These are the words, images, and beers that inspired the GBH Collective this week. Drinking alone just got better, because now you're drinking with all of us.
READ. // "The fringe benefits are priceless: clean air to breathe (after the spring sandstorms); stillness, solitude and space, an unobstructed view every day and every night of sun, sky, stars, clouds, mountains, moon, cliffrock and canyons, a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate—though impossible to name—in the remote." I spent last week backpacking with my family in southern New Mexico. Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is a go-to trail book—and despite a few racially problematic chapters, his meditation on the Southwest usually satiates my constant, escapist daydreams.
LOOK. // Watching tiger swallowtails, seeing caddisflies collect golden mica deposits, spotting black bears, the Strawberry Full Moon rising over the mesa…there are so many fun things to do outside! Chew on a piece of grass! Hold a caterpillar! Scrape your knee! Temporarily avoid all popular culture!
DRINK. // Lots of Drinking Water
If I forget about the old Dos Equis Lager Especial I found in the back of my Grandpa's fridge at the end of my trip, the only thing I sipped on all week was water. Stream water treated with bleach. Two to three drops of Clorox for each liter of water, mixed and left alone for half an hour before consumption. A small amount of liquid bleach helps avoid Oregon Trail-style dysentery and giardia. Very refreshing!
READ. // “I was like whoa, my dance is actually in this game? That’s crazy.” Chances are, you know about The Floss. Chances are, you don't know much about the kid who invented it.
LOOK. // I learned a lot watching Vice, the 2018 comedy/drama/biography film about Dick Cheney. Mostly, though, I just learned that Dick Cheney is even more horrible than I realized.
DRINK. // Monday Night Brewing's Shwaka
It's nice when a brewery can still surprise you several years in. Increasingly, I've turned to Monday Night for hazy/hoppy stuff and barrel-aged goodness of varying styles. But this foeder-fermented Pilsner is the only beer I wanna drink from them lately. It's crisp, medium-bodied, and hella satisfying. I hope they can it eventually.
READ. // "Plenitude is important in Georgia, where feasting and toasting are cherished, heavily choreographed rites. The meal felt like a food version of one of those movie montages where spinning newspapers keep stacking up on top of one another." Like most of the rest of the world, apparently, I've got a hankering to visit Georgia (the country, not the state)—and this fantastic New Yorker article by Lauren Collins makes it clear why. Published in April, it discusses Georgia's food and wine traditions, its post-Soviet rise, its new hordes of tourists, and Barbare Jorjadze: the country's recently rediscovered culinary forebear. Someone pass the khachapuri.
LOOK. // I don't always want to move back to New York, but watching "A Star is Made"—a 12-part package in The New York Times that follows the city's performers, from rappers and subway dancers to ballerinas and sword swallowers—kindled a fierce homesickness in me.
DRINK. // Lost & Grounded's Keller Pils
My god, Keller Pils is good on a hot day. Like most of the rest of Europe, London recently experienced a late-June heatwave, with temperatures peaking in the low 90s (not ultra-extreme by American standards, but pretty gnarly for a city that's generally not air-conditioned). The only thing for it was to drink pint after pint of Keller Pils, outdoors, in the waning daylight, at a birthday party, the heat still smoldering at 10pm. To think I didn't drink Lager a few years ago! More fool me.
Curated by The GBH Collective
