Dad Beers Ranked

Rating the highs and lows of later-life drinking.

Listen to the story, read by me. If you prefer…

Early one evening this week I was at a restaurant bar, waiting for my wife, enjoying a beer and thinking about drinking. This is a common pastime for adults of a certain vintage – especially the Dads – not just drinking, but thinking about it. Considering how alcohol fits into our frantic, older lives.

To enjoy a beer is still one of my most beloved routines, even as the after effects grow incrementally more burdensome through the years. So, why not rank these treasures, I figured. To bring some clarity to their true worth. Or at the very least, briefly regard these precious moments of indulgence.

So I took out my pocket notebook and here we go… a six-pack for tradition’s sake, of Dad Beers Ranked:

6. The Lunchtime Beer
Years ago this one would have polled much higher. That was then. As exciting and refreshing as the Lunchtime Beer still can be, with kids it’s more often a quick rush of blood to the head. Followed by a dragging afternoon and grumpy bedtime.

Are you really going to go into full day drinking mode? Not on your life. This beer is the alcoholic equivalent of trying to pull off the latest jean cut. Lunchtime Beers may feel like a time machine back to your younger self – when boozy days stretched seamlessly into spontaneous evenings, and naps were always an option – but there’s no such thing. It’s over. Put it down, Dad.

5. The Mid-Week Dinner Non-Alchoholic Beer

Is this really a beer at all? Sitting down to dinner on a Tuesday, tired as a Friday, this is little more than a mind game. A way to trick yourself into thinking you are imbibing precious medicine, when all you really need is a good sleep.

I’m relatively new to the non-alc stuff, and there’s a liquid methadone quality to this experience that I’ll never be 100% comfortable with. But quality has vastly improved in recent years, since preachy man-fluencers started prattling on about how evil booze is, and venture capital firms realized they could sell beer to non-drinkers, too.

These new, beer-tasting near beers have also led to my 11-year-old son asking, “Can I have one…? It’s not alcoholic…” almost every time I reach for that sad little tin. The only thing weirder and more painful than me drinking this stuff, would be seeing him chug one. No.

4. The Mid-Week Dinner Full-Alcohol Beer

Now we’re getting down to real business. The Mid-Week Dinner Full-Alcohol Beer is the equivalent of the kids getting ice-cream on a Wednesday night. Treating yourself with a hypnotic portal to proper grown-up dinners of yore. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re sitting across from your partner, eating fully-seasoned food, cooked without multiple diet restrictions, enjoying a conversation uninterrupted by burp jokes.

Beer is great with food, especially at the end of the day, more so when you did the cooking. I know it’s only ranking in the middle here, but this is the beer that most often reminds me why I drink. A simple pleasure.

Still, it also has a hint of the risk attached to the Lunchtime Beer. You may be a bit yawny through bath and bedtime, but by god it’s worth it.

3. The Birthday Party Surprise Beer

Kids birthday parties are the single most oppressive part of having children that, as if by some Big Toy conspiracy, almost no new-parent is given a single word of warning about. Scuttled weekend plans for a classmate you’ve never even laid eyes on, last minute gifts, generator-fueled bouncy houses, pointless conversations, sugar rushes, piñata pile-ons, sibling envy. They are somehow as messy as an Eighteenth with the parents out of town, and nowhere near as fun.

But… every now and then, beneath the Costco waters and Capri-Suns, some devilish Dad will have stocked the cooler with ice cold beer. The brand is typically one you wouldn’t be caught dead drinking anyplace else, and in most public parks you’re probably flouting the law right in front of your innocent family. Yet sweet baby Jesus, is that beer just as right as it is terribly wrong. One sip of watery generic US lager at a kid’s birthday party and somehow drinking feels dangerous again.

2. The Kids Are In Bed Beer

I’m not kidding, this beer has saved my life. Particularly when you have a baby in the house. Getting an infant to sleep can feel like convincing your very drunk friend to leave a party at which they’ve already collapsed and humiliated themselves in front of the very girl they came to impress. They just need a little more time, man!

Sitting on the couch, the house silent for the first time in fifteen hours, just knowing you’ll probably be woken again in the middle of the night, this beer doesn’t care. It understands you. Should this beer dare be interrupted by a tip-toeing, pajama-clad child, it’s more jarring than someone breaking into your house.

Left to its own devices though, this nectar is full-body, opiate-level bliss, for less than a gallon of gas.

1. The No Kids At All Beer

This beer could be had anywhere from a vacation with your partner, to a work trip with people you hate. It doesn’t matter. All parents know that a vacation with your kids isn’t really a vacation at all, anyway. The point here is distance. The further away from your kids you are, the better this beer goes down. And the next one, and the next one.

Because for once, it doesn’t matter how many you have. There is nothing you can do to save them now. They're miles away. And so are your worries.

You leave when you’re ready. You eat when you’re hungry. You sleep when you’re tired. And you drink when you’re thirsty. Cheers!