The Gravity of Craft Beer

Like reverberations of the punk scene that are still being plucked.

Craft beer.

Slow food.

Etsy. Ravelry.

Like knitters who purl stitch and ride turtles while wearing beer hats and listening to ambient grooves. Like flies and candy. Or babies and honey. Or rabies and stray dogs. Things are getting mixed up. People are making things.

What's interesting is that the beer equivalent of the slow stitch doesn't seem to have much stigma. In fact, quite the opposite.

I did not make these.

Men and women are mingling their extracts and mashing their grains in broad daylight and instead of storming over in their bath robe with a spatula and a high powered garden hose by moonlight to subdue the subversive and creepy newbies like Tom Hanks in The Burbs, people are getting neighborly. They're pulling up a chair.

The rebellion is peaceful, quiet. Or at least, not antagonistic. Unless, I imagine, you're a corporate entity that happens to have had their hands all over the beer market maven for some time now and come to find out that someone's been licking your lauter tun and tickling your snifter.

buy this shirt

Craft beer isn't exclusive to basement brewers and microbreweries, however. It isn't exactly new either. And beer mavens probably have never been exclusively monogamous. And although you can easily purchase a similar (if not always inferior) product at your nearby conglomerate, it is the process as much as the end product that makes the endeavor so attractive.

My mittens might be misshapen and entirely different sizes. My quilts may be puckered and imprecise. But I made them. And there is a satisfaction in having felt the threads pass through my needles with every amateurish turn. A satisfaction that runs deeper and feels fuller than exchanging a thing of thin plastic and my pin number for a hollow "thanks, again."

(i made this)

It's messier. It's more work. And it might not turn out how we expected. But that is exactly the point.

There's an expectation, called 'quality control' that too often is overly focused on a uniform user experience to allow for the attractive imperfections of a hand-made home-good. The imperfection? That's love. It's hard to bottle, and tastes so much better right from the tap.

So, my flies. My babies. My brewed. If you can make it yourself, or find someone who will, you'll get a taste of the imperfect beauty of an honest keg. Just eat something first. Home brew is a little bit wild, a little bit loose, and if you get your claws in some high gravity stuff, you might find yourself making friends with the floor.


Later dudes.
hb