Beers and Beards

Book 2. Chapter 7: The New Guy

Bimblebery was impressive, but he didn’t quite hit the same level as Kirk when it came to pub-fu. He tripped on John’s foot, but managed to keep his stride, appearing as though nothing had happened at all - possibly a combination of a high charisma and dexterity. He even nonchalantly scooped up the little wooden roller we’d left as an obstacle, neatly stowing it away in a pocket as he made his way from table to table. He was organized and efficient.

However, when Richter jumped up in his way, Bimbleberry bounced off and onto the floor. He was back up on his feet in an instant, smoothly apologizing, but the Thirsty Goat could get a bit rowdy, and that was going to be an issue.

Bimbleberry did have better customer service skills than Kirk. He was very sociable and got along quite well with everyone in the pub, especially Moony and Markus, who were positively beaming as they got waited on by the [Butler]. Zirce and Emma had been more enamored with Kirk, but Bimbleberry won them over quickly enough. Kirk’s forthright bravado would probably grate on some patrons, but most of us working at the Goat were that special kind of grating anyway. Bran was especially grating when it came to cheese.

One thing that made Bimbleberry stand out from Kirk was that he didn’t return to the kitchen to deliver orders. He vanished them into his paper storage, and with a pushing motion made them appear on the other side of the room.

Ah, suddenly [Paper Pusher] made much more sense as an Ability name.

This time it was Aqua’s turn to make a mess, spilling beer all over the floor. Bimbleberry nabbed a cloth and walked over to it. He simply swirled it a few times and the mess was completely gone. The floor even sparkled.

“Were our towels that amazing?” I asked Bran, who'd left the kitchen to Lemontwist so he could watch the proceedings.

“Nah, got to be an Ability.”

“Hmm… [Strengthed Tools] maybe?”

“Sounds right.”

Bimbleberry looked good doing it too. Never a sign of anxiety or concentration or effort, just smooth operation. At one point Zirce splashed some beer on his nice suit by accident. She immediately apologized, then stopped as she realized the outfit wasn’t even marked.

Bimbleberry smiled and explained, “[Immaculate Attire].”

There were two problems though. As a gnome he struggled to easily reach around the dining tables, and he really lacked a presence in the pub. Everyone knows how awful it is to try and catch a waiter’s attention in a busy tavern, and Bimbleberry was almost impossible to spot even a few tables away.

I looked over at Annie, who was crestfallen.

“Well, Annie?”

“He’s…. really good?”

“Aye, but…”

She put her face in her hands. “He’s right behind table six, but I can’t see him.”

“Oh, there he is!” I pointed to the tip of a head barely visible behind Moony’s back. “And now he’s behind Zirce at table eight!”

“But he’s so good at this!” Annie whinged.

“Yeah, he’s good, but not quite as good as Kirk. He’s missing vim, and you need vim to work in a dwarven pub.”

“Do I get any say?” Bran asked. We turned to regard him.

“Sure, go ahead.” Annie said.

“Havin’ a human around means I’ll have someone’s brain ta pick fer new recipes. That, and he’ll be able to easily reach the rafters so ya won’t need ta keep sending someone to clean up there. Johnsson took a tumble last time.”

“Ooooh, was that why he was demanding a rope system?”

“Aye, he’s just lucky he fell on his head. Would have been a disaster if he landed feet first.”

We all sucked in our breaths at the thought. Dwarves had naturally weak feet, which was why we wore padded socks and armored boots everywhere. No dwarf would be caught dead without those padded socks.

“Aqua was telling me how much she hated it up there too.” Annie said, with a tone of resignation.

We looked back to where Bimbleberry had hopped onto a stool in order to deliver a plate of cookies to Zirce and Emma.

“I guess that decides it. Should we let him finish?” Annie sighed.

“Might as well, he could have more to show us. Maybe [Nothingness] will help him stand out?” I chuckled.

Annie shook her head. “No, [Nothingness] makes people less likely to notice you.”

“Like Lunara’s [Shadowcloak] Blessing?” I asked.

“Yes and no. [Shadowcloak] drapes you in a tangible shadow and makes it easier to hide in darkness. [Nothingness] masks your presence in a crowd. Useful for a [Butler] or a [Burglar], but less so for anyone needing to hide or smite someone with darkness.”

“So… his Blessing Ability is to be less noticeable.”

“Aye.”

We glanced back to the room. Bimbleberry was nowhere to be seen.

Bran pointed to a pair of legs behind a table near Richter, John, and Johnsson. “Over there.”

—

In the end we chose Kirk. For me, the chance to pick a human’s brain for beer ingredients and alcohol was the deciding factor. I was still intently curious about my new world, and having Kirk around would give me access to an enormous wealth of first-hand information. I wanted to know how humans lived, what they ate, what they drank, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Also, I wasn’t actively trying to win the God’s little game, but if I wanted to take a crack at it I was going to need to access the human alcohol market eventually. Hopefully they didn’t have anything like Canada’s horrific alcohol import taxes. I used to pay four or five times what my European friends did for the same beer!

For example, one of the most famous beers in Europe is a Trappist ale. Trappist beers must be made by monks of the Trappist order in their monasteries and as a result, only ten Trappist monastery breweries are officially allowed to call their beers Trappist. There used to be eleven, but one of them lost the designation recently because all the monks had died of old age. That beer cost me nearly twenty dollars for a bottle compared to the five euros that any random Deutschbag could pay. Yeesh, what a ripoff. I was better off drinking Lucky, and that stuff was a swear-word at our old Beavermoose Brewery.

Bimbleberry had accepted his defeat with good grace, and taken his leave. Not before I got his contact info though, because I had other plans for the hyper-qualified little Butler.

Kirk had been overjoyed until we’d sat him down and forced him to read several dozen pages of dwarven contracts. It had taken him five hours, but soon we would have a brand new front of store! After he signed off on the contract, I got a notification for a little quest that I'd received from Tiara a while back. It was to complete a full hiring process for my first employee.

Quest Complete: The New Guy

Congratulations! You now possess your first employee!

Gained 0.2 charisma! Your new charisma is 15.2!

The implication that I now possessed him was a bit disturbing, but the gist of capitalism was that I now owned his labour. I’d try not to think about it too much, and leave myself a mental note to ensure I was giving enough vacations and pay. Not that maximizing profit meant much with the amount dwarves paid in taxes!

Anyway, that was yesterday's news, and I had to get back to business - I was sitting in the admin office trying to solve two major problems. Annie was out tonight meeting with a major potential client, and Aqua was busy cleaning the brewroom. That left me with some quiet time, and I was using it to do what I loved best - improving beer.

When I’d first arrived on Erd I’d set myself an epic quest to save beer from what I considered a sour fate. A cultural tendency towards tradition and conservatism due to a combination of long age and ancestor worship, had resulted in a beer that hadn’t been improved or changed in thousands of years. The stagnation of the dwarven brewing industry had left their beer sour, puckery, cloudy, and un-carbonated. There were several problems that needed tackling, but they mostly boiled down to six main issues:

A lack of cleanliness.Open-top fermentation.A poor malt base.No filtration.No chilling.A Godsawful bittering agent.

Over the past year I'd managed to solve a lot of those problems with the help of the Thirsty Goat staff. Cleanliness was now the watchword in the brewroom, and we even had everyone change into clean Thirsty Goat branded work clothes and shoes when they arrived at work every day. No grimy leather armor or chainmail with sandwich crumbs allowed near our beer! The cleanliness had yielded instant results, with the total number of failed batches dropping to near zero overnight. The success of my first change had left everyone favourable to my other ideas, and a brand new combination filter-and-chiller hop-back was taking care of problems 4 and 5. I still needed a lauter-tun to complete filtration, and I had one on back order with a local gnomish engineering company.

That left problems 2,3, and 6 as my main concerns right now, and none of them had easy solutions. Problem 2 - the open-fermentation tanks - could be fixed with money and space. I had access to both of them, but the easiest solution - steel pressure-tanks for fermentation - was taboo around the Thirsty Goat right now. Annie had blown a hole through the wall using one just a few years ago, and half the workers in the brew-room were still traumatized by the concept. Time would heal that wound, and I had hundreds of years to wait. For now we simply bottle conditioned every batch for a couple weeks, which was good enough.

Problem 3 - the poor malt base - was a result of using the tuberous erdroot. Erdroot was a flavourless potato-like vegetable used everywhere in dwarven cuisine including their beer. Most Earth beers on the other hand were made using barley, wheat, oats, or rice. Problem 3 had no easy solution for one terrifying, horrifying reason.

Dwarves were all gluten-intolerant.

I looked out into the brew-room at one tank of beer that was full of a light yellow liquid coated with white foam. I’d made a single batch of beer with some wheat I’d purchased from a local farmer who specialized in dungeon crops. There was a small plain right inside of Greentree dungeon called Goldenfield, and a lot of cereals were grown there.

Mostly for the gnomish population as it turned out.

For the umpteenth time since I’d made that damn batch I cursed the fact that I hadn’t spoken to Annie about it first. More freedom to play around with my brews was turning out to be a bit more trouble than it was worth.

Like: how to unload several thousand litres of beer that caused stomach cramps in a bad way. I’d almost thrown up after a single glass.

I tapped my fingers on the desk as I came to problem 6, or what I personally hated the most about dwarven beer - the sack of shit that went into the wort. Dwarven beer used gruit for bittering, which was a bundle of sticks and herbs that Annie bought from the local alchemist. It was vile, and I really, really, really, REALLY needed to get hops.

I’d asked Balin to bring me absolutely everything he found in the dungeon on the off chance there was something useful for me, but so far there hadn’t been any plants of note. He was supposed to return sometime later today, and maybe he would have something new for me. A dwarf could always hope!

I played with my pencil and was soon lost in thought while I cursed the conundrum of a full tank of worthless beer.

“You workin’ alone today, Pete? Where’s ma’ Annie?”

I looked up with a slight jump as I recognized the voice that had disturbed me. “Balin! Broooo!!!”

I jumped up and walked over to the handlebar-moustached dwarf I now called brother.

“Broooo!” Balin gave me a fist bump, then pulled me in for a hug. He smelled of sweat and blood, and I shivered.

“Are you okay?” I asked, pulling back and looking into his eyes. He was bright and chipper as ever, with no sign of strain or shell-shock in his bearing. The first few months I'd worried that becoming a full-time monster-murderer would change Balin’s bright and outgoing personality, but my fears seemed thus far unfounded.

“I’m doin’ great, Pete! Wait till I tell you what I saw!” He thumped a heavy sack on the table and it kind of… squished. “And give ya what I brought!”

And then he launched into the epic tales of Balin Roughtuff, Knight of Goldenlight.