This holiday break I found inspiration and a nifty new hat at the same place.
Like most other students, I spent the month off at home with my family. I hail from t he small town of Sonoma, Calif., which is also home to the finest wines of the California region. My time in Sonoma was mainly spent partying with high school friends at night and during the day either sitting on the couch switching from ESPN, Comedy Central and CNN or going through physical therapy to recover from a severely broken ankle I suffered this summer.
Needless to say, while I was relaxing I soon found myself drifting into a kind of stupor. I stopped reading newspapers, watched CNN with a bored eye and became generally uninformed and lazy.
I don’t know what could have awoken me from this state; I probably would have just drifted through the holiday season until I came back to Eugene. But as is so often the case in life, I was struck by an awesome inspiration in the most unexpected place.
In what some would call a juxtaposition of opposites, right over the Napa County line and outside the strip mall and subdivide town of Fairfield, Calif., which is located in Solano County, about 45 minutes away from Sonoma, is a Budweiser brewery. My girlfriend, Christine, suggested that it would be fun to take the free tour, and so my friends and I decided to go.
The four of us took the 30-minute tour and could not help but be impressed. Most people might know Budweiser is the No. 1 selling beer in America, but few may realize Bud Light is the second. One out of every two beers sold in the United States is made by Anheuser-Busch.
Each day the five main breweries brew millions of gallons of beer, and the Fairfield operation alone makes more than 2 million a day and can fill 2.6 million 12 oz. cans or 1.4 million 12 oz. bottles a day. There are 45 beechwood aging tanks at the Fairfield facility that hold 50,000 gallons of beer each, which is impressive until you consider that the St. Louis, Mo., brewery has three times the number of tanks. Anheuser-Busch can make more beer than most countries. Even though the Budvar brewery in Czech Republic may have coined the Budweiser name, Anheuser-Busch has made it a world-wide legend.
Taking all this in from our tour guide (who actually graduated from the same high school as my friends and me), I was inspired by not only the Anheuser-Busch corporation’s awesome beer production capability, but also by our own nation. Only a country like the United States of America has the power and resources to devote to such a product as beer. Sure all those specialty beers that folks here in Eugene love are great, I like them myself, but I discovered on that day in Fairfield that Budweiser can be seen as a symbol of our national power. And when you see the enormous capacity of the Budweiser plant, you begin to understand the power of this nation. When I considered this I realized that I was indeed lucky to be a part of America and that shell of indifference began to crack. I regained some of my enthusiasm and lost that laziness. So the next time you see me in a local watering hole, I won’t hold it against you that you may be drinking a Black Butte Porter, but I’ll be drinking a cold Bud and toasting the U.S.A.
Oh, and the hat? I picked that up at the brewery gift shop.