October 18, 2017 Article

The Old Coot can’t taste the difference.

By Merlin Lessler

It started with wine. Wine tastings to be specific, that complicated analysis of wine qualities: nose, legs, body, tartness, zest, oak tones, fruit hints and the like.  Descriptions that go on, ad nauseam. Rarely getting to the only thing that matters, “Does it taste good?”

Then, it moved to coffee. Starbucks lured us into a gourmet world of caffeinated beverages and made a long and steady pull on our pocketbooks, forcing Dunkin Donuts and other coffee vendors to follow suit. There aren’t many places left to order a cup of Joe and not get a puzzled look from the server.

Now, beer is in the game. What was used to be a simple selection process: beer or ale? Pick your brand. Some brands offered bock beer in the fall, but that was it, an uncomplicated selection process. Then came light beer, starting an avalanche of options. Dark beers, lemony beers, non-alcoholic beers, hoppy beers and now, hundreds more, as craft beers have gone mainstream. And, like wine, there are tastings, and a host of descriptive terms to describe the variations. It’s becoming harder and harder to buy a cheap glass of beer, a tragedy of crisis proportions for me and my fellow old coots, the world’s greatest cheapskates. It’s just beer to us, what once was the low priced adult beverage, but not anymore; the cost of that amber liquid with a frothy white head has increased, along with difficulty to know what to order as you gaze down a line of taps as long as a bowling alley. 

Wine snobbery, beer snobbery, what’s next? Not water. That commonplace, everyday beverage went snobbish decades ago when imported, bottled French water moved the price tag higher than a gallon of gasoline. It’s just a matter of time before the next commodity is repackaged and marketed to appeal to the snob in us. At a higher price of course. But, what will it be? Peanut butter? Kool-Aid? It’s too late for a lot of food items. The organic movement has been making inroads into the grocery industry for several years now. The simple egg has been reborn as a high priced “healthy” variation, Eggland’s Best. Tomatoes and other vegetables have a dual price option, the demonized regular variety, and the politically correct, organic choice, which are the same crops we grew in our back yards, practically for free. Now, we pay dearly for them. I’m going to get some of my old cronies together over a glass of cheap beer and see if we can figure out a way to afford to continue to eat and drink in the new gourmet world we live in.    

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