The flight of Pickle Beer left something to be desired. The company I kept did not.
I’m soon welcoming my first child to the world and this photo fittingly and lovingly was a part of the “lasts” leading up to her arrival: finishing touches to a nursery, checking-off items for work, a final summer catch-up with friends. That includes clearing cans and bottles out of a fridge where uniquely fermented and flavored beers have been sitting for some time, waiting for people to gather and moments to share. For hours, we sat in my yard, feeding a fire the sticks and broken branches that had been strewn across my backyard earlier in the day, remnants of a recent storm. A finite pile several feet wide and several inches high was prepared to toss into that night’s flames, a timer meant to exhaust the hangout when the wood was gone. Instead, we lingered past midnight and into the early moments of the next day.
Friends Whit Baker and Andy Morrison had joined me to pass around beers we deemed good and bad. Some we saved for a special excuse and some were meant to share because we dared not open them by ourselves: A fear of too high an ABV for one person or too much flavor we couldn’t taste without discussing it aloud with someone else. Andy had saved some coveted bottles of Saison from Seattle’s Fair Isle Brewing, a small cache of treasures from near his hometown in Washington. Few bottles and cans were fully emptied that night—there was plenty of Pickle Beer left if anyone dared—but each of those Fair Isle beers went until the final drop was in our cups, a last among lasts worth waiting for.
Words + Photo by Bryan Roth