Pensacola is not a beer drinking town. I decided this just the other day when I was trying to find a place close enough to Pensacola where I could drive to get a case of Leinenkugel's or two. In case some of you are unfamiliar, Leinenkugel's is brewed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and is my favorite beer. Check out my Beer webpage for further details.

Anyway, I found out that there was a distributor for Leinie's in Gulfport, Mississippi, which is only about 2 hours from here - not too bad for a beer run. So I emailed the distributor, and they told me that they only get the Leinie's Red in kegs, they don't sell to the public, and that there were four places in Gulfport that serve the Leinie's Red. Big bummer.

And it kind of pissed me off. Because, you really can't get what I consider good beer in this town. I mean, sure, the standards are there. You can get a Bass or an Anchor Steam at your local bar or liquor store, but you can't find anything that I grew up with in Iowa. No Old Style (piss). No Special Export (piss). You can't even get Pabst Blue Ribbon down here.

You're probably saying, "So what?" You can get crappy beer like Southpaw down here for $5 and change per 12-pack, and it's 5% alcohol, too. But I just don't like the taste as much as I did those other piss beers. They're just different.

My wife and I were in Belleville visiting relatives once, and we went to a local tavern to have a beer. And they had Stag in a bottle there. Stag! It used to be made right there in Belleville. My wife didn't like it. It was piss, but it was local piss! It's just like in Decorah, there was a little place called T-Bock's, and you could get a bowl of Schmidt (the bowl was a kind of glass they had that didn't resemble a bowl at all) for like fifty cents. It was piss, but it was on tap, cheap, and that's just what you drank when you went to T-Bock's.

There are no places like that here in Pensacola. It just seems like all of the bars here don't serve anything special. It's all Michelob Light. This town, especially the beaches, are pretty much filled with Michelob Light. I hate that stuff! Sure, it's piss just like everywhere else, but it's not even original piss.

So come on, Pensacola! Suck it up and get original! I'm getting bored with the scene.