Maybe I watched too many episodes of Cheers as a kid, but I always wanted a local - a place where everyone knew your name.
I've got close over the year, normally pubs near where I worked. There was a backpackers that we drunk at for about 3 or 4 year but eventually the publican moved on and all of that changed and eventually e moved on to. There have been places that I've drunk at often, often enough to know the bartender by name, enough to say hi when I saw him outside of the pub as well, but this is the story of a place that is as close as I get to a local - eventhough it's not really local.
It's the Alehouse Project in Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia an $11 uber ride from my house.
It's the place I've drunk the most beers, untappd tells me so - 567 beers to be exact - that's okay it's not the most someone has had close to 2000 there - now that is a local. 567 beers, not bad for 9 years. I know it's nine years because last Saturday I was at their 9th birthday. Weirdly of the lease, not the opening date. Why the lease - because this was meant to be a closing party. but it's not. We are getting another year of the Alehouse Project
It was is a side of the times - Alex (the owner) wants to close, he wants to move to Scotland where his partner is from, but global movement is a little difficult at the moment, so it's making that difficult - on the plus side we get another year of good beers.
Now I've been on this Journey since early days - I don't know why I originally went there, as mentioned it's not really local. Untappd tells me it was the 24th of August 2012 - so I was on it within a couple of weeks of opening. Maybe I had heard a rumour about it - I mean you could name the good beers bars of Melbourne on a couple of hands back then.
And that another of Alex's points, back then it was a bit of a destination bar, something special, you do amazing events - and I've been to enough of them - The Launch of Stone Brewing in Australia, the various 'Dark Side of' winter beer festivals, Hopfests 1 through to 10. But it's got harder of late - good beer is in most suburbs now (my new local is a 3 minute walk from my house) and then of course is the pandemic. Months of not being open, Months more of uncertainly, not great for organising beer festivals, of getting international beers in that no one else has.
As Alex said - It okay working 90 hour weeks when you are making money, but not when you aren't.
And I'll admit it, even I hadn't been there since the pre-pandemic days (literally 2 days before the pandemic came to Melbourne, I remember discussing it with Alex and he played with a friend of ours new puppy which she had bought with her)
But for this night it was like the Alehouse Project of old. There was a full board (10 beers) of Daryls - Daryl beer were always the one off beers that were made for the festival he held (Alex's nickname in the beer world is Daryl because his last name is Summers and that will only make sense to Australians, who are currently thinking - good nickname) most of these we re-brews of beers I had one drunken night many years ago - a couple of them were from a brewery that doesn't exist anymore (coming out of retirement for one night only)
And as the night draw on I realised why so many of those nights were special, there was the beer of course - and they were big beers of course (the 18% barrel aged barley wine was insane) and there were the shots of Patron that Alex likes to do with his nearest and dearest but there was this feeling that this was one of those nights, that everyone was catching up with mates, laughing, enjoying life. Something no of us do enough or haven't been allowed to do lately.
And I vowed to do it more often, I vowed that by closing time next June that I could get to 666 beers there, it felt like a nice round number - but maybe that was just the beer talking.
And the moral of the story - if you have a place you love to drink, support them, because now more than ever they might be gone sooner than you think (or you might get a 1 year reprieve)