HERZELE, Belgium – Spend a few days in forests of East Flanders with the world’s most insatiable beer hunters, and you quickly understand one thing about this tiny nation’s phenomenal ales:

America is barely scratching the surface.

You say your town’s favorite Belgian bar has 75 different bottles? You boast that your local beer distributor now carries six different Trappist ales? Big deal! The pros are tracking down even more exotic specialties.

“There’s always another great Belgian beer, right around the corner,” said Tom Peters, co-owner of Monk’s Cafe in Center City, as we geared through a muddy road toward the De Ryck brewery in this village 25 miles west of Brussels.

Along with Daniel and Will Shelton, beer importers from Massachusetts, we would spend several days in the Belgian countryside, sampling selections in search of something to bring back home for beer lovers in Philly and beyond. I’m not sure if we found the next great ale, but we drank some tasty contenders that you’ll see on store shelves in the coming months.

Belgian beers have been hot since beer writer Michael Jackson first popularized then-unknown labels like Chimay, Duvel and Hoegaarden 15 years ago in his syndicated column and guidebook. (The latest edition of “Great Beers of Belgium,” by the way, just hit bookstores and was featured this week at the annual KitchenAid The Book & The Cook restaurant festival.)

Just a quarter the size of Pennsylvania, Belgium has about 125 breweries that produce some of the most unusual beers in the world, including tart, fruit-flavored lambic, sweetened abbeys in corked bottles and colorful varieties of red, white, brown and strong golden ales.

Belgian beer is beyond a singular definition (and it is not, most assuredly, defined by the patently pedestrian and unfortunately ubiquitous Stella Artois). Yet, its beers have such a distinctive allure that importers and specialty bar owners are looking for almost anything that says “Made in Belgium.”

For those on the front lines, the rendezvous point is the annual Zythos beer festival held each March outside Antwerp. On its face, it’s a typical, noisy beer-drinking affair with taps pouring everything from the classic Kwak and De Koninck to the obscure (St. Pieters Taras Boula and D’Ecaussines Cookie Beer).

But behind the scenes, Zythos is a huge networking opportunity, with thirsty importers stalking the festival floor, slipping business cards to brewers and distributors eager to expand into America.

Last year, brewer Dany De Smet showed off his powerful Slaapmutske Triple, and the Sheltons quickly scooped it up for distribution in America. “I think people in America appreciate Belgian beer more than we do in Belgium,” De Smet told me, explaining his interest in exporting. “The U.S. is so big – it’s such a big market for me.”

This year? I was drawn to Pico Brewery’s Melchior, a hoppy head-banger that rang in at 11 percent alcohol. But the Sheltons and Peters were looking for something with less horsepower.

“Some of these brewers,” Daniel Shelton said, “all they’re doing is adding extra sugar to pump up the alcohol. I want something with less alcohol and a more complex flavor.”

In Herzele, a couple of days after the festival, we found just the ticket: De Ryck Special. It’s a relatively low-alcohol (5 percent) ale made by An De Ryck, one of Belgium’s few female brewers. Her great-grandfather established the brewery in 1886.

With its open courtyard and red brick buildings, the facility would look right at home in Fishtown. Most of the equipment goes back 50 years, installed to replace vessels confiscated by the Germans in World War II.

De Ryck and the Sheltons sorted out the mundane but often troublesome details of shipping beer across the Atlantic: pallet sizes, freshness dating, label registration, payment schedules.

Brewery worker Henk De Bruyckere caught me stifling a yawn, so he helpfully poured me another Special. Before long, the Sheltons and De Ryck were lifting glasses, too.

The deal was done.

And like that, an ale that until now had been available in perhaps a few dozen cafes within 15 to 20 minutes of this town would be headed to bars and beer shops 3,500 miles away.

The next great Belgian beer? Maybe. But even if it isn’t, there’s still another one right around the corner.

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ANTON DREHER’S cold, stiff hand has a hold on Bill Covaleski’s mortal soul.

Dreher, one of the 19th century’s great European brewers, has been dead and buried for 140 years.

Covaleski, the 40-something co-founder of Downingtown’s Victory Brewing, is a highly regarded member of America’s new generation of craftbrewers.

At first sip, it’s hard to see the connection.

Dreher is widely regarded as the father of modern lager; it was his recipe for Vienna lager that provided the DNA for the Spaten brewery’s first Oktoberfest beer in 1841. Yet the cynic could easily blame Dreher – and his European ideals of purity – for ultimately leading the brewing industry toward a strict adherence to established styles. Lager, at its worst, is all about conformity.

Covaleski, by contrast, is best known as an ale man. Like most microbrewers, he rejected many of the stale conventions of insipid, factory-made lager. As a fan of his bitter, aromatic HopDevil Ale, it was impossible for me to conceive of him paying his respects to Dreher.

And yet, as we stood in a snowstorm at Dreher’s mausoleum on the outskirts of Vienna recently, I could see Covaleski welcome the Austrian’s frosty grip.

“I guess this is where it all began,” Covaleski said, giving in to Dreher’s pull.

I reached out to wrestle him free but then let him go.

For, in just a few days of beer drinking in Austria, you understand why an American rebel strives for the perfection of European purity.

Covaleski’s visit last month was the second of two legs in a quirky beer exchange program between Philadelphia and Vienna. Last year, Victory hosted a group of 38 European brewers who traveled here to learn some of the 8-year-old brewery’s techniques. This year, Covaleski returned to Vienna’s 1516 Brewing Co. to cook up a batch of his famous HopDevil. I tagged along to see what kind of damage Philadelphia ale could do on the continent of lagers.

The deal was dreamed up by Austrian beer writer Conrad Seidl, known on his side of the Atlantic as the Bier Papst – the Beer Pope.

For Seidl, Covaleski’s visit was more than a chance to drain a fresh pint of ale spiced with Cascades hops. He was hoping the arrival of a classic American ale would serve as a kick in the lederhosen for all those Viennese beer drinkers whose idea of exotic beer is a sweetened Marzen.

“What I want is choice. Choice is the one thing every beer drinker needs,” said Seidl while draining a Helles at the city’s Fischer Brau.

Curiously, the delicate, lightly hopped lager in his hands was one of just two beers on tap at the brewpub; the other was a frothy Dunkels. No porters, no bocks, no stouts, no pale ales. But Covaleski didn’t seem to mind the small selection. His eye was on the thermometers beside each tap. “That shows me they really care that they’re serving their beer at the proper temperature,” he said.

We walked in the cold to a neighborhood bar called Arte Mayr and continued the conversation over an Ottakringer Zwickl – the beer Seidl believes is the closest his town has come to Dreher’s original Vienna lager.

“In Austria,” Seidl said, “you don’t find many brewers who dare to brew a different product. If a beer doesn’t adhere strictly to a recognized style, it’s rejected.”

Lack of experimentation is not a problem in America. Here, we’ve got brewers willing to dump most anything – coffee, berries, chocolate and copious amounts of hops – into their beers. The challenge is finding drinkers – brainwashed by a lifetime of Budweiser ads – willing to suck them down.

“In the U.S.,” said Covaleski, “the problem is that most bartenders are only interested in tips. So they’re reluctant to suggest or describe new styles for their customers. They just pour them whatever they’re used to.”

“That’s not surprising,” Seidl said. “When brewers create their own styles, it confuses the consumer.”

Indeed, that’s why many American micros give their beers catchy names. Victory, for example, avoids the debate over whether it’s brewing a Belgian-style trippel or a Belgian golden ale by simply naming its beer Golden Monkey.

Nonetheless, Victory’s strength is the homage it pays to classic beer styles. Both Covaleski and co-founder Ron Barchet were trained in Germany. Their Prima Pils and All Malt Lager, especially, are perfectly executed American interpretations of classic European styles.

But it is the pair’s HopDevil that best expresses the synergy of our visit to Austria.

This is an India Pale Ale, a style that is strictly British by birth. But like many American IPAs, HopDevil is made with Vienna malt, for its distinctive copper color, and is spiced largely with American Cascades hops. (The yeast, by the way, is thought to be the same strain as one of America’s classic, early IPAs: Ballantine.)

Covaleski and Horst Asanger, the brewer/owner at 1516 Brewing Co., cooked their batch on a cold Sunday morning. Brewing on a small pub system is a long, dull process interspersed with frequent moments of panic. While the two struggled with threatened boil-overs, they chatted about politics, Starbucks, pulled pork and Philadelphia’s Lex Street massacre.

Their biggest challenge was converting Covaleski’s familiar American measurements into metric weights. There was some doubt over the proper amount of hops to toss into the batch, but when the whole flowers hit the boiling wort, the bar filled with the familiar aroma of HopDevil.

“Don’t worry,” Asanger said. “Remember, it’s the spirit of the brewer that ends up in the beer.”

Later, the two spent an hour struggling to clean the soaking, spent hops from the dripping brew kettle. Rinsing the mess down the drain, Covaleski quipped, “The Blue Danube will run green tonight.”

River pollution was the least of their worries, though. Unspoken was the fear that Vienna would turn up its baroque nose at this American beer.

The city has seen other IPAs. We sucked down glasses of it at Siebensterm (Seven Stars) Brau, for example. But brewer Sprague Terplain, an American expatriate, complained how difficult it is to persuade Austrians to try something new.

“There’s a German expression,” he said, laughing. “What the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat.”

Covaleski, of course, couldn’t stick around the three weeks it would take for this batch to ferment and condition. On this occasion, he was a Johnny Barleycorn, spreading his hops and hoping they’d grow.

But last week, the reports came in via e-mail.

Asanger opened the faucets for a barroom that included a handful of city brewers hosted by Seidl.

“Straight away, the HopDevil is our second-best sold beer, beating our weissbier, who had that spot ever since we had it on tap,” Asanger wrote.

“It was very surprising for the brewers that Conrad invited, to see their clientele drinking a strong, very hoppy, ale, hopped with some strange hop from America.”

That satisfied Covaleski, but his story isn’t finished. After all, he makes delicious batches of HopDevil every week.

The taste of a perfectly made lager – maybe the one we enjoyed at the Schwechter brewery an hour after standing in the snow in front of the mausoleum – was still on his lips.

Drawing from the inspiration of his visit, along with a few bottles packed into our suitcases, Covaleski has just finished making his own version of Vienna lager. It’ll be on tap in May.

Anton Dreher is alive and well in Downingtown.

   Joe Sixpack, by Staff Writer Don Russell, was written this week with a bottle of Steigl Alt. 

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Like most numbskull ideas, this one sounded perfectly sane at the time.

The “time,” not surprisingly being the end of a long, confused night at a Center City tap room a couple weeks ago, when a pal told me, “Yo, did you know March 1st is National Beer Day in Iceland? “

Who cares? It’s too freaking cold up there, I say.

That’s a myth, he tells me. The Gulf Stream warms the whole island. And besides, they only call it Iceland to fool the foreigners, so they don’t run off with their gorgeous women.

Doesn’t take much to get me off the barstool. Like that, 700 bucks goes onto the Visa, and I’m flying 2,700 miles to this Northern Atlantic outpost to check out the sun, the beers and the babes.

Once again, I’m sad to report, I have been duped.

It’s minus 4 centigrade outside, it’s snowing sideways, and I’m trapped in the back of a tourist van with a bunch of drunken Norwegians on the prowl for, I believe the way they put it is, “da booty. “

Thus, when a bottle gets handed to me, I don’t pass.

The label says Berserkja Brennivin, and it goes down like week-old kerosene. Not a single brew to chase it, either.

Welcome to National Beer Day.

The event supposedly marks the date in 1989 when the government lifted the nation’s 3.2 max on suds. For most of the 20th century, the authorities had wisely feared that, supplied with anything stronger, the frozen, isolated population would drink itself into a permanent stupor.

Only problem: when they lifted the ban, someone forgot to tell the country’s brewers that they were now authorized to add a little flavor. It’s no wonder that, when I asked the locals about Beer Day celebrations, they shrugged and pointed me to the city’s infamous Icelandic Phallological Museum – a collection of severed penises, from whale to rat.

After a quickie tour of the weiner house, it takes just 90 minutes to consume the nation’s entire variety of lagers on hand at Reykjavik’s best beer bar, Kaffi Brennslan. By my count, there are four: a zero called Egils Gull, a waste of time labeled Thule and two from Viking. Even the local version of Guinness is weak as chamomile tea. Believe me, you’d rather drink Meisterbrau than any of these losers.

Even the locals turn their back on them. On Laugavegur Street, which is party central in this town, everyone walks around with sixpacks of Carlsberg and Heineken.

There is, however, the aforementioned Berserkja Brennivin.

This is a local specialty, which is to say it is most appropriately distilled in a bathtub. It’s named after the Berserkers, the screaming Aryan maniacs who bit their shields before raging into battle. Its name means “burning wine,” which is an understatement. Clear and caustic, it’s a schnapps made from potatoes and spiced with, egad, cumin and coriander. Whatever the proof, it’s toxic.

The government never banned the stuff, since the island had been drinking it since Erik the Red. Instead, it was packaged in an ugly black bottle with a generic, black label. The medicinal packaging, the authorities hoped, would turn off the citizens.

Instead, Brennivin sold better than ever, thanks largely to its new nickname: Black Death.

Black Death – you’ve gotta like that. In America, brewers spend millions boasting about their sparkling water from cool, mountain streams, and wineries choose select grapes grown in organic vineyards.

In Iceland, the national drink is a plague.

I take another gulp and look outside the window at a view that is vaguely reminiscent of the 7th ring of hell. A mile outside the capital, the landscape is a vast, ice-covered lava field, dotted with steaming geysers and dormant volcano craters. There are no trees, no houses, just gaping glacial fissures that have presumably consumed all living beings.

The more I swallow, the more I appreciate the barren beauty.

The babes, on the other hand, require no alcoholic enhancement. They are, present company excepted, The Most Beautiful Women in the World. We’re talking Nordic goddesses here, guys, statuesque and stunning, blonde and blue-eyed, and . . . OK, if I sound like a dog, excuse me. But Reykjavik’s reputation for centerfold-quality specimens is so well established that the national airline now runs cheap “midweek madness” tours just to ferry in foreign oglers.

Unfortunately, that means the streets are now full of pathetic cases, staggering around with half-finished bottles of Danish beer, looking for pickups and striking out. It’s getting so bad, one local magazine columnist recently warned visitors, “Let’s be real, do you really think a superstar lady is going to fall for a drunk, drooling tourist? “

Like I said, it’s very cold here in Reykjavik.

Joe Sixpack, by Staff Writer Don Russell, was written this week with a Viking Sterkur.

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Thirty-six – I counted ’em – 36 different Northwest brews tickled Joe Sixpack’s polished tonsils last week.

Others would call that a binge. I prefer “fact-finding mission.”

The scene was Portland, Ore., which – with all due respect to Philly, Denver and San Francisco – is the undisputed craft-beer capital of America. Though one-third the size of Philadelphia, the City of Roses is home to four times the number of breweries (they’ve got 28, we’ve got seven going on six). More than 40 others dot the region.

Some, like Rogue Shakespeare Stout and Widmer Hop Jack, occasionally make their way east. But the likes of Elliot Glacier Red Hill Scottish Ale or Hair of the Dog Ed demand a shlep to the coast.

I could go on about the fresh hops aroma of the award-winning BridgePort IPA, or the richness of Deschutes Black Butte Porter, or the sweet, malty refreshment of Full Sail Amber, or. . .

But that would only make you thirsty.

Instead, the more exciting revelation was Portland’s creation of a solid local beer culture.

OK, that’s a contradiction of terms – “beer” and “culture.” But in this case, I’m talking of a city population that regards its its hometown brews as a sacred treasure, where a vital, prolific brewing industry is promoted as an attraction by tourism officials, where brewers market their distinctive products by taking a personal stake in educating their patrons and connecting with homebrewers.

I’m talking about a city where half of the draft beer consumed by locals is made by micros. In Coors-crazy Philly, micros account for less than 10 percent.

Beer courses through Portland as strongly as the waters of the Willamette River. And, yet, there is nothing there that can’t happen along the banks of the Schuylkill. Indeed, if any of ’em are listening, our brewers would do well to cop a few of these ideas:

Theater-pubs

Imagine settling down to a good movie – gladiators and starlets on the big screen, a bag of popcorn in one paw and a freshly made pint of ale in the other.

Portland has a half-dozen places where a civilized filmgoer can catch a movie and a mug.

It doesn’t even have to be a good movie. The moronic “Rules of Engagement” seemed worthy of an Oscar after a tall glass of McMennamin’s Imperial Stout.

Maybe there are laws against such things in the Quaker City, but the bigger reason this hasn’t happened here is our regressive belief that it just won’t work. I’ve mentioned theater-pubs to dozens of friends, and every time the response is something like, “If you did that in Philly, they’d be throwing 40s at the screen.”

Nonsense.

Instead of turning old theaters into pharmacies, someone should find a space in Center City – the Roxy on Sansom Street comes to mind – and open a theater-pub. Do this, and I can almost guarantee better reviews from People Paper critic Gary Thompson.

An active brewers guild

You may not know this, but there is an actual organization called the Pennsylvania Craft Brewers Guild. The next phone call or letter I get from the guild will be the first.

The Oregon Brewers Guild, by contrast, is an familiar presence in Portland, with a paid staff, a newsletter and an office. Its director, Jim Parker, is an avid spokesman for the industry, promoting its ales and organizing its members.

This might seem like inside baseball to the average beer drinker, but in fact it’s cohesive industry groups like the guild that help put a better beer in your glass. The guild’s Quality Mark program, for example, analyzes members beers to ensure they are authentic, made-in-Oregon craft brews that meet style and quality guidelines. Beers that pass its blind taste test display the Quality Mark logo on sixpacks and cases.

“The idea is that the consumer can be assured he or she is getting a beer that is free of major defects and meets its style definition,” Parker told me over lunch at BridgePort Brewing Co.

If Philly-area brewers want stronger support from consumers, they could start by resuscitating their guild. A simple, made-in-Pennsylvania logo on every bottle would encourage consumers to drink local.

Homebrew friends

Widmer Brothers, the nation’s fifth-largest craft-brewer, honors its roots at its Gasthaus Pub by serving Collaborator, a rotating flavor concocted by Portland homebrewers.

According to Parker, an area homebrew club selects a style (it was schwarzbier during my visit) and Widmer provides the ingredients – free – to members. Widmer copies the winning recipe and puts it on tap, alongside its other excellent products.

Dock Street Brasserie (18th and Cherry streets, Logan Square) offered a homebrew recipe or two a few years ago, but nothing on this scale. This idea should be a no-brainer for craft breweries: Homebrewers are your best customers. A beer like Collaborator goes a long way toward making friends.

Beer tourists

When you arrive in Portland, the first thing you pick up is a guide from the tourism bureau. And the first thing you read in that guide is an essay on the city’s breadth of brewpubs.

You’ll also find the guild’s free, pocket-size directory – with maps – of area brewpubs.

A Philly guide is another no-brainer, especially for a city reputedly attempting to promote itself as a tourist destination.

McMenamins

We’ve got nothing like ’em on the East Coast. The outfit operates more than 50 pubs and breweries in Oregon and Washington, each unique and imaginative.

McMenamins Edgefield, where I hunkered down for two nights, is a 100-room inn with a brewery, winery, distillery, golf course, theater, live music and gardens. Its two massage rooms and six pubs thoroughly loosened Joe Sixpack.

McMenamins Kennedy School, meanwhile, is one of the most enlightened urban redevelopment projects I’ve encountered. Headed for demolition, the 85-year-old elementary school was saved when neighbors worked with the beer guys to rehab it as a community center/brewpub. Neighborhood groups get to use the Kennedy School’s gymnasium, meeting rooms and pool for free. In return, McMenamins’ $600,000 purchase price was waived and the brewery gets a steady customer base for its restaurant and 300-seat theater.

In a classic McMenamins’ touch, the school’s “Honors Bar” serves wine and plays classical music, while the “Detention Bar” pours whiskey, plays jazz and permits cigar smoking. The boys’ room looks just like the one where young Joey Sixpack used to sneak a smoke.

Elsewhere, McMenamins has renovated a ballroom with a “floating” dance floor, a hotel with a rooftop bar, a former Masonic lodge and a barn.

A chain like McMenamins doesn’t happen overnight, and I’m encouraged by the likes of Iron Hill, which favors old buildings (notably, Woolworth’s in West Chester), and the recently opened Dock Street Terminal at the old Reading Headhouse.

But Philly – which has more than 250 years of beer history – would do well to steal a few ideas from the upstarts in Portland. God knows, you could find 36 great, locally produced brews in our town. But with the recent misfortunes at Red Bell, Independence and Poor Henry’s, among others, it’s obvious that simply making good beer is not enough.

*

Joe Sixpack, by Staff Writer Don Russell, was written this week with a glass of Wild Duck Sasquatch Strong Ale.

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PARIS – Your eyes do not deceive you, mon ami. As the dateline sez, your People Paper beer correspondent has been dispatched across the Atlantic, to wine country.

No, I’ve not forsaken the grain for the grape. The byline, after all, is Joe Sixpack – not Pierre Carafe.

Nor is this some lame-brain editorial diversity scheme to reach out to a less-sudsy audience of Chablis-sipping posers. I believe we’ve wisely ceded that sector to the Inky.

Instead, consider this an exercise in widening one’s vistas beyond the tap handles down at the corner bar, a rare opportunity to explore the world past the banks of the Schuylkill.

And what have I learned?

1. French chicks kiss each other. In public.
2. So do French guys. Everyone loves everyone!
3. Despite the best efforts of the Pennsylvania LCB, beer costs more here than it does in Philly. Example: A tall draft of Grimbergen, a so-so abbey-style brew that runs about six bucks a glass in Center City. Mine, purchased less than 200 miles from the brewery in Belgium, cost 55 francs, the equivalent of $9.
4. Most important phrase to master: Ou sont les toilettes?
5. A freshly baked stick of French bread tastes every bit as good as a freshly baked loaf of South Philly Italian. But the butter here rules, thanks to a higher fat content.
6. You can’t buy Budweiser. In Europe, that name is largely controlled by the Czechs, who claim Budweiser is their trademark. In France, Anheuser-Busch simply calls its lager “Bud.”
7. It doesn’t matter what they call it. It still tastes the same, and the French – despite their pretentious tongues – drink it anyway.
8. And if they don’t drink Bud, they drink Heineken, Becks or the gassy Kronenbourg.
9. Le Metro blows away le SEPTA.
10. Only displaced Brits and Americans patronize the city’s few brewpubs. A Parisian would never be caught drinking ales with dumb names like Dark Triomphe and Inseine.
11. The Tequiza trend is alive here, too, in the form of a knockoff: Desperado, a clear-bottled brew with a tequila twist.
12. The strongest bottled beer this side of Samuel Adams Triple Bock is Brasserie Jeanne d’Arc’s 15-percent alcohol Belzebuth. A tiny 25cl bottle (42 francs, or about $7) of the 15 lager is enough for two to split. I hear the devilish beer will be in Philly by the end of this month, just in time for Halloween.
13. You know all those Montparnasse cafes Hemingway wrote about as part of the Lost Generation of American expatriates in the ’20s? Incredibly after 75 years, places like La Coupole and Le Dome are still open – but now they’re high-priced tourist traps, barely worth a quick coffee.
14. Only a few taverns offer barstools. It’s stand-up only, and it costs a couple francs more to sit at a table.
15. Dogs sit for free.
16. Though you can find a decent gueuze (Lindeman and Cantillon), the French favor the sickly sweet, filtered versions. Stay away from Gueuze Becasse.
17. Most of the best French brews are already available on the Philly side of the Atlantic. Save the airfare and check out Jenlain, 3 Monts and Ambre des Flandres.

Beer Radar

Next weekend is the 18th annual Great American Beer Festival in Denver, where sippers will sample up to 1,700 beers, one measly ounce at a time. Iron Hill Brewery (Newark, Del., and West Chester) will be trying to make it three medal-winning years in a row. Other locals vying for medals include: Independence Brewing Co. (Northeast), John Harvard’s Brew House (Wayne), Lion Brewery (Wilkes-Barre), Stoudt Brewing Co. (Adamstown), Tun Tavern Brewery & Restaurant (Atlantic City) and Valley Forge Brewing Co.. . .Iron Hill, by the way, announced plans this week to open a third location sometime next summer. This one’s in Media. . .

Beer freaks who can’t make the westward trek will convene on Oct. 9 at Dock Street Brasserie (18th and Cherry streets, Logan Square) for its coveted Beer Geek of the Year championship. . .Across town on the same day, German-American Yunkers will celebrate Oktoberfest at Manayunk Brewing Co. (4120 Main St., Manayunk).

Joe Sixpack, written this week with a bottle of Angelus 7, appears every other Friday.

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Ahoy, matey. Pull up your stool and listen ye closely as Cap’n Sixpack chills your spine with a terrible tale of seven dreadful nights adrift upon the high seas.

Neither pirates nor man-eating urchins plagued our odyssey. This fearless crew faced challenges of an even more evil sort:

A boatful of bad beer.

I shudder as the memory creases my brain. No soul should suffer such agony, lest the scars never heal.

‘Tis true, I confess, at first this tale may seem hardly so awful. We weren’t exactly marooned. In fact, this voyage was an all-expenses-paid Caribbean vacation aboard a luxury cruise liner. And, yes, they pleasured me with plush, poolside cabana chairs and mile-long buffet tables.

But man cannot live on buckets of ice-cold shrimp alone.

We set sail a fortnight ago, from a sleazy, shameless port known as Miami Beach, where topless supermodels and cross-dressing vixens lured us like sirens. They had little to offer us, though: just case upon case of lemon-corked bottles of Corona.

As the town disappeared over the fiery horizon, I sought refuge below. A large, dimly lit bar beckoned from Deck 5.

“What’s on tap, Admiral?” I asked the uniformed bartender.

He sneered and a gold tooth reflected the neon. “Draft beer on a ship at sea? You’ve gotta be kidding. Here’s our beer list.”

Shiver me timbers, it was like staring into my own watery grave. Miller Lite and Budweiser, Heineken and Harp – it’s a sad irony that a man could die from thirst afloat so much sea water.

(Honesty prevails upon me to mention, my friends, that the gods had seen fit to stock this vessel with ample supplies of whiskey and champagne. Were it not for these potables – well, I’d rather not consider that fate.)

Deck 6 was not much better. I hoped a Jamaican Red Stripe would soothe my throat, but it was not much tastier than a pallid bottle of Stroh’s.

On Deck 7, my eyes fell upon a Guinness Stout – a righteous brew, but not the sort of thing one wants to pour into the gullet when the temps are near 90. I shuffled off and waited for the first sight of land.

But the ports were as dry as a beached shard of driftwood.

Yes, the island nightclubs were filled with flavored rums and exotic, umbrella-topped drinks. Tanned virgins tempted me with backrubs and mai tais.

Not a single ale, though, would cross Cap’n Sixpack’s lips.

Fear not, mateys, this tale has a happy ending.

It is 2 in the afternoon. The sun is blazing and I am just emerging from the crystal-blue waters of Cozumel, a resort island off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. Black and gold fishies tickle my toes, a three-piece combo with a steel drum plays reggae on the golden sand, happy couples goof off ‘neath the palms.

I collapse onto my lounger, my salty palate thirsting for a cold one. A waiter appears and says the magic words:

Cerveza, amigo?

I nod.

In seconds he returns with a sweating, green bottle: Dos Equis Lager Especial. I’ve tasted it a hundred times before, never with any enthusiasm. And I’m still not thoroughly convinced that this was not a mirage.

But on this day, on this beach, in this mouth, it is the perfect beer. I have sailed the seas and survived the worst.

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