SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18

Beer Release: 12pm

Event Start Time: 4pm

Background

Although this style has largely fallen into obscurity, the Piwo Grodziskie is a unique style of beer that originated in the Polish city of Grodzisk. There are beers that were developed in neighboring regions that bear some similarities to this smoked wheat beer, but the Grodziskie is neither sour like a Berlinnerweisse, nor is it as smoky as a Rauchbier. Falling somewhere in the middle, and largely lost to history after peaking as an international style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we want to honor this light and crisp Polish original.

What’s in a Name?

Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize-winning Polish author whose masterpiece, The Books of Jacob, focuses on a very specific and often-overlooked part of Polish history: the Frankist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this novel, she examines the life of Jacob Frank (aka Jakub Lejbowicz), and while much of the novel deals with religiopolitical conflicts, there are several poetic passages that provide sometimes surprising theological and ontological perspectives.

One such passage focuses on the creation of the world, in which Tokarczuk writes:

Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside of itself, leaving just enough space for an emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world. The world comes quick, though at first it resembles mold, delicate and pale, but soon it grows, and individual fibers connect, creating a powerful surrounding tissue. Then it hardens; then it starts to take on colors. This is accompanied by a low, barely audible sound, a gloomy vibration that makes the anxious atoms quake. And it is from this motion that particles come into being, and then grains of sand and drops of water, which divide the world in two.

We find ourselves now on the side of sand.

Launch Party Details:

Inspired by the awesome and sometimes overwhelming sensation of existence, consciousness, and creation itself, we have invited the Berkshire Choir to sing a specially curated series of songs intended to be in conversation with this passage from The Books of Jacob. Having its roots in liturgical practices, a chorus of voices seems like the perfect expression for these big existential musings and the celebration of the mysterious gift of existence.