The guy at the holiday party raved about my homebrewed porter made with coffee and coconut and told his wife to try it.
A smart man would have known to stop there.
"Try this one too. It's a prickly pear ale. It's, um, weird. An experiment, but it doesn't taste anything like you'd expect," I said.
"I'm not into fruity beers," he replied.
A halfway intelligent man would have known to take a hint.
"Me neither. Just try it," I said, and poured a few ounces of the vibrant, garnet-hued ale into a glass.
He took a sip. No reaction. At least he didn’t look disgusted.
"Yeah, not into fruity beers, but you're right. That's not what I expected." He put the glass down.
"You made this?" his wife asked about the porter.
I nodded.
"It's so smooth,” she said.
Incorrigible, I insisted she try the prickly pear.
"Yep, not what it looks like," she said and put the glass down after one sip.
They thought I’d sell a lot of the porter if I opened a brewery, but the man wasn’t sure about the cactus beer, which I found kind of him, if disingenuous.
"Yeah, I know. The porter is probably the best thing I'll create in my life, and the prickly pear is an experiment," I replied. But they’d lost interest.
For the few purists I haven’t lost yet who think beer should contain only barley, hops, water and yeast, I was once like you.
Sure, I'd sipped fruit Lambic beers at canal-side bars in the Netherlands, but those were mere dalliances, much like my relationship with Germany where I wanted to live long term but left penniless, fading burns on hands and arms from working as a short-order cook in a bar with service awful even by German standards. The only job I’d ever failed at, I deserved to be fired but wasn’t. The owner just stopped scheduling me.
Brewed in and around Brussels, Belgium, yeast is not added to traditional Lambics like it is to other modern beers. Fruit can be added to the liquid extracted during the brewing process, which is left in an open vat to be infected by wild yeast. Possibly apocryphal, my favorite Lambic stories involve a huge cauldron in the attic of an ancient monastery in a tiny village, the brewer forced to filter out spiders, cobwebs and attached prey.
The taste of fruit Lambics is so distinct I always felt I was drinking an alcoholic dessert beverage, not what people think of as beer, a lame justification.
But traditionally beer with fruit or other sacrilegious ingredients? With extremely rare exceptions, a line I would not cross.
Eventually I made an exception for beer made with coffee, then coconut, as discussed in my last dispatch. They don’t taste like what people think of as fruity, a paltry defense at best.
Then I bought a house threatened with foreclosure and devolved.
At the depth of the Great Recession, amid the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis, after years of trying on and off, I finally secured a property of my own, or at least it would be in 30 years.