9. The Legal Beer
This one is less about the beer and more about the revelation. After spending years sneaking warm Natty Lights into your friend’s basement and eventually your dorm room, the first beer you legally drink is world changing at the first sip. It dawns on you that you can now walk into any liquor store, bar, beer distributor, or Mini-Mart, and there’s no longer anything that holds you back.
8. The Solo Beer
It’s 7:30pm on a Wednesday in the summer. Still light outside, and you’re home alone. With an MLB game that is going to determine if you can afford to pay for food this week on in the background, you sit alone and peaceful – the only friend you need here is the beer in front of you: cold, delicious, and will never sleep with your ex-girlfriend.
7. The Uncle Beer
You’re at a family reunion, out on the links, or maybe a at birthday lunch, and the uncle that you’ve watched take down nine beers before 10pm at every family gathering you’ve ever been to hands you a brew. You know that your parents probably wouldn’t approve of him feeding your underage ass a few Blue Moons while out on the golf course, so you don’t make a big deal of it and neither does he. A simple moment, but beautiful, nonetheless.
6. The Shower Beer
The peak of multi-tasking. Why delay the start of drinking just to bathe yourself? Music blasting and a cold one or two outside the shower allows for you to keep pace with everyone who got out of bed before 5pm and was ready to start drinking at the agreed upon time. There’s also something pure about your dick being out in the open while drinking.
5. The End of Week Beer
After closing out Canvas, sending your last work email, and opening the fridge, seeing a beer waiting for you is a borderline sexual experience. The instant it hits your lips, the stress of next week’s midterm, your bank account being close to empty, and the nine girls that have left you on read over the past week and a half melt away. It’s a cure for the nonsense you’ve endured throughout the past five days, and a reminder that after thirteen more of these, you don’t have shit to do tomorrow morning.
4. The Beach Beer
In my eyes, the beach is good for two things: bikinis and beer. Fuck sand. Fuck going in the ocean. Fuck sunscreen. But fuck. Sitting in a chair at 5pm at the Jersey Shore, just as everyone’s gone home, the breeze has started, and the sand no longer gives the bottom of your feet third degree burns, and you no longer have to listen to the worst country playlist this world has ever seen the family of harpoon targets next to you was just playing is what I imagine spiritual nirvana to be like.
3. The Tailgate Beer
Dressed in four different layers, gloves and winter hat on, and a stomach full of one, singular Slim Jim, a case of Bud Light gets slapped down on the curb in front of you. It’s nine in the morning and wearing a $27 jersey stitched together meticulously by small, Chinese hands, and you have four hours intense drinking in a parking lot ahead of you. Along with the growing stench of urine wafting through the lot, there’s a sense of comradery and unification filling the atmosphere that makes the beer taste like a twenty-five-point blowout. Go Birds.
2. The Airport Beer
Nobody truly enjoys flying. Plenty of people tolerate it, but no one is ever looking forward to sitting next to a guy that’s going to talk to you for a half an hour about the liberal media is going to ruin the MLB post-season and having to get up every nine minutes to let the mother sitting at the window seat change her screaming infant’s diaper. The Airport Beer is the calm before the storm. With enough of these, no amount of stomach fat from the four-hundred-pound guy next to you is enough to get you fired up on a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Miami.
1. The Free Beer
Nothing better than a free beer. Debate me all you want on 9-2, but this one is set in stone.
