Libations for Life: Air Travel edition

Much like cuts of meat, every life experience has a drink that enhances the experience. Here is a guide to matching the right libation with the situation. Here’s a glass of happiness to numb the pain of air travel.

 

The Situation: So you’re traveling by airplane, and you’re regretting it. Sure, you save time getting to your destination, but what you gain in efficiency, you lose tenfold in frayed nerves. You have to deal with tons of people, all of whom have the same tense look on their faces; you have to negotiate through this human maze while dragging along a carry-on bag or a laptop (or, heaven forbid, a child); and one of your connecting flights is somewhere in a different county and you have, like, two minutes to get there after you land. This litany of despair doesn’t include delayed flights or being made to go down concrete steps and through a maintenance area to get to the airport’s “shuttle service” (looking at you, O’Hare). You need a pain reliever and need it fast.

The Solution: A big ol’ beer.

The Suggestion: Cold. In a glass. And lots of it.

The Explanation: Look, when you’ve been running around airports all day just to sit in cramped, pressurized spaces with a couple hundred heat machines disguised as human beings, you’re ready to drink motor oil if it’s cold enough. However, you also need something that can settle the obvious intensity of air travel, but not down too much in case you have to keep your wits about you to hit a connecting flight. So something that calms but peps at the same time.

Enter beer … glorious, life-saving beer. It’s cold. It’s got energy-giving fizz. And it has enough alcohol to make you temporarily forgive that little brat who kept kicking you from seat B16. Throw in a bit of flavor in the form of an amber beer, and you’ve got a respite from the rat race.

The hoppy happiness pictured partially salvaged one brutal trip for me that included getting sick in Charlotte before going to Chicago for yet another flight. At airports, beer should be served in life preservers. Happy travels.