On childhood memories while drinking beer

Roberta's backyard bar

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of galavanting around Brooklyn for the better part of the day with a friend visiting from Los Angeles. We had some wine and cocktails, then some beer and a special "frozen drank" of gin and citrus juice, before finally getting a table at Roberta's. (I cannot recommend this place enough by the way. Snark all you want at my trendy hipster predictability. That pizza is the stuff of dreams.) Judging from the 1h40 quoted wait time for a table, we knew it was going to be a while before any food hit our plates despite having finally been seated. So we ordered some drinks, since they were obviously being expedited much more quickly than those genius pies coming out of the wood fire oven. Before we knew it, we had a beverage spread that rivaled the food buffet we were awaiting. Drinks leftover from the garden bar, cocktails, and a beer my friend ordered purely for its nostalgic value. Some story about drinking it with a guy she used to know, I think. It was a Greenflash beer, all the way from San Diego.

I took a sip. And for some strange reason I was flooded with childhood memories. Not the kind where you remember an exact place and time, the way smelling burnt popcorn reminds me of the time my dad burned the Jiffy Pop over the fire during a camping trip in Idaho. But rather, the warm and pleasant kind, which make up for their elusiveness with the certainty that it doesn't matter anyway because these memories are somehow mystically significant. While my friend stared at me, puzzled but amused as to why drinking beer should remind me of my childhood, the taste became recognizable. It was orange blossom water. I was remembering those afternoons baking cookies with my mom. Our sablé cookies, basically the equivalent of the American sugar cookie, are a quick and simple cookie. Easy to make with kids, and even more easily prepared for classroom birthday parties or gift bags. You can cut them into whatever shape you desire, decorate them any which crazy way, and perfume them however strikes your fancy. And my mother most preferred was orange blossom water.

Who knew that the same floral, exotic taste I first encountered as a half-naked child running around our New Mexico backyard would resurface twenty years later and thousands of mile away in a cold brew, simultaneously reminding the person sitting across from me of an entirely different set of memories. I may very well be wrong about this beer containing any trace of orange blossom water, but one thing I am sure of - for a few seconds, both my friend and I were transported to a time and place vastly different from what we were currently experiencing. And then, the pizza arrived.