B Is for Beer

  Gradually, though, the wallpaper slowed down to regulation Earth speed, and Gracie fell deeply, peacefully asleep. It was a primitive, timeless sleep, free of restless dreams, and she might have slumbered that way for hours had she not been awakened by a gentle but persistent scratching or tapping sensation just below her throat.

  When she could focus normally, she saw that a small winged creature of some sort was perched on her upper chest. At first, it looked to be a dragonfly, standing on its hind legs, if dragonflies can be said to have hind legs, but it was pacing to and fro and anybody who’s paid attention knows that dragonflies can’t walk. Furthermore, it was tapping steadily, purposefully, on Gracie’s breastbone with a front leg—or something resembling a leg—as if to get her attention. The thing was only slightly taller than a birthday candle, and had translucent wings that shimmered like moonlight on a barrel of rainwater.

  More fascinated than alarmed, Gracie wondered aloud, “What in the world are you?”

  Obviously, she wasn’t expecting an answer. Obviously. Imagine her intense amazement, therefore, when in a tiny, tinkly but plainly understandable human voice, the creature spoke. “What do you think I am, a Jehovah’s Witness? Do I look like I might be selling Girl Scout cookies?” Before a startled Gracie could even attempt a response, it went on to say, “What I am is the Beer Fairy, for crying out loud.”

  10

  Tasting the stale barf in her mouth, Gracie was pretty sure she wasn’t dreaming. She rubbed her eyes and stared harder. Sure enough, upon closer inspection, the teeny-weeny creature resembled in almost every detail the fairies whose pictures she’d seen in books. You’d probably agree. In addition to the silvery wings, she (it was definitely female) had flowing red hair, sparkly oversize eyes, a wise, mysterious smile, and a slender, perfectly formed body draped loosely in a strange billowy material that constantly changed color and glittered like diamond dust. She was barefoot, bedecked with a scalloped crown that noticeably resembled a bottle cap, and carried a black leather wand, apparently the instrument with which she had prodded Gracie awake. Gracie was awed, to say the least.

  “Are you really the Beer Fairy?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’ve never heard of a Beer Fairy.”

  “You have now.”

  “Hmm. Well, you’re very pretty.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Next door.”

  Gracie’s mouth flew open. “You live at the McCormicks’?!” That’s where her mommy was. More or less.

  The fairy laughed. “Not at your neighbor’s house, silly. I mean the world next door to this one.”

  Gracie nodded. She vaguely understood. “How did you get here?”

  “Why, through the Seam.”

  “The Seam?” Gracie was even more vague about that (just because a person turns six doesn’t mean they have to know everything), but she decided to ignore it. “Are you a kind of angel, then?”

  “No, no, no. Angels don’t do beer. They’re into the fine wine and cognac, angels are. They tend to be seriously sophisticated—and if you want my opinion, seriously snootered-up and pucky-wucked. You’ll never catch an angel at a kegger, believe me.”

  “My Sunday school teacher says beer is the Devil’s drink.”

  “Ha! Shows how little she knows about that old boogeyman. For her information, and yours, the Devil drinks Shirley Temples.”

  “Really!?”

  “You can take my word for it.”

  “Hmm. That’s funny. But you, Beer Fairy? You’re the fairy for beer?”

  “Put two and two together, did you? Let me state it this way: if a substantial quantity of beer is being consumed, you can usually expect to find me flitting about the scene.”

  “Does nobody see you?”

  “Yeah, when they drink too much they do, although they don’t remember it later. Or if they do remember, they aren’t brave enough to admit it.” With a soft whir, the fairy flew up then and landed on Gracie’s shoulder. “So, what do you think of beer, little lady?”

  Gracie screwed up her face. “It made me sick.”

  “That’s right. You drank too much too fast and you’re way too young.”

  “When people drink too much beer do you help them?”

  “Oh, if they’ve become pleasantly glad and dizzy, I might take steps to ensure that no real harm befalls them, I might enhance or even participate in their celebration; but should they happen to turn aggressive or nasty or stupid, which isn’t uncommon, I’m more likely to kick their butts. Believe me, kiddo, there’s not a tough-guy beer guzzler alive whose butt I cannot kick.”

  “Are you gonna kick my butt?”

  Gently shaking her head, the fairy smiled. “No, Gracie Perkel. You’ve been kicked quite enough today. I’m here to satisfy your unusual curiosity and to reveal to you the origins and mysteries of beer.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say that you’re a special case. Now, are you ready to take a little trip?”

  “A trip? Where? How? My mommy…”

  “Don’t worry. We’re going far away, but we’ll be back before you know it. Here. Hang on to my wand.”

  Ever obedient, Gracie grasped the wand between her thumb and index finger, but it wasn’t easy to hold on to, it being not much bigger than a tadpole’s tail. Nevertheless, she felt herself being pulled upright from the bed. Whoa! Easy now! With increasing speed, her body was rising toward the ceiling.

  “Let’s blow this pop stand!” shouted the Beer Fairy—and from the yippee and wahoo exuberance in her voice, anybody could tell it was one of the Beer Fairy’s favorite sayings.

  11

  For a scary moment, Gracie was sure her skull was about to be smashed like a cantaloupe against the ceiling. She imagined her mother entering the room later and discovering, in addition to the pool of barf, Gracie’s splattered brains all over the floor. But then, inches from a head-on collision, there occurred a poof! noise, she felt a strong rush of air, and the next thing she knew she was suspended somewhere in the atmosphere. At least, that was her impression.

  “What happened?” Gracie asked, in a voice as shaky as a wet chihuahua at a fireworks show.

  “We passed through the Seam.”

  “What Seam?”

  “What Seam? The Seam between the Earth and the sky, between the it and the is, between the fire and the smoke, between the mirror and the reflection, between the buzz and the bee, between the screw and the turning of the screw, and so on and so forth. You get the picture?”

  As a matter of fact, in terms of getting the picture, Gracie was between the huh? and the huh-uh. If she neglected to say so, it was because she was too busy straining to see how far she’d fall if she lost her grip on the Beer Fairy’s wand. And at that moment, she realized that she was already on the ground, standing amid a waving, seemingly endless expanse of tall, golden-brown grass.

  Opening her teeny toothpick arms wide as if to embrace everything in sight, the Beer Fairy announced, “This is where it all begins.”

  Puzzled, Gracie merely stood there, the grass enveloping her, the seedy spikes at the tip of its stems rubbing against her elbows like the beards of affectionate billy goats. (The grass was up to her armpits, and had she been five instead of six, it might have reached her neck.) The grass was almost crackly dry, yet Gracie could sense the moist heart of the Earth throbbing in it. Was that what the Beer Fairy meant about it all starting here?

  “This is a grain field,” the sprite explained. “A field of barley, to be specific. All beer gets its start as grain. Some pretty tasty beer is made from wheat; Asians brew an acceptable beer from rice, though it’s not my cup of tea, and there’re Africans who resort to millet for a brew that’s dipped warm out of buckets on village market day—neither better tasting nor less filling, I’m afraid—but the worldwide grain of choice for making beer is good old barley.” She performed a loop and landed on a stalk top, which bowed ever so
slightly from her cottony weight.

  “My uncle Moe says beer’s made outta hops.”

  “Your uncle Moe is full of you-know-what. Or else you misunderstood him.” The Beer Fairy thrust her wand toward Gracie. “Come along. With that in mind, we’d better get to our next stop.”

  “Are we blowing this pop stand?” asked Gracie.

  The Beer Fairy laughed a fairy laugh. “You’re okay, kiddo. You’re all right. Now, treat yourself to a good long look at this barley field as we lift off. You can appreciate its rustic beauty, I’m sure, but you could never guess what history or what forces lie hidden in that common crop.

  “Barley grains found near Al Fayyūm, Egypt, have been shown in laboratory tests to be 5,000 years old. That’s 4,994 years older than you, little miss. Whether barley—originally just another species of wild grass—was actually domesticated in Egypt way back then, or was imported as livestock feed from more agriculturally advanced northern cultures, is a subject scholars can debate until their glasses fog over. A more interesting subject is how the Egyptians figured out a way to convert that donkey chow, that camel fodder, into an intoxicating beverage in the first place, an inebriating liquid refreshment so wholly perfect that it’s endured and spread and has grown ever more popular through the ages.

  “For whatever reason, the ancient Egyptians weren’t satisfied with mere survival. They wanted to be remembered forever, which is why they built the pyramids, and they wanted to ensure that they’d be sufficiently glad and dizzy during their lifetime, which is why they invented beer.”

  “Did the Egypt people invent you, too?”

  “Ha! You are the inquisitive one, aren’t you? No, they invented me only in the sense that your mommy and daddy’s love invented you. But that’s another story. Right now, we need to go.”

  That suited Gracie fine. The mention of her parents made her think of home, and that talk about ancient Egyptians had made her miss Uncle Moe. Such thoughts were threatening to spoil her big birthday adventure. She need not have worried, though, because as they rose above the farmland, there was another poof!, another whoosh of wind, and in a wink she and the Beer Fairy were out of the sunlight, out of the sweet country air; were, in fact, indoors somewhere, inside a room that was chilly, smelly, and darn near as vast as a barley field.

  12

  “Can you guess where we are?” asked the Beer Fairy.

  Gracie glanced around the building, letting her eyes adjust to the artificial light. The place just looked like some dumb factory to her. Finally, for the heck of it, she sang out, “Costa Rica!”—knowing perfectly well it wasn’t true.

  “Notice that huge pile of sacks on that wooden platform over there. What do you think is in those sacks?”

  “Uh, flour.”

  “No.”

  “Sugar.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Cement.”

  “Guess again.”

  “Kittens.”

  “Kittens? What’s the matter with you, girl? Think. Where were we just now?”

  “Egypt.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake! Listen, I’m the Beer Fairy, I can tolerate a lot of goofiness—if it wasn’t for goofy business I’d practically do no business at all—but you’ve gone and gotten your six-year-old self involved with beer and I’m making a sincere effort to teach you something about the substance you’re dealing with. Now, I promised not to kick your butt, but if you…”

  “Oh, I remember now!” Gracie flashed her brightest smile. “We were on a farm for barley.”

  “Hey, hey! A barley field. Congratulations.” If you never thought fairies could be sarcastic, think again. “Didn’t that uncle of yours ever tell you that nobody likes a smart-ass?”

  Gracie tried half-heartedly to recall such sage advice, but all that came to mind was Moe’s warning that “Every time a person goes to the mall, she loses a little piece of her soul.”

  The truth of the matter is that Gracie had been far more interested in the wee winged creature hovering a few inches in front of her nose than she’d been in these new surroundings, whether indoors or out, and she’d experienced difficulty concentrating on the brewski lessons. You’d have much the same reaction, don’t you think? At any rate, Gracie resolved to both watch her mouth and pay closer attention, and she was all ears as the Beer Fairy continued.

  “Okay then, it’s barley grains—which is to say, barley seeds—that are in those sacks. However, between the time the grain was harvested in the field and the time it was funneled into the sacks, it was messed with, it was altered. The barley’s been malted.”

  Visions of Häagen-Dazs milkshakes jumped instantly into Gracie’s brain. She shooed them away. She was doing her best to be an attentive pupil.

  “The grains were soaked in water for approximately two days to speed them along toward sprouting, the first step in a seed’s development into a plant. During this germination period, as it’s called, the natural starch in the barley breaks down into a simple kind of sugar whose purpose, according to the plan of nature, is to nourish the baby plant.”

  Baby plants being nourished by sugar! A delighted Gracie thought that was too cute for words. She almost squealed.

  “Ah, but before this process gets very far,” the Beer Fairy went on, “before the grain actually sprouts, it’s heated in a kiln to bring the germination to a screeching halt, right when the newly formed sugar is reaching its peak. At this point, it’s become what we call malted barley, and the sacks of it are ready to be emptied into a masher. What happens there, do you suppose?”

  “Something gets mashed.”

  “Brilliant deduction. The malted grain is crushed into a fine powder, which in turn is emptied into one of those tall stainless steel water tanks over there. The water—with the mash in it, of course—is then heated to 156 degrees.”

  “That sounds pretty hot.”

  “Just a balmy day on the beach for a Sugar Elf, but for humans and most other life-forms…”

  Gracie interrupted. “There’s Sugar Elfs?!”

  “Forget about them. It’s enough to know that if there was no such thing as sugar, there’d be no such thing as beer. As the mashed grain cooks in the hot water, in fact, its remaining starch is converted by heat and moisture into other sugars that are more complex, more advanced, than the malted ones.”

  Noticing that Gracie looked confused, the Beer Fairy suggested that she consider malt as kindergarten or first-grade sugar, while the mash-tank sugar was high school or maybe community college sugar.

  Gracie wasn’t buying the sugar bit. “But beer is bitter,” she objected.

  “That’s where your uncle’s hops come in. While the mash is being cooked, before it’s strained out of the sugar-heavy water and disposed of, hop petals or else pellets made from compressed hop flowers (the pellets look exactly like pet-store hamster food, by the way) are dumped into the tanks. Hops reduce the sweetness of the mixture and add flavor and aroma. Without hops, Redhook and Budweiser would be little more than cloudy sugar water.

  “Okay, then, we’ve added our hops, but, Gracie, we still don’t have beer. Instead we have a tank of flavored liquid the brewers refer to as wort.”

  “Ooo.” Gracie made a face. “My cousin had a wart on his behind.”

  “That’s something altogether different.”

  “Well, it’s still kind of an ugly word.”

  “I guess I’d have to agree. Malt and mash and hops and yeast aren’t exactly puffs of pure poetry, either. For that matter, the English word beer itself (evolved from the older word beor) is not the most musical little tittle of elegant language ever to roll off a tongue. However, as Shakespeare once said…”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A famous guy who wrote a lot about fairies. You’ll read him someday. Knowing you, you’ll probably act—and try to steal a scene or two—in one of his plays. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

  “What’s that mean?”
r />   “It means that if beer had been called champagne, holy water, or potassium cyanide, it would be no more—or no less—wonderful. It also means that if your name was Gertrude or Hortense or Annabella, you’d be just as pretty, just as sensitive, just as lively and curious—and just as much a pain in the butt—as you are when your name is Gracie. Now for goodness sake, child, let’s get on with it!”

  13