Analysis: IPAs By Decade

November 2016, Josh and I headed up to the Big South Fork to climb the Standard Route of the O&W Wall. The Big South Fork is remote and wild, and the cliffs are intimidatingly tall by southeastern standards. At the top, Josh and I cracked open some cans of barley soda and enjoyed the gorge at its golden hour before making our descent. 

Once we returned to civilization and cell service (a McDonald's in Oneida, Tennessee), Josh posted a photo from the evening on his Instagram. Within minutes, vitriolic comments about our beer of choice  began blowing up the notifications on his phone. People did not approve of Busch. 

It was the 2010s, the height of the craft beer movement, and the Age of the IPA. Beer Wars was on Netflix, Fat Tire was no longer "fancy," and every town in Colorado had its own micro-brewery (8.4 breweries per every 100,000 21+ person, to be exact). Busch, and other single-name, macro-brewed, American-style lagers that retail for around $1 a can, were considered "cat piss.” According to Josh's refined friends and followers, we might as well have been a pair of slack-jawed yokels.

But that's all changed now. Beer taste has horseshoe theory'd back to the macro-brew, and now IPA's are the butt of jokes and memes. Micro and craft breweries have even started cranking out their own light lagers. But a six-pack will run you about $9.99 while a 12er of Busch costs and tastes about the same. That's basic economics. 

Speaking of economics, Busch and many other beers like Busch are union-made. And we should support labor unions. Unions are why our employers do anything remotely humane for us. And in the face of a fifty-year neoliberal onslaught on the working class, we should build worker power however and whenever we can; whether buying PBR or democratizing our own workplace. So here's a helpful list of union-made beers to get the revolution started. 

 

all-time great can design; bring it back, Busch.

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The Common Grace of Tailgate Beer

(Independence Pass, CO)

Benjamin Franklin was a syphilis-ridden inveterate skirt-chaser who thought the turkey should be the national symbol but he was right when he said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Wait. Google has informed me that Benjamin Franklin never said this. This, despite its numerous sources on sidewalk kiosks outside bars and breweries. We can all go back to thinking Mr. Franklin was just a chubby ol' creeper with a penchant for electricity and bad ideas (looking at you, Articles of Confederation [though, admittedly, the Constitution pretty much sucks too]). 

Whoever did say it was on to something. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. 

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is the author's written wrestling with the theological dilemma of existence and the perceived absence of God. The book has been referred to as the world's first piece of existential philosophy. The author lives in a world with a volatile economy, judicial problems, and new and disparate socioeconomic classes (no, not America; post-exile Persia) and confesses an existence that is contradictory and absurd, yet tries to make sense of it all. 

There is a common theme throughout Ecclesiastes that gives me great joy and hope: enjoyment.  

"There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their work. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?" (2:24-25)

"I know that there is nothing better than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their work." (3.12-13)

 

"This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the work with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us." (5.18)

"So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them through the days of life God gives them." (8:15)

"Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long approved of what you do... Enjoy your life with the one you love and whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might." (9.7-10)

 

"Have you had a PBR with lime? It's the reason I still go to church." (my friend, Payton)

That last one isn't from Ecclesiastes but it works. The gulf between God and humans is bridged in these moments of humans receiving and enjoying the good gifts of creaturely life: food, drink, friends, and even meaningful work. The German theologian and Nazi resistance leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the message of Ecclesiastes: "We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we must not try to be more pious than God himself." I grew up in a teetotaling culture that tried really hard to be more pious than God's own self. 

Oh, if the elders at Timberlane Church of Christ could have seen the pile of empty cans that accumulated throughout our stay in El Rito, New Mexico. Josh and I spent every day clipping bolts on beautiful, steep conglomerate walls in the dry desert heat and finished every night by a campfire with Doc Watson on the BlueTooth and a PBR in our hand. I spent the previous year in a "dark night of the soul" of sorts. But that week in New Mexico I saw the Deep Mind of the Cosmos in the panoply of stars. I heard the Everlasting Song of the Universe in the howls of coyotes. And I felt the Spirit of Creative Transformation in the conversations between two brothers, alone in the desert. 

Every can of cheap beer enjoyed on the tailgate of a truck or around a campfire with friends is a foretaste of the life of the world to come. At least that's the preferred vision for the future of Saint Brigid of Kildare. Brigid was an abbess in fifth-century Ireland known for her Christian virtue and “as a woman who likes to feast with plenty of ale and divine company.” She is purported to have prayed, “I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings with Heaven’s family drinking it through all eternity.” This is my entire eschatology.

Happy summer, megasplitter friends. I hope it's full of swimming holes, gravel rides, and tailgate beers. May the common yet good gifts of creaturely life mediate the presence of the Divine Mystery, whatever your religious persuasion. 

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