A Day in the Life of a Rock Star: Sweetwater Music

First of all, it’s funny how I’ve been living in Atlanta all my life and haven’t known about certain things that we have. The other day, Miss Corinne Stevie invited me to tag along with her friend Ydiz and his crew as they were going to the Sweetwater Brewing Company. For those who don’t know, Sweetwater (420) is a Georgia brewed beer that is very popular here. You can usually find them in your local grocery store in various colored cases depending on what type of Sweetwater that you like.

Luckily, I got the chance to try all of the different kinds of Sweetwater for a low price of $8. Yes, I said it! The Sweetwater Brewing Company which is open Monday-Tuesday from 9-5 and from Wednesday-Friday from 9-7:30, lets you buy a nice glass, souvenir cup for $8 with about six tickets inside that allows you to drink whatever kind of Sweetwater you like. At first I thought this was too good to be true, sure enough, I gave the cute chick my eight bucks and I kindly grabbed my glass full of tickets and walked inside to Booze Heaven.

I’m no virgin to Sweetwater so I didn’t have to worry about whether I would like the beer or not, plus they have different types of Sweetwater that I’m sure a person will find a drunken home with. They had SW Blue, which is a light, fruity kind of beer SW IPA, which is has a grapefruit taste to it, SW Motor Boat (You motor boating son of a b***h! -Wedding Crashers, dude) that had a light taste to it. They also had SW Georgia Brown and of course, SW Pale Ale, which is mostly what most bars carry. After a while, as my senses failed, they all started to taste the same: good and full of alcohol! They even had a band playing that did pretty good covers of Led Zeppelin, The Cars, ZZ Top, and The Doobie Brothers. I thought it would have been cool if they did nothing but Black Sabbath covers, which is really a mix between blues and metal, but with a crowd full of people who have been drinking, I don’t think that would be the best thing to play. Might start a riot.

Another cool thing about the place is that they take you on a short tour through the brewing company to show you how and where the popular drink is made and packaged. They didn’t exactly turn on the machines but the girl did explain to us how the process worked, which I think no one was really paying too much attention to for obvious reasons. It was still cool to see the large, silver containers full of Sweetwater and to see all of the packages full of bottled Sweetwater beer.

After the tour, it was the last call for drinks, so I moseyed on to the nearest bartender to get my last round and walked back to where Corinne and Ydiz and his friends were at. Some random group of people asked me to take their photo and of course I didn’t mind…which I’m even more surprised is that I took a pretty good picture considering the state that I was in. It was also cool to meet Ydiz’s friends who were also musicians. In fact, after we finished out last drinks and staggered back to our cars, we left and cruised on over to Ydiz’s friend, Jeff’s house where they had a cosmic jam session. It was like experimental meets funk as one of Ydiz’s friends played the guitar, which surprisingly only had four strings as opposed to six and Ydiz played the bass while Jeff played the Djembe (an African drum basically). It was like the Planeteers fusing their powers to create Captain Planet as they jammed out right in front of my eyes. On that note, it’s always cool when you have people to jam with on occasion. It allows you to grow more as a musician and also lets you fuse whatever you know how to play with others which can make something quite spectacular.

Later Days…