If you really want to get film nerds cranking their hogs, start talking about Planimetric Composition vs. Naturalism. This is their “active vs passive pickups” type of debate that all niche hobbies have. PC shoots things in a deliberately mug-shot, theatrical, entertaining way. Purists will wipe the combos dust on their Michael Haneke t shirt and bluster that naturalism is the only way to create true art.

Beer is the same. The pastry world has this performative aspect that exists in a demonstrative way that knowingly goes outside the scope of “actual” beer. It’s for entertainment, not integration. No one drinks these for nuance or careful reflection, but they serve a purpose. Similarly, we have @hillfarmstead Marie, a beer so rooted in naturalism that it is the ambient noise of lagers. It is so soft and delicate, you feel like you are impressed upon so deftly that beer itself is modifying the situation in careful ways.

You sip and it isn’t enough. It isn’t distracting but Marie is fueling the evening, speeding it along. By not drawing focus it enhances the crisp, clear, floral biscuit world that you are inhabiting. Marie makes no demands to change, it just makes everything else, better.

It makes you wonder about the highest function of a beer: is it sheer drinkability? This may be the most drinkable beer I have ever had. Even Live Oak Hef has a lemon banana quality that can slow things in a minor way. Marie is baked madeleine frictionless lubricant. The ethereal carb is endless and breaking through the pillow decimates the beer below. It is a perpetual motion machine of your own consumption, with no energy loss.

Marie transfers the intent and challah/fescue underpinnings of what you are doing and naturally amplifies it. No one will stop what they are doing to irritate you with a lengthy story about the boil, the type of vanilla bean, the casks, the reserve society, the cryo. It is the most oppressively utilitarian, disappearing beer ever. For that, it is flawed. A beer that is this crushable, is depressing.

Marie is a helles summer camp of bucolic intensity where the romance has a natural termination point, yet you sign up every year.