On Father’s Day 2010, I came home from the hospital. I was neither sick nor recovering from illness. Instead, I had in tow my exhausted, post-partum wife and newborn son: our firstborn. He arrived early by the O.B.’s calculation – so much so that we all showed up to his own baby shower (my NFP numbers had him close to right on time though).
A week earlier, I was bidding with my teaching staff on a 4-pack of imported Belgian Beer – one of many items up for auction to support our high school’s grad bursaries. I was in over my head against the top two bidders so I struck a deal with the colleague who I knew wasn’t going to back down: I would pay him a quarter of his final winning bid for one beer of his choosing. That was best $20 I’ve ever spent.
So, with custom beer glass in hand, I poured a perfectly-chilled, top five brew in the world and toasted a euphoric Father’s Day surrounded by family and friends. God is good. And yet, the beer I drank was not nearly as good as it was on the palate of the Trappist Monk who taste-tested the batch back in Belgium.
“This is grain, which any fool can eat, but for which the Lord intended a more divine means of consumption. Let us give praise to our Maker and glory to His bounty by learning about… beer!”
– Friar Tuck in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
My own father, whose palate was far less distinguished than the monk’s, would say that beer is “the nectar of the gods.” He came of age in an era of mass-produced Molson, Coors, and Labatt. Admittedly, some of the best sources of Canadian nationalistic fervour were within the context of thirty-second ads to sell the former’s suds. And everything has to be cold: cold brewed, cold filtered, and most importantly, consumed cold. If you chug the sub-zero, fermented corn syrup fast enough, your numb tongue won’t know how bad it is. When all you’ve known is industrialized ale, it’s hard to taste what you’ve been missing.
“I’ll tell ya another thing: their beer sucks” – John Candy in Canadian Bacon
Beer, unlike most wine and spirits, doesn’t age well. All alcohol chemically converts to vinegar in the presence of oxygen. The “sour wine” that Jesus rejected at the foot of the cross is a timeless example. Furthermore, Beer is degraded by the presence of light. Hence, beer bottles are traditionally brown or coloured to filter out some of the damaging rays. Brewers are gradually switching over to tall cans that prevent light from penetrating at all.
The reason craft beer is all the rage is because it tastes better. Microbreweries often get their product to consumers straight from tap to growler. Additionally, people crave an experience of beer in the way most common folk drank beer for hundreds of years: small public houses with beer as unique as the communities of people (and yeast) that live there. In ages past, even if there was nothing in particular to celebrate, you could at least celebrate the beer itself as it was likely more potable than the water.
“Lord, make us know the shortness of our life – that we may gain wisdom of heart” – Psalm 90:12
Life is as fleeting as the foam of a beer. But if craft beer is all the hipster rage, beer is having a tough time keeping up with hipster fitness trends. Light beers are advertised with fewer calories without compromising on taste (good luck) whereas a standard beer is the equivalent of a hot dog’s worth of carbs. And, of course, beer wouldn’t be beer without a customary 5% ethanol content – not your go-to beverage post juice-cleanse.
Somehow, the Germans have invented a method to produce dealcoholized beer without destroying the sensitive plant sterols that fermentation yields. It is now the recovery drink of choice for their winter Olympic athletes.
There must be sufficient nutrients in beer if Paulaner monks could survive a “Beer Fast” during lent. While many choose to give up alcohol for lent, these brothers only drank beer for 40 days. In the 1600’s, the strict order of monks moved from Italy to Germany where they involved the local brew master to help them keep a liquid diet. The original “doppelbock” was an unusually strong brew because “liquid bread wouldn’t break the fast” says Paulaner Braumeister Martin Zuber.
What’s the difference between baking bread and brewing beer? Barley Anything.
Barley, hops, yeast and water – the rest is varying quantity and fermentation time. For a darker beer, ferment longer. For a bitter beer, add more hops. Is bitter better? Perhaps the average India Pale Ale is meant to rouse us from our society’s saccharine stupor.
In successfully completing the Paulaner beer fast back in 2011, journalist J. Wilson noted that after the first few days of hunger, his body replaced the feeling with focus and he found himself “operating in a tunnel of clarity unlike anything I’d ever experienced.” With haste, Jews eat bitter herbs at Passover to remind them of the bitterness of Egyptian captivity before their flight into the desert for forty years. Beer can be both penitential and the party’s social lubricant – elevating our thoughts while removing some inhibition to express them.
In no way does great beer converge with Christianity more than in the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity. Basically, things that can be done at the most local level, should be done locally. You only widen the jurisdiction when the problem can’t be solved in the smaller jurisdiction. Subsidiarity affirms the human needs of local populations with the most personalized approach to deliver goods and services. That doesn’t mean a well-ordered society must return to serfdom, but modern technocracies are certainly lacking in their humanity.
Beer is at its best when it’s small. As professor Tolkien says, “small is beautiful.” As soon as a brewer expands beyond the local radius, the whole business gets stale, literally, and figuratively. We don’t like stale bread so we shouldn’t settle for stale beer. If your go-to beer makes T.V. ads, you can probably find a better beer.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Tempus Fugit, Memento Mori.
St. Patrick, Pray for us!
"A good pub is, to my mind, a place to waste time — in the best sense. And if the time you are willing to waste with someone is often the best mark of how much they mean to you, the place where you waste it with them becomes its own kind of living memory."
- Ed Condon from The Pillar