My beer obsession, as with many other beer fanatics, has gone through phases. In the first, I saved the empty bottle for each new beer I'd try. That doesn't last forever, as I kept running out of space. In the next phase, I began writing them down, but only by name, without any details about the contents of the containers. This is called "ticking", through true tickers go to great lengths to try each new brew they can, the smallest amount possible to claim they actually tasted it, and eschew beers they've had in the search for anything new. Phase the third began when I sat down with that first bottle of Lion Stout and wrote about it. Now the bottles were being saved, but when it came time to recycle, I saved the labels. In the first notebooks of reviews, I often pasted the labels next to the written review.
I gave up the label collecting after a few years, it got to be too much of a chore. So, the next phase was slightly different, posting reviews on line, saving bottles until it's time to toss them out, due to lack of space. I had hundreds of useless empty bottles at one time, just gathering dust, because I liked the look of them, having that souvinier. A friend asked me recently what he should do with all his, and I said, "throw them out." "But it took such effort to get them!" "Well," I said, "I record the experience in words. If you didn't do that, take their picture."
In this current phase, I have their pictures and the words right here on this blog. I'm currently going through a lot of dusty bottles in preparation for a move. But for two of them, I decided to snap a little portrait, a keepsake a momento.
On the left, one of the first cans of Furious ever, unfilled. When Omar first revealed to me that he was canning the Surly beers, he surprised me with a full 6-pack of Bender cans and an empty can of Furious, which I held onto for almost 5 years. I'd written the copy for what he would only tell me was "packaging", and since submitting it, he told the Surly Nation that there would be no bottles, forget about bottles. I was not the only one who never thought about cans. Hence the surprise.
On the right, a bottle even older, from the pre-can days. When Omar was going out to bars in search of new accounts, he'd bring bottled samples. This one has a sticker with the letter "b" on the back, so that was a Bender. He brought some to the Nile for me on occasion if he had too many left at the end of the night. What a heck of a guy. I hung onto a few of those, leaving one among the display bottles at the Nile, as a tease. "Yeah, they bottled, didn't you know? Didn't sell at all, so they switched to cans."
This was a very dusty bottle I held onto until it made no sense to pack up and take along on a move.
Empty growlers, though, that's another thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment