This Is My Blood: Tucher Helles Hefe Weizen

Day #2: Drinking During the Day

"Typical college students drink hot chocolate in the evening to relax after a long school day. We suggest drinking that frothy mug right when you get up in the morning. Now you'll have all day to enjoy the effects of HoCho, but you'll be sure to be passed out by 7 PM, so getting in twelve hours of sleep will be no problemo."

There are drinking scenarios on this list that are going to be more doable than others. I love drinking during the day, especially in the morning. Drinking a beer this morning would not have killed me, especially if I limited it to one. However, even if it's not a big ask physically, it would be a big ask emotionally. It would've been too weird. I would've felt dirty, like I was doing something wrong. There would be no thrill in drinking a beer while we went for our morning walk, or while we watched Tangled, or while we played with the Magic Doodle Board. It would just feel sad.

To be clear, that in itself makes me feel sad too. I miss the days when you could crack a beer in the morning and it would feel right. C'est la vie.

Don't worry, I followed today's rule literally—my beer was consumed at 3 PM, during an early happy hour, paired with some leftover cheese and crackers, the sun still high in the summer sky. These are my favorite moments of my and Pam's shared days off together, when all four of us can sit around the dining room table and just hang out over a beer (or milk). I drank during the day, yes. But I didn't follow the spirit of the drinking scenario, because... well, because I just fucking couldn't.

Two rather extensive postscripts:

—I mentioned about six weeks ago that there was an argument in the beer world over whether a hefeweizen requires a slice of lemon to accompany, or whether that practice was sacrilegious. Though my original conclusion was that the argument was stupid and that people should be free to do as they please, it still piqued my curiosity, and I finally got around to trying it out for myself. Maybe the slice of lemon I used was too hearty, but I felt that the acidity of the lemon overpowered what should be the stars of a typical hefeweizen—banana and cloves. Adding lemon makes sense in general (two fruits), but I thought that it also ruined what makes this beer style so special. To each their own, though.

—There's a page in Tasting Beer devoted to "Cooking with Beer," which I've avoided mentioning or practicing up until this point, because I don't feel like it's relevant to what I'm doing here. Beer does a lot when used in cooking—lightens batters, replaces stocks in soups, adds to dressings and marinades, etc.—but one thing it does not do is get you drunk in the process. We hem and haw about how a beer tastes, but the alcohol aspect of beer is integral as well, and when you use beer in cooking, that alcohol is mostly burned off. But the recipe for the dinner I made today literally called for a can of beer, and I still had two Tecates left over from Cinco de Mayo, so I threw one in the crockpot. The resulting meal (basically a clam bake without the clams, a crockpot full of shrimp, sausage, corn on the cob, and red potatoes) tasted nothing like beer. I got more out of the extra Tecate I drank on the side today than I did the Tecate that I poured into a bowl. I'm sorry to say, but there's no room for talking about cooking with beer in this beer column.

NOTES

BEER: Tucher Helles Hefe Weizen

STYLE: Hefeweizen

ABV: 5.35%

BREWED BY: Brauerei Tucher Brau

LOCATION: Nürnberg, Germany

PURCHASED AT: IGA during an emergency trip

PAIRED WITH: cheese and crackers

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5 (3.5 without the lemon probably)

BEER COUNT: 254 (two beers today)