Chapter 75
Lessons through eyes, eyes, eyes.
Hawkin
Brewer’s Reputation: 546.
Dream Cutter Stone Shard Quest: 14,922/15,000.
The Alik beer, the Ale from the Vale of Ara, Abigail’s Heart of Time ale…nothing came close to the beer Grafth shared with us. Just by looking at it, my vision tunneled. It possessed its own aura. Its presence was almost eerie, as though I had been dropped into a dark sea at night while blindfolded. The mere glass of beer possessed such body and vastness—presence!— that my hair stood on end. My arms became covered in goosebumps. It seemed as packed with power as the sea was with monster and teeth.
The aroma was a living thing. It pressed to my face as tangible as cloth. Was the aroma indicative of a barleywine? Was it some shade of billy goat? If dried fruit could be shredded into fibers and those fibers wove into sheets, then that’s what I felt pressing against me. And the fruits…I could not determine what they were. Were there aged stone fruits? Some sort of banana custard? What cousin of the fig did I smell? And the spices, was that cardamom? An ancestral vanilla? How many meadows were wrung of their aromas and preserved in the aroma. Strong as a breeze, the aroma blasted my hair back.
The foam formed a pyramid over the glass with sharp angles. Lights flickered in the foam and it looked like a cityscape at night. There were flashes of mauve lights, glints of bronze lights, and sparkles of mahogany lights. Biting through the foam was like biting through spun sesame paste nougat. All the tastes in my life until then had been relegated to the tongue. After my first bite of foam, it was like my entire body became a tongue. I could taste the foam in my eyelashes, the back of my mind, my elbows, and in my eyes. The effect could only come from an attribute.
I tasted the beer.
For a moment, I knew what it meant to live by earth and water and sun. I felt what it was to learn throughout the ages that something—some creature—preferred my grain. Throughout the hottest summers, something would harvest my grain. There would be bread and beer in the air. Entire swaths of land would be made ready. I knew what it was to grow by the millions, to house mice and hide deer, to fall by scythe, and to rest in standing sheafs in swaths. My destiny lay in the care of stewards and birds and…
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
In the beer, there were ribbons of flavor. They came altogether, yet I tasted them each on their own. There was malt, yes, but it was spiced as thought with rough black salt. The malt was as smooth as melting ice. A nectar, wrung from some summer’s haze, brought a candied strawberry musk to the beer. There were ribbons of flavors of grains of paradise: the woody and herbal peppercorn, ginger, citrus, cardamom, and coriander. Those flavors were almost knitted together. The hobs were subtle yet bright. They lent a resin of grapefruit zest.
After my first gulp, I found myself in the perspective of foreign eyes—many eyes! Ah, was that how spiders saw? Something about the world made so much more sense then; there was more to see and more to keep in mind!
Suddenly I found myself moving through a desire path in a field of grain. Hands came into view—the hands of my host!—and they pet the grainheads as we moved toward a barn. In a flash we were stepping through the door to the barn. We laid down a sheaf upon a long sun-beaten table. For hours we plucked the grains off. One by one, we cracked them with exact pressure with the use of a rocking mallet. One grain, too small by the perception of so many eyes, was set aside. This went on for hours. When it was night, a fire grew in a hearth. Stars twinkled in the sky and peered between slats in the walls.
We paused my labor for bread, soup, and beer. With a snap of our fingers, we brewed a beer, with different grains, that took the shape of a container all on its own. It did not move, but we drank it, evident by the bubbles in our belly and by the diminishing beer. And it was this beer!
So then what were we working on that we couldn’t brew with a simple snap of our fingers? And why meander out to a mountain stream for fresh water when Brewer’s Bubble could do the trick? Why make several of those trips? Ah! It was beyond me why we were separating the water by small spoonfuls! Why toss some spoonfuls aside? Why spend an hour looking at individual cones of hops? Why use miniature blades to peer beneath the leaves—small as ladybug wings—and scratch our head right behind our topmost eyes? Why lose sleep starting and waking a dish of yeast?—and tossing some, and adding some, and splitting batches, and tasting some?...Only to start over several times over.
Over a month, with nary a drop of sleep, we put together enough ingredients to brew 250ml of beer. During that time, we found ourselves brewing hundreds of highly ranked beers.
At last it came time to brew the beer whose ingredients we tediously labored over. The brewing went as expected. We were so vigilant, I felt almost omniscient. With great care over fire, we brewed that 250ml beer. Another month later, we pulled it out from a cellar of hundreds of thousands of bottles. It was time to drink it!
But I would never taste the beer. I came to, just as I finished my first gulp of the beer Grafth had shared. Abigail and I shared the same look with big, wild eyes. While the others chatted amongst themselves about the experience, and Thrush swung his legs while he hummed, Abigail and I spoke in near whispers.
“You know what we have to do, right?” said Abigail.
“We have to brew. We have to brew now.”
“What about them?”
“I have to brew. Right now.”
We leapt up and bolted for the cabin. The echoes of Grafth’s soft laughter bounced in all the shadows of trees.