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.”
“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 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.”
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?!”
“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.
“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.”
“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!”
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.