I think the first alcoholic beverage I ever drank was as an illegal minor offered a sip of Budweiser in my friend Tom’s kitchen. I was young and naive so I didn’t know enough to be proud of the fact that I instantly gagged and spit it out on his mother’s cleaned dishes draining in the sink. After that, I don’t think I was ever tempted by illegal underage beer again, though I did spend an unfortunate year consuming illegal whiskey and probably took ten years out of my parents life.

Well, I gave that up before my senior year in high school and flew straight until graduation. Then I went to Houghton College where I mostly flew straight, though I did occasionally break down and have a drink which, while legal, was the breaking of the student pledge I signed. That fact bothered me enough that it didn’t happen often. The only real industrious drinking I did was the occasional gallon jug or three of cider I just happened to allow to sit out too long before drinking. (And even that could be dangerous. I distinctly remember one day my friend and neighbor’s room smelling like a brewery because his roomate’s fermentation experiment exploded on the top shelf. I walked in to see him bent over his partially dissassembled stereo with a hair drying trying to get rid of the moisture that had saturated its innards. Christian colleges are a lot more exciting than outsiders give them credit for.)

So the point here is that I didn’t get to make much progress as an alcohol connoisseur until after graduation. Whiskey and Vodka straight was not something I thought I should do, not wanting to die, and I didn’t really know anything about wine yet to even try it. Beer, disgusted me.

So that left wine coolers. Seagram’s golden (does that even exist anymore?) appealed to me a lot. And between Seagram’s and Bartles & Jaymes (which actually is closer to beer than most people realize) I could enjoy an adult beverage.

But either the marketing and product development changed, or I just gradually woke up to the fact, so that I started feeling like my masculinity was at stake. All the wine coolers seemed more and more fruity and fru-fru. What was a self-respecting male who wanted his heart made glad supposed to do.

I did discover and start enjoying wine (usually out of a box with a spigot–only quality for me, baby) at this point, but it was almost always White Zin, which is pretty much the same sort of pro-estrogen drink as a wine cooler.

My wife and I tried Zima for awhile, but eventually we faced up to the fact that this was just albino frufruness.

But then the beers began improving. I think this may go back to Pete’s Wicked Ale (Pete’s a hero to me because he may have saved beer by being willing to fight with the California bureaucracy for his brewery–see Joel Miller’s Size Matters). Foreign dark beers for special splurging and a general routine of Honey Brown or Michelob’s Amber Bach became my drinking buddy.

(Our wines got darker–Merlots or Cabernet Sauvignons–but I still have no discrimination. To this day the way I choose a wine is to go into the grocery store and scan the shelves until I find the thing that sells for less than four bucks.)

So that has been the way of it. The only thing that has varied is the states relationship to fundamentalist pressure. MO and WA are great places to shop. Tennessee wants you to buy wine in places without sealed floors and with bright neon signs saying “PLEASE COME HOLD US UP.” Oklahoma didn’t let you bring your children with you to buy wine. Our only salvation was that the stores nearest us were in strip malls where we could pull up to three feet from the front door. “Be right back kids.”

(Probably the most gruesome aspect of OK’s system is that they don’t allow liquor (and wine) stores to open on election day–robbing us of the comfort we need.)

Oddly, though, I haven’t bought beer in a while. Some pastor’s wife told my wife about Mike’s Hard Lemonade. And I’m hooked. I don’t know if I’ve given up on ever really being a real man, or not. One could claim this is a regression to the frufru. But I don’t care. I really like it.

The only problem is the expense. I’m trying the Aldi version right now.

This post was brought to you (and powered by) hard lemonade.