An offering laid at the feet of moss-covered stone. A strawberry kiss from Strata hops drifts through lemon, honey, and fresh-cut grass. Crisp, bitter, and luminous from the first sip to the last.
In the old forests of Gaul, Britain, and Ireland, before Rome carved its roads through the wild, the Celts worshipped a god whose image was antlered and cross-legged, seated among beasts as though the distinction between man and animal had never occurred to him. His name was Cernunnos, the Horned One, and he was lord of all wild things: the stag, the ram-headed serpent, the boar, and every creature that fled at the sound of human footsteps.
What little survives of Cernunnos comes in fragments. The Pillar of the Boatmen, unearthed beneath Notre-Dame, bears his name beside a carved figure with antlers from which torcs hang like fruit. The Gundestrup Cauldron shows him enthroned in the forest, holding a serpent in one hand and a torc in the other, surrounded by animals who regard him not with fear but with recognition. He is not their master. He is their kin.
Cernunnos is a god of fertility and abundance, but not the domesticated kind. His abundance is the wild harvest: what the forest gives without being asked and takes back without warning. To find his idol in a clearing, half-swallowed by moss and lichen, antlers wrapped in ivy, is to understand that the land was never yours. You walk through his grove at his pleasure.
Green Idol is that moss-covered idol rendered as a West Coast Pilsner. Strata hops carry strawberry and lemon through a frame of honey and fresh-cut grass, bright and untamed as a clearing where sunlight breaks through the canopy for the first time in centuries. It won OBA Silver not by demanding attention but by earning it, the way a sacred grove earns reverence. You do not worship the Green Idol because you are told to. You worship it because something antlered and ancient is watching, and it would be unwise not to.
