The journey is more important than the destination

You could say that as a Belgian I'm overprivileged when it comes to enjoying the er... joys of beer. And you would be right. We have an incredibly rich and diverse history of beer making and beer tasting. In days of yore every village worth its lard had at least one brewery and of course more than one bar. Even today there are villages... [does 12 houses count as a village?] that have no bakery, butcher shop, general convenience store or any other such modern amenity. But there will be a church and two bars [we call them: café]. God forbid we would be thirsty after church.
Life, in fact, was so good to our ancestors that there were celebrations of one kind or another all the time. Flanders has always been a much sought-after piece of real estate by warring nations with good reason. People used to go from one celebration to another. When the week-long feast would draw to a close in one town, you just went to the next one to join in the fun there. There were worse places to be than mideaval Flanders, let me tell you. Then Albrecht and Isabella came and they decided there can be too much of a good thing indeed and do we really need -that- much celebration. Since that day, we celebrate our saints and saviors at fixed dates. It was a great ride while it lasted.

One thing we never gave up, although there are by now far less breweries, is our love of beer. And in the thousand years or so that we've been brewing it, we've learned a few things. It would be a sad affair indeed if we did not manage to create some really fine beer along the way.

Now that the world is growing into a global community and we're finding that once-remote places of the globe are essentially different burroughs of the same neighborhood we go and look how other people are doing what we love best. For me that means: what beer are other people drinking?

And that's exactly what I did when I went to the United States on several occasions. Few things are more horrifying than the taste of the mass-produced Budweisers, Millers and Coors Lights. If the beer was as good as its commercials it would be nothing short of nectar of the gods. Sadly, it turns out that the quality of the beer was inversely proportional to the quality of the commercials. So I had to either find something else or give up drinking beer in the States alltogether [the other alternative is drinking Belgian beer, which means paying a King's ransom for a single glass, and I'm not a king]. It was at that point Sean, bless his heart, introduced me to the delights of microbrews. I have had the opportunity to try some of the microbrews myself, among those some of them that have gathered their own following. The most important thing though is to go out and see what's out there.
And this is where the 2 Beer Guys shine: they are undertaking a great adventure that will last them a life time and which will take them from the awful over the curious [but not bad] to the truly amazing. And the only way to gather that knowledge in a meaningful way is to do as we have done it for centuries past: find yourself a buddy and take nobody's word for it when it comes to deciding whether a beer is good or bad.

2 Beer Guys, I salute you.