Charleston is nice — “the jewel of the Lowcountry,” a travel writer recently proclaimed. But can a place so nice become too precious? There’s a point on the third or fourth visit when the perfection and elegance of the “Holy City’s” streetscapes, its meticulously restored and uniformly classical houses, begin to close in on your brain’s right hemisphere.

You may find yourself craving a moment of weirdness, modernism or merengue. And with the real estate stakes so high — the median sale price of a home on the lower peninsula was over $850,000 in January — whimsy, experimentation and indolence seem to struggle for a foothold. The dazzling restaurant scene is so competitive, dining out on a Friday or Saturday can be as premeditated as a trip to the moon .

Those of us who live here may feel these limitations most acutely. Some recall a time in the last century when things were a little less battened-down, almost beachy, the pace decidedly slower. True, Charleston may have been even more formal and less sophisticated in many ways then — a Heineken and a platter of fried shrimp was the best you could hope for in the average restaurant — but Charleston fundamentally lived up to its billing as a hub of Southern adventure.

Fortunately, anyone — local or visitor alike — who chafes at Charleston’s stateliness and decorum today can find an instant remedy: its beer, served fresh from the tank in a largely industrial neighborhood two miles north of the city’s tourist center.