Amstel Light

I love it.

I really do love Amstel Light. I find more often than not that when hit in the face with an inordinately large selection of beers, Amstel Light is the go-to beer. Typically my troubles when it comes to ordering beer are a result of not knowing what type of beer I feel like drinking, not what brand.

It's interesting the common visibility level of the typical beer which enjoys a very loyal following. This beer is usually young enough to be considered still a scholarly insider's secret, but high-profile and rakish enough to let everyone know you were in on the scholarly insider's secret. Think Fat Tire. Think about it, frat boy. But I digress.

Amstel Light is a lager brewed in Holland and imported in White Plains, NY, one of those places that seem so romantically bleak and oddly rich in characters, as in Rodney Dangerfield and crew in Easy Money. Men who drink High Life out of the gold cans while driving their plumbing vans to the track and smoking cigarette after cigarette. These are men, men. Again, I digress. Amstel Light tastes great! Light beer or not, this is just one of my favorite beers to taste. It's crisp and refreshing, but not flavorless and thin like some bad Mexican beers or light American beers. It's got just the right amount of fizz and hoppiness. It's a Pilsner, so it's got a good amount of hops for me (it's no TAIX Pale Ale, but I could drink many more Amstels in a sitting than those—the TAIX PA is a pretty engaging experience), but, being Dutch, it's a little sweeter than a German Pils. Speaking of hops, I did try one of those too-good-to-be-this-unknown-and-I'm-gonna-make-sure-everybody-knows-it-beers, Dogfish Head or somesuch. It was mighty good. Very hoppy, as I like them. Something about how the beer is hopped for 90 minutes or so, which I thought was just an unnecessarily dramatic way of labeling your different brews by simple terms like mild, hoppy, the hoppiest! I also read that they use some starter yeast that's 1,000 years old or so. That would be odd. What do I know?

At any rate, I've been to Amsterdam, where they originally brewed this stuff. That town was groovy. Clean as hell, beautiful, interesting. Yeah, they're gonna make a good beer. Bier.

Anyway, it's a good beer. It's no Chimay, but hey, that's another post, right?

I'm eating pickles and drinking a Pilsner right now. It must be the Graff in me.

P.S. Can anyone in the Austin area tell me if I can find Amstel Lager (not Light) anywhere?

Masquerade, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Fact that I Would Never Find the Jewel-Encrusted Rabbit Buried in England

Ever read this book?

Masquerade, by Englishman Kit Williams, was as much a source of pain and frustration around my house when I was a kid as it was a wealth of entertainment and hours of escape into a truly weird, lush, awe-inspiring, and often nightmarish place.

I say pain and frustration because this book is actually a very intricately designed treasure map that led to an ornately jeweled golden rabbit buried somewhere on public land in Great Britain, and although my family was rich with some of the highest levels of intelligence ever assembled under one suburban roof, we just couldn't crack the code of the great lost treasure of Jack Hare.

Okay, so here's the gist: in the book, the Moon Chick falls in love with the Sun Dude (articulate gender delineation mine), and crafts a beautiful gold pendant for him, sending her trusted subject Hare to deliver the amulet to her Apollonian crush. Jack Hare braves many wild and woolly adventures to fulfill his quest, only to find upon his arrival that he has lost the trinket del amor, leaving it to the reader to decipher the clues strewn throughout the magical and befuddling illustrations.

The Treasure

This riddle proved impossible for my family, and I'm pretty sure we had given up on solving it long before it was announced that someone had deciphered the puzzle and found the treasure. Of course, it turned out that the X marking the spot had been located through devious and cunning methods involving the former lover of Williams or somesuch. I'm not sure anyone would have figured it out in a reasonable time frame, considering the solution rested in discovering that clues were revealed by drawing lines from the eyes of animals in the illustrations through the longest digit of the animal to letters on the borders. Or something.

At least it was pretty to look at.