So. This is perhaps the best example why the decision to publish the ‘ancient’ Diary entries as-is was a bit of a Zen exercise. I like Duvel a lot, for inherent and circumstantial reasons. I have done so since I first had it, here on Christmas Day in 2004. But I clearly wasn’t a proper Beer Nerd at all, yet, because I just blithely call it a lager. The shame. The nearly-unutterable shame.

But hey, everyone starts ignorant, right? Ignorance is not a problem, what you do with it is. And you can’t really be blamed for mistakes like these, when some breweries go out of their freaking way to muddy the waters about beer styles and perpetuate the simple-but-wrong idea that golden is lager and non-golden is ale.

Verbatim: Duvel. 330ml, $5, at Wellington, on Christmas. It’s sunny, so a lager with lunch. Bubbles aplenty, nice cloudy gold. Full flavour, but not bitter. Malty, Dad says. Nicely complex smell and taste, but not at all too much. Goes brilliantly with timing and weather.

Afterthoughts, October 2010: “At Wellington” means at my family’s house; so many entries are just tagged “at home”, and sometimes that gets tricky to define — here I was at the house where I grew up and lived for twenty-something years, but I also had a permanent-enough place of my own that “home” became an ambiguous word. Which leads to wonderful sentences like “as soon as I get home I should make sure I buy a plane ticket home”. Huh?

The little “meanwhile” note is also evidence that my take-the-damn-notebook-with-you habit hadn’t yet properly formed. The next entry is from three months later; I must’ve remembered that I’d had those in the intervening time. I have no idea how many other entries fell through the gap between bad habits and bad memory. I suppose that’s why I should keep a Diary. (And why I do.)