The Rehoboth Beach Marathon was one of my favorites
ever. When I was explaining to other people why I liked it so much, I found
myself jumping right to a description of the free beer at the after-party. The
free beer, donated by 16 Mile Brewery, was the liquid embodiment of all that
was great about the race, and, in the bigger picture, of everything that makes
it fun to hang out with other human beings.
A while back, I came up with a patented six-point marathon rating matrix, and one of the categories was, free beer. All of the
other categories had a 1 to 5 range. But free beer was binary. Unenlightened as
I was at the time, I said that “This factor is simple. There either is free
beer at the finish line or there is not free beer at the finish line.” 1 or 5. Oh how very naïve I was.
There’s some variety in the free beers served at the
end of races, but the one you see all the time is Michelob Ultra. Michelob
Ultra is watery shit swill beer. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with
watery shit swill beer. It has its place. If you’re in a situation where the
goal is to stand around and drink for an entire day – fishing, jazz
festival-ing, watching a friend work on his car, neglecting your marauding
children at a neighborhood barbecue – watery shit swill beer might very well be
exactly what you want. An 18 pack will only set you back about $15. And there’s
almost no alcohol in it, so you can pound down a dozen or so of them and wake
up in the morning fresh as a spring day and ready to coach tee ball or teach
Sunday school.
What absolutely makes my skin crawl, though, is the
advertising theme that goes along with Michelob Ultra. It’s marketed as the
beer of athletes and beautiful people with active lifestyles. In the ad, a
chiseled, handsome young investment banker bounds out the door of his Manhattan
skyscraper at lunch to go x-treme roller blading with his hot, fawning coworker
(who, as obviously implied, will probably screw his brains out later that night
or, hell, maybe even right then and there after an intense bout of shredding through
the city). But none of that changes the reality of what the beer is: Watery.
Shit. Swill. Basically 12 ounces of liquid marketing. The icing on the cake is
that the main promotional face of Michelob Ultra was, right up until the time physical
evidence came to light that 85% of the blood flowing through his veins belonged
to someone else, Lance Armstrong.
So, when you finish a race, rip the tab off your bib
and exchange it for one free Michelob Ultra (others available for purchase for
cash, $4.50 plus a valid drivers license), that’s all well and good. But the
scene after the Rehoboth Beach Marathon, organized by the Rehoboth Beach
Running Company, was in a whole different stratosphere. Race registration
included entry into the after-party. All runners got a neoprene frat party
bracelet that got you in, and non-runners could buy one for $20. The after
party had a DJ and a big buffet with a full spread of breakfast stuff and lunch
stuff. Once you made your decision about whether you wanted a pile of bacon and
eggs or a stack of burgers and dogs, you got to the 16 Mile Brewery beer
trailer. And the beer trailer had these spectacular party attributes:
- 3 kinds of delicious, local beer – Seed-Free & Joy, Cage Fight and Tiller Brown!
- No line!
- No limit!
Post-marathon hydration be damned! This was a party! I
sat down with some old guys who had run the race a bunch of times (“you’re not
exactly who we were hoping for, but sure” said one of them when I asked if I
could sit with them; the other of whom turned out to be a Delaware judge). They
told me that, yeah, the after party usually went on for hours, until the sad
moment when the beer trailer got hooked up to the truck (and even then, folks
could usually finagle one more round). Fun times and camaraderie all around!
The beer was from the heart – genuinely good and with
no aura of bullshit marketing. And the same was true about the race in general.
No big corporate sponsors, a quirky packet pick-up in an upscale sushi
restaurant, friendly volunteers. No VIP tent, available for an extra price,
separating the group out into after-party haves and have-nots. No five-page
registration questionnaire demanding information about your finances and
spending habits. Just a big fun setup designed to get people to hang out
together and have a good time.
The bigger the company, the more diffuse its
ownership, the larger the customer base to sell to, the more bland and
generalizable and scalable its products have to be. Small, local operations are
so refreshing, not for any kind of moral / smug / Michael Pollan reason, but
because they’re just more fun. It’s OK to make a buck in the process, but when
that’s the only goal, it shows.
Big races organized by big national corporations are
usually the ones that give you a ticket for one Michelob Ultra. It’s at the
little ones, organized by runners for
runners, like Rehoboth Beach, where you’re more likely to get a Cage Fight
Bold Ale (“Boxing gloves? You mean Bitch Mittens”) like the one from 16 Mile
Brewery. And what could be better than that?
Now that I’ve become more of a grizzled marathon
veteran, I have learned the folly of my former ways. “Free beer or no free
beer” is a gross oversimplification. There are fifty shades of free beer. And
16 Mile Brewery and the Rehoboth Beach Running Company really know how it’s
done.
Click here to learn more about 16 Mile Brewery, Georgetown, DE.
Click here for information about the Rehoboth Beach Running Company.
Click here for information about the Rehoboth Beach Marathon.
Click here for an article about Charlie Sheen calling Lance Armstrong a douchebag.
