"They don't need my help"

Like every millennial in a big city, I was into craft beer for a while. Who knew that there was a class of beer that looked like tar, tasted like chocolate, and got you really drunk? Right?

The best of these, we all agreed, was Bourbon County Stout, by a local brewery called Goose Island. We were there from the beginning, in 2005, when they didn’t make much, and the bottle was still screw-top because that’s all they could afford. (Bad form, preservation-wise.) We toured the brewery. We got drunk with their workers. We knew the guy who made it. He knew a couple of our names. One of us was the manager of their brewpub.

Bourbon County Stout was, for a minute, rough-edged and punk. A four-pack cost $19. It came out whenever, sometime in December I guess, always in time for holiday parties. It is now an absolute behemoth, ranked among the best beers in the world, selling thousands of bottles on Black Friday every year. There are a half-dozen different variants of it now, from barleywines to blends with coconut and cassia bark. Bottles start at $20 and go eye-wateringly north from there. Then people add a zero or two to the price and throw them on eBay. People hedge rare bottles of Bourbon County Stout as a commodity. During the Bad Times®, I gleefully opened bottles that cost more than a fully-loaded iPhone.

Sometime in the middle of this, Goose Island was taken over by Anheuser-Busch, and most of their quotidian brewing operations were moved to Red Hook in New York. (Bourbon County Stout is still made here in Chicago.) At the same time, dozens of new breweries were appearing in the city: Half Acre, Revolution, Off Color. And old standbys like Three Floyds remained firmly independent.