The Beer

Bubbles is a “Rosé Ale” by Rhinegeist Brewery in Cincinnati. If you're ever in Cincinnati, definitely visit the brewery. Rhinegeist has the most luscious rooftop patio. Here are some of my near-and-dears on said patio a few summers ago: 

 A lot of people have been talking about Bubbles, and since its early days, I have been one of its proselytizers. Just last month, I was singing its praises when it appeared at our French conversation group. A friend asked whether it had gluten, a logical question since the can says that Bubbles is by “Cidergeist,” the cider division of Rhinegeist. I said no, as I remembered it as a cider. But then I looked at the can, where the label says “ale.” Huh?

Quick googling does not resolve the question of what, exactly, Bubbles is, but a bit more research has. For those of you who have wondered, the full details are below. But first: an overview of the beer. I’ve enjoyed Bubbles in a number of settings (best season for Bubbles: summer), but had it last week at The Abbey, one of my favorite Pittsburgh coffee shop / beer bars:

From the can, it pours with a bubbly head (fitting, eh?). This is not so much the case when I have gotten it on draft. With or without that bubbly head, though, Bubbles looks just beautiful in the glass. It’s a sparkling clear pink, true to its “rosé” description.

It smells clean, subtly tart. And boy does that tart come through on the tongue. I mean, it’s not Cranberry Sauce - level tart, but it’ll make you smack your lips. It is bright, dry, lightly fruity. Stone fruits: peach and plum. Yum.

The reason I’m so crazy about this beer is that I’m not supposed to like it. Ciders are not generally my thing; I favor only those that are super, super dry, and even then, I wouldn’t order cider if beer were also on the menu. But that’s the thing: Bubbles looks and smells like a cider but it drinks like a beer. As a practiced Bubbles proselytizer, I should do a better job explaining that paradox, but you kind of just have to try it. As Dan Woeller puts it, it’s “a bit of a unicorn in the craft beer world.”

So why was I confused about whether this was a cider or an ale, and whether it had gluten or not (as most ciders and mead do not)? Well, when I first met this beer, its label read, “Bubbles: Rose cider with peach and cranberry.”

But then on April 28, 2017, that changed. Here’s how Rhinegeist announced the change on their Facebook page:

Prohibition, at it again: every state’s taxation laws around alcohol are complex - and can sometimes seem arbitrary. In Ohio, “fruit wines” are taxed like crazy, apparently. Bubbles would not have survived at $16.99 per six-pack. Classify it as an “ale,” though, and Rhinegeist can price it reasonably.

Though many ciders are fermented with champagne or wine yeast, Bubbles has always used an ale yeast. It seems that the addition of “neutral malt” was just enough to classify Bubbles as an ale. And without impacting its deliciousness, as far as this palate can tell.

The Book

Bubbles’s “unicorn” status and shifting morphology are what make it perfect for this week’s book: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.

How do I describe the plot of Annihilation? With just about as much delightful ambiguity and “you just have to experience it yourself” circular reasoning as I used to describe Bubbles. Our narrator is “the biologist." (Not a single character in the book gets a name. Her compatriots are "the psycholgist," "the anthropologist," and "the surveyor.") She is on the twelfth expedition into “Area X,” a tract of wildlife that has been reclaimed by nature and is so dangerous that only federal expeditions gain entry there. The second expedition ended in mass suicide; other expeditions have ended in murder; still others have ended with all the explorers returning to their homes without any memory of how they got there, then dying of cancer - every last one of them - within weeks of their return. The last of which included the biologist’s husband.

The first thing that the biologist and her team find in Area X is an endless underground “Tower.” (I know, it’s an oxymoron, and it's just the first of many). Oddly, the walls of the Tower are inscribed with endless sentences that sound like a sermon:

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that (23) [...] gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen (47) [...] in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth … . (50)

And get this: the sermon is “written” in living flora, a kind of moss wreathed with spore-shooting fungus (or as the biologist puts it, a “eukaryotic organism” (24)). It just gets weirder from there: an amorphous murderous “Crawler” who/that inscribes these words, a missing lighthouse keeper, dolphins with human eyes, and a howling beast that lives in the reedy wetlands of Area X.

Kind of like Bubbles: hard to explain, hard to pin down. A delightfully intriguing mystery that defies boundaries. You kind of just have to read it.

VanderMeer’s tone really gets to you, in a way that hasn’t chilled me since one of my all-time favorite books House of Leaves. (The endless staircase of the Tower will ring a bell to anyone who’s experienced Mark Z. Danielewski’s shape-shifting house.) For example, the simple act of writing about Annihilation here, and transcribing the Crawler’s words above, has got me spooked. It’s a rainy day here in Pittsburgh, and the metal lid of my mailbox just detached from the box and came clattering down on the concrete outside. I went outside expecting to catch UPS delivering my box from Warby Parker. But no one was there. And only because I’ve got Annihilation on the brain, I high-tailed it back inside and locked the door, tailed by the heebie jeebies. Remember how you used to run up the basement stairs after turning off the light? Yeah, just like that. (To augment the creepiness, the title Annihilation comes from the code word that "the psychologist" created to hypnotically induce her fellow explorers to spontaneously commit suicide, should the need arise.)

VanderMeer’s writing can be beautiful. For example, the biologist explains her aversion to cities thus: “The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction… none of these things appealed to me” (155). The broken parallelism of the biologist’s thought process strikes a chord. Lulled by clauses that repeatedly enumerate a city's physical parameters (its cleanliness, activity, density, luminescence, and odor), we land unexpectedly in that final clause: “the thousand ways it presaged our destruction." Huh?!  By the final clause, we're expecting another description of cities, not a harbinger of the end of the world. The discordant parallelism give powerful insight into the biologist as a character. To others, crowds and grime may be descriptions of space; to her, they are the beginning of apocalypse. 

One more highlight of VanderMeer's prose. Here, the biologist remembers the most startling specimen that she has ever witnessed, a starfish that she found early in her career. The memory of the starfish is the only way that she can begin to map the Crawler onto her own lived experience:

What I found when I finally stood there, hands on bent knees, peering down into that tidal pool, was a rare species of colossal starfish, six-armed, larger than a saucepan, that bled a dark gold color into the still water as if it were on fire. Most of us professionals eschewed its scientific name for the more apt “destroyer of worlds.” It was covered in thick spines, and along the edges I could just see, fringed with emerald green, the most delicate of transparent cilia, thousands of them, propelling it along upon its appointed route as it searched for its prey: other, lesser starfish. (174-5)

The starfish pushes her towards an encounter with the sublime. Pages later, she recalls, “[T]he starfish grew and grew until it was not just the tidal pool but the world, and I was teetering on its rough luminous surface, staring up at the night sky again” (178). Pages earlier, VanderMeer's opening sentence foreshadows this psychological upending, when he describes the biologist standing but with "hands on bent knees." On this page, her syntax trails: seven clauses in the first sentences, mirrored by seven in the last sentence. It's as if she can’t find words to describe a simple creature, just a starfish, no matter how many clauses she piles on top of one another. In this sense, form echoes content beautifully, since she cannot understand the Crawler, or her place in the universe, either.

I have no idea how they’re going to make a movie of this book, which is, overall, a very weird metaphor for nature, ecological destruction, and our meager human inability to encounter the sublime. (I mean “weird” in a wonderful way.) But apparently they have made such a movie, and it came out last week. Alex Garland, genius writer of Ex Machina and adapter of Never Let Me Go, adapted and directed Annihilation, the movie, and I think that only he might be able to pull this off. Maybe I’ll see it at The Manor so I can take some Bubbles into the theater with me.

P.S. Annihilation is only the first volume of VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy. I’m on the wait-list for both at Pittsburgh’s wonderful Carnegie Library. I’d promise to let you know if I get more answers when those books come to me - but even if I do get more answers, I likely can’t tell you without giving too much away. As one of my favorite authors would say: so it goes.