Page 20 of Golden Touch
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Because your dad makes that one.”
“By himself?”
He nods, and his expression seems to imply that I might be a little slow on the uptake.
“Okay,” I say, “but could you make it if I asked you to?”
“Well, sure,” he says with a shrug. “I’d need the recipe.”
“Of course. Let me double check the ingredients and maybe we’ll start a batch later today, all right?”
He gives me a curious look before nodding again and turning back to his work.
I head back to my father’s office, working out the math in my head. I recall that Goldenpour is a twenty-two-day beer from mash to can. That’s alongtime. We’re going to run out before then.
And my sister didn’t notice? Poor girl must have been more overworked than I guessed.
When I walk into the office, Livia is up on the rolling ladder that slides the length of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She’s got one of Dad’s many binders in her hands. This one saysUnpaid Invoices.
“Hi,” I say in greeting. “It’s me again.”
“Who else?” she murmurs without looking up from her page.
“Can you tell me which of these books has my father’s recipes in it?”
“In a moment,” she says, taking her time. She scans the page before making a careful note in the binder.
I hold back my sigh. I can’t believe we’re about to run out of Goldenpour. A smart business does not stall sales on their most lauded product.
Livia gets down off the ladder. After retrieving keys from her desk, she walks to the antique safe in the room’s corner. She unlocks the old metal door and rifles through the safe’s contents.
“Under lock and key?” I snort. “Really?”
“My idea,” Livia says. “Sometimes we find the beer tourists wandering around this place, looking to snap a picture of the recipes. But also? Your father is paranoid.” She pulls a set offolders out. “And that man won’t digitizeanything. One fire is all it would take to destroy forty years of records.”
“Ah. Interesting.” All elite breweries try to keep their recipes a secret. But you can’t really lock away a recipe—it lives in the minds of the employees.
She passes me the folders, and I quickly flip through them. There are eight beers that I recognize and another eight that might have been seasonal one-offs or perhaps ideas that my father has yet to produce. There’s one huge problem. “Where’s Goldenpour?”
Livia snorts. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No. Why?”
She lifts her flashing dark eyes to mine. “He doesn’t share that one.”
I blink. “No kidding. Trade secret. But I need to see it in order to brew.”
“You don’t understand,” she says quietly. “He doesn’t share it with anyone. Not even Badger. Why else would we be running so low?”
“Withanyone,” I repeat slowly. “Literally anyone? That’scrazy.”
She throws her arms out to the sides, as if to agree with me. And I’m even too stunned to admire her cleavage.
It’s like my fatherwantsto go out of business. “Huh. I guess I know what he and I will be discussing later this morning. But before that, I need to look at ordering supplies. Can you show me an inventory sheet from before he got sick? So I can duplicate it?”
Wordlessly, she moves the ladder to another location on the wall of binders and climbs up again.
I can see how this is going to go. Even if Livia would rather push me off a cliff than help me, she literally holds the keys to running this business, and I’ll have to figure out how to work with her.
