Page 19 of Golden Touch
CHAPTER 9
NASH
After a quick cup of coffee from the brewery’s breakroom, I set myself up to do an inventory. That means carrying a clipboard into the malt room to tally up the supplies.
Like the rest of the mill, the malt room has high ceilings and old wooden floors. Antique soda lamps hanging from the rafters cast a soft glow, and the place smellsdivine. Like toasty grain and magic.
Gun to my head, I’d admit that the Boston brewery where I work lacks charm. At BrewCo, the storage room is a nondescript, climate-controlled cinderblock warehouse. The grain comes off tanker cars and moves through the brewery via a system of chutes and hoppers, never touched by human hands.
It’s soulless, my father likes to say.Shouldn’t even call it beer.
That’s exactly why I don’t come home very often. There’s more than one way to make beer, and he likes his with extra judgment in the glass.
It still stings, though. When I was a young man, I thought my father and I would work side by side. He’d claimed to want me to join the family business, and I’d believed him. With his blessing—not to mention financial assistance—I got a business degree with the goal of adding more firepower to our combined skill set.
Those were the early days of the Giltmaker Brewery. My father hadn’t hit the big time yet, but I believed in him.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the same belief in me. It only took me a few months after college graduation to realize that he’d never see me as an adult. He’d never accept me as an equal. Our partnership was doomed from the start. He hated all my ideas. He belittled my efforts.
But I didn’t give up entirely until the day we had a horrible fight right in the middle of the brewery. Hefired mein front of the staff. Most embarrassing moment of my life.
Later, he claimed he didn’t mean it. But the damage was done. I took the first brewery job I was offered, and I didn’t look back.
Or I tried not to anyway. But then my father surprised us all—including himself—when, seemingly overnight, Goldenpour became an outrageous success. One week my dad was just another small Vermont brewer, and thenBeer Magazinegave Goldenpour the first perfect score they’d ever awarded to a beer. There’s a plaque in the brewhouse with the score gilded onto it.100.
That’s when the crowds started to show up. From my desk in Boston, I saw photographs of the line out the door—beer tourists queued up by the hundreds for the chance to buy a four-pack of the world’s most esteemed New England Ale.
Fast forward a few years, and Dad’s beers haven’t just won awards—they’ve wonallthe awards. This building makes some of the most vaunted beers in American brewing. If I’d stayed on, I might have been a full partner in the brewery.
If only my father had let me.
After all these years, it’s hard to acknowledge that I was once in love with the family brewery, before our painful breakup. Coming back home is like a visit to The One Who Got Away. Only it’s not a girl, it’s a job.
That’s why I was so hesitant to come back and help out, even in a time of crisis. But here I am, clicking the button on my penand counting up the bags of grain and hops. Trying not to feel sentimental about this place.
And every ten minutes or so I pull out my phone and stare at my texts. BrewCo employees seem to text me every ten minutes, but the text thread with my sister and Matteo remains silent.
Any sign of the baby? Everyone okay?
No response. Maybe they’re resting.
Or maybe something terrible has happened, and they’re rushing Leila into surgery.
Thanks, brain. Thanks a lot.
With a grunt of frustration, I stow my phone and go back to work. It’s hard to count bags of malt when you’re worrying about your sister.
After finishing in the grain room, I head over to the storage area. It’s not as atmospheric, because most of our products have to be kept refrigerated. To accommodate plenty of chilled beer, dad built a state-of-the-art cold room between the loading dock and the tasting room.
It’s forty-two degrees Fahrenheit in here, so my clipboard practically freezes to my hand as I write down how much of every kind of beer we’ve got in stock.
The answers are frankly troubling. How could we be so low on inventory when half the tanks are standing empty? I head back to the brewhouse to get some answers.
“Hey, Badger?” I have to call out to him a few times before he hears me over the sound of the water sprayer he’s using to clean out the masher.
The water finally cuts off, and he turns around. “Yeah, Nash? Something wrong?”
I hold up the clipboard. “Just doing a little inventory. Do you know why we’re so low on Goldenpour?”
