Mabon

THE LEGEND

At the autumn equinox, day and night stand in perfect balance. For one brief passage, light and darkness hold equal dominion over the earth. It is a hinge point, the moment the year pivots from growth to withdrawal, from warmth to cold, from the long exhale of summer into the long inhale of winter. In the wheel of the year observed in neo-pagan and Wiccan traditions, this turning is called Mabon.

The name is drawn from Welsh mythology. Mabon ap Modron, "the son of the mother," appears in the Mabinogion as a figure stolen from his mother when he was only three nights old and imprisoned in a fortress beneath water. He is a divine youth, a hunter of extraordinary skill, and his story is one of loss and recovery, of something precious taken at the moment of its beginning and sought across the entire world before it is returned. Mabon is the harvest child, the fruit of the earth claimed by darkness and held until the world earns his release.

The equinox itself requires no mythology to be felt. Farmers have always known this turning. The granaries are full, the fields are stubble, and the work now shifts from growing to preserving. In Bavaria, this is the season of the Festbier: golden, malt-rich, brewed for long tables and the camaraderie of people who know that the cold is coming and choose to meet it together.

Mabon is that gathering rendered in grain. A German-Style Festbier Lager at 6.1% ABV, it carries rich malt and bread-crust sweetness through a golden body built for the harvest table. It is not a beer of summer excess or winter austerity. It is the balance point between them, brewed for the evening when the sun sets at the exact hour it rose, and the year tips quietly toward the dark.