Little Beers are Okay

I guess it’s time to be open about my drinking problem.

It’s not the usual kind of drinking problem. The problem is that I did what everyone with a new hobby does. I overdid it. And the hobby was brewing beer. If you start fishing, you’ll fish every weekend. If you buy a wood lathe, you’ll make all your friends unwanted and useless wooden goblets for a couple of months. If you start making beer, you’ll want to have several beers every day.

There are two serious consequences of drinking several beers every day. For one, you get fat, and for another, you can never go anywhere. You’re always waiting for your blood alcohol level to be right before you get in the car. It doesn’t take a lot of drinking to get you in trouble if you have an accident. You may not be impaired, and the accident may be unrelated to drinking, but you can get a DUI off a couple of strong beers anyway.

For years, I barely drank at all. One reason was that I just wasn’t interested in it, but another was that I couldn’t get beer I really liked. When you make your own beer, you get exactly what you want. You pick the grain, yeast, hops, fermentation schedule, mashings schedule, carbonation level…everything just the way you like it. Then when you go back to factory beer, nearly every beer is at least a little disappointing.

I am now at the stage where I have 5 beers on tap. One is not quite perfect, but I still like it better than factory beer. One, my stout, is beyond belief. I actually get a little nervous when I consider the possibility that I may time my next brew wrong and end up with a stout hiatus.

I feel like I’ve been in beer jail since 2006. Now I’m enjoying all the things I missed out on.

When you have really good beer, you don’t want to have just one. You want to start with something relatively light and then have something with more impact. You’re not going to have one pint of lager and quit. You’ll want a stout or an ale next. So for a while, I was having several beers per day, most days.

I came up with an answer. Small glasses.

Early on, I got two sets of what people call pilsner glasses. These are tall, curvy glasses that are good for serving most beers. One set seemed a little small, so I got a set of glasses that hold 18.5 ounces, including foam. A beer that big is very satisfying, especially when you’re in the brewing honeymoon phase.

In order to be able to have more than one beer per sitting, I ordered myself some miniature pint glasses. I know “miniature pint” is an oxymoron. I’m not like Haagen-Daz, the company that pretends 14 ounces are a pint.

These things are shaped like English pub glasses, but they hold about 10 ounces. Now I can have a couple of beers without turning into Barney from The Simpsons.

It’s not easy to find decent beer glasses in this size range. Amazon offers about a billion different personalized glasses, which I don’t want, and it has a variety of huge glasses. It sells a lot of crystal, which gets destroyed in dishwashers. I had to search a long time to find plain old glass glasses that would work.

If you’re thinking about homebrewing, learn from my example. Get yourself some little glasses. You’ll get to have more than one kind of beer per day, and you might live to be 70.