First let me make an announcement. Help me in boycotting Anheuser-Busch since they are sellouts.
You know they sold…or are selling out to a non USA company. So here is what I propose:
Drop your beer off at my house & I will dispose of it. We’ll teach those Traitors!!
While walking down 6th street in Austin a few years back, I had to physically step over a man asleep on the sidewalk. His head was re
sting on the step of a business. It was a concrete pillow if you will. Just as I stepped
over him, his eyes opened and he looked at me. He and I melded minds in that brief encounter and he gave me the power of insight. It was at that moment I knew Austin and 6th Street in general were doomed. Now fast forward 20+ years and my moment of clarity was vindicated.
A Forbes Magazine article has identified Austin as the hardest drinking city in America. A great distiinction for the capital of Texas, don’t you think? Yeah, me too. The Forbes Magazine journalists used data from the CDC, the Center For Disease Control.
The data confirmed my suspicion years ago of Austin resident’s affinity for alcohol. The CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey last year found that 61.5 percent of Austin residents said they had had at least one drink in the past 30 days. That’s nearly two-thirds of the population.
Nearly 9 percent of everyone surveyed said they drank daily. For men, two drinks a day was considered daily alcohol consumption in the survey. For women, it was one.
Milwaukee came in at No. 2 overall and was followed by San Francisco; Providence, R.I.; and Chicago.
In the CDC survey, about 20 percent of adults in Austin admitted to binge drinking, or having at least five drinks in one sitting. In my opinion, that figure is low. Back in the day, I regularly saw folks throw back a 12 pack….a day in one sitting. But those folks at Forbes must have really spent some time in Austin and at UT. They didn’t mention in their report that Austin is populated with young adults at UT and hangers on from UT. They should have had full disclosure about that because they named UT the biggest party school in the nation in 2006.
Let it be known that UT has its own surveys on student drinking and yes they have been trying to discourage John Barleycorn there for, well….forever.
The UT survey is similar to the one conducted by the CDC in which students are asked about their drinking habits. In last year’s survey, about 72 percent said they had consumed an alcoholic drink in the past 30 days. Thirty-four percent said they had consumed more than five alcoholic drinks on at least one occasion. OK, that sounds more like it. It was the number of drinks per day that put Austin on the concrete pillow I saw that day.
This post has several morals to take from it.
1. Watch your driving in Austin
2. There are bound to be lots of fast and loose women there.
3. It’s probably the Texas heat. The number of consecutive 100+ degree days is a factor in the amount of beer consumed at Sholz’s beirgarten.
4. Mentioning Sholz’ probably dates me more than you non Texans realize.
5. It’s probably the republicans fault the kids drink so much. Everything else is these days.
I would have guessed the drinkingest town in Texas would have been New Braunfels. I was there as a young man and was with a friend who also has a German sounding last name. His grandfather had been working in the yard and was sitting down at a table outside when we sat down to visit. He was drinking a very cold beer from a mug.
He hit the mug on the table with a bang and said “Git me another beer, momma.” She poured him another from a pitcher and poured us one also. We sat there in that yard under a tree listening to the grandfather with his heavy accent, drinking beer. Forbes Magazine never surveyed anyone in New Braunfels.
