We’re living at this moment in little town in France, which we love. It’s called Pernes-les-Fontaines.

Technically, it’s a village of fewer than 10,000 people in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in the Vaucluse Department, the Carpentras Arrondissement and part of the intercommunalité of Les Sorgues du Comtat.

Forget all that. It’s a town in France, and one of extreme beauty and charm. (Our apartment is 40 feet away from a moat! Should the Visigoths try to sack the Lower Rhone again, we’ll be ready this time!)

Anyway, we enjoyed a lovely dinner last night with two wonderful friends of ours — an amazing couple, Olivier and Aurore, engineers both. (Aurore owns a gamification training and education company, and Olivier designs technology hardware for education.) Together, they have created an open maker-space called the FabLab, where all are invited to come and learn, build, create, collaborate, explore ideas and make stuff.

While checking out their cool new space last night, Olivier pointed to a partially disassembled washing machine, which he said would be converted into a beer brewing system. Incidentally, he mentioned, the owners of a local brew pub expressed intention to teach the craft of beer brewing to anyone interested at the FabLab. They told us about the brew pub, called Bar à Bières La mousse Gourmande, which we had passed walking by many times, but of which gave no notice.

With time short today, we ventured in to sample some beer. Which was excellent. We loved everything about this place. A few good house-made craft beers on draft. A great selection of good beers by the bottle (including Lagunitas, for fuck’s sake). And really nice people.