Lona and I went out to Flying Dog on Saturday (12/27) to meet up with some friends and have a few beers. If you haven’t heard by now, their tasting room is unbelievable. It was packed as usual. Lona takes our son and pushes their way through the crowd to get to the far end of the bar. My daughter and I, not being as low to the ground, get hung-up at the near end of the bar and I decide to try and get a beer before traversing the sea of people between me and the other end of the room where our friends are seated. There are 4-5 peoeple behind the bar pouring beers. The girl closest to me looks very familiar. It turns out she’s the QA manager that we met at GABF. Her name is Gwen and she’s really a nice lady. Not to mention she’s a Costco-a-holic. She doesn’t recognize me right away, but she soon sees the cross on my hat and then it hits her. “Your the guy from Lost Abbey. We’ve been looking for you!” After she gets me a beer, she comes from behind the bar and we find a 3x3ft space to stand and talk in. Right about this time Lona realizes that I’m no longer behind her and comes back to find out what happened to me. She and Gwen recognize each other, exchange plesantries, Gwen gets her a beer. See, I told you she was a nice lady. As I mentioned before it’s packed, so Gwen doesn’t have a lot of time to chat with us. She suggests that we come back during the week and talk with her and the head brewers. We enjoy our beers (all poured by the nice lady Gwen), get a couple of growler fills, and head for home.
It was determined that Tuesday would work the best for everyone, so we headed back up there. We get there and Gwen is really excited to see us. She tells us about how they’ve been looking for me because they want me to work there. I thought she was joking about looking for me, but apparently calls were placed to Tomme Arthur in reference to my whereabouts. We are introduced to Bob the Head Brewer and he takes us on a tour of the brewery. This place is so big I can’t even begin to describe it. I’ll simply say they have more 200 barrel fermenters (18)than we have tanks at Lost Abbey. At the end of the tour we meet Matt who is the VP of Brewery Operations. He was a nice guy and seemed very happy to meet us. At this point Gwen looks to Lona and says, “I don’t know if you want him to work here, but we really want him to work here.” She also tells us that no matter whether I end up working for them or not, they’re going to treat us as if we’re employees. We chatted for a few more minutes, got a few growlers filled, and left with ‘parting gifts’ courtesy of Gwen. Did I mention she’s a nice lady?
We just wanted to share this story as yet another example of awesome the beer community is. We went to Flying Dog because we like the beer. If I end up working there, that’s just bonus. As Tomme told me once, “it’s nice to be wanted” Thanks boss
