Travels with Barley (28 page)

“Where do you live?” Hardin wanted to know.

“Indianapolis.”

Hardin was familiar with Indianapolis. She said, “Well there's a place there that does henna tattoos. They can last a week. I'd wait till I got back there to do it.”

Morris, an African-American, wondered whether dark red henna would have enough contrast. “I'm not exactly light-skinned, you know.”

Hardin said she thought it would work.

I asked Morris his opinion of the Perfect Beer Joint.

“For a long-haul trucker like me after a hard day?” he said. “Four or five big-screen TVs, a pool table. And it always should have a hospitable female behind the bar open to good conversation.”

When Hardin came to inquire about whether Morris needed another beer, he said, “One more, then cut me off the beer, baby.” His plan, he told me, was to have another beer, take a long nap in his truck, and then head back to Indianapolis tonight.

Later, outside on Beale Street, I dodged a ferocious thunderstorm by ducking into Elvis Presley's Memphis Restaurant just as the rain started slashing sideways through the air. I chatted briefly with a friendly bartender who was probably two years old when Elvis died. He was of no help on my Elvis-and-beer question so I went out under the eaves of the restaurant to wait out the storm.

I had no clue as to where I might go next on the River of Beer when I struck up a conversation with Roger Willoughby, a Memphis-area musician and truck driver, who told me he had just come from Tunica, about an hour south, where he'd spent the weekend at “our little Vegas in Mississippi.”

Tunica, as I recalled, sat near the river and basically at the top of the famed Mississippi Delta (if you discount purists who say the Delta actually starts in Memphis). No matter: the Delta's fame lay in its hallowed position as a place that had birthed the blues as an unintended legacy of its historic yet troubled position as the onetime cotton capital of the world. On a rainy day, it seemed as good a place as any to head for, so in a lull in the storm I ran for my car, cranked it up, and drove south.

Houston, Tex.
—“Here, try this,” the man says, offering to pour something from a large dark bottle into my plastic cup.

Well, not just
my
cup. The man has been going around to practically everybody with a cup saying, “Try this! Try this!”

And everybody is trying it and I know I'm expected to try it, too. Here, you're supposed to try everything once. Skirt-Boy told me that as soon as I met him in person.

That's not his real name. His real name is Bev Blackwood and you met him back in the yeast chapter. But a guy named Bev who wears kilts to homebrew club meetings in Houston, Texas, can at the very least expect to get a nickname.

This is a diversion, 300 miles west of the Mississippi, to plumb the depths of homebrew mania.

I am on the semidarkened roof patio of a hotel parking garage. The air smells faintly of chili and heavily of beer. Doppler sounds of cars float up from a nearby freeway interchange. People are milling about—foraging, actually. Here, mysterious beer, even in its most outlandish interpretation, is the object of all desire.

I hold out my cup, though it has dregs of beer at the bottom—British brown ale to be exact. The man pours and the elixir slides down the sidewall like liquid gold, glinting like a goblin's eye in the poor light. I sniff, as I have now been taught to do, and sinus-clearing vapors X-ray up into recesses I didn't know existed.

I take a small sip. The taste is mellower than the aroma, though it still tracks down my throat like a slug of hot, boozy honey.

Which is what it more or less turns out to be.

“Honey mead,” the man says.

Then, grinning and looking around, he lowers his voice, draws closer and says, “Actually, distilled honey mead.”

When I don't immediately react to this because, at the moment, I am still ignorant of the intricacies of mead, not to mention the cascading intricacies of distilled honey mead, the man looks at me with the realization that he has just wasted his prize on an ignoramus.

“I went to Nuremberg,” he explains. “There they make mead, then distill it, then dilute it with water. I diluted mine with beer.”

I nod.

He looks at me in mild exasperation.

“This is 70 percent distilled mead, 30 percent beer. I added cabernet,” he says. “I aged it for a year in a bourbon oak cask. That's why you get all those vanilla tones.”

I nod again. He waits for me to say something.

“It's good,” I say. “I like it a lot.”

I realize how lame it sounds the second it comes out of my mouth.

The man nods as if to say, “Oh, jeez.” He goes off with his bottle, seeking more knowledgeable judgments and more articulate appreciation.

I ask my newly minted acquaintance and mentor Fred Eckhardt, who is standing nearby and also got a splash of this elixir, to decode this encounter. Fred is a seventy-six-year-old ex-marine Buddhist who teaches swimming classes to children back in his native Portland, Oregon. (And yes, the same man who penned “The Budweiser Menace.”) He wrote a book on how to homebrew lagers in 1969, ten years before homebrewing was relegalized. His 1989 book,
The Essentials of Beer Style
, has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for homebrewers and those who judge homebrew competitions. Eckhardt is a soft-spoken, diminutive, roundish man with blue twinkling eyes and a white mustache and goatee. Imagine Shakespeare's Puck reborn as a beer mensch.

Fred explains: mead is an ancient beerlike elixir made from honey, water, and yeast. It's not that hard to make. But throwing cabernet into the mead as you make it is pretty unusual. Distilling it and diluting it with beer is highly unusual. Putting it in bourbon casks—also highly unusual.

“It's also not particularly legal to do distilling but you can't go to these meetings without somebody sidling up to you with something they've distilled,” Fred says. He grins and adds: “That's why I like these meetings.”

He remembers another reason he likes these meetings. “Homebrewers, you will find, are fearless. They're not afraid to try anything.”

I'm at a homebrewing competition, my first ever, at a Marriott Courtyard off an extremely busy freeway interchange near Houston's vast Galleria shopping complex. The competition is called the Dixie Cup and it is sponsored by the Foam Rangers Homebrew Club, the oldest such club in Texas. The Rangers have about 100 dues-paying members. This being 2002, it is the Dixie Cup's nineteenth year and its theme is “The Night of the Living Fred” in honor of Eckhardt. Fred has never gotten rich off his beer writings but he is rich in beer friends. Beer People tend to treat their elder statesmen with great admiration and generosity.

The Dixie Cup is a regional brew-off that this year will attract more than 275 homebrewers, most from Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. That makes it one of the largest regionals in the nation. Brewers will enter 963 beers across a dizzying forty-two styles, including historical beers, meads, and ciders (but not any distilled meads cut with beer; those are just for fun). On the other hand, the Cup, given its proximity to Halloween, has a novelty category that mandates entrants brew up an ultra-strong brew with Halloween candy being one of the required ingredients. The style is called—what else?—Monster Mash.

The Dixie Cup is the last of five stops on a competitive brewing circuit called the Gulf Coast Homebrew Competition. Two of the other stops, to give you an idea of the nature of this, are the C-Cup, sponsored by the Crescent City Homebrewers in New Orleans, and the Lunar Rendezbrew sponsored by the Bay Area Mashtronauts of Houston (many of whose members do actually work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Puns are never spared and nothing is sacred to these people save the camaraderie of beer and the unflinching belief that homebrewers make better, more interesting beer than anybody on earth.

This is
not
an exaggeration.

Day 1 of my homebrew competition inaugural has been eventful to say the least. First, I was picked up at the airport by the Grand Wazoo, which is not a thing I can say has happened to me before. His formal name is Jimmy Paige, Grand Wazoo (i.e., president) of the Foam Rangers and I'd met him earlier by e-mail, seeking his definition of the Perfect Beer Joint. I thought he might come wearing a fez but he didn't. Instead, he arrived in a Ford F-150 pickup with a bumper sticker that read, “Save the Ales,” and wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt.

Paige is thirty-something, articulate, a big guy with a paunch but not a problematic one. We talked as he motored through traffic. He got turned onto homebrewing by a friend in 1990 while still serving as an officer in the coast guard; his wife bought him his first homebrew equipment back in 1993 “after she got sick and tired of hearing me talk about how much I wanted to brew,” he said.

Paige laughed, then added, “Boy, is she sorry. I wouldn't say it's an obsession but it is a pretty serious hobby. Most homebrewers set some pretty high goals. They want to promote beer culture and one way to do that is to be sure somebody isn't turned off by a bad batch of beer.” About the only downside Paige could think of to homebrewing was a kind of persistent public ignorance that “being a homebrewer, you are assumed to be an alcoholic. But I can assure you if you're an alcoholic, you won't stay in homebrewing. There are a lot easier ways to get drunk.”

Paige, in real life a marine surveyor, told me that people don't so much get voted Grand Wazoo as they volunteer their way into it. They work hard in the club and make it known that they're fool enough to take on the lead role organizing and presiding over the Dixie Cup, which becomes pretty much a full-time job in the three or four months leading up to the contest. On the other hand, the job really does come with a fez, which I would see Paige don many a time in full Wazoo ceremonial role during the Cup.

Paige tipped me off to the fact that the Dixie Cup was intended to generate some non-beer-related fun as well and some of that involved plans for Bev Blackwood. I'd had no idea that Blackwood's nickname was Skirt-Boy. Paige told me that Blackwood, a software instructor, had been a single-malt scotch aficionado with a local cable TV program called
The Malt Show
when he'd attended the 2001 version of the Dixie Cup and got hooked on beer judging. He joined the Rangers and quickly made a lot of friends for his brewing skills and for putting out a quirky newsletter called
The Brewsletter Urquell
. And then there was the fact that he kept wearing his Malt Show kilts to the meetings. This had provided joyful and welcome fodder for the irreverent joshing you might expect to find at the Rangers' monthly meetings, where beer is ever present. Blackwood's fellow Rangers had become so enchanted with his kilts, in fact, that they'd undertaken a stealth write-in campaign to the
Houston Press
, an alternative newspaper that annually publishes a “Best of Houston” list—things like Best Dive Bar, Best Bathrooms, and Best Place for a Last Date. One category was cross-dressing and the Rangers' campaign had resulted in Blackwood (without him knowing it) receiving a People's Choice Award in the Best Drag Queen category. “I've picked up a pink feather boa, some fishnet stockings, and a bright orange wig, which we plan to present to Bev on the final night,” Paige told me. “He has no idea what's coming.”

Already in the Grand Wazoo's truck was Randy Mosher (the person who, you may recall, sent me to see Maribeth Raines-Casselman, the yeast diva). Randy is a graphic designer by profession, a beer writer of great skill, a beer historian, and homebrewer by avocation. He was here as a speaker at the Dixie Cup. For what Randy really is, besides a Beer Geek, is the Willy Wonka of the beer world. He's not content to just make beer. He makes beer (trending toward recreations of antique and historical beers) with beer machinery that he makes himself. He went to welding school so he could make his own brew kettles and beer gizmos not dreamed up elsewhere. He forages online for things like pressure gauges from cast-off CPR training dummies and high-tech dairy pasteurization sensors with nine different temperature readouts. He buys these things that originally cost $900 or $5,000 for $20 or $140 on eBay and figures out how to mechanize a basement brewery as slick as Anheuser-Busch's. He also has opinions like: “Remember when Tom Wolfe wrote about abstract art and got to the part where the abstractionists had produced a blank canvas? Well, where do you go from there? It's the same with beer. Remember when Miller introduced Clear Beer? You can only go in that direction so long before you hit a wall.”

Homebrewers, I was learning, had a complicated relationship to commercial brewing—even craft brewing. Big Beer was often the object of scorn but I met a fair number of homebrewers who clearly would have loved to be put in charge of a massive brewery so they could churn out
their
beer on a mass scale. They were more charitable in their view of craft brewers—and why shouldn't they be? By one estimate, probably 85 percent of the nation's craft brewers started out as homebrewers. And, anyway, there was no particular reason to be jealous. I often heard homebrewers lament that once homebrewers went pro they lost their creative edge because, well, they were then required to make beer that they actually had to
sell
to the public.

After the Wazoo got us to the Marriott, which took a while, Houston traffic being basically equivalent to Los Angeles traffic (but with more American cars), I soon ran into Steve Moore. He, like Blackwood, had been an online buddy for a while, being the guy whose essay had tipped me off to the yeast obsession among homebrewers. (Several Rangers, including Moore, share an online column called “Foam Improvement.” We hadn't been talking long when Steve said, “You wanna go see my Big Rig?”

Now, in contemporary America this is a question a man needs to carefully consider but I knew, actually, that Steve was talking about his customized homebrew system. This being Texas, only the greenest of rookies are content to brew out of one of those 5-gallon starter kits from the local homebrew shop. A few years back, Steve told me, a Houston Beer Geek who also happened to be a welder got the clever idea of making 15-gallon multivessel customized homebrew systems run by a fully computerized console that would automate a lot of the chores that homebrewers face. (The Beer Geek has since moved to Alaska.) Steve bought one, slapping down $3,000 ($2,400 for the brewing apparatuses and $600 extra for the computerized console).

We hopped in his Mazda convertible sports car and, after lunching at a wonderfully run-down diner specializing in succulent ribs called Thelma's Bar-B-Que, bumped along this and that freeway until we got to Steve's house. The Big Rig was in his garage and it
was
big, though it didn't take up exactly half his garage as I expected it might. And I'm not a homebrewer (a fact that exasperated every homebrewer who found this out, since homebrewers are more missionary than the Mormons), so some of the finer points of the Big Rig were lost on me. But Moore, a thirty-something computer network administrator with close-cropped hair, a dry sense of humor, and an attractive girlfriend a foot taller than him, ran his hands over the contraption like some men do their bass boats.