#383 Hopped up

So I was looking at a bottle of beer. Beer bottles, like cans, haven’t changed a whole heck of a lot. You got your long-necked 12 oz bottle, your stubby, and your Mickey’s Wide Mouth. Mickey’s Wide Mouth was one of those weird ideas that caught on for no apparent reason other than it was weird. Like the Volkswagen “Thing” or the Pet Rock. More T-shirts and college dorm carpets were ruined by Mickey’s Wide Mouth than just about any other beverage. And it’s funny because those same individuals who had trouble with a wide mouth had no trouble whatsoever with frosty metal mugs of beer or bodacious glass schooners, or even the ceramic tankards with flip down lids brought over from Germany, the stein. Or more accurately “schtein.” Hearing slurring collegians try to speak German with the word stein was like watching rednecks try to say croissant. Intoxication is not a facilitator of cross-cultural elocution. But the famous Mickey’s bottle was always sloshing at just the wrong time. Unlike a tankard, you couldn’t actually dip your nose in it and feel the liquid before it hit your lips and unlike a small-necked bottle you didn’t have enough orifice tightness to hold the flow back once you actually felt it on your lips. A regular bottle allows the possibility of a sip and semi-suck action, which, like crawling across the floor on your knees on the way to puke in the thundermug, is a way to safely engage in a particular drunken action with the assistance of all available motor resources. Mickey’s did not assist that possibility. The mouth was too wide for a suck and too narrow for a preview. Beer was destined to run outside your lips and down your shirt. And if, like many collegians back then, you had a T-shirt with a big screen print of an authentic German beer stein on it then you could say: Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you stained my stein, oh Mickey. Then again that was probably pretty rare. The bottle I’m looking at now is from a company that prides itself on freshness, flavor and specialized hop flavors. This I gather from reading their label. It’s also apparent they’re making a bid for a particular niche of beer-drinking aficionados, as the label also sports the banner “Certified Organic.” Which is a wonderful thing. Lord knows it’s probably not a great idea to be quaffing brewskies laced with pesticides. Who wants a Budweiser DDT boilermaker? But the “organic” is fairly derivative. The final libation that we call beer is pretty far removed from the mash of hops, grain, and yeast that our caveman ancestors first found fermenting on their primitive sideboards waiting for whoever first got sick of the mess enough to finally do the dishes. And it’s not like alcohol is a healthy broccoli smoothie. I would think that by the time the brewer had enough poison alcohol in the drink the poison pesticide percentage would be tiny. Chug-a-lug the elephant and strain at a gnat?
America, ya gotta love it.