A fond parting toast to good old Gluek beer

Sitting in my fridge right now is a piece of history. Twelve ounces, crisp, cold, malty and doomed. A can of Gluek beer. Cold Spring, the brewery that made the beer, has announced it's dead, ending the run of one more long-running local beer.

When you consider that the name contains the word "Glue," which is not an attribute most associate with satisfying beverages, its longevity is remarkable. You might ascribe that to price: Man, it was cheap. Guys have warm, sodden memories of ultra-cheap weird-named beers from their college days -- in my day, frugal lads turned to "Fox Deluxe," whose name suggested it was derived from the kidney products of very special foxes. (The taste made you wonder how bad "Fox Ordinary" might be.) The state was littered with C-grade brand names, affixed to scratched-up brown bottles with cheap labels. There were beers whose names seemed to foretell the condition to come, like BLATZ -- one more and I will -- or Huber. ("No more, I'm Hubered.")

But Glueks was different -- it was once a premium brand, and it advertised heavily in the local papers. One ad from the early '30s showed a fellow getting out of a barber chair: "You're Shaved. No Nicks. It's time for Gluek's." Most people don't associate the lack of tonsorial bloodletting with an excuse to drink, but it was a way to tell people how to pronounce it. The beer's heyday passed, though, and unless you ordered it at Gluek's downtown joint, you could have assumed it died and went to Beerhalla, clinking a stein with the Hamm's Bear. Then it was back! And cheap!

And now it's gone. This is the point where we usually lament the trend toward mass-market homogenized brands whose flavor makes you think someone boiled a piece of bread in water, but the rise of microbreweries means we have excellent choices available. If only someone would buy the Gluek name and keep it alive, for the sake of local history. Otherwise that can in my fridge, well, that's the end.

(It'll sit there a long time. Gave up the stuff years ago. Makes you fat.)