Slovakia, 1995.
Mr. Creosote: “Better get a bucket.”
Maître d’: “booKAY?”
I’ve often been accused of being a cynic, a skeptic, and a whole slew of other –ics, as well as a few –ists (many of them colored Bolshevik, politically speaking).
These epithets are far better suited to beret-wearing, Gitane-smoking, feather-bedded French post-modern academics than a purportedly wholesome son of the stolid rural bourgeoisie, stringing barbed wire across the bucolic Hoosier countryside, and pausing only to ingest milk, play basketball and listen to both kinds of music (country and western).
These hyperbolic charges about my internationalist character, alleging a treasonable refusal to suffer fools, embrace the palpably untrue or drink PBR, are absolutely…well, valid, if I’m to be perfectly honest.
The fact is that one of the prime reasons for becoming a professional beer drinker almost 40 years ago was to properly channel my lingering bitterness at the ineptitude of the obviously drunken stork, who mistook New Albany on the Ohio for Neuburg an der Donau.
As a palliative, at some juncture between self-destructive youthful angst and that fateful decision to finally open the membership solicitation from the AARP, certain longstanding interests in beer, history, geography and pickled herring coalesced to form a bucket beer list.
Not a bucket of beer at a sports bar, which you’ll notice is usually filled with execrable mass market lager, but a bucket list, one of those experiential enumerations of the sort that inspired one of the worst movies I’ve ever been appalled to suffer through.
L …
