From Beer To Eternity

You're drenched in sweat from having just finished a 10k race in your best time ever. Your throat is parched from a softball doubleheader during which you scraped both knees and one elbow in a Pete Rose head-first slide into second base. You skipped the lawn work and instead decided to watch the Phillies on television, perched in a shaded hammock. What would absolutely, positively, hit the spot right now? If you said madeleines tea, go back to your Marcel Proust.

I'm talking frosty, refreshing, rewarding, thirst-satisfying, getcha-ice- cold-right-here, beer. It should come as no surprise that beer consumption goes up in the summer. Even people who are not regular beer drinkers in February can't resist beer's quenching appeal in warm weather.

It may surprise you, however, that we're drinking less beer these days. Steve Sendzik, owner of the Grape Street Pub, 105 Grape St. in Manayunk: ''People used to drink beer with reckless abandon. Now they're drinking less, in part because of the concern over drunk driving." They're also saying ''no" to beers five and six because of health concerns. You can't pick up a sports page today without reading about some athlete who's just admitted

himself to a detox unit.

This doesn't mean we don't still love our beer. We do, though we're pikers compared to the Czechs who, as the biggest brewskie imbibers in the world, consume roughly twice our 24 gallons per capita each year. It does mean that the beer business is changing, which it has been doing since 1840 when the lighter German lager beer replaced the heavier English style ale and porter.

Prohibition also had a major impact on beer drinking by (along with residual anti-German sentiment from World War I) wiping out half of the 1,500 breweries in the country and giving Americans a thirst for a still lighter brew.

Today, major American beers are lighter than ever with "light" beers taking an increasing share of the market. (Miller Lite is the second biggest seller in the country.) Light beers are even more suited to warmer weather

because their thin flavor is masked by intense chilling and because their lower alcoholic content (under 3 percent vs. up to 4.8 percent for regular beer and higher for ales and stouts) means less calories and a chance to fit into those jams you just bought.

In typical American schizophrenic fashion, while we are drinking more light beer, we're also drinking more premium, heavier beers, too.