I am ordering the grains, malts, and hops for the next brew. Nothing remarkable: quantities to check, sacks to plan, one variety to track down. Then, sometimes, something is missing.
Today, an unavailable hop is a modest inconvenience. We wait, adjust, move the schedule. The brew does not vanish. Still, that small absence leads back to a time when grain was never simply a material for brewing.
Older accounts of Durbuy already mention hop gardens around the town. The trace still needs careful handling, but it says something true: here, beer has never been separate from soil, gardens, and harvests.
In the early eighteenth century, during poor harvest years, some authorities forbade or restricted brewing so that cereals could be kept for food. A local history of Durbuy, citing ordinances of the provostry, records that in 1709, after a severe grain crisis, brewing was banned in the court of Barvaux.
It is worth measuring what that meant. Beer was not only a drink for pleasure. It belonged to the ordinary rhythm of houses, taverns, work, and meals. To remove it, even briefly, touched a daily habit and a real part of nourishment.
Grain first had to become bread, porridge, seed, reserve. In hard years, brewing came after subsistence. Brewing itself, sometimes imagined as free and convivial, in fact depended on a fragile balance: the land, the market, the harvest, and the decisions made when everything begins to run short.
So when I look today for a hop that is not available, I know the comparison soon reaches its limit. Our consequences are small. But the delay recalls a simple thing: a beer begins long before it reaches the kettle. It begins with what the season has left behind.