On April 8 of this year I went to Mutz Bar at the Maumee Bay Brewing Company. Maumee Bay is an excellent brewpub that appeared on the Toledo scene in 1995. There I met up with Mike Moore, a doctoral student in the Spatially Integrated Social Sciences (SISS) program at the University of Toledo, and Irfan Kaygalak, a visiting scholar from Balikesir University in Turkey. We sat down at the bar and ordered beer. Mike and I ordered Summer Stinger, an American Pale Wheat Ale. The barmaid informed us that they had just finished bottling the season’s first batch of the Stinger the previous day and that Mike and I were getting the first and second bottles respectively. The conversation over the first taste of summer was lighthearted and fun. Mike, Irfan, and I were driving to Chicago in a few weeks to attend the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers. Mike and I were making presentations at the conference – about the craft brewing industry of course. Mike’s girlfriend Jeanette would be riding with us. On the way to Chicago we were planning to make a lunch stop a 3 Floyds Brewpub in Munster, Indiana. Mike and I also talked about attending the Beeronomics Conference in Seattle, Washington in September. Abstracts were due soon so we had to decide what we wanted to present at the conference. Getting hungry we ordered some food and a second beer. A few minutes after the arrival of that second beer I heard a thud. I instinctively looked over my left shoulder thinking that perhaps a bar stool had fallen over. I was mistaken. There was Mike lying on his back. It looked serious so the barmaid called 911. Within five minutes eight paramedics were on the scene. The worked on Mike’s heart for fifteen to twenty minutes, but to no avail. Mike was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital where further efforts to revive him were equally unsuccessful.

Mike was 34 years old. He was a craft beer lover. In fact he loved craft beer so much that he made it the focus of his doctoral dissertation. He was in the second year of his doctoral program. Mike was my first doctoral student. He and I met every Monday morning to discuss his progress towards the completion of his doctoral degree. Inevitably those discussions always turned to what beer each of us had drank over the weekend. The discussion were particularly animated if one of us had tried a new beer that neither of us had previously tried. While I probably knew more about broad trends happening in the brewing industry than Mike there is no question that he knew much more about beer than I did – who was brewing what, which beers seemed to be trending, what new seasonal beers were about to hit the market etc. etc. The mention of seasonal beers reminds me about the time Mike and I drove halfway across town for the privilege of purchasing a single bottle of the highly sought after Kentucky Breakfast Stout brewed by Founder’s Brewery in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Luckily Toledo is a small town and it does not take very long to drive halfway across it. But we got our KBS and we were as happy as could be. Every now and then Mike would appear in my office with beer or two in hand. It was a gift for me of course. He had come across something that he thought I would like and he would purchase a few bottles or cans for me to try. Occasionally he would show up with a brew from New Glarus Brewery in Wisconsin. These were especially prized by me because New Glarus makes excellent beer and its brews are not available outside of Wisconsin. Mike had a friend who either lived there and came here or lived here and went there on what seemed like a fairly regular basis. This friend brought New Glarus for Mike. Mike always generously shared some of his haul with me. When I was beer shopping and saw something I thought Mike would like I’d pick it up. I remember being excited when I was at Capers Bar on South Byrne Road and saw that they had Wandering Pelican Black Lager on tap. This was a one-of collaboration brew between Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewery and Tampa’s Cigar City Brewery. I texted Mike about it and told him a growler was coming his way. It was duly delivered the next day. When all was said and done it was not an even exchange of beer between Mike and myself. Over the years he gave me more beer than I gave him. For the last couple of Christmases we even exchanged gifts of beer. Last Christmas I gave him a case of Great Lakes Christmas Ale. He gave me a 750 ml bottle of Monk’s Cafe Belgian Sour and a six pack of beers from De Brabandere Brewery in Belgium. He knew I loved the former and figured I might like the latter.

Mike touched a lot of people during his 34 years on this Earth. As might be expected he touched us all in both similar and different ways and we will all miss him for the same reasons and for different reasons. There is no way that the hurt I feel at losing Mike is anywhere near as great as that felt (and still being felt) by those who were much closer to him – his girlfriend Jeanette, his siblings Lynsey, Matthew, Andy, and Kiel, and his mother Patricia. But I will miss him. I will miss our Monday morning meetings, our conversations about beer and the brewing industry, our exchange of beer gifts, and having a few beers together at a local bar. All of us who knew Mike had hopes for his future. For me I looked forward to him graduating with his doctorate degree and, as his doctoral advisor, hooding him on graduation day. I looked forward to seeing Mike becoming an Assistant Professor of Geography at a university somewhere. I looked forward to many more years of collaborating with Mike on research into the brewing industry, of writing papers together, and meeting up two or three times a year at academic conferences. None of that will happen now of course. But I will cherish the memories – memories, by and large, created around a common love and appreciation of craft beer, the people who brew it, and the people who drink it.