The Bowdoin Orient

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." Quotations make for easy leads. Guilty. We've certainly used them in past articles. This time, we don't really even know what that T. S. Eliot stuff is about. Don't care. But we do know we don't want our column to go out with a whimper.

Carl Woock is this week's guest columnist .

Ivies Week is a special time for Bowdoin students. We crawl out of the libraries and classrooms and discover an unusually hospitable climate.

After five months of darkness and permafrost, we can now pretend that our college experience isn't so awful.

Before Spring Break we sunk more than a few hours (and dollars) into the Belgian Beer Fest at Lion's Pride. It was awesome! We experienced some pretty rare stuff, from hard to find Belgian beers from brewers like Smisje and De Dolle to Allagash's first ever "Cool Ship" batch of spontaneously fermented beer. Unfortunately, we didn't really coordinate our efforts well enough to turn the Beer Fest into a column unto itself.

We had hoped this week to write about one of the rarest beers out there: Kate the Great Russian Imperial Stout from the Portsmouth Brewing Company of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The brewery distributes Kate only once a year in limited quantity.

This week we honor the Winter Olympics with an international competition of beers. Admittedly, not all Olympic sports are created equal. Curlers, we're looking at you. After Charles Barkley learned your sport was for real he called his grandmother and "told her she could win a gold medal because they have dusting in the Olympics now." Beer drinking is a far more interesting, exciting sport than curling.

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to prosper." Internet consensus attributes this quotation to Benjamin Franklin, one of the smartest men and biggest bros ever to walk this Earth. We believe in this quotation. We want everyone to love and appreciate beer as much as we do.