Our Beer Girl

It's not a loss; it's a change. A change even more profound than moving halfway across the country to a city where we knew no one. It was just the three of us and now the two of us have to figure out how to exist without the third.

I know, this doesn't sound like much of a beer-related post and no, I haven't decided to give up the most delicious beverage on the planet. This is a post for me so if you decide to stop reading now, that's ok; I promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon. Otherwise, I appreciate you hanging in there with me.

Yesterday we said good-bye to our furry child, the one who had defined us for over 13 years. As I was searching for a particular picture I ran across one of our favorites of our little beer girl.

Just like you shouldn't let human children drink a full bottle of beer, we would never have given that much to our furry child. But, just like many of the parents I know, a sip, dip of the finger into the glass...well, I don't see a darn thing wrong with that. For as long as I can remember our girl was a beer girl and the hoppier the better even though those hops never failed to make her sneeze.

So on the day we said good-bye I guess it's only fitting that we'd already had beer plans. They weren't just any beer plans, though; they were in fact plans that involved a movie and three IPAs. We weren't sure we were going to go, that'd we'd be ready to have a bit of fun, but as the afternoon progressed we knew it would be better to be out than at home so off we went.

It wasn't an uber beer geek event but there were folks we knew there and it was a good beginning to the next stage. And the beer was good, thanks to the brewing team at Lompoc headed up by Bryan Keilty. The IPAs, The Spy Who Dry Hopped Me, Dr. Hop and From Lompoc With Love, of course are named to play off Bond movie titles. Our girl spent many hours watching Bond films with us and she would have loved to have sneezed her way through all three of the beers with us.