Beer. Remember when you met it?

Cold Bud has always been priority numero uno for my Grandpa, the legendary Jack Hess: attendee of costume soirees in pine-paneled banquet halls, long-suffering Chicago Cubs superfan. On summer visits he’d park his Caddy in the driveway and immediately grab the cooler sweating on the blue leather back seat, stack his red and silver cans in the veggie drawer in the fridge, and only then stop to give us a kiss.

My sister and I would lean our elbows on the arm of his chair while our Grandpa grumbled at poorly performing baseball players, and when prompted we’d sprint to the kitchen to fetch him a cold one. Tiny sips of the foam that fans out over Budweiser cans were my first introduction to beer—bracingly cold, metallic, dry to the mouth.

Then there was the Goebbel’s—$5.99 a case—that we’d hustled some of-age college kid to buy us from the liquor store that neighbored our favorite pizza joint. My parents came home early one night from a party to find four of us lounging unlawfully in my bedroom, sipping warm Goebbel’s that had been stashed for weeks in the back of my closet. It was beer so bad the memory still sends my stomach into a series of flips.

The first good beer I ever tasted was on a high-school trip to Brussels, most of which we spent singing Oasis’s Wonderwall loudly down cobblestone streets. One night our chaperone caught a kid initiating a drinking game at the pub. We’d been permitted to sample a couple of Trappists in the name of alcohol appreciation, and the proposal to play a round of Never Have I Ever constituted, for our teacher, a transgression of the first order. He tossed us the map and ordered us to find our own way back to the hotel, sulking behind the group as we negotiated the proper course home. I remember a friend cupping a gloved hand to my ear and whispering that it was all a ruse, that our teacher was in fact too drunk to find the hotel himself, the veracity of this assertion I still wonder about today.

Then I went to college in Vermont where there is also good beer, and so much of it. Fruity Magic Hat and hoppy Long Trail and my very favorite: Otter Creek Pale Ale, a beer to buy by the growler and drink with your best friend beside some burbling body of water. A beer that, to me, tastes like fiddle music and wild-eyed faces lit up by bonfires and limb-splintering black ice lurking just below every welcome mat. A beer, that is to say, that tastes like Vermont.

And then the Northwest. Remember the first time you met a new friend at a Seattle bar and ordered a few Imperial IPAs thinking everything would be fine? The beer here is so robust it commands you to slow down and taste it, damn it, or you’ll be sorry.

Sometimes I’ll drink two hoppy IPAs too quickly and get a stomachache so acute, I’ll swear off Deschutes forever. But then Brouwer’s puts something irresistible on cask and I’m back in love. And here’s what I love most about our crazy IPAs: they have a way of warning you before you have too much, and in this sense, and I mean this, they take care of you. Except for the most iron gutted among us, it’s sort of impossible to truly overindulge. Stick to Northwest beers and it is unlikely you’ll ever find yourself lost, a group of impertinent, Brit pop-obsessed high-school students your only hope for finding the way home.

Happy Beer Week everybody! Be sure to have a cold one in honor of our inimitable local brews.