Today’s Photo of the Month brings together my past and future, leads me to reflect about life. The photo before your eyes is nothing but a reminder about how ephemeral we - human beings - are.

It is a suitable post to celebrate the New Year and the 6th anniversary of the Photo of the Month.

Apologies to the gods of ale for not washing the bottom of the glass properly, as the bubbles suggest.

Past

Back to the year 2017. At the peak of my youth and just-hired, I was sent by the company to travel to Switzerland for work. Imagine the feeling of happiness and success, after all I was still in the beginning of the Dunning-Kruger curve and thought I knew it all.

With a bit of money in my pockets, I decided to enjoy as much as possible the weekends and free nights, which went very well with the 24-year-old Leo still full of energy whose life experiences were constrained to a few places in Brazil.

Back in the day there was no such thing as digital currency (not as easily), and paying for international expenses with a credit card was nonsense, with abusive taxes. I remember I exchanged a pack of cash in an exchange house. There was also none of these eSIM and even a physical SIM was not as popular and it was expensive, so I went without a 3G/4G (back in the day these were the tech available) cellular plan, but at least Google Maps already allowed downloading offline maps.

Well, I’ll leave the full story for another day. Back to the blog’s theme after this brief detour, I found a store in Luzern’s train station named Beers of the World. Now imagine for a while that I was more or less at the peak of my amusement for craft beer back then - maybe starting to fall - and I got so excited with the store as a kid getting a gift from Santa Claus. This was my Diagon Alley.

Of course I tried numerous beers on this trip, but a real find was the Fullers Vintage Ale from the 2014 harvest. I already enjoyed and admired Fullers, a lot due to the boot 1001 Beers to Drink Before You Die e due to the timeless London Pride, and I had only ever seen the vintage in the book.

Costing 10 Swiss Francs, this beer cost me about 30 Brazilian Reais back then - or 46 Brazilian Reais corrected by inflation. Nowadays I can find this beer in a local store and it costs between 150 and 350 Brazilian Reais per bottle, depending on the harvest’s year. It means this was a big deal, even more for someone just starting their career with a tight budget.

I bought two bottles, one to enjoy with a college friend named Zordan, whom I would visit in Munich at the end of the trip and another to store and age until a remarkable occasion happened or the limit date recommended for drinking of 2024 - or 10 years.

Back then we were recently graduated guys fucked up in the head, so we didn’t do a proper tasting. Looking back, today I enjoy this moment even more due to the contrast it brought after the second tasting done years after. But, still in the past, this is the best photo I have from that memorable moment:

Present

This section refers to the near past, in November 2024, when I finally tasted the second bottle of the Vintage Ale.

Since then, in these seven and half years that went by, so much changed in my life and the world around that it’s even hard to account for. I met Natalia, we moved in together, and we got married. I went through a few positions and experiences at Toradex. Would I have been capable of predicting any of the big things that happened? Absolutely not. Am I grateful for all of them - above all else Natalia entering and staying in my life? Absolutely yes.

Remember that my plan was to drink it in a special moment or the due date? Well, I found a remarkable moment to celebrate near the end of the due date, and it developed into finally drinking the long awaited for ale:

Writing this blog one year after the tasting session, I don’t feel as confident anymore to fully report my sensory experience. When I close my eyes and go back to the moment, I can remember the taste with some precision - even tracing back to the time of the first bottle in 2017 - but still I leave this part for your imagination. I can say for sure that this beer reminded me of a Barleywine but a bit more round and sweet, and I was surprised that it kept the cabonation, mostly as it was sealed with a regular bottle cap. I also leave to your imagination the reason of the celebration and only leave the clue that I did not become a father back then. I also feel I was unfortunate in not producing at least one other Vintage Ale to do a vertical tasting, but what’s done is done. Life teaches.

Two thoughts come to mind based on this whole experience:

  • Good times are ephemeral, but what is left of them in memories is eternal. In good measure, these are the moments - together with the bad ones, that is, all the ones we can call remarkable - that build us little by little through our lifetimes.
  • With effort and discipline it is possible to create an extraordinary day of tomorrow. Yes, one must live today with intensity, as this is the only certainty in life, but when making choices we must also think about the numerous todays that are ahead of us until the Great Conductor come take us. If we don’t make decisions thinking about these todays, we are doomed to a life short of its best.

Future

Here I am, with a baby on the way. She didn’t even arrive and is so much loved. When I find myself thinking about our future, I glimpse so many unique moments I have never lived before, from the happiest to those painful learnings every human being goes through, but now as spectator. I’m committed to keeping bringing, sometimes even without intention, fuel to live the extraordinary together with my beloved Clara and Natalia, and give them so many other opportunities.

Sometimes it’s scary to think I’m only in my thirties. If the life cycle run its course, I’ll still have about 60% of time ahead of me, whhch brings an enormous amount of new experiences in a completely different world than the one I live in.

About beer, I’ll keep discovering and adventuring myself. I even have in my personal cellar a Wee Heavy, a Hair of the Bode, and a Double Perigosa, all from Bodebrown, a brewery that I admire, some of them with a potential of aging for thirty years. May good beer be with me in this long road and may 2026 be wonderful.

Here’s to life!