Yes, it’s true. But the good news is it’s over. Started on February 16th, Merideth and I wrapped up our 29 day beer hiatus today, St. Patrick’s Day.
I had been thinking about this crazy idea for a few months. After almost three years of constant beer travel, we were starting to get a little burned out. After each trip, it took us a bit longer to recharge our batteries. To give you an idea of our pace, it took Merideth and I roughly 14 years to reach 300 breweries. If all goes to plan, we’ll do the next 300 in just four.
With the busy summer beer season rapidly approaching, we needed to take a break, and the end of SF Beer Week seemed like a good time to begin our beer hiatus.
I knew it would be a breeze for Merideth. I, on the other hand, was a bit worried about whether or not I could do it. Will power doesn’t come easily for me. In the end, it really wasn’t the test of will power that I imagined. It was just, for the lack of a better word, odd. On occasions where I would normally have a beer (after hiking, watching the Olympic hockey gold medal game) I thought, “I need to get a beer.” But then I reminded myself that I wasn’t drinking for 29 days. And that would be it. There were no DTs, no shaking, no irrational snapping at Porter or Stout for not getting me a beer.
Living in the beer backwater helped. There was no beer bar to tempt us. There was no cool beer event we HAD to attend. Friday and Saturday nights, we spent cozy on the sofa with the pups watching DVDs. The one instance I stared temptation right in the eye, I didn’t flinch. At a Monterey Beer Festival meeting, organizer Jeff Moses pulled out three Michigan brews that I have never tried and a bottle of Fantôme Hiver. I politely declined.
In a funny twist, due to a few different ailments, I felt like crap for a majority of the time. The medicinal qualities of beer might have helped.
We return to the beer drinking world tonight. Scanning the beer fridge, here are some of the possibilities for the evening:
- Hopslam – Bell’s Brewery
- Mischief – The Bruery
- Oude Tart – The Bruery
- Rugbrød – The Bruery
- O’Hara’s Leann Folláin – Carlow Brewing
- Supplication – Russian River Brewing
- Kristallweizen – Schöfferhofer
- Urtyp 1878 – Würzburger Hofbräu
- Weihnactsbier – Schwaben Bräu
Most likely, we’ll both fall asleep after splitting the first beer.
I’ve been thinking of doing this (maybe after Seattle Beer Week). I guess I need to move to a cabin in the woods if I’m gonna pull it off. Be hard to do it in Seattle. In the last 5 years, I think I’ve gone 2-3 days in a row without beer and I’m pretty sure it was because of a cold or something.
If we lived in SF, Seattle, etc, it would have been much, much more difficult