Why I started brewing beer

Why did I start brewing beer?  I’m not sure exactly.  Lots of other people have begun brewing beer and doing lots of other DIYish stuff in the past ten or twenty years.  So I’m obviously part of some general trend of people wanting to make stuff they could more easily buy.  There are probably lots of different motivations for this.  I can only guess at my own.  We start projects in life not by theorizing about them ahead of time.  We just start doing them.  Later, if at all, we have to think back on what it was that inspired or motivated the project in the first place.  

I wanted to make something, I know that.  And I really like the taste of good beer.  I don’t always feel like drinking beer.  But I would almost always choose beer over wine.  I hope that’s a genuine taste thing, and not a convoluted desire to appear more rustic than refined - but one never knows.  So learning to make good beer was attractive for the simple reason that I’d get to drink what I made.  I think I’m just going to make a list of some of the reasons I started brewing beer.  Not all of them were explicit when I started brewing.  But I think they were all present in some kind of basic way.

1. I like the taste of craft beer.

2. I need projects that involve manual labor and an actual result.  I should explain - I’m a theologian and pastor by training.  I read, write, think, teach, and help direct people’s spiritual lives for a living.  That’s a weird way to make a living.  But anyway, my point is that tangible results are not really part of my job rhythms.  So I have to fill that need in other ways.  When we bought an old house that needed lots of work in Fort Scott, KS, the renovation work did the trick.  When we moved to a New York City apartment, I had no other physical projects.  So I needed a project that would require effort and that would eventuate in something pretty closely connected in time to the work done.  Beer fulfills this need, even when the result I produce is a disappointment.  At least it was a clear result and I can say, “That didn’t work.”

3.  Brewing beer is difficult.  It’s kind of like a massive chemistry experiment that requires quite a bit of knowledge about how things really work.  You can put stuff together blindly when you begin.  The steps in the starter kits are easy enough to follow.  But when you start asking questions about how to fix problems or correct for this or that, you need to know what processes are taking place.  Or if you forget something and need to substitute something else.  Or if something goes wrong or tastes wrong and you’re trying to improve, then you have to start pressing into how the beer really gets made.  It’s kind of humbling really, knowing that for thousands of years people with no electricity and no high school chemistry have been brewing decent beer in their homes.  But, in our defense, we ceded this ground to large businesses for the better part of a century.  Learning the ancient craft ways again will take time and repetition.

4. I have not once brewed a batch of beer by myself.  I always do it with friends, a few or a bunch.  Sometimes we just gather the “serious” brewers.  Other times, we invite wider networks of friends, or people from church.  We do that when we’re doing a beer tasting or pairing beer with food.  It’s always more complicated to brew beer with lots of people in a small apartment.  But it’s a very communal thing.  Many of the tasks are best divvied up and shared.  Some of the tasks would be near impossible without another set of hands.  (Try pouring five gallons of boiling liquid through a strainer into another bucket by yourself.  No man is an island.  It takes a village.)

4a. This is not a distinct motivation but rather a specification of #4 above.  I have realized over time that I like talking to people while we’re doing stuff.  Actually my friend Brent Storms articulated this first, when he told me that he holds strategic leadership retreats not sitting down in conference rooms but instead while doing something like hiking together.  The minute he said that I knew exactly what he was getting at.  Conversations are better, more creative even, when had while doing something else.  Put me across the table from you and make me stare into your eyes and I may well go blank.  Join me for a three or four hour brewing session some evening and you’ll find that I can hold forth eloquently on everything from restaurants and sports to parenting and religion.  (I’m pretty good with all these, excepting the parenting).

5.  I already mentioned that I’m a theologian by training.  So that means I have been encultured in a tradition of argument and conversation that goes back many years and happens in many institutional settings.  But one of those settings has been monasteries.  And they brew beer in monasteries.  There is something prayerful and simple and beautiful about brewing beer with others.  I can’t say a lot more about that right now.  But if I can take up a practice I enjoy that puts me in a little closer existential alignment with the monks of ages past, that’s two birds, my friend.

6.  I’m also kind of tired of buying everything.  It’s kind of alienating to buy everything.  Besides, most of the stuff we buy is of really poor quality, because mass produced in factories by people who aren’t exactly putting their soul into what they’re making.  So learning to cook and bake has been a sheer delight to my wife and to me.  We make great, delicious meals and (usually) have fun doing it.  Brewing beer falls into the same category.  I want to produce a few things and not merely consume all the time.  I recently threatened my wife that I was taking up sewing so I could learn to make my own dress shirts.  (This went so far as some math calculations in my head about costs, trying to imagine myself wearing something I made, and projecting that I could make maybe one shirt a year.)  So making beer is fun of course.  But it’s also a kind of protest, a resistance to the life I’m being offered by my culture.  I’m asserting my agency by taking up a practice that holds some potential to return something we’ve lost.  I can’t always join official protests or march on Washington.  But I can take up a few simple daily practices that remind me how to be a human being.