Number Two:

My sources have informed me that this week's edition of Waters to Wine was not properly posted on the Middlebury Campus website, so I apologize for keeping all of my dedicated readers in limbo with my belated posting on The Restless Life. This week's installment is below.

Over the course of our collegiate years, we all (hopefully) grow more mature, more sophisticated, and more discerning in our tastes. We shun Top 40 radio for indie-music blogs, we trade department store garments for vintage store discoveries, and we deny our previous populist tastes as awkward reminders of a shameful past. For many, drinking tastes undergo similar changes – we move from thirty racks to home brews, from box wine to good years – and we treat our embarrassing alcoholic pasts with the same scorn we heap on boy bands or Beanie Babies. Some people delight in broadcasting their alcoholic maturity and look with self-aggrandizing pity on those whose liquor store purchase still includes canned beer or boxed wine. With this I take issue.

Some people question our maturity in light of our drinking habits or juxtapose the expense of our education with the price of our liquor – “I can’t believe you drink that stuff,” or “anything out of a can isn’t worth drinking,” are popular refrains – but these people are missing the point. No one buys Busch Light because they love the taste. No one drinks it with relish, pouring it dramatically into a red Solo cup to release its full bouquet. It isn’t spilled onto dirty basement floors in order to let it breathe. We don’t leave it in hot cars during the summer to let it age, and we don’t pair it with food for true gastronomical ecstasy (besides, everyone knows that a cold Busch Light is best paired with pizza, 2AM Grille food, and one to several more Busch Lights). Busch Light, and all other light beers like it, is bought with such enthusiasm and in such large quantities because it is cheap, it is available, and it gets you drunk.

Some will probably say that this is the problem, that we drink it exclusively to get drunk, which is fine. But arguments over taste or sophistication seem mostly irrelevant. One can appreciate good beers or fine wine and still enjoy being force-fed light beer by a room full of yelling twenty-somethings. I think that given the choice, the vast majority of us would sooner reach for a Vermont microbrew than a Bud Light, as we should. But come late Friday night, nothing beats beer that can be bought in boxes of thirty. There is a time and place for light beer, and we should stop disparaging those who drink it.

As we all get older and more mature, of course we’re going to look for new and better ways of enjoying alcohol, but that doesn’t mean that we need to cast off our storied history of collegiate drinking, and we certainly don’t need to belittle it. A great beer tastes better after a couple nights of lesser fare, so by continuing both facets of our college drinking careers – the sophisticated on the one hand, the less so on the other – we can actually heighten our enjoyment of both. It’s nice to grow up and progress, but we shouldn’t so willingly cast off our pasts, as they are still relevant and even gain importance as time goes on. Although in the case of boy bands, it’s another issue entirely.

Besides these first two introductory weeks, my column will be bi-weekly from here on out, so look for the next one (hopefully correctly posted to the Campus website) on Thursday, March 5th.