Ruminations, Part 2.

I’ve neglected this blog over a period of years roughly commensurate with the planning and realization of NABC’s Bank Street Brewhouse, which opened in 2009.

Those with the grace and patience to continue reading will recall that there was a gradual transition, from a preponderance of musings on the world of better beer in general versus a small number of considerations about NABC’s business, to the other way around. I started seeing invoices with an unaccustomed string of numbers in front of the comma, and bank statements with too few of them, and found myself shilling.

Now that some time has passed, it’s easier to look back on all this and realize that in spite of all the planning and preparation, the advent of Bank Street produced warm fuzzies for only a week or so, and then devolved into trench warfare over a period of years. The sheer number of miscalculations and mistakes we made over a far longer period than I ever expected, coupled with something akin to shell shock, produced a considerable degree of self-centeredness.

This fact alone won’t shock too many readers, but maybe it would help to know that the experience of starting a brewery from scratch using a bank’s big wad of money, and doing it fast, without the long, steady period of evolution that guided my first 17 years “in business,” caused me to stop, look in the nearest available reflective device, and aim knitting needles straight for my eyes.

Holy shit: It’s a business, after all.

Now, I’ve never considered myself a capitalist, and apart from the Red Room at the Public House and all the other little symbols I cherish as helpful tools to make non-thinking, habitual folks uncomfortable, I’m not a socialist, either. What I am is someone who always, at some point, finds himself utterly alarmed at being the member of the majority in any endeavor, and is prone to fearsome bouts of doubt and questioning.

But that’s the way it should be. It’s just that for me, blind and unthinking allegiance to any system of thought and preference is to be questioned, and perhaps avoided entirely. To claim allegiance to a system should be to have the ability to chart the loyalty, explain it rationally and defend it with reason, not emotion. The Dionysian side of beer drinking is gratifying, indeed; in many respects, I’ve devoted my life to it, but I cannot merely be a hedonist even if it’s something I’ve loved so well. The embrace of beer or anything else as a doctrine must come with sense and sensibility, or else fail to pass the acid test.

Which is what? The best I can do is say it’s a sense of placemaking, reverting to the old notion that the best beer in the world is the one you’re drinking now, and the best spot to do it is where you’re seated. Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” Isn’t all beer drinking, too? Give me honest pints, good people, and a quality venue. What else is there?

Back to the business end: Perhaps I’m finally coming to understand that while I’ve always humored myself with the notion that craft beer in general, and NABC’s food and beer business in particular, both constitute a bold, innovative refutation of workaday American capitalism-as-usual, it really isn’t the case at all, especially since Bank Street Brewhouse came about and demanded the fluffing of bankers and bean counters in ways great and small.

Label me naïve (and I plain don’t care), but by extension, I’ve always looked upon the entirety of the craft beer revolution as something blissfully transcending the exploitative grubbiness of commerce – still do, in fact, although it gets more difficult with each passing day to comprehend why my chosen field of endeavor, craft/good/better beer, seems so intent on forgetting the tenets that brought it to this wonderful place in a mad scramble to become just like every other business before it.

After three decades spent explaining why and how what we do is different from the industrial brewers (and furthermore, is better), now we’re intent on mimicking them: Accumulating capital, then deploying the capital accumulation to control marketplaces in the time-honored sense. For me to awaken and see that in spite of all our grand words to the contrary, the ideology of the cancer cell (growth for the sake of growth) applies to us, too, is depressing.

What’s more, we seem determined to become entirely Orwellian about it, changing definitions (how many million barrels constitutes “craft” these days?) to calculate a market share, so as to expand to such a point of return-on-investment that we can insist on one hand that the freshest beer you’ll ever drink is made right here – and by the way, you can now buy our beer in a city 1,000 miles away … and if they continue to love it there, by golly, we’ll just start brewing it there, so it can be local, too, everywhere in the United States, albeit devoid of whatever imagery that ever made it local in the first place.

Yep, just like those “regional” Budweiser breweries scattered over half the planet, but of course, craft remains somehow different from what came before, except that if we know nothing about what came before, how do we judge?

Don’t worry: I’m guilty of it, too. NABC bought into capitalism just like all the rest, and that’s what makes it so damned galling.

Ruminations, Part 1.

It’s truly bizarre to contemplate that after almost 2,300 posts spread over seven years at this blog, I sometimes feel like absolutely nothing of merit has been passed along from me to you – and the failure is my problem, not yours.

Today is one of those days. What I’m feeling is not self-pity, although it might well be sheer exhaustion. My personal world at home is solid, and my professional world gets steadily better fiscally (for the most part; there certainly are exceptions). I can summon the edge when I need it. In spite of it all, uncertainty is gnawing at me. You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, because apparently I’ve gotten very functional at being dysfunctional.

Let’s put it this way: Self-censorship is beginning to chafe.

It has been written that the sole purpose in writing is to tell the truth, and yet if I’m to be perfectly truthful with myself, I haven’t always done that here. While I’ve succeeded in avoiding overt falsehood, the simple act of refraining from deception is not quite the same thing as being entirely honest. Omitting items from one’s narrative isn’t the same as telling lies, but the overall effect might be the same.

To cite just one example: Have I been served flawed craft beers?

Yes.

Have these been brewed locally?

Sometimes, although it has been a while since I experienced one. More often than not, they’ve some from other parts of the country (distance from the source being a determinant of desirability, according to one school of thought, though I digress).

Have I discussed these flaws aloud?

Seldom, perhaps never. Rather, I defer the venom by heaping it on Shock Top or some other ridiculously infantile mockrobrew, and call it even for the day.

In a way, that’s dishonesty, but it’s an accurate expression of staying loyal to the chosen cause amid creeping disillusionment. But the cause is fragmenting, and craft beer is becoming something unrecognizable. I’m trying to discover whether the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss, favorable or unfavorable to my world view.

Lately, I’ve confided to close friends that my overall sense of frustration with the world of good beer and my place in it, both personally and professionally, is escalating. It’s a sure sign of cognitive dissonance that more and more often, I find myself dreading those occasions when I must stand up in front of people and preach the gospel of craft beer. Why am I being bothered?

So, maybe it’s time to work through this, publicly. For me, there’s always been a balance between the “good times” side of better beer and the thoughtful embrace of better beer as a doctrine. For me, blind allegiance to any system of thought is to be avoided, and constant re-examination merited. Shouldn’t this rigor be applied to beer, too, and to my place (and my company’s place) in it?

After all, 30 years later, it’s my damned career. Isn’t it supposed to make sense? Isn’t it supposed to make me happy?

I’m not sure where any of this will lead. Maybe nowhere. But when it comes to me and beer, I’m coming to some juncture where the flanks are under attack, the center is giving ground, and the battlefield is enveloped in the fog of war. There’s too much complexity, too much confusion and too little control. I need to figure out why.