Fermenting things has been part of my life for many years. From 2013 until 2017 I brewed my own beers. In 2016/2017, the municipality I live in experienced one of the most severe droughts in our province. Cape Town, one of the major cities in the world, experienced what they called “Day Zero”, the day when the taps run dry. If I remember correctly, this is the first major city in the world that experienced such a phenomenon.
This obviously impacted my beer brewing as we were only allowed to use 20 litres of water per person per day. I did not have water to brew beer with. For three or so years, I could not brew beer, and my equipment gathered dust. I brewed many hundreds if not thousands of litres of beer. On a daily basis, I drank a couple of beers. I wrote poetry, short stories, and I philosophised about the weirdest things.
My obsession with fermenting got carried over to bread baking, other ferments, and so many different things. But that is another story.
With brewing beer, you always brew a batch that does not come out perfectly. You experiment, but when that experiment does not go according to plan, you have 20-50 litres of beer you have to deal with. What do you do with it? I did not like dumping it, and I waited a couple of weeks to see if they were able to “self-correct”. I lived in the fantasy that maybe in the bottle the beers will magically turn out fine. But this did not happen, and for 5 years the bottles gathered dust in my storage room. And today was the day that dumped it all. This meant opening about 50 bottles.
All the brewing memories came back to me. The early mornings that I got up, the hours that I stood over the boiling wort, all the time spent bottling each bottle… Those were the days. I remembered the days as a young student reading poetry, drinking my own beer, looking at the mountains, thinking I was the king of my castle.
And here I am now, looking into the bottle again, but this time not drinking a single drop of beer. These beers never “self-corrected”, they were vile and the stinking smell made me think twice about how much I love drinking beer.
My girlfriend helped me open the bottles, we sat in this stench, experiments that did not go well, and all that time literally down the drain. But such is life, right? Sometimes, you need to pour things down the drain to see the light of day, to make space for something new to grow.
It is sad, I see all my beer brewing equipment lying in the house, gathering dust. I am not sure if I will ever brew beer again. It was a love affair drenched in youthful-existential feelings which I literally outgrew. Now, I would much rather read a book, drink an occasional craft beer, and enjoy my free time.
We outgrow some things, but we grow into new things.
The new year began with a clearing out, a growing into new things, a removal of what only gathered dust. Now, there are so many other things to sort out. But this is the first step towards something better, a less cluttered lifestyle, a less cluttered life.
The future has a lot of potential.
All of the writings in this post are my own. The photographs are also my own, taken with my iPhone.