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. =)