...more on the stress, overworked, kind of terrified front going on in the background here, but let's go ahead and bracket all of that and talk about something else instead:
LAGER.
Lager is a nice kind of beer. A good lager is very smooth and easy to drink and gives you a wonderful feeling of beer-satisfied. Unlike stouts and porters and IPAs and ales (all of which I like), the taste of a good lager doesn't kind of add up until it's unpleasant, nor are lagers likely to make you more tired than their sheer alcohol content would suggest (I find that other beers do that sometimes.)
Two example really good lagers: Kingfisher (Indian) and Carlsberg (Danish...I think.)
Now, the thing is, almost no microbreweries make good lagers, if they bother and make 'em at all. Lager is too declasse, too quotidian, too obvious and boring and vulgar and mundane, so they concentrate on crazy hoppy stuff and beers that sometimes take as much work to drink as, say, a sandwich would. To drink.
I don't blame them for this; the glory of microbrews is that people who really love good beer tend to run them, and there is no question that the microbrewery phenomenon of the last twenty years has dramatically altered the face of American beer selection for the better. I just think it's time that they realize that crafting a smooth, delicious lager is a worthy goal, one they could certainly address with their extensive command of beer mastery.
Thus: I call on the microbrewers of the western US to rally and offer delicious golden lagers to accompany their already-excellent selections of other kinds of beer. By the power vested in me by absolutely nothing, make it so.
