white | Literature and Libation

Beer Review: New Belgium Accumulation

December 19, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Despite being completely translucent, snow appears white because the crystal lattices of each flake contain so many tiny facets that they diffuses the entire color spectrum on their way to the ground. It’s like a reverse version of the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon falling lazily from the sky a million times over.

But this winter for me, for once, for real, isn’t about the twinkling aggregation of frozen water that piles up so beautifully on my lawn. It isn’t about the trance inducing schizophrenic blinking of the LEDs framing the houses in my neighborhood. It isn’t about the joyful chorus of Bing and Frank and Dean that floats so nostalgically into my ears from every speaker.

This winter is about fingers and keyboards and quiet clacking long into the night. Words, not snow, will fall this winter.

Despite appearing blank, the white background of a newly opened Word document is actually millions of engineered points producing every color as a literal carte blanche. What looks like nothing, a void of anything, is actually everything, all at once.

But this winter isn’t about empty Word documents, or sullen writers block, or bouts of seasonal affective disorder. It’s not about regret or longing, or trying to find meaning in what was otherwise a pretty bleak year.

This winter is about sharp black letters etched into the flesh of a white form, tens of thousands in little lines like mustering soldiers, all waiting their turn to see the front lines.

Despite being called white, a white IPA is more of an opaque gold, giving new meaning to the idea of yellow snow. White IPA is a marriage of the complexity of high hoppage and the effervescence of a wit, all while retaining a singular, unique identity that nods to both styles but lives as neither.

But this winter isn’t about trying to identify as something that already exists. It isn’t about assimilating, or conforming, or finding comfort in the protection of the familiar.

This is a winter of words, of intent, of future; watching my words pile up in drifts, watching the bubbles rise in my glass like an upside down blizzard, watching them accumulate at the top like a pristine, un-walked-through blanket of perfect white.

This is a winter of trying new things. Starting now.

Craft and Draft: The Write to Read

February 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Quick, what are you reading right now?

Aside from this blog post, I mean.

What is in the buffer of your reading RAM? What book invades your dreams from the comfort of your nightstand? What novel takes up precious space and weight in your laptop bag? What magazines and periodicals live in a neat little pile on the top of your toilet tank? What websites sit in your navigation bar for quick and easy access?

If you expect to be a good writer, you should have answers to these questions ready to spring from your literary lips. Mine are, respectively: The Love of Hops by Stan Hieronymus, Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, Smithsonian/Nat Geo, New York Times/The New Yorker/The Atlantic (and to a lesser extent, for the social aspect, Fark.com).

To channel and butcher Jack Lalanne – “Writing is king, reading is queen, put them together and you’ve got a kingdom.”

Reading is fundamental.

It is also mandatory.

Fortunately, most writers find the reading side of craft the “easy part.” We’re often guided into the world of writing by the gentle hand of reading, wanting to emulate our favorite authors, tell our own stories. I even know some writers who have the reverse problem to mine, they read significantly more than they write, and have a hard time making the transition from consuming to creating.

I admittedly do not read enough, even though I feel like I read a lot. It took going to grad school and interacting with other aspiring writers to realize that I was woefully under-read. Despite my years of studying literature in undergrad and reading for fun and self-edification in my free time, I discovered that I had so much more to read. I had missed out on champions of our art – Joan Didion, John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese – and my writing was worse for it. I thought that the amount and quality of what I was reading was perfectly satisfactory until I realized how much more successful, published writers were reading.

I came to accept that if I wanted to really take my writing from rookie to veteran, maybe some day earn a coveted MVW (Most Valuable Writer) award, I needed to start reading with purpose and artistic abandon.

But if you’re like me, brain packed and racked with obligations that push reading further and further from list of things you have time to do, you’re forced to be picky. You try to only read the best of the best, but deciding what is objectively best can be challenging, especially if your tastes lie outside the spectrum of the usual New York Times bestselling fare. It takes careful research and meetings with other readers to find what is worth your time and will best improve your own writing.

Our go-round on this planet is tragically short. Even if we devoted our entire lives to turning pages, we couldn’t even put a dent in the total text available. We’re forced to make choices about what we read, or if we should read, in a world filled with infinite distractions and alternatives to reading. Some stuff will get left behind. You won’t be able to read everything you want to read. But if you’re going to be a serious writer, you’ll have to make some hard choice, and you’ll have to turn yourself into a serious reader.

To try otherwise is just silly. It’d be like a chef who doesn’t taste what he’s cooking or an athlete who never practices outside of her events.

When you read a book, you’re not just taking in another writer’s opinions and style. You’re actively digesting the culmination of the entire writing process. A published book has been written and rewritten, edited by outsiders, edited by the author, marketed and branded, labeled and decorated, hammered into a work of gradable quality. Each and every essay and article in a periodical passes the probing eyes of an editor, and has suffered the torture of countless revisions.

When you read you are learning what it means to write in a publishable way, inhaling the intoxicating ether that billows up from writing deemed strong enough for public consumption. It is this ether that you should cherish and bottle, taking little sniffs of it every time you sit down to write. You have to appreciate the magical convoluted voodoo that goes into a completed piece of writing, and be able to break it into its baser parts.

And really, you should be reading because it is the reason us crazy writers spend all this time at the keyboard in the first place. We (with a few exceptions, I’m sure) write to be read, and reciprocation is just the decent thing to do. You can’t expect other people to read your stuff if you refuse to read other people’s stuff. It’s writing community service. Most other writers are just like you, laboring diligently, sweating in their fields of text, hoping they can sell their goods in their little roadside stand on the internet.

Be a good member of the community and read. Your art (and your friends) will thank you for it.

(One of) My humble bookshelf(ves)

Review: Harpoon White UFO

April 11, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

As I stood staring out at the blue of Deep Creek Lake, cold wind ripping at my exposed flesh, water lapping aggressively against the shore, I heard the voice of the depths. It whispered to me its secrets; long untold tales of souls lost to its icy waves, ancient mysteries that lay in the murk and darkness of the lake bed. The voice echoed infinitely in my ears, like each individual drop was telling me the story of its journey to the clouds and suicidal plunge back to the Earth. For that brief moment I knew nature, and it knew me. I was at peace, and knew zen.

Either that, or I had been drinking. Heavily.

I was in fact standing on the lake shore; I nearly fell in twenty different times. The wind did indeed rip at my exposed flesh; I had forgotten my coat and decided wearing two hoodies was just as good. And I really did think I heard the voice of the lake, but in retrospect, it could have been the fizzy-popping of the Harpoon White Unfiltered Offering (UFO) in my hand.

I love Harpoon Brewery. There is no other way to describe my attraction and relationship to their beers. They are cute a giggly, charming and warm. I’m pretty sure it is illegal to date a beer (or brewery) otherwise, I may have tried by now.

While Harpoon IPA (heart) is the flagship of this Boston-based brewing company, their UFO line (available in White, Raspberry, Pale Ale, and Hefeweizen) is something special. While I usually avoid wheat beers in an attempt to avoid yeast-related illness (my uvula tends to get all ornery when exposed to too much yeast) these are the exception. I tried the Raspberry variety first and I was hooked.

The idea of adding fruit to beer is arguably the single greatest anthropological advance in human history.

UFO White is a Belgian White style, unfiltered, sour, and thirst quenching. Other popular Belgian whites (namely Blue Moon) rely heavily on orange alone to add a citrus burst to their beer, but UFO White doesn’t. It adds lemon, creating and incredibly potent cirtusy beer that will probably meet or exceed your vitamin C intake for the day.

It pours with almost no lasting head, but leaves a pretty lacing of white across the top of orange-yellow body. It’s a particularly noisy beer; fizzing aggressively with little bubbles jumping wildly, trying to escape the glass.

This is a great conversation beer, as you can drink it as casually as a glass of orange juice. If you drink enough of it, you could probably even talk to things that can’t normally talk. Like lakes.

8.75 out of 10.

This picture makes it look warm outside. It was not warm outside.

Next up: Brooklyn East India Pale Ale!