My beer supply was getting a bit low, so I stopped into a liquor store yesterday looking for a six-pack or two. The glory days of the mid-90’s are long gone, when microbrews had just invaded the scene and were pushing Bud and Miller and Coors back from their dominant position on the shelves. But despite their retreat, most stores here in northern NJ still keep a few micros in stock – there are obviously still a few beer drinkers out there with standards, people who won’t settle for malt-flavored water with plenty of advertisement.

So, I was looking over the refrigerator shelf where the micros still hold out, and I saw something new. Well, actually, that’s not so surprising. The liquor stores around here seem terribly anxious to replace a really well made microbrew (e.g., Shipyard) with some novelty brand that might catch the eye of the Bud crowd, e.g. Three Stooges beer. The new brand I saw yesterday was definitely a novelty item, something meant to sell you on concept and not necessarily on quality. It is called “He’brew Genesis Ale”. Yes, a Jewish Kosher microbrew. Brought to you by the Schmaltz Brewing Company. The label does the Jewish angle to the max. Aside from a drawing of a nerdy rabbi-looking guy with a flat hat and beard waving beer bottles over a synagogue, you have the following inscriptions: “the chosen beer”, “chutzpah never tasted so good”, and “to life! l’chaim!”. The logo is the star of David amidst wheat ears. And then there’s the credo, with elements from the Torah and the Passover table: “Why is this beer different from all other beers? In the beginning …”

Well, I hate the idea of getting suckered into buying a product based on advertising and image. I mean, what is there in all of this that indicates that I’m going to drink a good beer if I plunck down $8 for it? I turned away from the refrigerator door, but something called me back to it. I’m not a Jew, but there’s something about Jewishness and especially Jewish humor that tugs some of my strings. And there was something poetic about the conclusion of the label credo: “may HE’BREW join in the blessings of your lives”. Well, OK, I pluncked down my $8, hoping that I wasn’t being taken in too badly.

I had one with dinner tonight. So how is it? Well, turns out to be a microbrew after all, something much better than the watery lagers that define mainstream American beer tastes. It has a strong nose, an opaque body, a lacy head and a nice, round mouth feel to it. As to the taste, it’s a bit on the hoppy / bitter side, which is not really a bad thing. It reminds me of how the mainstream beers like Piels and Rheingold used to taste back in the early 60s. I was just a kid back then, but my parents used to let me take an occasional sip; I very well remember those bitter hops, the taste of beer before the early 70s when the MBA types started reformulating the traditional brewmaster techniques so as to maximize profits (add more water, less hops, and plenty of highly targeted advertising).

Yea, this is an old world beer, perhaps like what they drank in the ghettos of Berlin and Warsaw before the darkness of the early 20th Century descended. There is substance behind all of the hard sell, significance behind the schmaltz. As with Jewish culture in general. Perhaps I’ll open one up after sundown on April 5th.

Oh, one more thought that relates to Judaism, but also to Islam and to Christianity. The Atlantic had a review of novelist John Buchan, a Scotsman from the early part of the last Century. In one of his international adventure novels (Greenmantle), he was mulling over the fervor of Islamic fundamentalism, apparent even in 1916. He made a point that was bigger than any particular ayatollah, something that addresses the question of why the world’s most influential religions all originated in the Middle East:

“It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror … they want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft.”

Well, I’ll drink to that. But I’ll also keep on praying that the raw spirits emerging from the deserts of austerity can be channeled toward the waters of peace, and away from the wastelands of destruction and death.