There Will Be Beer

What the fall of craft breweries says about man's past and America's future.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about caves. At first, it’s very difficult to imagine how they could be our natural living environment—but they are. Most of hominid history, and even human history, was spent in them.

I recommend spending some time in caves. It’s very illuminating. When you find a cave and spend time standing in it, sitting in it, caressing the walls, it begins to feel quite homey, even cozy perhaps. The light has a soft darkness to it that your eyes adjust to quite naturally, and the air has a faint humidity and oh-so-slightly-cool room temperature. They have better conditions than any apartment I’ve ever had. They are where we are meant to live. 

One cave I’ve been thinking about in particular is Raqefet cave. It’s in northern Israel on Mount Carmel, shockingly close to where I currently live. The cave (along with nearby Nahal Mearot, a UNESCO world heritage site) possesses the most extensive archaeological evidence of the Natufian culture. Who were the Natufians? They were the inhabitants of the Levant, ten to fifteen thousand years ago, and possibly the first people to practice agriculture.

The site is quite remarkable. You can look out from the caves and the transition to agriculture with your own eyes—a wall and a man-made milling area. In Raqefet cave, 13,000-year-old beer was discovered in 2018. It is to date the oldest fermented man-made product ever found. 

Visiting the caves, I felt a deep spiritual connection not dissimilar to what is experienced at many of the holiest sites in the holy land. The cave is where we are meant to be. This is further underlined by the fact that the skeletons found in Raqefet have the same exact paternal marker that I do I am directly descended from the skeletons in the cave. I am meant to be in the cave.

Recently, I started working as a brewer. This has caused me to ponder the national myths of mankind, and the ways we view our ancestors—The idea of “we were,” be it warriors, explorers, or kings. Upon feasting my eyes on Raqefet Cave, I had a moment of enlightenment, a flash where I understood how thousands of years of blood, each generation after generation, has led to me. We were brewers.

In many ways, this has been the natural progression of my career working around alcohol. I started when I was eighteen, working my first job at a nightclub as a high school student. Since then, I’ve worked in wineries, wine stores, breweries, pubs, and cocktail bars. Outside of work, I naturally made my own beer, as well as spirits including rum, vodka, brandy, whiskey, and literal bathtub gin. In the crazed peak of my hobby of homedistilling, I spent many hours working in a cramped bathroom as I hooked my still up to the washing machine water hookups and used the bathtub as a drain. I remember feeling lightheaded from the fumes, but I assure you these were merely the fumes of inspiration.

There are many tasks involved in working in a brewery. One that I spend much of my day doing is purging yeast. For the uncultured hoopleheads reading this, as the beer brews in the tank, yeast eats the sugars in the grain—which is what produces that sweet, sweet alcohol as a byproduct. When the sugars are exhausted, however, the yeast dies and falls to the bottom of the tank, forming a cake. This needs to be drained from the tank, which we call purging the yeast. 

I spend many hours of the week sitting on a carton as I hold a hose hooked up to the tank, draining bucket after bucket of yeast. I feel the yeast as it goes through my hand, I stare at its varying consistency (from sludge to forbidden milkshake), and I intermittently taste its slightly bitter essence to know when I hit beer and it’s time to stop. I understand the yeast.

Yeast is life and death. Its life is what makes so many things possible. Keeping the yeast happy is my primary goal. It’s said in the Talmud that bread is the stuff of life, with the words for yeast, froth, leaven, and alcohol all being interconnected in Hebrew. It is a biological tool that we have bent to our will. It alchemically changes liquid bread drink into a psychosis inducing drug that kills and inflects misery. Yeast is transferred and recycled from tank to tank to keep the process going with the same original yeast, called the mother. Some mothers for breads are said to be thousands of years old. Mother. The fermentation of alcohol is in many ways an Oedipal conquest of nature. Through forced reproduction of ancient creative forces, we machine something that makes us lose our super-ego father, quite literally violent and blind.

And what is done with the dead yeast? It’s feed to cattle, it’s turned into Marmite or Vegemite. That’s how Marmite was invented, it was a question of what to do with all these buckets of yeast from the tanks. It’s quite something that one of the most quintessential British foods is an industrial byproduct that is literal death. 

As we inch closer to the messianic age and the explosion of industry and technology predicted in the Zohar comes true, brewing has clearly undergone a revolution—in the form of the phenomenon known as craft beer. 

I remember the maturation of craft beer. It was an exciting time, hearing tales of how bars which had previously only had three or four taps now carried virtually limitless choice. I recall so vividly the excitement of road-tripping to various breweries, trying every slight variation of every different variety. It was sublime, I still remember many first sips cooling me under the sun as well as cold days where they warmed my cheeks in delight . 

It seems, though, we have entered into a counterrevolutionary period in beer. The market has become stagnant, trends have reached their maximum penetration—which is naturally followed by climax and softening withdrawal.

The most poignant example of this imminent flaccidity revealed itself to me when I worked at a beer bar in a Rust Belt town. This watering hole had over 80 taps and more than 500 different cans, covering every brewery in the local area and beyond. It took me a couple months to learn everything on the menu. 

Do you know how I felt when I tried everything in a so-called beer capital? Disappointed. Depressed. It was all so very mediocre and tedious.

In each beer genre, there were only one or maybe two good things that tasted how they ought to. Despite moving through stock quickly, I could taste the difference between batches; the quality control was so poor. I would visit the breweries that produced my favorites, only for my eyes to fall upon a bleakness rarely  seen outside of a Russian film.

Every place has the same decor. The used barrels, the same exact wooden tables and chairs in front of a fireplace from a Cialis advert, the same idiotic beer names and weirdly furrysexual labels, the same wooden signs and those small millennial gastropub chained lights. The same $20 burgers, all completely indistinguishable. The insulting Nashville hot chicken flatbread. And, worst of all, their other beers aren’t even any good! 

In many ways the plateau and decline of craft beer is reflective of the state of America. I flashback often to my days trying unbalanced festbiers and disgusting doppelbocks and thinking Tony Soprano put it best, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that I know. But lately I’ve been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over.” If America doesn’t start making a good helles again, we will have to launch a cruise missile at TSMC to prevent the Chinese from achieving hegemony. Such is the state of our impotence.

There is a sinister truth lying beneath our sad state of affairs—people actually like it this way. For some reason, I have no idea why, there is a subculture of psychotics that enjoy the microbrewing demiurge we find ourselves trapped within. These people unironically scream, “Fuck Heineken, Pabst Blue Ribbon!” They have made craft beer their life, and knowingly embrace the consequences to their palates and indeed, their souls.

In my professional experience, there are three types of beer enthusiasts. 

A) The Snob

The snob is almost typically a home-brewer who thinks that because he’s made piss water that he knows everything about beer. It is the biggest part of his personality, because he has never emotionally matured  past his university daysbut makes just enough money to support his meager dilettante brewing hobby. These are the types to non-ironically criticize the salt content of what I serve them. Even more degenerate is their use of untappd, an app to rate and review beers. 

I will explain further through highlights of a review written by a Snob concerning your humble author.

As you can see in the above photo of a very long review, this “self admitted beer snob” with “over 5000 beers on Untapped” was not happy. He ordered flights when it was busy, to which I happily obliged because no good deed goes unpunished. However, what he ordered was not on tap. He then decided to order pints as he apparently was illiterate when I re-explained the tap sheet. The beers he proceeded to order, all IPAs, for the rest of his stay were out of stock and unavailable. Despite my recommendations of good beers that were available, he instead decided to seethe concerning his lack of hops and write a review. The man looked exactly as you would expect.

B) The Millennial

The Millennial is the second type of deviant who is a craft beer hobbyist.

He is approximately 31-33, wears horn rimmed glasses, listens to NPR, has facial hair, banal tattoos, goes bouldering on the weekends, works in tech, has been married for three years, opened up his marriage at the 1.5 year mark, and has a dog. No kids. His favorite movie of the last five years is either Everywhere Everything All At Once or the Robert Pattinson Batman. 

This man is not a real human and should not be treated as such. He is a Tulpa created at Burning Man. 

C) The Lager Chad 

The Lager Chad is the only acceptable type of beer drinker. He wants something consistent, refreshing, and easy to drink. While they often have Neanderthal like bodies, these include but are not limited to: Rednecks, Divorced dads and uncles, blue collar workers, and brewers. They do not care about the labeling or if the hops were shat out by a civet in Sumatra. They want something that is actually good.

In my interview for my current position I was asked which type of beer I liked drinking most, and I answered a lager. I was told it was the correct answer because it is. A good consistent lager like Bud is very difficult to make and make well.  Once you’ve tried all the different type of beers, sure every now and then you want something different, but what are you buying? A lager. 

With this current state of affairs, beer is coming upon a fork in the road of history. The most hopeful outcome is that higher interest rates shutter the breweries that keep making lacto sours and sextuple hopped IPAs. God willing, we would see a maturation instead of stagnation. Good beers rise and become fixed staples in local markets, breweries become established similar to bourbon in America, and the market works.

What will actually happen? The truth is, all these myriad breweries have no real differences between them. They make virtually identical and interchangeable products. Consumers, unfortunately, are also too moronic to discern meaningful quality.

Thus, the only way different firms can differentiate themselves is through marketing and branding. More bullshit. I cannot tell you how many people pick beers purely off the label looking “cool.” More furry characters, more political identity inserted in your beer—it will all become worse. The beer becomes like the marmite, an industrial byproduct of the true product, the Jessica Rabbit-esque elephant on the label. The beer becomes death. America continues to slide in life expectancy but increases in polyamory as the housing crisis refuses to ease. Drain, taste death, pour, repeat.

Who was the ancestor of mine in Raqefet cave? What was he like? What was his choice of beer? Surely, if his world was anything like ours, it was a lager.

I dreamt vividly after visiting the cave of these first brewers. I dreamt of them opening primitive jars and sharing a beer together in fellowship—the same harmony we have with close friends and strangers alike. That’s what beer is really about. It’s about cracking open a cold one with the boys.

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