Full disclosure: I’ve never attended a high school reunion. But I have to imagine that the experience is a lot like how it feels to drink a beer at Bier Baron, the bar which rapidly slipped into the worn clothes of the Brickskeller late last year.

The Brickskeller was the first place I actually consumed beer in the city, rather than drank it. (I suspect that I’m not the only one — after all, when I arrived in the District, there were no Churchkeys or Rusticos to provide such sudsy education.) As a result, I often found myself apologizing for its well-documented shortcomings — the shoddy service, the relatively vacant stock, the well-below-par bar fare. Drinking beer at Brickskeller, in complete honesty and company of your beer buddies aside, was never incredibly pleasant.

Put it this way: drinking at Bier Baron is, in a way, like making a trip back to that stairwell where you got dumped between algebra and biology classes so many years ago. Sure, life’s probably better now: but that doesn’t make revisiting that space any more fun.