My Ninth Entry - Great Divide Brewing Company Colette Farmhouse Ale

A friend of mine texted me this week with the news that his son had been ticketed for being a minor in possession of alcohol during a fraternity party.  His son was two months shy of his twenty-first birthday, and had just been handed the beer when a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission raid team entered the party room and started writing tickets to the underage drinkers.

He didn't even get to sip the beer he'd just been handed, much less finish it.

I checked my sources in that town and found a specialist to defend my friend's son.  She told me that she would almost certainly get him deferred adjudication probation (no finding of guilt) with some community service, and he would be eligible to expunge the record shortly completing it.

It was a happy ending, I think.  He's a really good kid and, if he takes care of business, won't have a permanent record. He's also fortunate to be affluent enough to hire a lawyer for something like this.

It also made me think about how lucky I was not to have drawn that kind of attention during the wilder years of my youth. I am not going to overshare here and detail my youthful indiscretions - suffice to say that with a drinking age of 18 back in the early Eighties, I think it was much easier to achieve that unfortunate intersection of impairment and immaturity than it is today (but I could be wrong about the present day - my children don't tell me everything going on in their world, to our mutual relief).

That said, my clear record wasn't all luck. Back then, I was blessed with three saving graces that kept me mostly out of trouble:

• My abiding belief in my future prospects.

• My nascent understanding of the consequences to those prospects if I screwed up.  This comprehension was, I now understand, an extraordinarily beneficial gift to me in my youth. Because executive function is not fully developed for most people until their early twenties, a lot of kids are incapable of thinking twice about playing with cherry bombs and mooning police officers in school zones. Not me - I was very careful about who I mooned.

• A nearly pathological fear of disappointing my parents and their belief in me. 

I had enough self-awareness to know I was going to screw up - as Joe E. Brown said in Some Like It Hot, "Nobody's perfect" - but I also had enough precociousness to make sure that I maximized my chances of minimizing my exposure.

A few of my strategies:

Start drinking bad beer when you start getting drunk. My favorite beer back then was Molson Golden. It wasn't cheap - for a six-pack of Molson Golden, I could buy a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jax, Lone Star, or Dixie, which were all terrible beers, but also cheap. And as a person of limited means in those days, my plan was to get one of each - I would drink the Molson early, and then move on to the cheap beer later, with the idea that in my impaired state from the first six bottles of beer, I would not mind drinking the skunk-brew later.

It never worked. Going from my sixth and last smooth and fruity bottle of Molson Golden directly to my first of twenty-four metallic and funky cans of PBR was like following a plate of Churrasco's sublime tres leches with a can of Campbell's undiluted cream of mushroom soup and a spoon.

I could never finish that first can of PBR, which meant that my night of drinking was pretty much over and I would ease back into sobriety.  I also earned love from my college buddies by donating the case of PBR to them (they were not as discriminating as I was about the finer qualities of beer).

Don't be the designated drunk.  There's an old joke about the two guys being chased by a bear, and one guy stops to put his running shoes on because he doesn't have to outrun the bear: he just has to outrun his buddy. I kind of pursued that strategy when drinking in public - I never wanted to be the most drunk guy at my table. If trouble was coming, it would zero in on the guy least able to handle it, which was not going to be me.

Date (and if you're lucky, marry) girls who are forgiving truth tellers.  I met my patient and loving wife Lisa in college, and we dated through law school before marrying here in Houston. Not a drinker, she has always had the ability to gracefully tell me to stop drinking in those rare instances when I have had too much to drink, and I have always had the grace to accept her advice.

When you're drinking, keep a little money in your pocket for a cab (or have a forgiving truth teller who will come take you home). This is self-explanatory.

At 50, I've made it long past the drinking years of my youth without having done damage to myself or others. For my friend's son as he approaches his legal drinking age, I can only hope that he begins to make the transition to appreciating good beer for what it is - an artisanal drink that is the product of centuries of refinement and the loving creativity of fine brewmasters - and not something you swill from a red Solo cup.

To him, here's my advice:  Drink and appreciate good beer, and you mostly stay out of trouble.  Drink and binge on bad beer, and trouble will find you sitting on a stoop in an alley behind a bar with bad breath and an inside-out stomach.

The choice is obvious.

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I drank and appreciated some good beer this week.  It was the Colette Farmhouse Ale from the Great Divide Brewing Company in Denver, Colorado.

I liked the bottle design, which has some subtle elements that reward the kind of contemplation we only do with beer bottles and cereal boxes.

First, I noticed that there are only three colors in the label: black, tan, and orange, which coincidentally are the prevalent colors in beer. (Do you think that was intentional?  Uh-huh.)

Second, the name of the beer appears three times and the brewing company's name appears four times (once as an acronym).  Great Divide knows that brands benefit from repetition, repetition, repetition.

Third, the label includes some helpful tasting notes (which, as I have noted before, I much appreciate):

COLETTE is our homage to the saisons that Belgian farm workers have enjoyed for centuries. Brewed with barley, wheat and rice and fermented at high temperatures with a special blend of four different yeast strains, COLETTE is fruity and slightly tart, with a dry finish that makes it that rarest of treats — a beer as refreshing as it is complex.

Fourth, it also has a first for the beers in this blog, a food pairing note, which suggests drinking Colette with charcuterie, foie gras, Indian curry, or Camembert cheese. Not having any foie gras in my fridge, I instead paired it tonight with a scallop soup I proudly improvised from leftover stuff I found while inventorying my freezer (homemade chicken stock, a bag of frozen scallops seasoned with Old Bay, chopped onions and celery, frozen corn, shredded uncooked potatoes intended for hash browns, fresh green beans, garlic, thyme, basil, and whole milk).  The pairing did not offend my palate.

Fifth, there's a "bottled on" date (October 22, 2013), another first for the beers in this blog. (By the way, the increasing age of the beers in my fridge is something I'll write on soon.  So far, not a problem.)

Last (and best), there are a bunch of small details that evidence a lot of enthusiasm by the brewers.  A little flag tells us that the company was established in 1994; the label specifies the alcohol by volume (7.3%); we learn that the Great Divide Brewing Company's zip code is 80205; they proudly note that this was a silver medalist in the 2010 Great American Beer Festival; there appears to be a company seal and slogan, "Great Minds Drink Alike" (clever); and twice it declares Colette to be "rustic" and "refined."

As to the beer itself, it was light and yeasty, very easy to drink, which I learned is not unusual for the saison style, which are ales that were originally brewed in farmhouses during the winter months to be consumed in the summer by the farmhands as a hydrating drink. Taking a big whiff as I finished the drink, the aroma did something kind of cool: it changed character from second to second, going from yeast to oranges to something else and then back again.  Try it sometime as you finish a beer in a glass and you'll see what I mean.

Did I like it?  Yep, it was good and refreshing.  Did I like it more than the prevailing champ - the Bittersweet Lenny?  Nope, although the Colette was a really nice beer with a lot to offer, the Lenny still abides.  (And yes, that was a Big Lebowski reference.)

I'll try to get back on schedule and write the next entry on Sunday night after band practice.  (You didn't know I was in a band?  Now you do.)

See you then.