Beer for Art Geeks

If I haven't made it clear in my past posts, I don't drink beer.

I don't like the taste, despite years of beer-swilling friends coaxing me to "just taste this one; it's different" and not liking a single one.

But I did drink an entire beer once.

Oh, yes, I did.

It was at a Cracker show at the Flood Zone back in 1993 and if they had had anything, anything at all, to drink other than beer, I'd have swilled it.

But that night I needed some liquid courage and that one beer was the only way to get it.

I share this as a prelude to trying to describe my pleasure at reading an article in today's Washington Post about cask beers.

Why the sudden interest in a beer topic, you wonder?

Ah, well, it was written by Blake Gopnik, the art critic for the Post and a writer of whom I am inordinately fond.

Granted, he's always writing about art, a topic near and dear to my heart, but I'm also a big fan of his writing.

So when I got to today's Post Food section to find a front page article about cask beers and a new place in Logan Circle that will carry five of them, I read it start to finish and was mildly fascinated.

I don't know that I'm any more likely to like cask beer than I like pasteurized, carbonated beer, but I'm not ruling it out either.

Maybe it was Blake's enthusiasm for the subject or maybe it was the allure of an art geek trying to introduce me to something new.

For all I know, Blake is nothing more than a golden beverage fan and not necessarily qualified to write about beer, but I prefer to think that he's sharing his enthusiasm for cask beer in the hopes of reaching other art geeks like me who wouldn't take the word of anyone else.

Now I'm imagining about sharing some cask beer with Blake whilst discussing art for hours.

And if he wants to throw in some additional beer talk, I'll be all ears.

I might even become a cask convert as his urging.