My mother is quiet. It runs in her family. Holidays are awash in half-discussions about trips to a restaurant or what the weather was like on that one trip long ago. It just comes naturally to her, which is fair and faultless. I suppose English stoicism doesn’t rub off easily. She also, like many hardworking moms with four kids, loves to cap off the day with a good glass of merlot. And more power to her — I know what I was like as a teenager.
I’m sure she’d love to have a bottle for Mother’s Day, but there’s a certain solitude in that. She likes wine, and I like beer, and when we drink, we drink independently. There’s no piano-man solicitude. Just quiet and, sometimes, HGTV. Perhaps she’s looking for respite, and if she is, then she deserves it. But like any mother’s son, I’d love to be able to share an interest. And, damn it all, it’s Mother’s Day and I want to hear about my mom. I want to know this inscrutable woman who gave up so much to raise me and my siblings. I want to hear about how she used to work at a radio station. About why the hell she has a picture of herself with Billy Idol.
And no, a morbid and shared fascination with House Hunters is not a bedrock for familiarity.
So this Mother’s Day, I was looking to bridge the divide. To find a beer style which could convert her. And not just her. Perhaps mothers the world over. Or maybe just people who want to connect across one or the other bank of the boozy river.
If that’s the intention, though, where to begin?
Benjamin Pratt and Zachary Mack, owners of As Is and ABC Beer Co., respectively, are in agreement: the wine drinker not only would love a good beer, but deserves one. “I think a lot of times people not liking beer comes from an experience they had drinking some mass-produced lager,” says Pratt. “And then they’ll come in and taste something completely different from what’s expected. It can really shift people’s perception.”
These are three beer styles the experts might classify broadly as “gateway” styles. They share particular qualities with wines, like microbial connections, fruit notes and oak barrel aging. “People who drink wine can definitely find vinous qualities in beer,” says Mack. “Wine drinkers often have this idea that beer is this watery drink without complexity, but I think that idea comes from not knowing about complex styles. Beer can be flavored and manipulated and aged, just like wine.”
So, these are the beers for mom. Even if she doesn’t love them, they ought to provide at the very least a shared drink, a laugh, and a moment to remember.
