VOODOO RANGER beer

I nurtured them. I spoke to them. Sometimes I sang to them. They preferred instrumentals, so I hummed fugues in the key of ABV. Every day, the hops grew stronger, so did my passions. This, I thought, was the secret to happiness: caring for something, watching it flourish, giving it my time and energy.

But there was always one thing that hung in the balance. The farmer.

He was older, the owner of the land. He noticed me coming around often, and eventually, his patience wore thin. One morning, I arrived to find him standing at the edge of the field with a dog by his side.

“Sick him, Penny!” he yelled. Just like that, the dog was on me. Penny, a scrappy mutt with a mean streak, came at me like a freight train, nipping at my heels and taking my femur and hat for good measure.

I’d hop away on one limb, cursing under my breath, but I always came back. The hops needed me. They deserved me. Penny couldn’t tear me away.

Months passed, and something strange began to happen. The farmer started to ease off. He wouldn’t send Penny after me anymore. Maybe it was because he saw how devoted I was. Maybe it was because he realized that something about my obsession wasn’t just weird—it was pure. Or maybe, just maybe, it was our shared love for wood carving. When I’d take a break from the fields, I’d whittle a wooden duck, and I’d see him watching me in the distance. Absurdly enough, he was whittling too–a wooden figurine of me whittling my wooden duck. Yes, it was odd, but it was somewhat comforting.

Penny, too, softened. Despite eating my femur, she dug up an old rawhide and lent it to me as a temporary replacement. Not ideal, but it got me through the season.

Then came late summer. The days stretched long, and I knew the hops were nearing the end of their journey. I checked in on them constantly, watching the buds bloom, the vines twist higher. I was proud. They’d become my reason for waking up each day. But fall came quickly, and with it, the harvest.

I arrived at the field one crisp autumn evening, hoping to spend some final moments with my beloved hops. But when I got there, everything was different. The field, once lush and alive, was empty. The hops had been cut down. Shredded. My work, my effort, my purpose–gone without notice. They made an Irish exit from my life.

The farmer had done it, of course. It was harvest time, after all. “Surely there’d be a silver lining,” I muttered to myself. “A new life brewed into Hazy IPAs, Imperials… lightly hopped crushables at the very least?”

I wasn’t prepared for the heartless reality. The farmer came clean, casually like a stale rag across a bar counter.

“Nope, not IPAs” he said, scratching his chin, “they’re going to be turned into decorative soaps.” 

At that moment, the pressure in the atmosphere dropped dead.

I stared back at him. “Decorative soap?!,” I gasped. The hops I poured my soul into—the hops I had tended to like they were my own children—were destined to sit on a guest bathroom counter, never to be brewed, never to be raised in a glass after a hard day's work?

I dropped to my knees, eyeing the empty rows. What was the point of it all? How could the world turn if it wasn’t turning the most perfect hops into beer? To think they were going to be rubbed on skin before being washed down the drain.

I froze. Quiet. Empty. Numb. And then it clicked.

Life wasn’t about growing something, tending to it, and leaving behind a legacy for everyone to witness. It was about loss. Fleeting. Fragile. Like the hops, all things grow, only to be cut down in their prime and sent away in cute little gift baskets.

The moment I died inside was the moment I awakened.

I realized not every hop was destined to be a Voodoo Ranger IPA. Most degraded into mediocre beer or worse–soap suds. Yet that rare combination of carefully nurtured hops, barley, and yeast was what made Voodoo Ranger IPA so special. So “rangerous”. So refreshing that we cherish every last sip.

And that, my friends, is the whole point.