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I’ve come to realise over the years that my core pursuit is farming yeast. The by-product of being a better farmer is a beautiful beer. So, I agree wholeheartedly with the statement that brewers make wort and yeast make beer. I’m not sure if anyone who makes wort and ferments that wort into beer (at least if you want to really make great beer) would disagree. Yeast are complicated organisms when it comes to making beer, every beer is really a chemical experiment in the fermenter; and if you don’t understand the creature you’re farming, then you won’t achieve ideal results. So the better brewers read and study because the more you implement that science and experimentation in your farming of yeast, the greater the improvement to your final beer. I would add that I’m now making beers, in many cases, equal to those I would purchase from craft breweries, sometimes better. Almost certainly, fresher.

This is exactly the reason you may want to read Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff. At a bare minimum the reading of this book improved three significant misunderstandings or bad practices that affect the beer that I pour. And yes, it’s a dry read if you don’t like science. But, then, if you don’t like science you probably aren’t that interested in making the perfect beer.

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Back in the day, when I was an under-educated dipshit with right wing leanings, I would repeat a popular right wing mantra that multiculturalism has never worked. And I never questioned the logic, regardless that it came to me third hand in the way a cult tells itself a story of identity. I was a proud white man. The story fit my conclusions. White men were special. I hate to inform anybody of this one… but we’re not special at all. We’ve just had 200 years of might is right especially if it’s white.

So I thought writing an article about this mantra might be interesting… at least for those under-educated non-thinking right wing bigots who repeat that ignorant statement. Because it turns out that multiculturalism is what brought us out of the caves and into this crazy era of the Space Age homo sapien. Not DNA diversity, not bigger brains… the sharing of culture.

DNA Diversity is not the Secret of our Success

One group of people would have you believe that our genetic diversity is the reason for the homo sapien success story. Bollocks. Although we have this diversity of appearance that we as homo sapiens recognise in the finer details of faces … there is vastly more genetic difference between chimpanzees living on one side of a river to the other than there is between human beings around the planet.

In simple English, homo sapiens are more alike around the World than chimpanzees that live locally. So, no, genetic diversity didn’t make us this successful. In fact, there was a point in our early history where one father can be linked to all males. All males on this planet are related. At a point where human beings on the planet were reduced to approximately one thousand survivors of a cataclysmic event.

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