Annual Cali brew cruise
This much I know I love: California Craft Beer Week starts on a Friday and ends on a Tuesday—11 days later.
That’s a helluva week of beer and precisely the kind of math I do after I’ve had a couple of pints (and by a couple, I mean multiply everything I say by a factor of two). This recalls the “fuzzy logic” some mathematicians made vogue in the ’90s, but with more fizz.
Fuzzy logic is “employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false,” according to the mathematical minds of V. Novák, I. Perfilieva and J. Močkoř in their treatise Mathematical Principles of Fuzzy Logic. “Fizzy logic,” from the tragicomical mind of D. Howell, means about the same, but with some local brews, a pinch of deadline anxiety and more press releases from the beloved flack of fizz Jesse P. Cutler than one ever thought possible thrown in.
Nearly a decade ago, I had a gig at Fandom (then Wikia) seeding their beer wiki with beery bon mots. Cutler, if memory serves, secured me media credentials to an early iteration of California Craft Beer Week that was tantamount to scoring one of Bogart’s ill-gotten letters of transit in Casablanca. It meant I had safe passage from the South Park, San Francisco, tech barge and could wade my way to the Isle of Beer and still be on the clock. I remain both grateful and hungover.
When our dear publisher reminded me that the Craft Beer Week was upon us, falling as it does close to our Love & Sex edition, I was confident I could combine the concepts into a single, frothy valentine.
But love of beer is different than love and beer. If they meet in the wrong proportions, they get jealous of one another and the sense of betrayal sounds something like Caesar slurring “Eh, brew, touché?”
If you’re one of a couple and looking for a third in the form of brew, here’s my Fizzy Logic: If a beer can survive in Wine Country, it must boast some kind of evolutionary mutation that makes it worth raising the wrist. I found it in HenHouse Brewing Company’s timely release “Cluck The ’Rona.” This kick-ass Kölsch may not cure Covid, but it will definitely help you survive quarantine (not to mention, help get your craft brew column to the finish line).
Editor Daedalus Howell is the lead singer of Beers for Fears at DaedalusHowell.com.
