I start everyday with an alarm. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture plays until my sleep filled eyes can find the snooze button. But then, the morning lifts me up and pushes me out the door to start my day. I lived the entirety of my life searching for that snooze button, with little enthusiasm if any for a job that I HAD to go to. Behind these waking eyes I had a dream, although nothing so grand as Dr. King but from my heart nonetheless and as most things that should be it became a relentless need to one day become a reality. I get to brew beer.
It started as simple as any other obsession. A friend extends an invitation to come over and brew a beer in his garage as if we were a high school band rehearsing punk versions of boy band songs… which of course is just a hypothetical example and needs no further evaluation. With brewing beer came drinking beer, and with drinking beer came the “what ifs” and the “we shoulds”. After the “Yeah, that’ll happens” and the beers were consumed we put our labor of love to bed in its fermenter and ventured home to find that snooze button for another day. Little did I know that our little garage rehearsal would change the trajectory of my life to my every morning Tchaikovsky snooze and smile.
Years passed and the time spent as a retail slave had stretched me thin literally and figuratively, so the time had finally come to stick my neck out and get this dream moving. Like anything worth doing, this was not the easiest thing to make a reality. After some outright cold shoulders and near misses my spirit was taking quite the beat down, so I took what I could get in the industry in distribution. Not the dream, more like a mirage, but like all things in the pursuit of greatness I was to treat it like a learning experience that would hopefully lead to the ultimate goal. It did not. Like a forgotten flapjack my dream was pushed to the back burner while I destroyed my body for the distribution of one of the big three that shall not be named, and if you think I was ashamed to pedal such wares then you would be correct. But we do silly things in the search for something true, something real. Like retail, distribution was not for me and eventually was no longer an option, so I left.
As the years ticked by the dream would peek its head out from time to time and would lead us to massively sauced sessions of beers, brewing, and battlestar galactica. Memories were made and wiped on those days, and the dream was fed big plump virgins so that it would one day live. Surprising successes like my jalapeño scotch ale called Rowdy Roddy Pepper to my almost great but ultimate failure in The GIMPerial IPA made everything very real, the good and the bad. Real is the enemy of ambition, and if you let it, can be the reaper of that dream. My dance with the reaper has been a long and slow ass grabber under the mirror ball and strobe lights but in the end I persevered. No means no you reaping sumumabitch.
What did I do you might ask? As fate would have it, as the distribution door closed, the door of hope cracked open to let this fly in. A couple job postings at breweries and my fingers never worked as fast on an application as they did that day. I would have been happy with either job, and that’s pure honesty, but if I’m being completely transparent there was one that I was hoping for more than the other. I was called in for a “working interview” to one of my favorite breweries in Oregon. What the fahk is a “working interview” I thought, but was nonetheless ready, willing, and able to do whatever it took to prove to them and more importantly myself that this was what I was meant to be doing. As interviews go I have to say, best one ever. We brewed a beer. Like all those years ago in my buddies garage and every backyard batch in between we added grain to water, hops to boiling wort, yeast into fermenter, and pride swelling in my chest. I was asked what I thought and with restrained jubilation I got the words out that it was everything I hoped it would be. To which my future boss told me that the job was mine if I wanted it. The responses in my head were both loud and vulgar, but I managed to get out a composed acceptance of the position. I sat in my car in disbelief where someone must have been cutting onions, and immediately let the important people in my life know of what just happened. The first step has finally been taken towards the dream. I get to tap the snooze button every morning with a smile. I get to climb into my car, drive to a brewery and open the door with my key. I get to start my day brewing beer. Dammit, is someone cutting onions again?
The Upright Drunk 