The Greatest Letter Written To City Paper In Over 18 Years
You owe us $12. Our beloved grandmother (95 years young!) was visiting from her venerable Yugoslavian home and she said, “Hey boys, I’ve got a matter of minutes left on this great green ball and I need to taste life one last lonely time.” We assumed she was talking booze. Lucky day, we’d just read your enticing cover story on a pre-Prohibition style beer brewed by Victory [Cover Story, "Hop Heaven," Brian Howard, April 14, 2005]. Grammy quaffed in the teens, bathroom ginned in 20s, supped in the 30s, and so on, until they invented “Coors Light,” when she threw her hands into the clear Yugoslavian sky and said “That’s it! I quit!,” all the while never forgetting the warm corn-fed taste of her beloved pre-Prohibition lagers that she enjoyed in her scrappy Germantown youth.
What a disappointment. Words to describe this brew (swill) (translated lovingly from Yugo-talk): “horse-trough water,” “Windex,” “stale coffee without the coffee,” “same as sex in a canoe (i.e., fucking near water),” “bad neighborhood tapwater,” “Schuylkill punch” and “would be better in a bottle but only if it were actually some other beer that didn’t taste like total crap.”
Frankly we’re pissed. Flom’s pissed, Bader’s pissed, the beer is piss and Grammy’s dead (1910-2005). Fuck you.
Richard Erik Bader Flom
via e-mail
