| deeply did she bury her face in the white pillowcase you might have believed that above the neck she was one of those Egyptian mummies (though of Egypt we should probably say no more). Soon her pillow was as soaked as if it had been left out in the yard. Do you think she was overreacting? Could her disappointment really have been that horrible? No, Gracie was no crybaby wimp. Furthermore, she was hardly a stranger to disappointment as her daddy was forever—forever! forever! promising to take her places, to play games with her or buy her things, only to forget about it when the time came. What had upset Gracie, what had gotten her so worked up, was not so much disappointment as it was embarrassment and humiliation. She was only five (okay, almost six) but she wasn’t stupid. She knew that no beer can was heavy enough to injure a grown man’s foot by falling on it. Maybe it was her mother, maybe it was Uncle Moe, maybe it was both of them together, but somebody was fibbing in order to shame her. Somebody she loved was making cruel fun of her, undoubtedly because of all that interest she had shown in beer on Saturday; and probably, too, for having mentioned beer during church on Sunday. They were mocking her for that beer business and she didn’t exactly know why. She did know, however, that she wanted nothing to do with beer ever, ever again! Beer could |
are people who earn a living cultivating yeast plants and molding them by the tens of millions into cakes or powders. This is the yeast that brewers dump in the wort. There ‘s nothing yeast likes to eat better than wort. To hungry yeast, wort is like a steak dinner with chocolate mousse for dessert. Well, actually, for yeast, wort is more on the order of pecan pie à la mode with chocolate mousse for dessert, because what the yeast feasts on in the wort is the sugar. And as it digests it, yeast slowly turns that sugar into alcohol. Bingo!” “Alcohol makes beer beer, and people want beer because they want alcohol.” “Oh, beer does possess other charms, Gracie; but in the end, you’re correct: that ‘s what it comes down to. Yeast, like malt and hops and water, influences the character and flavor of beer, but its primary business, its day job, the work that pays its rent and makes it famous—in a funky sort of way—is to give sugar an extreme makeover. The people in the lab coats call that makeover process fermentation. What the Sugar Elves call it is something else again.” “There ‘s Sugar Elfs?” “Never mind them. Sugar is reliable, dependable; you can count on sugar to teach cakes and cookies to sing their sweet little songs, to grin from ear to ear whenever it lands on your tongue, and, when you aren’t looking, to rot your molars and make you fat |
