‘Clerks’ and Is Ticking Clock Porter

This beer’s name is a pretty obscure reference to the Kevin Smith classic, and those are often the best kind of references. 

The Movie: Comedy / 1994 / View Askew Productions

The Beer: A Barrel-Aged Porter with coconut and coffee! / 8.7% ABV / Smog City Brewing – Torrance, CA

Everyone has certain movies that remind them of home. For many of us from northern Monmouth County, New Jersey, those movies would be Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse flicks. It all started with Clerks in 1994, and to this day it’s considered one of Smith’s best films. I don’t watch it nearly enough, so coming across a Clerks-referencing beer was a great excuse to dig it up.

If you haven’t seen it, Clerks follows an entire day of work for convenience store clerk Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and his buddy Randall (Jeff Anderson), who works at the video rental place next door. As the hours pass, they encounter various customers and acquaintances, and experience all kinds of frustrations. Most of the main cast members went on to appear in Smith’s other films, both reprising their original characters and playing new ones.

The real reason Clerks remains so beloved — not to mention was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry — is its authenticity. Part of this is due to the fact that Smith filmed it in his off hours while actually working at the convenience store. The cast and crew were largely all locals (fun fact: the guy who gives Dante a citation for selling cigs to a minor was my daily carpool ride to to middle school), leaving the film untainted by pretentious Hollywood stardom.

The core of the movie’s genuineness, however, is its script and dialogue. The story is a collage of moments that traverse between funny, thought-provoking, shocking, frustrating, and even dull.

Either way, it’s all just another day on the books, and anyone who’s ever worked a retail or other service job can relate. Clerks is an homage to regular, everyday people and their idiosyncrasies. Even the more “out there” characters — Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) — are just grown-up versions of your old classmates who started smoking and drinking before all the other kids.

Speaking of those guys, the beer’s name, “Is Ticking Clock” is a reference to a song sung by Silent Bob’s Russian cousin. Kudos to the folks at Smog City Brewing for recalling one of the cleanest lyric lines:

“My love for you is ticking clock, Berserker!”

Fast forward 27 years later, and voila!

Style-wise, this porter may not seem like the most obvious Clerks beer pairing selection at first. But this one has coffee in it, which is a clear convenience store staple. It also has coconut, which could totally be a nod to Hostess Sno Balls and other cheap packaged confections (I know it’s a stretch. Just let me have this.) As for the bourbon barrel aging, well that just mellows out the sweet coconut and mocha flavors.

This porter’s a treat, but it’s most fitting as a Clerks pairing because it’s an ideal beer to unwind with at the end of your day full of work BS. And that’s whether or not you had to deal with your girlfriend finding a dead guy in the store bathroom.

Hey, even Jay says that he and Silent Bob are going to kick back and drink some beers at the end of their work day. If you’ve already seen the movie, you know very well what these two do for a living.