Our Minds on New Experiences
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I felt a familiar tingle as I was perusing Lady Justice’s website for the new Diverse Breweries database. It was that electric charge of new discovery, the experience one feels when the world expands. Lady Justice, with beers like Big Gay IPA, I Dissent Dark Ale, and Sandra Day IPA is a brewery and a social mission. Owners Jen Cuesta, Betsy Lay and Kate Power met while serving in AmeriCorps and hatched the idea of a brewery because they “believe that great beer can, in fact, make the world a better place. Lady Justice Brewing is a community-focused brewery dedicating time, space, and money to nonprofits and community partners that support and empower women and girls in the state of Colorado.” Oh yes.
One’s world doesn’t just grow with new experiences—our minds literally change. The new experience causes a cascade of change in our thinking as everything we once knew must now be reevaluated, however modestly, in the light of this new perspective. Brewing for the social good? How can I unthink that now?
Compiling my database, I was reminded how people use breweries as vehicles for world-creation. Backward Flag, for example, is not just a female veteran-owned brewery, but a refuge for former military. (Finding this brewery led me to understand that the backward flag is worn on a soldier’s right shoulder as a reflection of a flag seen from the reverse, flying backward.) One of my favorite discoveries is Spaceway Brewing, inspired by afrofuturism. The website flies like a starship through space, and the labels are some of the most striking I’ve even seen. Beer has a long connection with music—like, thousands of years—and brewhouses are often filled with its booming rhythm. So how about Atlantucky, founded by four rappers? Theirs is a dual world where the beer supports the rhythm rather than the reverse. I’d very much like to spend a few hours drinking with these gentlemen.
Anyone reading this site knows the experience I’m talking about. My mind was seriously scrambled the first time I did a beer tour in Europe. And I mean that literally. The first brewery I toured in Belgium was Palm—makers of a fairly nondescript pale ale. Yet the old brewery is gorgeous, and I was surprised to see a strange bonus vessel I didn’t recognize in the brewhouse. What’s that? It turned out to be a cereal cooker for converting corn—super common in Belgian beer. Many of the fixtures of Belgian brewing were there, through to the warm room and ritual pour I received after the tour. In the space of a couple hours, my software was busily rewriting itself to accommodate this new information. I understood beer, beer culture, and Belgium in an entirely new light.
A similar process happens anytime we encounter a new person. Their personality, the way they think, also begins to change us, even more profoundly than merely visiting a place. Indeed, our minds become interlaced with the minds of other people. We talk and exchange ideas, and a process of co-creation occurs so that parts of our minds now share the thoughts of the other. Our relationships are built on these shared experiences. Even after long separation, we can snap back into place with other people because our minds are entangled. We need merely to find that part of our mind we share with the other person and we’re off and running.
It’s not just new experience we crave. Visiting an old friend in a familiar place can be equally satisfying. Like sliding onto a familiar barstool, we find comfort in our familiar patterns. The rewiring happens at a physical level, as our brains store the memories. The more often we revisit a place, the stronger the memories become. In a place like a brewery, suffused with sounds, sights, senses, and of course tastes, that memory becomes three-dimensional.
Combine the two—visiting a new place and meeting someone for conversation—and our moods soar. We were built for moments like that. Covid delivered an unseen blow when it forced us into little bubbles of stasis where we could no longer experience these things, where we could not longer mix our minds together. Exploring these wonderful new breweries and the worlds they’ve created, even through the flat world of a computer screen, sent my mind crackling.
We’re going to get out of our bubbles eventually. A third of the population (in the US, anyway) is fully vaccinated, and we’re creeping toward half who’ve received one dose. By summer, anyone who wants to be vaccinated will be, and that combined with the warm weather should allow us to travel again and gather together. Breweries have been open for months, but now we’ll be able to visit and even tour them. This is going to radically change our experience of the world.
Epidemiologists define “normal” as the moment we can drop all restrictions. It’s a reasonable definition. But for most of us, normal means a return to immersive experience, new and old, where our minds expand and evolve, where we can co-create consciousness with one another. I think we’re getting close.
In the meantime, do explore the Diverse Breweries database. Click through to the websites. It isn’t the same as being there, but I’ll bet you feel that same crackle of life I did. Even better: you can start drawing up your travel plans now.