Summer: Enshrined in Americana as the flagship of cookouts, stickball, and dubious water sports, this scorching swindle of a season doesn’t reveal its depressing nature until school is out and you’ve been reduced to a sludgesicle of a working stiff.

When I was a carefree political science major in the city of Berkeley, summer was a time of liberation and growth. The clouds floated away for three magical months, but daytime temperature never went over 75 degrees. Students flocked out, the Irish flocked in, and every walk on campus became a spacious, scenic stroll through the unshackled beauty of the University of California. In the Bay Area bubble, summer would fulfill its Hallmark promise to no end, bringing with it barbecues, hikes, frisbees, and day trips to exotic and unexplored locations.

Now approaching the halfway point of my second summer in Diamond Bar, I’ve come to realize how much I truly despise this season. In the Los Angeles suburbs, daytime temperature rarely drops below 85. I don’t even want to imagine the heat my friends in New York, Washington and Texas are facing. The air becomes stagnant, alternating between dry and balmy as unfulfillingly as the sweat soaked and uncomfortably warm sides of my pillow. My after-school hours as a tutor transform into a dizzying, nine hour barrage of gerunds and participial forms. The payoff for making an effort to do anything depreciates as quickly as the price of oil climbs up the history charts. I try to get away with being lazy, but the payoff for slacking becomes equally devalued in the sprawling infrastructure of this seasonally and geographically futile existence. My body stagnates. My soul withers away. My hat collection is rendered useless.

Fortunately, there is always beer. Quaffing a cold one at the end of a mind-numbing day may not bring me any closer to September, but it does bring me closer to Oktober, and breweries know just how badly their customers need a glass of relief. My personal lineup of summer beers aims to refresh with the subtlest of alcoholic touches. Alaskan Summer and Texas’ St. Arnold Lawnmower offer delightfully balanced homages to Kölsch brewing, harboring just a little bit of everything one could expect under the umbrella of an afternoon beer. When I want to indulge in a more flavorful pint, I reach for a Hoegaarden or (if it’s on draft) a Sam Adams Summer Ale, citrus-inspired works of unfiltered wheat that offer a more complex approach to refreshment. If I need to quench thirst with no questions asked, I pour a glass of Pilsner Urquell, Hofbräu or Baltika 3, single-note European classics as addictive as they are invigorating. And, when nothing less than the bite of a rattlesnake will soothe my parched throat, I pop open a bottle of Shiner Bock, a beer drinking experience filtered through Texas, Germany, and San Pellegrino.

On lonely summer nights that call for a 9PM nightcap, though, none of these revitalizing refreshments will do. When it’s 80 degrees in my bedroom and I have nothing to look forward to in the part of the future most relevant to my sanity, the only beer that can fill the not-so-chilled glass of my life is Anderson Valley’s Cerveza Crema. A summer seasonal that defies conventional wisdom, this velvety copper ale bears little resemblance to the beer that one would expect in the month of July. In place of bite is a velvety body with a faint, creamy, caramel-tinged head. Where there would normally be hops is a sweet, malty flavor, ending not in a clean finish or lingering bitterness but in a slightly sour twist that all too soon fades out into nothing. Unintrusive and unmemorable, yet altogether pleasant and strangely refreshing, it’s the perfect response to an anticlimactic summer, there to tuck me in after a long day of nothing much at all.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 1:28 am and is filed under None.