AFFORDABILITY: A benefit of getting into homebrewing (this is a beer me and my wife made) is, if you relegate yourself to more expensive beers, you can make it yourself and get high quality, heavy alcohol content beers for under $2 per 22-24 ounce bottle. That’s a nice price. Plus, you can make whatever the fuck you want to make (I recommend the Beertools website’s huge list of recipes). Brain-buzzing beers for Budweiser double deuce prices, and all with the joy of doing it yourself, standing around the hot kitchen with your hot wife on a Saturday night, playing Parcheesi while your wort boils up, it’s family wholesomeness that involves beer. Plus the whole heritage of them old timey cats who used to make their own before there were stores with beer coolers to even pick from. It makes me feel like I’m moving in the right direction with my life, even if it is moving backwards. Fuck it though, we need more backwards ass people in this crooked world. 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Homemade beer is the super destroyer. You can stop in the dark hallway where the bucket is percolating in the closet and stand there and wait and then that lovely BLOOP BLOOP BLOOP from the fermentation trap peps your step off to bed where you have wonderful dreams of vikings and celebrations around cities on fire where the world is full of buxom women like Russ Meyer was god and nobody shaves their devilish parts and in this world Black Sabbath did an album of Marvin Gaye and Al Green tunes and it is a wondrous thing that fills the nighttime sky to aurally complement the billions of stars. Homebrew changes too, because you bottle it up and it ferments in the bottle, and usually we bust that open after 2 weeks in the bottle, but there is added sugar to ferment and sometimes what you drink after 2 weeks is potent but not as buckwild as it is after four weeks. This Beltane Brown was a thick one, with a nice sludge at the bottom of every bottle, and it had kick. The bottle I drank the other night as I conjure manned up this reviewable report on my own home swill was our last bottle of the Beltane, and our other beer we had one bottle of - the Spring Chicken Ale - my wife drank up the last of that. We have got to hit up the homebrew supply store and get some more batches bubbling up in the hallway again, making the light pixies dance in the cobwebs. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Me and my wife sit around, bullshitting while bottling a batch of beer, and come up with a mutually agreeable name, Then I go inside my Tron machine and pick out a hype font, size it up just right, add any details necessary, including date bottled, and print it up straight black inkjet on white sticker paper. This gets cut with scissors and slapped on the bottle. But I also have a giant box full of vinyl scraps from a job I used to have where we did vehicle graphics and shit like that. We pick an appropriate color of vinyl as well, cut it into little shapes of some sort, nothing fancy, always block and basic. The Beltane Brown had a dark red vinyl in a long rectangular shape. I, since I am the one into weird little alien mathematical tributes in our househould, pick where we place the vinyl, always overlapping the paper label just slightly and then going out onto the bottle. The Beltane Brown red vinyl rectangle went parallel the label like an underline. The font was some medieval woodcut looking type shit. The great thing about our homebrew labelling method is when one of our bottles has been used for three or four batches. The labels peel off a bit from condensation or washing, but the vinyl is solid, and it sticks out in different directions, and we always put the new label over top where the old one was, to keep any confusion from arising as to what we might be about to be drinking. That creates a layered effect where the bottle has these vinyl indications of a sedimentary history. It is simple attention to details like this, that no one would ever suspect the entire mad science method behind it, that make me feel confident I am on a righteous path in life, and one day my madness will be rewarded with success. Or perhaps it has already been rewarded and I just have a perverted definition of what success means. 10 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: No corporation shall ever be my master. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, I worked at Kinko’s for like six months, for the bennies as people have said within my earshot the past six months, a far cry from what William S. Burroughs meant when he said “bennies”. Kinko’s sucked, second shift, on weekends, sometimes one of only two people working and the other person sucked, though she could catch an apple with her mouth if you threw it in the air, which always impressed me. I would clean up at the end of the night, stupid thrift store tie and stupid thrift store white button-down pretend dress shirt, it’d be night time behind a strip mall structure in southside Richmond, Virginia, USA, Earth, and the dumpster from behind Chichis or Chilis or whatever indiscriminate piece of shit chain restaurant was next door would stink of my slow death, and I’d stand back there, wishing I smoked so I’d have an excuse to stand still for four minutes, and I’d look up at the pink haze of light pollution blocking out my astrological guidance counselor’s advice, and sometimes I’d think, “What the fuck am I doing?” and wish some snipered out societal malcontent was on a nearby rooftop and would snipe me off this twisted mortal coil. I got another job though, quit Kinko’s, and never worked a shitty corporate type job again, retail office management or wage slave. I even used the old jailhouse sewing needle white thread india ink method to tattoo an ahnk on my left forefinger prominently to sabotage myself should I ever get dull-minded and want to walk that path again. I doubt it would really sabotage anything, but it was a nice personal ceremony of destiny for me, although calling it a “ceremony” makes it seem like I put a lot more thought into it than I really did. Actually I just sat down one night and did it, and honestly, I think I already had it when I worked at Kinko’s. 7 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Life is good. My ambiance, my aura, my soul glow, my heart flutter, my mojo, my offspringing, my get down, my whole world - it is laid back and it is wide open. (I was on a kick where I made iron-on messages on blank t-shirts for a while, and I have a brown t-shirt with glittery gold iron-on letters that say on the front “LAID BACK” and on the back “WIDE OPEN” and the shirt has visible white stitching to make it seem athletic that runs right above the iron-ons and I am wearing it tonight with overalls, so I am feeling my oats, and thankful I live in the middle of nowhere, for the obvious external clutter reasons, but also because I am limited by environment to simply feeling my oats instead of sowing them as well.) This home beer reflects all that. Actually, it’s not even a reflection so much as just another damn piece of it. 9 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 7 & 1/5 STARS!
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