Recently, my world took a trip to hell in a handbasket carried by beer snobs. I realize that this might sound like a ridiculously hyperbolic thing to write, but as someone who has devoted the better part of his adult life to cooking and eating and teaching about cooking and eating, I am acutely aware that there are a lot of people who take food, wine and (this really blows my mind) beer way too seriously.
The most recent event that crystallized my thinking on this happened a few weeks ago at, of all places, an annual family members social at Vollmecke Family Orchards Community Sponsored Agriculture (VCSA) farm in Coatesville, Pa. Farmer Karen Vollmecke (Chester County Farmer of the Year 2006) and her mother, Jan, run VCSA, and it is the place to go for superb organic produce and a ramble through some of Chester county’s most beautiful farmland.
I don’t belong to the VCSA , but I’ve been going there to trade my homemade bread for the eggs that the Vollmeckes harvest from their magnificent free-range chickens. It’s a measure of the Vollmecke’s magnanimity that they invited me and my family, and also indirectly explains why I chose to bring my tool kit and help out with the cooking.
A CSA works best if the people who contract to buy a portion of the crop also spend some time working the farm. So, because I don’t buy any of the crop or spend any time weeding or pruning, I figured the least I could do was prep and cook a bit to show my appreciation.
It was while I was cooking that I met four people, the likes of which I had previously only encountered at art galleries in Manhattan or at music stores haunted by greasy looking grease-balls in black t-shirts and thick black-rimmed glasses where connoisseurs of one thing or another gather to amuse themselves by tormenting others with their expertise.
Just a few short paces from where I was cooking were two kegs of beer (It wasn’t an accident that I chose to work the grill closest to the beer. Believe it!). I don’t remember if it was the second time or the fifth time I decided I was so hot that I needed a refill, but what I can never forget was the scene that greeted me by the keg of Alaskan ESB beer: a tall, very white, bespectacled woman of a certain age (probably my age) with badly cut and frizzy white hair standing shoulder to shoulder with a tall, very white bespectacled man of a certain age who was suffering from a very definite paunch. Both held empty cups in hands that looked like they hadn’t held anything heavier than a toothbrush in a very long time. Now, I had made it to the keg just a moment before they did, and because they both looked so miserable and I had already had enough of this particular brew, I said “Please, help yourselves. I’m going to have the Victory lager instead.”
The woman fixed on my face with a pair of dead, gray eyes, and in a tone of voice that was at once monotonous and as discordant as a trio of male cats in heat said, “Oh, are you sure; is there something wrong with it?”
“No, I said, “it’s just a bit bitter and I’ve had enough.”
“Bitter?” the man said, his face as still as wallboard.
“Bitter?” the woman chimed in, “even for an ESB? I can’t believe it.”
That comment was delivered in such a withering tone of condescension that I realized then and there that I had two choices to make: lift the keg off the ground, try to hit both of them in one shot and run like hell, or turn away, fill my cup with Victory lager and get back to work. I chose the latter, and was sorry I did.
As I carefully filled my cup by letting the beer slide gently down the side to keep it from developing too much foam, some guy came along and told me I was doing it all wrong and that I should watch him do it. So what did he do? The exact same thing, but much-much slower. The end result, of course, was no better than what I had done, but I was too polite to break his thick skull about it and let him walk off secure in the knowledge that he was a siphon meister.
Now, if you think for a moment that my suffering at the hands of beer snobs was over, you’d be wrong. Very wrong. While Mr. Expert had been teaching me how to pour beer, boredom had piqued my thirst and I had again emptied my cup. And I damn well wasn’t going to go back to the grill with an empty cup. As I was refilling and enjoying the recent departure of the three brew-scags, a scraggly looking 20-something guy stepped up to the keg and said “Pilsner?”
“No,” I said “lager.”
“Oh,” he said, his disgust palpable. Then the wiener turned his back and walked away. There is only one word that is up to the task of describing a guy like this. “Wiener” isn’t good enough, and I’m too polite to use it (wanker).
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