The World's Finest Beverage

Let it be known that the title of this blog is not my intellectual property. Should there ever be a book deal or a Hollywood movie or a bobblehead doll collection spawned from this humble corner of cyberspace, one Dave Getzoff – esteemed college radio disc jockey and longtime contributor to my defunct Now Wave Magazine - will be duly credited and compensated for patenting the phrase “world’s finest beverage”. Will he be paid in beer? Probably.

All the good ideas I had for blog names (e.g. "Top of the Hops") were already taken, but then it dawned on me that "World’s Finest Beverage" had to be it. For most of the year 2007, Dave and I knocked back pints in various drinking establishments all over the city of Philadelphia and points north whilst watching bands such as Jukebox Zeros, Mean Streets, and Beach Patrol play to crowds of dozens. Yuengling and P.B.R. were our go-to draughts, but we downed everything from Brooklyn Lager in Brooklyn to Heineken bottles at the South Philly dive J.R.’s. More often that not, we didn’t refer to what we were drinking as “beer”, but rather as “the world’s finest beverage”. Dave, back in the mid-‘90s, had an under-21 friend who had lamented being legally unable to buy beer, saying, “I don't see what the big deal is - why on earth would anyone have to be 21 just to enjoy the world's finest beverage?” And just like that, a phrase was coined.

Kind of seems appropriate, though. Beer really is the world’s finest beverage. It’s been enjoyed by human beings since the 6th millennium BC. Of all beverages, only water is older – and that hardly counts! And if you’re like me, it’s not at all about the alcohol. It’s about the taste. Great minds from Plato (“He was a wise man who invented beer”) to Benjamin Franklin (“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”) to Homer Simpson (“I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer”) have articulated the sensory delights of tasting good beer. A wise man named Todd Trickknee once said, “I never met a beer I didn’t like”, and that always stuck with me. Whether it’s a pricey IPA, a good old pint of Guinness, or a cheap bottle of rotgut swill, beer is beer. It is delicious. It is thirst-quenching. It brings people together. I’m neither a home brewer nor a beer expert. I do not possess a "refined palate". I’m just a person who enjoys beer writing for other people who like beer. As such, I want to cover everything from Bud to barleywine to Russian imperial stout to malt liquor. And the best part about writing about a beer? I have to drink it first.