Sunday was a rather dry sporting day, even if you include the "discovery" of Kevin Durant's supposed burner account. The combination of the NBA’s All-Star break and the Milan Cortina Olympics delivered a great deal of incident, but very little of consequence. There were no fresh allegations of cheating curlers or references to serially violated hog lines; that mad Norwegian bastard who has mastered running uphill while wearing skis presumably picked up five or six more gold medals. The highlight of the FA Cup matches was remembering that the Wigan Athletic mascot is called Crusty The Pie, for the only valid reason.
This left a window in the schedule for a little author time, and fortunately this was the day the local tavern was tapping its annual keg of Pliny The Younger, a supremely rare and extremely good locally made and nationally renowned craft beer. All it required from your correspondent was standing in the rain for half an hour, waiting for the doors of the bar to open, and finding a seat in the corner where nobody would ruin the vibe by sitting down nearby in an ill-considered attempt at strained conviviality. Beer is usually a communal activity, but for the Younger, even pathological loners get a day off from judgment.
That last part of the plan sadly failed; the person in question here was actually quite tolerable and even borderline delightful, defying the well-worn stereotype that people are at their best when avoided. (If it helps, we never asked for a name and they never offered one, and good on them for that.) But the rest went to plan: the U.S.-Germany hockey game was on, the NBA All-Star Games were not, and the bar was filled with devoted day drinkers who finally had proper cover for their daily nooner.
The Younger was the lure, the limited edition offshoot of the Russian River Brewing Company’s more plentifully available older brother, Pliny The Elder; it is offered in two successive weeks at the local, and then it is gone. That it appeared on a day otherwise bereft of athletic entertainment—and no, the Pebble Beach golf tournament doesn't count, because most golf on television is the equivalent of listening to photosynthesis on the radio—is proof that we are all guided by a kind and benevolent force who cares for us all, even if that care comes in pint glasses and only turns up two weekends a year.
As the first recorded triple IPA, The Younger has attained an almost religious status among people who care about that sort of thing, even though it is now more than a decade and a half old. That’s a tribute to the fetish of scarcity through marketing as much as it is anything else. In and of itself, the beer is perfectly delightful, even for someone who doesn't usually drink beer. It's hard to explain in words the ways in which it is dramatically different from Pliny The Elder, or several of about a million billion skillion other craft brews, although surely an expert could do that. But a non-expert could tell you that it goes down remarkably easy, without a hint of the industrial harshness one can normally find in turbo-hopped beers. and inspires a person to consider it a treat not to be abused by ordering 20. That it doesn’t travel far from its home brewery in Santa Rosa during its two-week lifespan makes it seem all the more special, and the fact that you have to have friends in the tavern industry who both have access to the small number of kegs and are willing to let you know about it will make you think that you yourself are special, when in fact you just have connections in the right dank places. You are the "some people" in the Modern Lovers' "Pablo Picasso," in short, and Pliny is the reminder that despite all the evidence you're still not totally irredeemable.
But because this beer is served in a bar, and because bars have television screens, you will find yourself not drinking the beer theatrically, as though you were born with a beret, a pencil-thin moustache, and a pack of Gauloises rolled up your sleeve, but instead while looking to see if there's a game on to keep you occupied, and from looking too effete in your connoisseurship. It's beer, after all, not avant-garde theatre. And sadly, the only game offered during this round of author time—other than the stupid golf, about which you should either go to the course it's being played at or watch it at home, but under no circumstances subject the bar-going public to whatever hideous kink is served by watching it in public—was the U.S.-Germany hockey game. That was a scheduled beatdown that unfolded more or less as predicted; the game’s most memorable moment was American skin rash Matthew Tkachuk trolling German and Edmonton Oilers star Leon Draisaitl afterward for having never won a Stanley Cup, which is so un-Olympic a gesture that it once again sparked a memory of the "Pablo Picasso" lyrics. Specifically, the parts where the artist’s name is rhymed with “asshole.”
It all helped break up the beers, at least. This was a necessity, because you cannot simply power down a Younger, or an Elder for that matter. It isn't designed to be swallowed like, say, a PBR. If you drive to a preferred bar to have a Younger or two, you're committing to the bit, and maybe also to a cab on the way home. Either way, you're staying awhile, even as the bar fills up with more strangers you wish to remain as such.
In short, the Younger did its job as it was meant to do. It provided a reason not to watch the game, just as the game provided a reason not to interact with other customers except the ones you came in with. It was almost the perfect pivot point on a gray Sunday when stuck with a rowdy Tkachuk and nothing much to do. It was also a reminder that sometimes, through no fault of their own, people can actually get some things right, whether that’s a meticulously produced small-batch beer or the close-but-not-too-close energy in a bar that serves it. The only way it could have been better is if the Younger was being poured later in the day, while Sunday’s real television highlight, the 800th episode of The Simpsons, was being aired. It would have been nice to properly toast the smiling, googly-eyed bearded guy in the green Eagles jacket who appeared next to the Phillie Phanatic in that episode—Dan McQuade, our own version of Pliny The Younger. There are few better reasons to hoist one.
