In the Before Times, we had a party. Beer and cake and food and frivolity. Despite our daily exhaustion at trying to manage a household, twin careers, and this particular political point in history, we had a blast hosting our besties, finding conviviality in commiserating over current events.
What hit me, as the guests and music dissipated into memory, was not how much fun was had, but rather how neatly we had put a bow on another year. Promotions, new projects, unexpected challenges all wrapped up, tidily, the last present in the pile. The party was as much celebration as it was permission to move on to the next phase. It was a liminal moment—a transformative, transitionary point from which we could grow.
Liminality is an anthropological explanation for the psychological middle, a staircase between states of being. First described by Arnold Van Gennep in his 1909 work, Les Rites de Passage, liminality makes up the emotional and sociological basis of humanistic rituals, and the personal transformation contained therein. Van Gennep broke these rituals down into three phases: rites of separation that include a metaphorical death; transition rites that involve an established pattern or order, and are overseen by a master of ceremonies or other leader; and rites of incorporation, where the person going through the rite emerges on the other side, changed.
A diet version of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey, liminal phases bring meaning to an otherwise arbitrary reality, laying the foundations that make up life as we know it. Without milestones to mark, to stop, to analyze, life would be an endless, unchanging march into sweet oblivion. We need to build context and structure to justify sentient existence. Ever stop to consider why we celebrate birthdays? Anniversaries? Quinceañeras?
By the time you’re 40, imagine how many rites of passage you’ve been party to. At least 40 birthdays. Countless weddings, bar/t mitzvahs, retirements, graduations, divorces, funerals. Such activities underpin our existence. We may not actively consider them, but there they lie: between the conscious and the unconscious, as obvious and invisible as the breaths that get us through the day.
Without them, we are amorphous: a story with no teller.
I’ve long sought a “why” for beer. Why has a puddle of fermented grains and flowers interjected itself so continuously and relentlessly in virtually every society for our entire recorded history? The “it gets you drunk” theory is lazy and unsatisfying. The “community and culture” angle is much more metaphysically nutritious, but it lacks a certain lizard-brain answer that justifies the human investment in an agricultural byproduct for literal millennia.
I’ve invested a lot of myself into what—without examination—is just a drink. At times I feel guilty that my life’s work hasn’t been committed to a greater altruistic good. If beer has no purpose beyond consumption, am I living a life of fleeting fun, my legacy wilting on the bine, never to be picked?
Fortunately, I don’t think so.
Beer does matter. It’s an economic cornerstone of humanity, but beyond that, our beer-drinking rituals are liminoid, meaning they have the characteristics of a full liminal experience (only without the profound, life-altering conclusion that leads to personal transformation). Coffee and other drinks have similar liminoid structures, but there’s a cultural sprezzatura—a casual nonchalance—that hides beer’s immense importance.
A cellar full of beers feels like a ruin. All those potential moments and memories, literally bottled up, collecting dust. Beer is made to be consumed, and holding it in limbo feels ignoble. Like an abandoned building—purpose long lost to history—a collector’s hoard of bottles is haunted by what could have been.
Much of being a good bartender is theater. A warm welcome, a flair on the pull, enshrining the sanctity of the serve. Guinness has its two-part pour, Stella Artois a knifed chalice, Czech Lagers rustic side-pours. Those beers that have established themselves as liminal superpowers understand the importance of the trappings of a ritual, and build it into their identity.
The fabled pint at an Irish pub has everything to do with what happens around the beer. While the quality of the draft is nigh mandatory, it’s the atmosphere and context that make that particular pint such a rarefied ideal. People strive for the perfect pint because it contains the formula for a perfect moment. A perfect memory. A meaning marker.
What we’ve lost in our unplanned hiatus from bars isn’t about flavor or the beer itself. It’s about those moments that help define our relationships to others and to ourselves.
That last email flees the outbox. You’re free, at least for a geological blink. The ritual begins.
We are Sisyphus. We are Tantalus. Never satisfied, the failures of our collective days seek resolution, which we in turn seek through liminal microtransactions: pints at the pub.
Friday rolls around, its eager little belly pressed up against the bar, trying to get Saturday’s attention. Sloughing off a week’s worth of life is no easy task, but with that first order, that first draw of independence, the stress drops off in dangerous sheets, like snow from the top of a semi.
Taking glass in hand signifies a change—you’re no longer work you. You’re weekend you. Vacation you. Perhaps the real you, or at least, the less confined you.
Each beer is a microstory, a liquid cairn marking that point in time, a tether to here, now. The time it takes to drink 12-to-20 ounces gives us time to reflect, to talk, to bond and banter. The carbonation ticks an unnoticed clock, giving the ritual structure, limits. The bartender guides the entire rite, trusted, quite casually, to bring order to the swirling chaos of the human mind.
We die and are born in each pint. We enter the bar as one person, and exit another—not because of the drink itself, but rather, the act of taking time to transition between parts of ourselves. Changed through our communion: culturally, emotionally, spiritually. Beer is context. A catalyst. A connector. A point to link who we were to who we are, and ultimately, who we hope to be.
Bubbles cascading through a glass shimmer with the faceted soul of humanity: a wink from a wedding, a wish from a birthday, a welcome from a birth. While the major liminal events get all of the attention, we define ourselves with little moments. We mold ourselves to meaning, borne on ethyl alcohol and fruity esters. Filling our days is as simple as filling our glasses, sharing a joke, splitting an appetizer.
Life would be exhausting—if not downright impossible—if every day were packed to the pillows with life-changing meaning.
Beer’s crucial role is not gustatory or anesthetic, but rather, philosophical. Those shared beers—clinked glasses—circles of condensation left on the bar—are building blocks. The tiny blocks fill in the gaps between the larger ones and, cumulatively, build the outline of a person.
Without our everyday rituals, we’re full of holes.
And holey people leak.
