A Drinking Life: Invisible Gods

Under the rare sun of mid-fall, we entered Bury St Edmunds the way one does in England: hot. English villages possess no outskirts. One minute we were passing through fields of sugar beet, and the next wheeling, too fast, past the Greene King Brewery. My old friend Patrick Emerson—a subject of the Queen, though American by birth—had agreed to join me and serve as wheel man, and we were running a little late that day. I don’t recall how we managed to park or locate Head Brewer John Bexon, but apparently we did, because my next memory is John guiding us through the vast Georgian brewery, which dates to the last year of the 18th century.

Bexon, the third old gentleman brewer we’d met in a week, was at that point in his 34th year in the profession. At first he was distant and awkward with us. In 2011, traditional British cask ale breweries were at one of their many recent low points, at that time trapped between mass market lagers and the surge of craft beer. Greene King was to many the symbol of cask ale’s decline, too; its beers were not much loved, and the company kept buying more interesting regional breweries to shore up sinking sales.

But we were way into it. Greene King still makes an aged old ale that casts back to the 19th century. Even then it was the last British old ale still made in oaken vats, with wild yeast and bacteria curing it over years on wood. Old Suffolk was the beer that put Greene King on our itinerary, but we were pretty big fans of the brewery’s strangely underpowered 3.4% IPA, along with cask Speckled Hen—one of those products they’d acquired in the purchase of Morland Brewery (f. 1711). I was and remain a cask fanatic, and fresh, Greene King is spectacular.

Before long, Bexon realized these two Americans were ready to fall in love with the old brewery and he started perking up. A salty, working-class man with a knack for storytelling, he happily larded his many answers to our questions with asides and opinions.

Head Brewer
The world does not share consistent language about what to call brewers. In the UK, the modest title “head brewer” designates the person who oversees brewing. In a larger brewery like Greene King, it inevitably means the person in formalish attire (suit and tie if it’s a man) with an office. They are trained working brewers, often with an advanced degree from Hariot-Watt, but have ascended to the place where they no longer actually brew. I’ve met some of the great old gentlemen Head Brewers in my day, most now retired (the old ones were all men): Bexon, John Keeling, Miles Jenner, Derek Prentice, Steve Barrett, George Howell, Paul Wood. Meeting the old ones before they retired has been one of my greatest honors and pleasures of my writing life.

I was shocked to find a photo of this moment. Apologies for the quality.

By the time we’d gotten through all five stories of the old building, it was well after dark. Bexon was now actively playing to his audience of two, digging deeper and deeper into lost or ignored corners of the brewery. Down we went, ending up in the old brick-lined cellars underneath the main brewery building. Refrigeration had made them obsolete eons earlier, but we poked around their musty reaches anyway. At one point we discovered crates filled with decades-old beers. Elsewhere, a rickety wooden rack contained corked bottles of special ale prepared for the inauguration of King Edward VIII—never released because he abdicated the throne to marry an American. They had been in repose for 75 years.

Later still we were standing in a long passageway flanked by a bundle of pipes. It was not picturesque nor romantic, but rather wholly industrial and utilitarian. It was a corner of the brewery people never visited unless a disaster brought them. “These pipes carry the beer to packaging,” John told us. “We are standing under Crown Street.” He paused after divulging that information; and we all fell quiet to see if we might hear the rumble and clatter of a truck overhead.

“Very few people have ever been down here,” John said eventually, breaking the silence.

That moment under Crown Street, believe it or not—and I didn’t, at the time—was writing. When I signed a contract for The Beer Bible in 2011, I’d been writing semi-professionally for about fifteen years. Except for an unpublished novel, all my experience was in shorter-form articles. I had no real idea how to write a book, never mind one that was supposed to address every aspect of beer over the course of a quarter-million words.

Perhaps more importantly, I wasn’t remotely qualified to write the book. I stumbled across the opportunity as an accident of timing, pitching a (bad) book idea at the moment Workman Publishing was considering a line extension on their runaway hit, The Wine Bible. Over the course of a year, editors considered their options, including the most accomplished and experienced American beer journalists working. They hired me because my voice, which editor Kylie Foxx McDonald discovered on my beer blog, was closest to Wine Bible author Karen MacNeil’s. (I owe most of my success in writing to women; Willamette Week editor Audrey Van Buskirk gave me the keys to their vacant beer column at a time my only published works were a handful of poems.) Perhaps she shouldn’t have hired me—I wouldn’t have hired me—but the decision changed my life and sent it hurtling down an unexpected new path.

Mapping out the book was easy enough, but it exposed how many domains in beer I knew nothing about. That 2011 research trip, which extended more than three weeks and took me through England, Scotland, France, and Belgium, was my first opportunity to begin filling my vast holes of ignorance with real knowledge. I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize I didn’t know something until a brewer started talking—most of it inevitably brand-new to me. So, as long as a brewer was willing to keep plunging deeper into a brewery and keep talking, I was going to burrow into the experience like a tick.

Slowly, slowly, I was learning about beer. When I returned to my computer, what I saw and learned on that trip constituted all I had to work with, the potential scope of what I understood about that brewery, the British tradition, ingredients, philosophy, drinking culture; if I didn’t personally see those things, they couldn’t inform my book. Writers are incredible hoarders, but what we store are memories, not objects.

Eventually, we take all those fragments and sift, choosing and discarding. Bexon’s brief rant about beet sugar’s chemical deficits in making cask ale? In. His discussion of the pros and cons of using Victorian equipment in the manufacture of 21st-century ale? In. Our trip to the steel veins pulsing with beer underneath the brewery? Out.

What we actually call writing comes later, when the writer processes everything they’ve seen and decides what it means. They do something tricksy and controversial then, taking what they’ve seen and piecing it back together to convey that meaning. Good writing isn’t stenography. We don’t go into a brewery (or whatever the subject is) trying to hold mirrors up to what we’ve seen to reflect back to the readers.

Rather, we think about what makes that subject significant, why it’s different than others of its kind and what it can tell us about something larger or deeper. We harness the tricks of our trade in this process—theme, metaphor, evocation, emotion—attempting to make our (secret) case as compelling as possible. Every article or book is a reconstruction, a facsimile of reality designed to convey a very particular narrative. The stories we write become little worlds, ones that look organic the more artificial and carefully composed they are. We are little invisible gods, composing worlds and presenting them from the shadows beyond the page.

When people talk about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, they usually don’t realize how artificial the latter is—nor that both actually deal in truths. Had Kylie hired someone else to write The Beer Bible, it would have been different in every way from the one I wrote. No one sees anything wrong with this—of course they’d be different—and yet it exposes the construct of writing for what it is. Of course, good writing, in pursuing meaning rather than mere fact, has the capacity to get at truths that are usually overlooked or completely hidden.

Where is all this leading? Back to beer. I’ve spent half a life writing about beer, a decade and a half doing it for a living, and yet I’ve rarely even considered what it means to me, personally. I’ve always mined meaning from those breweries and countries I’ve visited, placing my spotlight outward. Looking back, I realize I have a lot of those Crown Street experiences rattling around my brain. More than that, over those long years—and well before, extending back into late adolescence—I see the ways in which beer has threaded through my life experience. It was there, as a rebellion, in high school. In college it was a celebration. In early adulthood, homesick in Wisconsin, it was a lifeline back to lupulin-green Oregon. Throughout my life it has rarely been center frame, but as my life morphed from wannabe professor to social work researcher to political writer, from single cab driver to married homeowner, from barfly to boring old man, it was never out of frame either. That is true of very little else in my life.

Some months ago I started to feel an itch to look inward—or to return to the metaphor, into those shadows. Partly I’d like to have an excuse to write about beer the way I experience it. Perhaps more potently, I’d like to interrogate my life the way I do breweries, trying to figure out where its meaning lies. Beer has been this strange touchstone in my life, but it’s also been a chameleon, forever changing with the circumstances of my life. Now that it has somehow become my life, it seems a worthy subject to investigate. So consider this the first in what will be a slow, intermittent series of personal posts about beer and life. I’ve mapped it out, like I would a proper book, and now I need to go do the research and begin piecing it back together. I’m looking forward to seeing what it becomes.