Halfway there, or, why I do what I do.

Having hit the halfway point for NaBloPoMo, I could reflect on ...

How and when America became the craft-assumed only repository of all beery good things, or how the word 'microbrewery', suffused with joyful struggle, became replaced with 'craft', rife with arrogance, or how and when small, independent beer wholesalers (such as myself) became harangued as impediments to small, independent 'craft' breweries (even as 'craft' beer has surged ever forward), or how 'cask ale' in America has become to mean tossing Twix bars in a firkin and calling that innovative (that happened!), or when the flavor of beer's noble and naturally necessary grain, barley, became a mere annoyance to the 'other' flavors of beer, or how fables of hoppy beers became required reading, or how real documents of beery things, of history and people past, became to be ignored and replaced, cyberman-like, with the adamantine constant of now-ness, or why experience was demoted from co-equal of experiment, or how the science of beer became damned as heretical, like Galileo by the Church.

I could reflect on all that, and I would reject it.

When all the hipsters and poseurs and culture-vultures have moved on to their next big anti-thing, I, and so many others, will still be there for good beer —we, the makers and the sellers and the scribes and the appreciators of good beer — we will all be there to re-confirm good beer for its 'old'-fashionedness.

I'll sign off, like pre-email epistle-writers might have:

Yours for good fermentables,
Thomas Cizauskas