Beer Friday: Where I am now the Zizek of Zymurgy
There’s a lot embedded in this little one off rambling by Alan McLeod–a lot of stuff to chew on. And I keep going back to it over and over again. He wonders as prelude to the rambling he quotes from a comment left at another blog, whether there’s anything to what he has to say. And I think there is. Too much really.
What is the quality and nature of the craft brew movement, how is success defined, is there a pop cultural achievement separable from “achievement” in a broader sense? All fine questions. I think the one Iam most enamored of though is the the one near the end where he sort of mumbles into his glass whether any achievement at all is possible or is there just a constant moving of the goal posts, redefining the movement exogenously and end0genously of its ever-shifting cultural and historical context.
There’s something Foulcautian in there and once that happens future beer blogging will be full of questions like do beers (re)present their own styles? To what extent does a beer present not just its own style but act as criticisms of all beers preceding? To what extent is each beer a failure of itself, de-tasted before it’s ever tasted? Is it possible that each beer carries in it a nightmarish disassembling of its constituent parts, rendering all subsequent beer tasting meaningless? Is this the endgame of our always-misguided search for objective mouthfuls of truth where there were only ever effervescent dreams now corrupted by too much th(dr)inking?
Am I destined to be the beer world’s Samuel Beckett?
