Heineken – Memphis Flyer

Due to the lingering plague, as well as a violent grab-bag of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, my topsiders have been drying out for over a year. At long last, though, a regatta in Fairhope, Alabama, got to its date without either running afoul of an outbreak, a hurricane, or the sort of Mach 8 winds that hurl logs, sailboats, and other debris through the air where they are really not supposed to be.

Marcel De Grijs | Dreamstime.com

Before you start sneering — sailing is a fairly COVID-friendly sport, with plenty of fresh air and Vitamin D-brewing sunlight. The whole point of the exercise is to get as far away from the other boats as possible — ideally a lot further than six feet. Add some beer to stave off pellagra, and it can be downright healthy.

Lunch, however, is another matter. After a hurricane season churned up the local waters something ugly, I suspected that ordering the oysters might be ill-advised. Still, 2020 hasn’t killed me yet, so I went all Charlie Sheen/Tiger Blood and ordered the little stinkers anyway. As a preventative, I had a Causeway IPA from Fairhope Brewing Company. If you are in the area, I highly recommend it; it’s one of those refreshing IPAs that is hoppy but with nothing to prove.

One of my lunch companions disagreed: He hates IPAs on the grounds that they taste like IPAs. Which I suppose they do. I found out later that he was geeked up on a lively psychoactive. For my money, Causeway IPA goes well with oysters, but it’s possible it doesn’t play well with psychedelic mushrooms.

Lunches down here are long and lingering, and competitive sailing is not. It’s not a relaxing sport — I can’t remember the last time I didn’t leave the boat with a few bruises. This isn’t the time for lingering contemplation over an artisanal brew. This is time for an action beer, whether you win or not. I mean a good, refreshing cooler beer that you never have to think about, just enjoy. It’s hot; you’ve got some sporting wounds and are wearing wet shorts. You want a Heineken.

It’s a Dutch lager and one of those great mass-market beers that used to be considered premium but, in a craft beer world, tends to sail under the radar (see what I did there?). In a beer universe of very powerful tastes, it is light but still holds its own. It’s not novel, it’s just exactly what it’s supposed to be. Holland, like Germany and Belgium, never joined in the accountant-led American race to the bottom of the beer market by coming up with cheaper and cheaper ways to churn the stuff out. As a result, Dutch and German mass-market beers, the good ones at any rate, were never awful in the first place. They taste exactly like they tasted back when they were considered premium.

For those of us of a certain age, though, Heineken is known for the high margin of error for “skunky” beer. This didn’t have anything to do with quality control in the brewing, rather it was thanks to those green bottles that didn’t filter out light as well as the brown ones. While the bottles are still green, they are now treated and have essentially become high-quality sunglasses for the beer, filtering light as well as the brown bottles do. Personally, I’ve always liked the taste of beer in glass bottles over cans. Brewers keep telling me that cans taste as good as bottles these days. Maybe. They also say that cans keep out 100 percent of the harmful light — which is hard to argue.

If you are on a boat, however, you’re drinking your action beer out of a can anyway. And if your blood is really up, it truly is better to crush a can on your skull than a bottle.

Back when the lockdown was really in lockdown, I saw a tweet announcing that Quarantine Drinking Rules = Airport Drinking Rules. Which makes sense. After this year’s alcohol intake, we all feel like we’ve crunched a few time zones.

These days, however, the airlines are struggling with everyone avoiding those “COVID cabins” in the sky. The travel I’d normally put in for the release of Haint Punch is causing me to Zoom more than fly. This isn’t a problem with the East Coast, but the people in Los Angeles take it as a matter of pride not to take unwieldy time zones into consideration. I always make it a point to have a beer in the shot just to let them all know I’m taking a damn meeting during cocktail hour. If you field a call from Egypt, remember that that time zone is so wide of the mark it’s more constructive to just get back on a plane.

Murff takes a meeting.

I almost miss sitting in the Amsterdam airport at 8:30 a.m., drinking a Carlsberg when your body thinks that it’s last night in New York. Airport drinking isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s not something you want to do daily, unless you are entering a Hunter S. Thompson’s liver look-alike contest. This is drinking with a purpose: to maintain a certain state of mind while avoiding another. Sure, there are those awkward moments when you make eye-contact with some perfectly lovely Dutch lady over her coffee and you can hear her thinking, “Oh … he’s one of them.” She won’t say it of course, and you wouldn’t know if she did. Dutch sounds like a Swede trying to speak German.

In Europe, Carlsberg and Heineken are the universal airport beers. Stateside, Heineken is also pretty ubiquitous. It’s a well-made pale lager out of the Netherlands that is drinkable, refreshing, and has more presence than the mass-market American beers trying to imitate it. At 5 percent ABV, it’s also a little higher in alcohol. Granted, Heineken used to be known for the odd “skunky” beer, but they’ve fixed that problem. The issue wasn’t quality control or even the beer itself, but those green bottles which were less effective than the brown ones at keeping out harmful sunlight.

If you want to drink local, even on the road, American airports are great showcases of homegrown beer wherever (and whenever) you happen to land. If you ask, the barkeep will point you to a beer you’ve probably never heard of and try to sell you a 24-ounce glass of the stuff. This is because airlines seem to like their passengers sleepy and fairly floppy. If you don’t feel like a 24-ounce beer gamble over breakfast, there is always Sweetwater.

Maybe it’s the Atlanta connection, but Sweetwater 420 Extra Pale Ale seems to be America’s go-to airport craft beer. And why not? It’s a West Coast style, dry-hopped ale — more interesting than the standard lager, but light enough to keep drinking without getting that bitter aftertaste. Depending on where you’re headed to (sales calls, class reunion, holiday with family crazies) or coming from (war zones, vacation, a night of designer drugs with L.A. sorts who can’t do time-zone math), this sort of thing is important. You have to maintain.

In the mid-’90s, Sweetwater jumped ahead of the craft beer boom by bringing the West Coast “micros,” as they were then called, to Atlanta. Is Sweetwater local? No. But it is regional and they are still privately owned. They have become one of the top brewers in the country without hitching up with one of the macro brands. And that matters.

As if air travel hadn’t gotten surreal enough this year, I understand that the airlines are now doing home takeout, so would-be travelers can experience reheated, rubbery food fresh out of the microwave in their own home. If you’re going to do that, at least pair it with a gigantic beer. For breakfast.