Beers and Beards: A Cozy Dwarf Tale

Chapter 52: The Brewing of Yeasteryear

“Why the long face?” I asked, as I pushed the mop around the dirty floor. I couldn’t really say I was cleaning; it was more like I was artistically moving mud around.

“I’m… still digesting what Balin told me.” Annie said, her eyes a little hollow. Her golden tresses and silky beard were wrapped up in nets, and we were both in grubby leather work-armour.

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Penelope. Do you want a goat treat, princess? Who’s the only clean thirsty goat in Minnova? You are!” I rubbed her head and presented the aforementioned treat.

*maaaah!!* [Translated from Prima Donna Goat] “Your obeisance is acceptable, knight.”

Annie slopped some water in my direction, but it was half-hearted. John, Johnsson, and Richter did their level best to ignore us. They were a bit busy making beer as fast as they could, so their distraction was understandable.

Their lack of hygiene was less so.

“Pete… were you -” Annie began with a note of trepidation.

“Ixnay on the ebornray ewerbray.” I interrupted.

“What? By Midna’s Mullet, so much about you makes sense now.”

“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?” I leaned seductively on my mop and blinked my eyes coquettishly. I’d tried this move in the mirror a while back, because… well because I was curious. It turned out that dwarves can indeed do coquette, though it’s kind of like getting assaulted by a barbershop.

“Ugh, never do that again.”

“You know you like it.” I flexed my biceps.

“I’m marrying your brother.”

“That poor soul. I tried to warn him.”

“Excuse you!? You tried to warn him about what!”

“I can’t say! You’ll mop the floor with me!” I covered my face with my arms in faux fear.

“I swear to the Gods, if you utter one more pun within this building I’ll -”

“You’ll pun-ish me?”

The rest devolved into soap suds and screaming. Only some of it from the goat.

–

“There. Done.” Annie stretched her back and sighed with relief.

“It’s acceptable.” I nodded. We’d mopped, dusted, cleaned, buffed, and then done it again. It had taken a whole day and a half, but we were finally done. The building practically gleamed.

“By the Gods!” Johnsson screamed as he slid across the shiny floor and smashed into some barrels.

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“Yep! Looks great. We’ll need non-slip footwear though.” I pursed my lips.

“I can see that.” Annie mused. Richter had gone to help Johnsson up, and slid into him instead. The two of them now looked like a pair of penguins trying to polka on ice. “Now that we’re done, do you care to explain why I just wasted a whole day being a maid?”

“Because Balin has a thing for maids?” I deadpanned.

Annie sputtered and blushed. Hah! Got ‘er!

“No, you idiot. Why was this such a big deal? I was only willing to go along with it because of what Balin told me, and I’m still not sure I can believe half of it.”

“Hmmm… there’s a limit on what I’m okay tellin’ you here.” I nodded in the direction of the flailing duo.

“That’s fine, what can you tell me?”

“Well, it all comes down to how you ferment your beer.” I took off my shoes and walked along the floor towards the fermentation tanks. “Take off your shoes guys. Just go barefoot for now.”

Johnsson and Richter looked a bit chagrined as they untangled themselves and removed their shoes.

“Aarons Arse, this is goin’ to be ungodly hot on my toes next to the oven.” Johnsson complained.

“You’ll survive.” His father said, as he carried over a large bag of coal. “Or would you rather be back on crank duty?”

“Nah, my back needs a day off. Toasty toes are fine.”

Annie and I found a somewhat secluded spot among the fourteen fermentation tanks. They were a sight to see; each square tank a two metre tall open-top wooden structure with a copper liner. The copper was all quite shiny, and I was again taken aback at how dwarves seemed to treat maintenance so seriously, while they outright ignored sanitation.

The fermentation tanks were something to smell too, as they had a pretty pungent aroma. About half of them were full, and two were nearing completion. I could tell by the crusty white layer on top. It kind of looked and smelled like a four square metre slab of cream cheese gently floating on a bubbly pond.

I waited a moment to ensure the three droppers of eaves were busy with their work before I began my explanation. I was almost giddy with joy; I was finally talking shop with another brewer. This was my first step on the path to introducing dwarf-kind to brew mastery of the craft!

Annie poked me in the side. “Why do you have that silly smile on your face? Are we starting, or what?”

“Right, right.” I took a deep breath. “To start, how many of your batches fail? One in three? One in four?”

Annie frowned. “About one in four. How did you know that?”

“An educated guess.” I pulled over a large wooden step-stool and climbed up so I could see into the tank. As Annie joined me, I pointed to the white scum on top of the beer. “You are using what my world refers to as the open-fermentation method. It was used for millennia, and it has some rather severe limitations.”

“What limitations? Wait, you said ‘used’! Does that mean you found another way?” Annie’s eyes grew brighter. I was struck. I hadn’t realised until just now how much energy and intelligence had been lacking in her demeanour. I guess the stress of nearly losing the brewery and the inability to experiment on her brewing had taken its toll.

“Yes, and you actually had the right solution.” I smiled at her and softened my tone. “Annie. You weren’t wrong. There was a better way.”

“I… I…” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she banished them with an aggressive wipe of her armoured forearm. “I don’t have time for this. What limitations?”

“It all comes down to yeast.” I shrugged at the segue and continued.

“Yeast?”

“Yup.” I pointed back at the white scum on top of the tank. “Yeast! Your brews keep failin’ ‘cause of a yeast infection!”

“Yuck, what? Beer is made from yeast, why would it infect it? That sounds disgusting.” Annie gagged slightly.

“You’re right in some ways and wrong in others.” I grabbed a small ladle from a nearby hook and scooped up some of the white scum. It burbled slightly in the ladle and Annie leaned in to examine it. “Yeast is a single-celled fungus that likes to eat stuff. In the case of our lovely tanks of wort here, it wants ta eat the sugar inside. It turns that sugar into alcohol as well as carbon dioxide. That’s what’s makin' all the bubbles.”

“Yes, I know all that.” Annie said, as she poked the contents of the ladle with her finger. It jiggled slightly, and popped.

“I figured, let me pontificate here.” I chided in my best professorial tone. My wife always hated that tone; she said I was beersplaining. “In open-top brewing like this, a layer of yeast forms on top of the wort, providing a slight seal against the elements. It isn’t perfect obviously, since the bubbles eventually push up through.”

“Johnsson once had a whole chunk pop up onto his face when he was checking progress.” Annie chortled.

“Hah! Well, in my world - “ I stopped short. “I can’t keep calling it ‘my world’ since this is my world now. My old world was called Earth.”

“Earth? What does that mean?”

“It means dirt.”

"Erd means dirt too, do all worlds name their planet after dirt?” Annie asked incredulously.

Wow, déjà vu.

“On Earth,” I continued, “this white goop is called Kräusen and it’s an important ingredient in open-top brewing.” I dumped the contents of the ladle back into the tank and held it out at arms length. “This spoon tells me that it’s pretty much the same here. After the hot wort is poured into a fermentation tank, you let it cool, and then skim some of the Kräusen into it from another tank.”

“That’s right.” Annie nodded.

“We call that top-cropping. Not to be confused with crop-topping, which is what we call it when a daughter utterly disappoints her father.”

“We call it ‘Ancestral Seed’ because -”

“Oh hell naw. Ew, stop.” It was my turn to gag.

“What? It’s a perfectly natural -”

“No! You’re ruining it! Stop it! Stahp! I beg you!”

“By the Gods, you are such a child!”

“I’m only fourty nine! Am I explaining this or not!?”

“Yes!”

I mentally and physically shook myself and took a deep breath. “Before I was so horrifically interrupted, I was talking about top-cropping. The massive benefit of using Kräusen is that you can skip the yeast-washing step.”

“What is yeast-washing? I thought we were discussing limitations, not benefits.”

“I’m getting there, patience my young padawan.” Annie looked like she was about to say ‘what’ but clenched her jaw instead. I cleared some space in the Kräusen and stirred with my spoon. The amber brown liquid was quickly filled with fine specks of debris. “This sediment is called ‘trub’, and it’s made from bits of dead yeast called ‘lee’ as well as leftover bits and pieces from the bittering agents you boiled into the - is that a stick?”

Yes indeed, a stick had bobbed up to the top of the wort. Annie reached in and grabbed it before I could react and tossed it down to the ground. “Yes, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to know the secret ingredients.”

“That was a stick! And we just finished cleaning that floor!”

“Continue.”

“Ugh. Actually, yeast washing isn’t important, but that stick is part of why your brews keep failing. It’s because there is yeast everywhere, and the horrific state of this brewery means that a lot of foreign yeasts are contaminating your brews.”

“What? How? The only yeast we put in is the Ancestral See-” Annie frowned.

“Don’t!” I put my finger up in a shushing motion and widened my eyes.

Annie rolled her eyes. “The only yeast we put in is the ‘Kräusen’. How are other yeasts getting in?”

“I’m pretty sure I saw Johnsson spit into one of these tanks earlier.” I'd been ready to murder him.

“It’s for good luck!”

“Well, it’s adding the yeast from his spit into the brew. Yeast is also able to get airborne, and it can stick to all the various contaminants that were in here. All that dust we took off the rafters? It had yeast in it, and I can guarantee it was getting blown into these tanks. All that mud? It had yeast in it, and then it got on your clothes, onto your hands, and then into the wort. The junk stuck to your unwashed brewing kettle? It had yeast in it!”

“Oh.” Annie’s eyebrows drew together in concentration. “We can keep everything washed. We always figured the boiling was sufficient for sanitisation, and we didn’t want to contaminate the taste with soap.”

“Hmm… no, you’d want to use a food-grade sanitiser. I suspect we will need to talk to an [Alchemist].”

“Aren’t you an -”

“Wrong alchemist.”

“If the yeast is airborne… I can think of a few ways to keep the air clean in here…. I need my sketchbook.” Annie’s fingers began to tap on the side of the tank, and I recognized the far off look of a nerd deep in thought. “How will we know if it worked?”

“Well, for one thing, you aren’t going to get a good Kräusen on a contaminated beer. So if you’ve got a good Kräusen, you know the beer yeast is thriving.”

“That makes sense. We call beer without it, ‘bastard beer’, because the Ancestral Seed di-”

“I got it! I got it!” I held my hands over my ears and Annie grinned wolfishly. Damn, she got me. “The long and short of it is that if you want to improve the quality of your beer and reduce waste, this brew floor needs to be clean and sanitised at every step, and kept that way.”

“That’s going to be expensive.”

“More or less expensive than the wasted batches? Besides, the lack of contaminating yeasts means that your beer will probably taste better too. All without breaking any traditions.” I practically purred the last sentence, and Annie twitched a bit. Yeah, I figured that would be the right button to press.

“There’s nothing wrong with following the traditions!” Annie replied, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“But think of the possibilities! So many ways to improve your beer. I can help you with your tank designs. I know a way of using the environmental yeasts to make special ‘lambic’ beers.”

“No! You will not tempt me, minion of Yearn!” Annie jumped off the stepstool and began to walk back to the entrance. I stalked after.

“They’ll call you the ‘second brewer’ and all will know the name Goldstone.”

“I’m not listening!”

“I’ll teach you the secret of stouts, and the process for porters. Take my hand Annie Goldstone, and I’ll - “

“I’m sorry to break up this family tiff, but we are out of Erdroot and we are busy with the current batch.” We were interrupted by John, who didn’t look sorry at all, and was in fact grinning. “Would you two please take your conversation to the market and obtain us some more?”

Annie and I stopped, a bit flustered. We turned and looked at each other.

“Sure?”