I’ve been contemplating shaving my head because it’s so hot. Joanna doesn’t want me to, so she gave me a haircut instead. (She wasn’t too thrilled about it being any shorter, but it was getting silly.) It took her half an hour and it kept getting shorter. Had I not taken a nap and/or washed my hair before having her cut it, I think she would have had an easier time. Since I don’t really care too terribly much about how it looks, I’m happy with it if she’s happy with it. Paying someone to cut hair just seems silly.

Mom sent me a meat thermometer, so I cooked a roast I bought a couple months ago. Roast and asparagus. I even cooked the asparagus the way Joanna likes it (properly) whereas I liked it sauteed until it’s no longer chewy, and then a little more so it’s a little browned. That is, I like it very much overcooked in lots of butter with garlic and salt.

So we talked about buying some wine to drink with dinner, but there’s almost nothing under $15/bottle that Joanna will like, so we bought beer instead.

Oklahoma has some weird beer laws. Really weird. Beer cannot be sold in grocery stores unless it contains no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight. (Keep in mind alcohol is measured % by volume in most of the rest of the world.)

This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. I’ve certainly lived plenty of places where you can’t buy beer in the grocery store at all. Making a separate trip to the liquor store never bothered me much.

3.2% by weight (which is about 4% by volume) is a sufficiently low alcohol content that it would preclude most beers from being sold in the grocery store. Or so you’d think.

Beer manufacturers, in a desperate attempt to sell beer simply produced watered down versions of their beer to sell in grocery stores. And if a couple beer manufacturers do it, they all have to do it in order to be competitive. All major domestic manufacturers play this game. So in the grocery stores you can find Budweiser, Coors… and even Shiner Bock. Shiner Bock, from the little brewery in Shiner, Texas is a long time favourite of ours. Jonah and I started drinking it while we were in Dallas in ’98– It’s nothing terribly special, except when you consider that it’s really cheap, yet tastes like an import. It’s got good flavor, but is mild enough most any beer drinker can tolerate it. We served it at our wedding.

Since we’ve gotten here, we’ve only gotten beer a couple times, but each time we’ve bought some Shiner at the grocery store. And it just tasted a little weak, lacking in flavor somehow. I started thinking that maybe I’d just outgrown shiner and didn’t like it anymore. And then one of my flight instructors mentioned Oklahoma’s 3.2 beer laws. Which he didn’t understand, saying that it was illegal to sell beer greater than 3.2% alcohol in Oklahoma. This didn’t make any sense to me, until I did some research.

A lot of breweries refuse to compromise their beer, and just lose the grocery store sales. Shiner apparently decided that such a large portion of its beer market required grocery store sales, that the only way it could sell in Oklahoma was to produce a 3.2 version. Such a compromise is unlike the reputation that Shiner tries to perpetrate, and so off-putting to me that I’m just not going to buy it here. It might have been one thing if the labels said, “Shiner for Oklahoma,” or printed the fact that it was 3.2 beer on the label. But no, bottle of shiner here is IDENTICAL to a bottle from Texas. You can’t tell by looking.

And it’s not like you can go buy Shiner in the liquor store and have it be the real stuff, if a beer company makes 3.2 beer for Oklahoma (and Utah, actually, has the same law), then everywhere it’s sold in the state it’s the same 3.2 beer.

3.2 beer could probably be served to school kids with little ill effect. Shiner bock is normally only 3.46% alcohol by weight, and you’d think that .26% wouldn’t make much of a difference. It does.

So, Joanna and I stormed off to the liquor store around the corner which is actually closer than the grocery store and were actually amazed at their collection. It’s a very small place that seems to make most of its money selling wild turkey to college kids, but despite the size, one corner is packed with an amazingly great beer selection. I got most excited about several Belgian beers. They sold Kwak, a Belgian beer which I’ve only had twice. The first time was in Belgium, at this really nifty pub which served 300+ beers and had the right glasses for all of them. Kwak has one of the most original glasses I’ve ever seen. The beer is a dark amber with lots of flavor, rather malty, and not at all bitter. I generally like my Belgian beer a little fruity, but Joanna doesn’t like fruity so much. They also had a belgian beer I’d never heard of before, which we haven’t tried yet, and Hacker-Pschorr. I’m new to Hacker-Pschorr, it’s German, and almost all the German beer you can get in this country is lacking in flavor but really bitter. The first time I’d ever seen Hacker-Pschorr was in a pub in Knoxville, and it was so good I was determined to drink it again some day. They were selling three different versions, and we got the Oktoberfest. While very good, it’s not as good as the porter I had before. Joanna and I really liked it as well, so we’re excited about trying the other kinds sometime.

We decided it would be really cool to operate a little beer shop. Not a liquor store so much as a beer shop. And sell a few hundred kinds of beer we’d managed to import from all over the world. Probably not a large enough market base for such a store, but we like the idea.

After dinner, we watched Punch-Drunk love. It stars Adam Sandler, which, we all know, is plenty reason to avoid any movie. But we’d heard that Adam Sandler fans hated this movie, whereas people like me who hate Adam Sandler supposedly liked the movie. It’s directed by P.T. Anderson, who also did Magnolia.

Punch Drunk Love is a short little movie, and it’s very weird, but it’s coherent and does what it does well. It’s far better than Magnolia. It’s a weird movie, which worked on me quite well, because I was really expecting something more along the lines of what Adam Sandler usually does. Overall, I’d say it’s worth seeing.