When War Comes
Nothing changes life as fast or catastrophically as war. We have just endured two years of a global pandemic that has killed five million, destroyed thousands of businesses, and disrupted every life. Yet when we saw images of the Russian military roll into Ukraine last week, we were reminded that suffering can get a whole order of magnitude worse. A lifetime’s work can be wiped out in the space of an explosion—or a family, or a future.
As one small example, we learned Saturday that the Lviv-based craft brewery Pravda had shifted from making beer to molotov cocktails. (In a coincidence, the brewery has a Portland connection—native Portlander and former Old Town brewer Cory McGuinness was the head brewer there from 2015-’18.) This isn’t a PR stunt. Lviv apparently isn’t under the same sustained attack Kyiv is—yet—but Russians have shelled its suburbs. How disquieting would it be to be making makeshift weapons to defend your city? Elsewhere, Carlsberg operates three breweries in Ukraine, and closed the easternmost two because it’s too dangerous to be working. The war is only a few days old, and residents are preparing for the unthinkable. To think that one day you could be busily making an IPA and the next planning to fight foreign soldiers in the street to protect your brewery—this is something most of us can’t even imagine. War transmutes everything, even the routine act of brewing beer.
Yesterday, Lars Marius Garshol offered another, chilling example from Estonia, a different country neighboring Russia that contended with its own invasion in 1940. He described an amazing project to capture the daily lives of Estonians (including a booming practice of farmhouse brewing)—one that ended abruptly in June of that year. By the time Estonians were able to take up the project at half-century later, farmhouse brewing was almost extinct. This is what war does. Culture is slower to crumble than a building, but no less vulnerable to war’s destructive logic.
Many examples of war’s brutality remain etched on the European landscape. I remember driving through the upper part of the Hauts-de-France near Lille a decade ago. One passes among ghosts. The land is stippled with strangely conical green hills that are actually old slag heaps from the coal pits mined for decades in the region. Down at ground level is the unsettling sight of vast green graveyards from the dead in WWI. They’re everywhere, too many to count, too vast to comprehend. Until the war, Lille was a major brewing center. German soldiers sacked breweries and took their copper to make shells.
This is one of those familiar stories, its significance sanitized by time. Of course hundreds of breweries in the region shut down or merged, and of course the characterful ales made there—before WWI they were much the same as the funky ales across the border in Belgium—vanished entirely. But this fact is too painful to sanitize: one of the reasons the industry took two generations to get back on its feet was because those few surviving small breweries had fewer people to drink their beer. Twenty-five percent of the local population had been lost in the war, most of them ale-drinking young men.
For older breweries in the UK, France, and Belgium, the World Wars have an almost tangible presence, and brewers routinely mention them in passing. In Germany the wars are a shameful memory, and the presence—and wound—lives in absence. Only once have I heard anyone mention them. While touring Reissdorf in Cologne, someone (media contact Jens Stecken?, brewer Frank Hasenkrug?) was recounting the history of kölsch and wandered into a historical blind alley, talking about how many breweries had been destroyed in the forties. Realizing what he was invoking, his voice just trailed off. The allies leveled over 60% of the buildings in brutal bombings, killing tens of thousands and leaving the city in rubble, yet the most powerful trauma many decades later is not the destruction Kölners experienced, but that which they wrought. As we hear stories of confused, young Russian soldiers asked to do real harm to their neighbors, that future trauma is as plain as day. War has profound costs for those who initiate it, too.
The molotov cocktails were appropriately filled in these bottles.
It’s impossible to say what, if any, lasting effects Russia’s attack on Ukraine may leave. Perhaps Russia will soon call off the invasion, in which case we could expect minimal changes, minimal trauma, and possible healing. Compared to other countries facing war, Ukraine’s beer situation is also less distinctive and built almost entirely around mass market lagers. Craft brewing is just a decade old, and any lingering farmhouse tradition is so subterranean even Lars Marius Garshol hasn’t located it yet. The writer and translator Lana Svitankova recorded a podcast over the weekend and she discusses Ukrainian beer, if you’re curious.
Agriculturally, it’s a different story. Ukraine is actually a pretty decent grower of hops—12th in the world in total production. The country also grows native-bred varieties, including Zagrava, Slavianka, and Natsionalnyi. (If I were a brewer and could source any of these, I’d be making a Ukrainian pilsner tomorrow!) An even bigger deal is barley. Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe, and grows a lot of wheat and barley. It’s a little difficult to assess the impact on beer because unlike hops, barley has other uses. Yet according to one source, Ukraine exported 4.3 million tons of barley in 2020, surely some of it bound for malthouses.
The biggest and most immediate effect is of course on the people trying to fend off this attack. The world has been watching in wonder at the spirit of Ukrainians as they fight back, from the president down to regular citizens arming themselves with those fire-filled beer bottles. When I sent Lana my wishes, she responded with the tenacity we’ve come to see from Ukraine in recent days, so I’ll leave you with her words. They are hopeful and courageous. The Russians and Ukrainians sat down to discuss the war today—I pray it leads to a quick end to this war. In the meantime, let this be a balm to your spirit:
“Since I represent Ukraine this is not only about me, but about all of us. When we are angry we act, not talk. So if Putin is a bear, we are a swarm of angry, deadly bees and he won’t get any honey here.”