Every year since 1989, I have traveled down to Houston, TX, a lovely city that is widely unappreciated among the great cities of this country. Did you know that Houston is closer to Chicago, IL, than it is to El Paso, TX? Moreover, it is a remarkably beautiful city, quite green—not at all the oil-reeking desert I had always imagined it to be. All that, and Texas also has the largest wind turbine usage in the country!
Why would such madness continue for nineteen years? I don’t think it is about what I do there; it has only to do with my crazy hosts.
Supposedly, I go to the annual Dixie Cup homebrew competition each year to host the “Fred Tasting,” but my real job is to adorn their annual t-shirts with my likeness. However, the tasting Friday night actually takes up most of my time. It comes after the day’s beer, cider and mead judging, and after a great potluck dinner, provided by the Foam Rangers and their friends, is served. Every year, I am scheduled at 10:30 pm. That’s Dixie Cup time, of course; sometimes it actually comes off as early as midnight.
I will share with you friendly readers the real secret of my popularity and success down there: they are always drunk and often unable to navigate back to their rooms safely. I have a lot more fun than they do, because I’m usually slightly more sober than they. But one needs to ask: Why would such madness continue for nineteen years? I don’t think it is about what I do there; it has only to do with my crazy hosts.
We have done some really strange beer-and-whatever tastings: bread, chocolate and Mozart, ice cream, nuts, sausage, Tex-Mex, junk food, stout and chocolate. We also did “Best of Fred,” “Where in the World is Fred?” “The Dark Side of Fred,” “Fredopoly,” and, this year, “Fred’s Good Stuff” (see box).
The Good, The Bad, and the Fredly
The strangest may have been the beer and bread tasting we did in 1992. I won’t bore you with the details, but we had French bread, wheat-nut bread, bagels, saltine crackers, blueberry muffins—you get the picture. The nine item beer list was stunning (Anchor steam, Munich dark, Duvel, Chimay Red label, etc). We also did a breakfast cereal tasting once, using beer instead of milk. You don’t want to know the details: trust me.
The most fun? Probably the beer and junk food tasting from 2004. Potato chips; pepper nuts; a white cheddar cheese, pretzel and apple single-bite sandwich; pizza; Cool Whip globbed into beer; and Oreo cookies (dip them in warm—108F/42C—barleywine, and you’ll never go back to milk).
The weirdest of all my tastings, and maybe the best, was the beer and ice cream tasting in 1994. They sent me free Ben and Jerry’s coupons they had received from Fletcher Dean of that company’s community services department, who had attended my chocolate/beer tasting at the AHA confab in Manchester, VT, a few years earlier. If I’d had any doubts, the free ice cream coupons locked me in. Never mind that I hadn’t the vaguest idea as to how to formulate such a bizarre adventure.
As usual, I faked it, but my experiments couldn’t have been a pretty sight. I did them in my backyard, hidden from neighbors’ prying eyes and shaded from the hot August sun. Beer and ice cream are not conducive to quiet reverie: so many ice creams and so little time.
