Sunday 17th January 2010 - Why American Beer is the Way It Is.

          I like to start my Sunday mornings with a good breakfast, but downtown Paris is closed (except for the churches, of course), so I end up on the bypass, where there is a nest of fast-food places, having a Macbreakfast.  By the time I'm finished, the rain has stopped and the sun is peeping out: which is cheering, but demonstrates that I didn't know which way is south.

          Then it's back for a hot soak.  I think there is negative pressure in the drain (ie it's pumped), because the plastic cup starts to crumple slightly, breaking the seal.  This means I have to keep the water running a bit, which makes me feel even more decadent.

          While I'm cooling off, I watch the Dallas Cowboys getting a good seeing-to from the Minnesota Vikings.  The Vikings quarter-back is, apparently, a hundred and forty years old, born just after the Civil War (often referred to here in the South as the "War Between the States") and looking distinctly like a character from Lord of the Rings.  I don't think the Vikings were on anything, but it sure looked like the Cowboys were.  Perhaps Gandalf put something in their tea.

 

          Then it's round the corner to the only restaurant in walking distance for the third component of my Sunday morning, what is known in parliamentary circles as a 'good lunch'.  I shall gloss over the food: it may figure in the story a little later.  But the beer turns up garnished with fruit slices.  Now who, except the Belgians, put fruit in their beer?  Here, wait a minute, the Belgians now own the biggest brewer in America.  Are they trying to modify the drinking habits of the American masses?

          I was listening to a programme on Public Radio as I drove here yesterday.  Yesterday (hats off, heads bowed, chaps) was the 90th anniversary of the 18th Amendement to the American Constitution, the one which imposed Prohibition.  Actually, the programme was really a bit of time for a man with an enormous collection of old music on '78s', and he had chosen Prohibition as his theme.  But as well as a lot of historic music about booze and boozing, he made the interesting claim that, because it killed off a great many brewers, Prohibition was the reason American beer is the way it is today.  Prohibition was a wonderful experiment, in the sense that it is a bad example of almost everything, not least that old adage about being careful what you wish for, in case you get it, but I hadn't thought to accuse it of turning beer into nothing more than an alcohol transport system.

 

          A bit later, a children's birthday party turned up.  There were three adult couples.  One of the games I like to play with groups in public places is (silently) to try to guess who is related to whom.  I concluded that they might all be related to each other.  Well, it is Tennessee, isn't it?