Brew Ha-Ha



By Tony Kornheiser



Sunday, July 28 1996; Page F01

The Washington Post 



ATLANTA



I'm steamed. There are loads of journalists here at the Olympics, and every one of them

seems to be preoccupied with bashing the United States of America. First, it was the

transportation. Everyone complained about the buses: "The buses are getting lost! The drivers

aren't from Atlanta, they were brought in from elsewhere, and they don't know their way

around!"



Well, the other day I was talking to one of the bus drivers, Nguyen Cao Fung, and he says

that's crazy. The roads in Atlanta are laid out exactly like those in his native Rawalpindi, he

said. We made it from the airport to the stadium in well under five hours, and that included a

stop for him to sacrifice a goat. 



Next, everyone is bashing the technology. IBM is apparently experiencing a few minor bugs in

its new, state-of-the-art computer system -- such as listing a boxer's height as "21 feet." Well,

did any of these carping journalists bother to find out if maybe the boxer was 21 feet tall?

(Willie "The Giraffe" Ngomo. Some of these Kenyans have altitude.) Anyway, I myself have

detected nothing awry with the computer system. In fact, I'm here using the same IBM system

to file my story and akdsskj3qi9ju13490uj(*U&4r3jig



bv89uy^%%$#HI(u problems whatsoever.



Other than the fact that nothing works, I think the Olympics are going swell. In fact, I felt

things were going so smoothly the other day that I took a break from the Games, and I did

something that every sportswriter ought to do -- I left the world of fun and games behind,

abandoned the hedonistic pursuit of entertainment and signed up for something educational. I

went to Budweiser Beer School.



I graduated at the head of my class, ha-ha-ha.



Budweiser was giving lessons in beer-making, and it opened the class to journalists, hoping no

doubt for great publicity from newsmen who would be so grateful for the free samples they

got at the end of a 20-minute class that they would not point out that mass-brewed American

beer tastes like tap water from Cleveland. I certainly wouldn't. 



The fact is, I couldn't sleep the night before. I'd been told there was an exam at the end of

beer school, and I was anxious about it. Did you ever have that dream where you're back in

school, and you've got an exam, and you haven't studied, and you're totally panicked -- and

when you wake up your pillow is gone? 



I signed up for the first session, the 11 a.m., because, like Sheryl Crow, I like a good beer

buzz in the morning. (Speaking of Bud, did I mention the Clydesdales are in town? Yep, they

were prancing through Centennial Park the other day. And the Bud Dalmatian was sitting up

by the driver, just like in the commercials. The only Bud animals that aren't here are the

famous stupid Budweiser frogs. Maybe there was some thought they would offend the

French.)



Anyway, I took the beer class with nine other people -- seven men and two women. The

women were wives, and presumably they came along in case their husbands got so tanked up

they tried to hijack the Bud Blimp.



I learned far too much about beer to go through it all here. In all modesty I am now, more or

less, a doctor of beer, a "biergenpushkin" in German. And it wouldn't be fair to throw all of

my technical knowledge about "hopping levels" and "aromatics" and "barley germination" at

you. But if I were forced to summarize all I learned about brewing and tasting beer in a few

words -- especially after tasting five different beers -- those few words would be: "Try to be

near a restroom."



The most fascinating thing I learned -- besides the fact that hops are green and smell like stuff

between your toes on a hot day -- is that beer wasn't invented, it was discovered. The Bud

Beer School theorizes that one day a caveman stopped to drink from a local stream. And that

stream had barley growing in it. And the combination of water, barley and microorganisms

that floated through the air conspired to produce a fermented mash the Neanderthal lapped up

and lapped up and lapped up, and the next thing you know he's wearing his loincloth on his

head, and he's picking a fight with a Cro-Magnon man. The next day he wakes up, and he

can't remember a thing -- which is terrible because the others had sent him out to bring back

the secret of fire. And not only has he forgotten the secret, he's forgotten where his cave is.

So the discovery of beer probably set evolution back 500 years.



But what a discovery, huh?



I mean, it's like the first guy who ate lobster, or the first guy who figured out how to peel an

artichoke. Forget Columbus. These are much better discoveries than discovering America.

America is huge. Somebody else would have discovered it eventually.



Anyway, we started tasting Bud. Then we got Bud Light. Then a dark, stout beer Budweiser

markets regionally, called Black and Tan, which tasted like a tire, and then Michelob. (By this

time I'd gotten so loaded I was talking all high and squeaky, like Kerri Strug. Did you see her

on the "Today" show? Did you hear that voice? She made Katie Couric sound like James Earl

Jones.)



Anyway, after drinking all the beer, we got our final exam.



We were asked: Where are hops added in the brewing process?



And I knew! And I proudly said, "jvyju^&$k975ECuiyxsa." 



                 © Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company