More musings on Hobbies + I brewed beer today
Beers in various stages of fermentation next to my toilet
It seems obvious that having routine check-ins or hangs allows for friendships to be built. But additionally, having some external thing that sets the endpoint of a hang is also key – it removes a layer of unknown to a “hang” – namely, when should I be doing something else, or am I infringing or whatever… It allows one to push those thoughts off until that task is complete. And hopefully, that endpoint is far enough in the future, that some depth can be explored and a friendship can be born.
Chris and I began brewing together back in 2011(?) and had a good 6 year period where we pushed this hobby from a small kitchen operation to a high tech 10 gallon system that was pumping out kegged beer for a small startup in Pioneer Square. We made amazing brews, caught our brewery on fire, got laundry soap in a beer but drank it anyways, ran a cool bar/music venue in my garage, explored chemistry and sour beers and aging in barrels. Lots of cool milestones. But ultimately, we spent 5-8 hours on a single day together every 2 weeks.
Brewing ultimately petered out in 2016 after a series of bad beers and no space to brew (apartments). I sold off the beer equipment and was fine if I never brewed again. Chris and I slowly grew more distant as well. Other hobbies and pursuits consumed our lives, we had less to talk about. It seemed that a friendship built entirely on a context would need a context to continue to enrich it.
At this time I was feeling pretty down about friends. My closest confidants had all decided to move away. Chris and my relationship never got very deep into emotional struggles so he never was a confidant – my attempts at taking it there were fairly unsuccessful, but at least until this point, I had accepted that as the limit of that friendship. However, with a lack of good friends to speak my mind to, I began to resent this about Chris. His tendency to talk a lot started to grate on me. “Couldn’t he just ask me some questions about me?” I was emotionally needing that type of friend and didn’t really have it. So this continued for a while, then right before Covid, his girlfriend broke up with him for essentially the same concerns – I felt validated for sure. When Covid hit it could really go either way for me on the friendship. So I let the friendship drop, with a test whether Chris would call me at all. We didn’t contact each other for a year.
Then as we emerged from Covid round 1, I butt dialed Chris. My emotional needs for friends had changed a lot by this time and the space and loneliness of Covid was a reset on my spite. Chris also had changed, he had been working hard on being less of a nervous talker, and tried asking more questions regularly. So here we are, somehow and I don’t even know how, brewing beer again after 5 years, hanging out for 5-8 hours every 2 weeks, but the dynamic has definitely changed. The emotional depth of the friendship is increasing. A new chapter of friendship once again enabled by this thing that is forcing us to be in each other’s presence until that thing is over.
Brewing Beer:
Chris and I are re-brewing some of our favorites from back in the day. Today we made the locally world famous “Honey Bucket Pale Ale” which gets its name from the 1lb of honey in every batch :).
Funnily enough we are trying really hard to get by with almost no gear and no science whatsoever. Essentially we are trying to unhobby the hobby actively, reduce it down to essential parts. We are aiming for consistency and ease of production. We are still iterating thus we are in hobby mode still. We sometimes muse on getting more stuff or exploring more “upgrades” or processes since we did it in the past and know exactly what to do, but then we just say “nah, let’s not complicate this”.
In a way we are making it more about the hang.
