Drinking The Largest Beer At The Airport Makes Everything Better

Austin L. Ray

Almost no one likes going to the airport.

And with good reason. It’s a uniformly terrible place, no matter where you live or travel. Best case scenario, you might end up in the equivalent of a slightly-better-than-mediocre food hall type situation. Worst case? You might end up in Newark.

And then there are the people, of course. So many goddamn people. Angry people. Loud people. Exhausted people. All with their attendant bad manners, unsavory smells, and general inability to act like a human in public. How is it possible that they’re always in the way? How do they not realize they’re surrounded by other people? Who raised these folks!

It’s bad, but you’re here. You’ve hurried up, and now you’re waiting. So, what should you do? Great question. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. I kinda love going to the airport.

And here’s how you can, too:

You should order the largest beer you can find. And then you should drink that beer.

I’ve applied this cheat code for years and am happy to pass it along to you. I’ve ordered the biggest beer I could find at the airport again and again and have found that it pairs well with just about everything. But more than that, a colossal beer precisely matches the freak of the airport's chaotic, savage vibes. It works every time, all of the time.

The process is almost too simple to explain, but let’s do it anyway.

As soon as you’ve found your gate, look around and assess your options. Note the sizes of the glasses you see on nearby tables and bars. Are they huge? If so, move toward them. Make them yours.

Did you make eye contact with a bartender? Perfect. Talk to them. Ask about the beer. “How much of it can you give me?” you might say. They might respond, “We have beers available in portions of 10 ounces, 16 ounces, and 49 ounces.” Go with the biggest one they’ll give you.

Doesn’t matter what kind of beer it is, so don’t get too hung up on that. A giant, ice-cold Coors Light will do the trick. An oversized, brutally bitter IPA? Sure, who cares! I once ordered 16 ounces of 14% ABV stout with cinnamon and other nonsense in it at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. No regrets. All that matters is that the beer is substantial.

How can this enormous beverage help you? Another great question. For one thing, it makes all the humans somehow quieter and less in the way. Their smells and sounds become subtler, their myriad annoyances a little more amusing. Everything is interesting and nothing hurts.

Now, obviously, if you don’t drink alcohol for whatever reason, if you despise beer as a concept, if gluten makes your insides go all screwball, don’t be weird about this essay—this advice clearly isn’t for you.

No worries. Thank you for reading this far.

As for everyone else, I want you to take this seriously, because it is serious. The best thing you can do for yourself in the dystopian, commerce-driven hellscape of an airport is to order the biggest beer you can find and then drink that humongous brewski.

After you’ve enjoyed a large beer, you should probably go ahead and order another one. What’s stopping you? Your plane taking off, maybe. But if not that, then nothing! Go ahead and get one more. In fact, go ahead and repeat this process every time you go to the airport. I promise it’ll help. Maybe eventually you’ll even stop dreading that place entirely.

I can hear some of you naysaying. “Austie, please, it’s a Tuesday at 3pm. Even though I’m at the airport and I am most assuredly not enjoying being at the airport, it’s simply not an appropriate time for a gigantic beer.”

Let me stop you right there. Time as a concept is moot at the airport. That’s just science.

Furthermore, you’re about to climb aboard a giant metal tube and hurtle through the sky at upwards of 500 miles per hour, an absolute affront to god and man and physics. Who knows what will happen up there.

Have you heard the one about Kurt Vonnegut and the envelope? It’s a much-repeated story, one that tends to take on different forms depending on who’s repeating it, the type which ends up on corny blogs of so-called “creatives,” the kind of thing that’s a weird-fonted meme you can find on google images. But it’s a good one nonetheless.

In the story, he’s working at home with his wife and he tells her he’s going to buy an envelope. A sensible woman, she suggests hey, why not buy a bunch, bring them home, then we’ll have envelopes. But he insists on his original plan because he’s “going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.”

Turns out, he’s not wrong—and it’s an admirable way to look at most things in life, up to and including that beautiful moment where you search for, purchase, and consume the most tremendous damn beer possible at the airport.

As such, I’ll let him have the final word here:

“I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. A fire engine goes by, and I give them a thumbs up. I see a woman with a dog and I ask the woman what kind of dog that is. The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around.”