Dale Van Wieren, beer geek nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Saturday evening.
5pm.
Sly Fox Phoenixville.
A meeting of the man and the moment.
Dale Van Wieren is going to drink a beer or something. Let me look at my notes….
Aha!
Not just a beer. His 10,000th beer that he’s tasted and logged in his….um…log.
There are two ways to deal with this: you can embrace the vibe, join in the celebration and refuse to be judgmental, or you can gasp, go with you sternest demeanor and, eyes turned skyward, scream out out the world
“My God! This man has spent the equivalent of at least half a year swirling a beer around in his mouth and then writing down what he felt about that!”
I’d go for the first option personally. Either way, though, you probably need to be on the scene, even if only to unleash a stream of vitriol at the guy.
It’s history, man.
Plus there’s gonna be a new beer release. That’s always good.
I expect to be there to join in the fun (eyesight willing). To show my solidarity with each and every one of you and your position on what all this means, I will both congratulate Dale for his achievement and bemoan how he has wasted his life.
It’s the least I can do.
And I’m good at doing that.
Can you ask him about the status of American Brewers III?
I can indeed but it will probably be the same thing he told me a month or so back: next year as a digital document with perhaps a print edition to follow. The searchability capability will be a real godsend in the former case, but I’d like the book as well; there’s something comforting and inspiring about those pages and pages of tiny type even as my eyes get less and less capable of reading it.
[...] 3. After doing some work in mid-afternoon and watching the first quarter and a half of the Villanova v. Delaware game on the tube, I set up to tape the rest of the game for later, locked Buddy in his crate and headed off to Sly Fox Phoenixville for the Dale Van Wieren sanctification. [...]