Strange Brew Part 8

"You're a cop," I pointed out. "Think you could get somebody over to the house to take a look around?"

He picked up the cell phone from its cradle on the dashboard of the Miata. "I'll call Burglary. Get somebody over there tonight. In the meantime, you ever thought about getting a security system? That neighborhood's not safe, Garrity."

"I started thinking about a security system as soon as I saw the guy's footsteps under my bedroom window," I admitted. "It gave me a serious case of the creeps. Tell whoever goes by the house to call first and let Edna know they're coming. Otherwise, she's likely to blow somebody's head off."

We got off I-285 and onto Georgia 400 and took it north, crossing over the Chattahoochee River, past exits for Roswell and Alpharetta, past Holcombe Bridge Road and Haynes Bridge Road and a lot of other exits I'd never heard of, until we got to Webb Bridge Road.

A couple miles ahead, past cow pastures dotted with new subdivision signs, Bucky turned off Webb Bridge and onto a b.u.mpy county-maintained road. The road curved and dipped, and suddenly Bucky whipped the Miata into a gravel parking lot. Directly in front of us stood a hulking pile of red bricks.

"It was a gristmill after the Civil War," Bucky said. "Cool, huh?"

They'd left the fading white paint letters on the mill facade, WEBB BRIDGE MILL, only now there were uplights mounted on the flat brick facade to illuminate the sign. Below the Mill sign there was a new sign. Five-foot-high pink neon letters over the arched oak plank front door said BLIND POSSUM BREWERY. A barn-red cylindrical grain silo stood on four legs and a pipeline ran from it to the mill building.

"Very rustic. Very picturesque," I said. "Very expensive, too. Where's all the money coming from for these restaurants? Did Jackson Poole have financial backers?"

"We're looking into that," Bucky said. He got out, came around, and opened my door. "When we get inside, do me a favor," Bucky said. "Just keep your mouth shut for a while. Remember, you're on a date."

"In your dreams," I told him, pushing the oak door open.

The fellow standing at the maitre d' stand looked like somebody who'd just abandoned his mule and plow out in the back forty. He was big and solidly built, with a meaty face ringed by a wispy gray beard that spilled down the front of his blue work shirt.

He picked up a stack of menus when he saw us walk in.

"Welcome to Blind Possum," he said, his smile showing uneven yellow teeth. "Y'all here for the Brewmaster's Dinner?"

"That's right," Bucky said.

"They're just starting the tour of the brewery," the host said. "Go on down through those doors there, and you'll see the brewhouse through the gla.s.s wall to your right."

The combined scent of beer and cigar smoke seemed to permeate the mill's old brick walls. Bucky inhaled deeply as we moved down the hallway. "Man. Smell that. Beer and cigars. I'm getting buzzed just standing here."

His voice echoed in the high-ceilinged hall. The floors were of a darker, polished brick, and the walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling gla.s.s cases crammed with a treasure trove of beer and brewing memorabilia.

"Hey," Bucky said, putting his finger on one of the gla.s.s cases. "Look at that. Hudepohl. Bet you never heard of that before. My granddad up in Cincinnati used to drink Hudepohl beer. He had an old wooden icebox down in the cellar, and when you opened that door, you'd hear those bottles clinking against each other." He grinned. "I snuck my first Hudepohl when I was ten."

"Good?" I asked.

"Nah," he said. "Well, I was only ten at the time. I remember thinking it tasted like p.i.s.s smelled."

My eyes scanned the shelves of beer bottles, labels, bottle caps. I saw Grolsch, Streilitz, Yuengling, and dozens more I'd never heard of. There were beers brewed and bottled in Akron, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Waukegan, Buffalo, Minneapolis, h.e.l.l, every Rust Belt town in the United States. Even Atlanta, it turned out, had its own brewery.

A neatly typed card on the top shelf of the display explained why those regional beers had gone the way of the collar pin and the b.u.t.ter churn.

In 1914 there were more than 1,400 breweries employing more than 75,000 people. The single most destructive force in U.S. brewing history was the 1920 enactment of the Volstead Act-known as Prohibition.

Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1929 only 400 or so U.S. breweries were in operation. By the 1970s only about two dozen regional breweries were still in operation in the U.S.

Today, 80 percent of all beer produced in the U.S. is brewed by four giant breweries: Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Stroh's. Only about 2 percent of U.S. beer is craft brewed, but that amount is on the rise.

Bucky walked on to the next display, an even bigger gla.s.s case filled with old-time beer advertising giveaways. There were lithographed tin bar trays, coasters, gla.s.ses, mugs, oil paintings, neon signs, scale-model tin replicas of beer trucks, tiny wooden beer kegs, and dozens of intricate porcelain steins.

"Cool," he breathed.

A group of people was gathered up ahead in the hallway, peering through a plategla.s.s wall. I could hear a woman's voice.

"Hey," I said, elbowing Bucky, "don't you want to see how they make beer?"

"I just want to drink beer, I don't want to dissect it," he said, but he followed me anyway.

A short bar was set up at the end of the hallway, just past the entrance to the brewroom. A college-aged kid was setting gla.s.ses on the bar, filling them from various taps. There were at least eight "in-house" brands, along with the fancy beers I was used to seeing in upscale bars: Sam Adams, Lowenbrau, Beck's, and others.

"All right!" Bucky said, pointing at the bar. "That's more what I had in mind. You ready for a cold one?"

"Start without me," I said. "I want to see the brewing operation."

Twenty or so people were standing in a semicircle around the young woman who appeared to be the tour guide. I inched my way closer so that I could hear what she was saying.

The woman pointed through the window at a pair of gleaming copper and stainless steel vats connected by a shared stainless steel stairway. "That's the lauter tun you're seeing there on the left," the woman said.

She was a tiny thing, barely over five feet tall, and the huge vats behind her made her seem even more toylike. She had glossy reddish-brown hair in a thick braid that hung down her back, a sprinkling of freckles across her thin, angular face, and dark blue eyes. Floppy black rubber fisherman's boots swallowed the lower half of her body, and she wore jeans and a tight black T-shirt with a blind, blissed-out possum embroidered over her breast.

When she turned around to point out how the grains were shoveled into a lid in the tank I saw what was written on the back of her shirt: WE MAKE IT, WE DRINK IT, WE SELL WHAT'S LEFT.

"The grains are cracked here, between a set of metal rollers calibrated for just the right consistency. We don't want to mash it so much we turn it into flour, but the grain does need to be crushed enough to allow for optimum extraction of the sugars that allow fermentation," the woman said. "We use a combination of wheat, corn, barley, and other grains, according to the recipe the brewmaster is using."

She moved along a few feet and pointed to the other vat. "In this vat, we've piped in water and we're cooking the crushed grain, or grist, with water heated to one hundred and fifty-five degrees."

Inside the brewroom, a muscular black man who wore the same type garb as our guide pulled the door open.

A bittersweet barley scent wafted out as we filed into the brewroom. The air was warm and yeasty, like the inside of my Grandma Garrity's kitchen after a day of baking. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with the scent.

"Beer's simple," the girl continued after we were all inside. "We use four basic raw materials. Malted barley, water, hops, and yeast. Believe it or not, water is the biggest ingredient, and the most important to the taste of our beer."

"Atlanta has good water for beer?" asked a man standing next to me. He was short and dressed for business in a dark suit and a subdued red silk tie.

"Atlanta's water is just fine," she said soothingly. "I wouldn't use it if I didn't think so."

"You're the brewer?" I asked. It sounded s.e.xist, but I couldn't help being surprised. I'd sort of a.s.sumed the Paul Bunyan-looking guy at the door was the brewer.

"Brewmaster," she corrected me. "My name is Anna Frisch. I make all the beers here at Blind Possum."

A couple of the guys standing around me snickered softly. Anna Frisch whirled around, clearly annoyed.

"Beer's come to be thought of as a macho drink through the advertising efforts of Miller and Budweiser," Anna said. "But believe me, in the early history of beer, especially in Northern Europe, brewing was always done by the women-it was a part of their life, like baking bread or spinning yarn."

Someone was squeezing my arm. Bucky.

"I thought you were just going to taste beer and keep your mouth shut," he hissed, handing me a pilsner gla.s.s full of a noxiously foamy red liquid.

"Just one little question," I said, taking a sip of the beer. It was ice cold, slightly bitter, and surprisingly fruity. I could have sworn I smelled raspberries or cherries.

"That's our Red Roadkill," Anna Frisch said, nodding toward me. "What do you think?"

"Different," I said, taking another sip.

"You're probably not used to craft-brewed beers," she said, resuming her lecture voice.

"The majority of American beer drinkers have grown up with beers made by the big brewers-Miller, Budweiser, Stroh's, Coors. Their beers are made with much more corn and rice and much less barley and hops, meaning a paler, wimpier beer. Our philosophy here is to make the kind of robust, distinctive beers small-town craft brewers made all over the U.S. before the Prohibition."

"And yet I notice you sell beers made by other breweries," I said, ignoring Bucky's elbow in my ribs. "Isn't that hurting your own business?"

"Not at all," Anna said smoothly. "Restaurants have to carry the premium beers. We have to have something to offer all our customers. Hopefully, though, they'll taste our Blind Possum beers and see the difference."

Bucky took a long pull of his own beer, which was a thick, coffee-colored potion with a thin creamy head on it.

"What's that sludge?" I asked.

"Blind Possum Black and Tan," he said. "It's a mixture of stout and lager. Probably too muscular for the likes of you, Garrity."

I took the gla.s.s from him and tasted cautiously. I wrinkled my nose and handed it back. "This stuff tastes like the stuff Edna used to rub on my chest when I had a cold," I said.

He took another long drink of the black and tan. "You got no nose for beer, Garrity. Better stick to the wussy stuff."

"Gladly," I said.

Anna Frisch was walking around the brewroom with the rest of us following slowly in her wake. She explained how the cracked grains were cooked long enough to allow the naturally occurring enzymes to convert the starch in the grains into sugar and showed us how the resulting thick porridge was strained and piped to a fifteen-barrel stainless steel brew kettle, where the mixture, called "wort," was brought to a rolling boil before the hops were added.

"Hops," Anna said, looking around her for approval from her students, "is the spice that give the beer its distinct pleasing bitterness. And it also acts as a natural preservative. And not least of the important properties of hops is that it balances the sweetness of the barley."

I tasted my Red Roadkill again and this time let it linger on my tongue a little. Okay. Hops. Barley. I could be educated. I was a bourbon kind of gal. But that didn't mean I couldn't enjoy a decent beer.

"Brew day is a big day around here," Anna continued. She walked over to a third tank at the back of the room and patted its stainless steel side.

"At the end of the boil we take the bitter wort and let the hops settle out of it for about half an hour. Then we pump it through a heat exchanger on the way to the fermenting tank. This cools it down to the right temperature for the yeast.

"Does anybody here want to guess what the yeast does?" Anna asked, gazing at her students, who were beginning to drift away in the direction of the taps.

"It makes it booze," somebody offered.

Anna frowned. "Sort of. The yeast consumes the sugars in the wort and produces ethyl alcohol, which also produces carbon dioxide gas. We let the carbon dioxide bubble out, and then, in the fermentation tanks, the wort is again cooled with chilled water until it attains a temperature of about thirty-five degrees. That's the aging temperature. We let the beer age for fourteen days, and when I've done some sugar readings and other tests, including taste tests, the beer is done."

Anna looked pleased with herself. Three or four people applauded halfheartedly. I joined in, too, until Bucky squeezed my arm again.

"Any questions?" Anna looked around hopefully.

People were staring in the direction of the bar and the adjoining dining room. The main, unasked question was "When do we eat?"

"Fine," Anna said, pushing the brewroom door open. "Let's see what the chefs have cooked up for us tonight. And see how those dishes match with the five Blind Possum beers you'll be tasting tonight."

Bucky took a last bite of the apple-stuffed pork loin and dipped it in the raspberry-pecan relish. He chewed for a while, swallowed, washed it down with the Blond Possum pale ale he was drinking. He sat back and let out a long, self-satisfied belch.

n.o.body at the table even glanced his way.

"Peasant," I said, managing just one more tiny bite of my garlic mashed potatoes.

"It's a brewer's dinner," Bucky said, snitching a forkful of my potatoes. "It would be an insult to our hosts not to burp."

I surveyed the table. Somehow, we'd managed to work our way through four courses: an appetizer of beer-poached Tybee Island shrimp, a trio of wild mushroom and goat cheese dumplings served with something called 'Winter Ale,' entrees of pork loin for Bucky and pecan-crusted baked brook trout for me, and now a waiter was setting the dessert, a decadent-looking apple strudel with warm caramel sauce and vanilla bean ice cream, down on the table. There was another kind of beer too, something the waiter described as 'Sweet Dream Cream Stout.'

"Take it away," I groaned. "I never want to see food again."

"Hi, folks!" Anna Frisch stood directly behind my chair. I was too gorged to move, my jaws weak from so much chewing and sipping.

"Did you enjoy the dinner?" she asked, moving around the table and eyeing the rows of half-full beer gla.s.ses.

"It was awesome," Bucky said. "I never knew there were so many kinds of beers before. This stuff is totally different."

"I'm glad you liked it," Anna said, her cheeks flushed pink with pleasure. "Tell your friends about us. We're planning to do these dinners every month."

"I'm fascinated with all these new microbreweries," I said.

"Yeah," Bucky said, cutting me off. He stood up and pulled out a chair for Anna.

"Can you sit down? I mean, if you're not too busy or anything." With Anna's back turned to me, Bucky gave me the zip-your-lips sign.

"Well..." Anna looked around the dining room. People were talking softly, forks clicking against china. Half a dozen guys sat at the bar, puffing away at inch-thick cigars. A willowy blonde dressed all in black had joined them, cupping a heavy crystal ashtray in one hand while she held her cigar aloft in the other hand, blowing a puffy tendril of smoke with crimson, pursed lips. The testosterone was reaching locker-room level. Any minute now, I'd be wishing I had my own set of b.a.l.l.s to scratch.

"Come on," Bucky said, giving Anna his boyish, aw-shucks grin.

"Just for a few minutes," she said.

Anna Frisch had changed out of her brewmaster duds and unfastened her braid. Now the thick paprika-colored hair fell over the shoulders of a snug-fitting sage green tunic worn over brown velvet jeans tucked into soft leather boots. She looked like a wood sprite.

She waved in the direction of the bar and called to the bartender.

"Jason, could you bring us a pitcher of the Belgian strong ale?"

"None for me," I said hastily. My temples were starting to throb from the night's excesses.

Bucky groaned. "I've got to drive home. Better not."

"Just a little sip," Anna insisted. "It's the house specialty. I've been tinkering with this recipe for a couple years now. I'm pretty proud of it."

Jason brought the pitcher and three clean gla.s.ses. Anna poured maybe three ounces into each of our gla.s.ses.

"There's an art to tasting beer, you know," she said, holding her gla.s.s up to the light and tilting it from side to side. "Look at it first. Since this is a Belgian strong ale, it's probably darker than beers you've been used to drinking. That means the flavor will be richer and heartier."

Bucky and I held up our gla.s.ses to the light, as Anna had done. It looked like beer to me, but what did I know?