(Ed. Note: I’ve been writing about beer for 15 years now, and I feel as though it’s time to see if we can’t condense this knowledge down into useful information that might help explain how we got to this point. We’ve been through a boom, we’re going through some pretty serious consolidation. Did we learn anything, and if so, what? To this end, I’ve come up with a short list of rules for Craft Beer which I’ll be expounding on in the near future.) 

I’ve been teaching people about beer at George Brown for something like eight years at this point, and the first slide of note in the first class is a picture of a bottle of No Name beer with its omnipresent no-frills yellow label and black text. The slide asks the question, “what is beer?” and answers it stating that it’s an alcoholic beverage made from water, malt, hops, and yeast.

“If it were that simple, we could have the exam now,” I say, prompting groans from the wine students who are sometimes forced to take the class. Sometimes I make converts out of them.

Some of you are already thinking that my first slide is oversimplifying the issue. Some of you are probably thinking that the No Name beer probably has at least some corn in it, so I’m wrong to begin with. Some of you are probably thinking, “hey, does he think non-alcoholic beer isn’t beer?”

You’re already parsing the meaning of the term and this is the problem.

Beer is necessarily ephemeral from a semiotic perspective and therefore it is generally not about the beverage but the bias of the perceiver of the beverage. It doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. In fact it probably doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to anyone. If I were to ask a hundred different people what they picture in their mind’s eye when I say beer, I’d expect to get maybe seventy very different answers and a lot of equivocation.

We’re a species defined by want; dopamine hedonists in search of feeling. If you’re a bodhisattva, your entire ethos is to eschew desire. If you’re a brewer, you’re in the desire business. It is a luxury good that contains small doses of recreational poison which an entire industry grew up around. It’s a thought expanding social lubricant with a lot of easy calories. Bacchanal juice. Dangerous stuff. Consider that 10,000 breweries popped up over the last fifteen years in North America. Imagine the thought process of the people who opened those breweries. What was the desire in the gestalt unconscious that led to that explosion? To be successful? To be trendy? To be artists? To be craftspeople? To get rich? To have their own beer? Meaning?

Well, that sounds like beer is not really about beer. It sounds like it’s about people. 

—–

Let’s step back for a moment. 

Let’s say you’re having a week like mine. I haven’t really accomplished much, this being as close to vacation as I get. I understand other people sometimes go on vacation. All of mine seem to be trips to beer destinations. I have taken out the recycling and made some chili and I’m listening to records and reading books. Now, I have had a couple of beers this week. I had some Godspeed Tmavy Lezak 12 with some homemade Czech Svickova. I got the recipe from Eva at the consulate. I had a Parsons Rum Brulee, which was pretty good, although I only got through about 2/3rds of it since I’m going to the gym and would like to see some progress.

At some point along about Thursday there’s an itch somewhere towards the back of my skull that says “you should go somewhere.” It may be minus sixteen with the windchill, but I figure the sunlight would be good for me. So I start to think of the possibilities.

If I dress up warm, I could walk a mile to The Granite, and I could have a natter with Mare and Tim and maybe Alistair and Matt. I could have a pint of Peculiar, which is just the thing in cold weather. We once made a clone of Peculiar in our George Brown Beer 2 class. I don’t know if I told them that. The beer pictured below is Fisher King ESB, which I made with them. I have cans of it in the fridge, but I don’t want fridge beer. I want people beer. 

If I hadn’t bought records yesterday (Bob Brookmeyer! Sonny Stitt!) I could drift down to KOPS and along to the Only Cafe and maybe have a chat with Alice and see if Murph is at the end of the bar. I don’t actually know Murph except to nod at, but I figure he’s one of those load bearing people that hold up reality. Hell, if I didn’t want to walk that far in the cold, I could sit in the snug at Noonan’s and soak up the nicotine yellowness of the walls, leftover from a Toronto that we’re rapidly destroying. Darryl and Dave might be at Sauce later to see Trombone Charlotte.

I’ve been meaning to go to Volo and talk to Chris Evans about how they make cask since I’d like people to know more about cask, but I feel like I’d need to give him more heads up than the chat I had with Miguel yesterday. Also, their happy hour is Tuesday. I haven’t been to Bickford Brewing or Red Tape and I feel like I owe them visits, but the heads up sort of applies there too. Katie probably deserves some coverage at Thirsty and Miserable. Of course, no one is paying me to write at this point, but I enjoy it a lot.

I could go to Rorschach and talk with Matt about a project we’re working on. I could drift along the streetcar and see how Dave Watts is doing with the re-opening at Shacklands. I could go get B-roll for rule three at True History. I could go to Eastbound for wings and chat with Dave and Tara and Evan and the bartender whose name I forget, but who I pretend is Kenny Loggins and just call Danger Zone.

It’s 11:30 AM as I’m writing this and I’m on my second espresso. Very few of these places are open yet. Probably I’m going to drink more coffee and listen to side two of Bob Brookmeyer Trombone Jazz Samba. There’s beer in the fridge, but a lot of it is obligational and begs to be reviewed, which I have been bad at over the last year or so. Editing The Growler was not real joyful. I tend not to drink beer until after work, so reviews are like a second job. It also leads to the nearly impossible to reconcile internalized idea that drinking beer for work must be taken extremely seriously out of some kind of Protestant Work Ethic. I have to take notes so that I know whether I can use the beer in a class or a written piece. 

The idea of having a beer comes with guilt, obligation, wonder, intellectual curiosity, respect for tradition, desire for novelty, camaraderie, budgetary concern, the potential to do someone a good turn, and the sheer joy of bouncing around the city like a pinball. The promise of an idle afternoon that might be wasted but isn’t frittered away. Hopefully people will be happy to see me.

I have to assume that everyone’s internal life is as complex on the subject. Everyone would have a different reaction if you asked them if they wanted to go for a beer. Maybe a venue preference (Lukr taps! Cask beer! Nitro pour! Maybe the local Firkin!) or a style preference (LAGERS!) or maybe just a trip to The Beer Store for a case of Laker. I don’t know your life. What I do know is that it presses the desire button.

So, when I say to you that beer is not really about beer, this is something that you already know intrinsically. If you’re making it, you’re trying to make something that you want to see made that pleases you or something that you think will tickle the customer’s Limbic system. If beer were about beer, you wouldn’t need bright colours on the can to appeal to an aesthetic sensibility. If beer were about beer, you wouldn’t be chasing that perfect combination of hops to biotransform and become the one perfect item that would finally sate the market’s demand for novelty. If beer were about beer, we’d only have one style of beer.

You’d just make PBR.