By Dick Cantwell

The Cult of the Brewer (and other Obsessions)

For years now I've seen this guy, at local festivals and alehouse events, working the crowd, looking for brewers. When he spots one, he'll head over and ask for a business card, and usually the somewhat surprised brewer will oblige. I have, on a couple of occasions, in fact. Once I realized I had given him more than one of my cards, I asked him about it. "Oh," he said in answer to my somewhat puzzled challenge, "I trade them."

Trade them? Trade brewers' business cards? With whom? In fairness to this guy, he does truly seem to enjoy beer, but the idea that there was a subculture devoted to the collection of brewers' relics frankly appalled me. No stranger to the collection myself (though most of mine -- stamps, coins, rocks, butterflies -- are relegated to childhood memory), I immediately flashed on the breadth of dementia possible to the collector of brewers' impedimenta, of which business cards are merely the most publicly and unobtrusively item available. A shrine to each of us, organized by region, locality and current brewery of employ, with a business card-documented provenance of our professional transience; some clippings from the beer press; and perhaps a used coaster or chapstick-smudged pint glass or tuft of beard hair, all palely illuminated by the unstintingly tended flame of an ethanol lamp -- yes, you've got it -- the distillation of our commercially available labors. No, strike that last part, the bit about the flame, for this has very little do with beer.

Some years ago, at a brewery where I used to work (you could look it up), we received a visit from a tour group engaged in strategically criss-crossing the country in the pursuit of really good collections of the promotional effluvium of brewing, or breweriana, as it is subculturally called. They trooped in and after a cursory look at the place settled in the few odd spaces our diminutive brewhouse offered -- between the bottling machine and a bright beer tank, in the doorways and on the steps of the catwalk, as we scurried about trying to prepare for the day's second knockout. No one asked for a taste; no one asked what type of malt we used or how long we held the mash at whatever temperature; they simply sat and exchanged sportsmen's tales of this sign and that label, the rare Florida redemption double-strike cap, the much-prized unopened six pack of Billy beer -- their Holy Grail.

There is an important distinction, of course, between the two stories. Neither has much to do with beer, the stuff we produce for consumption and sale, the reason most of us (brewers) got into this whole thing in the first place. The latter has to with an obsession with the marketing-driven by-products of brewing, the former with the cult of the brewer.

In many ways we've brought it on ourselves. Ill-suited and unfulfilled (and in many cases simply unsuccessful) in whatever pursuits we served before saccharomyces got under our skins, many of us entered the micro-brewers' arena strutting and crowing in self-parody, continually trying to go each other one better in terms of outrageousness at the same time we laughed at the mere fact that we were being paid to do what we loved. There were tattoos, there were earrings, there were outlandish sculptings of facial hair, and the next thing we knew we looked like so many sideshow barkers, big weird fish in an undefined small pond. In fact, we look ridiculous. Here's this guy -- he's been writing for years -- and he keeps Clubman® moustache wax in business; there's that guy, well, who knows what his story is, but he shaves his head and wears big hoop earrings, like a pirate; and what's with the guy -- a real pioneer -- with the tousled unwashed hair, the tiny little saxophone beard, and the computer nerd glasses? Of course there are any number of people who sport less over-the-top manifestations of accessory and tonsorial neglect -- the Ben Franklin glasses, the head-to-toe tiedye, the South Seas tattoos, the Dr. Livingstone beards. I mean, what is going on here? I don't mean to suggest that we should all straighten up and revert to a collective personal aesthetic reminiscent of 50s TV, but pardon me while I make fun of us all.

Of course, outrageous appearances among brewers are a matter of history. Look at the generational rundown of our most venerable industrial brewing families and witness a set of beards outdoing each other like Bartholomew Cubbins's hats. This one's got a big one; that one's got serious muttonchops; that guy (whose name is undoubtedly some multiple-iteration of a few of his forebears)has the twin wisps thing going, the maintenance for which would have to demand the full-time attention of a couple of footmen, or marketers. So maybe what's going on now among the snickering smaller fry is simply yet another rediscovery of Brewing Tradition.

But at the risk of seeming to bite the hand that raises the glass to my lips, I still have to laugh at the cachet the rank of brewer seems to have engendered. Sure I love what I do, and I hope I do it well, but for people to (sometimes literally) bow down in barroom tableaux reminiscent of the gaudier scenes of "Intolerance" in homage to my wares seems to me somewhat ridiculous. So far, at least, I'm not a media personality, like some of my colleagues; my face and form have never to date graced a T-shirt or coaster, for example. And I'm certainly no Pete Slosberg, the canniest media self-denigrator since Frank Perdue.

Just the same, I do have to get around to considering that what we do is kind of special. In harnessing, or at least enacting, the processes and sequences of nature to produce something uplifting and convivial is worthy of a modicum of respect. There is something of the alchemist or mad scientist in many of us, and in some of us, naturally, more than others. I've never, for example, used soured homebrew to commercially taint a batch of dark raspberry "lambic;" I've never pitched raisins as my yeast source, or primed bottles with them; I haven't yet made psilocybin mead. In fact, as I think about it, I may not be of much interest at all. I did once have a beard, but I'm nothing compared to the fuzzy caravanserei on display at even regional festivals. Ah, but there is one thing to recommend me to the deferential mass -- a box of 500 business cards, printed for my first brewing job and left unclaimed at the printer for lack of funds. They're probably still on the shelf, waiting to be picked up and paid for. Now wouldn't that be something for the old collection?