THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT CHARLIE - An evening with Charlie Papazian at Stone Brewing, Berlin

11/6/2018

*I wrote this article originally for the online publication component of Berlin based 'Bier, Bars und Brauer' which has since dissolved and so I have re-shared it here in my personal blog*

Charlie Papazian is a man who wears many hats.

 

Many, many hats.

 

There’s a common theme though, with the hats. Not only does he wear many, but he first started wearing them at a time when nobody else wore hats. They were outlawed actually, and nobody ever imagined they’d come back in fashion. Almost 50 years on, here we are in 2018... and everybody is wearing Charlie’s hats!

 

Feeling puzzled by my cryptic analogy? Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew. Allow me to elaborate.

RELAX. DON’T WORRY. HAVE A HOMEBREW.

 

These words - Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew - helped a nation stripped of all creative beer culture regain itself. America. Robbed of adventurous beer after a difficult post-Prohibition bounce-back, these words were the friendly, welcoming and calming words of the homebrewing father and pioneer, Charlie, the author of one of the world's best selling books on the craft, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, or, ‘the bible’ if you will, for homebrewers. Peppered throughout his first book, the soothing catchphrase - Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew - was designed to make the occasionally overwhelming task of brewing your own beer approachable. Charlie is responsible for inspiring millions of people to start homebrewing.

 

“I wrote that book with my heart and soul and my experiences... I kinda just said ‘this is what I need to communicate’” says Charlie. In the late 1980s, less than ten years after its release, sales of the book were skyrocketing with up to 70,000 copies sold per year. “It was a bestseller. Boggled everybody's mind!” Charlie’s casual expression is endearing. I guess he’s had some time to adjust to the fact that, with just a few cobbled-together household items, his passion and generosity in sharing his ideas would give rise to a community of over one million homebrewers and more than 6,300 microbreweries in the U.S.

Charlie is a legend.

 

THE OUTLAW FOR BEER

 

Here in Germany, it’s difficult to comprehend that America’s beer culture has not always been so fertile and adventurous. In the wake of America’s Prohibition, a damaged beer culture needed to rise from the dead, with the act of brewing beer at home remaining illegal due to a clumsy omission of a few words in the Federal Register after the 1933 repeal. In spite of this legal oversight, in 1973 Charlie, who’d brewed his first homebrew three years prior, began giving homebrewing classes in his living room. After many instances of high visibility on TV and radio, Charlie was acutely aware that what he was doing so publicly was illegal. In what I found very sweet, Charlie admitted that back then he’d had romantic notions of popularising homebrew immediately in the event that he ever got “busted or arrested”. But as he’d suspected, the Federal American Government had better things to do. Charlie was a modern day ‘outlaw’. But for the good of beer. My kinda outlaw!

 

Over the following ten years, just as much as his students, Charlie took delight in learning the art of brewing beer through experimentation. “That spirit of sharing and collaborating, it was necessary because there wasn’t anything else available” reflects Charlie. He would go on to teach over a thousand students, many who would become professionally involved in beer (including one Jeff Lebesch, co-founder of America’s fourth-largest craft brewery, New Belgium). “We were all pretty much equals in our enthusiasm for wanting to know this stuff and it was a necessity to collaborate and share information” Charlie remembers. His humility is hard to believe.

 

THE BEER PROPHET

 

Long before his seminal book on homebrewing and as a direct consequence of the collaborative community Charlie’s lessons fostered, Charlie and his like-minded homebrewing-boffin friend, Charlie Matzen, resolved to found the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in 1978. This also coincided with American President Carter signing a law finally legalizing homebrewing. At the time, American beer was suffering a wave of barbaric industrial lager after an inadequate post-Prohibition bounce-back. The AHA was the pioneering step towards tackling that, but they suspected it would be a battle. The stigma of homebrewing had widely left an indelible negative impression on society that represented low quality, clandestine exploding bottles of bathtub-brewed-beer. “That was the image of homebrew. That changed as people got older and there were younger people that just knew better...it’s this generational wave that we go through and the generational wave will happen here in Germany”, Charlie asserts. Today, the AHA is more than 46,000 members strong.

 

Charlie always had a vision for the States- “A homebrewer in every neighbourhood and a brewery in every town” he recounts. Well...that vision has come to fruition. But Germany? “One of the things that makes it so difficult to be a brewer in Germany is that beer is so ridiculously cheap...it's so hard to make a living and that’s because the beer drinker doesn’t understand the value that diversity and flavour can have”.

Very astute.

 

It’s difficult to say with any certainty when exactly Germany’s rich history of communal beer brewing and enjoyment started. Early incarnations of the modern Stammtisch (a regular get-together) date back to the early 18th century under the directive of Friedrich Wilhelm I’s ‘Tabakskollegium’. At these gatherings, a group of lads got together to smoke pipes, guzzle beer and discuss what was going on in the world. The Zoigl community brewhouses in Bavaria are existing artifacts of a culture deeply entrenched with a philosophy of beer and community.

 

Germany’s very new tendency to embrace the young scene of homebrewers and microbrewers has been slow, but it is finally happening. With the influx of more and more homebrewers, microbreweries, experimental beer styles, not to mention IPAs, there is no question that America’s craft-beer revolution has slowly diffused across the Atlantic ocean managing to finally penetrate Germany’s very rigid borders.

 

Let us take some solace in Charlie’s vision for America. But what is to become of us lovers of beer brewing, quality and diversity in Germany?

 

Charlie, the prophet: “The evolution is going to repeat itself... I think Germany is going to be one of the more difficult places, just like America was... It was so conservative and so difficult! The whole system was rigged. And things changed. It took twenty years before you could see some movement into the popular culture.”

 

MOVER AND SHAKER

 

After founding the AHA followed by the magazines Zymurgy (for homebrewers) and The New Brewer (for professional craft brewers), Charlie went on to found a separate organisation for small commercial brewers (of which there were only 6 or 7 at the time), the so-called ‘microbrewers’ as he’d dubbed them, which went on to become the Brewers Association (BA), an association for small and independent American brewers. He is currently still employed by the BA, with his retirement planned for December 7th this year; a date which will also commemorate 40 years since his founding of the association.

 

With Charlie behind the reins, the BA is proprietor of some of America’s major beer-related events such as The Great American Beer Festival (GABF), The Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) and The World Beer Cup. The GABF, in its 37th year, is the largest ticketed beer festival in North America with more than 60,000 attendees annually.

 

Did I mention he wears a lot of hats?

 

RELAX. DON’T WORRY. HAVE A HOMEBREW.

 

With Charlie we talked all matters of beer. From the dwindling sales of industrial lager across the globe as an opportunity to introduce ‘craft beer’, to the significance of having a traditional set of rules and values for brewing (so long as they’re not “a hindrance or barrier to be creative and innovative”). From the necessity for brewpubs and holistic drinking experiences to what it means to be truly ‘craft’.

 

When writing about anything, conforming to word counts is hard. When writing about Charlie, it was even harder. Charlie’s influence on the scene is inspiring. After listening to him intently, it becomes strikingly clear that his knowledge, background and experience is voluminous and not able to be summarised in a short written piece.

 

I marvel at Charlie’s mild mannered, calm soul, his altruistic vision and his desire to share as much as he is humanly able. Germany just needs to take his advice: Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.

 

A sea of Kates! The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever (MWHDE) Berlin, 2017

At the tender age of 16, my time was mostly spent working as a 'checkout-chick' (that's Australian for 'supermarket cashier') in Woolies between juggling that old quotidian secondary school chestnut, punctuated with occasional weekend party frivolity. Pretty normal teenage stuff, if you don’t count the goats, cats, dogs, kangaroos, wombats, mealworms (that's what the possums ate, as well as huntsman spiders we were tasked with hunting down to throw, live and agitated, into the freezer to become frozen spidery possum snacks)...

...and so many other organisms we cared for growing up due to an overly eccentric mum. 

Mum feeding a wee possum with an eye-dropper, cos, that's just how she rolls! 

My great soft spot for animals has existed since I was a wee lass (and I genuinely believe that anybody who doesn't love baby goats must be a bad person; 'kids' are definitely the cutest things on planet Earth! See image proof below)

Yeah, maybe I inherited *some* of Mum's eccentricity... 

My ginga ninja brother and I with some more goats

A little Abi (left), our Rhodesian Ridgeback, Tuli, me and a kitten hanging out next to our then very skinny Dad in bed! 

How many cats can YOU carry? 

I think that's my chinchilla cat, Missy! Oh bless her cotton socks.

Baby goats = CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE

I still sleep with doggies when given the chance. This is my Schillerkiez neighbour, Gretchi! 

So, the point I was trying to make, before becoming distracted with nostalgia for my menagerie riddled childhood, was that ... Kate Bush led a very different childhood to that of mine. Rather than spending hers milking goats and feeding rescued marsupials, Kate Bush rather spent her early teens writing songs destined to become cult like in their status. With accompanying choreographies so experimental, ethereal and strange, Kate would go on to receive widespread critical acclaim for her ‘eclectic, experimental and idiosyncratic music as well as her theatrical performances’. 



I, on the other hand, would go on to...well not much! I like to dogsit when given the chance. 

But back to the original point of writing this blog, Kate Bush's classic number one hit ‘Wuthering Heights’, with its dark and gothic descriptions of a romance between (the living or non-living?) Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff all pulled out of Emily Brontë’s classic novel of the same name is celebrated as one of the best songs ever written. 

In her video for the track, an 18-year-old Bush is dressed in a now iconic shaggy red dress with a black belt, red lipstick, green eye shadow and a deep red flower behind her ear, swaying and flailing to the song with movements so erratic and yet graceful that it’s hard to look away. 

There’s not much not to love about it! Watch it here:

And I am far from alone in my views! 

And so it was written; ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’ (MWHDE) would become an annual and international event, celebrated by thousands of Kate Bush lookalikes, destined to frolic upon wiley and windy plains across the globe every year donned in their shaggiest red frocks with not a care nor inhibition in the world! A sea of red, males, females and children alike, flailing like they just don’t care. And that’s exactly what happened, last year with a staggering 20,000 Kate Bush’s in attendance! 

MWHDE was initially inspired by a Flash Mob organized by UK artists Shambush! in 2013, but only went on to gain a strong momentum, going viral due to an Australian friend of mine here in Berlin, Sam Wareing, who became enamored by the concept of the Flash Mob and worked hard to create and promote the event internationally (initially as a dare, I'm told!)

And so this year on July 15^th 2017, I attended my first MWHDE … 

...and oh what a joyous event it was! 

Clad in a red dress that used to fit me perfectly, but now, after massive over indulging in America and Italy, was close to impossible to zip up, my awkward and restricted dance movements, though they surely looked comical, filled me with happiness and glee. My sweaty bosoms, pancaked tightly across my chest, crushed my lungs making it difficult to breathe as I pranced and lunged and swayed on the windy and wiley plains of one of Berlin’s most notorious parks, Görlitzer, known to tourists and locals alike as the mecca for scoring drugs from the (mostly) friendly chaps who heckle but always back off once told ‘no thank you’.

Despite my limited flexibility and exacerbated further by my general inability to dance and flail on the windy moors, Sam patiently guided us all hilariously through each absurd dance move using terms such as the ‘backwards pterodactyl’ and the ‘Restaurant on a train’, mnemonics that even the most uncoordinated amongst us (me?) could not possibly forget, and we fuddled our way through like the culturally diverse motley crew we were (a friend there with me did actually report hearing some Germans around us translating Sam’s funny associations into Deutsch!)

Watch our final performance here: 

** Albeit it unquestionably catchy, with lyrics such as ‘You had a temper like my jealousy

Too hot, too greedy’ as well as, ‘I'm coming back, love, Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream,

My only master’, upon closer lyrical inspection of ‘Wuthering Heights’, it becomes clear that antagonist ‘Heathcliff’ is probably a candidate for domestic violence and so it came as no surprise when the Melbourne contingent of MWHDE doubled as a charity fundraiser with proceeds going to Safe Steps Victoria to prevent and eliminate violence against women and children. On ya, Melbs! 

xx c

It's been a while...

You know… I’ve been in such a trance for the last 2 years that I forgot entirely about my blog- that I should update it, that I should check it out, look at the stats of people who have looked at it, pondered over how it came to be that I have several views from Mozambique… considered that I even have a blog! The trials and tribulations of the big city Berlin life, eh’?! Blog writing, or more so, having the chance to engage upon it, really is a middle-classed decadence. I guess in the days that I established mine and kept it updated relatively regularly, I was usually procrastinating from doing my German homework, or avoiding cycling in to my old part-time job in the lab up north of Berlin, Buch. Or just…not being so goddamned busy! Now I am SO GODDAMNED BUSY!

And let me tell ya… the things I’ve experienced since I last updated the world through my blog! Meine Fresse!

I digress, however.
It occurred to me this morning, whilst Skyping with one of my ol’ childhood besties (who will join me in Berlin in precisely 1 WEEK for a little European sojourn…finally!), who has an insatiable appetite for abandoned buildings and BERLIN abandoned buildings in particular (as did I), that yes, I used to explore these wherever possible, and in fact, I even had (have!) a painstakingly tricky to update (due to outrageous photo uploading time) blog about said ‘abandoned Berlin gallivanting’. This very blog you’re looking at now.
I also met the hop farmer, Sepp. He was the sweetest chap; with his rosy red cheeks and a warm heart, he excitedly offered me a bottle of his home brew, brewed using hop varieties he had created himself through hop breeding programs. As he proudly showed us the 3 new hop varieties this year has seen, I stood back and marvelled at how I came to be standing there- chilly and tired but with baffling amounts of energy. 

And it got me thinkin’… about times gone by.
Thinkin’ got me curious. Curiosity got me googlin’. I googled my blog, saw it was still there, had a little skim through my words and a deep chested chuckle at just how long ago that world now seems to have been…

Somehow I then felt a motivation to smash another entry out. But this time…about what?!

LONG SINCE retired from my foolish exploratory antics all those years ago, my older age has seen me instead resort to spending my rare and valued days off from work or travel sitting in the comforts of my cosy little apartment in Neukölln, Skyping with my family and friends in Straya, inviting friends to sit with me for Frühstück (breaky) at my large bay windows and listen to the Turkish bakers down below screaming boorishly at one another as obnoxious music blares and wafts of rotting bin juice drift into my coffee cup, or, on the rare occasion of me feeling guilt at not stepping outside on those days, I pressure myself into hitting up a Flohmarkt (fleamarket), which always make my heart flutter happily but in ways that make me angry at myself for not trying to get up and out of the house earlier since now the vendors all seem to be closing up their stands and I have only just arrived… complex feelings, them there. 

Today has been one of those days, though I’ve not yet managed to get out of the apartment, and given that it is already 6pm, there is no chance I’ll make any markets, nor see any of these last summer time sunrays before this imminent Autumn looms in with its leaf stripping powers. 

So much has happened over the last 2 years that I don’t feel capable of filling in the gaps. My entire existence has back flipped. But going back even further than Berlin alone, it strikes me that there was once a time when I was getting up at 6am to make my way into the staffroom at St. Albans Secondary Collage to prepare my lessons for a bunch of year 7, 8 and 9 brats as I endured that first-year of teaching’s compulsory baptism of fire thanks to the worst allotment possible. That existence could be aeons ago. I’m not even sure I’d be eligible to teach these days… there are tattoos on my arms. 

I recently updated my curriculum vitae, motivated by my visiting Dad and a pure evil woman I’ve been working with. As I commenced updating the ‘Employment & Experience’ section, it struck me that the jumping around of professions from scientist to teacher to scientist to teacher to scientist to brewer…could be misconstrued as discontentedness. Would that be a misconstruction? Or perhaps a sober realisation.

Not trying to get deep here or anything, but…

If there is one constant in this chaos of a past 6 years or so, it is, funnily enough the aspect in which this blog was named after: beer. 

Earlier this week I woke up at 5am to head out into the hop fields of the Hallertauer to harvest a couple of hundreds of kilos of fresh comet and cascade hop cones the size of my (very long) tongue to help out an esteemed brewer boyfriend of mine brew a wet hop IPA which will hit the market in 6 weeks or so. Just writing that paragraph makes me a little giddy. I can’t believe how happy doing that made me. 

A snap shot of the last couple of years in picture form:

Brewing Cristal's Raspberry Blonde Ale, circa August 2015 

Addition of the 50kg of raspberries into the fermenter  




A visit back to the homeland: Christmas with the Fam Jam, 2015 

Brewing Cristal's Raspberry Blonde Ale, circa August 2015

Artwork done by my delightful Aunty Jude, Melbourne, Straya 

Shooting a movie (yep)! September 2016 

The collaboration of the decade: Raspberry Fields Forever, a hoppy Raspberry Ale & Red Shadows, a dark ale. Mad collage making skillz acquired in my new role as Bierlieb manager ;) 

 

Photo credit: Athanasios Boucharas, Braust 2016

Had my first photo shoot! That was, awkward. They put lipstick on me. Braufest Berlin, 2016.

 

Brewing a wet hop IPA with hop cones the size of...well, reference hop cones against pint of beer for ratio. September 2016.

“I could have danced all night...” The Ballhaus Riviera (and Gesellschaftshaus) - Grünau

 

So, in keeping with the theme of my possible early demise, I thought I’d break into another abandoned building in Berlin. This one was slightly safer however; I only scaled one wall, and I had two friends with me. Pretty sure they had my back!
The three most frightening aspects of this break-and-enter were the amounts of debris I felt myself inhaling (all of a sudden I felt like a pack-a-day smoker!), the pretty hardcore Nazi graffiti throughout, and the freakin’ cycle there! This place was in Grünau, a goodly cycle North of Berlin city centre, and though the majority of the ride was warm and glorious along Treptower Park, in one unforseen change of events the road turned into what I’m pretty sure is the main highway to Dresden! So the bike lane vanished, the footpath vanished, and the cars were damned fast! I had no choice but to soldier on however (there was no possible turning back at this point), and the cars did not take too kindly to my being there! One particular arsehole motorist even overtook me just to get directly in front of me, slow right down and commence showering with me their windscreen wiper fluid! That was a first for me, and initially I was so thrown off by their bloody mindedness that I actually waved apologetically at them, embarrassed by being in the wrong! As they continued to spray me, I realised what was happening and seconds later I reverted back to my general cycling demeanour with the ol’ middle finger straight out yelling my panicked ‘resort to English in times of crisis’ abuse. I long for the day when my abuse turns instinctively to German! “DU BIST EIN ARSCHLOCH!!!” Hehe. That’ll mean I’ve truly integrated into German society. Surely then I’d be eligible for citizenship!?
Things only got worse as I reached the village of Grünau. In my frenzied state, I managed to overlook the major roadwork happening and cycled straight into the wet bitumen being laid. More German abuse directed at me, more flustered Cristal placating with niceties. 

But anyway, the Ballhaus Riviera, as it was exotically dubbed back in its heyday (1895-1897) was an incredible space and well worth the drama of getting there. I’d probably recommend catching the train to anyone interested in checking it out though...

So I wanted to write a small blog about the former Ballroom, mostly to exhibit my numerous snaps rather than my usual verbose diatribe. Bear with me...

The position of this place was amazing. Right next to the river...

I locked my (bitumen covered) bike up and within seconds found a gaping hole in the fence. Once through I realised that actually there were two buildings next to one another. The Ballhaus Riviera, built in 1895, and the Gesellschaftshaus Grünau, built in 1897. Without any ado, I sought an entrance.  Easy peasy for the first building- the doors were open! 

In I strolled only to be greeted by a beautiful, albeit reasonably small, ballroom. The disrepair was nothing short of heartbreaking. Another tragic tale of post-reunification abandonment, the hints of its former glory overwhelmingly evident.

I strolled through the building, first through the small ballroom, and then allowing myself to become engulfed in the sequence of smaller boxy rooms.

Getting into the next ballroom, much larger and more impressive than the first, proved to be much more of a test in agility. Channelling my fence-jumping roots, we climbed onto the structurally questionable balcony roof top, from which we were able to hoist ourselves through the smashed window on the first floor.

We entered into, very strangely you might say, what appeared to be a 'disco' styled room. And in fact, that’s precisely what this room had become! In the 1980’s, as a means of maintaining popularity when confronted with the fall of the wall and formidable resultant pressure to compete with the popularity of West Berlin clubs and culture, a disco was created in the Gesellschaftshaus.

 

As if portioning off an incredibly grandiose and stunning ballroom to make way for a tacky disco to keep their heads above water wasn’t heartbreaking enough, as I continued further into the establishment I became increasingly emotional about the state of the former ballroom- it looked as though it once featured in a fairytale, and all I could picture was Cinderella pirouetting in her gown.
But now...now it was in ruins.

I was confronted by the overwhelmingly evident juxtaposition. Where high society becomes low-brow. Where beauty becomes dilapidated.  

One saving grace, though that seems trite to say, was evidence of artisan occupancy, or at least guerrilla art. If the place is 'dead' by all accounts, why the hell not open it up for something constructive (though the eerie neo-Nazi presence would be enough to deter most candidates). 

Many many rooms...some massive, some tiny!

Evidence of an existence, perhaps of a class that I’ll never know. 

But that which I’ll never know, I can always dream about. 

The hustle and the bustle in the ladies bathroom as the women flock to reapply their lipstick, to straighten their knickers beneath their pretty frocks, to dance the night away...

The couples sitting at the bar, sipping on their martinis. The men dressed up debonair, black tuxes, polka dot bow-ties. The ladies, stunning and elegant. Thin waists, scarlet lips and voluptuous cleavage. 

 

My imagination almost surpasses the reality. So I decide to leave, before reality comes back. In a dreamy and delusional frame-of-mind, I jump on a train and flee back to Berlin, where there is no shortage of reminders of beauty long lost to mankind’s own stupidity.

(I wrote this blog back in March, however have only now had the opportunity to finish it off and hunt for some of the images I took)