10. God in a Glass

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a Bostonian Unitarian minister. His scholarship led him away from his church towards transcendentalism. He was one of several people seeking to come to terms with traditional religious teachings in the context of the new age of which they were a part, an age of burgeoning scientific understanding and rationalizations based on logic as opposed to belief. Emerson, a graduate of Harvard, began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and started to compare his new awareness with what he had assimilated in his Christian upbringing. He realized that spiritual truth could take many forms—millions of people following an alternative tradition must surely mean that there is another form of the same “truth.” Emerson said:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds… A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

The transcendentalists confronted issues of slavery and the rights of women, believing that all of humankind could be simplified to the level of the soul and that all people should be able to reach out to the divine.

Emerson also penned the immortal words, “God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.”

In a sentence, the transcendentalist linked a higher power with the daily reality of fermentation. And as a good Bostonian he will have been well aware of beer, and that yeast was the catalyst to its production, even though it hadn't been until the work of the likes of Pasteur, Cagniard-Latour, and Schwann,^[1] that the true role of yeast acting as a living agent was demonstrated. It was long after Emerson's death that the first enzyme was extracted from yeast by Buchner in 1897.^[2]

The conversion of grain to the feedstock (wort) for yeast to turn into an alcohol-containing triumph flavored with hops to delight humankind is surely a sublime example of a profound Buddhist concept. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche tells of a Buddhist scripture that speaks of “conditionality.” In addressing the matter of rebirth, the author describes the concept of successive existences:

The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like the pearls in a pearl necklace, held together by a string, the “soul” which passes through all the pearls; rather they are like dice piled one on top of the other. Each die is separate, but it supports the one above it, with which it is functionally connected. Between the dice there is no identity, but conditionality.

Sogyal Rinpoche invokes the tale of a Buddhist sage, Nagasena, explaining the concept to King Milinda. One of the examples Nagasena uses to illustrate the idea is the conversion of milk to curds and ghee: They are not the same as milk, but nonetheless are dependent upon it.

The example could just as easily be beer. Glasses of Budweiser or Sierra Nevada Pale Ale do not resemble one another in appearance or taste, and even less so do they resemble the raw materials from which they are made. But the living essences of grain and hops and yeast, bathed in purest water, are there. The beer is conditional upon the preexistence of its raw materials and on the journey that they took in field, malt house, and brewery.

Think of this: acre upon acre of soil in Montana, newly plowed and sown with barley seed from an earlier crop. Caringly, the farmer irrigates the fields as a golden sun beats down. The tiny shoots break through the soil level and wind their way towards the heavens, basking in the sunlight, inhaling the carbon dioxide and stocking the larder of the grain with carbohydrates. Below ground the tiny roots get stronger and stronger as they burrow through the earth, gratefully drinking nature's goodness from the terrain. Months later the barley is fully grown, and the grain now waves proudly at the head of each stalk, bravely enduring the mighty harvesters that separate it from the mother plant and usher it to the vast dark silos that will be its next home.

Soon vast numbers of kernels will be plunged into cool clean water, thirstily satisfying the need of the baby plant and moistening the starchy food reserve that the embryo depends upon to support its germination. Slowly and surely, the myriad complexity within each barley kernel makes for the partial digestion of the food reserve, and the nutrients enable the fledgling rootlets and shoot to develop. In a week or so, the grain is helpfully softened and has generated within it the enzymes that will now be able to break down the starch in the brewhouse. So the maltster halts the germination: He toasts the grain and, their work done, the embryos give up their brief lives. The heating causes new changes: Colors get darker, different flavors develop. Sometimes the cooking is gentle—giving pale lemon hues, then ambers and gentle sulfury flavors. Such malts will be transformed to lagers. Or perhaps the kilning is more intense, leading to reds and lighter browns, and toffee- or nutlike notes revered in pale or darker ales. Other grains are roasted, yielding dark browns and blacks, with burnt tastes of mocha, chocolate, and coffee. Such malts have sacrificed themselves to stouts.

Meanwhile in a garden somewhere in Oregon, Idaho, or Washington, hop vines wind their way over trellis work stretching as far as the eye can see. Come the fall, beauteous cones adorn the female plants and deep within each lie rich yellow lupulin glands suffused with the resins that will make a beer bitter to the taste and oils that will afford the triumphant “nose” to ales and lagers.

Taste the barley or the hop as they have matured in the field, and you will not sense delight. But transformed, respectively, by malting and by the boiling process in the brewhouse, then we see the magnificence of our God’s deliverance.

The starch broken by enzymes in the brewhouse is thereby rendered in the form of sugars that satisfy yeast. And so, after the boil, the liquid that is wort is cooled and yeast added. Greedily the yeast consumes the sugars, turning them into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and extracting sufficient goodness to allow the simple cells to grow and produce daughter cells. The yeast multiplies, and after several days there is perhaps three times more yeast than at the start—and beer whose flavor is so much more pleasing than the “wort” that the yeast had been fed. And what wondrous economy: Some of the new yeast can be used to “pitch” the next fermentation (no wonder the medieval brewers called this stuff that they saw collecting on their fermentations “godesgoode”). And the rest of the yeast can go to feed animals, even humans as Marmite or Vegemite,^[3] just as the parts of the malt that weren't extracted into wort head off to delight cattle.

Nothing wasted. Barley (plus other cereals like wheat, corn, and rice), hops, yeast, and water transformed by miracles of metabolism, fed by nature's bounty.