NOSTALGIA...

A few weeks ago, Dave dropped off about five boxes' worth of beer bottles from my collection. He still has five more to bring over, but it was a nice start. Of course, if I were to only blog about the beers I already had over here to begin with, I'd be well over a hundred by the time I got to the old stock. Not that I want to do that, since my plan was to blog in random order from the very beginning, and I'm excited to share some of the older bottles in my collection with you, Dear Reader, as well as the stuff I've only recently sampled.
In any case, I'm home today with lots of free time, so I decided to grab a box from the garage and begin photographing bottles. It was just my luck that the first box I grabbed happened to be the one with the bottles in it that I prize most. I opened it and smiled, and set up the bottles to get their pictures taken. It was then that I noticed how dingy they were, not just with dust, but with some very fond memories of a bachelorhood spent in Ohio as a very bad cook.
See, when Dave, Sean, and I had our apartment together, we set the Beer Wall up on top of the cabinets in our tiny corridor kitchen. Being young, single men in our early 20s, none of us possessed a great deal of cooking prowess, except maybe Dave, but his specialty was making cobbler in a cast iron dutch oven while it lay buried under the coals of a roaring outdoor fire. None of us really knew exactly how to prepare a meal over a stove without getting grease everywhere and setting off the smoke alarm. There were many a Saturday morning breakfast that served up black pancakes and crunchy eggs, courtesy of Yours Truly, and Sean believed no dinner could be cooked without using some kind of liquor as a major ingredient. His specialty was tequila-lime chicken, but once he decided to pan-fry some burger patties, and ran out of his sauce of choice. As a result, he reached for a bottle of Galliano that he received as a gift. Galliano, if you don't know, is a green, anise flavored liqueur, which to most people probably tastes like black licorice. For good measure, he threw in some Blue Curacao, which tastes like oranges. Once the flames died down, he brought dinner out to the living room. I took one taste and decided that one should never use these flavors to make a hamburger ever again. I believe it was the last time Sean ever made dinner for me. Sean seemed to enjoy his creation, however, and finished his burger, as well as mine. It's my theory that he probably enjoyed everything his wife Nicole ate while she was pregnant as well.
In any case, these bottles have a film on them from three years of single-guy kitchen adventures that took place a few feet beneath their perch, as well as three years' worth of cigarette smoke. This was Ohio in the last millenium, where you could smoke anywhere. Even non-smokers bought cigarettes so they could light them and put them on incense trays, just to give their place some atmosphere. I saw the condition that these bottles were in, compared to the new ones I've been posting online, and decided I needed to give them some TLC. I brought the box into the kitchen and wet a sponge, and proceeded to scrub the film off them, while trying not to damage their wet labels in the process. I set them up to dry, and was pleased with the result. I snapped their photos, and will be posting them soon.
It's funny how something as trivial as some grime on a bottle can bring back fond memories, and I was almost sad to wash the grime away, as it was put there during a great, happy time in my life. However, I have a new mission now, which I must not ignore: bringing you the highest quality, entirely-biased, self-serving beer blog I possibly can. It is for you, Dear Reader, that I have washed away the evidence of good times and bad cooking, although the memories will remain indelible forever. Much like Sean's special burger, which I swear I can still taste even now.

Nasty.