I suggest at least 2 hours of social time a week, specifically over a pint or three (that’s the self-imposed limit New Mexico breweries have pushed on their customers). Get some of your friends together, decide on a good time once a week, and make your schedule around it. You can thank me later.
I realize not everyone can carve out a good two or three hours in the middle of the week to hang out with some friends and drink beer, but if you’re reading this you probably already have an idea of it in your head. My little group of fellows is mostly retired or off work early in the afternoon, making 3:30 the perfect time to meet up at a brewery with food (that’s the important bit) and shoot the shit for a while. We’re not an exclusive club – the SO’s have all sat in on our shenanigans at least once – and we’ve added a few ‘members’ over the last few months, so you can make it anything you want.
Old Man Beer Hour Club
This week it’s my turn to choose the venue, and I’m going with a newer operation called Dripline Brewing. They brew beer, and the food menu is literally chips and smash burger. As long as there’s something to munch on, the guys will be happy, but we’ve had to exclude a lot of promising breweries from our weekly get together because they don’t serve food, period. It’s a shame, because I’ll go there myself and enjoy great beer, but the guys have their rules, and so a majority of the 40-ish breweries in ABQ won’t see our little group grace the taproom. Shame.
It always comes back to distribution, my writing, in this case because we’d all love to get together at some place that served beer from multiple breweries in the area. My absolute favorite taproom in the world, Loyal Legion in Portland, serves beer from all over Oregon and Washington, all in one place, and usually has several examples from each brewery on hand, so a consumer can get a really good taste of what that brewery does. Seems like a simple concept but nobody here has seen the writing on the wall. Yet. If only someone would drop me a couple million in funding, we’d be up and pouring in no time….I know a group of guys that’d show up every couple of Thursdays around 3:30, if the menu is good.
Because you can
Why not get a group going? One of my buddies says every week how much he really looks forward to the beer hour, and he really means it. He’s happily married and looking at retirement, and there’s a hot meal waiting for him at home, but he’s still very thankful for our group. Even after we tear his preferred political person to shreds. We have some rules, but they don’t really cover actual topics – politics is always a hot topic, and current events rear their head only to be hashed out by our wizened group of sage leaders.
WHAT
Yep, by the end of our weekly meetings, we’ve solved many of the world’s conflicts and created viable plans for long-term world peace. True Story. Not that anyone outside of the group will ever know, but we even solved cold fusion one afternoon. I think we were at a place called Quarter Celtic sipping on mead by the end of that day. Sadly, the governments of the world continue to ignore our efforts.
In a very literal sense, though, we talk through the things that are on our minds and find some common ground to work from, in a world that doesn’t exactly give a lot of direction on these topics. Over Beers.
What keeps it lively is the change, every week, in venue. There was a core of 4 of us that rotate and pick, in some order or another, and it doesn’t matter why a spot is picked as long as it meets the beer+food requirement. I live on the west side of ABQ and so will be fighting traffic, for example, unless I pick the one taproom on that side of town, anywhere near my house. That’s a totally valid reason to pick LCBC Westside. I try to choose new places for the guys, though, because they’d stick to the same places otherwise. I’m the pathfinder, like I will be this week.
I’m doing some research today at Dripline, checking ahead to make sure the guys will be happy here, and while I’m chatting with the bartender the brewer comes in and we start talking about beer and distribution (what else). They’ve recently started canning single cans one at a time on an Oktober machine. It’s an interesting start, I’m thinking, for a brewery with above par beer. But there’s just no other realistic approach to it right now, and he’s trying to lighten up the color of his IPA without losing the current body. Once they get done expanding their cold room, they might look at canning… So many things to consider, and every brewer/owner has a different set of priorities that direct them.