Travels with Barley (38 page)

Sheila put a hand on his arm and said, “Dar-ryl, don't you drop that beer now. You'll be sorry if you do!”

That's all it took.

Darryl bent over double with laughter and the beer did a somersault off his head and splashed into a wet half-moon on the sidewalk. The cup clattered into the street. I got, not for the first time during my trip, beer on my sneakers.

Darryl and Sheila were now down on the sidewalk, clutching each other in hysterical laughter.

“Aw, man,” Darryl said when he had recovered. “That's not right.”

Sheila looked at me and said, “If Darryl had made it all the way, he would've been a happy guy.”

“Really happy,” Darryl said, smiling sheepishly.

“Really, really happy,” Sheila replied.

“C'mon,” Darryl said. “One more chance, Sheila. Just one more chance.”

Sheila thought this over for a second, then nodded. “Okay, but if you don't make it, you're taking me to Biloxi on the weekend.”

Darryl said he would, absolutely.

They got up off the sidewalk and dusted themselves off. I followed them up Bourbon Street until Darryl came to one of those stalls where you can buy giant draft beers for $3 or a smaller one for a buck. (By my actual count, there would be sixteen walk-up beer stations between the start of Darryl's quest and Canal.) He came out with the beer and he balanced it on his head.

Darryl had close-cropped hair and a fairly large head, which helped. But I also now realized there was a good chance that Darryl and Sheila had been part of the beer-for-breakfast crowd I'd looked for so far in vain. He didn't exactly walk with the sure gait of those women I'd seen in Africa carrying jars of drinking water on their heads.

I decided to drop back quite a bit, not wanting to take a beer bath and not wanting to be responsible for distracting Darryl into failure.

I needn't have worried. Sheila distracted him plenty and Darryl didn't make it more than a block when the second beer tumbled off. But Sheila was very liberal in her interpretation of last chances and on about his fourth beer, Darryl gained the finish line.

At the fabled intersection of Canal and Bourbon, he gingerly took the beer from his head and chugged most of it down. He gave the cup to Sheila. She finished it off but with slightly more delicacy than Darryl had shown. He took the cup from her and tossed it in the air and then he grabbed Sheila up and they went around and around, her legs trailing. I feared for a moment that they would go crashing to the street or into someone else and this would end badly.

But it didn't. Instead Darryl put Sheila down and raised his arms in triumph. And then they locked arms and, looking up and down Canal Street, made a dash to the streetcar median where Darryl briefly flew out of one of his flip-flops. This was the subject of more hysterical laughter of a kind that most people, after a few beers, would indulgently recognize. I thought they'd forgotten about me but once Darryl recovered his shoe, they turned and, scanning to find me on the sidewalk, waved an energetic good-bye.

I waved back and watched them dash the rest of the way across Canal.

For a moment I considered running them down so that I could ask them about their beer preferences and their favorite beer bars, not to mention their full names and ages and what they did for a living.

But, nah. Darryl and Sheila were in love and beer-buzzed on a sunny day in a fabled and feral city and they were running off with exuberance to settle a hilarious wager. Whether they had arrived at this happy state drinking Bud or Abita seemed totally immaterial.

I would go on to sample some very nice beer at the bars that Gary back at Good Friends had recommended. But Darryl and Sheila proved part of my thesis. I wouldn't find the Perfect Beer Joint here and New Orleans may be, in the end, only an average beer town. But the whole place serves as a hothouse for the free-form beer joint; as my morning encounter on Bourbon Street proved, a beer joint could just spring up here, anywhere at any time.

Though at Quest's End, I still had one bit of beer business to attend to a bit farther down the road.

 

I left New Orleans and drove for an hour, over roads much improved in the decades since I'd first made the trip, to my old stomping grounds in and around Houma. Including side excursions, I'd covered about 2,600 miles along the Mississippi in my quest to find the Perfect Beer Joint.

Had I found it?

Not exactly. The Casino in La Crosse, where a homeless man slept out of harm's way, where happy lesbians danced to Diana Krall, where the beer was fabulous, and where Clay Holman had regaled me with stories of a bar-hopping Amish man had come close. And I'd been charmed by most of the places I'd visited and the people I met along the River of Beer. Thoreau, I concluded, had it right when he said, “The tavern will compare favorably with the church.” Or to put it in a modern context: the TV tavern Cheers is alive and well across America, where the beer joint does in fact function as a place of community and comfort; a place where people ordinary and extraordinary gather around Ben Franklin's benighted elixir, taking solace in friendship, camaraderie, and beer.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I'd have loved to discuss with my dad, under whose watchful eye I'd sampled my first brew as a kid. But he never got to know that I'd cadged a book contract to explore the River of Beer. Otherwise, he'd have thrown his head back and had a good laugh, for the idea that his beer-loving son would get a sabbatical to roam the country, steeping himself in all things beer, would have both pleased and befuddled him. I could easily imagine him lapsing into one of his Arkansas aphorisms and declaring, “I'll swan, Ken. What were those people up there in New York thinking?” (Sometimes I wondered the same thing.)

Pa was in good health but died suddenly, in July of 2000, felled by a heatstroke as he pushed his lawnmower through his overgrown suburban yard on one of the hottest days of the year. My mother had passed away five years earlier but Pa was doing all right. He had few expenses, a pension from the Post Office, a bit of stock he'd accumulated during a seven-year detour into retailing with Sears, Roebuck & Co., and a small monthly disability check from his World War II combat service with the Marines. He had a routine and family nearby, friends and company enough to keep him going. He could've paid some kid ten bucks to mow his grass but Pa was a stubborn guy. He was seventy-nine, an old marine determined to look after himself, and cutting the grass was a duty to his independence. The heatstroke killed him quick, which is how he'd have wanted to go.

Pa left a will and small estate, most of it tied up in his stocks and the little tract house he and my mother had lived in when we moved from the country out on Bayou Black the year after I finished high school. Even settling little estates can drag on, what with listless real estate markets and the endless red tape of stock transfers. So we'd finally tidied up the last bit of his business and distributed his small legacy to kids and grandkids about the time I finished my journey down the Mississippi.

One of the virtues of Pa doing all right was that he always had beer in the refrigerator (what he called the “icebox”). It was cheap beer, trending to Old Milwaukee and Pabst, but it was usually plentiful and always nice and cold. And part of his legacy, discovered on the day he died, were four cans of Pabst stuffed way back in a corner of his much cluttered icebox. My brother, Pershing, had put them aside and kept them refrigerated all this time, awaiting a day when he, our three other brothers, and I, all of us with families and busy lives, could get together and drink them in celebration of Dad's life.

So it was that we finally found ourselves on a sunny day in a boat, speeding through the lovely, wild estuary south of Houma, going fishing at Dad's favorite saltwater spot after launching at an end-of-the-road hamlet called Pointe-aux-Chenes. The watery world beyond Pointe-aux-Chenes is a place of meandering bayous, brackish, marshy bays, deep holes, and mudflats; it's a place we'd come, for as long as I could remember, to chase redfish, flounder, and speckled trout. It was one of the places where Pa not only taught us the art of fishing but a great deal about the wild wetlands around us. And he was never so comfortable as he was out here—rod and reel in one hand, beer in the other—offering fishing advice, a running commentary on the unfolding day, or telling stories of glorious trips past.

On this day, we stopped at each of Dad's favorite fishing holes. And at the last one, with the sun high on the water and pelicans flapping in the distance, we broke out Pa's four Pabsts. We recognized we were pushing the outer limits of lager life but each beer opened with the “koosh!” of a beer still kicking. We poured them into five red plastic cups we'd brought along and offered a toast—“Rest you, Pa, and thanks for everything.”

And then we quaffed our beers, which tasted perfectly fine, and went about doing what Pa would've done. We fished our way back, picking up a fish here and there. We drank a few more beers we'd brought along.

It wasn't the best fishing day; it wasn't the worst. It didn't matter. For we knew Pa was right when he said, as he often did, that the fishing, in a way, wasn't really what it was all about. It was about being out under the open sky in the wild places you loved in the company of family or friends who shared that love.

And, who, Pa would hasten to add, also shared their beer.

Acetaldehyde
—A kind of green apple aroma given off as a byproduct of fermentation; Budweiser is considered by many to have a mild acetaldehyde bite.

Adjuncts
—Barley substitutes, such as rice or corn, used to make lighter-bodied beer; they also lower brewing costs.

Alcohol by volume (ABV)
—The volume of alcohol in the total volume of beer, expressed as a percentage. The higher the number the stronger the beer.

Amber
—A generic term generally applied to reddish ales, though it can apply to some lagers.

American Standard lager
—The most common beer style in the U.S., epitomized by Budweiser; a pale to deep golden lager light in body, mild in hops, and high in carbonation.

Barley
—A cereal grain and the backbone of beer; sprouted then dried and roasted, it turns into barley malt, the source of sugars for yeast to turn into alcohol. The extent of roasting determines beer's color.(See
malt and mash
)

Barley wine
—Ale made at near the strength of wine, i.e., a very strong ale.

Barrel
—The standard measurement of beer shipments in the U.S.; a barrel equals 31.5 U.S. gallons. (See
keg
)

Beer yeast
—Microscopic, potato-shaped fungi of the genus
Saccharomyces
that, when added to wort, convert sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide through the process of fermentation. (See
wort
)

Biere de garde
—An earthy-tasting French country ale typically brewed in spring and drunk in summer.

Bitter
— A term designating a broad British style of well-hopped ale.

Bock
—Of German origin, a strong, usually dark lager.

Bottle-/cask-conditioned beer
—Beer, usually ale, to which live yeast is added after bottling or casking to increase alcohol and/or carbonation levels.

Brewpub
—A combination bar and restaurant where beer is brewed on the premises, usually with annual production of 1,000 barrels or less. The first U.S. brewpub opened in Yakima, Washington, in 1982.

British mild
—Lightly hopped, malty, low-alcohol ale. Now rare, it was once the British working man's session beer.

Brown ale
—A nutty, malty style associated with the English city of New Castle, though there are southern English variants.

Clone-purify
—The process of isolating a single cell of a pure beer yeast strain and culturing it into amounts significant enough for brewing.

Congeners
—Any of a vast number of organic alcohols, sulfur and other compounds produced during fermentation and accounting for distinctive characteristics—from earthy barnyard aromas to flavors approximating things such as green apples, bananas, and vanilla—in beer and other alcoholic beverages. (See
esters
)

Craft beer/craft brewing
—Beer made by a loose alliance of microbreweries, brewpubs, and moderate-sized regional brewers dedicated to repopulating America's beer landscape with thousands of new beer choices. (See
microbrewery
and
brewpub
)

Diacetyl
—a fermentation by-product responsible for a common buttery or butterscotch flavor in beer.

Esters
—Chemical flavor compounds, by-products of fermentation, that account for the fruity, earthy, or spicy notes often found in beer. (See
congeners
)

Extreme Beer Movement
—A movement of craft brewers dedicated to pushing the boundaries of brewing by developing esoteric, ultrastrong, and/or aged beers, or replications of ancient or historical beers. (See
craft beer/craft brewery
)

Framboise
—A Belgian style ale; a fruited lambic to which raspberries have been added. (See
lambic
)

Gravity (original and final)
—The density of fermentable sugars relative to water in a brewing mixture; original gravity measures the alcohol potential for a beer; final gravity measures the sugars left behind after fermentation.

Gueuze (geuze)
—A lambic that undergoes secondary fermentation in the bottle. (See
lambic
)

Gruits
—Ales dating from medieval times and brewed with herbs instead of hops; or, the mix of herbs used to make such beers.

Hefeweizen (hefe weizen)
—A German wheat beer with a signature clovelike taste and aroma. American hefeweizen often lacks these characteristics.

Hops
—A vine-growing plant common to dry, temperate latitudes; it produces flower cones that when added to beer, provide bitterness and aroma, while acting as a preservative.

India Pale Ale (IPA)
—Originally a nineteenth-century British style of strong ale, super-hopped as a preservative to withstand the long voyage from Britain to its colony in India. Nowadays, a style particularly popular with American craft brewers and known for its signature extra-hoppy taste.

International Bittering Unit (IBU)
—A measurement of the level of hops compounds in beer.

Keg
—One-half barrel or 15.5 U.S. gallons. (See
barrel
)

Kölsch
—A German ale known for its lagerlike qualities including pale color, clean, crisp taste, and light body.

Lambic
—A sour Belgian wheat ale fermented with naturally occurring wild yeast and other microflora—i.e., beneficial bacteria. (See gueuze)

Light beer
—In America, a reduced-calorie lager; in Canada and Australia, a low-alcohol lager.

Malt
—Germinated, kilned barley that forms the backbone of beer and gives it its color.

Märzen
—A German-style, reddish, medium-strength lager, traditionally brewed in the spring and aged until fall.

Mash
—A porridge produced by mixing malt with water and gently heating it. (See
wort
)

Mash tun
—a large vessel, often copper, where the mash is processed.

Microbrewery
—A brewery producing 15,000 barrels or less beer per year.

Mouthfeel
—A term describing the relative heft of a beer—thin or viscous—on the palate.

Pale ale
—A British style whose color is closer to an amber or a golden lager than traditional brown or dark ales such as porters and stouts. (See porter and stout)

Pilsner (pilsener, pils)
—The “golden lager,” of which Pilsner Urquell is the original example.

Porter
—Of London origin, a medium-bodied, medium-dark ale that has virtually disappeared in Britain but is a style much in favor with certain U.S. craft brewers. (See
stout
)

Schwarz bier
—A dark, strong lager of German origin.

Stout
—A dark, often black, ale with a rich, roasty flavor typified by brands such as Mackeson or Guinness. Variations include oatmeal stout, in which oatmeal is mixed with malt in the brewing process; and imperial stout (sometimes called Russian Imperial Stout), an extra-strong ale that the British exported with great success to czarist Russia starting in the nineteenth century.

Tripel
—Of Belgian and Dutch origin, a term that designates the strongest beer in the house or of a particular brewery.

Wit beer (white beer)
—A Belgian-style ale, often spiced with coriander, that is brewed with unmalted wheat and known for its cloudy appearance and slightly citrusy taste.

Wort
—A sweet, amber liquid, rich in fermentable sugars, extracted from mash. (See
mash
)

Zymurgy
—The study and science of how yeast do the work of fermentation.