onto a tray, to sauce evenly, to cheese just to the edges, to dot with pepperoni, mushroom, and green peppers, and to place tenderly in the oven.”

—poet Deborah Garrison on creating Domino’s pizzas

“Fuck it, let’s get four.”

—Mike, in front of a Walmart freezer full of Party Pizzas

That’s the kind of praise Party Pizzas deserve—profane and vaguely fond.

They’re savagely utilitarian: Mike is fond of leaving them out on the counter instead of refrigerating them, because our main party area only has a mini fridge, and Party Pizzas would crowd out the beer. “If one of ’em goes bad, we’re only out a buck,” he usually explains, though so far we haven’t found a reliable way to tell when a Party Pizza turns from merely unhealthy to poisonous.

Regardless of how we refrigerate them, the cumulative toll of the Party Pizza lifestyle will itself shift from unhealthy to poisonous, eventually. It probably already has started: As I enter my late 20s, stretches that involve more beers than hours of sleep, and more Party Pizzas than vegetables, hurt more than they did even two years ago.

But when I remember all the nights those pizzas have helped fuel—with grinding card games between evanescent groups of friends, hour-long conversations about music, longer rants about love and death—for a bit longer, “Fuck it, let’s get four” sounds about right.

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A Fear of Everything Except Permanent Psychological Damage

We were heading out the door when I realized my mother thought our dryer was trying to kill us.

“Turn the dryer off,” she’d told me.

“Why?” 10-year-old me asked.

“I don’t want it to catch on fire while we’re away.”

Looking back, 26-year-old me wonders why it would’ve been preferable for the house to burn down with us there instead of away, but 10-year-old me just nodded and turned off the dryer. The clothes remained damp until our return. Just like every other time we had to go somewhere mid-cycle.

Mom, now almost a decade deceased, had numerous such obsessions. Another one related to the dryer: She emptied the lint filter as if lint was about to replace the dollar as America’s currency. “The lint will catch fire if you let too much build up,” she’d say—or shout, if I was in another room—after seemingly every load.

I left for college convinced dryers were pyromaniacal death machines, so I was shocked during my freshman year to find people didn’t always empty lint filters. Sometimes I’d open a communal dryer and find six or seven layers of lint from six or seven cavalier undergrads. You fools, I thought each time I cleaned a choked filter. You’ll burn the college down, and then we’ll have to apply somewhere else.

Another of Mom’s fears was based not on fire but water. No matter how much of her I come to forget, I will never be able to throw a plastic six-pack ring away without hearing her in my head: Cut the rings apart or you’ll strangle a fish! And every time I hear that, I obey and take the rings apart. But instead of cutting with scissors I tear with my hands, because I know she’d find the brutality scold-worthy—You’ll hurt your fingers!—and I like that.

As long as I knew her she bought no vehicles but Subarus, largely because of their reputation as safe. But she still found ways to make driving seem extremely dangerous. Sometimes, when I was old enough to ride in the front but still short enough to fold my legs up, I’d thump a foot onto the passenger-side dashboard. “Don’t do that or you’ll set the airbag off!” always came Mom’s warning. If Subaru airbags actually worked that way, I later realized, then Subarus would be terribly unsafe.

Paradoxically, Mom still viewed Subarus as paragons of safety. While beaming over her first Subaru Forester, a low-slung SUV, she told me, “It’s good it sits so low to the ground because the bigger SUVs roll over all the time.” For a stretch after that, I flinched every time a Chevy Suburban or Ford Expedition passed us on the highway, certain the larger vehicle was about to topple over and crush us.

As with the six-pack rings, I’m still trying to rebel. Earlier this year, I bought a newer, taller Forester—they’ve gotten a bit bigger with each redesign—and smirked when I saw this label on the visor:

Rollover_Replacement_Needed

It made me like the vehicle more.

Along with Mom’s affinity for Subarus, I’ve inherited much of her anxiety. One manifestation: Every time I leave somewhere and plan to be gone for more than a day, I need to do several laps around the place to make sure everything’s turned off, I have all my belongings, and no animals are being strangled by six-pack rings in the corner. If I’m traveling with someone, they eventually resign themselves to going outside, sitting in my Subaru, and hoping it doesn’t roll over while they wait.

Once, while my girlfriend, Rosie, was helping me close up a house that was going to sit empty for a few days, she asked if it was OK to leave a package of hot dog buns on the kitchen counter. “No,” I said. My tone befitted a request to shoot me in the thigh: “That’d bring mice!” Mom’s words in Dad’s voice.

Rosie responded by heading for the Subaru. I joined her half an hour later, laps complete.

Despite the contrary evidence, Mom’s anxieties fueled her best qualities. Her concern for animals—Cut the rings apart!—manifested itself in hundreds of hours spent volunteering for the local animal shelter. Though her car- and dryer-related fears were tough to take seriously, they were borne from her trying to keep her family safe. And she did the same for her pals; one of her lifelong friends, Sharon, told me, “She was the caretaker and worrier of our group. Always pointing out the danger.” She turned her worries into her best trait: bottomless caring.

Likewise, I benefit from this neuroticism. I’m an editor by trade, and while compulsively triple-checking a document out of fear I’ve missed something is stressful enough to twist my intestines, it’s rewarding when it turns up a would-be $20,000 mistake.

I learned about taxes, investments, and retirement planning years before most of my peers, because in my early 20s I became convinced I’d be a bankrupt, accidental tax cheat by 30 if I didn’t wise up.

And I picked up my now-favorite activity—improv comedy—not because I wanted to go on stage and be funny, but because at 25 I got an obsessively nagging thought that I’d die miserable by 50 if I kept pounding beer and watching hours of Netflix every night. It’s tough to enjoy Trailer Park Boys with that anxious snake in your head, so I signed up for an improv class to get myself out more. A year later, it’s what I enjoy doing most.

Our anxiety—and I say our assuming Mom’s experience felt similar to mine—can’t be called a double-edged sword, because a double-edged sword would still have a hilt, and thus an obvious way to keep it from hurting its wielder. (I’m not sure if dwelling on cliches counts as anxiety or just pedantic introspection.)

Instead, our anxiety resembles the shrapnel embedded in Iron Man’s chest, poised to destroy his heart: It could’ve taken him out, but instead spurred him to make an armored suit and start shooting lasers at his problems.

I often wish neither of us had shrapnel, Mom, but thanks for passing on enough armor to deal with it.

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Micah and Righty Raid the Biodome

We were walking towards Montreal’s Biodome when I saw a bus unloading doom: a horde of 60 children on a day trip from summer camp.

They immediately swarmed towards the Biodome, which was the destination I’d most wanted to hit on my Montreal vacation. The Biodome is like a zoo, except instead of each animal being in their own tank, lots of animals live in small ecosystems together. The experience is something like being on a hike in the forest, except instead of having to actively search to spot animals, it’s hard to look anywhere without seeing one.

The other way the Biodome is different from hiking is that you may have to fight your way through massive groups of children. The child-horde from the bus entered just ahead of my girlfriend, Rosie, and myself.

Inside, I saw that a bunch of overmatched teenage counselors were in charge, each trying to control a squadron of eight to ten younger urchins. “Micah, come back,” one counselor pleaded in every exhibit I encountered her squadron. She gave such a plea whenever Micah—a thin but athletic blonde boy—outpaced his group to see the next cool animal; for instance, penguins.

“They can’t fly!” Micah told the counselor as he hurtled towards the penguin exhibit.

“Micah, they can’t, but we need to stay together,” his counselor said, exhausted nearly to tears.

Rosie thought Micah was cute, but for weeks to come, the counselor probably had nightmares of Micah charging into the penguin pool and drowning. “They mate for life!” Nightmare Micah would inform the counselor between gasps for air.

I didn’t have much sympathy for the counselor, though—she could’ve ended Micah’s nonsense by teaching the rest of her squadron a game called Tackle Micah’s Scrawny Ass Until He Learns to Listen. But that’s probably one reason I’ll never be a camp counselor.

Another reason is that I have no idea how to interact with kids. Rosie and I are in our mid-20s, and we’re at the point in our relationship where she has asked me dreadful questions like, “When do you want children?” and “How many do you want?” My replies of, “When I’m 30, I guess?” and “Few enough to afford” don’t ever seem to be what she’s looking for—but they reflect my uneasiness around children and my worries about the time and money it takes to raise them. Rosie has numbers, names, genders, and rough dates of birth picked out already. I have a mental clock running down to when I think I’ll want to start a family.

But in the Biodome, I had children whether I wanted them or not. In what I think was a coral reef exhibit, I became swamped in several summer-camp squadrons. In front of me were two girls, probably eight or nine years old, with their backs to me. The one on the right (Righty) clandestinely tapped the one on the left (Lefty) on the back of her far shoulder, playing the “I’m Gonna Poke You But You Won’t Know It Was Me” game. Lefty turned around to find out who poked her and saw … me.

In my life, I’ve been sucker punched twice. I’ve been in two car wrecks. I’ve performed live comedy with no scripted material. None of those moments froze me up like seeing Lefty turn around, thinking I’d poked her.

Lefty stared back and up at me. I looked down at her. Our eye-lock felt like it took longer than Lefty had been alive. Insanely, I didn’t want to sell Righty out by snitching to Lefty.  She would never believe you, anyway, I thought as I saw discomfort grow in Lefty’s eyes.

And now you look like a fucking weirdo, came another thought. My eyes flicked to a sea anemone, but the creature was no help.

What if she tells a camp counselor I poked her? my brain helpfully finished as Lefty turned back around. I made a path through another group of children—I’m 230 pounds and graceless, so the scene looked like a water buffalo tromping through a colony of prairie dogs—and abandoned Lefty and Righty to their game.

Righty, if you’re reading this, know I never snitched. And know that Rosie will look back on kids like you and Micah and think about how adorable y’all were. Meanwhile, I’ll look back and realize how accurate the answer, “When I’m 30, I guess?” really is.

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Beer Review: Founders All Day IPA

ALLDAY_3

Beer Style: Made by Founders Brewing, All Day IPA is a session beer. “Session” drinking essentially means drinking for a long time without getting blitzed—or as I call it, “having a DAY.” BeerAdvocate posits that session drinking started during World War I, when British shell-production workers had government-mandated windows during which they could drink. The munitions makers wanted to be able to drink for a few hours without returning to work falling-down drunk. (You can also accomplish this goal by quitting your job, but the wartime Brits were too patriotic for that.)

To the end of producing tasty but session-able beers, brewers try to make their session offerings tasty with a low alcohol by volume (ABV).

ALLDAY_2

Beer Packaging: The centerpiece of All Day IPA’s label is a wood-paneled station wagon toting a red canoe, because nothing caps off a day of binge drinking like hopping in your 1979 Ford Country Squire and driving it into the river.

The Beer: All Day IPA is well named. This would be my beer of choice if I ever needed to drink IPAs for some 24-hour hops-endurance challenge. (I’d name the event 24 Heures du Hops.) At 4.7% ABV, All Day IPA has only slightly more alcohol than a light beer, but it easily out-flavors any light beer I’ve ever had (as well as many craft beers). You can drink a bunch of these without feeling bogged down, so Founders Brewing fulfilled the session part.

As for the IPA part: This beer wouldn’t be as satisfying with a meal or as a single-drink experience as something like Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA or Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. However, it still tastes great—its sharp-but-light bitterness is like a lead guitar with just the right amount of distortion. And a few All Day IPAs won’t make you bloat up or want to fall asleep like heavier IPAs might. The makers of this this brew set out with a clear goal and nailed it.

 

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The Unit

February 2013

“Let’s get rid of all the big shit first,” I said to Mike at the beginning of the worst-planned weekend of my life.

I was moving out of my Chesterfield, Virginia, apartment. It was the place I’d moved after college to find a job; I was unsuccessful. I was temporarily going to stay in a small guest room in Northern Virginia, so I came up with the terrible idea of sticking my belongings in a storage unit until I found a new place of my own. The storage unit I selected drew me in with the promise of a free first month’s rent.

Mike had agreed to help me over an extended weekend. I’d gone three hours out of my way to snag him from our hometown, as much because I wanted to work on preserving our friendship as for his help.

Continue reading

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Beer Review: Flying Dog’s Mint Chocolate Stout

Tonight, I picked up a six pack of Flying Dog’s Mint Chocolate Stout.

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Beer Packaging: Ralph Steadman—an artist best known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson—illustrates Flying Dog’s packaging, and it always comes out looking pretty crazy. This particular box features disembodied wings, floating eyeballs, and what looks like a pint glass vomiting up beer. LET’S PARTY.

Beer Style: Per Flying Dog’s website, “Mint Chocolate Stout is a dessert beer you can have more than one of.” Which tempts me to drink 15 immediately after dinner, then explain to my horrified girlfriend, “No, dear, the website said this was OK.”

The Brewery: Flying Dog is based in Frederick, Maryland, and they really like giving tours. When you get to the place, the staff intercepts you at the door and asks if you want to take a tour. Decline, and they’ll make you take a mini-tour anyway; for instance, to get your growler filled, you first go to the bar, drink free samples, say things like, “Gosh, that’s good,” (because anything else would be gauche), and then must go to a separate cash register in a gift-shop area to pay for your growler. Finally, you can return to the bar and have your growler filled. Note that the mini-tour doesn’t unlock full Flying Dog privileges: You can’t buy six packs there unless you take the full tour—though you can drive to the gas station down the street and buy all the Flying Dog six packs you want.

I’m guessing all this has to do with brewery regulations. For instance, Maryland’s 2013 Senate Bill 32 decides how much beer production breweries can sell on-site. Since politicians wrote it, the bill is roughly 700 words instead of these four: “Sell all you want.” The bill, like Flying Dog, apparently wants people to take tours, and incentives brewers to give them in exchange for higher sales limits.

Mint Chocolate Stout in One Text: “Got Flying Dog’s Mint Chocolate Stout. Completely changed my outlook on that brewery.”

Mint Chocolate Stout, Elaborated: Before trying this beer, I viewed visits to Flying Dog more as an excuse to drive through Maryland for an afternoon than as a dedicated beer run—I liked their stuff, but not enough to make a huge effort to get it. Their Mint Chocolate Stout changed that, though: Its body is pleasantly sturdy, and its flavor is more well balanced than any “gimmick” beer I’ve ever had. Often, beers with a nontraditional flavor—mint in this case—either go too hard on the extra flavor, which would’ve made Mint Chocolate Stout taste like mouthwash, or go too soft, which leaves you chasing the flavor. But with this beer, Flying Dog hits a perfect balance between those two extremes. It’s a shame they don’t brew it year-round, because I’d go through a mini-tour any day to buy the stuff.

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