Beer of the Week: Double D Blonde

Once we get past the name of Double D Blonde, the wheaty, quick-drinking blonde ale out of Oregon's Hop Valley Brewing Company, you can appreciate it as a hoppy little number that won't offend you, won't overwhelm you. It's lager-golden and keg-ready at 20 IBU and 4.9 percent abv. It has a sharp note upfront that hits the sides of the tongue and snaps more strongly than your typical football-watching beer.

In this, I'm assuming a typical football-watching beer is a bladder-filler like Coors Light or Miller Lite, beers that do a great job of staying wet and are in your stomach before they warm a single degree. They have almost no taste because they need almost no taste. The ritual is in the cracking, the tipping, the finishing, the repeating. You could do that with Double D Blonde - it's much more drinkable cold than even a bit warmer. At the front it has notes of citrus and spice. If it rises a couple of degrees, it has stronger notes of hatred and despair. It's welcome at first, but you're better off not letting it stick around your mouthspace too long. Crack it, tip it, finish it.

We wonder, then, why do we name such a party beer after the first girl most men would approach at the bar. Or is that true, that guys go for a certain hair color and torso dimension? I figure most dudes are omnidirectional attention-slinging machines, basing any dedicated wooing on the three-point assessment (face, then body, then left ring finger) but I'm not sure I'm any more attracted to a beer called Double D Blonde than I would be to a beer called Brunette Who Can Wolf-Whistle or Girl With Curious Hair. The most interesting people are rarely the ones who are approached most often. Visuals are so often misleading, but they're all we have to go on, so sometimes you wind up talking to the wrong person because the person looked promising, but what you really need to do is tilt your cup, tilt your cup, smile, nod and double back to the keg because your beer got warm and started tasting like unsalted sweat. Shake it up, troglodytes. The world includes more than double-d blondes, blessedly.

Suggested game pairings for this week: It's straight out of Ducks country, so Arizona at Oregon tonight is a must. Going with the blonde theme, Air Force at UNLV, not that anyone's going to see that. Tomorrow, pour a tall glass for Philadelphia visiting the bottle-blonde Arizona, but knock it back quickly and then move along.