Stinging nettles, wild chokecherry and blue gummy bears are not your usual beer ingredients – unless you’re Eric Steen, the founder of Beers Made by Walking.

Steen first thought about combining his two major passions of environmental education and craft beer when he was on a canoe trip in the Yukon. “The trip guide was telling me about some of the plants that grow up there,” he remembers, “and I started wondering what would this taste like in beer?”

Steen stewed on that question for another couple years until he was approached by the Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which was looking to plan an event involving craft beer. That’s when Steen launched Beers Made By Walking (BMBW), a program that invites brewers to make beer inspired by nature hikes and urban walks.

There was a time when the legal drinking age was 18, and for the layman, beer was more for function than form.

Such has been the case for my father. He has shambled through the hallowed halls of D.C.’s Brickskeller, which once held the Guinness World Record for having the largest commercially available selection of beers. He has sipped gold with diamonds in his eyes – liquid gold and baseball diamonds -- but I can guarantee the beers he drank didn’t cost more than a couple nickels.

For example, he lists Bartel’s Beer as an early favorite, which he remembers coming from Passaic, New Jersey. Bartel’s was $2.95 a case in 1975, plus a 49 cent deposit – a penny per bottle and 25 cents for the wooden case. “It was awful,” he recalls. For that price I’m sure it went down sweet.

Speaking of saccharine nectar, Miller High Life was a staple during sweltering summer ballgames with his beloved Greenpeace Sea Slugs team. Slugging and chugging were one and the same, as someone always supplied “a huge aluminum tub full of ice and tiny seven-ounce bottles of High Life,” he said. “They were dee-licious.”

The headlines read: "Slugs' bats powered by ponies."