Your Friendly Neighborhood Beer Guru (Finally,I'm Getting Paid For This)

Well, friends and foes, I finally made it to the job high-class alcoholism and voluminous beer knowledge destined for me.

I started selling booze part-time at the first wine & spirits store I visited in Nashville. At its beer corner, I made friends with the owner, also an Ohioan. A beer tasting and dozens of nights jawing about alcohol followed.
When Job #1's pay stayed flat for 2009, I made some overtures about picking up some hours. The manager seemed pleasantly shocked. When my friend Josh departed from the store, I inquired again, and now I've switched sides of the counter.

Thanks to Nashville’s arcane liquor laws (I’ll explain in a moment), the wine & spirits stores led to my new second job. I haven’t worked two jobs at once since my days covering Hilliard then running to the Easton Barnes & Noble, but I’m looking forward to this one. Two weeks into this job, I already feel I can bluff my way through a wine conversation.

However, ask me about food pairings, then the facade quickly cracks and crumbles.

About this liquor laws: Tennessee, in its infinite wisdom, classifies any beverage above 6.1 percent alcohol by volume as spirituous in nature. Any beer 0.1% above that threshold falls under the jurisdiction of the wine & spirits. So there is some need for a beer guy in a Tennessee liquor store. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have cut it - I haven't drank more than a glass of hard liquor in years, and my wine knowledge is almost totally restricted to reds.

These stores are devoted to high alcohol and nothing else – no corkscrews, no logo glasses, no mixers, no drink stirs, no beer cozies and don’t even think about a gift bag for a wine bottle.Grand Cru carries booze and nothing else. No exceptions.

The advantage is I never have to see someone walk past a shelf of high caliber beers to pick up a cube of Gennesee Cream Ale or a 12-pack of Budweiser Select in the course of my shifts.

The disadvantage is the discount I now receive –after telling almost anyone about the new position, the amount of discount is the first question. No, I won’t give that out.

But it will sort itself out in short order. I theorize that the second job will sap my energy, leaving me without the need for a nightcap to lull me to sleep. So by working among all that alcohol, I will actually drink less.