The other day, a few of us were sitting at our favorite Albuquerque brewpub, Quarter Celtic, sipping their recently released Single Action Kolsch (very good). The conversation drifted toward discussions of our most memorable beer drinking experiences: sneaking the “beer our fathers drank” out of the fridge when our parents were out for the evening, the first legal beer we sipped at a tavern, and wonderful places where we had enjoyed a beer since.

Tony had the most interesting story. He was going to college in the east and the friend of the brother of a classmate asked if he’d like to spend a day working on the lobster boat his father sailed out of South Addison, a Maine town just 50 miles from the Canadian border. It would be a new adventure for this Albuquerque boy from the high desert and he quickly said yes.

“I was dropped off at the wharf before dawn,” Tony remembered. “Oscar [the owner of the boat, the skipper, and the head lobster fisherman] and his helper greeted me. He was a real 60s person — he had a pony tail down to his butt, and, as we found out at the end of the day, he lived with two or three women.

“The first thing he did was give me a couple of Dramamine pills. I thought they were for sea sickness, but I soon discovered there was another reason. Our first stop was a herring processing plant where we picked up buckets of two-week-old fish heads to be used for bait. They smelled terrible, and one of my jobs that day would be stuffing them into the traps after we’d emptied them of lobsters.” It wasn’t the choppy water that nearly made Tony lose his breakfast.

The three man crew soon settled into the routine that would last until sunset: sail to the location of the first lobster pots, winch them aboard, separate lobsters that were too big or too small and throw them back into the sea, secure the claws of the keepers with rubber bands, and put them into a tub through which flowed very cold sea water. Then Tony would grab the fish heads and re-bait the traps. During the process an occasional claw would fall off and Oscar would put it on a little shelf right next to the boat’s hot exhaust pipe.

“It was really intense, hard work for several minutes; then we’d rest until the boat reached the next location and we’d start all over again.” This went on until the sun was very low in the western sky. “”Oscar turned the boat around, and we sailed into the sunset toward port. He went over to one of the barrels with the lobsters in them and reached his arm in, all the way to his shoulder. I wondered what he was doing and hoped that I’d secured all the claws properly. An angry lobster could take off a man’s finger with one of those things.”

Tony half expected to see lobsters clinging to the skipper’s arm when he pulled it out of the barrel. But that didn’t happen. Oscar was clutching three bottles of Molson Golden Ale in his hand. “He gave us each a bottle and pointed to the lobster claws. As we chugged toward the shore, we watched the changing colors of the sunset, ate the delicious bits of lobster meat that had been cooking by the exhaust, and drank our chilled Molson Golden. I’d never before had a beer that tasted so good, and I haven’t since.”

We all agreed that Tony’s was the best of the golden beer-drinking memories we’d been sharing that afternoon and bought him a Single Action Kolsch. It was golden and Tony said that it was very good.

But not as good as that Molson Golden he’d enjoyed many years ago at the end of a long, hard day of lobster harvesting.

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