I'd be hard pressed to give you the exact year and age when this life long love affair started, but sometime between the 9th and the 11th grade, I had my first sip of beer and to flog a dead cliché - it was love at first gulp. Like a lot of other youngsters in small town India at that time, I started with a Kingfisher but pretty soon, like Naipaul visiting the whores in his youth, we settled for beers that gave most bang for the buck. We were naive and still finding our way around beers so we'd buy the ones that offered the most alcohol for the least amount of money. Terms like malt, single batch, ale, lager, fermentation, yeast and microbrewery were way in the future; right now we settled for some of the favorite beers of truckers in North India - brands like Bullet, Godfather and Hayward 5000 were staples. A little while later, the Wal-Mart of Australian beers - Fosters (a fact that we obviously did not know at that time and the marketing machine of Fosters that worked overtime had no intention of letting us know) came along and we indulged in that luxury every once in a while, imagining it to be the best beer in the world. Oh the naiveté and exuberance of youth!
Neither Bombay, nor Chicago made me a beer sophisticate. In fact, in Chicago, I gulped down Budweisers by the six packs, again the marketing machine making me believe that I was having the "King of Beers." It was not until I visited Belgium in the fall of 2002 and had my first gulp of a locally brewed Trappist beer that I fully realized what I had been missing all along. Trappist beers are brewed by Trappist monks who starting brewing these beers to fund their monasteries and their beer has a very distinctive taste compared to the mass produced beers. Of course, beer does not carry the romance and aura of wines, you don't find any beer snobs ruining your evening by snickering at you when you cannot pronounce the name of that 1989 vintage from a godforsaken place in France. But luckily for me, I moved to Wisconsin - a state that has a proud tradition of micro-breweries and an equally passionate population who could not care less about wines and could not be any crazier about their six-pack. Wisconsin of course owes this tradition to its German roots from the 19th century.
Anyways, it was here that I was introduced to the tradition of micro-brewery and the brewpub, a small, locally owned brewery that brews beers in small batches and serves them fresh in the attached pub or restaurant. The first thing that you order when you go to a brewpub is their sampler.
The sampler, as the name indicates, includes small samples of all the different beer types (usually ranging from half a dozen to a dozen) that is available. You can then order regular sizes of the ones that you really liked. Nowadays, when we visit a small mid-west town, my mouth waters at the prospect of exploring their brewpubs and what they might be brewing at that time of the year. As Shahrukh Khan famously intoned in "Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge" - it is difficult to decide which girl to go for, some have great lips, some have great hair.....well for me, it is difficult to decide which beer to order on a particular day. Some are delicately spiced, some have heavenly aroma, some are delightfully bitter, while some are wonderfully sweet. But I am not complaining. So you can keep your Chardonnay, your Merlots and your Pinot Noirs; you can also keep your single malts aged in oak caskets for a dozen years. Bring me that perfectly brewed fresh this morning beer, poured lovingly and gently from the tap in my 20 Oz glass. And yes - I will take fried fish with that please. So here's to beer!