Category: Boozing

Going for the Gold

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Gold Camp Road
Bibleburg as seen from the single-track detour over the collapsed tunnel that keeps Gold Camp Road blessedly free of dinosaur-powered tourism.

I was feeling guilty about not riding yesterday (too tired, too hot, too wussified), so today I sacked up and did something I’ve been thinking about for a while — rode from Chez Dog up Old Stage Road to its intersection with Gold Camp Road and then down Gold Camp back home.

It’s been a while since I tackled that ride — 15 years or so — and last time around some friends and I found ourselves climbing through a series of stimulating weather patterns, each worse than the one that preceded it, until we were descending Gold Camp in a full-on snowstorm.

Today I was by myself and glad of it, too, because I ain’t the dog I was then and can no longer bear the howls of derisive laughter. I spent a shameless amount of time in the Voodoo Nakisi’s granny (22×28) and recycled a fair amount of salt because I was sweating all over my downtube water bottle. There were no snowstorms, only dust storms whipped up by passing motorists hellbent on enhancing the washboard on the gravel road.

The descent was big fun, though. I shot past a crowd of casual mountain bikers who had been ferried by van to the intersection of Old Stage and Gold Camp, at 9,000 feet, and were enjoying the leisurely, traffic-free descent back to town (a collapsed tunnel some years back closed the road to motorized traffic). I greeted a few and should have stopped to chat, but I was hot and sweaty and tired and thirsty and I could tell that not one of these folks had an ice-cold beer or an air conditioner on them.

So on I plummeted, and after a quick shower and a semi-massive lunch with lots of water I dropped by McCabe’s Irish Tavern for a couple pints of Bristol Brewing’s Compass IPA. I had a column to write, and they had beer and air conditioning. It seemed the smart thing to do, for a change.

Entering the Twilight zone

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Twilight Summer Ale
There's nothing better than beer for flushing out the headgear on a hot summer day.

Ack. Ninety-something outside and only a little less than that inside. By the time I got done shoveling out the VeloBarrel this afternoon I decided I was not interested in cycling of any sort, especially as practiced by me. So instead I rode the Vespa down to the grog shop for a sixer of Deschutes Brewery’s Twilight Summer Ale.

This tasty brew, a seasonal beer available from May through September, will take the rabies out of the maddest of dogs beset by Englishmen in the noonday sun. Herself likes one on a hot day, too, so we’ll put a couple in the freezer for 10 minutes and then hit ’em hard, like a hungry Hemingway chugging a distingué at a Parisian café. Well, I do, anyway. She nurses hers as if Prohibition is coming back.

I like the Green Lakes Organic Ale too, though I was not impressed by my first encounter with the brew. My second, however, followed the first leg of the Adventure Cycling Association‘s 2010 Southern Arizona Road Adventure, when a new friend and I had a dram apiece at the Velvet Elvis in Patagonia. Something about 48 miles of cycling and 3,400 feet of vertical through sun-splashed, wind-whipped southern Arizona, I guess. Whatever — I was an instant convert and have remained one.

Not much action in Le Tour today and even less tomorrow, the second rest day. Tuesday brings the Alps, and thus the pain; all the big shots vow to attack without mercy, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Well, that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it? So far it’s the officers doing all the talking and the grunts doing it hand to hand, just like in real life.

Beer me! No? Then wine me!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Wisdom from Mount Mia
"Is there an adequate supply of cream? Yes? Then we have no problem."

Forget about that little problem in our nation’s capital, folks — we’ve got a problem right here at home. Seems there are more beer drinkers than there is beer for them to drink.

I’m talking about real beer, of course — Colorado craft beer, not the swill the megabrewers pitch to America’s small hat sizes during televised sporting events. I’d rather drink water. And you know what fish do in water.

Happily, there’s good news on the booze front. The United States has slipped past France to become the world’s biggest consumer of wine. And I helped! We’re No. 1! USA! USA! USA!

Wide-awake drunk

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Remember the good old days, when a guy who wanted to achieve the glorious state of “wide-awake drunk” had to horn an eight-ball of the dumb dust and drink a liter of Stoli? Expensive, illegal, yet oh so much fun.

Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.
Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.

Of course, that was when men were still men instead of women, only with testicles and more fashion sense. Popping some orange sunshine, drinking a case of beer and driving downtown to try to tip over a parked boxcar on Larimer Street was our idea of a relaxing Saturday evening with the fellas.

And then America underwent wussification. The old Denver warehouse district became LoDo, a hangout for art fruits, sushi-nibblers and wine-sippers. The Ell-Ess-Dizzy was supplanted by Ecstasy, immortalized by P.J. O’Rourke as “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid.”

And the nose whiskey/gullet whiskey cocktail? It went mainstream in a lamestream fashion with the debut of caffeinated booze-bombs like Four Loko, a pisspot of 12 percent alcohol, 156mg of caffeine and Christ knows what else that sounds like canned dumb-ass to me.

Thank God the FDA and the FTC have the peddlers of this weenie juice by their immature nutsacks with a downhill pull. Maybe the light-hitters who guzzle this swill will grow a hairy pair and sample a manly concoction like windowpane and Jack Daniels,  crystal meth and Schlitz Malt liquor or cocaine and whatever anybody else is buying because we spent all our money on the blow, dude. Really. Seriously.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make myself an Irish coffee.

Mmm, beer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Ivywild School
Ah, remember those glorious fall school days, when Teach' would pour you a nice pint of porter before getting down to the Three Rs. ...

Here’s something you don’t see every day: The fine folks at Bristol Brewing and the Blue Star want to turn a shuttered school into a brew house, bakery and community center.

I got wind of this a while ago and my only complaint is that this project isn’t happening in my neighborhood. We got schools out the wazoo around here — surely we can afford to shut at least one of them down, make a happenin’ hangout out of it. One is an easy two-block stagger along a bike path from Chez Dog.

God knows what passes for education in this country these days lacks a certain value. We might as well get drunk and enjoy the decline and fall.

Meanwhile, early returns indicate that this WordPress blog is at least acceptable to the literati (which is to say that while it remains largely content-free, at least it will load on both Macs and Windoze boxes). More as it develops. Any Linux weenies out there? Leave your thoughts in comments, please.