April 2011
Liquid Striped Ties
Way back in our late teens and early twenties, my mate Nat and I had our moments of pure, blithe opinionation.
Nat in particular had a holy trinity of “Nevers”:
1) He would never marry an American
2) He would never go to Ambassador University (the college our denomination owned – in Texas of all places!), and
3) He would never, ever wear a striped tie.
There is no way to soften the blow of Nat’s flawed fidelity to his principles, so at the risk of offending Oscar Wilde, I’ll call this spade a spade: Nat failed on all three.
1) He married a girl from Michigan. Her name is Tricia.
2) Nat met Tricia at Ambassador (he came over a year after me…), and
3) He now has a number of very groovy striped ties.
Sometimes it is good to be an abject failure. Nat is such an abject failure, in fact, that he is now established in Texas, and the recent tenure-track position he scored at the obscenely well funded Texas Christian University, where the lovely Tricia also teaches, means that he’ll be in the Lone Star State until he retires.
All the while displaying his collection of striped ties.
I brought up the subject of our abject, and oft misguided, opinionation as a roundabout way of getting to one of our greatest and most passionately shared prejudices: that American beer should be “put back in the horse”.
When I first came over here, dismissing American beer outright was de rigueur.
And to begin with, we were very right. I remember the early-mid nineties in Texas. We were young college kids, and we drank some awful stuff. Bring up the names Meisterbrau, Olde English 800, King Cobra, Carling Black Label, and a whole raft of other offenders amongst my mates and you’ll get rolled eyes, laughs, and a near-universal cringe: “What the heck were we thinking?”
I can tell you what we were thinking: bang-for-the-buck, pure and simple. Olde E at one stage went for 99 cents for a 40oz at the Sandy Center.
One bottle gave you a buzz and two took you where you wanted to be.
All you needed to do was get it down your gullet without bringing it back up, which wasn’t easy.
But even in our backwater college town of Big Sandy things finally started changing. A curvaceous young girl called Laura Orsi (who five years later condescended to become my wife) connived to get the Sandy Center store to carry Hornsby’s Cider. Laura’s ripple, in retrospect, was indicative of a revolution that was occurring in brewing circles across the nation.
That revolution was the emergence of microbreweries. In some places, this surfacing required a relaxing of brewing laws.
In some it was brought on by a growing remembrance of what was possible in the world of brewing (itself brought on by re-exposure and reminding of the venerable Belgian, German and British brewing traditions).
Both forced a challenge to the status quo.
This is not to say that Americans as a whole now drink great beers. Most of them, most of the time, still drink the stuff that earned a less than savoury reputation, but things are definitely different over here.
I wish I could say that it was Australians who are boldly bodysurfing the cusp of brewing excellence, but that isn’t the case.
I’ve traveled a fair bit, and while the deep and venerable brewing traditions exist in Europe, and there are a few notable exceptions in Australia, and elsewhere, America, against all expectations, is where the excitement is.
I’ve been back six or seven times since my first trip OS in ’94.
It isn’t as if I am working from notes a dozen years past their use-by date.
In this context, and taking a broad perspective, anything that significantly disrupts the status quo in Australian beer production has to be a good thing.
There are a few notable exceptions to Australian brewing atrophy but they merely prove the rule. Squire’s and Coopers produce beers that are almost universally worth drinking for more than the kick.
Toohey’s Old is a tad thin but has some character, and both Cascade and Boag’s have some special moments (it’s an island thing), but on the whole, local Australian production is swill. And the choices available at the local pub are dismal.
I’ll happily drink local pub beer when I’m back home but, and I am being very careful to not exaggerate here, if most Australian pubs had a tenth of the on tap personality that I have to choose from here in Lewiston at my favourite pub where I am writing this essay seven miles down the road my house, I’d choose that tenth over the local Australian products I had on offer. Every single time.
It seems, upon reflection, that the revolution in American drinking brought on by the gall and vision of American microbrewers might be summarised by the re-emergence of the striped tie as an emblem of cool for Nat.
Both are archaic in their traditions yet their style is cutting edge.
They possess ample space for bold statement, and so indulging in one requires a certain joie de vivre.
As a proud Aussie, I can hardly believe I just typed this essay.
If it were not for the fact that I live here and get to enjoy the liquid benefits, I’d kill to be writing the reverse of this article…
Kookaburra