My Beer Year

  At the end of the three-and-a-half-hour cleaning process, we did not drink a beer: the draft lines were filled with water. In the morning, Denver would open the taps and allow the water to flow into buckets before reattaching the kegs to the lines. When beer began to come through, Denver said, he’d count to four, then pour himself a sample of one of the beers from each group of coupled lines. If the beer tasted like yogurt or water, he’d know something had gone wrong. If it tasted like a Hair of the Dog beer—poured with the perfect amount of carbonation, zero off-flavors, and at the perfect temperature—we’d done it right. Even though I wouldn’t be there to see the beer flow, I felt the warm sense of having made the world a better place, as though I’d just picked up litter or returned a lost puppy.

  Months later, on Superbowl Sunday, I’d pass up guacamole and hot wings to return to Hair of the Dog. The brewery was closing early because it didn’t have a TV, and as soon as the last beer was poured, I started running between the cooler and the bar, trying not to slip, waste beer, or do anything destructive. This time, the cooler didn’t seem as foreign and the lines didn’t look menacing, a reminder that first impressions can’t be repeated. While the cleaning solution did its work in the lines, I sat at the bar disassembling faucets and plopping the parts into the hot water bucket. My hands turned sticky and smelled like stale beer, but something had happened since the last time I was there. Tonight, the faucets seemed ordinary and my hands dismantled the pieces with an innate understanding. At the end of the night, Denver gave me an old faucet to take home, so I could practice. Later, I showed the faucet to Tony.

  “You should be like a soldier with his gun with that thing,” he said, sounding impressed. “You should be able to take it apart and put it back together blindfolded.”

  I was pretty sure blindfolds weren’t part of the Certified Cicerone exam, but he had a point.

  Eventually, instead of running back and forth with Denver like I’d done last time, I sat at the bar on a cushy stool. I’d brought a copy of the only Certified Cicerone exam ever released by the organization. (As far as I know, no tests have been leaked.) I’d been carefully filling in answers over the past couple of weeks. Tonight, I had the benefit of being in a room with a Certified Cicerone. When I got stuck on a question I didn’t know, I asked Denver for hints.

  “How about this one,” I said. “A draft pale ale with a bit more flavor than ordinary, but still generally less than four percent.”

  “Think about the spectrum of English ales,” he said, steering me toward a country with beer styles I hadn’t yet studied. Then I remembered that “ordinary” was also the name for a subset of “bitters,” a broad category of English pale ales. Now, the question made sense.

  Sometimes he told me my response was right, or he would say, “I like that answer.” A few times, we resorted to Google. I hoped doing the practice exam would make the real exam feel like this second line cleaning, something familiar I could do with ease, even with sticky, stale-beer hands.

  There isn’t any manual on how to prepare to serve beer to the public for the first time, so I considered stretching, hydrating, carbo loading, and elevating my feet. Instead I just stood quietly with about a dozen volunteers under a small white tent next to other tents where hundreds of beer drinkers were, well, drinking. The annual Holiday Ale Festival in downtown Portland was in full swing. At some beer fests, brewers or brewery employees pour the beer, but more often the beer is poured by beer lovers who do the job for free. For beer geeks, volunteering at festivals is like building a house for Habitat for Humanity, a way of giving back that, in this case, happens to be rewarded with free beer. Somehow, I’d never done my duty. Not only did I feel like it was time to enlist, I thought I might learn something useful about beer during my shift.

  Behind a plastic picnic table in the corner of the volunteer tent, two beefy men watched us.

  “Move closer!” one of them bellowed.

  “Even closer!” the other one commanded.

  We shuffled in.

  “It’s Saturday night at a beer festival,” the first guy said. He sounded like he was using a megaphone. “That means you’ll be on the right side of the table.” A loud roar went up from the adjacent tent, where more than four thousand people would be drinking beer over the course of the night. “Those people are all totally sober, I swear,” he quipped.

  “We only have fifteen beers below seven percent,” he continued. “That means people will be getting drunk.”

  During its nineteen-year run, the Holiday Ale Festival has become famous for serving an array of beer with high alcohol contents. That translates to high amounts of drunkenness, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, which are commonly considered beerfest amateur hours. No one I knew—and I mean no one—would attend this festival on Saturday night. But seeing as I was a beer-service amateur, this was my night. The organizers assured us that a security brigade would help identify drunk people, escort them to an exit, and strip them of their wristbands. We were told to pay close attention and only serve people who were wearing wristbands and could hand us noncounterfeit tasting tickets. (During past festivals, counterfeit tickets began appearing in the tent within hours of opening on the first day.)

  If I had been an unarmed gladiator about to enter the arena, my only weapon would have been an Oregon Liquor Control Commission pamphlet titled, “What Every Volunteer Alcohol Server Needs to Know.” I’d printed, signed, and stuffed the publication into my back pocket; I was required by law to have it on my person while I served—theoretically so I could refer to the list of indications that someone’s intoxicated.

  I marched with the other volunteers down a beer-soaked plywood walkway behind about twenty jockey boxes: rectangular picnic coolers fitted with two beer faucets on the front and dispensing coils that are usually bathed in ice water inside. One of the bar managers showed me to my taps, where a woman with dreadlocks was finishing her volunteer shift.

  “You’re going to be serving one of the most popular beers at the festival,” she yelled in my ear. “Are you ready?”

  She poured some coffee-colored beer from a plastic pitcher into a tasting mug.

  “Now it’s my turn to drink!” she said jubilantly, before bounding down the plank.

  I’d already realized that signing up for the six-to-ten evening shift meant I wouldn’t enjoy the same perk—the festival ended at ten o’clock. Obviously, other volunteers had done the same calculation, because by the time I signed up, this was the only shift available.

  I looked over the top of my jockey box at a line of serious-looking people waiting for beer. Every time I moved, two want-ad-size pieces of paper fluttered on the table, descriptions of the beers I was serving that had been ripped from the festival brochure. The beer everyone wanted was called Hopworks Incredible Abominable of the Enchanted Barrel Forest, a tongue twister I would enjoy watching people try to say over and over again. The beer was a variation of the brewery’s Abominable Winter Ale, a popular canned beer.

  Once upon a time, I was a canned beer skeptic, which was one of the reasons I would visit Hopworks Urban Brewery one weekday afternoon. The brewery canned about 60 percent of its beer, so I was surprised by the small size of the canning line. The canning system at Hopworks operates only one to three days a week, at a rate of about sixty cans a minute, which qualifies it as a midentry canning line. On the other end of the spectrum, a canning line at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Catersville, Georgia, packages seven million cans a week. At the end of a row of fermenter tanks, I watched long, leggy ramps moving bumbling empty cans, which were inverted as though they were on a nauseating amusement park ride. Then a sweep arm pushed the cans onto a conveyor belt, where they were inverted again and rinsed with hot water. Inside a glassed area, which reminded me of the airport security booths that blast travelers with air, the cans received a squirt of CO2 then their shot of beer. A robot hand topped and sealed the can, then the closed cans were inverted again, rinsed with more water,
and blow-dried. A machine printed a “canned on” date on each one, then the cans traveled through an X-ray machine that reveals the volume of beer in each can. Variations in foam mean some cans won’t have enough beer inside. Those lightweights were unceremoniously dropped down a plastic ramp, where they would become free beer for the staff.

  Aluminum became the standard material for cans following the repeal of Prohibition, and in 1935 the first canned beers were sold in Richmond, Virginia, by Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company. Later that year, Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch started selling canned beer, the drinks that helped raise soldiers’ morale during World War II. During the past decade, canning made a comeback as craft brewers realized its benefits. Cans are superior to bottles for a couple reasons: they better protect beer from light and oxygen, and because aluminum is lighter than glass, shipping them costs less money. I’d questioned canned craft beer in part because of the sound—a can opening reminded me of my Busch-drinking days in Utah and, therefore, that bloated, bad-beer feeling. I also assumed cans would make the beer taste metallic, but that’s not the case. Thin plastic linings in cans prevent the beer from touching any metal that might alter the beer’s taste.

  I thought about the canning line as I prepared to pour the Incredible Abominable of the Enchanted Barrel Forest. At 100 IBUs, the Enchanted Barrel Forest was one of the hoppiest beers at the Holiday Ale Festival, which explained the line in front of my jockey box. Humans are capable of perceiving as few as 6 IBUs, but somewhere around 100 we lose the capacity to detect a difference in scale. Most beer drinkers don’t take into account how a beer’s maltiness affects its overall hop bitterness; instead they turn to numbers. Hop hunters who seek out beers with maximum IBUs are like people who eat naga jolokias, the peppers that are listed near pepper-spray intensity on the Scoville scale: masochists looking for palate-destroying experiences. The other beer I would serve was the BridgePort Up in Smoke Lager, the sad trombone next to the hop trumpet. Not only was the beer a lager and smoked—two unpopular traits—it had just 5.4 percent ABV and 14 IBUs.

  As I started pouring beer from the pitchers into people’s glasses, I had some regrets. At every beer festival I’ve ever attended, I’d asked the volunteers to tell me about the beer they were pouring. With so many choices, I wanted some advice, or maybe a few guiding adjectives. But since I hadn’t had come to the festival until that night, I was pouring two beers I’d never tried.

  “What’s it like?” people asked when they finally reached the front of the line, usually after they struggled to say the entire name of the Hopworks beer.

  “People really seem to like it!” I answered cheerily, an attitude I maintained for at least thirty minutes. At that point I realized, if I was going to survive the remaining three-and-a-half hours of my shift, I’d need to tone down my enthusiasm—I was already starting to lose my voice. Still, I focused on each pour, trying not to create too much foam, which really pissed people off, while creating some head, so the drinker could experience the beer at its best. A beer’s head holds aromas, which, as I’d learned in Nicole Erny’s class, affect flavor, and makes foam atop any beer an essential part of tasting it (an inch of foam on a pint is a good standard). While some beer styles aren’t conducive to producing foamy heads, these two beers wanted to foam. I also tried to keep the glass from touching the pitcher, and keep the pitcher from touching the faucet. Keeping that space is key, said one of the orientation guys. “Otherwise it’s like kissing everyone at the festival.”

  “Don’t touch that glass with the pitcher,” a woman in the line next to mine shrieked as a volunteer poured her beer. She sighed and shook her head disapprovingly.

  “OK, OK!” he replied.

  I was impressed she knew to make the demand. Maybe she’d contracted mono after last year’s festival.

  When someone in line asked the same guy about the beer he was pouring, he told them it was “really sweet.”

  “When you said it’s really sweet,” I said to him, as I poured beer into a glass (which felt like an advanced multitasking move), “did you mean you didn’t like it?”

  “Nope, I’ve never tried it,” he replied bluntly.

  That’s when I came up with my description for the Hopworks hop bomb, a factually accurate line I’d deliver over and over again: “It’s really hoppy, at 100 IBUs.”

  Fifty minutes into my shift, a thin stream of foam poured from the Hopworks faucet into the pitcher. “The Hopworks beer is kicked,” the bar manager yelled at the crowd. The guy who got the last pour bounded gleefully into the crowd, and everyone else groaned. Immediately, things got a lot easier. I had time to wipe up beer that had dripped from the taps onto the tables. I filled the pitchers with the sad trombone beer and created games for myself. Now were there more inappropriately intoxicated people, ironic holiday sweaters, waxed mustaches, or foreign accents? No one who came to my line was inebriated to OLCC-brochure standards, but I did see “alcohol monitors” escorting festival goers to the door, outside of which I pictured a shameful wristband-cutting ceremony.

  When the BridgePort beer ran out at 9:55 P.M., I lamented I wouldn’t have the chance to try that beer, either. The only other person who seemed disappointed that the smoked lager was gone was the guy who’d been standing nearby to have his mug refilled with the smoked beer every five minutes; I’d refused to give him bigger pours (he wasn’t the only one who’d asked). Even though it seemed ridiculous to be refilling his glass with two ounces at a time, I was being watched, and there was no way I wanted to be booted from volunteering without getting my free beer at the end of the shift.

  When the clock struck ten, I walked down the plank I’d come up four hours earlier. Inside our gathering tent, the other volunteers seemed giddy. We’d survived, and were about to drink for free. Organizers delivered whatever beer was left in the pitchers when the clock struck ten. There wasn’t much. A few brewery names were written on pieces of tape stuck to the pitchers, but most of the beers were unmarked. It didn’t matter. We started pouring beer into our mugs in a frenzy.

  “This one tastes like maple,” one volunteer announced.

  “This has to be a barley wine,” said another.

  “This sour is so disgusting it reminds me of vinegar.”

  It was like eating from a dim sum cart, a jarring range of flavors united by a common theme. Twenty minutes later, the beer was gone. I’d just survived my first beer-service challenge, putting me one step closer to Cicerone status, but I didn’t feel satisfied. Not only didn’t I have a chance to really taste the beers and enjoy them, all night I was separated from the beer drinkers by a jockey box, which felt like a barrier to understanding the beers and the scene. Even though I was volunteering, it was still a job, I thought as I walked out onto the street, where the lights of the city’s two-story Christmas tree twinkled overtop the white festival tents—Portland’s version of a white Christmas. A few people at the light rail station were wearing Santa hats. The train was the sleigh that would carry us home.

  I knew that before I could take the Certified Cicerone exam I would first need to take the Level 1 test: the Certified Beer Server exam. Compared to the Certified Cicerone exam, this test was highly accessible: you just had to pay a fee and take it online. But I’d been putting off the easy exam.

  “Oh, that test?” Megan Flynn told me one day over lunch. “It’s so easy! You could pass it anytime, no problem.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. The syllabus made the test seem like a serious challenge to my knowledge of beer styles and draft systems, in particular. I worried I wouldn’t pass on my first try, and if I couldn’t pass the “easy” level on my first attempt, how would I psych myself up for the Certified Cicerone exam? Feeling the pressure to get to the Level 2 exam, I decided to take the test the next day. I would have thirty minutes to answer sixty multiple-choice questions, a pace that eliminated the option of looking up answers online. I did some last-minute cramming by watching a video about draft systems, and I tried to me
morize the specs for a few more beer styles. Before I sat down with my laptop to take the test, I made sure Tony and Oscar wouldn’t be arriving home from the indoor mountain bike park during the next thirty minutes, the kind of interruption that would most definitely lead to a fail.

  “Go for it!” Tony texted. “Good luck!”

  The multiple-choice questions appeared one screen at a time, and once I answered one there was no going back. Some I knew right away, while others gave me pause. The ticking clock in the corner of the screen made me nervous, but I finished the test with a few minutes to spare. The next window revealed the news: You got 51 out of 60 possible points. Your score was: 85%. Congratulations, you passed! I was relieved. Before I closed my laptop, I looked at the list of questions I’d missed: beer styles, glassware, storage and serving, and keg mechanics. I had some studying to do before spring.

  When Tony and Oscar walked in the door, I said, “You’re looking at a Certified Beer Server.” I had proof. I’d printed out my Certified Beer Server certificate, which had my name and the number 177863.

  “Whoa!” Oscar said. “That’s cool.”

  “I’m going to put it on the fridge,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he chanted. “Right here!”

  We made a clearing in his magnetic alphabet letters.

  “You should definitely serve me a beer tonight,” Tony said, as he pulled some salami and cheese out of the fridge for Oscar’s lunch.

  “Only if we have the proper glassware,” I replied.

  The following week I received a small cardboard box in the mail. Inside was a rectangular, black and gold lapel pin that said “Certified Beer Server.” “Congratulations on passing the Certified Beer Server Exam from the Cicerone Certification Program!” read a typed note inside the box. “You are receiving a lapel pin to commemorate your achievement, we hope you wear it with pride.” Maybe I’d wear it to the exam in April.