My previous post about Bend Brewing‘s latest beer reminds me of a story about their website and domain name… Way back in 2000, when I was working for an internet development company (Alpine Internet Solutions, they’re still here), I had grabbed a bunch of "brewing" domains (we could get domain names cheap, for $10). Among them were the very locally-oriented "redmondbrewing.com", "sistersbrewing.com" and—you guessed it—"bendbrewing.com."

Not long after I registered bendbrewing.com, the company got a call from the Bend Brewing Company; it seems they were upgrading their website (they had had a site for some time, only parked under some convoluted hosted domain) and were inquiring about the bendbrewing.com domain. I thought it was cool that they called and said I’d have no problem giving them the domain if they were interested in our company hosting their site. Hell, I almost would’ve given the domain to them at retail, if they asked.

Instead, they merely said thanks, but no thanks, and launched their new site under their current domain name—"bendbrewingco.com."

Really, I had no intention of being a cybersquatter! It just worked out that way.