Sitting on my porch
Since early spring, 2000.
Why are you still here?
Rancid, rancid beer.
Who will ever drink you now?
Stupid law students?
Your box is rotted,
Your brewery has closed down,
Yet still you live on.
Farewell, sweet Celis!
I fear I hardly knew your
Sweet, fruity flavor.
Backstory: In the spring of 2000, during my first year of law school, I attended an after party for the law school theater group, Assault & Flattery, at a house on Avenue G in Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood (lovingly nicknamed "the G-Spot"). Our theater production was generously sponsored by Celis, the then-Austin-based brewery, which provided innumerable cases of its many varieties of beer for our drunken enjoyment. Among these varieties was Celis Raspberry, which to this day I can still honestly say I have never tasted.
Fast forward to the late summer of 2001. Thanks to good connections and just the right amount of popularity, the singular honor of living at the G-Spot has passed to me and a friend, who took occupancy in August of that year. We were astounded to discover that a single case of Celis Raspberry had survived not only the many Assault & Flattery and other G-Spot parties, but was in fact still sitting on the back porch, having endured two Texas summers and one winter. Needless to say, we left the case undisturbed in honor of the fact that, uh, it was there.
At some point, during a party hosted for idiotic drunken first-year students, somebody got a mind to actually drink some of the beers in the obviously-rotting-and-decaying cardboard box full of above-room-temperature beer. I only wish I could have seen what happened to that person.
We moved out of the G-Spot in August 2002, after the bar exam. I can only hope that the Celis case has found happiness somewhere. Here's to you, my skunky pal.
