I want to build a perfect beer. Not a brew-one-once and move on type deal. Not a quest to make a perfectly balanced Hefeweizen as illustrated by beer style gurus and numbers and gravities and refractive indexes. No, a perfect beer. A house beer. My beer. One with no particular style or regional affiliation or suggested seasonality. One identified by a number in the cardinalization of iteration that it surely will take to perfect and in the end, just called “beer.” “Give me a beer,” a friend might say … OK here it is. Beer. I can permanently paint the sign above my two tap kegerator. The left will say ‘beer’ and the right will say ‘sour.’ The sour is another quest entirely.
How will I know when I have it right? What will it look like, smell like? I really don’t know, and that is part of the quest. It will have grain, hops, yeast and some water. I suppose I can count on that much. Which ones? How much? What else — fruits (doubt it, ) spices, sugars? Maybe. I can say this, I will know I have gotten there when I take a sip and immediately want another. I will like the beer in the heat of summer and the dregs of winter equally. I will simply come to know that beer as a matter of course.
More to come …
