I don’t like phony holidays: Arbor Day, Bosses’ Day, Secretaries’ Day, Take Your Child to Work Day, Brothers’ and Sisters’ Day, Friendship Day, Hug a Tree and Punch a Lumberjack Day.
Back in college, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I even agreed never to celebrate Sweetest Day because its contrived nature bothered us.
But there's one phony holiday I like.
National Homebrew Day.
Establish in 1979 by the American Homebrewers Association and recognized by Congress in 1988, National Homebrew Day falls on the first Saturday of May.
I like it, and I plan on joining America's 250,000 homebrewers in celebration this coming Saturday.
I say that with no partisanship, by the way. I am not a homebrewer. Granted, I am often a recipient of homebrewers' (and home winemakers') generosity and experimentation, which is good, but I've never made a batch and don't plan on trying.
So why do I like homebrewing?
Lots of reasons.
For one, homebrewing slings a stone at Goliath. If people can make their own beer, they don't need to patronize the Millers and Anheusers and their mass-marketing campaigns that tend to celebrate everything that shouldn't be celebrated about drinking: drunkenness, wild living, a loosening of sexual inhibitions.
I also like its low barrier to entry. According to a homebrewing friend of mine, anyone with a clean 6-gallon plastic pail can brew beer.
I also like homebrewing because such crafts ought to be admired as little arts. The term “little art” was coined by Richard Weaver to describe conversation, manners, and hospitality, but I think it fits crafts, too. Art in general requires the practitioner to focus concern on something outside himself. The artist must concentrate on his painting, the writer on his prose. In this, art is a “selfless” pursuit because it deflects a person's attention away from himself.
Crafts like homebrewing do a similar thing. The brewer must concentrate his attention on hops, water, mixing, timing, and other things. It's quite the process and in carrying out the process, the brewer becomes an artist. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist.”
Chesterton's observation is particularly apt because homebrewing and gardening are both crafts that involve the production of foodstuffs. It's probably no coincidence that they've both been honored by generations of monks. Monks viewed gardening as an inherently ennobling task that brings a person into contact with creation. I suspect they viewed brewing much the same way. Like gardening, brewing requires one to work with creation in order to bring forth a good product.
Homebrewing also celebrates good aspects of individualism. Yes, Americans take individualism too far, but in its essence — the desire to be true to oneself and God in one's unique calling — it's a good thing, and homebrewing is a good expression of it. It allows a person to pursue a craft, to enjoy the results, and to adjust future efforts in order to avoid mistakes and to enhance the product. In this, it's a microcosmic analogy to the pursuit of the virtuous life.
Perhaps most importantly, I like homebrewing because of its product: beer.
If the pursuit of “little arts” is an exercise in detachment, beer in moderate amounts is its perfect complement.
When a person drinks, the reality of the goodness of creation shines. I can only attest to this from personal experience and from observing others, but it seems to me that, as a person drinks, he lets go of self-obsessiveness and its accompanying worries, with the result that he doesn't refract God's creation through the distorting prism of self-regard. He is then able to see reality as it really is, as a thing that is good because it was created by a good God.
I honestly believe that's why drinkers smile so much when under the influence of a few beers. It's the effect of selflessness shining through.
I gotta believe it's even better when that selflessness was further cultivated while actually brewing the drink that induces it.
God bless the homebrewers on their phony holiday.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Wednesday Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
