Genealogy Of Morals: Planadas
Hill Farmstead Brewery

 

 

Bought at the brewery a few weeks ago.

Genealogy Of Morals is one of them titles where it hearing it evokes a strong but weirdly subdued, almost subconscious reaction. I... I know those words. That's a thing that I read, back in grad school. Probably spent tens of hours on it. But now, more than a decade later, I've blotted it out, don't even remember who wrote it, and I really, deeply wish I had spent that time doing something productive like playing Animal Crossing.

So let's google, here... ahh, it's Nietzsche. I remember trying harder with Beyond Good and Evil. I remember finding profundity here. I remember feeling pride--real, deep, legitimate pride--at breaking through, my efforts paying off, being able to say "this is what this means, I understand this," without any outside guidance.

And then I remember the stark realization, a day or two later, when it was clear that no one else in the class had read a page of it. How the conversation devolved into the same rote tracks as every other conversation, in every other class, over every other topic.

And then I feel shame, because somehow it took another five years or so for me to realize things I'm still not comfortable articulating: the hollowness of intellectual effort is prime among them. Even the institutions meant to prop up the pursuit of non-monetizable pontifications gave up on any pretense of actual rigor decades ago. Engaging earnestly with difficult texts is one of the easiest ways to make yourself non-viable as an academic, let alone as a regular person.

So, err... this beer. Is my appreciation atavistic, a remnant of a more hopeful and naive past? Is the fact that such references can be made only by a brewery as disconnected and self-sufficient as one named after its one ancestral farmstead not proof of the ineffectuality of literacy in the twenty twenties? Should--shouldn't I just be pounding some White Claws or whatever?

No. No. There is supreme beauty here. There may not be payoffs in a direct sense. This may not be an overt status symbol. But there are some experiences so sublime, however unmarketable, that they warrant the effort of an 18-hour round trip drive, or a 20 hour rumination stooped over a dog-eared trade paperback.

This one pours a very dark black color, with a very small head, and not much lacing.

This smells like fruity and caramelly coffee, tobacco, roast, light smoke, and dark chocolate.

This has a really interesting coffee flavor – it starts out bitter but gets sweeter as the beer warms, with an almost smoked tea meets hot chocolate sort of flavor in the coffee. There’s some oak, tobacco, and bourbon as well, and some light fruitiness.

This is medium bodied, with low carbonation, and no booziness.

I don’t think this will age very well at all, so drink it now. It’s nice now.