Vestiges

THE LEGEND

The crow has always been a psychopomp, a guide between the worlds of the living and the dead. In Norse mythology, Odin’s ravens Huginn and Muninn flew out each dawn and returned each dusk carrying the knowledge of everything that had happened in the world. In Celtic tradition, the Morrigan appeared as a crow on the battlefield, choosing which warriors would die and carrying their souls across the threshold. The crow sees death not as an ending but as a passage, and it walks both sides of that passage without fear.

A two-headed crow is something else entirely. It is a creature that should not exist, two beings fused into one body, sharing a single heart but looking in opposite directions. One head faces the past. One faces whatever comes after. The arrows through its body tell the rest of the story: this union was not ended gently. It was severed by force, by circumstance, by the kind of loss that leaves entry wounds.

Vestiges are what remain after something has been taken. Not memories, which soften and shift with time, but traces. The groove worn into a stone step by a hundred thousand footfalls. The shape of a hand pressed into wet clay that hardened centuries ago. The lingering presence of someone in a room they have left. Vestiges do not comfort. They testify. They say: this was real. This existed. This mattered.

Vestiges is a West Coast IPA at 7.2% ABV, built on Simcoe, Erebus, Strata, and Centennial hops. Resin and fruit arrive in layers, each one a stratum of what was and what remains. It is not brewed to celebrate. It is brewed to remember. The two-headed crow still watches from its perch, looking backward and forward at once, carrying what it can between the worlds.