Barn Brewing

Morning meanders — rowing on Lake Champlain or cycling the Adirondack foothills, for example — offer much more than an aerobic and aesthetic jumpstart to the day. Heavy breathing. Beauty. Perfect prologue for peripatetic sorts (such as yours truly.) But prologue to what? Lately, especially when gravel biking backroads and byways, my morning meanders have been barn brewing meditations…

Rosslyn Redux habitués will note that my barn-ish palavering occasionally borders on obsessive. My interest undergirds not only our Rosslyn backstory, but also an enduring architectural bias that inspires my brainstorms for a future homebase, a successor to Rosslyn.

I’m not a barn expert, an agricultural architecture preservationist, or even a particularly astute student of barns and farms. But I am a barnophile. (Source: A Barnophile of Bygone Barns)

And as an unabashed barnophile my morning bike-a-bouts provide plenty of ideas and ingredients — bygone barns pop up everywhere along the Adirondack Coast — to inspire my barn brewing.

Barn vernacular,
so utilitarian
and so efficient.
— Geo Davis, “Barn Vernacular Haiku” (Source: Toward a Barn Vernacular)

The barn endures as a practical yet proud icon of rural living. First and foremost a utility structure, the barn evolved to maximize usability while prioritizing efficient construction, cost, and maintenance. (Source: Toward a Barn Vernacular)

(NB: Regarding the photo above, double-sloped roofs (gambrel roofs) appeal to me less than gable roofs, but the practical benefit — maximizing interior space — is foundational to barn design.)

It’s tempting to explain my barn attraction as being rooted first and foremost in the utilitarian practicality. That’s *part* of the puzzle. But there’s more. Wabi-sabi wonder, ample volumes, tantalizing textures, and — full disclosure now — not an insignificant endowment of nostalgia.

Woven into the earliest tapestries of my childhood are fond associations with barns. (Source: A Barnophile of Bygone Barns)

I’ve waxed wordy on my youthful associations with barns elsewhere, so no redundant recap now. Instead a mini meditation on barn brewing borrowing from beer, coffee, and storms. Think optimal inputs mingling and coalescing, fermented or compressed, and possibly-eventually maturing into the perfect quaff, the perfect storm,… the perfect plan.

Barn Brewing

I bicycle back roads 
gathering ingredients —
     rusty rustica and 
     practical layouts,
     fenestration and forms
     floating in fields,
     timbers and trusses,
     pitches and massing
     in overgrown meadows,
     textures and shadows,
     silos and barn doors
     in reforested barnyards —
vestiges perduring  
from forgotten farms. 

Suddenly senses
snap to attention —
     air storm-charged and
     thunder rumbling,
     a grinder exhaling
     aromatic rhymes from
     roasted coffee beans,
     the hint of hops and
     mash mingling
     as wort wonders,
     awaiting straining —
and inspiration steeps
potentiality.

Here I veer, unable to capture and contain and convey. Unable to lay bare the beams, lift the loft, suspire open space out of memory and into three dimensions, distilling enduring artifacts into a cohesive and inevitable whole. An executable plan.

Filtering and refining, I clarify or *try* to clarify as the brewer strains wort and the barista presses steam swollen grounds. Fermenting. Percolating. Patient. Too patient. Or not patient enough.

After the the initial surge and simmer comes the distillation of essence. Of spirit. Perhaps, in time, this will mature into a plan. Cohesive. The ale and the java will be quaffed. The storm will release its rain. And the barn brewing ideas and sketches will amalgamate into blueprints, and a home will be born.