I drank wine and beer during this year's Super Bowl. This is a first for me. Most of the time, I stick to beer during a Super Bowl, but once I did a wine evening. Never before, though, have I done both. You may well ask what's the difference between a Troeg's Mad Elf (ale brewed with cherries to a stiffness of 11 percent) and a decent pinot noir. The difference is that the Mad Elf is a lot better. A great pinot might come close, but this one had a plastic cork, and so the year or so it sat on my shelf did diddly for the taste. Ah well.

So I'm sitting there, watching the second half (spent the first half and half time unpacking, getting the boys to bed, etc.) and scoring the ads. Not much going on. I liked the Anheuser-Busch baby Clydesdale ad, and Barbara didn't. My main feeling is that any attempt to make beer drinking a family occasion is a good one. After all, my three-year old son Max can differentiate between styles and even has a favorite (he's partial to wheat beers), and my one-year-old son Sam goes into ecstatic convulsions every time he's treated to a one-drop taste of any beer. It is possible to train good beer drinkers early, and I intend to do so.

I also thought Honda took the lead of the Bud Light Venus de Milo ads and went one further with their "mudflap girl" ad for the Timberline pickup. The Venus de Milo just stood there naked. The naked mudflap girl walked around. I'm quite impressed by the ingenuity. Maybe next year there will be a real, live naked person in an ad. Oh wait, there was that guy in the "Lost" promo...but male nudity seems to be a staple of network TV these days. Not that I actually watch any network TV, of course.

So I'm watching and on comes this ad for herestobeer.com. Essentially, a lot of people are lifting glasses of beer (beer of color, even!) and then there's a message at the end to check out the web site. Barbara says it's an A-B site, and I make no bet. But I'm curious.

Back in 1999, Interbrew (which had just merged with Labatt) contracted with TotalSports (the company I worked for at the time) to create beer.com. The intent was to create a site that would draw both the serious beer drinker and the titties 'n' beer types. We ended up creating a vaguely countercultural site (one cover story celebrated the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs triple album) that attracted very few (fewer than 50,000 a day, anyway) readers. I was one of the folks who put that site together and kept it running. It didn't work for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones was that the European side of Interbrew wanted a classy site, and the Labatt side of Interbrew wanted more stories about starlets who'd just had their breasts enlarged.

Interbrew canned TS in early 2001 (taking beer.com in-house), and TS itself imploded not much later after a quasi-merger with something called Quokka. Actually, it was Quokka that bit the dust, but no one really cares. The point here is that herestobeer.com sounded like what beer.com was supposed to be.

herestobeer.com is the product of the Beer Institute, which is the lobbying arm of the brewing industry--both the big boys (A-B, Coors, SAB-Miller) and a large number of "micro" brewers. The site itself is exceptionally generic...but it does pay tribute to many styles past that of "American pilsner." The concept seems to be to urge the visitor to do a little research and be a bit more adventurous in the pursuit of beer. That's cool with me.

There's an 11 question "what's your style" quiz. Turns out my style is "American special," which means absolutely nothing. Whatever. The site itself doesn't have much to offer the experienced beer drinker, but it's not really aimed at such folks. The big boys hope to get more folks "tapped in" to their stuff, and the "micros" (it's really hard for me to call breweries like Sierra Nevada, Boston Brewing or Rogue "micros," but still) hope to entice folks into trying new styles.

It's all good. And necessary. After one week of wandering through a beer store a day in my new home base (on average), I can tell you that it's a bitch to find decent beer in the Maryland suburbs. I found a couple places that carry McEwan's Scotch Ale or Spaten Optimator (the top-selling high-gravity imports) and one that carries Dogfish Head brews (pretty sad, when you consider the brewery is 70 miles away over in Delaware). I know of a couple awesome beer stores in the district, but they're a bit of a haul and I thought I might find something closer. Not bloody likely. Guess I'll have to bite the bullet and do the drive.

But enough of my bitchin'. In a few weeks, I'll make the trek to Philly and grab a few cases of Bell's. And I know I can wander down to Alexandria and buy cases of Dogfish Head (at good prices) at Total Wine. My life as a beer freak will become somewhat more itinerant (no more one-stop shopping at Sam's Quik Shop), but there is romance in the adventure. Which, I think, is one of the messages herestobeer.com is trying to sell. And if it isn't, well, then those folks are fools.

Oh, and I'm quite pleased with Pittsburgh's stomping of the Seahawks. I may be a beer snob, but I'll take a gritty city like Pittsburgh over Seattle any day.

Jon Worley wrote this while enjoying a fine IPA from Stone Brewing of San Diego--a beer he couldn't get when he lived in Durham.