This Is My Blood: Blue Moon / Stacy's Mom

It's time to acknowledge the enormous elephant in the room. I am a hypocrite.

Is there any explanation for being so against taking pictures of food and drink, and yet also taking a picture of my beer almost every day this year so far? Nope—the only possible explanation is that I am a filthy fucking hypocrite. Crucify me, I deserve it.

Let the record show that I feel so fucking lame every time I get my phone out and snap a picture of a beer bottle. I feel dirty. I take no pleasure in this. It's absolutely 100% my least favorite part of my 2020 beer project. And yet I still do it, day after day. I take out my phone, I line up the beer under light, and I take a pic.

I try to do it discretely. This is easier said than done at family dinner, which has become a free-for-all of flying food and screaming these days. There's no way Pam is not going to see me take my phone out and take a picture like some fucking Instagram asshole. I quickly apologize to her in the same manner that I would if she walked into a room and caught me jerking off. I am ashamed.

I try to tell myself that it's utilitarian, that I'm doing it because the blog post is going to look better with a picture. I try to tell myself that very few readers, if any, are going back and reading any of these This Is My Blood posts. I try to tell myself that it's okay, that everyone does it occasionally.

But none of that helps. Any time I go on social media, and see that a friend has posted a picture of his/her alcohol, I get mortally embarrassed for that person. The lameness is overpowering. And yet, there I am, dutifully posting a picture of my drink every single fucking day.

Here's what Pam and I had for her breakfast brunch part 2 (complete with understandable coronavirus-fueled cancellations):

That looks pretty good, right? (Not the quality of the picture itself—that's a bitchfest for another day—but the actual beer itself, it looks tasty.) We mixed Blue Moon and orange juice to make a "beermosa." Birthday girl's choice. It was a perfect pairing (hey-o). I enjoyed it. I want you, the reader, to know that I enjoyed it. So I'm going to take the goddamn picture, and I'm going to goddamn post it here. I suck.

I have my limits. Later in the evening, friend of the blog Casey O. came over for one last hang before the stay-at-home order (our hang included copious hand-washing, no physical contact, and six feet of separation between us), and she was kind enough to bring a sixer from IGA. I had a Stacey's Mom from Evil Genius. Despite its name, I really fucking liked this beer (more on Evil Genius coming later this week). But I did NOT take a picture of it. I would've been too embarrassed. "I'm taking this picture for my blog" is too incomplete an excuse, and I would be even more embarrassed to have to explain further.

I mean, let's be real, writing twice a day on a blog is already embarrassing enough, requiring air quotes and knowing winks in explaining this lame fucking hobby, so taking pictures for said blog isn't really that much worse. Still, I have held the social-media-food-pics-are-lame principle close to me for so long that it feels extremely uncomfortable loosening my grip.

I wanted to write about this now, and acknowledge the stunning hypocrisy, before things started to spiral even farther out of control, now that we are focusing at least some of our efforts on pairing beer with food. I will talk about meals occasionally in this column, but I cannot imagine I could ever possibly stoop so low as to take a picture of a meal and post it on a blog.

Could I? Oh god.

NOTES (Beer #1)

BEER: Blue Moon

GENRE: Belgian Witbier

ABV: 5.4%

BREWED BY: Coors Brewing Company (I had no clue about this)

LOCATION: Golden, CO

PURCHASED AT: ABV Beverages

PAIRED WITH: Well, the OJ, plus scrambled eggs and bacon and bagels

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

NOTES (Beer #2)

BEER: Stacy's Mom

GENRE: American IPA

ABV: 7.5%

BREWED BY: Evil Genius Beer Company

LOCATION: Philadelphia, on Front Street in Fishtown

PURCHASED AT: IGA (by Casey)

PAIRED WITH: Primo's Sharp Italian hoagie (gotta support local)

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

BEER COUNT: 123 (this includes one Blue Moon spread out over two beermosas, one Stacy's Mom, two gin and lemon seltzers, and one more Guinness)