A splendorous premium golden ale with a deep malt backbone and a beautiful fresh citrusy hop character like Angels and Demons in love. A liquid interpretation of William Blake’s poetry. His words have spoken to us and through our beer they shall speak to you.

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence.” – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793)

More than two centuries ago, a most remarkable soul was born in London, England, a soul we would all later come to know as William Blake, and regard as one of the greatest and most fascinating revolutionary thinkers of the time.

Artist, romantic poet, printer, antinomian, prophet and imaginer, Blake searched for the doors of perception, the place at which all would be infinite. He encourages the premise that there is no limit to enlightenment, that there is no limit to mind expansion. The Great Red Dragon swooping down on the Woman Clothed with the Sun in Love.

Seeking the unbounded and infinite, Blake composed between 1790 and 1793, a period of radical social and political conflict following the French Revolution, a series of prose and poetry illustrated in illuminated printing upon etched plates he titled “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” both in imitation of biblical prophecy and portraying his own deeply revolutionary and romantic beliefs. The work has become one of his best known and most influential, impacting not only musicians, artists, and writers, but psychologists and philosophers as well. Most notably among these is Alduous Huxley, who named one of his most well-known works “The Doors of Perception,” which consequently inspired the name of the American rock band The Doors.

“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a critical parody upon the Swedish theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg’s work published in Latin 33 years prior entitled “Heaven and Hell,” within which Swedenborg espouses the conventional Manichean moral view of good and evil. In contrast, Blake expressed a depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order, ergo, a marriage of heaven and hell. Unlike those of Dante and Milton, Blake’s work paradoxically reveals the conception of Hell as a place of liberation and the unrepressed, opposed to the authoritarian definition of Heaven. Blake eulogized Dionysian energy and passion in opposition to reason and temperance, the latter two of which he considered restraints on spiritual enlightenment and individual self-expression in an already imprisoned society.

With our British Golden Ale, we celebrate William Blake’s legacy through “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” two Golden Spirals intertwined in eternal delight.