Well well well if it isn't the first real Worth a Shot post.

Breakfast beers for Georgia

Hey, it’s Will. I used to write Drinking the Bottom Shelf for Serious Eats, then Drunkspin and fast food reviews for Deadspin, a beer comparison column for Men’s Health or Men’s Fitness or one of those, some beer stuff for VinePair, plus sports for Boston.com for a bit too. Then I spent few years as a back-line troop in the Selling People Shit They Don’t Need wars, but when plague struck the stock market fired me faster than you can say “We’re sorry, Will, but we’re going to have to let you go” (faster because they skipped the “We’re sorry” part).

Since then I’ve been absorbing wisdom every day and absorbing two double IPAs and a half pound of spaghetti for breakfast as I listen to Brian Lehrer in bed some of the days, but not most of them. Most days it’s just the wisdom, which I have decided to share on a semi-daily or perhaps I mean bi-daily basis, who is to say, as I’ve neither settled on a posting schedule nor learned what those prefixes mean. 

My promise to subscribers is the following: I will recommend things to you, always at least one beer per post*, and usually something else. The initial not-beer recommendations will probably skew toward things to eat and drink, for those are likely the topics that brought us together in the first place. Then once the bait is set, I’ll switch it on over to a wider range of possibilities that inches me closer to my ultimate goal of telling you exactly how to live every second of your life. Now drop and give me 20!

Which brings us to giving me 20. Don’t, for now, either pushups or dollars. No pushups, because what the fuck am I going to do with 20 of your sad, flaccid pushups? Stuff them into the bitcoin vending machine at South Station? As for dollars, I clearly haven’t earned any yet. Should our love ever devolve into the sort of grand and greasy union in which it’s appropriate for money to change hands, we’ll know. 

For now I’m just looking for something to focus on, ideally something that connects me to other human beings in the tenuous online way that’ll need to suffice for all us smarts at least until we’re 21 days past our second stab and ready to again burden the physical world with our timeless classic foibles and flaws, plus whatever new shit-tricks we’ve picked up in a year-plus of this degraded, degrading pandemic existence. 

I don’t intend to focus on Covid-19 any more than strictly necessary, which is to say it’ll come up a fair bit these first several months because hey pal, you signed up for a newsletter written by a person living in America in 2021. I’m all for escapism and I’ll try to join you on as many fanciful or at least denialful flights as possible, but, again, I’m coming at you from deep inside the colon of our shared reality. This isn’t intended to be your 11th rewatch of Friends. First off, we don’t necessarily like each other, never mind live across the hall and intermittently bang in increasingly stupid combinations. Second off, fuck that show. It sucks. 

So we won’t be discussing any more pandemiciana than we have to. I’m also going to steer reasonably clear of politics-as-sport, whatever went down on Twitter yesterday, Gritty (he rules, and I have nothing to add) foodstuff classification (I’ll mention if a thing is good, but won’t get sogged down by whether it’s an authentically Omahan interpretation of itself), dumbo op-eds and insider media beeves, hard seltzer (just not interested in the topic!), parenting (fascinating and important and not at all my beat), and New York as a concept or a city or a place to buy a breakfast sandwich from a cat (I love NYC, but who cares). 

All right, thanks for reading and/or signing up to read in the future. Tomorrow or whenever we’ll kick it off proper with unveiling of the best beer I drank in 2020, plus I hope a couple jokes or compliments or whatnot for those of you who are too good-looking to care what I drink. For the uglies who want to hold me to the premise of this whole thing on Day One: Today you should drink Maggie’s Farmhouse Peach, a sweet 5.3% ABV fruited saison from Terrapin Beer Co. in Athens, GA. As for the day’s bonus recommendation, it’s to please get off my back if this beer is bad or retired or otherwise undesirable or unavailable. I had it a few years ago on vacation and recall liking it at least in the “hey, I’m on vacation and this is beer and therefore awesome!” way, and I’m just trying to squeeze some Georgia love in here today.

*Breweries used to send me tons of free samples. They stopped doing that a few years and addresses ago, but should they rediscover god’s light, I’ll always disclose whatever bribery was associated with a given recommendation. My secret dream for this newsletter is for alcohol distribution laws to get loose enough that I can defile each Beer of the Day with a little click-to-buy button that somehow delivers unto me a dime for every six-pack sold--in which case the corruption will get intense, but again, always disclosed!