State #21: Virginia

Beer: The Love

Brewery: Starr Hill Brewery, Crozet, VA

ABV: 4.6%

You know what's nice? Flying 3,000 miles to Virginia, getting to your friend's place, opening up the cabinet to get something to pour your beer into, and finding this glass.

Here’s a multiple choice question for you. What on earth could possess me, a man who wrote these words while wearing a sweat-stained baseball cap and a scruffy, untrimmed-for-three-weeks beard, to buy a beer with a pink label?

a)    The proceeds went to breast cancer research.

b)   I am completely secure in my masculinity. And also nobody saw me drink it.

c)    It was on super-duper sale.

d)   I was in Virginia for a wedding (Congrats, Aaron and Stefanie!), the beer was from Virginia, and I was feeling kind of mushy. And also I was thirsty.

While the fact that Mark A. Thompson has made a living making beer makes him more of a man than me, I think his third-grade-looking signature and pink-labeled beer might bring him down closer to my level of manliness.

If you chose D, congratulations! Choice B is also a decent choice, if not the best choice, because I have to be honest with you, I don’t think I’d roll up to a party with a six pack of this stuff. It’s not just that the label is pink; the beer is called The Love. From a marketing perspective, it’s approaching Smirnoff Ice levels of femininity, and I have to think that’s hurting sales among red blooded men like myself who would otherwise enjoy a nice microbrewed hefeweizen.

The 'Starr' in Starr Hill comes from the name of the neighborhood in Charlottesville where the brewery was originally located. Thus, the stars all over the bottle.

The Starr Hill Brewery, where The Love is made, claims the name comes from the yeast used in its making. A friend of the brewer brought back a particularly tasty strain of yeast from Germany, and after ten years he finally “shared the love” with the brewer by providing him with some of the yeast. Also, as we all know from reading bumper stickers, “Virginia is for Lovers.” So, I guess it’s got that going for it too, which is nice.

Check that: I think this bumper sticker sums up Virginia a little better.

The beer was just okay: standard wheat beer fare, but with very little head. I imagine the brewery must be doing well, however, since they moved from their original digs in Charlottesville to a larger facility outside of town a few years back. In general, I imagine Charlottesville must be a nice place to start up a brewery, what with all the drunk students, jerky popped-collar lacrosse players, hipster faculty, and Thomas Jefferson's ghost wandering about.