| EDITOR’S NOTE |
DO YOUR BEERS SING? Anyone who has been listening or reading for long enough knows I’m a student of the creative process. Understanding why and how brewers make creative and technical decisions about the beers they design and brew is something I never get tired of exploring.
That interest doesn’t stop at brewing, however, and over the past few decades I’ve put similar energy into exploring the creative work of musicians, of fine artists, and of craftspeople. The impulses are similar in all of these fields, from the idea to execution, and viewing creativity as this continuum can unlock new ways of solving problems.
That’s why I was so enamored with the new Beatles documentary Get Back, available on Disney+ and directed by Peter Jackson. Thanksgiving proved the perfect weekend to binge watch all three episodes, and anyone who works through their own creative struggles in any field whatsoever should immediately add it to their viewing queue.
What we see is a group of creative people at work, with different motivations and diverging interests, who are also highly aware of the expectations placed on them and their duty to deliver on and above those expectations. But the most incredible thing to watch was how some of the songs that we have received fully formed, produced and placed in albums, had to endure a long period of iteration, change, and development.
Listening now, we know the songs and have a canonical idea of what the production should be because the album version is the one we’re familiar with. But as the documentary lays out clearly, that final form is an illusion—a brief capture of the song at that moment, filtered through the post-production lens of the producer. Songs, then, are never “done.” As long as the artist plays them, they change. Guitars and amps change. A singer’s voice changes. Musical context changes. And great artists are always looking for that thing that adds something magical and memorable to the performance of a song.
The songs the Beatles wrote weren’t divinely inspired; they started with loose ideas and were honed into what we now know of them. Some ideas popped up but were shelved for the time being, only to show up later. Iconic songs may not have made the cut for the current album because the songwriters had a sense that they could make it better and needed to give it time.
Likewise, the energy of a new player (in the case of the Beatles, Billy Preston) changed the dynamics and brought a new energy to the group’s collaboration.
The analogies for brewing should be obvious here, of course. Beer is creative work in motion, always changing with ingredients, time, and people. Perfection doesn’t happen from the start, but it’s achieved through work. And adding the right spark of talent to the team at the right time can make a group as talented as the Beatles even better.
If you love the creative process as much as I do, you owe it to yourself to watch. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this issue that we’ve constructed to showcase how brewers are engaging in the same creative processes. After all, we made it for you.