Microbrewed Adventures by Charles Papazian Read Free Book Online Page A

use.”
    That was the beginning of that!
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    YOU’VE GOT to take into perspective that this was 1983. The best commercially available homebrewing yeast was dried yeast and came in small envelopes. Ale yeasts were often not of the best quality, and “dried lager yeast” was not lager yeast at all, but simply ale yeast called lager yeast on the package. Therein lay my dilemma. If I could gain access to a quality culture of ale and lager yeast, I might have a chance at brewing beers that would be acceptable to the people of the “King.” The challenge was to avoid compromise. The beers had to be good.
    I called in a favor to friends at a brewing laboratory. One week later I had two small test tubes, one each of anonymous ale yeast and anonymous lager yeast. I was assured that they were of very good brewing quality and had been removed from a frozen yeast bank and cultured back to activity inside these tubes. I looked disbelievingly at the tiny drops of liquid and the small, almost imperceptible, amount of sediment that dusted the bottom. From these two drops of liquid sprang forth hundreds of beers, the first two emerging as lagers, Masterbrewers Doppelbock and Masterbrewers Celebration Light Lager. Juggling carboys and available space, I brewed several 12-gallon batches to top out at 31 gallons of final beer. Brewed on a stove top in a 5-gallon brewpot, fermented in 6½-gallon glass carboys at room temperature and “lagered” for three weeks at the same room temperature under my kitchen table, the beer was finally ready to keg. I called George, announcing, “You can deliver those kegs.”
    I’ll never, ever forget the look on my neighbor’s face when the Anheuser-Busch van stopped in front of my home. He leaned on his yard rake with an expression that spoke for itself. I shrugged my shoulders as the Anheuser-Busch representative wheeled into my front door eight empty quarter-barrels of beer. After the van left, I looked over at my neighbor, who was still frozen leaning on his rake, his mouth wide open. I didn’t say a word. He knew I was a homebrewer…but the van from Anheuser-Busch?
    A short time later, the beer was transferred into each keg with a gravity siphon. A small amount of corn sugar was added for initiating natural carbonation and the hole was ceremoniously bunged with a wooden cork and a hefty whack of a hammer. One week later I summoned Anheuser-Busch to pick up the filled kegs.
    My neighbor was doing yard work as the Anheuser-Busch van pulled up to the front of my home for a second time, and he again stopped and with a dropped jaw, stared at the scene in silent disbelief. The two-wheel dolly entered the house empty and emerged with two quarter-barrels of beer—four times. As the King of Beers guy drove away, I turned to my neighbor, feeling that by now I owed him an explanation. I said, with a shrug, “Anheuser-Busch needed some beer, so I’m helping them out.” I immediately turned and walked into the house without waiting for a reaction.
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    THOUGH SATISFIED that the beer entering the keg was excellent, I was nervous. Would it survive the trip to St. Louis? Would it carbonate? How would it survive the journey into the can?
    The can. That was the unknown factor beyond my control. I heard months later that a “small” canning line, perhaps used in a pilot brewery, was used to fill and seal the cans. I wondered later why more than half the cans were only half full and there were so many commemorative empties. It was later explained to me that it took more beer to fill the canning line’s plumbing than there was beer. The kegs were emptied before the beer began to emerge on the filling end! Empty cans were flying off the conveyor belt and half-fills barely made it to the sealer. Anheuser-Busch was a union brewery and all the professionals had to keep their hands behind their backs, sweating over the whole procedure as the line