The Tank That Went Sour

Tank six turned on me in the second week of March. I came in at six, before the streetlights on Saint-Laurent had gone off, and the sample from the sample valve tasted like a green apple left in a warm car. Not the good kind of tart. The kind that means something in the tank has already decided for you.

I took a gravity reading twice, then a third time, hoping the hydrometer was lying. It was not. The fermentation had stalled somewhere around 1.030 and a wild thing had moved in to finish the job its own way. Eleven hundred litres. Four days of work. A pitch of yeast that cost more than my first car.

A tank never argues with you. It goes sour and waits for you to notice.

What a garage taught me

Before this I spent three years under a lift at a shop on Papineau, changing oil and listening to a foreman named Réjean explain that machinery does not care about your intentions. He was talking about brakes. It works for beer. You can be tired, you can be behind on invoices, you can have a dog that needs the vet. The tank has no opinion. It ferments at the temperature you actually gave it.

So I dumped it. Eleven hundred litres down the drain, a sound I will not describe because you have probably heard it. Then I took the valve apart on the floor with a bucket under it and scrubbed until my knuckles were raw, and I did not let anyone help, because the fault was mine and the scrubbing was the honest part of the apology.

Six tanks, one of them watching

By April the other five were fine. Clean, patient, doing what they were told. That is the strange part of this work: failure teaches more than success, and you can only afford a failure every so often. I wrote the whole thing into the logbook in pencil, in detail, and I read it before every pitch now.

You cannot talk a fermenter into forgiveness. You can only clean it properly and start again.

On Saturday I was behind the bar and a regular asked why the pale ale was off. I told him the truth for about forty seconds before his eyes drifted to the hockey game. That is fine. People come here for a pint and a place to complain, not a lecture on diacetyl. Barley handled the rest of the conversation.

I locked up at nine that night. Barley had slept through all of it, curled on the malt sack by the door; he is fourteen and has opinions only about the delivery truck. The street was full of people going somewhere, and I smelled like acid and caustic and probably like defeat, and I walked home anyway, because it was March and the air had finally gone above freezing.