There's something to be said for self-determination and for independence. People always want to be masters of their own destinies to as great a degree as possible, and the whole of the New World has been shaped by those who wanted to pursue their futures on their own terms, from Nunavut to the United States and from Panama to Argentina. While today the borders are firmly drawn with thick ink on the maps and stern guards at the crossing points, that doesn't mean they won't stay the same through tomorrow and tomorrow.Cascadia! Not just a more aesthetically pleasing name to describe the Pacific Northwest, but a region made up of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. On occasion it's been tapped as a country of the future, and perhaps one day that will be the case after all - granted, in order for that to happen something would have to happen to the United States first, as history shows that it takes a rather dim view of secession. Secession Cascadian Dark Ale, on the other hand, is nothing to look at dimly. Indeed, it's dark enough that even when you shine a light down on it, it remains resolutely opaque. Brewed by Hopworks Urban Brewery of Portland, Oregon, Secession is an organic, carbon-neutral beer that urges us to "join the party and uncap a revolution." I've been looking for a bottle of this particular brew for months, and was pretty much resigned to having to go down to Portland to find some, when during an unsuccessful search for a bottle of Rogue's Voodoo Bacon Maple Ale I found it on the shelf at the Central City Liquor Store in Surrey.According to the label, Secession is a Cascadian Dark Ale - this is a relatively new style of beer, the result of experimentation by craft brewers across Cascadia, making use of Northwest hops as a key ingredient. The style was pioneered by Rogue Ales of Portland with its Skullsplitter in 2003, and has been catching on since. Technically it's a kind of India Pale Ale, and while I know that the "pale" here refers to the nature of the malt that was used to make the beer, there is nevertheless something off about taking something as dark as Guinness and calling it "pale," sort of like calling East Germany "democratic" with a straight face.
As far as the beer itself goes - it's got something of a spicy smell, one which brings to mind pine trees in springtime. The taste is recognizably that of an IPA, somewhat bitter with a vaguely metallic, hoppy aftertaste that is nevertheless much more tolerable than other IPAs I've tried. With a 6.5% alcohol content it hits somewhat hard if you're not eating anything with it... and you really should be eating something with it, if only to cleanse your palate of the hoppy aftertaste once it's run its course, like big, thick, dripping sausages and a mound of mashed potatoes. At least that's what it made me hanker after. Keep this one cold before you uncap it, too - it was easy enough to tell that it would taste a lot worse if you give it the chance to warm up. The label gives it "15 degrees Plato," but this isn't an instruction to serve it at a temperature of 15 degrees - this refers instead to its sugar content. Apparently it's a popular measure in at least the Czech Republic, but this is the first time I've encountered a North American beer using that particular yardstick.As the old commercials say, you have to live here to get it. Secession is pretty much only available in Cascadia, though you may also be able to find it in parts of Idaho and Alberta, even though Alberta has never been part of Cascadia and would in fact stink up the place with all its coal and dirty oil. We keep all those all-natural pine-scented air fresheners all along the Rocky Mountains for a reason. At Central City, a bottle of this set me back about $8.65 before taxes.Stepping back from the beer for a moment, I have to give Hopworks kudos on Secession's graphic design. It's a clear, individual label - not many beers have national maps on them - done in the colors of the Cascadian flag, using Hopworks' specific, eyecatching font; both in design and taste it strongly outperforms the other independence-themed beer I've tried, L'Independante of Quebec, and that one was an honestly pro-independence brew.I don't normally like pale ales, but Secession was worth a go - so if that's up your alley, uncap a bottle and raise a stein to a free Cascadia.ANDREW'S RATING: 4.25/5Previous Quaff Reviews
For a movement that has essentially no real-world political presence, there's a surprising variety of iconography available on the internet for the purely theoretical Republic of Cascadia. After having been west of the Rockies for this long, I have to admit that the idea of a union between British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon has become an increasingly appealing prospect. Even a year ago I thought it was real low-probability stuff, but the more I read about the political and economic situation in the Western world in general and the United States in particular, the more I can hear those distant, tortured groans as the world buckles under the weight we've piled upon it. The more I doubt that the map of North America several decades hence will closely resemble the maps you'll find today.Granted, it's still low-probability; it just seems less so than before. Even in the salad days of the early 2000s and 1990s, there were those who explored the notion of Cascadia independent. One of the touchstones of that has always been a flag - after all, what's a country without a flag? The flag is a symbol to bind peoples together, to represent a country's situation or struggles on a piece of fabric waving in the wind - it's something to rally around.It's just that some of the Cascadian flags out there are really... meh, in my opinion. Not bad, not with so many actual country, province, state and city flags that are manifestly horrid - for example, the flags of Pocatello, Idaho and Provo, Utah, which resemble nothing so much as the box art of personal productivity software. Right now, the effectively official Cascadian flag - as "official" as something like this can get, anyway - is the Douglas fir flag, which consists of a Douglas fir tree charged on a horizontal blue, white, and green tricolor.I've never liked it, really - there was always something about it. Having thought about it more recently, it's because of the tree itself; it just looks too complicated to me. One of the core necessities of a good flag, as related by the North American Vexillogical Association, is to keep it simple. While the idea of the tricolor is simple, the tree isn't - it's got a realistic appearance, with branches and void space here and there, and thus brings what I feel is an unnecessary complexity to the flag. Granted, that alone hasn't kept flags down in the past; the alternately straight and wavy sunrays on the flag of British Columbia have a level of complexity to them as well, though not to the same degree.There are other flags, of course; perform an image search for "flag of Cascadia" and you'll run across plenty. The only thing they tend to have in common is the blue-white-green color scheme; specific references to nature are common but not universal. I rejected those flags. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... one that I made myself.
Here, my intention was simplicity first and foremost; this flag of Cascadia is made entirely of geometric shapes while retaining the straightforwardness of the standard Cascadian tricolor. Here, the green symbolizes the forested land, open fields and environmental awareness of Cascadia, the white for the mountains that give it its name, the three joined peaks to represent the unity of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon within Cascadia, and the blue both for the sky and the Pacific. My original concept for the flag had it rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise, to represent Cascadia's north-south geography, but I couldn't get it to look quite right.I'll admit that I'm not much of a flag guy; this is only the third one I've designed and the first that's entirely from scratch, not reusing any elements from other flags in order to connote a connection. Still, this is what I made. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't - personally, I like it fine.Here's hoping I haven't just recreated some flag I've never encountered before.
These days, it's easy to figure that the center can't hold. Despite President Obama's protestations that the United States is still a triple-A country even after Friday's debt downgrade - as if the President of the United States would, or could, claim anything else - these are proving to be uncertain times, and uncertain times often lead to the questioning of old methods. These days, there are definitely people out there wondering if the United States of America, as it currently exists, hasn't passed its best before date.
There aren't too many secession movements, even proposed secession movements, in the United States today, which is not really much of a surprise when you consider what was going on a hundred and fifty years ago. Nevertheless, there are a few that, so far purely intellectually, consider the prospect of slipping out of the straitjacket the United States has become.
One of 'em, I can practically see from my front window. The Republic of Cascadia is a concept for an independent state carved out of the Pacific Northwest, echoing the 1970s visions of Ecotopia, generally conceived as a liberal, environmentally-focused state - think Seattle, or at least Seattle as it's commonly perceived, as an entire country. Back in January, TIME Magazine listed Cascadia as one of the Top 10 Aspiring Nations. While the extent of the Republic of Cascadia varies from expounder to expounder, with some including northern California, Idaho, and bits of Montana, generally speaking it's formed around a core of Oregon, Washington... and British Columbia.
Makes it just a bit more complex.
One of the more well-known flags for the prospective Republic of Cascadia. This image was originally created by Lexicon at Wikipedia, and has been made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
