Malt Life
The joy of DIY
I’ve been getting a slow start to 2024. More specifically, I’ve been slow in getting back into regular writing and social media stuff. Besides editing the Amy Belfi episode for Talking Writing and doing more interviews, I’ve been writing and practicing music a lot, and working on the video components of the first part of the Weird Music performance. Oh, and bedtimes have been a mess since the holidays; we’re only just getting back into a normal routine.
Two Fridays ago (1/19), school was cancelled (as well as Olivia’s work, although she had a meeting and a few things to catch up on), so I decided to brew beer, which I haven’t done in about a year. When it snowed on the previous Tuesday and Wednesday, the cold and the feeling of being trapped inside by all the white made me want to fire up the stove. I’ve had all the brewing ingredients just sitting around and haven’t been able to put aside the time, so I used the feeling as a prompt to get the mill going. As soon as Friday’s school cancellation was announced, I knew I was going in.
I started brewing sometime around 2016 when I got a kit from my sister- and brother-in-law. I got hooked quickly, and started getting deeper and deeper into it over the next couple years. When Henry was born, I tapered off but still did it occasionally. Once the pandemic hit, I went back into it and didn’t purchase beer for two solid years. Last year I was really trying to push Weird Music out the door and it again fell by the wayside.
My recent brew day looked like this: I got the mash going in the morning and then took Henry out sledding. We came back and I set it up to start boiling while we had lunch. During the boil, I exercised and prepped for cooling the wort. As it cooled I hung out with Henry and then had a bit of a hectic moment trying to get it into the fermenter and pitch the yeast with Henry calling me to play with him.
The analogy between art and brewing in my life is easy for me to see. Neither makes sense when put to a cost benefit analysis against spending that same time working, but both give me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that I don’t always get from work I do for others. I think it goes down to the core of the fact that I like making things. I like to be able to enjoy something and think to myself, “I made that. I saw it through from beginning to end and created something.”
And with both pursuits, I have to fit it into my life and around my more important responsibilities. It can’t dominate, or it becomes maladaptive.
Cooking is probably a more common version of the same impulse, although cooking for yourself actually is very cost effective. When I was in my twenties and my finances were somewhat emaciated, cooking was the first thing that I started doing regularly to serve myself, and I think it created a paradigm for me that has continued to today. Instead of following the structure of spending most of my time working so that I can buy goods and services provided by other people, I’d rather work less for someone else and work harder on elevating my standard of living through my own unpaid effort.
Renovating my own house, staying at home with Henry, making my own music, cooking my own food, and brewing my own beer are all ways of directly improving my own life.
