One of the best things about having kids is that you never know what they’re going to say next. This can also be one of the worst things about having kids. Like the time that we had a monumental snowstorm, and the boys were out helping the Wonderful Husband shovel out our cars. The entire street was quiet.

Two rather intoxicated, inappropriately dressed individuals were stumbling up the block, and our two little cherubs invited everyone to “look at those freak shows!”

In the snowy quiet of the evening, their little voices rang out as clearly as church bells. Thankfully, the two individuals were too far into their cups to be too offended and continued on their merry way. Or the time that we went shopping for pants, and G announced to the entire store that they were “lucky he wore underwear today” as he made his way into the fitting room.

Luckily, we are getting to ages where they’ve learned to think a little bit before they speak, and we don’t have quite as many embarrassing encounters as we did when they were little. These days, the tangents that we go off on are usually a lot unexpected.

The other night, A and I were in the process of unpacking groceries.

Wait, I need to start even farther back. I am a huge fan of the Broadway show “Hamilton.” I haven’t gotten lucky enough to see it yet, but the soundtrack has been on repeat on my play list for months. I’m both a history nerd and a theater lover, and this show is just the perfect collision of all my favorite things.

Once every six months or so, when I get to turn something besides Kidzbop or the soundtrack from “Moana” on the car radio, I choose to play “Hamilton.” The kids have either given up, or maybe they can actually recognize greatness, and they have really gotten into it, too. It has become the one thing that we can all agree to listen to when we are in the car together.

“Hamilton” has also really sparked the kids’ interest in early American history. I am only too happy to engage in discussions about the Founding Fathers, the Revolution, and the early years of our country. We are even planning a trip to Boston in the near future to walk the Freedom Trail. A happens to be studying this very subject in his history class right now so we are just all American Revolution, all the time.

So, back to the groceries. We had been listening to “My Shot” on the way back from the store, and we continued singing it, with each of us playing different characters. (For those of you not familiar with it, it’s an imaginary meeting in a bar between Hamilton, John Laurens, Hercules Mulligan and the Marquis de Lafayette where they are discussing how they’re going to take their “shot” at greatness, if given the chance. In the play, each of them punctuates their story by doing a shot of alcohol.) In the song, they also reference drinking pints of Sam Adams (an anachronism in the play, but so catchy!). A, who is a little more mature than the other two, completely gets the subtleties of the song, and after we finished our little performance, he made the comment that he “didn’t understand why they’d be drinking Sam Adams. It’s terrible beer.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, that for a moment, I forgot I was talking to A and not his father, who happens to share just about the same opinion of that particular brew. Then reality set in. My 11-year-old just voiced his opinion on BEER! After I picked my jaw up off the floor, my first question was “and you know that how?”

I really shouldn’t have been surprised that his answer was “I read it in a book.” I was too busy exhaling a sigh of relief and I missed the first part of his lecture, but after I came to my senses, he was busy explaining to me how Sam Adams was what was known as a maltster, not a brewer. Maltsters, (in case you didn’t know. I didn’t!), provided the malt to the brewers to they could make the beer. According to A, Adams wasn’t very good at making malt, so any beer that was made with his malt, would have probably tasted awful. He continued to tell me that there was no historical connection between the actual Sam Adams and the Sam Adams brewery of today.

By the time the groceries were all put away, I had been thoroughly schooled on colonial brewing practices and Sam Adams. A has that kind of brain that soaks up all the little trivial bits and pieces like this, and it was fun to hear him rattle off fun facts and his own opinions of things. I have to say, I never imagined a world where my 11-year-old would be educating me about alcohol, but you know how it goes with kids. You never know what they’re going to say and you never know when you’re going to be the teacher and when you’re going to be the student.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.