leaning, [post] tower

freshman year of college makes drinking beer feel like a chore, so it took me a while to recover and start to appreciate that there is a purpose to knocking back a cold one other than proving to all the frat brother crushing cans on their heads and doing shirtless kegstands that you’re the beer pong partner they didn’t know they were looking for. but by the time i traveled in Europe junior year, i had distanced myself far enough from cases of natty ice and pitchers of bud light to give the brewskie a second chance. i drank beers all the places you’re supposed to drink beers: guiness in dublin. heineken in amsterdam. pints of everything in london (okay blah blah blah it was mostly pints of cider. pub culture! it was still pub culture! cider or beer, it all still makes you start to think that sign hanging over the bar advertising bangers and mash sounds like a great idea.) so even though i still usually pick a glass of white over a pale ale, the fact that i can write usually instead of always is an improvement!

all of this is a very fancy way of saying: lansdowne bar. 44th and 10th.

what, you didn’t get that by reading between the lines of a paragraph about college and europe?
the point is that at this pub-y watering hole, far enough west that it’s more of a destination than a home base, you can order a beer tower. (when i first heard that, i pictured a pile of pints, stacked in a pyramid, a la soup cans in a grocery store. well… i say grocery store, rob trump says hilarious foil of a bowling alley.) what it actually means is only slightly less surreal: for thirty bucks they deliver to your table this six foot clear tube, which holds 120 ounces of beer. before you freak out, that only the equivalent of two pitchers.

okay, freak out now. I DIDN’T KNOW A PITCHER WAS 60 OUNCES EITHER!

there’s a tap at the bottom and that’s basically that. and you can fill it with any beer they have on tap. i would have remembered to ask which ones they had, but we had twin towers (too soon?).