B Is for Beer (7 page)

At least, that was her impression.

“What happened?” Gracie asked, in a voice as shaky as a wet chihuahua at a fireworks show.

“We passed through the Seam.”

“What Seam?”

“What Seam? The Seam between the Earth and the sky, between the
it
and the
is
, between the fire and the smoke, between the mirror and the reflection, between the buzz and the bee, between the screw and the turning of the screw, and so on and so forth. You get the picture?”

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As a matter of fact, in terms of getting the picture, Gracie was between the huh? and the huh-uh. If she neglected to say so, it was because she was too busy straining to see how far she ’d fall if she lost her grip on the Beer Fairy’s wand. And at that moment, she realized that she was already on the ground, standing amid a waving, seemingly endless expanse of tall, golden-brown grass.

Opening her teeny toothpick arms wide as if to embrace everything in sight, the Beer Fairy announced, “This is where it all begins.”

Puzzled, Gracie merely stood there, the grass enveloping her, the seedy spikes at the tip of its stems rubbing against her elbows like the beards of affectionate billy goats. (The grass was up to her armpits, and had she been five instead of six, it might have reached her neck.) The grass was almost crackly dry, yet Gracie could sense the moist heart of the Earth throbbing in it. Was that what the Beer Fairy meant about it all starting here?

“This is a grain field,” the sprite explained. “A field of barley, to be specific. All beer gets its start as grain. Some pretty tasty beer is made from wheat; Asians brew an acceptable beer from rice, though it ’s not my cup of tea, and there ’re Africans who 68

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resort to millet for a brew that ’s dipped warm out of buckets on village market day—neither better tasting nor less filling, I’m afraid—but the worldwide grain of choice for making beer is good old barley.” She performed a loop and landed on a stalk top, which bowed ever so slightly from her cottony weight.

“My uncle Moe says beer’s made outta hops.”

“Your uncle Moe is full of you-know-what. Or else you misunderstood him.” The Beer Fairy thrust her wand toward Gracie. “Come along. With that in mind, we ’d better get to our next stop.”

“Are we blowing this pop stand?” asked Gracie.

The Beer Fairy laughed a fairy laugh. “You’re okay, kiddo.

You’re all right. Now, treat yourself to a good long look at this barley field as we lift off. You can appreciate its rustic beauty, I’m sure, but you could never guess what history or what forces lie hidden in that common crop.

“Barley grains found near Al Fayyum, Egypt, have been shown in laboratory tests to be 5,000 years old. That ’s 4,994 years older than you, little miss. Whether barley—originally just another species of wild grass—was actually domesticated in Egypt 69

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way back then, or was imported as livestock feed from more agriculturally advanced northern cultures, is a subject scholars can debate until their glasses fog over. A more interesting subject is how the Egyptians figured out a way to convert that donkey chow, that camel fodder, into an intoxicating beverage in the first place, an inebriating liquid refreshment so wholly perfect that it ’s endured and spread and has grown ever more popular through the ages.

“For whatever reason, the ancient Egyptians weren’t satisfied with mere survival. They wanted to be remembered forever, which is why they built the pyramids, and they wanted to ensure that they’d be sufficiently glad and dizzy during their lifetime, which is why they invented beer.”

“Did the Egypt people invent you, too?”

“Ha! You
are
the inquisitive one, aren’t you? No, they invented me only in the sense that your mommy and daddy’s love invented you. But that ’s another story. Right now, we need to go.”

That suited Gracie fine. The mention of her parents made her think of home, and that talk about ancient Egyptians had made her miss Uncle Moe. Such thoughts were threatening to 70

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spoil her big birthday adventure. She need not have worried, though, because as they rose above the farmland, there was another
poof!
, another whoosh of wind, and in a wink she and the Beer Fairy were out of the sunlight, out of the sweet country air; were, in fact, indoors somewhere, inside a room that was chilly, smelly, and darn near as vast as a barley field.

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12

Can you guess where we are?” asked the Beer Fairy.

“

Gracie glanced around the building, letting her eyes adjust to the artificial light. The place just looked like some dumb factory to her. Finally, for the heck of it, she sang out, “Costa Rica!”—knowing perfectly well it wasn’t true.

“Notice that huge pile of sacks on that wooden platform over there. What do you think is in those sacks?”

“Uh, flour.”

“No.”

“Sugar.”

“Not exactly.”

“Cement.”

“Guess again.”

“Kittens.”

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“
Kittens?
What ’s the matter with you, girl? Think. Where were we just now?”

“Egypt.”

“Oh, for goodness sake! Listen, I’m the Beer Fairy, I can tolerate a lot of goofiness—if it wasn’t for goofy business I’d practically do no business at all—but you’ve gone and gotten your six-year-old self involved with beer and I’m making a sincere effort to teach you something about the substance you’re dealing with. Now, I promised not to kick your butt, but if you…”

“Oh, I remember now!” Gracie flashed her brightest smile.

“We were on a farm for barley.”

“Hey, hey! A barley field. Congratulations.” If you never thought fairies could be sarcastic, think again. “Didn’t that uncle of yours ever tell you that nobody likes a smart-ass?”

Gracie tried half-heartedly to recall such sage advice, but all that came to mind was Moe ’s warning that “Every time a person goes to the mall, she loses a little piece of her soul.”

The truth of the matter is that Gracie had been far more 73

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interested in the wee winged creature hovering a few inches in front of her nose than she ’d been in these new surroundings, whether indoors or out, and she ’d experienced difficulty concentrating on the brewski lessons. You’d have much the same reaction, don’t you think? At any rate, Gracie resolved to both watch her mouth and pay closer attention, and she was all ears as the Beer Fairy continued.

“Okay then, it ’s barley grains—which is to say, barley
seeds
—

that are in those sacks. However, between the time the grain was harvested in the field and the time it was funneled into the sacks, it was messed with, it was altered. The barley’s been
malted
.”

Visions of Häagen-Dazs milkshakes jumped instantly into Gracie ’s brain. She shooed them away. She was doing her best to be an attentive pupil.

“The grains were soaked in water for approximately two days to speed them along toward sprouting, the first step in a seed ’s development into a plant. During this germination period, as it ’s called, the natural starch in the barley breaks down into a simple kind of sugar whose purpose, according to the plan of nature, is to nourish the baby plant.”

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Baby plants being nourished by sugar! A delighted Gracie thought that was too cute for words. She almost squealed.

“Ah, but before this process gets very far,” the Beer Fairy went on, “before the grain actually sprouts, it ’s heated in a kiln to bring the germination to a screeching halt, right when the newly formed sugar is reaching its peak. At this point, it ’s become what we call
malted barley
, and the sacks of it are ready to be emptied into a masher. What happens there, do you suppose?”

“Something gets mashed.”

“Brilliant deduction. The malted grain is crushed into a fine powder, which in turn is emptied into one of those tall stainless steel water tanks over there. The water—with the mash in it, of course—is then heated to 156 degrees.”

“That sounds pretty hot.”

“Just a balmy day on the beach for a Sugar Elf, but for humans and most other life-forms…”

Gracie interrupted. “There ’s Sugar Elfs?!”

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“Forget about them. It ’s enough to know that if there was no such thing as sugar, there ’d be no such thing as beer.

As the mashed grain cooks in the hot water, in fact, its remaining starch is converted by heat and moisture into other sugars that are more complex, more advanced, than the malted ones.”

Noticing that Gracie looked confused, the Beer Fairy suggested that she consider malt as kindergarten or first-grade sugar, while the mash-tank sugar was high school or maybe community college sugar.

Gracie wasn’t buying the sugar bit. “But beer is
bitter
,” she objected.

“That ’s where your uncle ’s hops come in. While the mash is being cooked, before it ’s strained out of the sugar-heavy water and disposed of, hop petals or else pellets made from compressed hop flowers (the pellets look exactly like pet-store hamster food, by the way) are dumped into the tanks. Hops reduce the sweetness of the mixture and add flavor and aroma.

Without hops, Redhook and Budweiser would be little more than cloudy sugar water.

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“Okay, then, we ’ve added our hops, but, Gracie, we still don’t have beer. Instead we have a tank of flavored liquid the brewers refer to as
wort
.”

“Ooo.” Gracie made a face. “My cousin had a wart on his behind.”

“That ’s something altogether different.”

“Well, it ’s still kind of an ugly word.”

“I guess I’d have to agree.
Malt
and
mash
and
hops
and
yeast
aren’t exactly puffs of pure poetry, either. For that matter, the English word
beer
itself (evolved from the older word
beor
) is not the most musical little tittle of elegant language ever to roll off a tongue. However, as Shakespeare once said…”

“Who’s that?”

“A famous guy who wrote a lot about fairies. You’ll read him someday. Knowing you, you’ll probably act—and try to steal a scene or two—in one of his plays. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

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“What ’s that mean?”

“It means that if beer had been called
champagne
,
holy water,
or
potassium cyanide
, it would be no more—or no less—

wonderful. It also means that if your name was Gertrude or Hortense or Annabella, you’d be just as pretty, just as sensitive, just as lively and curious—and just as much a pain in the butt—as you are when your name is Gracie. Now for goodness sake, child, let ’s get on with it!”

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13

It ’s rather obvious that Gracie and the Beer Fairy were touring a brewery. Right? In this brewery, as in every brewery, there would have been men working: busy brewers all over the place. Right? Yet the men had failed to take the slightest notice of the presence in their midst of a strange little girl in a vomit-stained birthday dress with a ginger-haired, gossamer-gowned “dragonfly” on her shoulder. Right? But being smart, you’ve guessed (correctly) that Gracie and the fairy couldn’t be observed, were invisible to the men due to the fact that they were on the Other Side of the Seam. Right?

Or, if you didn’t figure that out on your own, your grandpa surely pointed it out to you—provided he ’s still hanging in there with you, which he may well be since your grandpa, after so many, many experiences of reading you bedtime stories about talking choo-choo trains, teddy bear picnics, and the hardships of young Abe Lincoln, stories that surely made his teeth feel squeaky and his eyelids droop like coffin covers, well, he must have jumped at the chance to read you a book about
beer
; must have been so enthused that he poured himself a tall frosty one before he began—and if Grandma hasn’t been checking on him, perhaps a couple more by Chapter 13. Right?

It wouldn’t be unusual. That ’s often the way it is with beer.

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That ’s the way it is with beer, but so far we ’ve encountered no actual beer in this brewery. Rather, the tour has stalled before some huge tanks of warm water, flavored (heavily at some breweries, lightly at this one) with malt and hops.

(It may be worth mentioning here that the water used in brewing also contributes to the character of beer: for example, hard water—water with a lot of mineral content, such as that in Ireland—lends a muscular nature to a stout brew like Guinness, while softer, less mineral-laced water such as that for which the Czech Republic is famous, produces the paler, crisper style of beer known worldwide as
pilsner
or
lager
.) At any rate, at this point the Beer Fairy, growing a tad impatient, hustled Gracie along to a second, equally large set of tanks: the fermentation vessels. “This is where the rabbit jumps out of the hat. This is where the so-so hits the go-go and lets loose the mojo. This is where beer becomes beer.”

The transformative agent, the freelance sorcerer whose alchemy turns wort into beer, is
yeast
. Once the wort has cooled and has been transferred into fermentation tanks, yeast is summoned to the tanks and left undisturbed therein for at least ten days to do the mysterious work that yeast and yeast alone can do.

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Although she was aware that her mother used something called yeast when she baked bread, Gracie had not the remotest idea what the stuff was (for a time she believed yeast to be the opposite direction from west), so the Beer Fairy had to explain.

“Yeast is a miniature plant, a fungus actually, a cousin of mushrooms and toadstools; but while each mushroom is composed of numerous cells, a yeast plant is so tiny it ’s got only one cell to its name. To see a yeast plant, you’d need a microscope, although you’d have no problem locating yeast plants to look at, because they’re floating around in the air almost everywhere; not just in breweries or in the woods and fields, but in your house, the White House, the Vatican, and a rock star’s dressing room. Maybe especially in a rock star’s dressing room.”