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If you are reading this then something went horribly wrong and you may be the only one left. We had heard so much about the Mayan prophecy that the world would end on 12/21/12, but I didn’t believe it. There was nothing in my non-superstitious mind that made me think that this was anything more that another Y2K: something cooked up to make the paranoid more paranoid. And I always felt that 12/22/12 would be just like 1/2/2000, and we would all be fine, but I didn’t expect what would happen at Elysian Fields on that Thursday…
For the last 12 months, Elysian Brewing Company had made us privy to one of the best marketing campaigns in the history of craft beer. A campaign that took hours of planning and months of preparation. One that brought in artwork from acclaimed cartoonist Charles Burns, and turned them into the labels for each of the 12 Beers of the Apocalypse. One beer a month, always released on the 21st, and given names like Peste, Fallout, Omen, and Ruin. Each party allowed you to fill a passport book, and anyone with all stamps had access to the life raft.
Hopefully, the raft would be lava proof, because at 6:00 PST, Elysian released Doom upon the world.
Rock music. Gas masks. Trench Coats. “The End is Beer.” Elysian had put together a post-apocalyptic Guy Ritchie film. Death was mingling, handing out buttons, The Final Countdown blared, brewers were in clothes straight out of Thunderdome, and every member of the staff was in black. And each of the previous 11 beers were available. Miss Wasteland? It was available (and it was awesome). 
The place filled quickly, and soon we were milling around with people from all walks of life: brewers, head brewers, guests, marketers, salespeople, financial analysts, garbage men, students, and any other of age person that had a valid ID. It was a surreal place.
We had all gathered to celebrate the end of the world. The Mayans had to be right. Why else would they have stopped building calendars out several hundred years later? We were all there for the same reason. A group joined by like-minded goals, linked by one wavering image: an apocalypse.
I have left this behind as a record of what happened there that night. If you are lucky enough to still be around, please remember what took place just north of the stadiums in downtown Seattle. But then again…if you are still here, then maybe you are the ones that truly missed out.
