Constant A. Nieuwenhuys, known professionally as Constant, was a member of the post-WWII European art movement, CoBrA, founded in Paris 1948. It was named for the homes of its founding members (Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), who included among them artists Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Constant Nieuwenhuys (known simply as Constant) and Ernest Mancoba. An avant-garde art movement that lasted only three years, CoBrA “grew out of the artists’ critical stance toward capitalist production and consumption. As a form of resistance to Western artistic values, they explored the elements and strategies of folk art, children’s art, and art from Africa and the Pacific Islands. Their resulting work was often characterized by bold color and spontaneous brushwork that evoked the brutal nature of the social conditions of the time.”

What on earth has this got to do with beer (aside from the fact of Brussels being in the name of the movement, and its emergence as a successor to the city’s interwar Surrealists) you might ask? Not much, to be honest. But in 1948 Constant set out a manifesto of his and the group’s central ideas, in an article aptly called “Manifesto”. And some of the ideas he sets out in that text (with a little effort) rhyme with some of the issues facing post-modern brewing in 2020 - a return to the “primitive”, a rejection of bourgeois sensibilities and the overweening power of the “genius”, the essential value of freedom to experiment, and the confusion of production in a post-cataclysmic world. Or, maybe they don’t, and this is all navel-gazing intellectualising. I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Manifesto (2020)

With apologies to Constant A. Nieuwenhuys

The dissolution of Western Classical brewing culture is a phenomenon that can be understood only against the background of a social evolution which can end in the total collapse of a principle of society thousands of years old and its replacement by a system whose laws are based on the immediate demands of human vitality. The influence the ruling classes have wielded over the creative consciousness in history has reduced brewing to an increasingly dependent position, until finally the real psychic function of that brewer’s art was attainable only for a few spirits of genius who in their frustration and after a long struggle were able to break out of the conventions of form and rediscover the basic principles of all creative activity.

“Western brewing...turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life.”

Together with the class society from which it emerged, this culture of the individual is faced by destruction too, as the former's institutions, kept alive artificially, offer no further opportunities for the creative imagination and only impede the free expression of human vitality. All the isms so typical of the last fifty years of brewing history represent so many attempts to bring new life to this culture and to adapt its aesthetic to the barren ground of its social environment. Modern craft brewing, suffering from a permanent tendency to the constructive, an obsession with objectivity (brought on by the disease that has destroyed our speculative-idealizing culture), stands isolated and powerless in a society which seems bent on its own destruction. As the extension of a style created for the social elite, with the disappearance of that elite modern craft brewing has lost its social justification and is confronted only by the criticism formulated by a clique of connoisseurs and amateurs.

Western brewing...turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life. But, just as with a social revolution, this spiritual revolution cannot be enticed without conflict. Stubbornly the bourgeois mind clutches on its aesthetic ideal and in a last, desperate effort employs all its wiles to convert the indifferent masses to the same belief. Taking advantage of the general lack of interest, suggestions are made of a special social need for what is referred to as 'an ideal of flavour,' all designed to prevent the flowering of a new, conflicting sense of flavour which emerges from the vital emotions.

It is precisely this act of destruction that forms the key to the liberation of the human spirit from passivity. It is the basic precondition for the flowering of a people's brewing that encompasses everyone. The general social impotence, the passivity of the masses, are an indication of the brakes that cultural norms apply to the natural expression of the forces of life. For the satisfaction of this primitive need for vital expression is the driving force of life, the cure for every form of vital weakness. It transforms brewing into a power for spiritual health. As such it is the property of all and for this reason every limitation that reduces brewing to the reserve of a small group of specialists, connoisseurs, and virtuosi must be removed.

“What we call ‘genius’ is nothing else but the power of the individual to free himself from the ruling aesthetic and place himself above it. As this aesthetic loses its stranglehold, and with the disappearance of the exceptional personal performance, ‘genius’ will become public property and the word ‘brewing’ will acquire a completely new meaning.”

But this people's brewing is not a beer that necessarily conforms to the norms set by the people, for they expect what they were brought up with, unless they have had the opportunity to experience something different. In other words, unless the people themselves are actively involved in the making of beer. A people’s brewing is a form of expression nourished only by a natural and therefore general urge to expression. Instead of solving problems posed by some preconceived sensory ideal, this brewing recognizes only the norms of expressivity, spontaneously directed by its own intuition. The great value of a people's brewing is that, precisely because it is the form of expression of the untrained, the greatest possible latitude is given the unconscious, thereby opening up ever wider perspectives for the comprehension of the secret of life.

In the art of genius too, Western Classical culture has recognized the value of the unconscious, for it was the unconscious which made possible a partial liberation from the conventions which bound brewing. But this could only be achieved after a long, personal process of development, and was always seen as revolutionary. The cycle of revolutionary deeds which we call the evolution of brewing has now entered its last phase: the loosening of stylistic conventions...it signifies the end of brewing as a force of aesthetic idealism on a higher plane than life. What we call 'genius' is nothing else but the power of the individual to free himself from the ruling aesthetic and place himself above it. As this aesthetic loses its stranglehold, and with the disappearance of the exceptional personal performance, 'genius' will become public property and the word 'brewing' will acquire a completely new meaning. That is not to say that the expression of all people will take on a similar generalized value, but that everyone will be able to express himself because the genius of the people, a fountain in which everyone can bathe, replaces the individual performance.

In this period of change, the role of the creative brewer can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty, irksome sensory aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering unconscious in the human mind. The masses, brought up with culinary aesthetic conventions imposed from without, are as yet unaware of their creative potential. This will be stimulated by a brewing which does not define but suggests, by the arousal of associations and the speculations which come forth from them, creating a new and fantastic way of tasting. The drinker’s creative ability (inherent in human nature) will bring this new way of seeing within everyone's reach once aesthetic conventions cease to hinder the working of the unconscious.

“A new freedom is coming into being which will enable human beings to express themselves in accordance with their instincts. This change will deprive the brewer of his special position and meet with stubborn resistance. For, as his individually won freedom becomes the possession of all, the brewer’s entire individual and social status will be undermined.”

Hitherto condemned to a purely passive role in our culture, the drinker will himself become involved in the creative process. The interaction between creator and consumer makes brewing of this kind a powerful stimulator in the birth of the creativity of the people. The ever greater dissolution and ever more overt impotence of our culture makes the struggle of today's creative brewers easier than that of their predecessors - time is on their side. The phenomenon of 'kitsch' has spread so quickly that today it overshadows more cultivated forms of expression, or else is so intimately interwoven with them that a demarcation line is difficult to draw. Thanks to these developments, the power of the old ideals of taste is doomed to decay and eventually disappear and a new brewing principle, now coming into being, will automatically replace them. This new principle is based on the total influence of matter on the creative spirit. This creative concept is not one of the theories or forms, which could be described as solidified matter, but arises from the confrontation between the human spirit and raw materials that suggest forms and ideas.

Every definition of form restricts the material effect and with it the suggestion it projects. Suggestive brewing is materialistic brewing because only matter stimulates creative activity, while the more perfectly defined the form, the less active is the drinker. Because we see the activation of the urge to create as brewing’s most important task, in the coming period we will strive for the greatest possible materialistic and therefore greatest possible suggestive effect. Viewed in this light, the creative act of brewing is more important than that which it creates, while the latter will gain in significance the more it reveals the work which brought it into being and the less it appears as a polished end-product. The illusion has been shattered that a beer has a fixed value: its value is dependent on the creative ability of the drinker, which in turn is stimulated by the suggestion the beer arouses. Only living beer can activate the creative spirit, and only living beer is of general significance. For only living beer gives expression to the emotions, yearnings, reactions and ambitions which as a result of society's shortcomings we all share.

“The problematic phase in the evolution of modern brewing has come to an end and is being followed by an experimental period. In other words, from the experience gained in this state of unlimited freedom, the rules are being formulated which will govern the new form of creativity. Come into being more or less unawares, in line with the laws of dialectics a new consciousness will follow.”

A living brewing tradition makes no distinction between delicious and disgusting because it sets no aesthetic norms. The disgusting which in the brewing of past centuries has come to supplement the delicious is a permanent complaint against the unnatural class society and its aesthetic of virtuosity; it is a demonstration of the retarding and limiting influence of this aesthetic on the natural urge to create. If we observe forms of expression that include every stage of human life, for example that of a child, who has yet to be socially integrated), then we no longer find this distinction. The child knows of no law other than its spontaneous sensation of life and feels no need to express anything else. The same is true of primitive cultures, which is why they are so attractive to today's human beings, forced to live in a morbid atmosphere of unreality, lies and infertility. A new freedom is coming into being which will enable human beings to express themselves in accordance with their instincts. This change will deprive the brewer of his special position and meet with stubborn resistance. For, as his individually won freedom becomes the possession of all, the brewer’s entire individual and social status will be undermined.

Our brewing is the brewing of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era. For this reason it does not conform to the ideals of the first, while those of the second have yet to be formulated. But it is the expression of a life force that is all the stronger for being resisted, and of considerable psychological significance in the struggle to establish a new society. The spirit of the bourgeoisie still permeates all areas of life, and now and then it even pretends to bring brewing to the people (a special people, that is, set to its hand).

But this brewing is too stale to serve as a drug any longer. The chalkings on pavements and walls clearly show that human beings were born to manifest themselves; now the struggle is in full swing against the power that would force them into the straitjacket of a clerk or commoner and deprive them of this first vital need. A beer is not a composition of malt and hops but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these things together. The objective, abstracting spirit of the bourgeois world has reduced brewing to the means which brought it into being; the creative imagination, however, seeks to recognize every form and even in the sterile environment of the abstract it has created a new relationship with reality, turning on the suggestive power which every natural or artificial form possesses for the active drinker. This suggestive power knows no limits and so one can say that after a period in which it meant NOTHING, brewing has now entered an era in which it means EVERYTHING.

“Our brewing is the brewing of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era. For this reason it does not conform to the ideals of the first, while those of the second have yet to be formulated. But it is the expression of a life force that is all the stronger for being resisted, and of considerable psychological significance in the struggle to establish a new society. The spirit of the bourgeoisie still permeates all areas of life, and now and then it even pretends to bring brewing to the people (a special people, that is, set to its hand).”

The cultural vacuum has never been so strong or so widespread as after the last economic catastrophe, when the continuity of decades of cultural evolution was broken by a single jerk of the string. The craft beer evangelists, who in their rejection of the cultural order threw artistic expression overboard, experienced the disillusionment and bitterness of talent become useless in a destructive campaign against industrial brewing, against a society which, though they recognized its responsibility, was still strong enough to be considered as theirs. However, brewers after this calamity see themselves confronted by a world of stage decors and false façades in which all lines of communication have been cut and all hope has vanished. The total lack of a future as a continuation of this world makes constructive thought impossible. Their only salvation is to turn their backs on the entire culture (including modern craft brewing, DDH IPAs and Triple Fruited Sours). In this process of liberation it becomes increasingly apparent that this culture, unable to make artistic expression possible, can only make it impossible. The materialism of these brewers did not lead, as bourgeois idealists had warned, to a spiritual void (like their own?), nor to creative impotence. On the contrary, for the first time every faculty of the human spirit was activated in a fertile relationship with matter. At the same time a process was started in which ties and specific cultural forms which in this phase still played a role were naturally thrown off, just as they were in other areas of life.

The problematic phase in the evolution of modern brewing has come to an end and is being followed by an experimental period. In other words, from the experience gained in this state of unlimited freedom, the rules are being formulated which will govern the new form of creativity. Come into being more or less unawares, in line with the laws of dialectics a new consciousness will follow.

Featured