Talk of the Town - Forever (hic) young March 25 2004

At last. What makes you round, comes around.

German brewmeisters claim to have invented a beer that shouts auf halten to the human aging process.

Forget the Internet, hydrogen fuel cells and that finding a cure for cancer stuff. This is progress.

Lie back, couch kartoffeln of the world! You have nothing to gain but additional years of staring at the tube. No longer are you a heart attack in a barcalounger. If the Fatherland has truly figured this out, we’ll all be watching Super Bowl 2094.

A Beer of Youth has Nobel Peace Prize written all over it, in foam, but there is one drawback. In addition to the traditional contents of barley, hops, yeast and water, the new anti-aging beer contains vitamins, minerals and ... algae.

This could prove detrimental to the new compound being sold as beer, because the Germans have very strict laws on the subject — historically, they’ve had a lot of strict laws (see “Reich, Third”) — dating back to the early 16th century. Their exacting definition of beer actually ranks as the world’s oldest law, which doesn’t quite add up when you consider the world’s oldest profession.

Oh sure, brewers call the algae “spirulina,” because who in their right marketing mindset would list a bulked-up form of plankton on the table of ingredients? But anything resembling the scum atop a subdivision retention pond has never been on my list of most-wondered-about taste sensations.

Conversely, if it means a longer life, I could adapt. Because beer doesn’t taste all that good in the first place. As with most vices — smoking, whiskey, watching C-Span — it requires a sophisticated adult palate.

Now when you’re a kid, taste buds don’t lie. You go right for the good stuff. Chocolate bars, Kool-Aid, those pure sugar dots gnawed off a 3-foot length of cash register tape. With a Ritalin chaser.

Drink an entire beer for the first time (sub rosa at age 13 during an older cousin’s wedding reception; don’t try to prosecute, the statute of limitations expired loooong ago) and it’s not a memorable gustatory experience. Beer is rather bitter. Even when it’s not, as with Guinness Stout, the mother’s milk of Ireland, it’s comparable to drinking a loaf of bread. Lemonade makes a lot more sense.

But the siren song of adulthood summons us nevertheless. Peer pressure, coupled with the unique sensation of having a room revolve around you while shedding an inhibition or 20, makes beer drinking an inevitable right of passage.

Beer commercials build on this momentum. Most of the people you see in them are young, athletic and happy. Which provokes the question: Why is the average beer drinker middle aged, pear shaped and prone to yelling at the TV? Especially after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunctioned.

What happened? How did all those tight-ab party animals morph into a pod of beached whales? Must be the corrosive effects of pure mountain spring water. But the negative stereotypes surrounding beer consumption could vanish if we are to have longevity served up to us on draft.

This improvement comes just in time to save the beer trade, under siege by the Atkins Diet. Because Americans seeking to shed pounds have all but abandoned the carbohydrate, clobbering the bread and pasta industries, as well as purveyors of liquid malt.

I knew the Atkins craze had gone too far when, at a recent neighborhood party, someone offered me a bottle of low-carb beer. It looked like normal beer, but shortly after I performed a Jekyll-to-Hyde dry heave in the kitchen sink, it occurred to me that something was amiss.

I don’t know what an isolated carbohydrate tastes like, but its absence from beer places the revised beverage on a taste scale somewhere between warm saliva and a glass of pureed caterpillar. This chemical vivisection of a proud alcoholic tradition could be squelched if health-obsessed Americans are persuaded that beer will add years to their lives.

Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle, the company that came up with this new product, is a former monastic brewing establishment — a little alcohol takes the sting out of celibacy — with a target market that includes the U.S., Poland and South Korea. For some reason, that threesome is hilarious. Proving once and for all that Germans do have a sense of humor, at least when they’re not bent on world conquest.

One other marketing issue should be noted, in addition to the algae. There’s some uncertainty in English-speaking society about how the name of the new brew will go over. Klosterbrauerei calls their new product Bathbeer.

It might be cute. A little rubber ducky on the label. Hops on a rope. Plastic bottles that double as tub toys.

But if it tastes anything like bath water, I’ll take the heart attack.

glen.slattery@creativeloafing.com


Glen Slattery is tapped out in Alpharetta.