Beer's not so simple

Kerry Byrne describes himself as a Boston redneck and the ultimate authority on the "gridiron lifestyle" of beer, food and football. Granted, the Super Bowl is the night when many a TV viewer on the couch with a six-pack and a batch of wings will feel he has a good working knowledge of all three. But Byrne is a professional: a food writer for the Boston Herald, an award-winning beer scribe and the self-styled "Chief Troll" of the in-your-face Web site www.coldhardfootballfacts.com.

So, Byrne was the man to call with my question: Football and beer go together -- most obviously on Super Bowl Sunday -- but could Byrne help me use my understanding of beer to deepen my appreciation of the big game? He rose to the challenge.

"There's a reason why beer is the most popular adult beverage in America, and football is our most popular sport," he said. "This may push the bounds of esoterica, but there are a lot of similarities. Both are seen as kind of macho: Beer's kind of macho, football's kind of macho. Meanwhile, baseball is the sport of the intellectual class, and wine is the drink of the intellectual class.

"But ... even though wine drinkers fancy their product as very sophisticated, in fact, beer is far more complex than wine in terms of ingredients, flavor profiles, the number of processes used and the range of flavors.

"And the same thing goes for football. ... In terms of strategy, comparing baseball to football is like comparing checkers to chess.

"Beer and football both appeal to the average person because they purport to be accessible to all people, without pretense. But beneath it all, they are both incredibly rich, complex and sophisticated to anyone who dares to study them more beyond their superficial, primitive appeal."

Well, so much for the bounds of esoterica. I asked Byrne if he could give me some beer analogies to put the game in context.

"The Patriots are Anheuser-Busch, they're the monolith. They're known as the Evil Empire among sports fans in every market outside Boston. They're viewed much the way craft brewers view A-B -- they crush the opposition, they win mercilessly, they just win and win and win."

And what about the Giants, I asked.

"Who?"

I asked about the quarterbacks.

"Tom Brady -- I guess you could call him the Sam Adams Boston Lager of the game: the consistent, award-winning, all-American product. He's won more football games faster than any quarterback in history, right out of the gate in his first year, like the local beer in Boston. The famous story about Sam Adams is, in 1984 before it was even on the market, it won at the Great American Beer Festival. Tom Brady was an unknown, and before you knew it he'd won the MVP at the Super Bowl.

"Eli Manning is the son of the first family of football. But Eli's always been, like, the third fiddle. The father Archie is one of the great players in Southern football history. His older brother Peyton just won the Super Bowl, and some think he's the greatest quarterback ever. Eli has been a complete bust in the NFL until this year, and all of a sudden he has a chance to bring home back-to-back Super Bowl titles for the Manning family.

"So I'm trying to think of a beer that fits that image, a big-name product, the child of an empire, overshadowed by an elder brother, who could now become the biggest name in football."

So, Eli is Bud Light? I asked.

"I think you've answered your own question."