Brewing up a revolution

The word “drafts” in the title for this blog refers not only to the various versions or revisions of a text, but to a writer / thinker’s favorite pass time: drinking.  The connection between writing and drinking has been well-documented.  Many writers have been as famous for their drinking habits as for what they’ve written (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway come immediately to mind — and Kerouac of course who managed to kill himself off at the ripe old age of 47 from the complications of over-indulging).

Another enthusiastic drinker was none other than Karl Marx.

As it happened, Marx was no stranger to alehouses either. He was a co-president of the Trier Tavern Club, a society of about thirty university students from his home town whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible: it was after one of their revels that young Karl found himself detained for twenty-four hours, though the imprisonment did not prevent his chums from bringing him yet more booze and packs of playing cards to ease his sentence.

This is from the first chapter of Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life.

Last Saturday, our brewery hosted its Sixth Annual Long Island Nano(brewery) Cask Festival.  It’s a small craft beer festival that feels more like a gathering of friends.  Because our brewery and other nanobreweries are small, we tend not to be in competition with each other.  And most of us brew because we love good beer and want to share that goodness with others.  Our focus is more certainly not on following the capitalist model.  Our small businesses are mostly run like worker-owned cooperatives.

This year we had the fine folks from The Brewer’s Collective at the festival.  Their logo communicates exactly what they are about.  From their table at the festival I took a couple of their stickers and put one on one of my notebooks.  (I have another notebook with a “Read.  Write.   Revolt.” sticker.)

Brewing your own beer is simple and fun.  But it’s even more fun to brew with a friend.  And more fun to brew with nine friends.  Mike and I started brewing together more than ten years ago and we continued to bring more and more of our friends in to lend a hand on brew day.  Everyone would get to take a keg home.  Today, now that we are licensed and selling beer to the public, we make a lot more beer, but we still try to operate in a collective fashion.  Our on-going collaboration with Secret Engine Brewing Company is just one example of how we are trying to build a communal culture.  The lonely capitalist might wish to crush all competition and subjugate and alienate an army of underpaid workers to accomplish that antisocial goal, but not us!  We aren’t capitalists.  We are artists.  We are artisans.  We are the collective.  We’re in this life to do good, to respect our fellows, to make the world a better place.

If you want to be part of the revolution, brew your own beer.  And while you’re at it.  Teach your neighbor to brew.  Brew together.