An email comes crashing through the ether like Arnold Schwarzenegger on a motorbike shouting come with me if you want to drink…
“I write to you my Friends from the Past in the 9th month of the year of our lord 2036. The changes we have seen over the last decade seem almost uncomprehensible. It is hard not to yearn for the time back when we hadn’t realised the third world war had started, or at least we were all afraid to say it, back before we came to terms with the oil peaking, back before The Fall, back before the inundations, back before the floods, back when we could sit in pubs and bars and drink beers with real hops and real malt and real alcohol and talk to real people. What a halcyon age it was! If only we knew at the time how that age was at an end we might have made a little more of it when we could.
I miss alcohol, I know it is deeply troubling to say such things now. I also know that you can of course still get alcoholic beer if you pass the character test and pay a $400 registration fee. Who has the money for that though I ask you? Cheaper to risk your neck with the moonshiners. Alcohol free beer is all well and good, but things certainly took a turn when the excise take dropped so low the government had to tax non-alcs like spirits. I get dark looks when I question this in polite company. Being a pariah comes natural to me.
And hops, oh how I miss hops. Back when we had diesel to harvest and export and import them, the taste of a hoppy pint of IPA is seared into my memory. Of course as hop breeders and drinkers and brewers all pushed hops further and further towards exotic fruit flavour compounds, it should have been obvious that sooner or later the messy, expensive carbon hungry way of growing them would be dispensed with for flavour essences produced in a lab, quite the human tale that, chasing innovation and innovating one’s self into redundancy, perhaps even extinction.
Grain is all ear marked for bread these days of course. The famines leave us in a situation where one can hardly argue with that. As 90% of beer is now non-alcoholic it’s no huge problem. Some caramel essence pleases the masses and a little goes a long way. God knows that is the mantra of our age. With so little diesel to be spared, it is what it is.
At least the craze for haze is still with us. Well, you all know what I really think about that. But it makes people happy. The Milkshake IPA obsession has taken on a real life of its own. We had to do something with all that milk powder once the ships could no longer export it. The Taranaki Milk Powder Mountain is expected to run out sometime next century at this rate.
Of course, one can still feel the experience of gently getting inebriated with friends at the pub. As long as one surrenders completely to the simulation. It seems astounding to think 10 years ago there were no AI pubs at all! Strapping on the head unit and the sensors that raise one’s heart rate and lower one’s critical judgement is now one of the most popular pastimes of a Friday evening. There are of course concerns about crimes committed in the simulations. The government has brought in harsh fines for artificial crimes. Again, when I question this, I get uncomfortable looks and changes of conversation at dinner parties.
There are of course some things that haven’t changed. Despite there only being a set number of essences, syrups and water treatments available, Garage Project still releases a multitude of beers each month. It’s funny, 10 years back I would have wanted to put the word beer in inverted commas. The new reality takes hold fast it seems. Anyway, more power to them. It’s what brewers do, roll with the punches and adapt.
I am not joking when I say I wish I had made more of real beer drunk in real pubs at the time. We were all so concerned with how tough things were we let the most wonderful, sociable, sacred, ritual that is pub life go without even thinking about it, without even fighting for it, without even seeing it. At the time I used to say “things will get worse before they get worse” and here and now the truth of this is unmistakable. Sometimes people seem to hold on to the idea that ‘normal’ is coming back and just hold their breath. Well friends of the past I say to you — don’t hold your breath, instead go hold a pint.”
Just a thought my friends.