A beer for Bocce, a pilsner for petanque

I spent a week at a cottage earlier this summer, and obsessed over what kind of beer to bring. I ended up with some Flying Monkeys Hoptical Illusion and some Mad Tom IPA, both beers I like very much. I'll admit I also wanted to wow my family with my hip and astute beer selections.

We got there, I cracked one open, and we started to play petanque (really bocce, but we call it petanque because we're french canadian and bocce is what the "english" play.)



It was boiling hot outside and sunny. In fact, it was that way all day, every day for the whole week.

The beers I'd brought did not do. They were bitter. They had too much character. They had too much personality for that heat. They stuck out like a sore, bitter thumb, fish hooking the inside of my cheek.

My beer sampling conditions (at my house, on my back deck) differed greatly from the conditions at the cottage.

The next day, we hit up the local beer store. The selection was small (nothing craft out there!) and we chose two lawnmower beers: OV (Old Vienna) and Red Cap.

The idea behind the OV was that it has a close association with the O'Keefe, which you'll see from the first post in this blog (Brau: The Origin Story) is something I've been looking for. I wanted to see if OV had the same taste, or "brau" as O'Keefe (editor's note: it did not).

I took these two beers back to the cottage and stuffed them into the freezer until they were nearly frozen. At that point, they were finally drinkable.

I'd found the perfect refreshing bocce beers (the red cap more than the OV).

I then fell into a routine. During the scorching days, I'd drink one of these lawnmower beers. Once the heat had died down and I was relaxing after a long day of petoncle, sitting and swimming, I'd pop one of my delicious hand picked beers. In that situation, they were a delight.

Funny thing was, once I got back home, I tried a Red Cap and couldn't finish it. It was too sweet. I poured it out.

It taught me a lesson, though: Beer is situational. I think it's impossible to have a favourite beer, just the right beer at the right time. There's a beer for every season, and a beer for every taste. That's part of the beauty of it.

There's even a right time for lawnmower beer. I'm no beer snob, nor do I want to be.

And there's still Red Cap left in the fridge for my next cottage week.

*Illustration: True to life graphical representation of us playing Petanque at the cottage.