Lessons from Beer Halls

Two priests and a layman walk into a bar—more precisely, we drive to the Sierra Nevada brewery in Mills River, North Carolina. We slow in the parking lot, overwhelmed not only by architectural beauty but also by the sheer scale of the brewery’s buildings. It is night. The main structures, bathed in warm lighting, resemble a massive modern ski chalet with steeply pitched roofs, enormous windows, a brick facade, and copper trim. A row of brilliantly lit silver siloes draws our eyes heavenward. (Technically these are vats of beer, not siloes, but “vat” hardly captures the scale.) We stop in our tracks. One of my friends says quietly, “Beer built this.” 

Hearing music, we walk around behind the buildings. There we discover a grand amphitheater with a seven- or eight-member band on stage playing a Grateful Dead cover. None of us are Deadheads, but the musicianship on stage is impressive. We pass a woman dancing, trance-like, perhaps enjoying something more than the brewery’s offerings. Seeing us—two cassocked clergy plus a man in a sport coat and tie—she calls out, “You come to get religion? You’ve come to the right place!” We have, in fact, just come from choral evensong at a nearby Anglican parish. We seek not religion but beer. We find good beer—and beautiful buildings. 

Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio says that the two most encouraging developments in recent American history are classical education and craft brewing, in that order. I suppose Ken has the beer itself in mind, but I am as much encouraged by the buildings built by beer (and cider and liquor and wine) as I am by the beverage itself. 

For the past year I have regularly driven past a dozen or so such beer halls along Nelson 151, also known as “The Brew Ridge Trail” or “Alcohol Alley.” My destination on these drives is a 176-acre farm where we are building St. Dunstan’s Academy, a boys’ boarding school providing Christian formation in the Anglican tradition and an education in the classics, the skilled trades, and sustainable agriculture. (My priest friend serves on our board; the man in coat and tie is our headmaster and founder, Thomas Fickley.) The structures I pass inspire our work. We have just finished our first timber-framed building on campus, we are working on our second, and we are planning our third and grandest yet, the Great Hall.

Inspiration, though, is not quite the right word. We are challenged by these buildings. They are unnecessarily beautiful—if all one wants is a dry place to brew and consume alcohol. But they are not simply places for imbibing beer, but are also designed to encourage conviviality and community. 

A cynic might argue that the reason for building beautiful beer halls is not community or conviviality or even drinking, but rather avarice. They are made to be places where people will spend money—places that will deepen “brand loyalty,” predisposing consumers positively towards a brand’s message and marketing. Be that as it may, this works precisely because the founders, funders, and architects of beer halls attend to human beings as embodied creatures who need more than ugly “utilitarian” structures. They build, in other words, from a fundamentally true anthropology, even if the brewers are complete atheists.

Why are not more churches and schools built with this true anthropology in mind? An ugly school building might be cheap, but it does not serve the ultimate purposes of education. As T. S. Eliot says of society as a whole, a good school is one “in which the natural end of man—virtue and well-being in community—is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end—beatitude—for those who have the eyes to see it.” The end of education is arete, excellence and human flourishing leading to worship for those with eyes to see.

One objection is that of funding and funding priorities. Schools do not, as a rule, attract venture capitalists and angel investors expecting a hundred-fold return on investment. Nevertheless, many school leaders can make beauty a higher priority. No one will donate to building beautifully if school leadership does not articulate a clear vision for why beauty matters. If school leaders are already resigned to mediocrity, then mediocrity is most assuredly what they will get. But prioritizing beauty does not necessarily mean spending more money. It might mean de-prioritizing cutting-edge technology. It might mean building smaller but lovelier structures or finding creative ways to keep more of the labor costs in-house. It might mean designing simple classroom and administrative buildings to get a school off the ground before taking time to fundraise and build an awe-inspiring chapel as the campus capstone. Or, as in the case of the Ecclesial Schools Initiative (ESI) in central Florida, it might mean partnering with local churches to reduce costs without sacrificing beauty.

I spent three years as curate at St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Oviedo, Florida, which has partnered with ESI. I had the great privilege of regularly praying and singing Morning Prayer with the faculty, staff, and student body. ESI’s mission is “expanding access to extraordinary education,” and the great majority of the student body would have qualified for the federal free-lunch program. Creating a lean and sustainable model was a top priority for ESI’s founding team. The partnership with St. Alban’s (and now other churches) enables students to begin their days in a beautiful chapel—a place in which the theological significance of sacred space is clear—while simultaneously reducing ESI’s costs. St. Alban’s is an example of how to build beautifully without spending a fortune. It is built in a traditional cruciform style, appointed with lovely wood furnishings—many built by parishioners—and finished with cut glass depicting the life of Christ.

Already existing schools might be stuck with middling or ugly spaces, but even here we can prioritize beauty without significant cost. I spent my high school years on a dusty campus in Tucson, Arizona, where we had rugged trailers for classrooms. The classroom I best remember had walls adorned with student-painted murals of John Donne’s poetry and Van Gogh’s art. Much of the year, I sat directly in front of Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV. Eventually I discovered, rather to my surprise, that I had accidentally memorized the poem. No doubt some of my notes were incomplete as a result, but I suspect Mr. Monroe would have accepted this tradeoff. In spite of real limitations, my teacher managed to lend his space a touch of transcendent beauty. (His subject? Theology.)

Every school can make beauty a higher priority, and those that can build genuine landmarks should do so. The beer halls of Nelson County and beyond are a gift and a challenge. Those of us called to educate students—to form them in the love of goodness, truth, and beauty—must rise to the challenge. Let our buildings draw eyes and hearts heavenward.

Fr. Mark Perkins is chaplain and assistant headmaster of St. Dunstan's Academy.

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Illumination by Jean Fouquet, image found on Wikimedia Commons via public domain. Image cropped.