The right beer makes for happy campers

It wasn’t until I was a college student that I was introduced to the concept of camp beer, and even then, it was by one of my English professors.

He had two children; the daughter was an undergrad like me, the son was a grad student. Both were studying to be English teachers.

I got to know the family pretty well, hung out with the kids and sometimes the parents. To most people, the whole family must have seemed deadly serious and eggheaded, but they were really a fun-loving bunch.

For some reason, they took a shine to me. And when summer rolled around, they invited me to visit them at the cabin they rented every year in northern Minnesota.

I expected they would act very much the same in the wild as they did in their comfortable home, so I braced myself for an erudite weekend.

Ho, ho, was I in for a surprise.

Their camp was a small cabin on a grassy knoll overlooking a still lake. As I drove up to the cabin, I saw a hill of blue Hamm’s beer cans piled outside a cabin window.

There was a light drizzle, so everyone was in the cabin, playing cards – Uno, it turned out. I walked in and saw all four of them – mom, pop, the two kids – seated at a small kitchen table next to a window. A can of Hamm’s stood in front of each of them.

“Camp beer. Best kind there is,” the glassy-eyed professor said as he handed a can to me.

As the evening progressed, the professor and his family told me the principle behind camp beer – it has to be cheap, and you have to bring lots of it.

Just the other day, I visited a friend at his family’s country estate.

I didn’t arrive until late in the day and had to leave the next morning, yet I still brought a case of camp beer, in this case it was something with the improbable name of Jacob Hackstein Pilsner, “Brewed in the Finest European Tradition” by Gluek Brewing Co. in Cold Springs, Minn.

When I saw Jacob Hackstein for $5.99 a case at the local liquor store, I went into camp beer bliss.

Somehow “Jacob Hackstein” does not make a good beer name, which makes this even more attractive as a camp beer because when you run out of things to say to each other at camp, as you inevitably do, you can always talk about Jacob Hackstein, speculate how a beer came to be named for him, who he is, where he came from, and how he can afford to sell his Euro-tradition beer so cheaply.

I assure you, you won’t be talking about the quality of the beer. There’s not much to say. Calling it a pilsner is demeaning to that style of beer. It’s a typical American lager, only cheaper than most.

Oh, there is one other thing about camp beer. It is essential to keep it very cold. The colder the better. The warmer it gets, the less palatable it becomes.

Happy camping.