Back from Beach Week already? You’re fiddling to open the
door to your apartment or town home on the outskirts of whatever moderately-big city you
live in—dropping them, of course, while your arms are full of luggage and
trash. The door gives, you walk into the living room-turned-steam room and set
the bags down. You and your cat lock eyes, knowing that neither of you really
wanted this: to go on a week
long hiatus in the peak of summer and return to
tauntingly high grass and a hardwood apartment coughing up somebody’s sweat in
the heat of the day. Oranges are still on the counter from that obscenely good
deal from work—the one where you got five pounds of oranges because it was the “economical”
thing to do. Scratch your beard, peel an orange, sit down. There’s still a full
day before you have to return to work, twenty-four full hours of watching the
second hand spin while you wait despondently. You need an escape. So what do
you do? Your cat is waiting on you. When it’s 90 degrees inside, and you’re
sweating with the orange peels into your Ikea couch, what do you think of? 
On the Road,
published in 1957, is a great introduction to the Beat Generation’s mindset and
manifesto: the creation of art by means of experience through travel and
experimentation for the main goal of innovation. Beat Poets and Writers heavily
imitated the lifestyle of gypsies, staying nomadic in nature and traveling
together in small packs, and whether they were writing down manuscripts of what
would later be some of the most influential and revered literature in North America
or just sitting among the orange fields of California after a long day in the
orchard, their physical location mattered not nearly as much as their mental
sprawl and their ultimate accomplishments. However, Kerouac’s art—and the
generation of art he helped spearhead—wasn’t a pedantic, formulaic art at all.
Kerouac created this generation of honest art with hardly any effort at all,
his art an extension of his being. He simply did. 
Enter Evil Twin’s “Low Life”. Evil Twin, founded in Denmark
by Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø,
treads in very Beat footsteps with their self-proclamation and self-identity as
“Gypsy Brewers” (meaning simply that they don’t technically own their own
brewing facility but instead brew on contract and on-site at other breweries
across the world) and their passion for high experimentation in an ever-expanding
Craft Beer world. “Low Life” is a perfect example of this: as a pun sighted at
another very popular American beer, Evil Twin created an American-Style Pilsner
that is absolutely astonishing. A sweet, wheaty nose gives way to crisp, clean
orange marmalade flavors and lemon peel acidity righting itself on the back end
with slight hop bitterness and lingering citrus. To drink this beer is to read
Kerouac’s landmark work: what sets out as a self-aware satire of American culture suddenly creates and
manifests in itself a completely new identity—a new and enlightened “future”
because of a bland “now”. Whether the name “Low Life” is a joke becomes irrelevant with every sip, as its sweet and sparkling citrus
flavors reel you into a world of beer without irony or pretense and leaves you
with a respect for this renegade brewery that creates art with every sip—not because
they’re trying to break the mold, but because they’re not trying at all: they
simply do. All Evil Twin logos and beers are used by permission from the brewery/company itself with infinite gratitude from yr. writer.
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