The weirdest part about drinking beer in our current era is how much it reminds me of underage drinking 30-plus years ago.
By most measures, drinking today is wildly different from the way things were in the years of big hair and padded shoulders. There’s a plethora of styles beyond anything we could have imagined in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The tastes and flavors that we consider basic today are oceans away from the stuff that we occasionally snuck, cajoled, or stole three decades ago. (I did not encounter citrusy hops until well after I was of legal drinking age, and it took another few years to discover any acidity or sourness other than what you’d find in cider, which itself was very rare on the West Coast back then.)
But in one regard, the situation is very much the same: just like when I had not quite reached legal drinking age, most of the beers I drink today are canned or bottled, not draft.
This is a remarkable shift, and one which evokes more than a touch of nostalgia, which I mean literally. When you’re just learning what beer is, not yet having reached your 21st birthday, the feeling of a can in your hand is a cold and clammy (or yes, sometimes warm), highly tactile sensation of freedom and lawlessness, a hint of doing something wrong (but which feels very good) that communicates itself to you with an almost electric buzz on your palm and fingertips.
The writing on cans and bottles offers hints of the world that awaits: the realm of bars and adulthood and various activities you can’t quite do yet, and places you have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, since you don’t yet have any real experience at all. When you are an underage drinker, enjoying a can of Coors your best friend snuck out of his parents’ porch fridge, you can spend a good amount of your drinking time studying every single word that is written on the label. Repeatedly. For an underage drinker, a single can of beer is a precious thing. It is both evidence of and an invitation to the future.
Even the bottles carry impressions you might remember for decades afterwards. The scratchy, slightly raised lettering (screen-printed?) on the deep-green bottles of Rolling Rock. The dumb rebuses, read through the waxy plastic seal under the crown caps of Lucky Lager. Breaking off the bottom-edge shrapnel pieces from the gold screw caps of Mickey’s Big Mouth stubbies. The slippery feeling of perfectly removing a label from a bottle with no rips or missing pieces, which was then known as a fuck buck: a make-believe voucher for flirting at parties, handed over to a potential partner, allegedly redeemable for the stated value.
By contrast, for the past 20-plus years, the bulk of the beer I’ve consumed has been served to me on draft, without those tactile sensations from packaging. But with the pandemic still not solved, I’m not spending time in bars, and am thus mostly drinking from cans and bottles. Strangely, the feeling of the cold, condensation-coated can is the same as it was when I was 17. It’s a nice hold, a familiar but almost forgotten heft.
This might not be so strange to most beer folks back in the States, since packaged beer is a larger part of things there, to say nothing of crowlers and growlers. I’ve had a few crowlers brought over to Prague for me, and while the beers inside were pretty great, the plastic-feeling labels seemed to be missing a bit of romance, or at least tactility and information, extraneous or otherwise. Or maybe I’m just old enough now that I don’t need to look for clues to a forbidden world on the outside of a can or bottle.
And yet I do: I study them intensely, the cans and bottles that count off my daily beverage intake. I don’t drink from them anymore, not if I can help it (I use a ceramic mug or a glass), but I still read all the words on the outside of the package: the names of places I’ve visited many times by now, the list of ingredients I know intimately, the slogans and branding and government recommendations. I look to them for evidence of the way things were before this time, and as a reminder of the way things will be once again.
