Summerfall: Where Gravity Takes Us
Gravity is an everyday kind of thing but far from boring. I prepare my morning coffee, pouring hot water through grounds as vapors of aromatic vanilla and coconut and tobacco lift through the room. Meanwhile, on the other side of the filter, a rich, dark coffee drips - obediently, conveniently, gathering at the bottom of the glass container. With the spine of my book resting on the table, I thumb through chapters until I reach my bookmark, letting the pages gather neatly to either side. Pressed under the weight of the case for my reading glasses, the book stays open. Through my breakfast nook window, I watch a squirrel dutifully munching a pine cone as the next generation of pine trees falls from its mouth to the ground. All this, with gratitude to gravity.
This is an ode to the invisible force that moves us and also keeps us put.
I like thinking of gravity as companion to my other senses. There’s sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch*, proprioception (which allows me sense the relation of my body to itself - is my hand by my side or up over my head?), and gravity (which allows me to sense my relation to space).**
Gravity is the felt sense of up and down; it is the simple and unquestioning trust that when I pour my coffee, it will indeed stay at the bottom of my mug until I tilt it for a sip. Trusting the pull, the ebb and flow of gravity is an everyday kind of thing. You just sort of let it happen, unconsciously dancing with a cosmic force.
We fell through summer into fall
Sometimes a person or an idea or a place pulls us in a way very much like gravity. At one moment you’re going about your day then all of a sudden you find yourself floating through space, “falling up” at a dizzying pace but it feels like the most natural dance. That’s how this whole brewing endeavor started for us. At one moment we were reading a bare bottle beer label (which includes a recipe for the brew you’re drinking) and the next moment we were on craigslist searching for a homebrew kit. Then we found ourselves driving 40 miles south (twice) to purchase two car loads of brewing equipment. All of a sudden, we were the proud new owners of a three-tier gravity-fed homebrew set up (as shown in the picture above - the system relies on gravity to pour liquid from one keg to the next). Driving home, with our new experiment clanging around in the back of the car, we felt ourselves to be the captain’s and chief creators of a new adventure.
That was when, just like a pine cone accelerating toward the earth to plant a new tree, we accelerated into the plumbing and mechanics and artistry of brewing. Well, of course if we make beer then we’ll need bottles to pour our finished product into. If we have bottles then they will certainly need labels. A label is fine but what if ours have a story? What stories would the labels tell? Well, if we’re captains then this brewing experiment must be taking place in the back of our spaceship. Spaceship? Yes, we are traveling across the galaxy, no, the universe, to search for new flavors to throw into our beers. Well why stop at beer? If we can make beer then we can make Kvas! What’s Kvas? Oh it’s this Russian drink that I grew up with. We only bought it for special occasions so to me it always tastes like family, friends, celebration and a bit of indulgence. Ok…Kvas…Kvas…Kvas.. And we’re captain’s of a space ship? Yes. Ok… I guess that makes us…Kvasmonauts? Kvasmonauts! Yes! Brilliant! Can we have code names? Duh! …
That’s how the story of the kvasmonauts was born. Now we just had to figure out how to use the equipment. We launched head first through tubing and gaskets and plumbing and mechanics and sight glasses and temperature gauges and wrenches and chemistry and biology and flavors and it truly felt like falling up.
Summerfall is the first beer we brewed. The Summerfall label proudly honors one of the most magnificent marine mammals, the whale, who is a skillful dancer with gravity. And whether the whale knows it or not, the same moon that lights the ocean nights, also pulls the tides, with gratitude to gravity.
*Truthfully, touch is not a single sensation either. Touch is a combination of the senses of temperature, pressure, pain, light touch, crude touch, and tickle.
**The things we are able to perceive and “sense” goes far beyond the basic 5-7 senses we are taught to attend to. I would also like to add alertness, hunger, thirst, oxygenation, and possibly something akin to “spidey sense” to this list but those warrant different odes. This is about gravity.
