The festival beer is a collaboration. Hops's idea from the start, though I didn't understand what he meant until the second tasting session. He brewed it in response to the season: a golden ale, lower bitterness than his standard, a nose that runs to apple and a little pear and something warm underneath. Not a fruit beer. A beer that understands autumn the way a good cook understands a season, by distilling what the season feels like and putting it in the glass.
"It's patient," I tell him on the Thursday of the second week. We're in the tasting room, early afternoon, the brewery quiet except for the sound of Bev setting up the pub. "It doesn't announce itself. It waits for you to come to it."
"Good patient or boring patient?"
"Good patient." I hold the glass up. The colour runs darker at the edges than you'd expect. It’s not quite gold, more like the light through the trees outside right now in the last week of October. "Confident patient."
"What does it want?" he asks.
I know the answer. I've been thinking about it for three days without letting myself arrive at the conclusion, and now I arrive at it. "Aged cheese," I say. "Not sharp. Hm, something with a more complex paste. A cloth-bound cheddar that's been somewhere between eight and twelve months. Or a mountain-washed rind if you can get it." I'm not looking at him, I'm looking at the glass. "And something roasted. Savory. Caramelized. Roasted root vegetables with good fat, carrot and parsnip, honey only if it's very restrained. The fat will open the beer. The caramelization will echo the malt." I pause. "And something acidic. Small. A pickle, maybe, or a fermented element. Bright acid to cut the fat and reset the palate so you want another sip."
Silence.
I look up.
He is grinning. It is an uncomplicated, delighted grin.
"What?" I say.
"You just designed the pairing."
I replay what I said. I did. Out loud, in the exact detail a kitchen could execute from. My hands are on the table and they're not shaking.
"I talked about a pairing," I say.
"In precise enough detail that my kitchen could execute it from the description alone." He leans forward.
"The fermented element," he says. "I make a fermented hot honey. We don't use it on the menu yet — it's a personal project. I've been making it all summer."
"Fermented hot honey."
"Yes."
"With what culture?"
He tells me. It's specific and slightly unusual and entirely correct for the flavour profile of the beer. I stare at him for a moment because this is the part of Hops Sullivan that keeps catching me off guard: he looks like a man who runs a warm and sociable pub, and he is that man, completely, but underneath is a brewer who thinks about fermentation the way I used to think about sauce reductions — obsessively, privately, with real pleasure in getting it right.
"You made that for the festival," I say. "Before I came?"
"I made it not knowing what it was for," he says. "Now I know."
The late afternoon light is shifting through the tasting room windows. At some point while I was talking about the pairing, Bev put a small plate of bread and butter on the corner of the table, the way she does when she knows we'll be here a while, and neither of us touched it.
I take a piece of bread. I eat it. He watches me.
"The harvest festival is next weekend," he says.
"I know." I have been not-thinking about this. The festival is the endpoint — it's why he needed the pairing, it's when the collaboration he entered requires a finished result. After the festival there's no reason I'm still here. I've been extending my stay at Silver Lodge week by week on the small and privately admitted grounds that I don't want to leave yet.
I've been treating Silver Ridge as temporary the way I treat most things right now — armor. If it's temporary it can't disappoint me. Eight months oftemporarywhile I moved through cities and small towns trying to find the thing that would make me want to cook again, and here I am in a brewery in the interior of BC with a notebook full of pairing notes and a man who looks at me like I'm something he's still working out.
"Tell me about the festival," I say, because I'm not ready to say the other thing yet.
He tells me. The Harvest Festival, nine years running, agricultural families and town businesses and a beverage competition he's been trying to win for two years.
"You haven't won?"
"The Kowalski cider's taken it three times," he says. "It's excellent cider. I'm not offended."
