Hey, olllllo, better copyright ‘Two Ounce Culture’

Copyright “Two Ounce Culture,” trademark it, maybe even “Two Ounce Beer Culture” as well, before I pretend I thought of this simply brilliant phrase to characterize the taste, rate, move on mentality.

Rob Fullmer, aka olllllo, posted this yesterday, linking to and quoting from a New Yorker article that is worth the, well, time — which is part of what it’s about. Here’s what he put in bold type:

As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

I am not suggesting revisiting the chase our tail debate about beer and brewing as art. For me, it works just to replace the word art with the word beer and read the sentence again.

The brilliance of beer is that any particular beer can do this, but without itself becoming the center of conversation.

Saint Arnold Brewing founder Brock Wagner made that point maybe 10 years ago: “We want you to think about what you are drinking. I’ll think about the beer when I first taste it. After that I’m sitting there with my wife and with friends shooting the breeze and it becomes background. But periodically I will think about the beer again.”

Little of that in the “Two Ounce Culture.”

*****

Rob begins his post with a challenge: “I often ask my beer friends and those that claim an allegiance to a beer culture they seem to think exists only in sampling form, ‘What was the last beer that you remember having three in a row of.’ I can tell you my last four of three. It was New Belgium La Folie, Four Peaks KiltLifter, Four Peaks Eight Street and Coors Banquet.”

I thought about this and realized I would flunk. I can’t remember the last time I had drank the same beer again, and then again. Two in a row, that’s easy. That would be Schlafly TIPA. Before that (512) Pecan Porter, and before that Urban Chestnut Zwickel.