This Bud's For You

We're almost through here. The "Beer Summit" has come and gone and has been widely viewed as a guarded success. Professor Gates, Sergeant James Crowley, and our President drained their frosty mugs and agreed there was still a long way to go before we could all really get along. And then there was Joe Biden. What was he doing there? Widely known as a non-drinker, in his words, “Too many alcoholics in my family,” there he was on the patio outside the White House tipping a cold one. Who was "acting stupidly" now?
No worries. Joe had a Buckler, a non-alcoholic brew from Heineken. I understand Joe's plight. He wants to fit in, but he's got this issue about intoxicating beverages. That's what the friendly folks at Heineken want us to know: it's "for the enjoyment of those individuals who want to experience the taste of a fine beer without alcohol." Okay, fair enough, but when you're hot and thirsty and staring down the first big racial divide of your new administration, do you really want to savor the taste of something that tastes a little like a Heineken?
I faced that same dilemma when I had only recently retired from professional drinking and went with my buddy who had also just hopped on the wagon to see a Jimmy Buffett show. We drank a lot of ice-cold blenderized concoctions without the alcohol and found them all to be very expensive alternatives to Slurpees. So we slid on down the menu and found the non-alcoholic beers. We tried the Coors version: Cutter. We tried Kaliber, from Guiness. That was better, because it tasted like good beer. The problem was that when we used to drink beer, we tended to drink stuff that tasted more like Coors. Or worse. Truth is, we weren't drinking beer for the taste back then. We were drinking beer for the alcohol content. By the third or fourth one, we didn't notice how it tasted. Take the alcohol out, and you're left with that fermented hops taste that is exactly what you're looking for right after you've finished mowing the lawn.
And maybe that's what was going on out there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue last Thursday. As a nation, we were grabbing a cold one after working for the past forty years, three hundred years, to improve race relations. We know that, metaphorically speaking, the grass in our back yard will still need to be mowed next week, if you're black or white, or even if you drink Buckler.