Fermentation Friday: Fire, boobs, and beer

Standing around a turkey fryer in the driveway after sundown really gives you a feeling for the mystical side of brewing beer. The stars twinkling in the crisp, cool spring air. An owl hoots in a nearby tree, the breeze picks up and chills you just a bit. It's such an ancient process, and creates such a historically important item that it almost feels holy somehow. Standing there next to the licking flames and hollow whoosh of the propane burner, you can almost picture hooded monks standing around wood-fired kettles. Scantily-clad pagans smeared with paint praying to some since forgotten deity that their brew yields fermented goodness. Ancient Greeks making some form of offering to Bacchus. Hell, the oldest written recipe on record was for making beer! Alcohol in one form or another has been vital and sacred to so many societies over the years... but no more.

Now it's frowned upon. Decried and denounced as the work of the devil, not holy men. Hatchet in one hand, bible in the other, alcohol has been inextricably linked with the evil some men do under its influence. Needless. Senseless. Wrong.

We've lost that holy connection. That mystical feeling that comes with practicing the arcane alchemy of producing alcohol. And on a crisp spring night, the season of pagan rites of rebirth and fertility, the absence of mysticism from the beer making process seems even more obvious. Empty.

Well, let's bring it back, damnit! Let's take booze back to being something magical. Get our your hooded robes and body paint, we're gonna make some fucking beer!

Hey, there's a thought! Fucking beer... yeah.... that could work! Some kind of pagan rite during the brewing process. Once the boil is going, everyone strips off their hooded robes to reveal nude bodies covered in crude body paintings. Then the ritual sex will begin. And by ritual, I mean free-for-all. It'll be epic! And in the middle, the brew in the turkey fryer will be bubbling away.

Maybe take a break for some kind of neo-pagan events like fire-breathing and... fire breathing. Maybe take care of some little brewing details like sparging. Then back to the orgy! There'll be penises and breasts flopping all over the place (note to self: get some girls to participate). Old school mysticism. The spectacle will be awesome to behold!

No, not like that...

That's what I'm talking about!

It'll be so wild, we'll have to be careful not to forget to take the starting specific gravity. Then we dump it in the primary, pitch the yeast, and put the airlock on, passing around the bottle of cheap vodka so everyone can take a swig before we pour it in the airlock. You know, for good luck. Then, if our randomly chosen divinities smile on us, the beer should be ready to drink by the time the summer solstice comes along, and another batch can be brewed in a similar ceremony while the old batch is consumed! It'll represent... something.

So that's my goal for brewing this spring: turn it into a pseudo-religious orgy festival with fire.


Or maybe I'll make a lager. That'd be cool.