I don’t know how others first tasted alcohol - whether you snuck dad’s beers and shotgunned them beneath the bleachers furtively as a teen, or if you perhaps were allowed to raid the liquor cabinet as though it were not actually locked… but here’s how I first had a diluted beer.
I haven’t had something like this in many years, and in having a drink of this last night bought on a whim… I stepped through time.
Warm summer nights in the 90s, knee high to a grasshopper, sipping a shandy in suburbia at sunset - I had no idea what it was to be cool, I just liked what I was drinking. I need to contextualise how we got to this first, though.
Despite the wall of options at the Sainsbury’s shown earlier in this thread… what I left with was this.
My dad’s a weird combination of upbringing conditions - continental European and British thanks to his folks, son of a war veteran and a refugee, then he was brought up elsewhere. We had a very famous neighbour who dad scared the absolute living shit out of between a loud voice and crazy shit like throwing knives with me in the backyard as a very young kid - doing some very trailer park tier stuff in an upper middle class suburb for a few years like it was normal while other kids rode bikes… then he put on his suit and tie and would go be corporate all week. It was like a harder edged Malcolm In The Middle vibe.
In keeping with the European vibe of letting a kid try wine, dad’s spin on it was that when we were having dinner as a family on a hot night, outside, sat around a big, inelegant green picnic table, he drank beer, and I drank a concoction of beer and lemonade called a Shandy as an 8 or 9 year old. Mum did NOT like it. I absolutely loved it.
