For The Confederacy

Day: 125

This morning I shaved myself a wicked new beard in a style that, when I meant new people and they asked;

“What do you do for a living?”

I could reply “I specialize in civil was re-enactments and photography and am working towards my doctorate in civil war history at Northwestern.”

I am aware that it is a bold faced lie, and I don’t really know enough about the civil war to carry on a 5 minute conversation much less write a thesis on, but I don’t think anyone would actually confront me on it, and it seemed like a hell of a fun way to spend a day.

Matt, Chad, and I left our hostel, had a tasty seafood lunch, and meant up with Aaron and Lei Lani at their downtown hotel. We had an entire day in Boston, without any plans, and want to be tourists. Which major attraction would you take in? Yeap, I didn’t think any of you would disagree. We made our way on the T(subway) to the outskirts of Boston to the Sam Adams brewery for a 2 pm tour.

I have been on a couple of the “big” brewery tours in the past (Heiniken and Guinness) but I wasn’t expecting something so small. They took us into a tiny brewery without air conditioning where fifty miserable people sweated for an hour in the climbing humidity and excessive temperatures while some random intern told us all the witty rhetoric of Jim Koch, the founder of Sam Adams. We watched Jim in a few videos and he seemed to really love his beer, and with charming phrases like; “A Brewer and A Patriot” who could resist his goofy charm. I took some pictures of a few brewing tanks, but the bulk of the tour was in one little area and was the live equivalent to a really long commercial.

That is until they funneled us into an undersized bar (where I astutely positioned our group in the back, for beer drinking reasons), that actually did have air conditioning and they passed out 7oz. (200ml) tasting glasses. They spent the first round teaching us how to “taste” beer, about color, smell and what a beer should really be. They passed around three rounds of pitchers of beer for everyone to sample, but after each round we were the last people to get beer so the extra pitchers seemed to funnel into the back of the room where we were standing. The entire tour would have a single glass and we were hiding in the back after each round with a couple of leftover pitchers, slamming our 7oz glasses as quick as we could. Other than a few fireman who were on the tour also (and quickly picked up this tactic for themselves) no one seemed to care that we were drinking so much, probably because the rest of the groups were families with little kids. “Look little Billy, this is how to get drunk really fast on a free tour!”

The beer that was flowing like water quickly stop and our buzzed selfs were ushered into the attached gift shop (surprise, surprise!) before we made our way back to the T to get back into Boston. we wandered around downtown for a while, and even had another couple of rounds before everyone decided that it was naptime so we could still make the most of this evening. Our group split up and went back to our respective sleeping establishments.

By the time we showered off the brewery tour sweat and slept off our buzz, we were back out and it was after dark. Aaron and Lei Lani were having “date night” so the rest of us just grabbed a cab and headed into Feanual Hall area to find some dinner. After a few hours we meant back up with the others and set out to do our own little Bostonian pub crawl. Where I meant lots of people who thought Civil War history was completely interesting.