The Session #76: Compulsion

This month's Session was hosted by Glenn Humphries at Beer Is Your Friend

Here's the topic I want you to write me a blog post on the subject of compulsion as it relates to beer. The idea for this Session topic partially arose from the Beer Audit session Adam at Pints and Pubs hosted a few months ago. In my effort and those of a few other bloggers, idea of buying more beer than we need was touched on. Writing about buying heaps of beer got me thinking about just what it is that compels me to keep buying beer.

This topic has come at a great time for me. After blowing way too much of my monthly budget on beer during a trip to Chicago, I assured myself I'd stop buying beer for the rest of the month. I should have known there was no chance I'd pull that off; I was 5 days short when I saw 4 bottles of a beer that's released in March and usually gone by the end of April on the shelf, and felt that I had no choice but to grab a bottle.

On a positive note, I successfully managed to hold off on buying a bottle of New Glarus Anniversary Strong Ale, though that's partially because the display at a local grocery store has it tucked away in the back with a price tag for a bomber of Serendipity under the still fully stocked shelf of beer.

Anyway, compulsion plays a huge role in my beer buying habits. I constantly talk about adding beers I really enjoy to my "rotation", only to end up buying a new limited release every time I stop at the liquor store.

My experiences with compulsion are generally related to rarity. If I think I'll like a beer but I don't know how long it will be around, I'll jump at the opportunity to snatch up a couple bottles. I'm not one of the people who will grab an entire case of beer or stand in line for hours because of hype (though I'll admit I will probably eventually make it to Darkness or Dark Lord Days), but I generally have some idea what breweries I respect enough to try something a little off the wall.

As I write this post, I'm finishing off a bottle of Shorts Huma Lupa Licious that I bought the weekend of the Great Taste of the Midwest--in August of 2012--as a part of an effort to get rid of the absurd collection of bottles and cans around my mini-fridge. I had Needless to say, 9 months was a little bit too long to sit on this one, but it was my last bottle!

To this point, I haven't had much of an issue with hoarding my homebrew. I loved the idea of sharing something that I made with family and friends. Within a week of discovering that the liquid that had been sitting in the corner of the room for a month was actually drinkable, I had consumed or given away about half of my first batch. While I've been a little bit more careful since making that realization, it should be about spent by the time my second batch is ready to be popped open.

Better late than never

Well, thanks to some computer issues, I wasn't able to post for The Session #52.  This really sucked for me, as it was a topic that is very relevant to this blog.

As host of Session #52, I’ve decided not to focus on the substance of beer, but the material that plays a supporting role. Bottles, coasters, cans, labels, ads, tap handles, church keys, hats, t-shirts, tip trays, glassware and signs have been collected by fanatics ever since beer has been sold.

 I can probably come up with about 50 posts for this topic, and since I'm way too late for the session this month and all I'm doing for the time being is working on job applications, cover letters, resumes, and a plot in a community garden I think I'll give it a shot.

I guess that the natural place to start this topic for a blog about a beer bottle collection would probably be with the bottles.

Back in the fall of 2010, my longtime friend Phin moved into an apartment owned and operated by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  The apartment that he moved into wasn't cleaned out particularly well, as there were a number of alcohol bottles left on display.

The bottle that stood out to us was called Sigmund Snopek's, a beer that was apparently brewed by Lakefront Brewery, just a few blocks from our apartment.  It gave us the idea to put more bottles on display.  Since then, we've moved into a new apartment (where we at one point had 99 bottles of beer on the wall), and then moved out of it after graduating college.  According to the Facebook Photo Album I made, we have at least 160 bottles in the collection (I think it's probably over 200, but I haven't uploaded a lot of the pictures yet.) 

We made a set of rules about putting bottles onto "The Wall", and have since come up with a number of unwritten rules.  Unfortunately, now that we're no longer living in that apartment, The Wall is currently a set of bags tucked back in a corner in my parents' storage room.

I have a tendency to rate beers a little differently than most, in that I break it down into rating the bottle and rating the beer itself.  For instance, a review that I'm planning on doing sometime in the near future is for a beer called Polygamy Porter.  It wasn't my favorite, but it wound up being put on display (translation: it was one of 34 beers to be on the front row of one of the two shelves) just because of the funny name and bottle art.

Anyway, moving out of the apartment was pretty rough on the collection, as not only are the bottles no longer on display, but a handful had to be thrown out since there was no room for them.  Fortunately though, most of those were watery macro lagers that we didn't really want anyway.  Not to mention, the political drama unfolding in the state left a number of the bottles on the boycott list.

Well, I'm rambling, so I think I'll end this post.  I'll be back tomorrow (or later tonight) with another long-winded post about some of the other beer-related goods I'm collecting.

The Session #50: What makes you buy someone's beer?

FINALLY!

I've been dying to get in on "The Session" for months now, but always drew a blank when it came time to write something up.

This time around, I'm ready for it.

This month's question is pretty basic: what makes you buy someone's beer?

Price is definitely a factor for me.  I'm a college kid who is currently looking at post-grad jobs paying in the range of $12-20,000 a year.  As much as I'd love to buy a 10 dollar bottle of beer, it's just not an option right now.  With that said, I don't find myself buying totally cheap stuff all that often, I just make sure that I'm not dropping 2 bucks a bottle for a six pack (or 4 pack, if that's how the company does it).

After price, I take into account style.  While I'm open to being a little adventurous, I know a few things about my palate.  I'm generally not a huge fan of darker beers.  Don't get me wrong--they're good--just typically a bit thicker and harder to drink.  But if they're done right, I get over that fact pretty quickly.  Additionally, American Style Pale Ales are not for me.  Once again, I can appreciate them, but they put an end to my night of drinking pretty quickly.

Next would probably be how difficult it is to find.  I just posted about a beer from Utah; odd stuff like that really draws me in. A part of the mission of The Wall is to find every bottle we can, so buying a beer I've never seen before takes precedence over buying one that we have on the wish list but can find in a number of places. 


Those beers that make up my wishlist?  They're usually from companies that I'm familiar with.  I tend to get a lot of beers from Wisconsin: Lakefront, Sprecher, New Glarus, Ale Asylum, and Capital (though I've pretty much maxed out on my hometown brew.)  Next comes other companies that I tend to like a lot: Bell's, Three Floyds, and New Belgium.  After that I'll head over to the higher end singles, where I'll often use Beer Advocate ratings and my personal tastes to find something for a special occasion.  That's how I wound up with a bottle of Piraat a couple weeks ago. 

So there you have it, that's my selection process.  So far, I haven't come away disappointed too often.

Let us know about your beer buying decision process in the comments.