SATURDAY MORNING WITH CRANKY DON JOE | Crisis After the Scots Hit Town and Drank 'Em Dry

My name is Cranky Don Joe. Cranky DJ to a lot of my neighbors. I am not an expert. Which immediately makes me more qualified than half the people on television.

Now, I know the world has serious problems. There are wars, elections, inflation, taxes, and there are still people trying to explain cryptocurrency to me. But this week, global civilization was confronted with a crisis of a completely different magnitude. The city of Boston, Massachusetts, a town built entirely on historical defiance and aggressive sports fans, nearly ran completely out of beer. And it was all caused by an invading army of men wearing plaid skirts.

Friends, I am not exaggerating. This wasn't a minor supply chain hiccup. This was a tactical fluid depletion. Boston bars reported emergency midnight keg deliveries, multiple historic taverns completely exhausted their liquid inventories, and transatlantic flights coming out of Edinburgh reportedly ran entirely out of alcohol before they even hit the halfway mark over the Atlantic Ocean. I am convinced those fellows were using airplane peanuts to absorb the cabin humidity just to keep going.

The madness unfolded as thousands of supporters from Scotland, known affectionately as the Tartan Army, descended upon Boston to support their team during the World Cup. For most ordinary Americans, Scotland returning to the tournament for the first time in twenty-eight years was a nice little human interest sports story. For Boston bartenders, it became a terrifying struggle for survival.

According to local reports, the Samuel Adams Downtown Boston Taproom sold nearly ninety kegs of Boston Lager in a mere four days. They consumed inventory levels that normally cover the entire Fourth of July weekend. Other pubs reported sales figures that tripled on St. Patrick’s Day. Think about that. St. Patrick’s Day in Boston is generally considered the logistical equivalent of the Super Bowl, Thanksgiving, and a family reunion happening simultaneously inside a fireworks factory. The Scots looked at that benchmark and treated it like a light warm up.

Understand something: Americans like to believe we know how to celebrate. We host parking lot tailgates in blizzards that would concern arctic wildlife. We deep fry household objects that were never intended to encounter hot oil. We build entire seasonal depressions around football teams. But after reading these reports, I have reached an uncomfortable conclusion. The Scots are operating at a biological level that defies modern medicine. They have achieved a state of cellular hydration that should technically be impossible.

One Scottish supporter told a television reporter that he and his friends went into a famous downtown bar for "two pints" and stayed for twenty. Friends, somewhere between pint two and pint twenty, the outing changes legal categories. That is no longer a casual afternoon stop. That is a full time professional labor shift with mandatory overtime and a retirement plan.

What fascinates me most is not the sheer volume of liquid. It is the terrifying, organizational precision. Nobody accidentally drinks ninety kegs of craft beer. That requires military grade planning. Somebody had a schedule. Somebody had a spreadsheet. Somebody held high level logistical briefings.

Meanwhile, my local church committee still cannot schedule a pancake breakfast. We have been looking at the calendar since Easter, and at this point, we are aiming for Christmas. Two committee members are currently locked in a tense, ideological standoff over whether the bacon should be pork or turkey, and the secretary hasn’t checked her email inbox since the Obama administration. I watch the Scots mobilize a multi city beverage consumption strategy across an ocean in twenty minutes, and I look at my parish council. The contrast is devastating.

Deciding I should probably understand this level of international logistics, I asked my grandson to show me what people were saying online. That was mistake number five. He opened up what he called "Soccer Twitter."

Friends, I have never seen a darker, more unhinged corner of human existence. It is not an information network. It is a digital gladiator arena where people with cartoon characters as profile pictures scream at each other about turf quality. My grandson tried to explain a "meme." He showed me a picture of a crying man with a Scottish flag painted on his face, captioned with words that were spelled entirely wrong.

I spent fifteen minutes looking at it, trying to find the joke. By the end of the conversation, I felt like I had been hit in the back of the head with a heavy piece of dictionary. If this is how the next generation communicates, our future historical documentation will just be pictures of confused dogs and aggressive punctuation.

I decided to go to a sports bar down the street to clear my head, which was mistake number six. I immediately encountered a local fellow who had apparently watched forty-eight consecutive hours of international highlights. He cornered me by the peanut bowl and spent twenty minutes breaking down the traditional culinary landscape of the United Kingdom. He tried to explain a dish called "haggis."

According to him, it involves sheep organs boiled inside the animal's own stomach. Friends, I failed high school biology and still know that the stomach is an exit, not a cooking utensil. I told him that in Minnesota, if you boil an animal inside its own internal plumbing, the health department closes your building, the governor calls a press conference, and the police get involved. He told me it was a delicacy. I told him it sounded like a dare from a guy who lost a bet at a county fair.

According to business owners in Boston, bars across the city prepared for large crowds. They doubled inventory. They scheduled maximum staff. Then the Scots actually arrived, and suddenly preparation became a fictional concept. Managers were calling in emergency state wide shipments. Distributors were working double overtime just to keep the lines pressurized. One establishment reportedly ran out of every single category of beverage on the property, leaving absolutely nothing behind except Bud Light.

Now, I do not wish to start a theological debate. But if a Scottish football fan crosses the entire Atlantic Ocean, walks into an American tavern, and discovers that the only remaining option on the continent is a lukewarm can of Bud Light, I suspect that legally qualifies as an international provocation. That is how peace treaties get revoked.

Fortunately, emergency trucks stabilized the perimeter. But the truly mind boggling part of the story is that despite this unprecedented consumption, local business owners have overwhelmingly described the visitors as friendly, respectful, and incredibly good natureed. Some bar staff even reported supporters helping clean up the public streets after the celebrations ended.

Friends, I can barely get people in my own neighborhood to return a shopping cart to the corral. I watched a grown man leave a metal cart directly in an empty parking space yesterday because it was raining three drops a minute and he didn't want to compromise his hair. Meanwhile, thousands of soccer fans in kilts are out here performing municipal street sweeping duties after a twelve hour pub crawl. That is elite level citizenship.

My grandson tells me this is what international sports culture looks like. The singing, the bagpipes, the camaraderie, the passion, and the atmosphere. I suppose he is right. Because despite all my complaining, there is something undeniably refreshing about thousands of human beings gathering together for a reason other than screaming at each other on the internet. For a few weeks, people from different sides of the globe are staring at the exact same screen, sharing the exact same experience. That doesn't happen very often anymore.

So yes, Boston experienced a temporary beverage crisis. Yes, a few refrigerator doors were physically ripped off their hinges from repeated use by overenthusiastic tourists. And yes, somewhere in Massachusetts there is a beer distributor who is going to need a therapist just to recover emotionally from the month of June.

But there are far worse problems for a city to have than welcoming a stadium's worth of enthusiastic visitors who support local businesses, clean up after themselves, and leave behind stories that people will be telling in New England for the next fifty years.

As for Larry, he has spent the entire week insisting that Scotland represents the single greatest traveling fan base in human history. I asked him how he reached that absolute, definitive conclusion. He told me he watched two viral TikTok videos and half of a documentary on YouTube.

Naturally. This is the same man who still prints out physical MapQuest directions, highlights the turns with a yellow marker, and keeps them inside a three ring binder in his glove box.

Until next time, Cranky DJ

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