I am currently drinking something called Evil Twin Imperial Biscotti Break at our local after writing Christmas Thank You Notes to family, a habit that I have contentedly allowed to fall to the wayside along with a raft of other Proper Southern Manners, but which I have now had cause to take back up after marrying Shannon, a Midwesterner.

Midwestern Manners are not all that different from Southern Manners, I now realize.  They share an emphasis on maintaining the propriety of presentation even, perhaps especially, if the meat & potatoes of a situation, interaction, etc. is spoiled and everyone would truly be happiest if that situation, interaction, etc. were just pulled out of the crisper, bagged up, and tossed in the can.  Midwestern Manners, however, are far more stubborn.  Midwesterners are going to send their Christmas Thank You Notes even if the cow has died and the tobacco crop had caught worms and the four youngest caught chills on the prairie and died in January but couldn’t be buried until the land thawed in March.

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Southerners, at least in Jay’s Evil Twin Biscotti Break-lens’d South, are going to abandon the Christmas Thank You Notes sometime in between the crop catching worms and Annabelle Mae catching pneumonia.  They don’t get the luxury of leaving Annabelle in the barn for two months.  They’ve got to get her in the ground pronto because they need to stay on-point to address the next plague visited by an endlessly needling Wrathful God.  That Wrathful God obviously holds Slavery a worse transgression than Indian Genocide, and a person needs to accept this fact and be prepared.  If that means that Christmas Thank You Notes get cut quick from the roster of civilized society, well, knee-jerk “Sir”s and “Ma’am”s will just have to make up the difference.  And give the Ma’am’s with extra emphasis to old African American women.  That’s only right and proper.

So, Evil Twin Imperial Biscotti Break.  It’s a double stout.  Imperial, I get, but break what, I don’t know.  I can say, however, that whether as an accompaniment to writing Christmas Thank You Notes or to typing ramblings so that Shannon doesn’t get too pissed at you for dropping the Blog Ball, this is a fine alcoholic beverage.  It comes not in your standard 16-ounce glass but the slim-shouldered, wide-hipped 12-ounce glass that lets you know your Craft Beer is High Test (a phrase taken from my mother, incidentally, who has probably only drunk four glasses of beer in her entire life but uses “high test” to differentiate between decaf and regular coffee).

Evil Twin’s Biscotti is 11.5%, I believe.  Its trace of froth at the top of the glass is red at the curvature of the bubbles, which I find neat because I don’t know how or why that is the case.  It also tastes quite a bit like a chocolate milkshake, though in an adult way, not tasting of childhood in the way that Camel used to make Cotton Candy-flavored cigarettes, etc.

No, this Biscotti Break is a bit sweet, sweeter than biscotti, actually, which isn’t all that sweet, as far as my mouth can currently recall.  It’s smooth, too, actually tasting a bit like that sweet spot in an ice cream soda when the ice cream has stopped being ice cream and has now turned currents of your root beer into an oil slick of sugar and milk.  So maybe it tastes like an ice cream float rather than a shake.  Why ghettoize it, really?  Let it do its thing.

So what the hell is a beer Break in this context?  I guess I’ll go online to see.  Give me a sec…

(insert on the bar’s stereo AC/DC singing/swinging “Touch Too Much,” an underplayed and scabrously witty stuttering blues rock piece…)

 Well, when I google, “What is ‘break’ in beer,” my first hit is: How to Break a Beer Bottle with Your Bare Hands: 5 Steps.

I have lived that life already, and am happy to pass that hit up.  Subsequent hits turn up a story on bears breaking into a cabin and drinking 100 cans of beer.

So I’ll shift and google the name of the beer itself…

Okay, Beer Advocate tells me that my Sunday evening libation (chosen because I have an unusually tenacious cold and have determined that a stout worthy of medieval monks would surely be medicinal) is made in Denmark.  The New Yorker just ran a piece on how Brits are currently infatuated with the Danes, an infatuation that has created skyrocketing rates of British women seeking artificial insemination from Danish donors and adds proclaiming “Congratulations, It’s a Viking!,” which all makes me feel a bit more cogently the Imperial proclamation in my Biscotti Break’s name.

Beer Advocate also tells me that, “The Roman Empire had a certain “je ne sais quoi” – festive food culture, extravagant architecture, and spectacular live entertainment. Some might argue the Emperors were brutal, mad, and hungry for power, and the people vain when taking baths and working out all day. Listen – that’s still all part of the secret Imperial ingredient – keep it cool, clean, confident, arrogant, and flamboyant. Forza Imperiale.”

Goddamn, 21^st Century Marketing!!  You have to give props for the reduction of all historical fact to the Lincoln Log’ing of Sales Pitch Language.

Roland Barthes should be ecstatic.  Flip to whatever page, boy, and dig your meaning from your immediate sensation!!!

Anyway, Caesars digging human blood sports with class… So Evil Twin Imperial Biscotti Beer is, at heart, a Southern beer!  Like Southern imperialness, it is used up fairly quickly.  Like the region of the country that damn near completely created all of the music of the United States (and thus of the last century), it has some tasty-ass notes.  And like an America, whether playing in the backyard with an assault rifle or gaming how to work Burger King beyond the Green Zone in Kabul, it wears its will-to-power on its sleeve.   Biscotti Break isn’t sitting on the dock of the bay.  It’s buying that shit and then leasing it out.

Unlike Jay, however (who has just been thrown a bit from the tat-sleeved bartender chick’s switch from AC/DC to Otis Redding), Biscotti Break stays smooth and yummy.

I do sincerely wish, though, that the curvature of my own personal froth had traces of red.  Can I get a little nod to Powhatan out there?  Maybe a fist??  Only if you mean it, though.  Don’t be a fucking poseur.  A Wrathful God hates a poseur.

Okay, now that that’s settled…  I will now be satisfied waiting here in Brooklyn and for another trip west to rise into my vision so that the Less Wrathful God of the Midwest can visit some of that red froth on me somewhere down the line.