On Friday July 19, 2013, my son was born.
As is to be expected, his birth did not go entirely as we had planned it to go. It was a traumatic experience for him, for his mom, and for me. As a result of his traumatic birth, he didn’t get to stay with us for very long before he was whisked off to the newborn intensive care unit for observation.
He’s fine, but the fact that he spent his first two days in the world in an incubator on a different floor of the hospital than our recovery room made for a pretty emotional start to his life (for his parents much more than for him I’m sure—we had to wake up every three hours to come down to feed and hold him, he was warm and safe and sleeping and probably didn’t even notice).
As anyone who’s had a baby can likely attest, you don’t get much sleep in the first little while. On top of that usual lack of sleep, we had the emotionally draining experience of having to frequently visit—and then leave—our son throughout the night. All told, by the time he was actually with us in our hospital room on Sunday July 21st, we’d probably had less than 10 hours sleep in the 65 hours since we had taken a cab to the hospital at 4am on Friday morning and a good portion of the time we’d been awake had been spent crying.
Needless to say, we were frazzled.
On the night our son finally joined us in our room, my wife spent a considerable amount of time holding and breastfeeding our son until she finally slipped into what I imagine was the first real sleep she’d had in some time. When she did, I took over (the holding, not the breastfeeding) and turned on the TV. It was then that my father-in-law offered me a beer—something that my in-laws had slipped in with the food and clean clothes they’d brought to the hospital “just in case.”
It was in this state—emotionally drained, tired to an extreme I’d never before experienced, and overjoyed to finally, permanently have our son with us—that I drank what was without a doubt the best beer I’ve ever had. My newborn son was in my arms, there was a baseball game on the TV in our room—a Baltimore Orioles/Texas Rangers game that history tells me the Rangers lost 4-2—and I was finally able to relax. The beer, incidentally, was a can of Muskoka Brewery’s Mad Tom IPA, but frankly I’m not sure that matters all that much. Mad Tom is without a doubt a great beer, but truth be told, I don’t think I even finished it.
This experience has inspired me to explore the emotional component that sometimes accompanies a great beer and I’ve asked a handful of “beer folks”–brewers, writers, and industry folks–to detail their best beer experience in a series aptly titled “The best beer I’ve ever had.” I’ll share their stories with you here in the coming weeks.
Ben's Beer Blog 
Congratulations Ben&Co. The follow up lines that I wish to write are very difficult to get out because everything sounds trite. It is hard to talk about everyday miracles without sounding like that older lady in the office talking about God’s little precious miracles. So much of our everyday is ‘magical’, maybe. Enjoy it, in all its frustrating and tiring glory.
I am glad that you are getting a bunch of people to talk about their best beer ever because the experience of being mindful, the act of being all there for a moment reminds you that life does happen between big events. The big events often throw your ordinary life into sharp relief. A baby forces most people to take things slow again and if you ever walk with a toddler, it is all about the little things whether it be a bee or another grey stone on the same path that you walk each and every day.
I look forward to seeing what occasionally snarky, always informative and mostly entertaining beer people have to say about their best beer ever. Methinks that it will not be what is expected.
Thanks for sharing.
Indeed. I imagine my son’s going to force me to slow down a little too. He certainly already has taken a toll on my usual beer consumption and I don’t really care all that much. Thanks for your comment!
I totally agree. One of my best beers was the night after my Ben was born. I actually wrote about this same idea in December: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/chris-schryer/best-beer_b_2296062.html the best beer can be very different from the best-made beer, or favourite beer.
Great post on HuffPo, Chris. I’m sure I must have read it at the time and I feel far less original now!
Not at all. I think it’s a great topic to explore, and know that you’ll get some great stories out of it. I can’t wait to read more of them!
Ben. Congratulations on your new baby from myself and the team at Muskoka Brewery.
Thanks Jason and Muskoka Team.
Send me your address Ben – we want to make sure you celebrate this event properly.
Jake – Muskoka Brewery – tap.room@muskokabrewery.com
Done and done. I’m suddenly even more grateful my father-in-law didn’t bring Labatt Blue to the hospital that day…
Congratulations Ben on your new baby. You didn’t name him Tomas by any chance did you? he, he.
No, I named him after his grandfather, Molson Schlitz Maximum Ice Johnson.