Bracing Pep
I’m not entirely sure, but I may have been the first person ever to drink an ALE8 in Madagascar. CC gets a great big HOWDY for sending TWO bottles of Eastern Kentucky Ambrosia our way. (CA and HL get a HOWDY too for transporting said ALES in their luggage from the US to Mg.) One bottle has already been drunk, and I’m going to hide the other in a safe place away from KP, who’s also rather fond of an ALE8 every now and again.
Friend, if you’ve never had the privilege of tasting the glorifying power contained in an ALE8, I urge you to do so now. Like cocaine or heroin, that first taste of ALE8 is powerful, heady stuff—a soul-shaking event that’ll rock your world. And try as you might to relive that first sensation, your search will be in vain; it’s never the same.
The Madagascar ALE8 was evocative of that first sip, which is about as close as you can hope to come. It transported me back 14 years to sophomore year at UK. I was with the Burch and he wanted my first ALE8 to be special, so we drove in his old, red Toyota pickup out to the ALE8 machine, near Grater’s Ice Cream Shoppe. The machine was twice special: it dispensed long-neck bottles of ALE8—the kind of old-fashioned bottles that you paid a deposit on—and, given the right climatic conditions, it served iced ALEs. You won’t know if you’ve got an iced ALE until you crack open the bottle cap and take that first swig. If you’re lucky and conditions are right, after the first pull the temperature equilibrium achieved inside the machine is broken and the liquid undergoes a spontaneous phase change, becoming an instant slushy. My first ALE8 iced, and was pure magic.
So magical was it that afterwards I began to bestow the drink with mystical powers. Nights before chemistry exams I would wrap my class notes around an ALE8 (always a long-neck, of course) and let it sit in the fridge over night so the information might become infused in the liquid. Then, on the way to the exam, I would sip the ALE8 and literally internalize the material. The results were always good, so I took this as a positive sign and looked for other areas of my life where I could apply the powers of ALE8. My convictions were strong. How else can I explain after having my wisdom teeth extracted, and still under the effects of anesthesia, telling the dental assistant that I wouldn’t need any pain medication as long as I had a six-pack of ALE8 waiting for me at home. True story, I swear. Oh, those were the days.
I wasn’t alone in my ALE8 mania (for better or worse). A tight band of brothers formed around the power and lore of ALE8 that year, and we sure had some good times together. We made late-night runs to convenience stores combing their stock of ALEs for vintage deposit bottles from years gone by. We made a pilgrimage to the factory in Winchester to pay homage to the source. We held meetings and initiated fellow believers, and stood in solidarity against the ALE8-haters. One brother even spent a night in jail defending the honor of ALE8 against the haters: Nobody calls ALE8 "Eastern Kentucky Swamp Water” without paying a heavy toll, that’s for damn sure.
Those were good times and good friends. To my ALE brothers wherever you are: To each their own, but to all an ALE8.
