Playing God with Single Celled Organisms is More Complex Than I Thought- Brian McFadden

Until two months ago, I was an average college student, satisfied with using my key-chain mounted bottle opener to crack open a mass produced bottle of beer. I had never really given any thought to how exactly beer was made. Sure, I knew there were some large kettles, fermentation, yeast cultures, etc...But I never really thought about how it all came together. Beer, in essence, was a delicious end product that I paid "too much" for at local establishments and grocery stores whenever my mini-fridge ran dry.

When I discovered this class had an option for beer brewing as part of the course, I was elated. My desire to learn "hands on" and my previous knowledge of cooking made me confident that I could brew a decent beer. I found two partners, helped to write out a proposal, and off we went.

I went down to my basement ( I am the only member of our group to live in a house with a sufficiently private and dark basement) and found the location photographed above to be suitable. However, the blurriness of the image, in my mind, directly relates to just how hard it was to truly understand this project. My basement was always a basement, until it became a basement with 10 gallons of beer being brewed within it that needed to be kept un-oxygenated, unmolested, sanitized, temperature controlled, monitored, regulated, and transferred and processed in a timely manner. My basement will never be the same.

Of course, jumping in head first seemed like a good idea at the time. I left Charlie Papazian's "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing 3rd Edition" sitting idly in the box of equipment we purchased for the Wine and Hop shop on Monroe. It never occurred to me that, oh, you know, they gave us the book for a reason!
That night in late September, our group set forth in producing our first beer, a Brown ale, whose ingredients were purchased from the Wine and Hop Shop.

Though later posts will discuss in great detail the processes which we used to create our beers, I feel that it would be helpful if I described some of my overall feelings towards this project:

The title of this blog to me is a both a parody and an homage to the quote from 1 Corinthians 13, "Through a Glass Darkly". As I have always interpreted the quote, I believe that the concept of "God" is that of uncertainty. We do not see God within magnifying glasses, binoculars, or through microscopes...Yet society throughout it's history has claimed that God is inherently present in all of these places. Without a tool to truly analyze and understand the Almighty, society was left analyzing the images they perceived as "Godly" or "of God", trying to piece together an endless puzzle.

This project, by a method of role reversal (however blasphemous), has allowed us to play God. Yeast is our society. Beer is their environment. Together, the yeast face environmental and population pressures which we ourselves cannot interpret precisely enough to intervene in order to produce our desired outcomes. We merely set the ball forth rolling, and were forced to sit back and watch quietly through the dark, murky, swirling primitive soup. The lesson itself is not biblical (nor do I intend on elaborating any further on the nature of religion in the absence of understanding, it is merely my framework) in nature, but rather, it is a social construct that seems to befit the situation, as it fits many other so well.

This project, by a method of role reversal (however blasphemous), has allowed us to play God. Yeast is our society. Beer is their environment. Together, the yeast face environmental and population pressures which we ourselves cannot interpret precisely enough to intervene in on, in order to produce our desired outcomes. We merely set the ball forth rolling, and are forced to sit back and watch quietly through the dark, murky, swirling primitive soup. The lesson itself is not biblical (nor do I intend on elaborating any further on the nature of religion in the absence of understanding, it is merely my framework) in nature, but rather, it is a social construct that seems to befit the situation, as it fits many other so well.

If I am God, then this is Adam and Eve...and 999,999,999,998 of their closest relatives