Some Good Things Only Come Around Once

There’s something deeply funny about the fact that one of the most meaningful symbols of my twenties ended up being a beer that tastes like someone dropped an apple orchard into a tailgate cooler.

Not a fine whiskey. Not an expensive bottle of wine. Not some craft IPA with a paragraph-long description and notes of oak, citrus and “hints of caramel.” Just Busch Apple. Cold enough to hurt your teeth. Usually held in the hand of someone wearing swim trunks and forgetting sunscreen existed.

And over the years, it became attached to some of the best moments of my life.

Sometimes it would be a tweet. Other times it would be a text in a group chat. Regardless, the second someone caught wind of the return of Busch Apple, everyone was full speed ahead to go grab a case. Many of us would buy as many cases as we could, even though most locations limited purchases to one per person. Busch Apple was a treasure to us. It felt like winning the lottery if you walked into a store and saw a pallet sitting there untouched.

There was strategy involved. Recon missions. Friends texting blurry photos from liquor store aisles like they were documenting Bigfoot sightings. Someone always knew a guy at a convenience store who “heard they might get a shipment Thursday morning.” We treated release season like sneakerheads waiting on a shoe drop, except instead of Jordans it was apple beer and instead of camping outside a store overnight, it was six dudes frantically driving across town after work.

I once drove to five different liquor stores in the same afternoon hunting for it. At the fifth store, I found two remaining cases stacked beside a rack of Fireball shooters like hidden treasure. I carried them to my car with the kind of adrenaline normally reserved for emergency situations.

A pallet of Busch Apple at a grocery store in 2026. (Kevin Severin)

That’s the ridiculous beauty of it. On paper, none of this should matter that much. But life is strange like that. Human beings assign meaning to things all the time. Songs become time machines. Restaurants become landmarks for relationships. Certain smells can bring back entire summers in one second flat.

For us, Busch Apple became part of the scenery.

Float trips and Busch Apple are synonymous among me and my friends. You can’t really have one without the other. The story started in 2022 when one of my friends packed a cooler completely full and brought it to our annual float trip. At the time, none of us really knew what it was. The craze hadn’t exploded yet. It was just this random seasonal thing somebody grabbed on a whim.

Then we cracked one open on a sawed-off school bus on our way to the river in the middle of a rainstorm, and suddenly it all made sense.

A school bus used to transport floaters in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. (Kevin Severin)

I don’t know how to explain it other than saying it tasted exactly like summer feels. Sweet without being too much. Ice cold. Perfect for sitting in a raft while your friend badly sings country songs from a waterproof speaker that keeps dying every twenty minutes.

That float trip also carries a heavier memory for me. At one point during the day, several of us were dealing with heat exhaustion pretty badly. I remember feeling genuinely scared. One of my close friends ended up steering our rafts toward shore and helping all of us recover before things got worse. I still remember the heat radiating off the rocks. The sound of the river. The crushed Busch Apple cans floating around the cooler afterward while we sat there recovering in silence and trying to laugh the situation off.

After that summer, Busch Apple became part of everything.

Me and my closest friends floating the river in the summer of 2023. (Kevin Severin)

Camping trips. Lake weekends. Tailgates. Long drives with overpacked coolers shoved into the backseat. Campfires where conversations somehow bounced from complete nonsense to life advice within the same five minutes. Someone trying to cram “just one more” into an RV mini fridge that had already exceeded its structural limits three hours earlier.

And every year after the supply disappeared, there was always this assumption that it would come back soon enough. Except then it didn’t.

For three straight years, nothing.

Every summer there would be rumors online. People swearing they saw it somewhere. Reddit threads analyzing distribution schedules like stock market experts. Then eventually acceptance would settle in. Guess not this year either.

That absence made it matter even more.

When it finally returned in 2025, it felt emotional in a way I can’t fully justify. I remember cracking open that first can and immediately texting multiple friends like we had all just won something together. It felt less like a drink returning and more like an old chapter of life briefly reopening.

Like the glory days walked back through the front door carrying a cooler.

I love the concept of limited edition things. There’s something fascinating about the way scarcity changes our relationship to ordinary objects. Is Busch Apple objectively better than every other beer on earth? Absolutely not. If we’re being realistic, there are probably dozens of beers that taste “better.”

But that’s never really been the point.

The point is that it leaves.

If Busch Apple sat on shelves year-round forever, I honestly think some of the magic would disappear. Part of the excitement comes from knowing the window is small. You wait for it. Hunt for it. Appreciate it while it’s here. Then eventually it vanishes again.

A lot of life works the same way.

Summers don’t stay. Neither do certain friendships. Neither do college years, lake weekends, road trips or versions of yourself that once felt permanent. There are phases of life that feel endless while you’re inside them, then one day you realize they became memories.

One minute you’re floating down a river with twelve friends and a cooler full of Busch Apple. The next minute half those people have moved away, gotten married, drifted apart or become someone entirely different.

Some relationships tied to those memories ended altogether. Some friendships faded naturally over time. No dramatic fallout. Just distance. Different schedules. Different priorities. Life gradually pulling people in separate directions until traditions that once felt automatic suddenly stop happening.

That’s probably the hardest part of growing older. Not the dramatic endings, but the unnoticed final times.

The last float trip before everyone got too busy.

The last summer where the whole group was together.

The last late-night campfire conversation you assumed would happen again.

You rarely recognize those moments while they’re happening.

And there’s grief attached to that realization. Not devastating grief. Just the softer kind that appears when you look back at old photos and realize entire eras of your life have already disappeared.

Some versions of ourselves disappear too.

The reckless, hilarious, invincible version of you that could survive on gas station snacks, three hours of sleep and pure momentum. The version that thought summer would last forever. The version that believed friendships could never fade if everyone simply wanted them badly enough.

Me and my friends eat dinner together at Roxy's BBQ in the summer of 2024 on our Reunion Trip. (Kevin Severin)

Time changes all of it eventually.

But I think that’s exactly why those memories hold so much value now.

Permanence isn’t what gives life meaning. Impermanence does.

The fact that something ends is what forces us to love it while it’s here.

Busch Apple became symbolic of that for me. Not just the drink itself, but everything attached to it. The summers. The road trips. The laughter. The people. The temporary versions of life that once felt permanent at the time.

You can’t keep summers forever.

You can’t keep every friendship forever.

You can’t preserve every version of yourself forever either.

At some point, the campfires burn out. The coolers empty. The traditions slow down. People move away. Life changes shape whether you’re ready for it or not.

Still, I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.

And I think the limited-edition nature of Busch Apple is exactly why it became so meaningful in the first place. It arrives for a brief moment, creates chaos and excitement, brings people together, then disappears before you’re ready for it to go.

Kind of like youth, and summer and the best things life gives us.