Sometimes I feel sorry for beer.

Not just beer in general, but very specific beers. There I am, browsing in a bottle shop and I spy a bottle or two of something that looks like it’s been sitting there for ages. Beers that everyone has cast their eyes over and then turned their nose up at, in preference for some other purchase.

And so they sit there, lonely and unloved.

It happened with the Baird Brewing beers from Japan. They sat on the shelves at Dan’s for ages, with no-one touching them. Most likely because, if I remember correctly, they were priced $3 to $4 more than other craft beer bottles. So a lot of people passed them by – including myself.

Until, one day, I looked at those bottles of Suruga Bay imperial IPA and decided someone should take them home. And that someone was me.

I gave those beers a loving home. And I didn’t even get angry when I tasted them and found they’d gone all to hell after sitting on the Dan’s shelves exposed to light day in and day out. Instead, I felt a little holier than thou – kind of like those people who get a dog from the pound and insist on referring to it as a “rescue dog” because it makes them feel extra-special. (really, people, we know how a dog pound works – if no one picks the dog up, they get put down. You don’t need to spell it out for us).

I felt sorry for beer again recently – and again at Dan’s. I stumbled across four single bottles of Ballast Point’s Grapefruit Sculpin. And they all had a discounted $3 sticker price. That made me feel a bit aggrieved; the idea that a wonderful beer like that had to be discounted seemed like such an insult.

But, of course, it was also good because it meant I saved myself more than $10 on the full price when I bought them. Unlike the Baird imperial IPA, the Grapefruit Sculpin was still fine.

See, caring about beer can be rewarding too.