Bitter & Sweet

I had a very busy social calendar last week and I am still playing catch-up from it all. My apologies on the late blog submission. I try to write and post on Saturday or Sunday because I figure this is when people may have time to read my missives. I'm losing points.

Saturday night was the culmination of a process that began a year ago. It was not a continuous preparation yet it was an event that happened in stages. If you are a regular to the Bierkergaard blog you know that I like to drink beer, good beer. On occasion, I  homebrew. Not all of the time, but in the last four to five year, I have made about 15 cases of different styles of beers. Typically, not mainstream styles but Belgians, Anchor Steams, and the most recent offering a Russian Imperial Ale.

I will never ever brew a Belgian Wit again. It blew up my bottles like IED.'s in the night. Far too volatile. I will leave that style to the professionals who have the right techniques and precise brewing diagnostic tools. Higher ABV beers tend to be  more forgiving and slow moving. Easier to corral.

Making beer is a messy and laborious process and one needs a decent amount of equipment to do it right. Any skimping on the quality of the process or products going into it will typically create a bad beer. Wine apparently is more idiot proof. As long as one has the right type of grapes and follows proper protocols the wine will be fine. Beer can go bad a thousand of different ways.

So, Saturday night my buddy and I unveiled our Vlad the Imperial Aler brew. It had been cellaring for a year and we had kept our paws and palates off of it besides a preliminary drinking of a bottle two months in to make sure that the brew was on the right track. It was good at the time but still raw and discordant. The various elements had not come together, like that Beatles song.  

Nothing worse than waiting for something that winds up sucking despite initial hope and dreams. I guess like life itself in some ways. All these preliminary dreams and eventual disasters co-mingling which brings me to the point of this blog. Eventually.

As noted, our brew was titled "Vlad the Imperial Aler."  Here is the label that my co-brewer Matthew Lester crafted. Quite clever.

Vlad is this case is a stocky female ready for her ox-like duties. Vlad the Imperial Aler * the term that I coined, Yes, a play on the horrible historical character from Eastern Europe who impaled his enemies. Not exactly a chummy dude. Russian Imperial Ales double-down on both the malted barley (the sweet) and the hops (the bitter). All beers have a balance to some degree between these two elements. Except Budweiser and its ilk which castrates its beer like the Clydesdales it tromps around with its commercial and little cute doggies. Bud's diss on Craft Beers during the Superbowl really was weird. Like Bud has anything worth crowing about. I have had seltzers with more depth and character.

With the Vlad, we doubled down 2x (double downed on our double down) with the hops. It was a factor of four. The hops were half of what came with the kit and the other half were homegrown at my previous residence, a bitter tale indeed that I will bore you with no further. These homegrown hops became the representation of something greater, a reconciliation of sorts. We were concerned that the Vlad would be too bitter, and that is why we gave it a year to age.

My Dad likes to say that "Beer is Beer" and his assessment on Beer Snobs like me is that we are the equivalent of cork sniffers with wine. And there is some pomposity in the Craft Beer scene. My buddy that I brewed the Vlad suggested that we enter the Vlad in a local Ironbrewer Competition and I vetoed that idea. I am tired of trying to impress critics with my efforts and falling short of affirmation. I have written an excellent college prep book that I can't get authorities to even sip. I have finally come to the place where I am tired of trying to persuade the experts. They are often wrong and obtuse, protecting their domains of influence from outsiders like me who are willing to ask hard questions and hold people accountable for the mess we have made of higher education. It doesn't really pay to be prophetic. The wicked kings of the Old Testament like Ahab had hundreds of false prophets on the payroll who told them what they wanted to hear, while the Elijah's who spoke truth had to run for their lives. It is just the way of the world.

Meritocracy is just a code word for the insider game. I get it now after all of these years of kissing the rings of the powerful and prestigious. No mas. I am going to do it the way I feel called to and the difference I make is daily with kids and not in bowing to some hot-shot who throws a cheap bauble my way while cackling on about empowerment and access.  

So, I I decided against throwing my pearl of a beer in front of the swine. There are a lot of pigs who rule the pen who are A-OK with the slop. And, the crowd that is flocking to Craft Beers may or may not really like better beer. I just would have become pissed if some pseudo-sophisticates sniffed that my beer was not the best. So, it was losers dice and I wasn't rolling.

I do notice that my Dad does tend to go to the right in my beer fridge where the good beers reside in some sort of Brahma-like caste system. What he means to say when he talks about good beer is that it is not worth the extra dollars to buy Craft Beer. The additional 50% of quality in taste costs 100% more, And there is some truth in that. For example, it is pretty easy to cook great dishes at home with the right ingredients and a little cooking know-how. It is extremely difficult to create dishes of excellent restaurants as a rule. One can approximate but that last amount of distance takes an enormous amount of skill to cover. That last ten percent is what you pay for.

I keep my cheaper beer to the Left like some Judgment Day of the Sheep and the Goats.

The Vlad did turn out to be exceptional. I had invited a group of friends who have shown over the years a strong commitment to great beer. We casted the night as a Russian-themed event with food and drink. Our special guest, besides the beer, was a good buddy of mine named Neil Gussman. He is a great thinker and is part of the literary class. He has a deep take on things and an appreciation for words that is atypical in our rapidly dumbed-down world where image is all. Here is pic of him in his Army uniform speaking of Russian Writers:

I neglected to mention to my invites that he would be showing up in military clothes because he didn't have time to change after getting off from his duties in the Army Reserves on Saturday. It did provide an interest motif for his discussion on War and Peace. I can hardly summarize Neil's erudite thoughts in this blog post but here is one thought that I distilled: Russian writers are masters of detailing the human condition, in all of glory and gory. From the Gulag to the highest echelons of power, the Russian writers explicate in great detail the internal world of people and external conditions and consequences of our actions. Neil noted that Tolstoy makes good compelling and interesting. In a pathological world where what bleeds is what leads, these Russian writers show that bloodletting is a reality in our world, but so is that great spirit who sheds his own blood to cover the sins of many, either figuratively or literally.

The bitter of life threatens to subsume us. The sweetness threatens to make us complacent. There is some great see-saw in the Universe that require for us to know evil so that we may learn to really detest the taste of it, both in ourselves and others. Yet, in this realization, not let us turn  us into monsters who no longer have a taste for the good, the beautiful, the noble, and the pure.

• It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.
  • As quoted in Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (1950) by Harold Victor Martin.
  • Variant translation:
  • I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.
    • Last Notebook (1880–1881), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 83: 696; as quoted in Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (2004), p. 21, hdn ISBN 0-313-30384-3.