The Beer Hole

I was shocked, a few years back, to learn how little most brewmasters make. I mean, it’s understandable if your local brewpub only pays their head guy or gal 30k—that’s a small scale operation, after all. But most brewers aren’t that small. They just take pride in paying their most important employees shit wage, providing them instead of vague status perks.

The influx of Millennial liberals into the entrepreneurial economy has lead to some comical, and very sad, effects. There was a sign up at an Indianapolis charcuterie asking for applicants for an apprenticeship position. The pay was $500 a month, and a yearlong commitment was required. Good news, though: you got all the fatty meat you could eat, and every second Sunday was a day off.

“Is this for serious,” I asked the young man with the handlebar moustache.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You work here, you’re a rock star.”

And as everyone knows, rock stars are famous for how little money they make. But so goes the vagaries of our sad, broken country: a generation of young people have abandoned all hope of financial stability and will accept instead a chance to become known locally as that cool dude who works at the meat packing place.

So head brewer positions have their perks. You get to drink all day, for one. Bloggers and cicerones kiss your ass. And you get to go into the VIP area at Dark Lord Day. But 30k at a big-name, mid-size brewer? You can’t retire on that. You can’t afford to get sick, even, or take a day off, or do anything that might mildly annoy your employer, who is statistically one of those icky Ayn Rand guys who thinks that treating people like shit is a sign of moral intelligence. He is a job creator. You are a mere maker. He’s given you your maker space and you have utilized that space to craft a socially favorable identity—what more could you possibly want, you ungrateful piece of filth? You—ugg, people like you make the ubermensch feel all shruggy, if you get my drift. Keep yapping and we’ll transfer brewing operations to Vietnam. Over there you can throw sass-mouth child laborers right into the boiling tank.

Long story short, I was quite pleased when I heard that Toppling Goliath’s old head brewer had left the business on short notice. Because, frankly, fuck the business owner. Fuck all business owners who aren’t also practitioners, or who refuse to adequately value their employees. I met that guy, and he had the same air of holier-than-thou self-possession as every other coked-out degenerate restaurateur I’ve ever known. These are the guys who give their employees mealy-mouthed lectures on being team players, on the morality of grit and selflessness, but then shut down operations overnight and refuse to issue the last three week’s paychecks. These are the people who conflated selfishness with honor, the rat bastards who’ve taken control of every single aspect of this country and consider themselves the only true victims of the horrors they’ve wrought upon the world. In 2055, when potable water is as valuable as gold and a lucky few toilers survive to literally lick the shit from these people’s assholes, they will cry about the good old days, about how government and unions brought down the glorious systems that used to make life so pleasant. Fuck them. I hope they all die.

And so rumors abound regarding the fate of TG. None of them are good. They’ve had to abandon several batches. Other beers have been renamed because they can’t stop fucking up the recipe. This, 1492, is from their Hop Patrol series, and it resembles a decently hopped homebrew. The carbonation was off—no sound was made when the cap was removed, as if I were unstopping a bottle of Sam Adams Utopias. It glugged out with minimal fizz and smelled pleasant but uneven. The unevenness continues throughout the flavor, with green and fruity hops blotting out everything else, ending on nodes of juice and water.

Topping Goliath is in trouble. And that’s a good thing.

Lifts trap door leading to crawlspace, pulls out vellum-sheathed tome labeled “Beerhole Scthick.” Leaves door open, takes several steps upon the dusty hardwood before sitting down laboriously and opening the book.

ME
Lessee… “Bitch about pricing,” “Bitch about Beeradvocate reviews,” “Bitch about extremeness,” “Thinly veiled suicide threat…” Ack! None of these work! Wait… what’s this? “Gimmick review.” Yes! That will do nicely.

Turns to camera. Several teeth are missing. Eyes are welled with tears. Begin speaking in tone that is absolutely flat and normal.

ME
Jack’s Abby is only lagers. They make some very good beers. They also popularized India Pale Lagers, which are stupid because the back ends get all weirded out from lagering. I do not know if they lager their exquisite Baltic Porter, but I think that would be illegal since that’s not how you do porters.

Sighs deeply. Turns momentarily to face a mirror. Turns back toward the camera. Skin is to beginning to peel off my face, melting.

ME
Berliners are kind of popular in America now. The first one I remember that was really good was from New Glarus. It was nearly as thick as Weinstephaner’s Hefe, which is perfectly thick, only the NG beer was soured wonderfully by lacto. The result was like a wheat milkshake that was also a citrus soda. It was fabulous and completely different. After trying something like that, it’s no wonder other brewers would want to try to emulate it.

Looks downward toward hands. They are tiny and frail, veins sticking through the skin as blue as the sky and as thick as earthworms.

ME
Traditional Berliners are not as sour as New Glarus’. They were traditionally only lightly soured and then flavor would be added in pubs. There’s Red Syrup (raspberry) and Green Syrup (woodruff). Michael Jackson’s first edition of the World Guide to Beer showed all three colors lined up like a traffic signal. It was cool, and it seeing it made me realize how differently Americans had interpreted the style. There was a booth at the recent American Craft Beer Fest, in Boston, that actually had the syrups on hand. I drunkenly explained how cool that was, how I’d just read about it in an old book. The woman running the booth said that no one ever used them, and she disappointed, on a personal level, that I requested the woodruff.

Turns toward window then snaps ahead away. Camera pans upward, toward window. The sky is red from pollution and blood. A hairy, three-fingered hand, perhaps belonging to a disfigured chimp, taps lightly on the glass and then beckons us to follow it.

ME
So… Jack’s Abby. Their Berliner seems remarkably traditional, at least as I understand the style to traditionally exist. Lightly sour up front, leading to a middle that’s like a combination between a Shock-Tart-Flavored American Berliner and a nice, traditional municher, with lights nodes of cereal against sunshine and hay. The finish is fabulous, really shows off their brewing acumen. Zero esters. Delicious dryness.

Sigh again, more loudly. No longer any energy to lift up head. Camera pans towards the still-open crawl space door. A line of ants, each the approximate size and shape of a Coronita bottle, is streaming out of the hole. The ground is alive with them.