Beverage of the Week: Sure, I haven't had a Blue Moon in a while, why not?

Blue Moon's got a new hazy IPA. Trying it made me go back to the original to test my nostalgia.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

For two years of my life, Blue Moon was just about the fanciest beer I could get my hands on.

There’s a bar near the University of Pittsburgh campus called Hemingway’s Cafe that was one of my favorite spots in college. It was a little further away from the Carnegie Mellon campus but had the added benefit of having fewer Carnegie Mellon people, which was a significant plus in my book. Terrible school to attend, Carnegie Mellon. Thoroughly unpleasant. Good football team this year, though.

Anyway, Hemingway’s was great for me, a broke student who made $10 per game to referee intramural football and who’d grown up with incurable poor brain. Not only did it have a great, post-11 p.m. half-price appetizer deal (and the best spinach artichoke dip I’ve had TO THIS DAY), but there was always a rotating $1 beer. Most of the time it was boring domestics like Miller Lite. On Wednesday nights, however, it was a foamy cup of exotic Colorado beer with a hastily-cut orange wedged on top.

So, rather than brave country music night at Paul’s, Wednesdays were spent at the narrow bar on Forbes Ave drinking what we thought was the high life (and not, like many other nights, actual High Life). In four years filled with Pabst and American and Augustiner (not the great German beer but the knock-off Yuengling variant) Blue Moon was the best brew I had on a semi-regular basis.

I still love cheap beers, but in the years since Blue Moon has fallen by the wayside. It kinda fell into the Sam Adams trap where it was everywhere and good enough, but rarely more appealing than whatever local brews were available. I’d wager I’d had no more than three of them over the past decade.

But Blue Moon has a new hazy IPA to try out, and I’m a sucker for hazies. Plus, I listen to a lot of the How Did This Get Made? podcast while I’m mowing the lawn — yes, I understand the sheer dad-ness of that sentence — so I can probably recite Paul Scheer’s beer pitch off the cuff at a given moment.

This all brought Blue Moon back into my life, both in original form and its new hazy IPA variant. Let’s see if it’s any good or if I’ve merely been blinded by my own nostalgia.