I've sat down to do this over and over, and here I find myself again. It's a scary thing to start writing, so I think I'll gird my will with a drink.
I guess this is a lifestyle blog, if drinking is your life. It isn't really all my life consists of, but it's something that I partake of frequently, and think about more often than that. So, with that serving as an introduction, let's get into it.
Beer.
This beverage has consumed my professional life for about four years. I'm new to the scene overall, but I've spent more time digging into the history and culture surrounding beer than anything else I've ever been paid for. I've read books, I've traveled, I've asked questions, and I've drank (a lot) all to find out what beer is about. These are simply my musings on the possible origins and what I think about it in today's age.
Beer is, essentially, as old as human culture. We have pretty good evidence of beer being intentionally produced, on a large scale, in Israel about 13,000 years ago. That's older than writing, as far as we know. Let that sink in for a moment: beer was more important than non-oral histories, or record-keeping. However, there's a couple of good reasons why that might be.
First off, beer is a spectacular storage system. You're still getting a lot of the calorie content of grains that are converted into beer, and it really never goes bad. It can get a bit nasty and sour, but it isn't going to make you sick. This is wildly important when you're worried about whether or not you're going to make it through the next winter, and where your next meal might come from.
Next, it tastes good! Though beer produced 13,000 years ago might not have tasted like the brown IPA I'm drinking right now (though it's my homebrew, so it's not as good as a professional example anyway), but we certainly wouldn't have continued to produce beer if we thought it tasted bad. Over time we got better and better at producing this malted nectar, and we have always made sure to consider the drinkability of the final product. Egyptians had something like 17 different types of beer (Oh Lord, please don't quote me on that number) that were regularly available, including celebratory brews and "weight-loss" varieties, all of which were apparently quite drinkable and pleasant.
Finally, it does, in fact, cause intoxication. This really can't be understated. Beer contains a pretty potent drug, and humans REALLY like the effects that it has on them, in general. This affected state has been seen as a number of different things throughout the years. It's been used as evidence of a god, as a cure for many woes, and as a celebratory bridge bringing people together.
All of these things come together to make a long-lasting beverage that is widely misunderstood in this day and age. We still see beer's influence on our culture, almost everyone feels they know what beer is, but the truth of its history and variance is lost to most in the drunken haze of college. We see it (nowadays) as that fizzy yellow liquid that you had too much of at that party; the drink that you finally grew out of. While I can't say that I didn't have too much of it in college, I think that since then I've delved a little deeper and picked up on a greater set of nuances that our culture as a whole could benefit from.
Obviously, there are a huge number of people that appreciate the greater variety that beer has to offer, and see how it can be elevated in our collective consciousness. But it's still generally seen as the lesser of the alcoholic choices, maybe only above "Flavored Malt Beverages" - those sugary, artificially flavored potables that introduced you to your first hangover (no shame). That long-held belief is actually a lot older than you might expect as well. The depiction of beer as the libation of the working class was common at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Those who could afford it drank wine, those who couldn't drank ale.
So, we have a lot to fight against when it comes to elevating beer to the status that it deserves. Thankfully, with the new "Maker's Culture" that's influencing our cultural psyche, we have people that are working hard to produce fantastic offerings. New takes on old styles, rustic offerings produced with local ingredients, and brand new varieties that have never been seen before. This is a huge shake-up for the scene that used to be heavily populated by the same product under different names. Now people have choices, they have variety, and more and more people are realizing that you can coax more flavor out of those four ingredients than just a splitting headache and a dry mouth the next morning.
If you've made it this far, I'm not sure what you're doing. This was a dry-run to get things off my chest and see what I'm looking to do on this forum. I think this will be about more than just beer (I'm hoping to write up a bit about cocktails, craft distilling, and anything else I can get my head around). For a little while it'll probably just be my reactions to the craft beer developments happening around me, but we'll see what it becomes!
I guess this is a lifestyle blog, if drinking is your life. It isn't really all my life consists of, but it's something that I partake of frequently, and think about more often than that. So, with that serving as an introduction, let's get into it.
Beer.
This beverage has consumed my professional life for about four years. I'm new to the scene overall, but I've spent more time digging into the history and culture surrounding beer than anything else I've ever been paid for. I've read books, I've traveled, I've asked questions, and I've drank (a lot) all to find out what beer is about. These are simply my musings on the possible origins and what I think about it in today's age.
Beer is, essentially, as old as human culture. We have pretty good evidence of beer being intentionally produced, on a large scale, in Israel about 13,000 years ago. That's older than writing, as far as we know. Let that sink in for a moment: beer was more important than non-oral histories, or record-keeping. However, there's a couple of good reasons why that might be.
First off, beer is a spectacular storage system. You're still getting a lot of the calorie content of grains that are converted into beer, and it really never goes bad. It can get a bit nasty and sour, but it isn't going to make you sick. This is wildly important when you're worried about whether or not you're going to make it through the next winter, and where your next meal might come from.
Next, it tastes good! Though beer produced 13,000 years ago might not have tasted like the brown IPA I'm drinking right now (though it's my homebrew, so it's not as good as a professional example anyway), but we certainly wouldn't have continued to produce beer if we thought it tasted bad. Over time we got better and better at producing this malted nectar, and we have always made sure to consider the drinkability of the final product. Egyptians had something like 17 different types of beer (Oh Lord, please don't quote me on that number) that were regularly available, including celebratory brews and "weight-loss" varieties, all of which were apparently quite drinkable and pleasant.
Finally, it does, in fact, cause intoxication. This really can't be understated. Beer contains a pretty potent drug, and humans REALLY like the effects that it has on them, in general. This affected state has been seen as a number of different things throughout the years. It's been used as evidence of a god, as a cure for many woes, and as a celebratory bridge bringing people together.
All of these things come together to make a long-lasting beverage that is widely misunderstood in this day and age. We still see beer's influence on our culture, almost everyone feels they know what beer is, but the truth of its history and variance is lost to most in the drunken haze of college. We see it (nowadays) as that fizzy yellow liquid that you had too much of at that party; the drink that you finally grew out of. While I can't say that I didn't have too much of it in college, I think that since then I've delved a little deeper and picked up on a greater set of nuances that our culture as a whole could benefit from.
Obviously, there are a huge number of people that appreciate the greater variety that beer has to offer, and see how it can be elevated in our collective consciousness. But it's still generally seen as the lesser of the alcoholic choices, maybe only above "Flavored Malt Beverages" - those sugary, artificially flavored potables that introduced you to your first hangover (no shame). That long-held belief is actually a lot older than you might expect as well. The depiction of beer as the libation of the working class was common at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Those who could afford it drank wine, those who couldn't drank ale.
So, we have a lot to fight against when it comes to elevating beer to the status that it deserves. Thankfully, with the new "Maker's Culture" that's influencing our cultural psyche, we have people that are working hard to produce fantastic offerings. New takes on old styles, rustic offerings produced with local ingredients, and brand new varieties that have never been seen before. This is a huge shake-up for the scene that used to be heavily populated by the same product under different names. Now people have choices, they have variety, and more and more people are realizing that you can coax more flavor out of those four ingredients than just a splitting headache and a dry mouth the next morning.
If you've made it this far, I'm not sure what you're doing. This was a dry-run to get things off my chest and see what I'm looking to do on this forum. I think this will be about more than just beer (I'm hoping to write up a bit about cocktails, craft distilling, and anything else I can get my head around). For a little while it'll probably just be my reactions to the craft beer developments happening around me, but we'll see what it becomes!
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