Minor Intoxication

Life's hard on minors - you can score drugs easier than booze, and all I've ever bothered to do was drink (with the occasional joint mixed in for variety). So there I was at nineteen, with a powerful thirst that couldn't be quenched by college beer. My friends brought home cheap, foul poison, the kind that made Thunderbird wine and MD20/20 seem like nectar. I'd give them a twenty and specific orders, and they'd come back with the same foul concoctions time and again - several times it was brew in plain silver aluminum cans stamped "Cheap Beer" with no logo or other evidence to incriminate its maker. Their taste in hard alcohol was worse. You can degrease engines with some well vodka, but the shit they bought could corrode stainless steel. That any of us survived is a miracle.

One evening I sat by my window, thinking about the empty space in my liver, and concocting a plan to beat the drought: I'd make my own beer. I'd learned the theory - if not the art - in high school, and with professional grade supplies from the brewing store down the street, I was unstoppable. If I couldn't buy it, and I couldn't swindle it, I was going to bloody well make it myself.

My roommate grew anxious as I stockpiled plastic buckets and bubblers and sieves and bags of strange looking grain. Hops come in small, moist, green nuggets in a ziplock bag. They give beer its crisp finish. I caught my roommate with my hops in one hand and rolling papers in the other, and should have let him do it, but I was poor and hops are expensive. "That's not weed, that's hops, moron." He just blinked at me.

The next day I headed to the kitchen on the first floor and boiled my grains, strained the wort, added the hops, let it cool, and threw in the yeast. The wort was pitch black, like the liquefied souls of the damned. It smelled like the construction fumes when Heaven was built - not quite Heaven yet, but getting there fast. The swirling mix of heaven and hell steamed and bubbled and popped and splashed angrily all over the kitchen. Guys walked through the kitchen asking what the hell I was doing.

"Cooking."

"Cooking what?"

"Beer."

"Oh."

Simple conversations for simple minds, and everyone is simple minded when it comes to beer: there's the getting, the having, the drinking, and the inevitable purging the next morning. "Brewing" falls somwhere under "getting" on the list. They left me to my experiment.

I hauled the five gallon bucket upstairs and deposited it between my roommate's mattress on the floor and the wall. The bread smell of fermenting beer filled the room for a month. One morning I woke in my bunk above to find him asleep below, spooning with my brewing bucket, a sick smile on his face. I snapped a picture and went to class. When I came back, there was a stain on his mattress.

Sick fuck.

The day of truth arrived some two months later, after primary fermentation, after secondary fermentation, after straining and clarifying and sterilizing and bottling. On a crisp February evening, twelve of my closest friends gathering around to watch. Not to partake, for they trusted Auggie Busch more than the guy down the hall, but to watch their Socrates of brewing philosophy drink his hemlock.

And it was good. Damn good. No Mr. Beer can compare to doing it the right way, 5 gallons at a time, in your dorm room.

The alcohol content was somewhere north of 40 proof, which is pretty stout for beer - more than twice what's normal. The extra pack of hops I threw in for kicks signed off the sweet aftertaste of honey with a dramatic, bitter pop! It zinged. It zanged. I got wasted, and around midnight they abandoned their 30-packs and grabbed my Sobe bottles full of black death. Through the fog of what felt like coming death, I watched them stumble and lurch around the front yard, running into each other and barely taking notice. Someone complained that his arm stopped working, but we calmed him by putting the moonshine in the hand that still functioned...more or less.

By two o'clock in the morning the scene was utter chaos. Empty Sobe bottles were strewn everywhere, rubber washers and aluminum lids littering the bushes and sidewalk and bodies laid out where they'd fallen. It looked like the Jonesburg massacre, only we didn't have any Kool-Aid. In a far corner a freshman from the Nashville was clinging to a high tree branch, babbling incoherently about fire and salvation. That night he found Jesus somewhere near the streetlight.

I destroyed that recipe for the good of humanity. One bottle remains from the batch - it's labeled "used motor oil," and it's still fermenting to this day in a locker buried under the dirt floor of a storage shed somewhere in Oklahoma.

Wanna drink?