A 20+ year Journey

My beer adventures began over 20 years ago. Not long after my daughter was born, my late wife, Kathy, and I started frequenting a restaurant called Cooper's Seafood House. She worked second shift at a hospital and every other week my mother-in-law would have my daughter over for a sleepover.

That would coincide with my wife's every other weekend shift. Kathy would get out at 11:30 PM and I would pick her up and we would head out for some food and drink. At the time I pretty much stuck with the Big Three and we would spend a couple of hours talking and having a few drinks, beer for me and mixed drinks for her, have some apps and then head home.

At some point I decided to try something different in the beer department, it may have been a German or Belgian, I'm not sure, it was a long time ago. What I do remember is being astounded by how much more flavor the beer had as compared to what the Big Three had to offer in the states.

This ritual of every other week at Cooper's continued for a few years and every time we went I would try to have two or three different beers, some in bottles, some off the tap. I gravitated toward Belgians and the malty side of the spectrum. I could unequivocally say, at the time, that Corsendonk's Monk's Brown Ale (I believe it's called Abbey Brown now) was my favorite for quite a few years, the dark fruit aromas and flavors really hit the spot for me. Kathy even enjoyed it and she hated beer. It wasn't long after that when I "forced" her try some stouts, she being a coffee and dark chocolate nut, that she actually started liking beer. She would always say she didn't like beer and my response was always that this is different. When she finally relented and took a sip she saw the dark side. The malty, dark, coffee, chocolaty stuff and lambics, especially framboise, turned out to be her favorites. It got to the point where our favorite tender, John, would give us a beer without us even asking for the beer menu, he knew what we liked.

I haven't intentionally purchased a Big Three beer since that first German or Belgian or whatever it was in the 20 plus years since then, they just became flavorless.

Those were fun times, it was full of great conversation and good beer.