Essays
The Perfect Keg
Excerpt
From the Introduction
What are your beer ambitions?”
The question brought me up short.
I was part of a panel, advertised as a question and answer session with some of the city’s top beer writers, for Toronto Beer Week. Nine guys seated on a small stage in a cozy amber and beige cellar bar. The audience, scattered around the room at low tables or propping up a bar boasting more beer pumps on it than I had ever seen, wrote questions on little pieces of paper and then handed them over to the master of ceremonies. He then read them out. The evening had started out with fairly straightforward queries eliciting our thoughts on beer and brewing trends, but it had grown progressively rowdier and more creative as audience and panel swallowed more and more of the evening’s subject matter.
Leading to the question about our beer ambitions. Good God. What were my beer ambitions? I don’t really associate beer with ambition. Usually they work at cross purposes. But after thinking about for a moment, I answered. Get good at making it.” From there we moved on, to a discussion of beer’s aphrodisiac qualities.
Beer is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages on earth, maybe the oldest. Some historians even think it spurred the birth of civilization. When our hunting and gathering ancestors stumbled on beer, through some lucky accident, they quickly realized that if they wanted more they were going to have to settle down and get busy inventing farming and brewing. Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage on earth, and the third most popular drink in the world after water and tea. Traditionally a humble working-man’s beverage, beer has come up socially in the past few decades. Today beer fans discuss a particular brew’s nose or its finish the way wine snobs do a specific vintage. Restaurants offer menus built around beer and food pairings. Some even have a beer sommelier ready to guide your drinking choices among different ales or suggest an amusing wit beer to go with dessert. That sommelier likely studied to become a cicerone, a certified beer expert. Beer festivals and events like the one I was part of attract thousands of people. Never, in human memory, have their been so many different kinds of beer available to the lucky drinker.
For all that, though, what do we really know about beer? About how it’s made, and what it really is? Nowhere, except perhaps Germany, are brewers even obliged to tell you the ingredients in their product. Plenty of beer companies boast about their product’s all-natural ingredients, but all-natural what? When you hold a bottle of beer in your hand, you hold a mystery. I like to think I know a lot about beer. I can explain the difference between ale and lager yeast. I know what makes pale ale pale and imperial stout imperial. I can rattle off the stages of brewing, too. Having said that, if I am honest, I am aware of how little I know.
***
In the weeks after that night, I kept thinking about that question and my answer. But just thinking, nothing more. Then one afternoon, my wife and I were out for a walk with our dog Millie on the farm we own with a bunch of other people in the Ottawa Valley. It was late fall. The leaves were gone and the grass was brown. We trudged down into the lower fields in the direction of the derelict 1940s era Ford that marks the end of our property. As we walked, with Millie busily trotting ahead of us, we talked about the brewing idea. I’d written about beer, and read a lot on it. I’d drunk plenty of it in my time, too. I’d even tried making it over the years, with varying degrees of success, at home and at you-brew” establishments. Getting really good at making it seemed like a fun next step.
Then it hit me. Why not do it here?” I said to her. Make it a whole hundred mile thing. Actually, we could make it a forty acre thing.” It was coming to me. We could plant some barley there,” I said, pointing to a sunny patch on the side of a hill. And run the hops up the side of the chicken coop.” I was walking faster. We’ve already got fantastic well water.” By this point, I was almost running, eager to greet the great future appearing before me: A lifetime supply of beer. And all I had to do was plant it, brew it, bottle it and drink it.
Brewing beer I realized would also be a good way to learn more about it and writing about that would be a great way to share it with other people. An adventure was starting to take shape. This wouldn’t all be me down on the farm, becoming one with the soil and extracting nature’s bounty. I’d talk to chemists and biologists to understand beer at its most fundamental level. I’d work alongside top brew masters in different breweries to learn the tricks of their craft. I’d visit barley and hop growers. I’d discover how firkins are made. I’d even learn what a firkin is.
In the end I would have a compact little barrel filled with homemade ale. The product of a particular patch of Ontario farmland and a particular time, the second decade of the 21st century. But my beer will also be the story of all beer wherever it is drunk and whenever people have drunk it. I’ll know why beer is both bitter and sweet, why German beer tastes German, and British beer, British. I’ll understand malting. And where people ever got the idea of germinating barley in the first place. IBUs, specific gravity, the tasting spectrum you name it, I’ll know it. That mystery in the beer drinker’s glass won’t be a mystery any more. I’ll gain a deep understanding and appreciation of the science and art of beer all from brewing one perfect little keg.
