Rip up the past, lose the future?
Published March 2022 in Ferment Magazine
Craft beers are cultural butterflies. I don’t mean they flit from one thing to another. I mean most live cruelly short lives, capturing our attention for just a brief moment before they’re gone forever. Label designs come and go. Beers are brewed, drunk, and forgotten within the space of a few months.
The pace of change may have slowed a little recently, dampened by the pandemic, but within the breweries themselves, it is compounded by the usual daily churn of emails, documents, details, sales receipts, recipe sheets, early drafts of design ideas… All the digital froth that informs the intangible side of a brewery’s space in the world.
How much of this culture we all love do we lose forever each year? We can burn through our days in a heedless rush of the now, or we can stop to think about what we will leave behind. For the brewers the question becomes even more focused. What are you creating? Are you building something that will last, a legacy? How do you know it won’t be forgotten?