On Thursday, March 22, 2018, my father Jonathon Abernathy passed away suddenly at the age of 72. It was unexpected and caught us all off guard; as such, plans were canceled or rescheduled and many things took a backseat while we’ve been sorting things out. Including most activity here on this site.

It’s hard but we’re doing okay. The last few weeks have been occupied with doing all of the things you don’t think about until it happens: funeral home arrangements, writing an obituary, planning a memorial, hosting the memorial, sorting through old photos and possessions, and more. A lot of condolences, and emotions, and sometimes questions. I suppose it’s nothing you can really prepare for until it happens.

But enough of that, this post is to pay tribute to my father and share a bit about who he was and—of course—some of the beery memories I have.

Dad was a beer drinker, of roughly the Boomer generation, but he wasn’t one who was steadfastly loyal to a particular brand; just the opposite. He bought beer within his budget, and sometimes that meant beers like Hamms or Milwaukee’s Best—whatever might be on sale that week for “everyday” beer— and sometimes that meant Deschutes Brewery or Kona or Widmer mix packs. That is to say, he wasn’t a beer snob, and was willing to try any specialty beer or homebrew that he was offered—but didn’t turn his nose up at “cheap” beer, ever.

He wasn’t terribly fond of the big, boozy beers like imperial stouts or bourbon barrel aged things—they were too strong, and he’d rather just have a shot of bourbon (of which we did many). But he always tried them, and often he liked them just fine; he just knew his limits when it came to beer vs. booze.

Growing up, Dad was always willing to give us kids sips off his beer, and we lived in a household that didn’t make a mystery out of alcohol. It was never glorified, and it was taken seriously, but it was never taboo or off-limits, either; we’d get sips of beer, or a sip off the occasional shot of tequila or other spirit, or wine, and we understood the effects it could have on you. I believe this demystification of beer and alcohol is directly responsible for the fact that I never drank or partied in high school or before I was 21—no, really—and is the reason I’ve never made alcohol a mystery to my own children. (Who, despite my efforts, almost never take me up on my offer for a sip of whatever I’m drinking.) And it helps to foster responsibility and a respect for alcohol.

(Not to say that nobody ever got drunk or that we were perfect… but you get the idea.)

Beyond the beer, he was a great father and grandfather, a good husband, and I was privileged to call him my father. He was patient, kind, fun, funny with an offbeat sense of humor, had a good work ethic, and was an all around good guy. In the mid-1960’s during the Vietnam War he was drafted into the Army as a Corpsman and served as a medic, spending one year in-country, though I believe he didn’t see much if any direct combat.

In the mid-70’s he got a job with the Willamette Industries KorPine particle board plant here in Bend, at which he worked until the plant’s closure in the early 2000’s. There were many times after work he would go have a beer with coworkers at Grover’s Pub, which wasn’t far down the road. Grover’s became The Hideaway Tavern in 2012, a sports bar with a great taplist—of course. Because of that connection, my mother, one of my brothers, and I toasted Dad with beers at The Hideaway/Grover’s the weekend after he passed (my wife took the picture):

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Other beer-related memories, let’s see…

–Back in the late 90’s we’d get together on Saturday afternoons at Legends in downtown Bend, which served up happy hour pints of good beer for only $1.50. (The location in the O’Kane Building was originally Stuft Pizza, and a host of other restaurants since then, and is now for lease I believe.) The happy hour price might have started at $1 and then went up to $1.50, I don’t quite remember, but it was a good deal, and we’d sit upstairs and enjoy two or three beers.

–A night in Portland, drinking draft Guinness at Biddy McGraw’s on SE Hawthorne while a local Irish folk-rock band played a raucous range of songs, including a blazing cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” The place was packed, we sat on the bench seating against a wall opposite the band, and to get to the restrooms you had to pass in front of the band and the people dancing, requiring you to dance a bit of a jig yourself to get by. We were there drinking with my brother who lived in Portland at the time, and it was the one and only time I visited Biddy’s.

–Similar time in Portland, visiting my brother who lived on SE Yamhill Street at the time, and finding out you could go out the back exit of his apartment building and walk down the alley to the Speakeasy Tavern on Taylor Street (still there, by the way). Putting “Piano Man” by Billy Joel and other songs on the jukebox and drinking beers (probably the likes of Widmer, BridgePort and similar ones back then) and just hanging out.

–Picking hops out at my parents’ place in late summer, off their back deck, filling paper grocery bags. Harvesting hops was really only my interest but Dad would always help me out and got a kick out of it.

–We always got more beer than we ever needed for the annual family reunion camping trip, always cans (more camping friendly) and a number of years back I started bringing cans of good craft beer along with the case of PBR or whatever suitably cheap beer we’d bring. (Canned Ten Fidy is hard to beat when camping!) One year I’d picked up a couple of cans of Anderson Valley Gose, which my Dad hadn’t heard of before, so I gave him a taste of the one I was drinking. Nope! “How can you drink that?” he asked, in a good-natured way. Sour, salty beers were just beyond what he could do, but at least he tried.

–He did like Black Butte Porter, which was probably one of the first microbrewed beers he ever tried. Yes, back in the “microbrew” days, and one of the things that impressed him about the new microbrews coming out—compared to the regular canned light lagers—was that you’d “feel great” the next day after drinking them. Translation: you wouldn’t be (as) hungover or feel the aftereffects. He was pragmatic that way.

–Then there was the time I confidently yet very naively helped to brew a batch of beer at Mom and Dad’s place; Mom was hoping Dad might take up homebrewing as a hobby. He didn’t, other than to enjoy mine, and that batch was the one-and-only one we did there, partly because the enamel canning pot they had was stripped of the enamel finish on the inside bottom. I said “naively” above because I was still inexperienced enough at brewing to say, “Well the beer is boiled so what could happen other than adding some flavor?” Yeah, not so much. We brewed a porter, I think, and bottled it up in Grolsch bottles, and after a few weeks it started developing a really heavy, earthy flavor. Pretty much undrinkable, but there’s a stage when you’re still a new enough homebrewer that you can’t bear the idea of dumping a batch. So we powered through it, somehow. Dad found that the best way to drink it was to cut it half-and-half with a can of lager.

–Sitting on our back patio in the summertime, the family together, enjoying beers and grilling up dinner. No story, nothing more than that; the family together, hanging out with Dad, drinking beer. Those are the good memories.

Cheers, Dad. I miss you.