Grizzly Growler

Exotic is another word for home sweet home

I’ve drank a Fiji Bitter during a nasty cyclone in Fiji. I drank a malty devil on a hot July day in Havana, Cuba. I sipped a big Pilsner in a 1500-year-old castle in the north of Albania, as American war planes flew overhead on their way to bomb Serbian positions in Kosovo. Two-days-later, I enjoyed a Sarajevsko Pivo in a shelled-out cafe in downtown Sarajevo. I’ve always considered those to be exotic beer drinking experiences. Whether it was enjoying my first Steinlager on a boat out in Auckland harbor during the 2000 America’s Cup finally or slaking my thirst after a long, hot Latvian sauna outside of Riga, my memories of these exotic locals will forever be imprinted with the beer I was enjoying at the time.

One person’s exotic is another person’s mundane

But something struck me the other day, as I overheard a German couple in a taproom talk about how wonderful it was to be having such good beer in Montana. Our friendly mountain community might not seem like exotic local to those of use who live here day to day, but neither do those places I mentioned seem like anything out of the ordinary for the folks who live there.

Exotic is defined by mindset of the person who is visiting a place. And it’s not always tall mountains, sandy beaches or dense forests that stick in the mind. Often it’s the smallest, most fundamental things that make a place exotic in our minds. Lord knows my Latvian friends get tired of the long winters and fearsome Baltic storms every year, in spite of a healthy supply of great beer and hot saunas.

Beer is the common denominator

Alcoholic beverages are often served in places with bad drinking water, so the likelihood of arriving at your destination and ordering a tall, cold one after your trip is pretty good. And more often than not, I bet we remember how sharing a beer with a new friend in a new place actually stays with us many years later, or how the taste of something not tasted in many years can take you back to that place. I did this recently when I was able to try a bottle of Fiji Bitter many years after I traveled to those islands. The taste instantly brought me back to Nandi town and the dry northern days and the heat that settled in after the cyclone passed by. I could taste the reminder of those friendships I formed with my island friends and the sweet smell of a cold beer after a hard day of work fixing the grass shacks obliterated by the high winds of the storm. It made me remember dark night staring up at the Southern Cross as if I’d never seen it before. And I hadn’t.

Prost,

GG