Freya’s Magic Stick

AFFORDABILITY: Freya’s Magic Stick is a homebrew we made that I concocted completely on my own, the first time I’ve imagined up a beer recipe. Basically after listening to the new Burzum record too much while falling asleep, I got into Norse mythology, and started learning about gruit ales made in that region of the earth. Gruits are flavored and bittered with herbs instead of hops, to this day in fact, made in big fucking pots and meant to drink sooner rather than later because it don’t last well. Apparently the types of herbs used - juniper berries, sweet gale, mugwort - they can be mildly psychotropic as well (that is not a juggalo vacation spot, although I guess actually it is). I did some poking and prodding inside the internet, read about old ladies who kept the same stick of juniper for stirring their beer that the yeasts would actually live on, so they called it a magic stick, because it magically fermented beer, and if you moved often times someone would give you a special stick to take with you on your move from the old village. All this was happening the same time I trimmed the fuck out of a juniper bush at the end of our driveway, so I had gotten way up in that bush and become close to it, feeling its branches, and I wanted to cook up some of it into a gruit ale. I also trimmed up a link of it for my own magic stick (which is currently drying out to take all the bark off of and then carve cryptic designs all over with my wife, so it should be ready by the fall). After all the planning and recipe conjuring, I went to the Fermentation Trap place up in Ruckersville to get ingredients for this and another batch. The defense intelligence dudes who had owned it as a hobby business apparently sold it to some upwardly mobile redneck dude who used to build houses. He didn’t seem to be as well-versed in the home beer shit, but he was a decent dude. Still though, the total runs the fuck up in a place like that, and the fucking ingredients for this beer alone, I’d guess were like $80. Being we got 27 big bottles of beer out of it, that’s about $3 a goddamned bottle. I guess that’s cheap for those big bottles, comparable at least to big Guinnesses or Red Stripes or whatever. But still... $80? I was like, “WTF Ceva?” 1 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: There is a certain craziness to this beer, there is no denying. My man Mike Gee was over last week so we could record some wack ass thirty-something white guy freestyles against the world’s better judgement, and I told him up front, “This beer tastes like ass, but it tears you up in a strange way.” He didn’t think it tasted so bad, more like a shot of Goldschlager than a beer, and yes, it tore us up. By the end of the evening we were doing some stupid rap bullshit that has already been deleted from my goddamned laptop. Tonight though, I plan on taking a bottle of this Freya’s Magic Stick (with mad head, by the way, you have to open it in a pan because it overflows, and overflow is sticky like honey) and kicking it out on the sitting stump by the pigs, who hopefully have not escaped yet. They are trying their best, and should be slaughtered in the next week I’d say. I am not looking forward to figuring out how to move 550 pounds of pig, so perhaps I’ll get drunk when I have to do that, get my berserker nature on, and suplex them motherfuckers into the back of my truck. Also, I’d like to say that everything I’ve ever learned about fixing cars has been because I don’t feel comfortable paying so much for another man to do it - it upsets my alpha male internals. I can vouch that before I drop $250 to get the next pair of pigs slaughtered, I’m gonna buy me some slaughtering equipment and do that shit myself next time. Fuck paying some dude to do some shit that I ought to be able to do myself. Plus, if I do it myself, I can mix in pig blood with the berserker beer to try and turn myself into a wolfman. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Usually we had printed out our shit with wacky fonts on white labels, but the day we were at the Wal-Marts looking for label paper, which was a frustrating experience since all sticker paper is like pre-sized now to mail out Christmas cards or shipping labels or some shit. I just want blank full sheets of sticker paper, motherfucker. But as I dug quickly through the office supply aisle while the middle kid wanted to go look at toys and the youngest kid was just screaming to not actually be in the seat of the shopping cart anymore, and I found sheets split into two halves what were recycled paper looking brown, so I boughted it. Being the Magic Stick is some Scandinavian bullshit, we went with a retarded olde world font, typed that bama up, and made labels. I have a big box full of vinyl I took from an old job that would've been used for printing letters for vehicles or signs or whatever, and I didn't really steal it so much as organize the vinyl room and ask the boss if I could have all the scraps that needed to be thrown away. He was like "sure" because he was stoked somebody was organizing a messy corner of his life, so I ended up with what probably amounts to a couple thousand dollars worth of vinyl sticker scraps that have lasted my personal vinyl sticker needs for nearly a decade now. Anyways, our Bird Tribe Brewery homebrewing label style is to print out a label with the name and bottling date, and then have some sort of shape of a certain color of vinyl sticker material go across a corner or edge of the label in the same way on all the bottles of the batch. My thinking behind this, because all the most retarded things in my house come from my thinking, for bestest or worst, is the big homebrew bottles we clean out and use again would eventually have layers of watered out labels and colored pieces of vinyl all over it, gradually buried by the long existence of each individual bottle in various homebrews over the years of my stupid life. This obviously makes it all great, because it increases the bizarre magic of my every day life. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Nothing can ever be my corporate master unless we enter a post-Apocalyptic world where corporations involve wearing leather jackets with the sleeves cut off with rusty steak knives and living in structures made of crudely stacked rocks. And though I am a slave to many things in this little life of mine, to one solitary corporation I am not. Though I guess if you think about the many-tentacled beast and how it always is trying to slap a new headlock on a dude like me, then I guess I am a slave. Which is why I drink nasty tasting mildly hallucinogenic homebrews. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Freya's Magic Stick tastes terrible, but the culture it comes from, and is somewhere beneath the electronic buzz at the surface of my life, deep down in my bone marrow and blood stream, it makes me tolerate it. I have been drinking this stuff more like a sipping tea that is cold than a beer, and it wonkifies me good enough. I have to admit, this batch turned out so left field-ish that I have become nervous of trying to correct it and making another beer flavored and bittered without hops, but I will. And I will try to add more psychedelic properties as well. I want a beer that makes me feel like Fox cartoon notions of drug abuse are drawn out eventually. And corporate beer will never give this to me. And microbrewed beers are simply corporate-minded individuals making beer on a smaller level to get their hands a little dirtiers and feel like they are still attached to the end product. It is all bullshit, and this beer has none of that to it. This is beer brewed in my kitchen, fermented in my hallway, and stirred with a stick from the bush beside my driveway. And if it becomes absolutely terrible tasting (which it is getting close to), then I'll feed it to my pigs the Friday night before slaughter. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 STARS!