When I was in kindergarten, our teacher asked each student to name something that was always in the fridge at home.
Most children quickly responded with apples or cheese or orange juice, but as a future beer connoisseur, my thoughts were elsewhere. My answer was beer.
I drew a simple childish drawing of a Budweiser can, and my teacher, Mrs. Waddell, was more than a little befuddled. When I came home and told my parents, they were bemused. “You could have picked anything in the fridge!” my mother said. “We always have eggs and butter in the fridge too, why didn’t you pick those?” my father asked. They recognized the humor in the situation though, as they still regale friends with this story.
It’s true, our fridge was a veritable cornucopia of chilled foodstuffs, yet nothing piqued my interest quite like that red and white can. Of course, the reason we had those beer cans in the fridge was rather unusual. Budweiser, it turns out, makes for an excellent slug poison. For my green-thumbed father, slugs were the scourge of his existence when he was tootling around in the yard, and he was always looking for ways to defeat the slimy parasites.
My father couldn’t drink the beers anyway, as he had been diagnosed with celiac disease many years before. That means he is extremely allergic to gluten, and too much of it can be deadly. Thus, sadly, he cannot have beer in its truest form.
