William, Hogarth, Printmaker: Beer Street (1751)

"Can anybody find me an ESB, please?"

After a five-hour drive and four hours of The GrandOtter's baby shower, I felt more than ready for a couple of beers and a spot of supper. Constantly aware of my surroundings when out on the prowl, I'd spotted a place on our way over to the hotel that looked as if it might fill the bill. The Spot, a so-called Sports bar conveniently located less than a half mile from our hotel. Its website claimed that this bar had been operating continuously since the Kennedy Administration. The menu looked typical bar fare and listed that they carried a beer I rarely see anymore, an ESB or Extra Special Bitter, a common enough brew in Blighty but seldom seen in this country.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my beer to taste bitter. I prefer beer with flavor. If it provides hints of dandelion, so much the better, for beer was initially intended to sit along the savory side of the palate rather than the sweet. When we were seated and the wait person asked, I ordered up one of those longed-for ESBs. She responded that they no longer carried that one on tap, but she thought she might have a bottle, or, no, a can of it around. She soon returned to report that, no, they didn't even have that beer in a can. I asked what else they might have that could qualify as bitter. I might just as well have asked a fundamentally unanswerable question, for she started rattling off a list of beers I'd never heard of, except for the ones I had heard of before, none of them bitter.

Space Dust? It tasted like perfume. Bodhi sounded and tasted like a meditation and proved sweet and unsatisfying. I ordered something familiar but it tasted of grapefruit. After, I went to the bar and questioned the tender. She, too, went through the long list of names I was mostly unfamiliar with but could not directly–as through experience–identify which of those were bitter. She offered me a taste of two or three, each more awful than the one before. I settled on a can of the venerable old Rainier, not traditionally considered a bitter beer, but at least an honest lager. I swear it might have qualified as the bitterest brew in the place.

The evolution of every product seems destined to transform the original into its opposite. What began as perhaps honest attempts to improve beer has almost succeeded in producing water, beer's opposite. That in a bar with sixty years of experience, I could find no evidence of a single bitter beer in existence suggests to me that we are, as a society, approaching a dreaded singularity. Flavor will shortly be reduced to ether, and sweet spring water will become the standard by which bitterness will henceforth be ascertained. Then, I suppose, far into a future I will not be here to witness, science and so-called civilization will somehow manage to once again turn water into bitter again. They call this The Wheel Of Production: advancement evolves into debasement before beginning to move toward improvement again, around and around to supply the endless demand for new and improved versions, none of which are new or improved.

I consider myself fortunate to have experienced that once-upon-a-time time when I could reasonably expect to find something both Extra Special and Bitter when happening upon a tavern. This is no longer that time. Between hipsters and light beer drinkers, appreciation of the more definitive flavors has waned to near an all-time low. The Spot is about a hundred miles west of this planet's largest concentration of hop fields, yet I hear that demand was down this year, and some of those yards weren't even planted. Demand is down. Who needs hops to brew spring water? No hops are called for to brew perfume or a meditation, either. I'll slink home wiser but unpleased. The more I see of the future, the less I find there for me. May I not exit this Travesty Gracefully. Can anybody find me an ESB, please?

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz