Old friends visited on Saturday, as they have for a number of years now, and we ate and drank and talked on the deck. In honor of that stretch of years, I put some of the bottles from past gabfests on one of our deck tables. Every year, I keep examples of the beer and other drinks consumed at the event and tuck them away in my garage.

Looks like we drink a lot, but of course we don’t. Five or six bottles a year adds up after nearly a decade, but it only amounts to one bottle per person or so each year.

These are among this year’s bottles. I sampled them all, in a small glass. I can say that porter isn’t really to my taste, but I’m sure someone likes it. The others I found refreshing, in small samples. That’s the way I am with beer.

Voodoo Ranger is made by New Belgium Brewing, with breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina. “Our Voodoo Ranger family is brewed with trendsetting hop and malt varieties — and served with a side of sarcasm,” the New Belgium web site says. Does sarcasm need a dish, or can it be served in a paper cone?

The Great Lakes Brewing Co. is out of Cleveland. Naming a beer for the Edmund Fitzgerald seems a little odd, but it is a local reference — that was the ore carrier’s destination, at least according to the song:

Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland…

Other sources, perhaps more reliable, say she was headed for Detroit. In any case, that too is on the Great Lakes, and Great Lakes Brewing also makes Eliot Ness Lager, Commodore Perry IPA and Burning River Pale Ale, definitely a Cleveland reference.

Finally, Gumballhead is a brew of 3 Floyds of Munster, Indiana. Gumballhead the Cat is apparently a web comic. If I felt like reading more of them, and I can’t say that I do, I might find out why the cat is carrying a space helmet that says FFF (other pictures have it as a Soviet space helmet, complete with CCCP). Some minor mysteries are better left alone.