With the pressure of Christmas shopping mounting, I scanned my gift list. The variety of people there was wide, the possibilities daunting. Then it hit me; one-stop shopping at Ballast Point Brewing Company in Scripps Ranch. Of course! It’s close to home, convenient, cost effective, and thirst-quenching! The choose became ridiculously clear: twenty-two ounce “bombers” of Sculpin IPA for everyone, how could I go wrong? I have to say that it seems unreasonable to have expected me to know Aunt Lulubelle’s entire daily intake of prescription drugs. I can see now that some are definitely not compatible with alcohol but, hey, I’m not a doctor! As for my softball team, let’s face it, this bunch of Old Pro rejects are never happier than when they’re suckling from the commercial teat of their favorite mass-produced swill-juice! Who am I to try and enlighten them? I do feel bad about my niece and nephew, Little Deirdre and Precious Heart. I understand now that beer might not have been the best gifts for a six and a seven year old. In my defense, however, if we lived in Europe, I’d be the most popular uncle around. My mailman certainly deserved a wonderful gift. Just as I was about to give him the glass vessel of hopped nectar I got to thinking about the cruelty of forcing him to calculate the dimensions of his bag and the bottle. Was it fair of me to subject him to the rigors of the Pythagorean Theorem while he tried to figure out how to carry his gift back to his truck? I think not.
Finally we have my loving wife, who happens to work at Ballast Point. The more I thought about giving her the very commodity that she helps distribute into the world, the more I realized it would be like involving us in some cosmic equation of liquid redundancy, and that would be wrong. So, in spite of all my good intentions, here I sit with eighteen bombers of some of the best beer made on Earth…what to do? What to do?

Daniel J McAuliffe Scripps Ranch 12-31-10