Beer, in a Barley Husk

What follows in an excerpt from my narrative journalism piece on brewing in Ithaca:

Beer is made of four ingredients: malted barley, hops, yeast, and water. The Reinheitsgebot, or German Beer Purity Law, was passed April 23, 1516 and forbid brewers from using any ingredients in beer other than barley, hops, and water. This was in the days before knowledge of yeast, when the muck at the bottom of fermentation vats would be scooped up and brewed into new batches. That muck was rich in yeast, the essential component of converting sugar to alcohol.

Today, beer is made with a number of other ingredients, including corn, rice and wheat. And though the Reinheitsgebot has been repealed (and never affected American brewers anyway) purists still stick to the four ingredients. The basics, however, are still the same. Let’s get to know them, shall we?

2-Row Pale Malt: Barley picked and submerged in water till it begins to sprout. Placed in a kiln, the barley becomes frozen in time, with a great supply of sugars that have converted from starches in order to feed the once-growing plant. But you have to know it.

Place your proboscis upon it. “Cereal grain” seems so anachronistically fitting – it smells like sweet cheerios – the grainy smell of a barn – not of hay, but of sweet barley – not the cardboardy smell of oatmeal. It’s an intense aroma, but a sweet one for sure, and almost musty. It is a tan color, more yellow brown than sunflower seeds, with a similar but rounder shape, like an unblossomed tulip, yonic in its curves and creases. Peel away its brittle hull, beneath, the hard casing cleaves in a way Georgia O’Keefe might very much appreciate.

Put one on your tongue, transfer it to your molars and bite down. There is a satisfying crunch between your teeth, and then the same taste as the smell. But dig deeper. Taste the nutty hull, and then focus on the sweet inside, sweet inside the way a coconut is, with a sort of meatiness to it – not all sweet, but sweet with something behind it. Bite it in half – it’s white on the inside like popcorn – like a popcorn kernel the casing gets lodged in your teeth the same annoying way. Roll the husk on your tongue and swallow.

Hops: I never actually got to see a hop vine laden with upside-down humulus lupulus reeking of flowers and citrus and earth, never peeled back the pinecone bracts of that bitter bud, cousin of cannabis. No yonic symbolism here, though the resins and oils for brewing strictly reside in the cones of female plants. And as the plants are perennial and therefore may be reproduced through cuttings, they stand rigidly in Amazonian ranks up poles and wire.

Ah, but I have only seen palletized hops, which have been milled and compressed into capsules green as grass and remind me in color and shape and texture of the PennMulch I spread the summer I worked landscaping. But smell and taste! Cascades pour forth the tang of grapefruit and flowers, Centennials waft lemon and bitter herb, Magnums dispatch sour earth and grass...