Several iterations of this essay were published at the old NA Confidential.
A few years ago one Sunday we went for a stroll and passed a here-today, gone-tomorrow evangelistic church occupying an old shotgun house that had witnessed far better days.
A graying middle-aged man I’d never seen before was standing out front, and he waved animatedly as we passed. I stopped and looked at him with as dull and disinterested an expression as I could muster, but he was undeterred.
“Some Sunday, why don’t you come to church with us?”
I stopped and thought about it. “Sure, as long as you’ll come to my church with me.”
Now he was the one pausing to think. “Where’s your church?”
Got him.
“Any pub will do.”
We kept walking. I never saw him again.
—
Ordinary and otherwise forgettable days, whether near and far, are often the ones I remember best, especially if the memory is marked by the presence of beer.
Maybe a quiet glass of New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red from my dwindling stash to accompany a good book, or schlepping bottles of lager as secured inside the bicycle panniers as we pedal the Bavarian countryside, times are better with better beer.
Human life spans are long and short all at once. Most of our days and nights are long passed and beyond immediate recall, and yet I’ll never forget that one time in Bohemia, walking to the neighborhood rail station pub tap for pitchers of draft beer, and then spending the afternoon drinking with good, kind, giving people, even though communication was a challenge owing to our linguistic divergences.
On that occasion, we brought the beer back with us, but I’ve never felt that drinking better beer was an activity to be hidden. I prefer my beers to be part of the public record. The reason why bars, pubs and other watering holes are the only places I’ve ever truly felt comfortable — my natural habitat, in all honesty — is in part a statement about my innate proclivities, and also owing to the historical function of those places as third spaces.
Nowadays most of us in America have living rooms of our own, but a social instinct still impels us to find another milieu to spend time apart from home and work, another comfortable spot; perhaps a gym, coffee shop, park bench … or even a church, in a pinch, as derived from sheer ennui.
Well, I suppose churches can be interesting to look at, in Europe, while drinking at a sidewalk café across the square.
The functional examples I’ve cited are a bit dry for my taste. I prefer my third spaces to offer beverage alcohol, most often beer. When I’m surrounded by people who feel the same way, anything is possible. This is especially true when you’re a wandering stranger, and find yourself welcomed, albeit temporarily, into the open public living rooms of locals.
It never gets any better than that.
An inviting barroom shifts the perspective of the traveler from the expansive outside looking in, to the inside looking back out … at times, very tightly. From five thousand miles away, you enter a cozy room and ask for a tankard of whatever is made right there, whether in the building, the town or the region.
Granted, one might have a lovely experience in Munich at a mock Pampas restaurant specializing in the beef and wines of southernmost South America, but really, shouldn’t you be going somewhere else for that? This is why I cannot get excited about chains, franchises and concepts from elsewhere.
They offend my sense of, and advocacy for, local creativity.
—
The late Bostonian ward-heeling politician Tip O’Neill rather famously commented that all politics is local, and in like fashion, my pathway is leading me inexorably to this conclusion: All beer drinking culture is local. There remains an essence and primacy to what is being brewed at or near the place one drinks beer.
Truthfully the homebrewer’s self-made bounty is the purest possible example, followed by local commercial brewers and their products. If the beer comes from elsewhere, whether down the road or around the globe, there remains a commensurate importance in choosing genuinely local ownership of the establishments serving it.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive all the way to Chico, California, and drink Sierra Nevada at the “neighborhood” chain restaurant, Applebee’s. They may serve it, but chains don’t deserve my patronage.
Returning full circle to the man’s invitation those many years ago to come to church, it may sound as if I’m formulating commandments and theological doctrine. You bet it does. What do you think this philosophy major has been pondering all these years while balanced, at times precariously, atop those thousands of bar stools?
Beer drinking is my sacrament, and pubs are my sanctuaries. When the collection tray was passed, I put all of my money into beer. I got the true religion for sure, but it came from drinking the beer … and not the Kool-Aid.
