“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Our favorite Hundred dollar founding father dropped that bit of knowledge on us a couple hundred years ago. Now if he believed that, there must have been some truth to it, I mean the man was scary smart. He invented the pot belly stove, rocking chair and bi-focal glasses just to name a few of his achievements.

Hell, the man is credited with discovering electricity. By credited of course, I mean that’s what they told us in grade school. In reality, he was just testing his hypothesis that lightning and electricity were related.

But he did do it by flying a kite in a thunderstorm, with metal wire and a key tied to it. Tell me there wasn’t beer involved in that decision. I’ve drank my fair share of beer, and that’s something I doubt I’d ever try, regardless of how much I wanted to prove the laws of physics.

My point is, me and Ben have this one thing in common. I love beer. Beer has the same effect ice cream does for me, just in a more grown up way.

That doesn’t mean I pound down a twelve pack every night (least not any more, not at my age). I feel the need to emphasize that because in this day and age, sometimes an individual’s love of beer can be misconstrued as alcoholism, which isn’t fair… not to the beer lover or the alcoholic.

Just like ice cream, the taste of a cold beer makes me happy, and the right beer on the right occasion can really be a glorious thing. But you can do this and enjoy your beer in moderation, without slugging dozens of them down, in the same way I can enjoy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and not have to drive three or four more in me, simply because I can’t stop. In fact, I feel like this would hurt more than binge drinking.

There was a time in my youth though, that quantity was more important than quality. Back then I was the king of finding beer deals anywhere I could. Natty Lights. Milwaukee’s best and Busch were not below my standards, in fact, many of my friends would enjoy mass quantities of these bargain beers and brag about how much money we saved! After all, most of us were all young fathers and didn’t have a lot of spare cash, so if you could pick up a twelve pack for under $7.00, you were a true hero.

One sunny spring day, on our way to go fishing ,my brother in law  and I stopped at a  store and discovered  a beer called Blatz in the beer isle. It was only $8.00 for a full case. Eight bucks for twenty four bottles of beer! Jackpot! We pooled our our money and had enough for the beer, a pack of smokes, some live bait and a bag of chips. You never saw two young fathers so excited and proud of what they had done. Our wives would be so proud of us for being as frugal as we were that day.

Well, they weren’t as proud as we had hoped they’d be. The next morning we  discovered why they called the beer “Blatz”, because that’s what we ended up doing in the bathroom for the better part of the day. But we still saved money and had a great day on the pond, even if we never caught anything more than a good buzz

Yeah, we definitely leaned more toward quantity back then, but today things are different…

(to be continued)