Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [18]
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.
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 workers did the best they could. The way it was described to me, the scene sounded like an episode straight out of “I Love Lucy.”
But the beer survived and was enjoyed by the nearly 100 attendees. Both brews were miraculously “clean” and did not suffer from traveling. The Doppelbock was preferred, though both were beers in which I took a great deal of pride. How did I feel? Totally surprised at how well they had turned out. This success inspired me to have no fear and pursue beer as a passion for years to come. The support given by George Charalambous, Anheuser-Busch, the Master Brewers Association of the Americas, the American Society of Brewing Chemists and the Ball Corporation was tremendous. It was the beginning of a long, mutually supportive relationship between homebrewers, microbrewers, craft brewers and the technical people involved with the large brewing companies. For these opportunities I am forever grateful.
There is one more part to this story.
I continued to brew with the lager yeast, using it in virtually all my beer recipes. It behaved extraordinarily well and resulted in great-tasting “ales” and “lagers” even when I knew it was not an ale yeast and I had no facilities to cold lager my lagers. So, my secret was that I was not making true ales nor true lagers for many years. In fact, nearly all of my recipes in the first editions of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing (1984 and 1991) and The Homebrewer’s Companion (1994) were based on having used this unknown strain of lager yeast. Ten years later I asked the source whether they could tell me where this lager yeast had come from. Their answer was a simple “no we can’t tell you, sorry.” A few years later, I tried