All things in liquidation

A friend of mine loves a good beer. He'll also settle for a bad one if he has to. It makes sense to him that beer can be good and bad and everything in between. Only beer, every gorgeous golden drop, is always innocent. Unlike him.

There was one night, back in his student share-house years, when my friend was led further astray than usual by beer. Quite a lot of beer. He and his housemates lived a few doors down from a pub.

They could barely afford to drink at the place, or any place for that matter, but still, it was nice to know it was there.

On this particular evening the smell of lager was drifting in over their backyard as heady as ever, a lover's happy-hour whisper. Besotted, my friend gathered up his coins and headed pubwards, to sip his single pot at a glacial pace, and pray the pool table might grant him a free game.

When he got there, the pub was closing up, for good. Men were hauling sheets of tin out of a trailer to hammer them across windows and doors. When my friend asked what was going on, he got a one-word reply from a man with nails between his teeth: ''Liquidated.''

My friend wasn't sure what this meant. As far as he could tell the pub did very well on the liquid front. Another hammer-wielding man filled in the blanks: ''Owners went broke and skipped town.''

The men and their trailer were quickly gone, and my friend moped home the back way, surprised to see the pub's rear hadn't been boarded up. Glinting in the moonlight behind the flimsiest of wire gates were slabs upon slabs of Victoria's finest.

''Liquidated,'' my friend sighed.

An emergency meeting was called in the share-house kitchen. Ethics and morals were discussed. Consciences were wrestled. It was decided that this would not be stealing. Not really. It was more like an open-ended student loan. The details are sketchy but one thing is certain - a student share-house generally bereft of beer became, overnight, awash with the stuff. Instead of milk crates, six-packs and slabs now doubled as futon bases. In no time, word got around and a soggy string of parties ensued. Friends and strangers alike shared in the bounty. Stocks soon dried up. But not before the household got a handyman in to fix the leaking pipes the landlord always ignored. The handyman was paid in cold, hard cans.

Not surprisingly, my friend has come to regard beer as a great provider. Some of us, he likes to point out, would not exist if it wasn't for the warm glow and joyful abandon a few well-timed ales have brought to a courtship ritual.

Beer, he notes, is also prudent. It giveth, it taketh away. Behold the brewer's droop, he says. That's your wise ale's way of saying give it a rest.

As a young boy, my friend spent formative weekends collecting empties in a Port Melbourne pub, while his mum worked in the kitchen. Fresh from Canberra, as my friend was, it was quite the culture shock. Coming from Canberra, any culture at all was quite the shock. He'd never seen or smelt anything like a pub before, let alone rows of regulars tenderly clutching their precious amber pots. And he'll never forget the anguished cry and lunge of the old bloke whose glass he'd tried to collect when it still held at least half a mouthful of froth.

Froth, my friend decided, was rarefied stuff. Only our most hallowed liquids are topped with froth. Beer, coffee and the sea.

In my friend's eyes, beer is the perfect accompaniment to memories. He is his own case in point. Fond, beery scenes sparkle in his mind like fine sediment, or the gold dust he collected in a tiny jar on a primary-school excursion to Sovereign Hill. He and his schoolmates rode a red rattler there and back, sleeping in bunks. He vividly recalls poking his head down the long carriage corridor after lights-out to see his teachers at the bar in the dining car raising a round of beers to each other, the sun setting off their grins, their hands full of liquid gold.

Coming of age, my friend and beer grew well acquainted. A family member he hadn't seen for a while frowned disapprovingly and told my friend's teenage self that he was developing a ''beer face''. The two words thrown together like that intrigued and appalled my friend who, after peering anxiously at his features in the mirror, decided he and beer should see other people for a while. Reunited, he later wandered the streets of New York as a backpacker, in search of a bar that might sell him a stubby of Coopers ale. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And ridiculous though this quest was, it served him well. The little brown bottle from Australia, when he finally found it, tasted fine, but he had to admit it was wasted on him, since he was by then completely drunk on New York.

Returning home, my friend worked any job that came his way. Beer settled in beside him, ever the toiler's companion. As one of the big ad campaigns of the day noted, beer really did taste better when you'd earned it. You couldn't cheat, my friend learnt. Beer knew proper hard work when it saw it. And it favoured old-fashioned physical labour, the stuff that got you grimy, out in the fresh air, and preferably while standing back at the end of it all to declare a job well done. The harder you worked, the more sublime the beer tasted. Mixed with camaraderie and aching muscles, a well-chilled lager took on mythic proportions. It was as if the nectar of the gods had been slipped something extra by the gods themselves, who clearly approved of wholesome exertion, just rewards and the fermentation process.

In my friend's opinion, beer is unfairly associated with overindulgence when, in fact, it knows all about having too much of a good thing. While it gets on dangerously well with curries and noodles and all kinds of deep-fried excesses, it does draw the line at chocolate. Beer and chocolate just don't go well together. It's as if the self-respecting brew is saying, ''Am I not enough of a treat as it is?'' Beer is proud that way.

It's also deeply symbolic. My friend's theory is that if orange juice and fried eggs are the embodiment of the rising sun and dawning day ahead, then beer is surely the golden-hued afternoon and evening. A rewarding ale is the liquid yellow light of late afternoon itself, poured in a glass, crowned in heavenly cloud.

Mystery abounds in the making of beer. This is demonstrated by my friend's father-in-law who, despite a background in applied science and 30-odd years of producing magnificent home brew, swears he's still learning the dark, swirly art of brewing. This is not a man prone to illusion. Ask him the secret to home brew and he'll tell you the secret is it's cheap.

Simple yet complex, bitter yet sweet, beer's wonders never cease. Just ask my friend.

■ Good Beer Week runs May 18-26. goodbeerweek.com.au