Advent Beer #11: Grandl by Ankerbräu Nördlingen

Eleven days in, I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t really know much about beer, and that I most certainly judge books by their covers.  That said, I had optimistic hopes for tonight’s beer as I’ve been not having the greatest time with job these days and drinking on Fridays always seems like a good idea after a long week of work, and I was wondering if whomever put together this advent calendar had the wherewithal to put some quality beers on the Fridays of the calendar, because it’s not like they wouldn’t be able to look at a calendar to know when they are.

So when I pulled Grandl out of the fridge, I was pleased to see a fairly traditional, nondescript beer can design that reminded me of a throwback style like a Miller High Life can or like the Milwaukee Brewers typeface, which are kind of the same things considering Miller’s influence with the Brew Crew.

But anyway it’s almost like this can was a metaphor for the beer itself, because out of the can came a clean, golden lager with not a lot of aroma.  The first sips were positive, but not really blown away; everything about this beer seemed pretty no-nonsense, nothing special, but at the same time not at all bad, and very drinkable.

The fact that BeerAdvocate lists this as simply “lager” and not like “festlager” or “alleybier” or “kellerbrau” or some other weird classification I’d never heard of until embarking on this journey, brings everything back to earth for something simple, basic, yet perfectly adequate.

Sure, it’s not bursting with flavor like Turbo Prop (#6) or has the explosive characteristics of a good dunkel like Kirta (#5), but it’s still a classic, smooth beer that goes down smooth, doesn’t overstimulate my novice pallet, and is something I know I could drink 2-3 of without breaking a sweat.

Either way, I’m gassed.  I found myself already beginning to fall asleep at 8:45, while trying to watch Scrooge virtually with some friends, but such shouldn’t be a surprise considering I’m raising an infant that’s up by 6:30 every morning.  And I thought I was all ahead of the curve by knocking out all of my daily chores and running earlier in the day that I’d be able to have a ton of time to myself to wind down the evening, but now all I want to do is go to bed before 11 pm and actually feel like I can get some sleep, so this review is about as long as most of the other beer reviews but is in fact full of fluff and talking about how I’m wrapping this up but overall, Grandl was solid, refreshing, and it’s general position in the rankings don’t do it justice as much as it shows where it stands to other beers with stronger gimmicks and more memorability.

Current Rankings:

  1. First Coral (#2)
  2. Kirta (#5)
  3. Turbo Prop (#6)
  4. Perlenzauber (#9)
  5. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
  6. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
  7. Grandl (#11)
  8. Hell (#1)
  9. Tannen Hell (#8)
  10. Tradition (#10)
  11. Käuzle (#3)

 

Advent Beer #9: Perlenzauber by Privatbrauerei

When I first pulled the can out of the fridge, I immediately noticed the design of what appeared to be a woman looking in through a porthole, presumably underwater. My first thought was mermaid, but the rest of the can subtly looks like a barrel, and now it’s kind of fucked up, because a woman is trapped inside of a barrel that just so also happens to have a porthole.

Either way, it’s an eye-catching design, and as someone who judges books by their covers, it’s admittedly one that would make stop and examine if I were to come across this kind of can or bottle in a store.

As for the beer itself, I had a moment of pause when I saw that it was classified as “German Pale Ale,” because like I’ve said numerous times, I don’t know that much about the world of beer outside of drinking what I like to drink, so I see German pale ale and am really hoping that it’s nothing like an India pale ale, because if there’s one thing for sure is that I’m not really a fan of IPAs at all because they’re basically piss, so I’m hoping that a GPA is nothing like them.

Fortunately, after pouring it into a glass and taking the first sip, it’s definitely nowhere near the flavor or profile of an IPA. Honestly, I would’ve imagined that this was a lager if I didn’t look it up on BeerAdvocate for the proper name and source, and reading some of the cursory comments, I’m clearly not the only one.

Not sure if this is common for other German pale ales, but I certainly like them way better than IPAs.

Overall, nine days in, woman in barrel bier fares well. It definitely lives on the upper half of my now-rankings, and it’s got a pretty non-descript but light taste and body that was easy to drink, and I could easily envision myself drinking a couple of these if I were in an evening of drinking.

I guess it also doesn’t hurt that I had a particularly shitty work day, having been in meetings for six of the eight hours in my work day, some of them a little more invasive than others. But really that’s where drinking really steps up into the routines of life.

Current Rankings:
1. First Coral (#2)
2. Kirta (#5)
3. Turbo Prop (#6)
4. Perlenzauber (#9)
5. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
6. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
7. Hell (#1)
8. Tannen Hell (#8)
9. Käuzle (#3)

Parent Triggered

One of the things that I learned throughout my 30’s is to metaphorically not keep score with so many things in life.  Because life is not as fair as we’d all like it to be, and so very rarely is a perfect 50/50 balance, no matter how logical and equal people think they should be.

For example, say I meet up with a friend, and I pick up the check for a $40 dinner, and the next time we get together, they pay for a $20 lunch at Willy’s.  I could be a prick and mentally ledger that they still need to pay out another $20 for us to be even, or I can just appreciate the sheer reciprocity and be content that I’m getting one of my favorite foods for free.  Frankly, I’d rather do the latter than try to keep score.

My mom and I were talking about Korean politics way back when, back when Moon Jae-In had successfully reached through to the insane neighbors up north and made some massive ground in diplomacy.  Naturally, we were both dubious that anything was really going to progress beyond some monumental photographs, but her stance was that there was no way that the north was going to play nice enough for anything substantial to happen because there was no way that they were going to give anywhere close to equal what the south would have to give.

I explained that this was an instance where expecting fairness was never going to amount to anything, and that this was a prime example of where a 50/50 split just wasn’t plausible.  There are just some times in life where it might have to be 55/45 or even 65/35 in order for progress to be made, and sure it’s not fair, it’s not equal, but sometimes it takes one party to be bigger in order for progress to happen.

It’s like playing any variant of Civilization, like whenever India comes knocking on the door and you have Gandhi asking you for a king’s ransom’s worth of knowledge and technology, and refusing him results in him literally declaring nuclear war.  It’s not fair and it’s not equal that he’s asking for a 70/30 relationship, but when that 30 is the survival of your civilization, you still come out of the agreement knowing you made the right call.

You just can’t expect to live life thinking that everything is always going to equal out and everything is going to be fair, because it most certainly never will be, and thinking that will, only leads to frustration, angst and heartache.

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Writing when I don’t feel like writing

My motivation to write lately has been pretty nonexistent lately.  Not necessarily due to depression, quite the contrary, I’ve managed to pull my head out of the darkness a little bit better since my last brog therapy session.  It’s just that I just don’t really have any motivation to write.

I’m not finding a lot of things on the internet that are inspiring me to write, and maybe I’m still in a state of having writer’s rust when it comes to consistent brogging since I got my site back up months ago.  The point is, I just haven’t felt like I’ve had any real inspiration to write, and I don’t particularly feel motivated to write about things out of thin air either.

Regardless, the anxiety of letting too much time pass between posts is greater than the anxiety of feeling like I don’t have anything to write about, so in order to try and fill the airtime, I’m doing something I used to do whenever it was that I felt like I had nothing to write about: sit in front of a blank canvas and just start writing and see what words I can barf out.

Life lately has been somewhat steady over the last few weeks, especially since my mom is living with me for a few more weeks, and I have the peace of mind knowing that my daughter is in good hands while I hole up in my office for work; I’m actually utilizing my dedicated office space in order to take my job more seriously, as I probably really wasn’t during the first few weeks of quarantining, especially since I had a newborn baby that’s now a 7+ month old infant now.

My entire team has been told that we’re basically going to be working from home until at the very earliest, January 31st of 2021, and frankly even that seems like a dubious milestone in my opinion, because I think when the day is over, schools are what are going to be driving the decisions of all companies on whether or not they’re going to make employees come back to the offices or not.  Child care is low-key the main thing that is going to determine whether or not businesses large or small will be going back to offices any time soon, and even that, is going to be determined by the availability of a vaccine, since ‘Muricans can’t stop being so selfish for two months to effectively quarantine and let coronavirus burn out on its own.

But whatever, for better or worse, I’m working from home for the remainder of this year, and into the start of next.  Regardless of the state of work in that time, I can always have peace of mind knowing that I am always going to be home with my child, even if she will be with the nanny that we’re going to have to hire part-time in order to have eyes on her while I take my job seriously.

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The corporate workplace injury risk

In the world of internet sports fandom analysis, every sport’s offseason is often pocked with discussions on the player(s) that everyone’s favorite teams should want to acquire, whether it’s through a trade or free agency.  It’s a thankless and pointless black hole of exercises, because in the grand spectrum of things, the chances of a professional sporting franchise actually utilizing the opinions of a bunch of internet armchair general manager tough guys is probably pretty slim, and what it really amounts to is a bunch of dudes on the internet vying to see who might actually be right about theories or predictions.

Among one of the more predominant tropes of internet sports arguing is the dreaded injury risk player.  As the name insinuates, these are professional athletes who have a reputation of getting injured frequently, and therefore not capable of playing the kids games in which they’re contracted for large sums of money to perform.  These are often times players capable of above average talent when they’re healthy, but the constant fear of them getting hurt and providing zero ROI is significant of a deterrent to actually jeopardize their employment chances.

A good example of an injury risk player is linebacker Jadeveon Clowney.  This guy is an absolute monster defenseman who is capable of altering an opponent’s entire offensive scheme just to mitigate his impact; that is, when he’s actually playing, and not on injured reserve, nursing a laundry list of injuries throughout his seven year career that’s enabled him to play a full 16-game season only once.

Pitcher Stephen Strasburg is also another good example, as sure, he’s helped the Nationals win a World Series sure, but from a business standpoint, the guy isn’t glass fragile as he once was, but can be assured to miss at least a month every single season with some sort of really questionable (pussy) injuries.  He’s made 30 starts in a season just three times in his eleven year career, and someone I’d definitely classify as an injury risk player.

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Everything is inadequate

The following are health bars from Left 4 Dead 2.  The way the game works, the only time a player will be at 100 is at the very start of a game, and once they take any modicum of damage that brings them down from 100, you will never see 100 again, no matter how many health packs you use.  It’s kind of an appropriate analogy to life itself, that once damaged, it will never be unblemished, no matter how much repair and fixing goes into it.

Note the partial bars that are to the right of the solid colored bars.  These are what the zbs community refers to as “decaying health” or “pill health.”  It’s health that counts towards your overall hit points, but also ticks down over time, unlike the solid bar health.  In spite of the tropes and memes about L4D out there, you can take pills as often as you can find them in order to keep your health high, but it will always be temporary and degrading over time.

L4D health bars are a good analogy to how I feel my life is going these days, and often times why I feel like I could use some therapy.  I’m long past the point where I’m probably closer to 50 than I am 100, and much like in L4D, I don’t think I’ll ever see 100 again any time soon.  Right now, if I had to guess, my solid bar probably maxes out at 60, and if I ever want to be any higher than that, I’ll have to down a jar of pills to get up into the 90s, but that time will be temporary, fleeting, and will come back down naturally over time.

I realize that this makes me sound like I’m thinking that I need a lot of medication to get through my days, which couldn’t be any further from the truth, but from an emotional standpoint, I definitely could be in much better shape and I can’t really figure out why I’m in such a dark space in my head so often lately, when I really shouldn’t be.

But today, I am frustrated, sleep deprived and completely over basically everything and I feel like this is the culmination of weeks of a thousand cuts and I’m having a day where I want pretty much nothing but to be left the fuck alone and to have a little bit of time to myself. 

Continue reading “Everything is inadequate”

When your brain wants you to be sad, you’ll be sad

Lately, I can’t shake it, but I often times find myself feeling sad.  A few weeks ago when I posted about wondering if I needed therapy, it really wasn’t one of those posts where I was trying to be humorous, it was more erring towards legitimate pondering than it was trying to be funny but I understand how it could be misconstrued considering the vast majority of the time on my brog I’m trying to be funny.

The thing is, I have no real reason to be feeling sad, too.  Sure, my paternity leave is over and I’m back to a job I’m often times feeling very lukewarm towards, but the reality is that I have a job, my mom is staying at my house and alleviating mythical wife and I of our biggest concern, which is childcare during the work days, and there’s a small sliver of normalcy starting to come back into our lives.  My child is healthy, often happy, and there are no adequate words to describe the happiness and joy that she brings to me, but whenever I get settled down and have the time and capacity to get into my own head, I can’t help but feel sad from time to time, and I really have no reason to be.

I think I’m generally unsatisfied with certain aspects of my life and it’s silly to think that I feel like a lot of things would improve if I were to win the lottery or find some way to take financial concerns off the table entirely, and whenever I get into my own head, these pessimistic and worrisome thoughts tend to permeate into my head and leave me feeling more blue than I really have any right to be.

I’ve been asking myself lately what I think would make me happy, and the answers that come up are often times further into the realm of impossibility, like being able to take my child out to certain places, because the world is fucking dangerous still because America can’t get their collective head out of their asses and put some fucking masks on for 2-3 months and eradicate coronavirus instead of waiting for a vaccine that large swaths of the country won’t take anyway because they’re anti-vaxxer dumb fucks. 

And then there are more realistic things, like wanting to make things with my hands, but that requires tools, materials, space, to which those require time, money, time and money, to which those are commodities in which I do not have a lot of to expend, because no matter what, my child will always come first.  By no means do I harbor any resentment towards my child for such reality, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but in the fleeting amounts of spare time that I do have, I feel like I want to do things that I just don’t really have the means to indulge in, at least not without a bunch of prerequisites.

In a perfect world, I have a workshop space, where I can create and do and build and explore things.  But in order to have that, I need to have money, to which I’m not struggling to pay bills or have a fairly normal life as it is, but I don’t want to take out loans for things that don’t add any true value outside of personal gratification, so this is where it would be nice to just win a lottery or something, just to jump start a lot of personal projects and to oh, quit my job while in the process.

But back to the point, I occasionally feel irrationally sad, and it doesn’t take a lot to trigger it sometimes.  It’s times like that in which I ponder on if I should seek therapy, which isn’t that easy of a decision for me to make, because my work insurance doesn’t cover any, and I wonder if I have the financial means to go out of pocket on it.  I’m not saying I want medication, quite the contrary, I barely like taking ibuprofen when I have a headache, but I don’t think it would hurt to know why my brain sometimes insists that I be sad, when I really shouldn’t have any reason for it.  My life is pretty good in spite of the dumpster fire ‘Murica is these days, but when the brain wants to be sad, it’s going to be sad.