Saturday, October 26, 2013

Beer That Couldn't Even Hurt A Fly

I went to Otto's brewpub last week for a drink with a friend, and got the kind of slap in the face that is so typical of eating or drinking out in State College. You try to give things a chance here rather than to become preemptively embittered, and then you get hit with the mediocre. (Full disclosure: I am writing this after a mild food poisoning episode from eating an ill-advised "Gator and Pork Burger" at Rathskeller -- I was trying to give it a chance.)

They had a Green Hop Ale #1 on cask-pull, so my friend and I decided to try that out. Possibly interesting. But it sucked. Had almost no hops at all. Presumably they ONLY used green hops and no dried hops, and as Joy Of Cooking will tell you, dried herbs are 4-5 times stronger than fresh by volume. Anyway, it was bland beer, indistinct, not much fun to drink. Should have been dumped down the drain, all 1000 gallons of it. I ordered a Slab Cabin IPA to wash it away, which is reliably good. When my friend went back to the last 1/3 of her beer, she found a little fly in it and just gave up. The penultimate insult.

I mean penultimate in its real sense. As we got up to leave 10 minutes later, the FINAL insult was revealed:

While we were talking, the fly managed to crawl all the way back up to the rim of the pint glass, apparently unscathed by hops, alcohol content, bad vibes, or anything else, and like us was also getting ready to go somewhere else.

Whack.

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