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A Marriage and a Beer Fest

10/20/2017

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The Wedding

Living in Europe as an American is living two lives: the one you have now, and remembering the one you leave behind. In Europe I have new friends, new family, a new way of being. But when my family comes to visit, memories of home, who I was, and how I behaved all come rushing back. My English slang now fresh in my mind, I struggle with even the basic German sentences. It’s a weird dual existence, but one I am extremely grateful to have.

These past weeks have been like wrangling cats. You try to set a plan, but ultimately people do what they want to do. But that's how weddings go, or so I'm told. Thankfully everything went without a hitch, and we were even granted a few hours of sun! It was an albeit unique experience, worrying about everything going according to plan, making sure people are where they are supposed to be, and remembering to relax and enjoy ones self makes the day go by in a blur. Still, it was the perfect wedding for us.

Yet planning this wedding, coordinating family, giving tours through Switzerland, translating English to German etc. was more of an exhausting experience than I originally thought it would be. But hey, at least there was plenty of cheese and beer. Almost serendipitously, there was the craft beer fest in Zurich just before I had to say goodbye to my parents.

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The Beer

Walking down a random farm road on the outskirts of Zurich, we came upon a small barn with the smell of smoke wafting through the air. We arrived around 6:30 pm to a well attended beer fest, a band setting up gear, and the delightful (at least to some) smell of a pig roast. There were eighteen breweries in attendance, three of which were Danish (if WarPigs counts solely as Danish).

We showed our tickets, received our tokens and festival branded Teku glasses and headed straight for some beers. 

(If I may have a get-off-my-lawn type side-rant, why all the Teku glasses, Europe?)

I was thoroughly impressed by the variety of beer available, from your standard IPAs and Stouts to table beer, pumpkin spiced beers (a rarity, I’ve come to find), and sours. All the breweries in attendance had at least three beers available to try. None of which were only IPAs or pale ales.

Every brewery on the scene was dishing out a variety of styles. If I’m to be honest, beer fests in Berlin were typically only IPAs and Pale Ales, so this beer fest was a breath of fresh air. I don’t mean to offend, but already the Swiss beer scene seems more healthy than some.

Frontrunners were for us the table beer from Blackwell (a close contendor for my favorite Swiss brewery), the aforementioned pumpkin spice beer from the Bier Factory, and a coconut porter by Broken City Brewing. Just a small curiosity I noticed, all of my Swiss beer drinking friends seem to reach for porters and stouts. Anyway, for me personally, the sour beers available from Brasserie Trois Dames and BFM were stellar (a sour red and a gose, and a saison respectively). 

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I intentionally avoided Warpigs and Mikkeller. Mikkeller has a tendency to charge more for less amounts of beer, and I’m just not into that. The concept though of creating a fancy place for fancy beer drinkers is a rant for another time. I’ve had an excellent stout from WarPigs, really excellent, but I don’t know too much about them. 

​Simply put though, I would much prefer to give my well earned tokens to Swiss breweries, even if all the foreign breweries were charging more for (all) of their beers.
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Beer fests aside, life has been hectic. Bureaucracy, PhD/grant applications, finding an apartment, etc etc, but hey, brew setup is complete! Not fully 100%, but operational at least. So stay tuned for actual homebrew posts!
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Life and other things

7/3/2017

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Right, so...
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 I just moved to Switzerland.
 
Overall this is a good change of scenery, both for me and my now fiance (I’m also getting married), despite the fact we had no choice…

Backstory time: Some of you may have noticed that my posting has dropped off as of late - my last post was at the end of February. Not how I intended to start this year. Seeing that it is now July, and I already missed my one year anniversary, I had a look back at the progress I had done, and these past two months have not been pretty.

In an effort to clear my head – plus I hate being vague online - I figured it would be good to post what has been going on behind the screen.
 
I have been pulling massive overtime for the past four months in an area I was forced into. The joys of working at a startup. I was initially brought on to write articles on current topics within biotechnology. Then, due to a push for the company’s A-round funding, I was told to make sales calls. On the few days I had a normal 8.5h working day, I was just too exhausted to research anything. To top it off, when things were starting to look like I would go back to writing articles, the content department was shut down. So I was no longer needed. 

Then the panic really set in. Being an expat and all, joblessness has the added bonus of being kicked out of the country. My visa and job were expiring, and the small window I had to get everything in order was quickly closing. I could have tried to find another job here in Berlin, but since I’m foreign, most employers don’t want to go through the paperwork. This would need much more time than I had. 

Prior to the chaos, amongst one of the small breaks I had from work, my girlfriend and I took a hike on the outskirts of Berlin. We always wanted to move to Switzerland the hard way. I get a job, get the visa, and have legal entry into the country. Then, she would follow suit. That way we could proudly say we did it ourselves, with no help nor easy access. Re-evaluating our situation, we realized we weren’t doing ourselves any favors by prolonging the inevitable. Marriage makes both our lives easier, I wouldn't have to worry about being deported, and you know the whole ‘love’ thing. So, after noticing we were only making things harder for ourselves, we agreed to get married. I say ‘we agreed to get married’ as I still wanted to make a proper proposal. 

Then I lost my job.

So it has been a hectic couple of weeks, decent highs and terrible lows. I hope you can forgive the reduction in posts. I realize what has happened to me is really just life. I don’t mean to moan or whine, and I certainly know people whose situation is worse, so I am thankful for the job I had and the luck awarded to me. Still, things took a turn for the worse there.

But thankfully, there is a happy ending! We’re here now, still getting married, and with a roof over our heads. Other than being a huge relief, it's good to know we figured this whole thing out. Plus, it also means I will be able to focus more on research. I will (most likely) begin a Ph.D. project sometime next year. As to what it is about, I will have to hold off for now, as I’m not sure if it is advisable to reveal the project. I will freelance a bit on the side, get back into brewing, and hopefully be involved with some professional brews with a few friends I have in Switzerland. Also expect some website redesigns, homebrew recipes, and of course, more posts!

In the end, it has been a real shitty first four to five months, but now it seems to all have been worth it, and things are going back to normal. 

So please stay tuned for your regularly scheduled programming! 
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Musings on 2016

1/11/2017

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It being that time of year we submit ourselves to the will of giant metal tubes blasting through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, one begins to contemplate where they've been and where they're going to. 

2016 was a bit of a wild ride: joblessness to employment, traveling to Italy and Poland, starting a blog to writing freelance. From a personal career standpoint, 2016 has been a good year.

It was time to say goodbye and head home. Leaving my partner and Berlin, I entered the calm hours of the early morning. No one here besides those who work terrible hours and the few travelers who decided to buy that competitive ticket at 5 30 in the morning. 

My destination: California.
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At the beginning of 2016, I was still looking for a job and getting desperate; anything to cement me in Europe. I felt I had to stay here. This is the place for the beginnings of Western beer culture and where I know I’ll eventually make my mark. 

Thankfully, I was hired for a biotech job. One which lets me hone my writing skills, albeit in a marketing tone. Yet now I can plan: which schools to apply to, which breweries to volunteer for, which mentor to follow, where I want to go with my life here in Europe. 
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​Entering the airport, you come face to face with herd mentality. Stampedes charging off to their flights, competing with each other to see who can walk the fastest. Then, full stop. Line - check into the flight - line - security - line - wait because someone let their child have a fit - passport check - then, finally to the gate. Another horde of people going to and fro, pushing their way to where they need to go. Then, turning down a corridor, I find myself alone. For some reason, no one is here. Face to face with modernity, announcements playing over the loudspeaker in different languages, planes pass by overhead, strange lighting - I begin to feel like I’m in a sci-fi movie as I reach my destination. 

Time to wait, flight’s delayed.
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​Leaving LAX, I'm hit with that all too familiar LA air. I step into my mom’s car - which I’ve entered countless times before - feels somehow new, somehow different. The sun shines brighter down here, but maybe that's just me.

I am asked to give a talk about the archaeology of brewing to a female-only craft beer club, which, given beer’s history, is oddly appropriate. My main points: beer is our cultural heritage, requires serious study, but should be enjoyed and taken lightly. In sum: it is always about the beer; it is never about the beer.
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Future Plans
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This past year I decided to write more about beer, in hopes to show people the heritage behind beer and brewing. I have had the privilege to interview fascinating people, write on topics from a malting facility in iron age Germany to the trials of brewing for women in Africa, and to participate in fun blog writing groups, all the while learning more about beer.

This year will see more interviews, more traveling, more and more about brewing archaeology, and, once I get my system up and running, actual brewing. My Father showed me a homebrew setup which would work perfectly in my apartment. Seeing that it’s close to my old homebrew system, I feel daft for not thinking of it before. 

In any case, it will allow me to do what I love most: brew beer.

Here’s to the start of 2017!
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About Me

7/31/2016

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Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy
     Benjamin Franklin

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Except that Franklin never said that. Nor is it true that the IPA was invented to last the journey to India, the Pilgrims went ashore because they ran out of Beer, or that Ale-Conners sat on benches to test the strength of beer. But that is one of the joys of learning and especially with studying the history of beer, you get to re-discover the truth and learn how things really happened.

Brewing has been a part of human material culture ever since the Neolithic. It is intertwined with religious, culinary, and ethnic traditions. As such, studying the history of brewing not only covers the scientific/technical development of an industry but also ourselves, our political games, economies, rites of passage, and daily rituals. That is why I decided to start researching it.

My dissertation focused on the Faroe Islands, with a pre-viking era settlement. Incidentally, there were some pots with potential beer residue, so my adviser and I decided to have a look. The results were inconclusive, and we were unable to modify our experiments to increase resolution due to time constraints. Hopefully in the future we will be able to try again, but in the meantime, the materials will sit in the storage area of the archaeological department. 

My fondest memory of my masters was sitting in the library with piles and piles of articles and text books on beer. Whether about beer in Africa, India, Asia, South America, drinking rituals to the legitimacy of residue analysis, it was really an endless exploration for more knowledge. An experience I never felt with biology.  

This blog, then, serves as a continuation of my studies. So, here you will find my jottings on academic papers, investigations, interviews, and brewing. Topics I hope to cover are the current knowledge of brewing archaeology, the roles beer played in the past, and the people acting behind the scenes.

Cheers!

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    Jordan Rex

    Beer archaeologist

    From California, migrated to the UK to study,  drank in Berlin, now settled in Switzerland

    @timelytipple
    instagram.com/timelytipple/
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