It’s such a privilege to have a second childhood and still be in possession of some of one’s faculties. Brewing in Asheville is just like being a kid in a neighborhood where everybody’s got kids – some of them have lots of new toys, some of them have little, cool toys, and all of them like to play. The main thing is there’s lots of kids in town, with more moving in all the time, and the pickup game that is Asheville beer is getting bigger and bigger.

No grownups or scoreboards allowed.

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“It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this,” Kreider goes on, brilliantly, “any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.”

To pick one nit, it does seem sometimes to happen all by itself–independent of a person’s anxious desire to be occupied. Day follows day follows day, a box of To-Do appears behind this door, which, son of a gun, was that even there yesterday? And what about this list in my hand? Who put that there? Hold on, wait, I have to answer this…  You rise sore into the day that keeps you on your feet and going until you collapse into the night’s sleep equivalent of a Megadeath concert however many hours later, then rise sore into the day… And you (you, who like sitting) didn’t ask for it. The days were longer, before…idler, more free…less productive.

Well, boxes of To-Do have indeed been proliferating around our rickety old barn by the stream, lately. There’s a crate with a canning line in it, a newly leased space, a just-installed mother of a brite tank that, freshly packed with IPA, sprung an alarming leak, a swirl of roster changes around which we’re all learning to dance (with new partners and the tune unknown)…this on top of the gradual incorporation of the grain augur that’s redeeming the elbows’ and backs’ of our brewers from their many batches of toil (though not without its hiccoughs) and the systemic alterations made front of house that necessitated last month a three day furlough for the Tasting Room. Commerce, we disorganize and rebuild ourselves around you.

Also: listened day before yesterday to an excerpt from a keynote address given by the late David Foster Wallace to a class of college graduates. I forget what college, but I feel enormously envious and protective of their experience, ’cause this excerpt flat knocked me down. Click the link, please! I will not demean those nine plus minutes with summary, but will say that they involve consciously practiced thought. They involve the lame truth that our default mental state is woefully small and self-interested. It speaks to the intelligent person’s capacity, however, to substitute for this automatic childishness a wider, more adult awareness: the world does not exist for me; the people in the world do not exist for me; neither my comfort nor my convenience are the point of the human day. This is good!

So let this be a quality of the busy season: that we occasionally sublimate ourselves to the great, shifting abundance of folks and needs and places that clutter the day and the unseeable vectors of cause and effect that put us where we are, next to who we’re next to, doing things. Let our engines churn but our minds find time to idle.

I’ll take mine with a pint, if you please. And how are you, after all?

-D.W.

They say that older people are happier than younger, which seems counter-intuitive for a moment and then makes perfect sense. Illusions are heavy baggage, and the strain of fitting the world in them is a crippler. The denial or suffering required to deal with the damage done to them by brute reality exacts psychic pounds. But who is illusionless expects little and so’s happy with what comes. Expecting nothing is only jaded if you’re bitter about it; if you’re cool with it, well, it’s like what the brilliant and peculiar Darryl Zero says in the brilliant and peculiar film Zero Effect (1998) about looking for things: “When you look for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad, because of all the things in the world, you only want one of them. When you look for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good, because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.”

Sometimes, though, an illusion is so appealing that it’s impossible to flush it all the way down the toilet. You start flushing it, then reach in and save it and say, hang on, I can do something with this. Take the idea of meritocracies, for instance. We grow up thinking that if we work harder than the next guy it will translate into success. We grow up in thrall to the idea that every generation does a little better than the last owing to equality of opportunity and hard work. The cream rises to the top, the early bird gets the worm, blah blah blah. Some of us see through this illusion earlier than others. Some cleave to it out of necessity. (I heard a one-percenter interviewed on Planet Money or something who said that a person with a cell phone isn’t poor. “If you have a cell phone, you aren’t poor,” he said, chuckling.) The truth is that equality of opportunity is a myth so long as schools are unequally funded. A smart kid from a poor neighborhood can reach the same finish line at the same time as a middling kid from a rich neighborhood, maybe, but she’s got to run faster and harder and the wind’s against her and someone’s shooting at her and there’s all this crap in her way.

It’s childish to think that society at large will furnish conditions in which merit blindly determines success, but it’s grown-up to look to your own. It isn’t an illusion if your own actions bring it forth.

There is much that we at the French Broad Brewery do not have. We are not shiny. We are not controlled by millionaires. We are limited. We are the old horse, the small claim, the bowling shoes, the gift wrapped in newspaper, the battered car with a busted odometer, the sweaty collar, the strong back and its ache at day’s end.

But we’re running hard. And our beer? Our beer is pretty damn good, y’all. Come on over and get you some this weekend. We’re here every day.

This van has a hole in it and I’m not even kidding.

-D.W.

Puxatawney Phil gets his annual fifteen minutes every Candlemas. Later on we “spring” forward. Some people (I just learned this) mark the start of Spring from the day after President’s Day. Pitchers and catchers report in February for Spring Training.

When the calendar and astronomical reckoning declares Spring, it’s one of those things where you’re like, O.K., but where’s the beef? My feet are cold. This wind cuts. Sure I bought oil for the lawnmower and cherry trees are budding, but let’s not kid ourselves: half of Asheville grilled out in the first week of January, too, and nobody planned then to be lawnchair sunning the next day. Winter isn’t finished–it’s doing the same “Not…Dead…Yet!” routine we see every March into April. Like the German fancypants dancer out for vengeance against Bruce Willis’s John McClain in the first Die Hard.

Saturday’s supposed to bring snow, and them who plant before Mother’s Day will know better next year.

But it is a joy kept in a shelf all its own to see the days get longer, and few things in life can compete with the happiness of the year’s first shorts-outside.

At 7:02 A.M. this morning Spring officially kicked off in the Northern Hemisphere. What for us is the Vernal Equinox is the Autumnal Equinox on the other side of the equator. In Iran and other countries with large Persian populations the new year is being celebrated. Here at the Brewery and in every other working Brewery on the globe we’re celebrating (wittingly or un) the ancient Mesopotamian festival of Akitu, or, the cutting of the barley. Someday, soon and finally, winter’s last chilly gasp will thaw and recede into the deep earth, beneath the booming flowers and unruly lawns, and we will yawn into the warmth, beers in hand, beers sweating on hands, game on the radio and neighborhoods buzzing with lawnmowers, kids splashing in pools, kids sprinting through long, long days, winter a memory impossible to feel. We will wake up in the dark and turn on air conditioners. We will sleep under only sheets.

It’s going to be great.

-D.W.

In all seriousness, this is the first time in the life of brewer Peter Batinski that one of his recipes has been tapped at a public drinking establishment. He seems duly impressed by the moment and I am too–and so should you be, Beer City residents, who’ve watched with satisfaction the critical massing of Asheville-style craft beer. It is doubly neat that this first coincides with the other first for us: the nitrogen effect. I had a drink yesterday thinking to myself, big whoop, and then I was like, What? The word tapioca comes to mind. Caviar. Wayne Newton singing “Tiny Bubbles”. Also this is a big, strapping, John Wayne in The Quiet Man kind of beer, with an ABV sitting at 9.5% and chocolate notes that might physically make you weep. And it’s black as ink and cold as sin. And there’s only about five gallons of it, y’all, so make haste.

Cask IPA with Columbus dry hops, too! Holy crap, so much beer! All you have to do is buy it!

Now here’s a picture of Dave Desmelik, who plays TONIGHT!

D.W.

The Magic City Brewfest falls on the same day as Asheville’s own Beer City Festival, Saturday 1 June. We’ll be there and here, handing out top-shelf beverages to beer lovers, selling t-shirts, koozies and such for gas money, discovering homecooking and road food in a gastronomic synchronicity that spans 350 statute miles, a veritable Van Allen Belt of beer, a constellation of carbonation, a subcontinent of suds.

Be there. Or here. Say hello!

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There’s a downside, though. The folks who started this company have kids. Kids graduating from college, kids getting married, for Pete’s sake. And, the folks who started this company have canes, prescriptions, eyeglasses, and engraved invitations to any number of undignified medical fishing expeditions that offer more in the way of embarrassment than revelation. Growing old, as they say, is not for sissies.

So, anyways, we went round the houses with our carefully-crafted product, our history of paying bills and carefully husbanding cash (some call us cheap, but we think of ourselves as careful husbands), and we got some good people to trust us with a pile of cash. This windfall-cum-amortization-and-APR has presented us with the opportunity to get some chemical peels, some hair implants, hip replacements, Saville Row suits that make a happy imposture of our aging posture, &c. A cashflow fountain of youth, as it were, should we choose to spend it on our all-too-compromised selves.

But then we looked at our dear brewery. The floor drains have seen better days, and believe us, beer likes to be in shiny and new coolers, kegs and other such packages. So, we’re spending the money on her. She’s getting snazzy automated grain handling, a beautiful new cooler, and, in a few weeks, we’re going to shut the tasting room for a few days and do some pretty serious bust enhancement up in here. The beer will be the same, only better, and there’ll be more of it, and the sound of a running brewery, which is the most beautiful sound there is, will be more precisely tuned, more humming and less clattering if you know what I mean.

Take our advice: If you love it, see just how you can love it more than you love it.

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I’ve been reading T.H. White’s The Book of Merlyn. How it starts is, Merlyn confronts the expiring octo- or nonagenarian King Arthur and convinces him to become childlike again for a pair of transformative courses in being. The King has no desire to alter his form (he has earned his age; it would be undignified) but permits the wizard to enliven his brains, to give his mind the elasticity and nimbleness of youth. Merlyn krausens Arthur’s brain, see: all at once he bubbles and fizzes and dashes into wonderment.

So the guys took a pint of French Broad IPA fermenting at a high roll (how you felt in your 20s) and added it to a cask of ret-to-brite IPA (how you feel now). Describing the difference between this and the dextrose method, Alex Chambers said “that yeast feels good” and pistoned his arms like you do when at a brisk jog. “That yeast got laid last night,” added Brewer Peter Batinksi, “It’s ready to go.” “Happy yeast,” Chambers concluded.

The effect, I am glad to report, is a remarkably clean cask-conditioned ale. This IPA is indeed vigorous. Its happiness is light on the grateful palate. Do come in and try some!

From left: Batinski and Chambers.

-D.W.

When asked, “Would you let your daughter marry an Oompaloompa?” 1 out of 1 French Broad employees answered, “Sure.”

When asked, “Would you let her marry one of those winged monkey creatures from ‘The Wizard of Oz’?” 1 out of 1 French Broad employees said, “It’s her decision.”

When asked, “Would you let your son marry a guy?”‘ fully 100% of the staff replied yes without hesitation. (Interestingly, when the question became, “Would you let your son marry a guy with slight hearing loss?”, there was total reversal.)

Her decision, Shannon? Really?

To the question, “Have you guys seen ‘Ben Hur’?” 2 out of 2 employees eventually answered yes. (Clarification was called for: one employee said, “Was Charlton Heston in that?”) Both respondents concurred that it’d “been so long” since they’d seen it, and both evinced surprise when informed that a man had died during the chariot racing scene.)

That’s him, all right, Alex.

Finally, in response to a question put in the field in an unscientific, seat-of-the-pants manner just prior to publication, Rainbow Road was universally declared the most reviled and difficult track in MarioKart.

No caption needed here, I think.

As usual, this poll has a margin of error of +/- 0%. And as usual, please feel free to suggest questions in the comments section for the next poll.

Thanks everybody. And go team!

-D.W.