Chương 48: Chapter 46 – Winters end

Alric was reviewing the numbers at his desk. Next to the page he was writing on lay Seren's ledgers. His mind still bent in strange angles when trying to read them, and he had simply endured the headache for the past two hours, having concluded that resisting it would require more effort than it was worth. What reassured him were the numbers themselves. For nine weeks of winter, they had consistently supplied one hundred and fifty-three taverns, inns, and bars, mostly with one cask a week, right up until the end.

Alric circled the number, satisfied. It had the solid, comforting quality of something that had happened regardless of weather or fatigue. Still, it had not been without its downsides. The one that stung most was the refusal to sell grain, this forced them to stop making beer. Only the Three Barrels had agreed to sell grain, and he had turned that down in the end. He would have needed cooperation from most of the taverns, each selling small amounts, for it to have worked at all.

For the same reason, he could not bring himself to ask Berrin. He suspected Berrin would have agreed, but it would not have changed anything, and asking for a kindness that solved nothing felt uncomfortably close to theft. He turned the page to his inventory. It was mostly small silver coins, but the total came to eleven gold, four large silver, and six small silver. Alric reduced it without thinking. Eleven point four three.

Numbers, he had learned, were far easier to understand once they had been made smaller and less sentimental. He knew it was a lot, but the new building had costs. The magic stones for the boiler would come to four gold. The pot and the sword case together would be two. The warehouse upgrades would cost another one and a half. That left four and a half gold. He stared at the number for a while. Forty-five wagonloads of grain. The kind of figure that felt faintly obscene when written down.

Then he wrote new deductions beneath it. Mara, Hal, Seren, and Henry would each receive a large silver as a winter bonus. Stephen had joined late; Alric settled on five small silvers for him. He put the charcoal down and stretched. For a moment, he tried to imagine how each of them would spend the coin. It would likely be a small fortune to Mara, Hal and Henry. He remembered Mara and Hal had almost cried when he bought them proper boots.

Henry would likely dote on his girlfriend in some way, probably something to do with food, Henry sure loved food and making sure everyone else did too. Seren... He accepted he had no idea what Seren would do with it, probably save it. The warehouse felt quiet now. The smell of grain had been replaced by hot metal, which was less comforting but at least honest. They had run out of fermenting stock three days earlier. The boiler was kept running for warmth rather than brewing.

Without a hearth, it performed that task enthusiastically, as if determined to justify its existence. Leaving his room, he passed through the fermentation section. It was filled with cleaned, empty casks. A separate pile stood at the far end, marked for those considered suspicious. They were filled with water to check for leaks or lingering smells from whatever had lived in them before. Those casks had lived long and interesting lives and Alric had learned not to ask too many questions about that.

The blizzard outside was serious now. He was glad not to be in it, he knew he would not have been able to make deliveries even if he had stock. Still, it was warming slightly. Perhaps three weeks of winter remained. They were idle, and idleness, like damp, had a way of settling into every available corner. Henry and Stephen had gone to visit their partners. Mara sat with Seren, both sewing new grain bags with the careful focus of people who preferred needles to numbers.

Hal avoided them, making small adjustments to things that did not need fixing. It seemed to help him all the same, and Alric saw no reason to interfere with a process that produced calm. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Alric pulled a sheet from his item box. It was titled Training. Things he meant to teach the staff, written in a hand that suggested he intended to be understood rather than admired.

Neither Henry nor Stephen showed much interest in becoming brewers. Henry had only asked whether the brewery would ever stop needing muscle. It would not. He was content with that. Stephen was similar, practical enough to say it still beat dock work, which was a recommendation rather than praise. Alric walked over to Mara, Hal and Seren who remained, they were currently cleaning shelves.

"Right, I've been neglecting your three's training, want to make something different?"

"All right, so that's mead, more or less," he said. He was using the pots again, and it felt faintly nostalgic, in the way that struggling with old problems often did.

"So we don't need to put the honey in the boiler?" Hal asked. Alric shook his head.

"We only boil the water to clean it, so nothing's alive in it. After that, we add the honey, some of the foamy casks, and wait." He had never used the word yeast, nor explained it. The staff simply called them the foamy casks and knew to keep them topped up, which was close enough to understanding for most practical purposes.

"Remember how we gently warmed the cider until it was quite hot before we casked it, after we squeezed it? We can do that with mead as well. Then we add berries, orange peel, whatever we want for flavour. We call that back-sweetening. You can even add more honey at that point. That's what I'll do with my cask. Now I want you two to do it." He gestured.

"I'll charge your stones, but take two pots each." This was how he always taught. He demonstrated once, answered questions, then made them repeat it, trusting repetition to do what enthusiasm rarely could. Once Mara and Hal had mixed the honey with water from the boiler, they transferred it to the casks.

"What about wine, Mister Alric?" Seren asked.

"It's similar to cider," he said.

"You use the press, squeeze out the juice, then gently heat it and add the foamy casks. Where wine becomes difficult is that good wine needs the right grape and the right barrel, then time. Sometimes two years, depending on the grape. Both are problems. The coopers make one kind of barrel, and we don't know what grapes Moreen can get. So the plan is to buy grapes from several vineyards this year and see which works best with the barrels we have. After that, we can buy out that vineyard's stock. In two years."

He paused, then added, "Barrels that have held wine are useful, though. You can age all sorts of things in them. Even a heavily hopped beer can leave a cask that makes excellent whisky later."

"You really do know a lot about this," Mara said, glancing at him. Alric shrugged. To him, it did not feel like much. He had simply enjoyed good drink in his previous life and experimented now and then, which had turned out to be a surprisingly transferable skill.

"About whisky, Mister Alric," Hal asked.

"Are we ever going to do spirits?" Alric tilted his head.

"I think about it often. But for us, spirits make sense when you're selling beyond the city. They keep, they travel. There's little point while beer here still has room to grow." They accepted that, or at least accepted that it was not a decision for today.

"With the cider," Mara asked, "what did we do with all the apple leftovers?"

"I sold them to a farmer who dropped off grain," Alric said.

"They're good for pigs or compost. Not much use beyond that."

"Compost?" Hal asked.

"It's something you put into soil to help plants grow."

"Like manure?"

"Similar," Alric said.

"And well outside our concern. Maybe in the new building we can do something with it."

"What else can we make into drink, Mister Alric? Something we can grow ourselves?" Seren asked. The others smiled.

"We'd need a farm for how fast we go through things," Alric said.

"Potatoes can make a powerful spirit, but that needs a still. I know a fair bit about it, but learning the rest would be expensive." Meanwhile, a different kind of meeting was taking place.

"So you're saying he stopped bringing beer? He warned you?" the man asked. Both sat on wooden chairs, a cask between them. His cloak was blue and spotless, more ornamental than practical, as though it had never needed to justify itself.

"Aye. Said he ran out of grain. Tried to buy some from us. I didn't sell," the other man said with a shrug. His own cream-coloured cloak was stained with mud at the hem, having lived a far more eventful life. The blue-cloaked man noted it down.

"And he always used an item box?" The other man nodded.

"So. A mage who can brew through a blizzard. Dwarven beer, at that." He glanced at the cask, as if it might offer clarification. The other man shrugged again.

"We need to find him before the innkeepers do. When the storm breaks, find out how many others he sold to." The man in cream left. The blue-cloaked man remained seated for a long moment, then added a note to search the crafters' quarter, having decided that this, at least, was something that could be done while the weather made up its mind.