We’re voracious consumers of culture. And each week, a member of our team shares the words, images, and beers that inspired them.

READ.// “Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways. Even as QR code technology threatens to render printed menus obsolete, it occurred to me that nothing can replace the texture and poetry of a physical menu.” Many post-COVID behaviors are likely here to stay, and many for good reason. But it’s important to understand what’s potentially been lost to the grinder of technology and efficiency, as Adam Reiner’s story in Taste about menu collections demonstrates. A friend of mine collects menus from memorable meals (he asks first, and often requests signatures), and over the years I’ve seen his walls come alive with the framed poetry of those meals and memories. The effect is like the flash of a novel unfolding in the second that your brain clocks the title on the book’s spine up on the shelf. I’ve since taken to collecting my own menus—these little memory wormholes—as a result.

Perhaps just as important as the personal stories is the access to the past in an historical sense, which is something breweries could also keep in mind. So many of the in-the-moment decisions we make in hospitality add up over time to reveal the patterns of our food and drink cultures, however transitory they may seem at first. Something the next generation may cherish.

LOOK.// Kurt Herrmann graduated art school a few years ahead of me at Lock Haven University in Central Pennsylvania. I got to know him as one of the few examples of a peer who’d “made it,” mostly because he stayed in the area after he graduated and would come to student shows to chat about what everyone was working on. He was quiet and almost invisible, skulking around the galleries—hardly a celebrity grad who often steals the show.

Over the years I’ve become more and more drawn to his particularly playful, otherworldly interpretations of those Pennsylvania rivers and mountains that still sing inside my own body. And his latest series, an explicit celebration of the Appalachians that’s currently on exhibit at the Octavia Art Gallery New Orleans, captures so much of what those forests, rocks, and waters often feel like when they’re filled with birdsong, sunshine, and the riot and rush of spring.

DRINK.// Burial Beer Co.’s Rust Vienna-Style Lager
Drier and a bit sharper than most, this Vienna Lager trades in a bit of the comforting vibes the often-too-flabby versions of this style hold onto in exchange for a brighter, drier, more brisk finish—to great effect. I often enjoy beers like this around a fire, and this one seems to embody a bit of that crackling flame all on its own.