On Thursday 12th we went to an art gallery in which, amoung other fascinating exhibits, we saw a painting featuring a crowd of homogenous, cold and miserable looking office workers filing their way down the road to Melbourne station. The painting depicted the 'six o clock swill', which was the mass exodus from work at five, into the pub across the road from the station, to drink as much beer as possible before six o clock when the pubs closed. The pub depicted still exists, though with rather more generous opening hours so we honoured this tradition by visiting for a swift pint before it hit six.
On Saturday 14th we went to the MoonDog brewery for a tour and some tastings.
But beer, you may be surprised to note, is not the link here.
What really struck me about that painting was the depressing conformity of this lifestyle. Everybody works in an office. Everybody wears the same sorts of clothes. Everybody drinks for fun. At the same time. In the same establishment. And very probably the same beers. Even though the very fact that everybody does it, renders it quite a lot harder to do. And, I imagine, upsets the balance at which the number of other people joining you are 'company' rather than 'crowd'.
Why all be so very similar?
In contrast, Moon Dog brewery has created, Willie Wonker style, a beer that tastes exactly like a Bloody Mary, and is served to me with the obligatory celery stick. And it eschews any form of mass production.
"We still do everything by hand" says our guide, "anyone who has ever had to stand there and mash it, or cut up sixty watermelons with a pen knife to create a water melon beer, has asked why we don't mechanise. Nobody really ever answers. We just don't."
MoonDog still have to make a living, and it is their most standard beer which they have a separate brewing room dedicated to, and which sells in the greatest numbers. It appeals to the broadest spectrum - it's a safer product. But there's just the one of it. Everything else is a wild and fantastic experiment.
As our guide explains, "if you are going to go to all the trouble of making a beer, especially by hand, then it really might as well be ridiculous."
We have visited another brewery in our time here, and the part which stood put firms was the risk the brewers had taken to get here.
"We were just a few guys brewing beers," said our guide there, "and we put out loads of applications to banks for funding and every single one of them got rejected.
Eventually someone was kind enough to explain why.
'You're fulling out the firm wrong' they said, 'you keep missing out the box where it says 'collateral'.
'Well we haven't got any,' we said, bemused, 'we don't own a house or anything to put up against it.'
'It doesn't matter,' said the bank manager, 'just put down something.'
After some thought the application form for funding was resubmitted, stating as collateral, 'a car, two bikes and three surfboards'.
The bank had a good laugh and then gave us done funding."
Throughout our travels we have been continually struck by how easy it really is to just have a go, and by peoples ability to view failure of a risky venture simply as another experience, learn from it, pick up and move onwards and upwards.
You really don't have to be another grey face on a grey day heading out of a grey office and into a grey crowd to have your proscribed 'fun' drinking average beers.
You can be ridiculous and happier for it. And that's really not just the perogative of kooky breweries. Open up that cafe, buy that smallholding, give it a go. Just hedge the risk a little - you don't have to be throwing away your life savings to be genuinely committed. And it's OK to work in an office. There's nothing about that which is inherently dull, whatever people tell you. Just allow yourself to be different. Approach it differently. Make it make you happy.
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