Barley Mowat 

Well, I’m outta here. I leave tonight for my annual vacation. After last year’s brief experimentation with a beer-friendly location (Belgium) we’re right back into the tepid light lagers of the tropics. Specifically, this time Sharon and I are off to Vietnam.

While Vietnam is not without it’s own, unique, take on beer, it doesn’t take much research to realize that it’s all pretty awful. If the idea of “street beer served as green as possible in plastic jugs” doesn’t thrill you, there are a few genuine cialis online uk around Hanoi (the biggest city I’ll visit), and I imagine I’ll even try their beer. I might also go to the blatant Pilsner Urquell ripoff just for the novelty.

However, the fact that these breweries all seem to specialize in that wonder of wonders, light tropical lager, doesn’t mean I’ll like them very much. Don’t expect much of a beer post when I get back, is what I’m saying. I’ll likely head over to the on Belgian bar I found online and spend my time there. Chimay is sort of authentic Viet, right?

Check you suckers later.

So, I’ve been busy recently. You’ve probably noticed due to the lack of blog updates. Well, it’s for good reason folks, because I’m working on a side project that will directly benefit you. Why pimp my side project here? Well, what’s the point in even having a semi-popular beer blog unless I can shamelessly promote my other gigs on it?

If you’ve read any of my reviews of local beer festivals, you’re probably aware that I’m not exactly a fan. They tend towards the absurd, cramming hundreds (or thousands) of people into a fenced-off concrete-paved area, and serving them ordinary beer in tiny glasses. At least there’s usually a big cover charge to get in, so they have that going for them. Yet the attendees still find a way to get far too drunk.

“What did you think of that Pilsner?” “Blaaargh”

To be honest, it’s not all bad. If you’re new to craft beer, these festivals are a great way to familiarize yourself with the broad, dazzling array of offerings out there, all in a very short period of time. Plus, brewery representatives frequent these festivals so you can ask them about the beer on offer that day, or their other products.

At least, you could if the line behind you wasn’t shoving you out of the way because it’s Their Turn, Dammit! Or if the people at the booth actually were the brewery reps, or knew anything about the beer. In reality, they’re often just festival volunteers who are there to work a few hours then drink for free.

Just like how fast food workers are volunteering so they can eat and pay rent for free.

Fast forward a few hours and things get louder, drunker, and generally not my kind of party. Yes, I’m a snob, and yes, I’d like to be somewhere with excellent beer, small lines, and a pastoral setting in which I can sip my beer out of a non-shitty glass without someone jostling me hard enough for my monocle to fall out, and into my beer.

That’s fine, I guess. It’s been pointed out that beer festivals aren’t really intended to be for people like me, and that there are a lot more people like that than like me. I get it, and accept it, but really I just want a festival that’s more geared at the high end beer geek.

No such place exists. Until now. I’ve teamed up with five other local beer geeks who are just as frustrated with the local scene to create our own festival. We were going to call it Horse Blanket, because we’re esoteric and cool and whatnot, until someone Googled “Farmhouse Fest” and found out that all the domains/handles were free. Farmhouse Fest it is, then.

The people serving you the beer will be from the brewery. The beer in your glass will be interesting, unique or awesome, or quite probably, all of the above. The glass itself won’t suck. The location will be the UBC Farm because, let’s face it, everything is better on a farm.

Including, uh, whatever the hell this is.

Actually, let’s talk about the farm a bit more. The main thing going out to UBC gets us is space. Huge spaces. With trees. And orchards. Look at our cialis uk next day delivery, and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Thus, instead of a tiny hall crammed with brewery serving tables all lined up in a row, at Farmhouse Fest you’ll see individual tents with quite a bit of space between them. Room to breathe. Room to set up picnic tables and barrels, or to spread out a picnic blanket. We’re serious about that—it’s a nice field and there will be lots of open space, so slow down and enjoy yourself and your awesome beer.

I could rant a bit more about why it’ll be awesome, or you could just go read the damned website already. I wrote most of it, so it’s basically like Bonus Blog. Tickets will be going on sale at noon today, which should be right around now. Click here to buy ‘em. Best do it fast, though, because there aren’t very many of them.

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Aside: Yes, those are fifty dollar tickets. Yes, that might seem a bit higher than the other festivals you’ve been to. No, I don’t think that’s too high. Did you read all that hot air above about space? You know what space is made of? It’s composed primarily of absent ticket-purchasing festival goers, and YOU have to pick up their slack. Frankly, having seen the finances, I’m surprised by how low we managed to keep that price, given our very low ticket cap (by local festival standards) and the extremely high cost of some of the beer we’ll be serving.

So, that happened. At the beginning of February I vowed to live an entire month in strict adherence to Health Canada’s Low Risk Alcohol Guidelines. I’ve done no-alcohol months in the past so I figured this would be no big deal. I mean, I can still drink right? This should be easy!

Well, let’s just say drinking a tiny, exactly prescribed amount is a lot harder than not drinking at all. It turns out that a blanket decision to avoid liquor is a lot easier to self-enforce than a nuanced “it depends.” As a result, two days into this endeavour I dropped the “strict” from my goal of adherence. From there it became more of a general observance that didn’t quite keep tradition with the intent.

Kind of like when you give up Yoga for Lent.

All told, though, I did okay. As part of this fool exercise I tracked every single drink I consumed during the month. There were 37 of them. Yes, they were mostly beer. Those 37 beers comprised 58 standard units of alcohol. Don’t look at me like that, I bet you did more. For comparison, I had an unnamed friend also track her drinks. She had 94 standard drinks. I think the Betty Ford Client has a wing named after her and a held bed.

The first real casualty of adherence was the stupid “2 drinks in 3 hours” rule. If you don’t recall, the rule basically says that you can’t have more than two standard drinks in a 180 minute period. This seems reasonable on the surface, but in practice it fell apart on February 3rd when I was served a 12 ounce bottle of Rochefort 10 at a restaurant. That one bottle of delicious Belgian Quad is 2.20 standard drinks. Try as I might, I couldn’t nurse it more than 90 minutes. So screw that rule.

Wait… rules are optional now?
This changes EVERYTHING!

I also broke the “4 drinks in a day” rule three times, but never by much. The weekly rule of 15 drinks was more or less in constant violation, but again never by more than a drink or so. I ended the month with a very precisely calculated weekly average of 15.01 standard drinks, and even managed to easily stay in compliance with the “two non-drinking days in the past seven” rule. Heck, that one was easy.

So, what did I learn? Quite a bit, actually. Now that every waking hour was no longer consumed with sourcing then imbibing the nearest, cheapest source of sweet, sweet medicine, I had a bit of time to do some reading. I choose to look into the actual science behind these peculiar guidelines, and what I learnt will come as a shock to you. Unless, you know, you’re a jaded cynic who figures the Powers That Be simply pull numbers out of a hat and call them guidelines. If that’s you, then you won’t be surprised one bit.

Okay, okay, it’s not that bad, but the reality isn’t too far off. You see, there are lots of studies about alcohol and health. Lots. It’s almost as if the world conspires to make recruiting volunteers for these studies at the universities where they’re done cheap and easy. And, in general, the studies tell us that drinking a set amount of alcohol per day improves your health to a certain point, and then slowly begins to make it worse.

Curiously, all these things tend to peak around two drinks a day. So when the government comes along and recommends that we all drink two drinks a day, it’s based on maximizing the health benefits of having a little bit of alcohol in your blood while minimizing the health impact of having lots in your blood. If we were going for truth in advertising, these guidelines wouldn’t be called the “Low Risk” guidelines but rather “Maximum Benefit” or, if they want to maximize website clicks, “Three Secret Drinking Hacks For Longer Life, That The Government Doesn’t Want You To Know” despite them, you know, being the government. It was funny when I thought of it last night, okay?

If we really wanted “low risk” guidelines I think a better approach would be the levels at which the benefit of drinking hasn’t been completely eliminated by volume. At these levels, you’re still better off for throwing back some sauce versus not drinking at all. What are those levels? About 5 drinks a day for men and 3.5 for women, more or less. For some risk factors it’s more and for others it’s less. Coronary heart disease risk, for whatever weird reason, appears to only go further down as you drink more.

Somewhere to the right is immortality.

What about drinking to damage to your health? Well, the science on that side of things is a bit more vague. All we know for certain is that drinking lots generally isn’t great for you, and that conducting studies involving volunteers deliberately inflicting themselves with serious, permanent injury is oddly looked down upon by the medical community.

What science suspects is that regularly soaking all of your organs in a solvent like alcohol is probably bad for you. At low levels of intake, it seems that your liver is up to the job of scrubbing all that nasty booze out of your blood before it can do any damage. This explains the benefits of low level drinking. The damage seems to start when level of alcohol in your blood begins to accumulate faster than your liver can get it out, otherwise known as “being drunk.”

Again there’s not a lot of agreement about “how drunk” is “bad” but researchers tend to put the number around six drinks in a sitting, or what is also referred to as “binge drinking.” Why six? Fuck if I know, and fuck if they know either. Six is, and I’m not kidding here, pulled out of researchers’ collective assholes because “it seems like a lot.” Seriously, everyone admits that Six is just a made up number with no data to back it up but no one can be bothered to do actual research into this to get a better idea, because of that whole “killing the subjects” thing. Wimps.

And yet science claims to know how many lightning strikes are bad for your health.

Okay, I’ll back down a bit. Six really is a lot of liquor, and probably more than you should be eyeing up at the pub. I know it’s only three full pints of Driftwood Fat Tug but we should all be honest about how much alcohol is in 60 ounces of one of the strongest IPAs in town. It’s a lot, folks, and you shouldn’t be drinking it in one go unless the “broken nose capillary” look is in this year.

So, in the end, the takeaways are pretty much what you’d expect: Don’t drink too much, call your mother more, keep track of how much you are intaking, keep a clean house, lay off the liquor once in a while, and lastly: start shotgunning vodka if you have heart disease.