Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Beer

I was just minding my own business the other day when I was informed that beer only stays good for 3 months!! Oh my, I thought, I have some beer that is older than that...

After some discrete inquiries I learned that beer does have a shelf life, but it is longer than 3 months. However, I was challenged with the response of why on earth would one keep beer for that long? Logically, when you consider the competition - beer versus cocktails - cocktails win 80% of the time.

The immediate concern was what to do about the beer?
  • At first I thought I could have some friends over and drink it, of course keeping the hard liquor locked up for the evening. BUT, what if the beer was bad, I would die of mortification if I served bad beer.
  • I thought I could throw it away and start fresh, but the idea of wasting potentially good beer knotted my stomach and I quickly discarded the notion.
  • My third thought was to test it to confirm its quality.
If the beer was still good then I could share it. BUT then I realized that I should employ some statistical test on a sample of the bottles to determine the proportion of bottles that were good and bad; with the hope that the majority of them were good. Because really, if I sampled only one bottle luck of the draw would result in me testing the only good bottle. However I soon realized that I would have to drink every bottle to confirm the quality. My plan was to drink one beer a day, solely for purposes of testing the beer. I say "was" because it didn't turn out quite as I anticipated. I am not a hard core beer drinker, which really I should have guessed based on my preference for cocktails.

However, after five days of drinking beer I had to take a break. My body was designed to drink cocktails as frequently as I desire, but not beer. =)

I've taken a week off and I think I am ready for another testing session, but I think I will limit it to three days for health reasons, as well as concern for the public at large. At this rate I should have all the beer drunk within say six weeks... at the earliest. To date although I have drank five beers, somehow 11 new beer appeared in my house... It has me stumped too. I'll keep you posted. =)

3 comments:

Janet said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Janet said...

You know, I can never keep beer in the fridge because I will drink one every day with dinner. In one week a six pack just disappears. However, I did have a bottle of vodka that hung out in my cupboard untouched for three years!

I would have come over and helped you test your beer and if the beer happened to be bad? Well then we would just start in on the cocktails!

Anonymous said...

Nicole, there is no such thing as bad free beer. There is only good free beer and less good free beer.

Chris E.