He was quite a character and I met him once, although I forget where or when. Beer writer and beer promoter Alan Eames passed away recently. His book The Secret Life of Beer reads like a wacky beery evening spent swapping stories at your local pub.
Here is a wonderful remembrance of Eames written by his friend, beer writer Tom Bedell, for The Commons News of Vermont.
And, from the AP obit:
Once, during a trip to South Africa, he taste-tested a rare dark beer in a small village and liked it so much he asked to see the brewer, who was said to be a village grandfather. The women who served him began laughing, he said.
"My translator informed me that the beer wasn't made by grandfather, it was made with grandfather," Eames told the Rutland Herald in an October 2006 interview. "They put his cremated bone fragments in with the rest of the ingredients."
Eames was a fantastic and entertaining man. I met him once as well and I will never see beer the same way, it is truly a part of human history, and Alan Eames could convince anyone of that.
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