By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Columnist

In my house, there are only two types of people: The beer drinker and the nonbeer drinker. I'm the first type and my wife is the second. (The cat, who doesn't really get a vote, prefers room-temperature milk.)

We've lived and worked around this dichotomy for years, but lately I'm feeling the strains of it more and more. Lately, I'm wondering why my wife can't understand the pleasures of beer drinking.

We knew about this division going into the marriage more than a quarter century ago. There are lots of other lines we could have divided on: Cats versus dogs. Baseball versus opera. Crest versus Colgate. In retrospect, none of these things proved really important, not the way the beer thing is turning out to be.

My wife thinks beer tastes somewhere between cleaning fluid and battery acid and smells even worse. She sometimes shudders when I pop one open. She politely chuckles if I ask her to bring me one when I'm too busy watching a Braves game on TBS to get it for myself.

Still, we've managed to smooth over our taste-test differences just fine, thank you. We've learned to co-exist. We don't try to enforce our tastes (no matter how bitter) on one another. I like beer and she doesn't. Simple as that.

I've only seen my wife drink beer on two occasions, both of them momentous ones in our world travels. The first beer she ever had was at the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam. The second was at the Hofbrau House in Munich. If you've got to drink beer, she figured, those are the kinds of places you should do it. She doesn't attach the same sort of beery aura to Anna Bannanas, the old Columbia Inn Round Table, or even our backyard barbecues the way I do.

Anyway, none of this used to be a problem. As I grow older, though, I often find myself looking around for someone to share a pau-hana beer with and come up empty. The sad truth is that the crowd I used to run with got old, had kids and mostly stopped drinking beer. The younger ones, who don't invite me out very often anyway, tend to drink things like Zima or watermelon martinis when they do.

Often, after a long, hard day of writing columns and complaining about bosses over plate lunches, I'm left to that worst of habits, solo drinking. "When I drink alone I like to be alone I like to be by myself," George Thorogood once sang. Me? I prefer a crowd.

Which is why I often end up looking pleadingly at my wife. I give her this pitiful hound-dog look when I get home. Woe is me, it says, nobody to drink beer with anymore.

My wife scoffs, and the cat begs for milk. Once again, I'm on my own.

There's just one thing left to do: schedule our next trip to Milwaukee, the city that made beer famous. If she won't drink with me there, I'm pretty sure there's no more hope.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com or at 525-5460.