Epiphany in a shoe

An oak-aged, brett-infused hop bomb

Those who know me know that fashion is not my thing. I have no care for it. I’m the type that, when I find a shirt I like, I will buy three  (usually plain blue) so that I don’t have to worry about buying any more for a while. Clothes are a utilitarian thing. Shoes are to be worn, should vaguely match your belt and the colours of the pants and shirt shouldn’t clash.

So when my wife pointed to a picture of a shoe in one of those free ‘lifestyle’ (read advertising heavy) magazines that turn up in the mail weekly and pointed out how impractical, ugly and ridiculous it was, I was entirely in agreement. But then suddenly I had one of those moments. I realised that there would be people out there to whom fashion matters. People who would be able to lecture for hours about how, yes, the shoe isn’t to be worn day-to-day but that it pushes boundaries and shows the designer is rethinking the point of ‘shoe’, crossing barriers and merging styles. That such discussions about such shoes are the point of the fashionista’s life.

It was a short leap from there to think about the discussions I have had recently about BrewDog’s Tactial Nuclear Penguin or Sink! Or discussions I have had about the characteristics of single hop IPAs, or the current debate about whether a dark IPA is a contradiction in terms or whether it should more appropriately be called a Cascadian Dark Ale.

For some people, who have the same view of beer that I have of shoes, beer is just something to be drunk. It can have flavour, it can have character, it can reflect their personality but at the end of the day these are just minor footnotes to the consumption rather than the reason d’etre for the beer.

Lately I have read more comments dismissing beers such as Stone & Wood’s Pale Lager, Mountain Goat’s Steam Ale and Matilda Bay’s Big Helga than praising them, or even just accepting them. Which is fine, except the fashionable way seems to be to dismiss them with the statement ‘meh’, which offers no insight or discussion, merely indicates disinterest. To dismiss these beers in such a way is pretty much to say that every beer needs to be oak-aged, brett-infused, hop bomb that is a trial by ordeal to drink.

These less exciting beers may be tennis shoes, but they are comfortable, well-made tennis shoes with genuine leather uppers and we still wear those more than anything else. And sometimes that’s the point.

If you find the shoe at right in anyway ridiculous or impractical as you schlep around in a pair of old Nikes, just bear in mind that it is the footwear equivalent of the extreme beer that we covet…and that somewhere, someone is quietly sipping on a well made Pilsener, from the bottle, and really enjoying it…all the while laughing at us.