Tuesday, July 31, 2012

E.D.B. vs the childless night.

I use an app on my smartphone called Untappd. It allows you to track the beers you drink and keep quick ratings on whether or not you liked it. Just like any other “checking in” style apps you can earn badges. Last night I earned my 500th unique beers checked in badge. Okay, over my life span of drinking beer, it’s not that impressive.  The thing is those 500 beers were since I started using this app… just under a year ago.  The journey to getting 500 unique beers is a funny story with a lot of good beers, a ton of bad beers, mostly decent beers, and some pretty god awful beers.

It’s those god awful beers that make for the best stories, and are usually the one that ends up getting me into trouble.  Just this last Saturday, Blondelicious and I lucked into a kid free night as Clone (our youngest son who is a lot like me) was invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. Earlier that day while helping out with a Podcast regarding Beer Snobs vs. Beer Connoisseurs, it was noted that I was only 5 away from my reaching my 500th beer. Saturday night Blondelicious said we should strive to hit 500, and off we went!

We ended up at one of our local favorite watering holes, Brewsky’s. They had Southern Tier’s Unearthly on tap. I’d never had it, and even though it’s a double IPA (India Pale Ale), and I don’t like IPAs, I ordered it anyways. This was one of the worst IPAs I’ve had. It was so bad I ordered a Jack and Coke to chase it. But for every sip of beer I was taking, I needed a swallow of chaser to get it down. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and slammed the entire pint just to finish it. The bartender and manager both said no one they have had order it has liked it. The only other they had that I didn’t like was Dad’s Little Helper Black IPA… Yes another IPA, but this is a black IPA and I thought it might be better. I was wrong. Not as bad as the first one, but still not a beer I like. So what did I do? Yep, chugged it down and then finished off my Jack and Coke. As I stated I had been drinking earlier and I just chugged 20oz of 9.5% and 6.2% ABV (Alcohol by volume) beers and slammed a 20 oz. jack and coke… in less than 10 minutes. For those that aren’t in the know, your average mass produced beer is usually 4.2 to 4.8% ABV.

Things get really fuzzy there. Then the next thing I recall is being in Blondelicious’ car and her being mad at me.  To paraphrase, “I’m not happy! It’s 8:30pm on a kid free night and you are passing out!” Fortunately I am an experienced drinker. I told her drive to a bar way out of our way so that I could sober up on the drive. We started having a conversation. She was talking about “Topic A” and I was talking about “Topic 2”. All the time I’m giving her driving directions on where to go, so we started arguing because we didn’t understand what the other was talking about, I decided I didn’t want to go to the other bar, so I gave her directions to start heading home. I was tired of arguing and it was just frustration. She didn’t realize that. She did realize we were heading a different way that she knew was wrong. This brought up another communication breakdown. This one, however, resulted in us figuring out what had happened and what went wrong. Everything smoothed out. That is when we went to another favorite bar of ours, Oasis… because I had sobered up enough to stay awake.
So the moral of the story is this my friends, If you have a kid free night, don’t slam really bad beers followed with a whiskey chaser… it just pisses off the wife.

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