Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 83: Full frontal hops in Poperinge, Bamberg and Žatec (1999).
For those who weren’t present for the arrival of a new millennium, you sure missed a preponderance of palaver.
Civilization had a Y2K affliction, having decided on the fly to tether all of life’s myriad processes to computers via a tangle of twist ties, duct tape and a power strip. Suddenly there was panic at the prospect of our loyal cyber servants misreading dates, emptying bank accounts, dismantling power grids, and losing the passwords to the patchy forerunners of today’s mighty PornHub.
On my part, I have absolutely no idea where I was at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. It was a Friday, so in all likelihood I was working at the Public House. In the event of the unthinkable, I knew beer would continue pouring from our taps, although without electricity it would gradually become warmer than accustomed (an entirely different level of existential dread for Americans).
Drinking room temperature beer in the dark never bothered me much, but 2000 duly arrived, and apart from a few minor glitches, Mother Nature persisted. Freed from whatever precautionary angst I’d been feeling, there could be only one...
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