American Beer has been mocked for decades. Europeans have greatly enjoyed mocking the weak lager that the major American breweries have churned out, and with good reason. It is not flavorful, it likely has bad additives in, it is a pale imitation of the good lagers of places like Germany and the Czech Republic.
Yet something has changed with American beer. American beer is now good. You can still drink that cheap lager but alongside it you can now find high quality lagers, interesting ales, weird IPAs (who veer right back into shit tasting again), and everything in between. Independent American breweries will bring out their version of an Imperial Stout in winter and in summer release their version of a Gose. They’ll emulate the higher strength fancy Belgian beers. New micro-breweries appear all the time at festivals run by guys on shoestring budgets.
You get the picture.
Meanwhile in Germany strict rules govern beer - “Reinheitsgebot”. It is likely that this law has helped preserve and continue the German beer tradition but it also represents a form of stasis. There is no ability to develop something new, there is no incentive to hone the craft in a different way. The limitations of these regulations mean German beer is capped in certain ways that other countries are not. For some this is ‘TRADITION’ the Trad types tend to trip over themselves about RETVRN and are likely to hold things like this up as ways to GO BACK. I would argue that this law and the attitude it inspires is far more about the worshipping of ashes than the preservation of fire.
Brewing beer requires a degree of skill and it is a technique and a craft that must be preserved for future generations. This craft and appreciation of the craft is the preservation of fire. It manifests far more in the American beer scene, even with the snide redditor type beer brewers who dominate beneath it is a real pursuit of excellence. No doubt this ends up in some bad places, excessively hoppy IPAs catered towards weed smokers for example. Yet as a driving force it is creating new and organic small t traditions that one day perhaps will rival something like Munich Beer Fest.
Many in dissident spaces hold reflexive positions in two diametrically opposed ways - a lot cling to the liberalism of 40 years ago and others cling to odd ideas that anything new must be opposed be default. The liberals and the Trads. Both share a conception that one can just ‘go back’ but this is misguided and the beer example helps shine a lot on that. American beer didn’t just ‘go back’ it went forward in a different way, it recovered with a different approach and along the way changed elements of American drinking culture. The reality of preservation of fire as an ideal to hold onto is that just going back is never really possible, we are instead creating new ways of being that are more aligned with our goals and reality.
Once you start looking you can see this all around through people who are genuinely interested in preserving real traditions and deep rooted ways of living. Homeschoolers today are not just trying to emulate schooling of yesteryear but developing new approaches. People trying to build more resilient traditional buildings borrow from the past techniques but still apply current or even new technologies and approaches. The past can serve as inspiration for the future as we rediscover what has been lost but we ourselves are products of the modern age.
As current inhabitants of the current year we can’t escape that. We carry a certain amount of ‘baggage’ no matter how based our online personas are or how we convince ourselves of X or Y trad position we approach it in a way that is completely different than our ancestors. Reason has snuck in, rationalization, to take us to some of these positions. Not all of course, our gut reactions we are better at listening to. We stopped suppressing our disgust reflexes, we started feeling less ashamed of our past, but our recent ancestors never even had the concept of that to shed. This is a gulf between us and them that can’t be returned to, what we can do is push forward with what we know.
In a way I think our generation are destined to be the relics if we get this right. The future will be radically different from the current and perhaps more like elements of the past. Yet it won’t just be the past in the same way American beer will never be what it was pre-prohibition. It will always be something new, we must keep the fires burning not just tending ashes.