Bar Mitzvah Beer

October 25, 2009

By the time I was bar mitzvahed, had I tried beer? Probably a Heineken with my dad or a Moosehead as well. Not a HeBrew, of course, the brewery now celebrating its own bar mitzvah. Since Jeremy Cowan and I are the same age, that would have been impossible. Distribution networks for 13 year old brewers were not what they are today.

13 – as the label of HeBrew’s 13th anniversary Bar Mitzvah beer states, is a magical number. The time of becoming. Becoming a man. Becoming celebrated. 13 is a baker’s dozen. It was Dan Marino’s jersey number. Even though I grew up in Miami, I was never a serious Dolphin’s fan. The methodical chant, “Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins Number 1,” meant little to me. It was merely a posture. A way to claim allegiance to one’s home team. I was neither a Dolphin nor a Hurricane fan.

Hebrew’s 13 is a dark, intense beer where fruit flavors (raisin, cherry) become bourbon and vanilla, two of the number one flavors associated with many “extreme” beers. Extreme beers get our attention. They make us drive to places like Munster, Indiana once a year or post ISO on message boards for what we cannot buy in person.

One cannot mention the beer, however, without mentioning the brewery’s campaign that accompanies the beer. On its website and on the bottle itself, HeBrew features contributed pictures of folks’ bar/bat mitzvah pictures.

HeBrew is the self proclaimed “chosen beer.” It is, we might say, number 1 (or at least, number 1 to itself). To be “chosen” is to position one’s self among the rest of the pack. Nestled among these pictures of smiling kids in their talit and kippot reading the Haftorah (somewhere in the pack) is me.  A major tradition in American, Jewish culture is to take a picture of the bar/bat mitzvah to be, blow it up, and have guests at the reception sign the enlarged picture. My dad took me into our backyard for my picture. I put on my flea market Rolling Stones shirt (with rock and roll pins attached) and picked up a ukulele as substitute for the guitar I did not yet own. My picture was taken:

I cannot remember whose idea it was to put the copy of Tattoo You in the tree.  I am positioning myself as a rock star. I strike a pose. This pose is the pose I repeat here on this blog space once or twice a week. A posed beer photo. A posed idea. A posed almost 13 year old in a suburban backyard (the natural framing of the picture is not natural at all; when, after all, would one stand in front of a tree with a ukulele?). The pose I speak of is the pose on the t-shirt I wear – Mick Jagger strutting or having tattoos superimposed on his face for a cover shot. It is the pose we encounter almost daily on websites like Ratebeer where users feel compelled to state how much a certain beer has or has not lived up to its hype. They are posing. Presenting themselves in a way to attract attention (for good or for bad).

Beer is posing. Taking stances. Modeling. Positioning. Another meaning for pose is to get attention. What are we doing when we write about beer or obsess about beer if not requesting attention? Look at me. Look at what I drank. Look at what I think about what I drank. The bar mitzvah photo, too, is an attention getter. I’m a man. Take my picture.

And that, I am sure, is why I shared my own picture with HeBrew. To get attention. To draw attention. The world of photography, craft beer, and new media is one of attention getting. Web 2.0 is Web 2.me.

Posted in bar mitzvah, beer