What is a Blendery?

A blendery is a different approach to making beer.

Most beer that you are familiar with, has been made in almost an assembly line process. The testament of a good brewer is not the ability to make a great beer once, but the ability to make the same great beer consistently.

With a blendery in contrast, the objective is to make a lot of diverse beer components, many of them may not taste good or balanced on their own, but when blended correctly result in an experience that couldn’t be achieved as a single one-off batch.

In a blendery there is a constant tension between generating a larger and increasingly diverse set of blending components while maintaining an intimacy and fluency with those components in order to make the best blends from that stock.

The Name?

TL;DR - Mieza Μίεζα): Where Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great and his companions in some nymph caves.

“For a long time I tried to come up with a name that appropriately matched a beer-making approach or a beer-drinking experience that I wanted to convey.   Names describing or alluding to ingredients or processes that I was passionate about, were always too literal or just didn’t encompass everything I wanted to say. Mieza is a blank space I can project onto, possessing a modicum of myth and some underlying themes that my approach to blending strongly shares.

I imagined ancient Mieza as this idyllic training grounds; a place where there was a certain amount of comfort and protection from the outside world but unleashed characters who were undoubtedly effective once outside.   There’s also this sense of a “lost boys” sort of playful violence that captures a lot of my approach to blending. Both of these  underly my view of the blendery’s polarity; a safe space where beer ideas can be approached with a boyish enthusiasm, an open heart, while simultaneously holding an air of rigor, intensity, and an unforgiving execution of blends.

Finally, we can’t really say what the relationship between the two colossal figures of Aristotle and Alexander the Great  was actually like, but what I extrapolated was a powerful melding of curiosity, contemplation, wisdom with a certain amount of courage, confidence, and thorough action.”