CRABS's second pilgrimage to Boston is now history, and I think we can all safely say that Ben is still a liability.
This year I did not have the pleasure of riding up with Milhouse, Kurt and Les. I really missed sitting in an enclosed space for 8 hours breathing in their gas. I also did not share a hotel room with them this time, so my ass didn't hurt each morning. Instead I drove up with Trixie and Marty. We stayed with my old friend Ethan, who I've known for 30 years, which shows how old we're getting: we've been friends since 8-track tapes were popular.
We arrived in my hometown of Newton on Thursday, Valentine's Day. Trixie took me out that night for a surprise dinner in Boston. We spared no expense in sharing this romantic holiday - we took the subway. It smelled just like I remember it from my youth: a mixture of B.O. and rotting corpses. In fact, the Boston subway is very much like the New York subway, except in New York they at least make an attempt to remove the stabbing victims. Boston calls their subway the T, which I think stands for "trash". Anyway, she took me to Jacob Wirth's, a restaurant with a good beer selection, including several Belgians. The place has a nice wood interior (heh heh, I said "wood"). There were many couples celebrating Valentine's Day, except at the bar there were three guys sitting together. I heard one of them say, "For Valentine's Day I'm going to buy my wife a fur coat and a diamond ring. This way if she doesn't like the fur coat she'll still love me because she got a diamond ring." The second guy said, "For Valentine's Day I'm going to buy my wife a designer dress and a gold bracelet. This way if she doesn't like the dress she will still love me because she got a gold bracelet." The third guy said, "I'm getting my wife a T-shirt and a vibrator. That way if she doesn't like the T-shirt she can go fuck herself."
We had a nice romantic dinner and a few beers. I gave Trixie a taste of my Golden Monkey. Then she had some beer.
Friday we visited some old friends and neighbors of mine - people I've known since the Pleistocene Era. Then we drove by my old schools. They looked exactly the same as I remembered, with the barbed wire and everything. Then we subwayed into town for the main reason we had traveled to the Gay Marriage State: the Beer Advocate Extreme Beer Festival. It was the Night of the Barrels, where almost all the beers had been aged in wood. By the end of the night, Trixie had gotten more wood than a 12-year-old boy at the Neverland Ranch.
Here is a list of the beers I tried. It's a good thing I had my recorder with me or about the only thing I would've been able to tell you is that I got drunker than Ted Kennedy at a fraternity rush.
My favorite beer of the evening was North Coast's Old Stock Cellar Reserve aged in a bourbon barrel. The worst beer was Ithaca's Tastes Like Burning. It was extremely hot and nasty, which is how I like my women but not my beer.
We ran into Kurt, Milhouse, Les, Brian and Sean, but I don't remember much since I was plastered. All I remember is Milhouse yelling "Ben loves men!" into my recorder.
After the fest the three of us walked to a brewpub called Rock Bottom. Well, Marty and Trixie walked; I staggered. If they hadn't helped me I'd still be wandering the streets. Actually I'd be dead from frostbite. They ordered the sampler, which had 7 beers: Lucky Dog Light Lager, Improper Hopper IPA, Brewmasters Choice, Munich Gold, North Star Amber Ale, and two others. I was too wasted to try them but the consensus was that only two were decent.
They helped me stumble to the T, which was no easy feat as I had established myself as an even bigger liability than I had been the year before. Once we boarded a train, they let go of me for just a second, at which point the train lurched forward and I fell backward about twelve feet onto the floor, banging my elbow and causing the passengers to look on in horror. Then they placed me in a seat and I managed to make it the rest of the way without incident.
I don't remember the rest of the evening. Apparently we all made it back to Ethan's place, and I woke up the next morning feeling okay except for the splitting headache and broken elbow.
Saturday brought typical February Boston weather: sunny, dry, and chillier than Hillary's love hole. We took the T to Boston Common and walked the first half of the Freedom Trail. We stopped at Finagle a Bagel, which has a neat contraption where a conveyor belt brings a whole bagel to a circular blade that cuts it in half and whips it down the line. Click here for a video. We had a bite at the Hub Pub, where our bartender had one of the thickest Boston accents we heard all weekend. Next to the pub there was an awning that said "Rear Entrance", so of course Trixie had to bend over in front of it while Marty snapped her picture, causing a construction worker to shake his head and say, "Now I've seen everything."
We saw many more sites along the Freedom Trail, including this engraving that my sophomoric sense of humor just had to point out:
We went into Faneuil Hall and met Ben Franklin, then ate our way through Quincy Market.
Then we T'd and walked to the Saturday night session of the Extreme Beer Festival. It was extremely cold and my face was freezing, but I found a warm place to put it.
Once again we partook of many extreme offerings:
Well, that is certainly a record for me. The greatest number of beers I had ever tasted in a single evening was 57 at the previous year's Extreme Beer Festival. This night blew that record away. (Heh heh. I said "blew".) What amazed me was that I was not as drunk as I had been the night before, and I sampled almost twice as many brews. The key was that I took smaller samples and did not go back for seconds.
Click here for a 360-degree video of the fest.
By the way, the media was there, and apparently all the breweries knew it because they displayed nice-looking signs and banners, whereas the night before they had asked a local elementary school to print their signs. Which of the following two photos do you think is from Friday night and which is from Saturday?
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The night's drinking was not over, as Marty, Trixie and I walked to Jacob Wirth's where we had a few beers and some food. We ordered a Golden Monkey, which was great; and a Harpoon 100-Barrel Series Firth of Forth Scottish Ale, which sucked. At this point the alcohol was taking its toll, and I am told that I passed out while eating. Good. I was still a liability.
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| Because 85 beers isn't enough. |
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| Yes, that's me with just my eyeballs showing. (Heh heh, I said "balls".) |
Then it was back to Ethan's place, where the 4 of us stayed up til the wee hours. They drank while I managed to not fall or pass out.
On Sunday we said good-bye to my old friend and drove back to Maryland for a much-needed liver detox. I did not touch a beer until the CRABS meeting 3 days later, although I did brew my 400th batch the day after we returned. It had been a fabulous trip, like MASHOUT except with less sodomy.