La Fin du Monde—an Apocalyptic Beer Experience
Aug 13 '01 (Updated Aug 15 '01)
The Bottom Line Don't go to Canada simply to vandalize the property of nathsmom; pick up a case of La Fin du Monde while you're there.
Fireflies danced around the boughs of the pine trees that separate my lawn from my neighbor's. The glowing bugs looked like blinking lights strung across a row of enormous Christmas trees. The whole scene wanted to feel like Christmas, but it didn’t feel like Christmas. It was too hot to feel the least bit yuletidish—stickily and mercilessly hot in the way that Philadelphia is always stickily and mercilessly hot in the summer.
I was sweating as I moved the lawn chairs from their customary shady spot to the crest of the hill upon which our house is built. “Did you want me to bring you a beer?” Mrs. Sloucho called as I adjusted the chairs so that nothing would block our view of the fireworks. “Please,” I replied absently. I didn’t think to say more. I was too busy cursing the trees belonging to a neighbor a few houses down. They get bigger every year, and soon we won’t be able to see the fireworks from our backyard anymore. We’ll have to drive to the park itself and subject ourselves to John Philip Sousa melodies piped through crackling speakers.
My favorite thing about watching the fireworks from my backyard is that it’s quiet, quiet enough for me to savor Mrs. Sloucho’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Few people realize how lovely a song (both melodically and lyrically) our national anthem is. I was looking forward to hearing my wife half-sing, half-whisper the song as an a cappella accompaniment to the pyrotechnics.
She emerged from the house with a glass of iced tea for herself and a bottle of Yuengling Porter for me. When I saw the label on the bottle, I realized it was my own damn fault. She had asked me if I wanted a beer, and I hadn’t specified a preference. Mrs. Sloucho doesn’t drink beer, so there was no way for her to understand how miserable an experience it would be to consume anything as sticky as a porter on a sticky July night in Philadelphia.
Because she had already opened the porter, I had a swig. I didn’t want it to go to waste unless it was as bad as I expected it to be. And while Yuengling Porter is ordinarily one of my favorite beverages, it was, on that evening, even worse than I expected it to be. If I was going to enjoy the fireworks and my wife’s singing, I was going to need something else to drink.
The fireworks would be starting soon. I hurried back down the hill to the house and into the kitchen. I flung the refrigerator door open in search of any beer the least bit suited to the heat and humidity outside. A Tecate would have been nice, but apparently all the Tecate was in the basement refrigerator. I didn’t have time to go down and get one. Mrs. Sloucho was already yelling, “They’ve started! They’ve started!” I remembered putting a half-case of Yuengling Lager in the kitchen refrigerator earlier that week, but I had apparently drunk all twelve during three consecutive nights of grilling.
The only non-porter in the refrigerator had been left by a houseguest. I was waiting for the guest to return and drink it, as I was offended by the fleur-de-lis displayed prominently on the label. Are the French not content to lord their wine manufacturing over the rest of us? Must they get their Gallic fingerprints on beer bottles as well? Some say that the Canadian French are better than the Continental French; some say they’re worse. I say they’re all French. And to drink a French beer on the 4th of July seemed wrong somehow. But to drink a Yuengling Porter seemed even more wrong. So I grabbed the bottle of La Fin du Monde and returned to my lawn chair, a chair that I suddenly felt inclined to call a chaise longue.
My first sip was remarkable. Mrs. Sloucho wasn’t singing yet, but the fireworks were showering the sky with color. The beer washed over my tongue in cascades that seemed to match what I was seeing overhead. All of my taste buds took turns springing into action. At first there was the mild bitterness of the hops. Then I thought I was going to dislike the beer because the sweetness was so strong, but it only lasted a second before fizzling out and giving way to an acidic sourness that left me absolutely craving another sip.
And another.
And another.
I didn’t drink the beer like a beer. I drank it the way I always imagined connoisseurs to drink wine. (I don’t drink wine, so I really have no idea how one is supposed to drink wine.) But as much as I enjoy beer, I rarely find myself performing cunnilingus (in its literal sense of "tonguing the hollow") on a beer bottle. Strangely, though, I couldn’t help myself. I liked the way the beer felt on the underside of my tongue. I liked its champagne-like fizziness. I remembered the line of some monk who said that drinking champagne is like drinking stars, and I wished that I could bring that monk back from the dead just then and give him a swig of La Fin du Monde and say, “Yes, but drinking this beer is like drinking fireworks.”
Although I drink beer (rather a lot of beer in some people’s estimates), I don’t know very much about it. The label of my La Fin du Monde bottle (which I’ve saved) claims that the beer is triple fermented. That sounds expensive and impressive to me, but I have no idea what it means. Neither can I say whether the triple fermentation is what gives this beer such a high concentration of alcohol (9% by volume), but I am unequivocally for anything that can be so jam-packed with alcoholic goodness and such a pleasure to consume.
I drank the beer as slowly as I could, but the only way to make it last until the end was to stop drinking about halfway through the fireworks show and save the final few swigs for the finale. I was eager for the finale when it came. There were several deafening thuds and then a huge white sphere appeared, fully formed, in the sky. It shimmered as eight smaller blue spheres shot out of it. Then the blue spheres began to drip earthward, turning red as they descended.
It was a spectacular sight even before Mrs. Sloucho and I perceived the pitch-black shape of what looked like an American eagle in the center of the white sphere. The shadowy bird became larger and larger. It looked as if it was gliding straight for us, but we were sure it was part of the show.
Then, impossibly, it flapped its wings—twice—and resumed gliding. It was still in the middle of the white sphere; it still appeared to be headed straight for us; it was still jet black against the shimmering background; and it was still getting larger by the second.
It was too perfectly placed to be real—but too realistic to be part of the show.
As I heard the ruffling feathers, I instinctively drained the remainder of my beer into my mouth. I didn’t know what else to do. Thinking about the silhouetted bird only confused me, so the only course of action seemed to be to drink.
Swoosh.
As the glow of the fireworks died, the huge bird (I have no idea what species it belonged to) swooped into the pine branch directly above our heads. It had been flying straight at us with that branch as its objective. Paralyzed by my own confusion, my inability to accept the bird as a coincidence, I hadn’t thought to lower my arm. As I brought my gaze down from the bird overhead to the section of sky where the fireworks had been, I discovered that I was still holding the beer bottle directly in front of my face.
“LA FIN DU MONDE,” read the label.
“You ain’t just whistling Dixie,” I thought.
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This is my contribution to sundogg99’s Great Proletarian Wine Write-Off. I’m so darned proletarian that I figured I could skip the wine part. But as partial justification, I will say that La Fin du Monde has a French name and is made in the French part of Canada and contains as much alcohol as some wines. To a prole such as moi, it might as well be wine.
For more entries in The Great Proletarian Wine Write-Off, check out the profiles of the other participants:
Sundogg99 (host)
mangiotto
sarah_knipper
repulsemonkey
PALWalrus
Mr.Eyore
Fez_Monkey
jkkelley (oenopeonesse, or something like that)
ermitano
kellydeal
ThePirateKing
deaser26
zzjulia
canuckyeti
Or, you could just stop by our web page at: http://www.sundogg.com/tgpwwo.html for links and a cool picture!
Thanks to sundogg99 for hosting and setting up the web page and generally being one of the cooler folks on the epinions site.
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Sloucho
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Member: Mike Davis
Location: Philadelphia
Reviews written: 199
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Read my reviews in order to heal the sick and control the weather. Seriously.
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