Brewing and Burning

Last Saturday, I brewed my "Imperial Claus" beer. Brewing beer is in my Germanic DNA. My Grandfather helped design Coors, Budweiser, Hamms, and other breweries. We still have many of his architectural drawings. The Imperial Claus--I have a knack for naming beers--is an Imperial IPA. High ABV, high hoppy beer. I threw in a good amount of my homegrown hops into the brewpot in addition to the 3 hop pouches that came with the kit. The beer has an eerie green glow. Think Naughty & Nice, Santa with a Snape-like edge.

I am usually not super-technical but when I brew, I ramp up whatever lab and quantitative skills I possess and muster my inner-scientist. Precision and cleanliness are critical in home-brewing. And since I am also cheap, nothing is worse than brewing a botched batch of beer. It is only at the end of the bottling process that one realizes that the kit was compromised along the way. After all of that work and fifty bucks, just to have a ruined run of beer.

I am thinking about pairing Imperial Claus with a book night. The last couple of years. we hosted a Russian Imperial Stout affectionately named Vlad I, the Imperialer Aler/Russian Literature Night and then the next year we had a Silver Bells (a Belgian Dark Ale)/Christmas Carol presentation. Both were great and much appreciated by the attendees. I recruited some literate friends well-versed in the topics as presenters.

Perhaps Moby Dick would work....hmm. I am 84% through Moby Dick and I know the White Whale yet lurks in the deep seas of the remainder of the chapters. Melville has taken a meandering path to the  final confrontation between Ahab and Moby, breaking all of the rules of hitting the reader hard at the start with an unexpected happening to harpoon them into the rest of the book. No, he engages in all of these sardonic yet funny forays about whales as a species, the characters, various places, etc. Every so often, the book turns dark and ominous, with Moby Dick, the White Whale himself, being brought into the chapter only to swim away.

The part of the book that I am reading now, Melville goes to great length to tell the tale of the drunken Blacksmith on board who lost his wife and kids due to his love of alcohol. Once happy and industrious, Melville portrays him as a man who let booze enter his house as a robber. Soon, the hammer goes silent and the fires of affection and familial love grow cold. The Blacksmith leaves home for the sea where he is to forge the final weapons to slay Moby. There is a line that says something along the lines "that it is hard to burn a scar," since the Blacksmith has many scars from  his years of working with molten metal and alcohol anesthesia. 

In our current opiod crisis across the heartland, it is pain reduction and pleasure enhancement that makes people want to die to themselves, suppressing physical or perhaps psychic pain. They want the hand of Big Pharm/Heroin Dealers to hammer them into submission, a narcotic nirvana. The desire to die to oneself is a spiritual necessity. But, we either die the right way into an empathy for the human condition beyond ourselves or we attempt to die to all feelings of vulnerability, nakedness, and suffering.  With the awful and horrific shooting in Las Vegas, the gunman let our his inner demons and they were legion.   

Side Note: I may weigh in on my thoughts on the 2nd Amendment in a future blog post but I have to think about it a lot more before I do so. I watched a discussion on the 2nd Amendment yesterday between two legal scholars who disagree--and when you have two stellar legal minds who don't agree on interpretation, we must grant that it is more complicated than commonly portrayed. 

As I cleaned up on my home-brewing, I was distracted by some texting  I was doing with some friends and absent-mindedly grabbed the stand that the brewpot had sat on while boiling for an hour. It had not yet cooled sufficiently and I burned my hand. I had to have a refresher course apparently on the wisdom of letting things cool. How this beer, booze, blacksmith, books, and bullets all tie together I am not sure. But, the pain is telling us something and we must listen, lest our souls be scarred.