featuring…
♫ Seasick Steve, Man From Another Time
🍺 Hopfenstopfer Incredible Pale Ale
Words & photos: Vincent Abbate
Last Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the Who Is Blues Listening Party. (Thanks for the reminder, Facebook.) Sitting here today on a cold, dull gray afternoon, I recognize that coming up with the idea for this regular celebration of beer-and-blues in the middle of January was no accident. I hate January.
Once the familiar warmth and boozy partying of the holidays passes, January turns dreary in a hurry. Armed with good intentions, you tell yourself the new year is a chance to reinvent yourself. To make a new start. But where I’m from, things can’t get rolling until the kids are back in school and businesses get up and running again. By then, it’s mid-January and your forward momentum has ground to a halt. Even in normal times, there is a dearth of concerts in winter. Life seems to have been put on hold. Yet the clock is ticking away the whole time, silently, unceasingly, a stealthy adversary.
Then – WHAP! – in the seeming blink of an eye, January is over and you realize one-twelfth of the year has already vanished down the drain.
As if that weren’t enough reason to get a bad case of the blues, there’s this.
Unlike the protagonist of Seasick Steve’s song, I don’t like the dark and it is not my friend. I wonder how people up around the Arctic Circle survive winter. I wouldn’t. My mood is seasonally affected even at the 51st parallel. I need and crave light.
But there’s always beer and music, right?
Man From Another Time is a 2009 masterpiece from the aforementioned Seasick Steve. I’ll be exploring it with the help of Hopfenstopfer Incredible Pale Ale from Germany’s Häffner Bräu.
Just saying “Hopfenstopfer” puts a smile on my face. Drinking it promises to be even better.
