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The Brewer's Tale
By Rick Olivo, aka Strange Brewer
PART I
The old man shuffled into the brewhouse. It was dark, so he flipped on the light switch. The great kettles gleamed, their polished copper surfaces lovingly rubbed to a red-mirror finish that seemed to glow. Generations of being carefully polished by brewhaus workers had done that. Workers who understood the value of cleanliness in the brewroom. The painted brick walls were spotless, the hardwood floors oiled and hand rubbed to a dull sheen. How many years had he come to this room to make the beer? How many brews had he presided over, the old world master, a priest in his temple. Thousands, he thought, untold thousands. He reached out and with a shaking hand, he touched the great kettle, hand hammered so many years ago by proud workmen who signed their names with their craftsmanship alone. A craftsman appreciates the work of other craftsmen, he thought. And for nearly six decades he had admired the workmanship of the three great mash kettles, with their great bulbous bases, their gracefully fluted vents. He gently touched them, one by one, as one would caress the face of a lover, then carefully wiping their surfaces with a handkerchief. No need to make more work for the boys, he thought, as he had so many times before. The he roused from his reverie with a start. Who will care if I mark them up now, he thought with bitter clarity. He remembered. There would be no more brews here. The brewery he had come to as a young man, came of age in, then grown old with was being shut down. Closed because it was obsolete, much like the old man himself. An old brewmaster in an old brewery no one much cared about any more. In a few short weeks, the brownstone façade, the sturdy brick walls, all would do a dance of death with the wrecking ball. His precious brew kettles would be cut into pieces and tossed ignominiously into a scrapyard somewhere where the rain would fall on them. He knew this, knew it in his head, but not in his heart and he wiped the fingerprint off the kettle as he had done so many times before. He could not do otherwise. A brewer he had been, a brewer he would remain, until the end.
PART II
The old brewer remembered the day the owner’s son called him into his office. He was always a little nervous around the young man who affected three-piece suits, expensive gold jewelry and sunglasses he wore even at night. The old owner understood men and beer. But he was dead now and there was a new regime that used words he didn’t understand like “market share” and “demographic penetration.”
The old owner had been a hard-headed businessman. But he understood beer. The young man understood numbers and accounts that lit up the screen of his computer. He knew all that fancy stuff they taught him in Harvard Business School. But he didn’t understand beer; and he didn’t understand men. And he made the old brewer more nervous than a visit by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agent.
“Henry, the board has decided. We are going to start brewing a light beer. Our research shows that’s the trend, and our profit margin will be much higher on a lighter product.
The old man had never called him “Henry.” He had always referred to him as Herr Heinrich or as simply “The Braumeister,” in recognition of his German brewing heritage.
But he deferred to the young man as a proper German craftsman would. He followed his instructions and brewed the light beer to the specifications of the marketing department to the best of his considerable ability, but it was weak, watery and spiritless and he detested it. Nevertheless, he drove his men to the best of their abilities, and the beer did in fact sell well, and the company became ever more profitable.
But the old brewmaster drew no joy from his successes. It was as if something very important had been lost from his soul, something small, but vital. It was not like it was in the old days, the days before prohibition. Ah, now those were the great days, when the beer of his father was amber and malty, life-sustaining and filled with joy and hops. Not like this bloodless, pale stuff the sophisticated set preferred nowadays.
He forced the thought from his mind, recalling the bad days of prohibition, the last brew, when the old owner sadly gave each man two weeks wages and three gallons of good beer he could no longer sell.
They had kept him on, to help make soda pop. It wasn’t easy. There were times he was laid off for weeks at a time. But he waited for the bad days to end, as he knew they must.
He had even been forced to brew bootleg beer for bad men, for that Capone fellow down in Cicero. He paid good, and he insisted that his beer be nothing but first rate, but as the law-abiding son of a German immigrant, he could not abide bootleggers. But on the other hand, prohibition had made no sense to him at all. Beer was food! How could you outlaw food? Bah! Such foolishness.
He recalled the day of jubilation when the 19th amendment had passed and the beer he had secretly prepared in advance for this day was trucked away to thirsty drinkers amid the cheers of the reunited brew house crew. He was a man of the old school, he considered. Like his father before him who had worked at this very brewery until the day of his death, placing his black derby hat on the hat rack in his office, as he did every day when the shift whistle blew, never to pick it up again. The day after the funeral, the young brewer, still wearing a black armband, picked up the derby, clapped it on his head and walked out of the office to be confronted by the expectant stares of the brew house gang.
“All right,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s make the beer!”
PART III
As the old man ruminated, it occurred to him that each generation of brewers had been tested in the fires of adversity. And like fine German steel, they had bent, but not broken, their temper was true, and their beer was good.
Grandpa Otto, he knew all about trouble. In a day when it was illegal for a brewer to even leave Germany, he had brewed in the great breweries of Munich. But his was a restless spirit, longing to be freed of the strictures place on him and his family by the ironclad German law. Although he was a master brewer, he was still a poor man. He dreamed of the freedom in a land he had only heard of in whispers. America. In America a man could live free, say exactly what was on his mind. In America there was no secret police. They would not conscript his sons for the Army, they would not tax the life and soul out of a man. It was a land where a man could move about without getting permission from the authorities, where he could buy land of his own without being accused of trying to step out of his station. So Otto and his wife Anna took their small son one night and with just a few marks in their pockets, slipped out of Munich bound for Hamburg, an immigrant’s ship and the freedom of America.
He was one of the great German brewers who left their native land to bring lager beer to a thirsty new world. They took with them the rich heritage of German brewing, that found expression in the perfection they demanded of themselves and those who worked for them, a reverence, a sense of awe almost at the miracle they wrought from their mash tuns. Those attitudes had been stamped into them through centuries of German beer purity laws that were far more than just legislation on some piece of paper. They were expressions of an abiding religion, a covenant with the drinkers of their product, a pledge that only the healthful, finest quality beer would pass their lips.
The old brewer sighed when he compared the powerful, fragrant beers of his grandfathers with the pallid, insipid fizz-water that passed for beers these days. Old man Schlitz, Busch, and Coors would have puked in their hats to have tasted the beers now being sold under their names. Otto had been a stern and exacting taskmaster, but he had been a fair man in his way. His men never lacked for beer, even if their wages were only a dollar a day. They always had Sunday off under his regime, and on Christmas, there would be gifts of Schnitzel, ham and fresh bread, baked by his own wife. It was the way of things in those days, before the accountants and union bosses had messed things up.
His father too had been a hard man, tested in his own forge of trial. The old brewer remembered listening to his tales of shoveling tons of spent grains, hauling them to the brewery’s stable of hogs as a young boy. The old brewer himself had in his turn shoveled and sweated in the explosive steam heat of the brew kettle following a brew. Every brewer had to learn brewing from the floor on up. It was Otto’s way, it was his father’s way, and it was his way too. He learned the way of beer from such tasks, the mysteries of the yeast, the wonderful, almost sensual spice of the hops. He became proficient at judging grain and would amaze his fellows by predicting within half a point the results of a brew simply by tasting a few grains of malt. He thought of his lifetime of brewing, of the men he worked with, most long dead. He considered this, and the cost of his life’s work. The bent stooped back from too hard work, gnarled fingers, burned and crushed innumerable times by unforgiving metal. The eyes, bleary from too many nights doing paperwork. Most of all he thought of his son, the brewmaster for the new brewery across town.
PART IV
A new stab of pain went through the old brewer's heart, as he thought of his son, so like his father in so many ways. He wondered at which point they had been so distant.
The youngster's fate had been set on the day he had arrived on earth. He would be a brewer like his father's before him, he announced proudly at the brewery as he handed out cigars to his boys, soaking in with pride their congratulations. And even as a boy, his son had loved to come to the brewery and explore the tuns, tanks piping, the grain silos, the hops bins. Perhaps it had been when he sent him to that college in California, to get a degree in the brewing sciences. Surely it was then. As the young man would come back, filled with the state of the art brewing knowledge, he would shake his head at the old man’s hopelessly outmoded notions.
“You just can’t do it the old way anymore, dad. It’s a business; it’s a competitive business. Anyone who doesn’t adapt, well they are just going to be left behind.”
The rift widened, and eventually, the two stopped talking about brewing, or much else that mattered for that matter.
Had he been so wrong, the old man considered. After all, there was no arguing with his son’s prediction. The brewery was closed. He was retiring, left with nothing to do.
But the old man could not adapt. He clung to his faith in quality, in handcrafted beauty, not in the soulless industrial monster that was the new brewery. He had made his choice, and so had the company, when they selected his son as the head brewer for the new facility.
He had been to the new brewery many times. He was amazed by the modern automation, by the technological wonder of it all.
The specialist technicians who worked there vastly impressed him. They knew far more, it was true, than the old blue-collar laborers who had produced beer for generations at the old brewery. But there was some indefinable quality about the simple working me that was missing in the college-trained engineers and zymurgists who made up the work force at the new brewery. Did they ever take up a collection for the family of a co-worker in mourning? He doubted it. Did they play softball at the company picnic any more? He knew they didn’t. No, something had been lost, along with the character of the beer. The soul was no longer there. Just as the light had gone out of the relationship with his own son.
So this, then was it. The bitter trub at the end of a keg of life. It had taken all he had to give, and he had given gladly; for such was what they expected of him, and what he had expected of himself. He knew he had done his best, that he should be content, but why then was he so defeated? Because life is not like beer, he thought with genuine sorrow. You can’t just tap a new keg and continue to celebrate. It is time to go home and wait for the only true rest, the sleep of eternal night. He hoped that end would come mercifully quick.
He had not noticed, absorbed in his mournful ruminations, the light growing dim in the vast brew room’s west window. The shadows edging to night, despite the baleful yellow glow of the single light.
His solitary contemplations were interrupted as the door swung open. In walked his son, with a concerned look on his face.
“I thought you might be here,” he said softly, gazing at his father’s troubled face with concern. “Mother was worried. She sent me to look for you.”
“Ach,” said the old man, embarrassed. “Just an old man saying goodbye to his old friends.”
He looked at his son, with a sudden, deep burst of love, the love he had felt for him as a very small boy, when he worshiped his papa.
“You are a good son. And you have always been right. I am an old stubborn man. I should have listened to you long ago. I have been so wrong about so many things.”
The younger brewer was suddenly abashed. He had never heard his father speak this way.
“Pappa,” he said, using the name he had not used in many years, “ I wouldn’t change you one bit, even if I could. I love you papa.”
The tears that had been welling from the old man’s eyes flowed hot and without shame, as he embraced his son.
“Ach, son, you do not know how good it is to say that to you. I was a afraid I would not know how to say it before I was gone.”
“Gone? Where are you going?” the son asked, bewildered.
The old man spoke carefully, deliberately, as was his practice when making important pronouncements.
“I do not think I will long outlast this place. There is too much of me here. I do not want to outlive my time.”
“But papa, if you die, who will brew the beer?” he asked, with the beginning of a gentle, loving smile.
“You will brew it, my son. I cannot brew your beer. You brew it. It is the beer for your time. Mine is gone. When they tear down this place, I shall die,” he said with finality.
Understanding filled the young man’s face. “Tear down? You mean you haven’t heard?
The old man now had his turn to be bewildered. “Heard? Heard what?”
The young man was grinning broadly. “The board met today. They’ve decided not to tear down the old brewery. In fact, Brewing is to begin again. And you are to be brewmaster.
“But what madness is this?” the old man asked, in confusion.
“It’s simple pappa. Changing times, businesses must change with the times.”
”But that is why they closed the brewery. We cannot brew the modern beer here.”
“No pappa, but the people don’t want just modern beer. There is something new happening with beer drinkers. They want handcrafted beers. You know how microbreweries have been exploding! Everybody, seems like wants to get in on it. Anheiser-Bush, they have their own craft-brewed beers. Well, the board decided if it was good enough for AB, we ought to be able to knock their socks off with the kind of beer you can brew. Quality beer, with heart and soul. Not the kind of industrial beer I make. Oh, there will always be a place for my beer. It’s what most people want. But there is a growing market for your kind of beer. Made your way. That’s what the board decided.”
“And what could make them change their mind like that,” asked the old man with wonder.
The son smiled archly.
“Let’s just say they had a little persuasion from their new brewmaster. I can be very persuasive if I have to be. It’s an inherited characteristic.” The old man barely heard him. In his mind, his thoughts were racing. I have to find Lennie, and George and Santini, and have them get the crew together. There is much to do. We must begin tomorrow. Early. “It’s time to make the beer.”
FINIS
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