Guinness sign in the window, Grace O'Malley's Pub, on south Michigan Avenue in Chicago.  (photo: Kathy Riordan)

If I reach back into the far recesses of my memory, I still can't pull out the first time I ever had a Guinness.  I can, however, generally, and without much assistance, tell you the last time I did.

Those are happy memories.

I grew up in a part of the country where beer drinking was a byproduct of the rough and tumble life of southwestern Wyoming, cowboys and roughnecks, keggers on the river, Coors and Oly by the can tossed to the wayside, what really tasted like pity in a cup, some rite of passage where you had to say you slugged it at a party in high school but didn't particularly gain any appreciation for it.

Going to a college where even a sniff of the stuff would get you bounced from the student body didn't do much for any aspirations as a brew aficionado.

It was travelling to Europe post-college that jumpstarted an appreciation of beer, not that yellowwater stuff back in the sagebrush, but deep, hearty, room temperature ales, the kind my ancestors had flowing in their veins, put down in pints in Britain or swilled in mugs across Germany.

And so it was that someday, somewhere, someone first poured me a Guinness. 

I'm pondering it now.  

Bubbles that go down instead of up.  A frothy caramel head.  Mother's milk. 

Every true Guinness aficionado knows there's a secret to the perfect pint pour of Guinness, as explained by a Guinness brewmaster above.

It takes a visit to Ireland to fully appreciate Guinness, and so, marrying an Irishman, I made the obligatory trip some years into our marriage and learned the secret. . .that the closer one gets to the River Liffey, the better it tastes.