This Town Doesn't Care About Sophisticated Drunks

I'm sitting here thinking how sad it is that Miami so rarely has beer festivals. Yes, we have a yearly festival where filthy gutter trash celebrate Columbus Day by having sex in public, but when it comes to celebrating really important things, like beer, we fall short by a wide measure.

I went to a festival here in 2003, and it was really good. They grabbed an area of sand over on South Beach and set up tents and kegs and casks and so on. For your entry fee, you got a few tickets, each of which was good for a two-ounce serving of beer at any of the booths or tents at the festival.

They had pretty girls serving the beer, and girls being what they are, it was generally possible to charm them into going way past the two-ounce mark and forgetting to take your ticket. So for the price of admission, I got so hammered I saw old episodes of My Three Sons on the backs of my eyelids.

I learned a good deal about beer that day. I had my first serving of Fin du Monde, and I got to compare various wheat beers side by side, and I determined that there was no point in drinking Old Shipyard products regardless of how pretty the bottles were. The festival helped me shape my own recipes later on.

Unfortunately, nobody in Miami gives a crap about beer. This is a town where everyone drinks rum, which is the worst hard liquor you can buy without going to a hardware store. We have a fairly good microbrewery here (the Titanic Brewery), and it's October, and they don't have a single beer event on their calendar.

I used to live in Austin, Texas. They were much more serious about beer. I'll bet half of the town will be drunk until the first week of November. Why can't we be like that?

Miami struggles and strives to be super-hip and trendy, and beer isn't "rad" or "awesome," so we neglect it. We have one bottled beer made here, and it tastes like dishwater. Hurricane something or other. It's basically Bud in a prettier bottle. One of the dumbest, most pointless products I've ever seen. Putting corn-and-rice swill in a microbrew bottle is like putting a Timex in a Patek Philippe box.

Thank God I have my own beer to save me from the drought. I feel like a survivalist, huddling in my office next to my beer taps while the unwashed outside my doors torture their livers with Bacardi and other household cleaning products.