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Silicon Valley has never been as booze-fueled as New York. The tech sector here owes its success to programmers addled on caffeine, programmers who give their software names like "Java," "CoffeeScript," "Cappuccino," and other tributes to the old cup of joe.
But booze still has its place. Beer pong played a key role in the early days of Facebook, for example, if only in helping the social network’s obsessive programmers quiet their minds and relax. Over at Twitter, they brewed their own beer and launched their own wine. And ales fuel all-night hackathons like Yahoo’s Hack Day, where creativity is the goal and pizza blunts the impact of alcohol.
Of course, alcohol could play another supporting role in the Valley: helping to make sense of the endless river of startups drowning the tech scene at the moment.
The names blur together; Dropbox sounds like Box, which sounds like Square, which sounds like Fousquare. But if you imagine each of these companies as tipples rather than technologies, as clinks rather than clicks, as delightful drams to lift your spirits rather than hustlers trying to lift your dough, it becomes so much more pleasant and memorable to watch them float by as they make their way downstream to their liquidity benders and consolidation hangovers.
Above, find the 14 most memorable drink-plus-tech company pairings we could come up with. If you care for a chaser, leave suggested company/cocktail combinations in the comments; we'll update the post mid-day to toast the best of your ideas.
Bar photos taken at House of Shields in San Francisco. All photos: Ariel Zambelich/Wired 
