Friday, March 10, 2017

Blithering Idiot

I was out at Beer Night of our little church group in Manchester last night at one of those places which has a beer menu that runs into the dozens.  I ordered Blithering Idiot because well, I felt obligated.  It's an English barleywine, which I am not familiar with.  It is found in the upper-left area of this chart of beer types, so you'll know who its relatives are. Sweet and dark, not what I usually have.  I don't think I will be gravitating to this style, but I wouldn't mind it occasionally.  It is fun to read the reviews of beers.  Perhaps they know what they are tasting, perhaps they are posers - I don't know, but it seems a rather harmless hobby.

It did put me in mind of Dave Barry's discussion of a California wine tour of about a decade ago, which included the wine-reviewing phrase "nuances of toast" that entered our family's stock of in-jokes.

On my road trip, I learned that Columbus Ohio has gone all-in on local craft breweries, enough that it would take one quite a while to take them all in.  Columbus has recently passed Cincinnati and Cleveland as the largest city in the state and is growing/spreading, not shrinking like the others.  I was surprised at the number of small airports until it occurred to me how much easier they would be to build in Ohio, in contrast to, say, Goffstown, NH.

2 comments:

  1. My wife and I took a spirits (alcohol, not ethereal) tour with my son and his SO about a year ago in Columbus. In addition to a craft brewery it included mead, hard cider (my wife approved) and a distillery. I enjoyed most of it though the beer flavors were a little 'out there' for my taste, which tends to stick with American IPAs and the occasional light lager to cool off after mowing the lawn.

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  2. "Truffles and underbrush," my husband used to say about pretentious wine bouquets.

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