A shout-out to the Brewers

Not the Milwaukee baseball team.

Is there a more thankless job than Brewer at a microbrewery? You have to lug tons of heavy shit around all day, spend half your time up to the elbows in caustic as you sanitize, work around huge boiling vats even in the middle of summer, and deal with high waitstaff turnover that could give fuck-all about what you labor to create.

At the same time, the place where you work is always on the edge of closure, the owner only cares about maximizing profit so you're working all hours of the night. The owner thinks he's a brewmaster, so he's fucking with your recipes and criticizing your procedures. You're lucky to have the tiniest bit of health insurance, if any, and your place of employment could close down with no notice at any time.

Groupies? Yeah, you get them. 50 year old men with scraggly Jerry Garcia beards and graphing calculators peeking out of a shirt pocket, who always want a tour of the cramped dungeon you call a brewery, and go on for hours about every other beer they've ever swilled before pedalling away on their recumbent bicycles.

Yet you keep making beer.

Hey, brewers, thanks for loving beer and loving your craft. The job might be a pain sometimes, but some of us out there appreciate the way you guys do it.