I like to come up with new ideas to celebrate my love of beer. Sometimes those ideas come from things I see or hear and other times they are thrust upon me by my own ineptitude or bad timing. A week of unexpected expenses has left me bereft of my usual beer money and I was left staring at myself in the mirror with a feeling of unease as I am a pretty regular (every other day at least) purchaser and peruser of local breweries and liquor or beer stores. To say I enjoy the acquiring of beer almost as much as the drinking would not be an understatement and I didn't relish the thought of the next two weeks without being able to add to what is already a pretty full series of fridge spaces in and around my home. While the budget conscious part of my mind saw this as a time to tighten the belt and reset my off kilter ways of spending, my totally irrational beer brain was apocalyptic at the prospect of not bringing home some new and favourite beers until the middle of the month. Luckily for me, my rational brain has been winning a few more of these types of battles lately and I committed to what I'd like to think is the wholly fun and interesting campaign of Drink the Fridge.
After spending a few hours with my budget for the next couple of months, making sure we were planning ahead and setting aside to rebuild our now depleted savings, I then turned my mind to this concept of clearing out and drinking up the beers I had bought, was given or thought I needed at some time or another. A walk through the house yielded some real gems lost in the back of the food fridge and downstairs in the now seldom used bar fridge, beers forgotten or left for another time, now fast approaching. A lot of fruity sours, dry hopped this or that, lagers, ales, stouts and various one offs that somehow caught my eye when I first purchased them but then found a way to the darkest recesses of my mind and my fridge.
So out of necessity and really, about damn time, I'm taking the better part of the next two weeks to clean out the beer backlog that has built up as I constantly pursued the next beer and the one after that, even though I had and have a bulging collection of beer spread across the house and beyond that was just waiting for me to drink them. Perhaps this lesson learned will help me to value my dollar a little more, respect the budget I make and drink my beer when I should. This isn't about the cellared stuff, the ones we are keeping for later in the year or beyond, this is simply about the beer we buy and then set aside, pushing back as we buy more and more. It isn't that it is bad beer (for the most part), it's that I am as guilty as the next person of picking up something a few times a week because its new, shiny or I just wanted to. I guarantee you that many craft beer drinkers have a similar predicament but maybe the rest of their lives are better organized than mine so they aren't pushed to confront this compulsion to buy everything as often as I seem to find myself doing.
Drink the Fridge will hopefully reset my mind to what I am buying and give me an opportunity to catch up with some stuff I am now seeing again for the first time. Will it be all sunshine and roses? Hell no, some stuff may have turned, gone bad or just plain not be what I thought it was. But the need to confront myself and bring order to this chaos is just what I need to get right with the beer gods and the universe I live in.
Cheers!
Polk
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