Working Man's Blues

It was a Thursday night in the hood, and since most of the membership was out of town on various pursuits, the slave driver of the BC4M, Bim coerced us into having a "working" meeting where we would update the spread sheet that contains a listing of all the beers we have tasted. The spread sheet had started to lag behind our actual inventory of beers tasted as no one wanted to actually go through the drudgery of typing all the information into the computer. With Snake in the Pacific Northwest hunting venomous Olympic Marmets, 10pm in NYC performing his new "acoustic act", Frank the Tank on Long Island "sunning" with his goombah cousins , Big Mike doing "security" for The Jonas Brothers concert, and J. Wilder working on his upcoming Halloween outfit, Dogfish Head Man, the membership was down to Fred and Crazy Ken. Armed with what seemed like an entire ream of paper, we commenced our task of balancing the book with the spreadsheet. "What the hell, did you put one beer per page?" asked Ken, as we split the forest of paperwork up three ways. As we started to go through the BC4M Bible to look for missed beers, we opened up a Grand Teton Brewing Co Lost Continent Double IPA (8.0%). Bold, hoppy and malty, this one was a solid good. As we milked the beer, we listened as Bim called out two pages of beers from the book that had somehow not been entered into the database. "I must have been really fuckin drunk when I typed those in" said Bim, while Fred replied, "You didn't type shit". Back on track after what seemed like an hour, we moved on to a Schlafly Reserve Barleywine Style Ale (10.2%). Aged in oak barrels, this was a 2008 vintage that seemed to mellow with age. A bit of heat was found as the dark amber liquid rolled around the tongue, but it was balanced with a warm rich flavor so we gave this one a really good. As Bim and Fred's wives goaded us about our boring night of "work" we finally got around to the final beer of the night, Eel River Brewing Co. Raven's Eye Imperial Stout (9.5%). This one featured a maniacal looking raven on the bottle, and the beer poured as dark as African dungeon on a moonless night. Thick rich and robust, this one will put some hair on your juggies and it rated a really good. After three hours of eye-bleeding torture, we had finally caught the list up and Bim thankfully dismissed us for the evening. Even though we had only sampled three beers, we left Bim's exhausted and ready for bed.

P.S. Mad props to Fred's wife for diligently typing in all the required info into the database. Typing at over 100 words per minute, she made a mockery of us as she updated the list in less than 30 minutes. Cheers to Mrs Flintstone from the BC4M.