Quick announcement, Fingers fam: your old pal Dave is actually getting married this weekend, so things are a little busy around Fingers HQ at the moment as we finalize last-minute details for The Big Day™.

Typically on Wednesdays I’m planning to alternate between longer-form interview podcasts (like this one with author Joe Keohane) and discussion threads (like this one), plus a few errant blogs here and there. Right now, these Wednesday stories and threads will go to everyone, but after 10/22, they’ll be for paid subscribers only. So if you haven’t yet purchased a subscription, now’s the time! They’re on sale!

Thanks as always for supporting independent drinks journalism. Your subscriptions fund the original reporting and hard work that goes into recent Fingers stories like these:

• Big Beer's disturbing, deeply American vision of work and leisure

• The pseudoscientific spectacle of @BangEnergy.CEO

• Striking against "corporate greed" at Kentucky's biggest bourbon distillery

• How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing

Anyway! Because I’m running around trying to find Nebuchadnezzars of Bartles & Jaymes Fuzzy Navel wine coolers for the reception, I haven’t had a chance to edit the next Fingers interview (with The Food Section’s Hanna Raskin!) and I won’t be here to participate/moderate a discussion thread. So instead, I’m going to publish something a little different. A blog that’s a bit offbeat, that would never see the light of day (and maybe for the best) if I didn’t have this here boozeletter to launch it out into the world. It’s a rare vintage I pulled up from the cellar tucked deep within the bowels of my musty, foreclosed-upon mind palace. Frankly, I’m not sure whether I should serve it to guests. Could be vinegar at this point.

But enough with the tortured wine metaphors! I’m publishing this post, dammit, and I’m doing it as a reminder—to myself‚ and to you, dear reader—that while my coverage here tends to skew towards the heavier, darker, thornier aspects of drinking in America, drinking is a lot of fun. Fingers should be fun, too. I hope you enjoy gawking at this trainwreck… just don’t die of secondhand embarrassment while you do.

🎵 Notorious I.P.A

After a decade of writing professionally, there’s a lot of shit sitting on my Google Drive. Most of this flotsam, if it wasn’t published, is something associated with a project I did eventually publish—sections of stories that had to be cut down, transcripts of interviews that didn’t wind up being fruitful, and so forth.

But every once in awhile, I come across something that I don’t think I published anywhere, and that doesn’t really seem to have been written with any particular intent beyond my own distraction or amusement from some unremembered task at some unremembered hour.

Below is such an item. It came from a Google Doc titled “juicy IPA,” created May 10 2018. It’s a really dumb and bad hodgepodge of beer references arranged to paraphrase the first verse of… well, you know. Maybe I had just watched the Golden Road “Area Codes” video, or something? Anyway, upon rediscovering the humiliating stupidity of my creation, I knew I had to share it with you. Here it is.

**

“Notorious I.P.A.”

“‘Juicy’ is the first single by American rapper The Notorious B.I.G. from his 1994 debut album, Ready to Die.”—Wikipedia

“[T]here is not yet a ‘classic’ juicy IPA to which we can all turn as the standard and platonic ideal. So juiciness remains an elusive term until we figure out what we actually prize in juicy IPAs.”—Beervana Blog, 2018

***

Yeah, this beer is dedicated

To all the neckbeards that told me I'd never amount to nothing

To everyone leaning over the mashes that I was sparging in front of

Telling forums on me when I was just tryin' to get on Untappd (it’s all good)

/

And all the brewers in the struggle

You know what I'm sayin'? It's all good, baby baby

/

It was all a dream, I used to read Zymurgy magazine

Gary Fish and Ken Grossman up in the CBC

Hanging paddles on my tuns,

Every Saturday brew tours in the taproom having fun.

/

I let my mash lauter ‘til my cash falter

Who cares we need to sell brew, the recipes I can’t alter,

Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack

With the hat to match.

/

(Actually, that’s still pretty much what I wear, duh-ha, duh-ha)

You never thought that homebrewing would take me this far

Now I'm in the limelight 'cause people want sludge with bite,

Get it bottled, beer looking extra mottled.

/

Born brewhound, the opposite of emotionally sound,

Remember when I went on /r/beer and got absolutely clowned?

Now I'm blowing up like I thought I would

Call the brewery, same location, gentrifying hood.

/

It's all good (It's all good)

And if you don't know, now you know.

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