Happy Beer Day: Garrison Keillor, A Glass of Wendy from "Leaving Home"
"Wendy's is the beer a man drinks because it's the best. It's made from the deep wellwater from the town of Saint Wendell's ... Wendy's is made from it, using an old German recipe, by people who have worked for Dimmers Brewery so long they don't remember if they were hired or if they took a vow. The old brick brewery was supposed to resemble a Bavarian castle, but when it was built, in 1879, bricklayers had beer rights: there was two-fisted day-long drinking on the job. When the layers got on high scaffolding, it made them dizzy. So the building starts out to be a castle and rises royally for two stories and then it quits and becomes a sort of barn. The bricks for the towers were used to make a brick road because the layers felt more comfortable on their hands and knees. The brick road is a hundred feet wide for about seventy-five feet and then it's seventy-five feet for one hundred feet and then it becomes a path.
"You think of this as you sit in an old dim bar and drink a Wendy, and you think of how the beer wagons kept rolling in Saint Wendell's through Prohibition. They trained the horses to make the deliveries, and these smart Percherons memorized complicated beer routes -- stop here, skip two houses, stop there -- and when they stopped, a guy ran out of the house and grabbed his beer. The horses didn't make change but they did everything else, but of course if a horse got on the sauce himself, he might get mixed up, but usually they did the job and if the sheriff came, all he found was a wagon and a horse with red eyes and bad breath. ... In Minneapolis, you go to any hotel or shopping mall and find an English pub or a Western saloon or small-town tavern with a name like BILLY BOB'S, but the antiques come from the antique factory and the concept was developed by a design team ... but those aren't the same as a joint where people have sat for fifty years, and all of them people you know. It's the difference between a lie and the truth. It's not true that Wendy's is the best beer in the world, actually it's not that good. And it gives me terrible gas."
The beer I drank tonight, which I bought only for the pretty cherry blossom can:
