“Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.

A little voice inside my head said, don’t look back, you can never look back.”

Don Henley, Boys of Summer

Personally, I think you can and sometimes should look back just for perspective on how far you’ve come (or how much you’ve circled back). Looking back in longing for what was, though, as Mr. Henley implies, is fools folly. What’s gone is gone.

Yet, nostalgia.

Summers of our youth.

Old Cadillacs and the Grateful Dead.

Things we can’t get back. Gone for good.

Memories haunt us, don’t they?

This American Barleywine is a nod to nostalgia, to an America that once was, summer days that will return, and the little things that make a gray, late winter day worthwhile.