This Is My Blood: Chimay Grande Réserve

I took one of those personality quizzes last week. You know the kind—you answer like 30 questions about yourself, and then it spits out an analysis of what those answers say about your overall personality. For this particular quiz, there were four different scales for which you were rated 0-100, from "not like this at all" to "very much like this indeed." I scored around 50 on three of the four quadrants, but a full 100 out of 100 on one quadrant. It is scarily accurate:

I mean, this pretty much sums of the purpose behind wanting to do a beer-a-day project and the wherewithal to finish it, doesn't it? I have a curious mind, I want to explore something that I'm not familiar with, I have a wacky idea, I weaponize my curiosity to see that idea through, and, oh, also, I have a propensity for substance abuse.

So yes, if you know me as well as this online personality quiz knows me, then you shouldn't be surprised that I spent the entirety of 2020 drinking a different beer every single day. And while you'd be excused in thinking that I did this just to have another excuse to fill this blog with hundreds of thousands of additional words of nonsense (because that's mostly true), I also had two concrete goals for This Is My Blood.

The first was that I wanted to "understand beer." What I mean by that is, I wanted to appreciate beer for what it is, not what it does. I've known what it does since I was sixteen years old, and I don't need to spend another entire year exploring the dark corners of that part of my psyche. No, what beer is, besides an intoxicant, is an ancient art form, crafted in a myriad of many peculiar and specific and unique ways, and meant to be tasted. It's the only art that you can consume with all five senses (okay, "hearing beer" is a stretch, but the carbonation does satisfy the ears to an extent). Just like you can technically burn a Pablo Picasso painting for warmth, so too can you drink beer just to get drunk. But that's not why it exists!

For the most part, I believe I achieved this goal. I can look at and smell and taste and feel a beer, and use those clues to tell you about the beer, tell you where it came from, and what it means, and what joys it possesses. I'm not good at it—i.e. I won't be judging on any beer competition panels any time soon—but I can at least perform the task in an amateurish way. And of course there are many mysteries that were not solved in 2020—e.g. okay but so like what really makes a Belgian beer Belgian, and is it something besides crude geography?—but I've long come to the realization that beer tasting requires mystery. If every question had an answer, then the journey would be over, and when it comes to drinking beer, the journey is the best part. No one wants this quest to end.

The second goal for This Is My Blood was more substance abuse-related and thus much less interesting. This goal was to limit my alcohol intake to 550 servings of alcohol over the course of the entire calendar year. The thinking was that a 60% decrease year-over-year would be enough to prove that I could cut back, and the fact that I was handcuffed to beer-every-day meant that I would be limited as to when I could consume more-than-one-beer-per-day within the confines of a 550 hard limit.

As you can see by the final count of today's beers below, I achieved my goal by drinking 550 servings of alcohol throughout 2020. This is good. I definitively drank many fewer beers than I had in most or all of the previous individual fifteen years or so. At the same time, I have some mixed feelings about the whole thing, and question whether it's truly an impressive achievement, or if I found too many ways to bullshit around with it.

Primarily, I'm talking about the ambiguous ways in which I determined what "one serving of alcohol" meant throughout the course of the year. Of course, if I drank a full beer, then that counted as one serving. If I split a beer with Pam, then that was 0.5 servings. But without other clarifications, I found myself taking advantage of those definitions. If Pam and I split a 12% ABV beer, then I'm drinking 0.5 beers technically, but that's still the same amount of alcohol as two full Miller Lites. Or if one cocktail is going to be one serving, then why not pour like 3.5 servings of vodka into it so it still only counts as one? In other words, I was taking advantage of the murkiness of the rule to still get as drunk as I possibly could under the circumstances. 

 

And that defeats the whole fucking purpose! The purpose wasn't to "drink fewer than 551 drinks," the purpose was to get rid of that innate need to get drunk. Getting drunk by sipping on fifteen Miller Lites and getting drunk by sipping on four Rude Elf Reserve Dark Belgian Ales is the same fucking thing. If I technically drank nine fewer beers under the latter circumstance, then that means I'm just cheating the system. I thought that I could use the constructs of a hard yearly limit to be able to limit myself day-to-day as well, but that didn't end up being the case. Instead of, ya know, not drinking so much on any particular day, I just found myself "saving up" extra beers for the days when I knew I was going to be drinking a lot. 

Plus, consider this: it's very easy to imagine that I would not have been able to stay below the 550 threshold if there wasn't a global pandemic to keep me at home. Now, obviously there's still the matter of the children, but even if there were an additional five Saturday nights in this hypothetical universe without COVID, theoretical nights when Pam and I got a babysitter, that's five additional Saturday nights when, instead of drinking 0.5 beers at home, I'm drinking 5.0 beers while at a bar or restaurant. I don't know how I would've done it without COVID. In a way, you could say that I'm only successful because the world was so screwed up this year.

So maybe the achievement of drinking less comes with two or more asterisks attached. I guess that's just something I have to accept. It's also not something I have to dwell on, ya know? Because I also had a ton of fun completing This Is My Blood! It was a very large pain in the ass sometimes, but also, how cool was it that I got to drink a new beer every day? And then use that as an excuse to occasionally stretch my writing muscles? Looking back, despite the labors of writing every single fucking day and the cringey ways in which I found a backdoor for my alcoholism, for the most part I actually do believe that this was a worthwhile endeavor.

Beer, as you may have noticed by this point, is very important to me. It's not a coincidence that I named this column after a church sacrament—beer is a ritual that in which I have partaken for half my life now, and it is very much a part of me, and the name was specifically chosen to reflect that. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to know more about something that you love. Through this daily ritual, I was able to consider beer creatively, artistically, intellectually, nostalgically, academically, and self-deprecatingly.

I am historically known for my affinity toward alcohol, for better or worse (probably worse). But now, I think I can confidently explain why that's the case. Yes, I very much enjoy the act of getting intoxicated, but there's more to it now. There is that extra layer of appreciating. I can now say that I like beer for what it is too, and not just for what it does.

Cue the notes, one last time.

NOTES

BEER: Chimay Grande Réserve

STYLE: Belgian Strong Dark Ale

ABV: 9.0%

BREWED BY: Bières de Chimay

LOCATION: Baileux, Belgium

PURCHASED AT: Foodery Rittenhouse—I picked this bottle up yesterday, and it was the first time I actually used this place as a bottle shop as opposed to a lunch spot. It was nice getting the opportunity to wish the manager a happy new year, though.

PAIRED WITH: pear cobbler

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 550

 

I wrote all this and scheduled the publishing in advance, before even drinking the beer, which was the first time all year that I did that. But I felt like it would've been weird writing this post in 2021 and backdating it to the previous year, especially if I'm mostly just writing the conclusion essay anyway. But I did, however, map out specifically what beers I was going to drink today. 

 

Chimay was the centerpiece, the only new beers I was trying (didn't want to complicate things too much). I also planned to repeat three beers—2° Below and Voodoo Ranger, which I just had on Christmas Eve, and Accumulation, which I haven't had since fucking January 3rd (so that kind of acted like a full circle-type beer to drink).

I will also have some champagne, from a bottle whose label I will definitely note while I'm drinking it and include that in the master list eventually. Finally, I plan on having wine from a bottle that has been sitting in a box for the past year, along with the New Year's resolutions that Pam and I wrote down and stored away. We plan on drinking that wine and reflecting on the year that passed us by more quickly than we could've ever imagined. I will also include that wine on the master list.

In the next couple of days, I will fill in the following brackets with my opinion of Chimay Grande Réserve: [nice round taste, very rich like a Belgian should be, nothing straying too far from the Strong Dark Belgian Ale formula but then why would you?] If you'll recall, Pam mentioned it in her closing interview last week, so I'm hoping it can be a beer we'll both enjoy as we ring in 2021.

Finally, I want to make it clear how much I'm going to miss doing all this. Yes, it was a relentlessly annoying pain in the fucking ass to keep up with the daily blogging about a subject that, let's face it, has a finite shelf life as far as blogging goes... and yet, looking back, I am so proud of what this body of work ultimately amounted to. If you're still here after 366 days, then I want to thank you for taking this bizarre journey with me. I hope you learned a little, and I hope you drank a lot, and I hope you had as much fun as I did. Cheers.

Love,

Joey