This book is about time. And this book is about beer.

First, time. There's Greenwich Mean Time, Daylight Savings Time, Eastern Standard Time, Mountain Time, Time Magazine, Tea Time, and time to leave. There is a lot of time and not enough time. Time to boogie and time to get down. Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Time heals all wounds.

Time is measured by devices called clocks. We wear portable clocks, called watches, on our wrists. On my wrist right now is a watch made by Timex. It is a digital watch, powered by a small battery. It cost less than forty dollars and it has five buttons that enable me to make use of various functions. One lights up the Indiglo display so I can read the time at night. Unfortunately I can't make much use of this feature, as the passing of years has weakened my reading vision and lengthened my focal distance to one inch beyond the length of my arm. Once in a while I push the Indiglo button just to see the pale, green glow. (I would hate to think I paid for something that didn't work.)

My watch has other features. It sounds an alarm at the same time each day, reminding me that I really do have to get out of bed (as opposed to the clock radio that simply tells me I should consider getting out of bed). By pushing various combinations of buttons I can keep track of time in two time zones, see how long I can hold my breath, count the number of laps I swim in the pool, or track how long it has been since my last beer. This is a very smart watch! Of course, I don't use any of these functions, because I can't remember which buttons do what, and I threw out the instructions long ago, and they were written in such tiny type I couldn't read them anyway, and if I really get into trouble (like the time my watch inexplicably began to chime on the hour, every hour, even through the night), then there is usually a nine year old willing to help.

This is about beer and time, and how the two are inextricably linked. This is a relationship about which the aforementioned physicist was undoubtedly clueless.

In 1978, after six years of planning, I went on the Great Beer Trek, the epic quest of a young man to discover the state of America via a rigorous field study of the nation's beers. In 1978 Timex was making watches, but they ticked. Watches didn't beep, they didn't glow, and they didn't wake you up in the middle of the night with their hourly chimes. They ticked, and when they stopped ticking you wound a little stem on the side that was connected to a spring, that was connected to the kneebone, that was connected to the ankle bone, and they kept on ticking. When my watch stops Indiglo-ing I can throw it right in the garbage, which is to say there has been a quantum leap in time measurement technology in the past two decades.

That is, things change. Time doesn't change, but times do. Beer doesn't change, but beer drinking does. At the time of the Beer Trek beer was disdained as the beverage of the fat slob watching wrestling in his underwear. Now, there is no chi-chi restaurant without a beer list, and the watering holes of the beautiful people measure their quotient of chic by how many taps they operate. Indeed, the time for a new and completely different journey has come. It's about time, and it's about beer.

My own sense of how best to measure time came from the Beer Trek, when, in self-defense I started running. My wife, beer mate, and travelling companion (all named Laura) traveled a demanding schedule, our itinerary guided entirely by the dictates of the quest to learn more about beer. Day's end invariably found us many miles and many memories from our originating point. I started running so that I could connect more viscerally with the places we roosted. Beer's terrific, but there are other sensory organs beyond the back of the throat and the gut. I created the "mile per beer" rule-- that I would run one mile for every beer drunk that day. Not only did it keep my consumption under control; I got in great shape.

Here's the moment on the Great Beer Trek when I came to understand the importance of time. We were rushing through Montana, midway between nowhere and nowhere else. As always we were in a panic because regional breweries were closing at such a rate that there was a sense that the Budweiser takeover would be complete if we didn't hurry. (Indeed, two breweries- Fall City and Horlacher of Pennsylvania- closed during the actual Trek). We took a shortcut, literally forty miles of bad road. There were people to see, breweries to visit, and beers to drink. Then we took what we thought was a second shortcut, a dirt tributary. We drove five miles into the heart of darkness. Laura was driving. There was a single mud puddle in the middle of an otherwise dry road. "Look out for the puddle," I cautioned. Too late. It was no puddle, but a sinkhole disguised as a puddle, waiting to trap beer trekkers who were now miles from any human habitation. We were stuck.

I pushed, I pulled, I cursed, I threatened, I pleaded, but all we could do was to spin our wheels. Finally, we went to plan B. Laura would stay with the van. I would go back to the "main" road, and hope that someone would happen by who could help. Frustration bubbled over, and I shouted that if she had just missed that mud puddle, none of this would have happened. It wasn't one of my finer moments as a human being, but I was mud splattered and running late on a critical mission.

Always a good time manager, I thought it made sense to put on my running shoes and to combine my daily jog with the rescue mission. If we ran late, at least my run would be out of the way.

Two miles into the run, the endorphins kicked in, and I could feel my frustration dissipating. Distant movement caught my eye, antelope on a nearby hillside. I slowed instinctively to a walk, and realized for the first time that a spectacular day and the majesty of Montana surrounded me. Perhaps there is more to life than beer.

Beyond the visual panorama and the sensual envelopment of summer sun, there was sound, unlike any sound I had ever heard, a symphony of coos and clucks, that came at me from all directions. I scanned the surrounding long grasses and realized the curved protrusions were not sticks, but birds. I was in the midst of a huge flock of cranes, sandhills, I guessed, not the more rare whoopers. I was dumbstruck. What had I done to be so blessed? I had merely set off on a beer trek to have an adventure. We had whizzed past the cranes on our rush to the next beer. Because of that pothole I had slowed down, backtracked, and experienced something that would stay with me forever.

From that point forward miles and beers would measure the time in my life. There came another sound--this time a small pickup truck from Idaho, carrying an older couple who was intentionally getting as lost as one can in America. Would they have a towing chain? Of course they would. In no time at all we were unmired and leaning on our vehicles, soaking in the Montana sun. The old couple was glad to hear our stories of sudsy. We all shared a beer. They were quite delighted when Laura and I left them with colorful, quenching libations from our visits to the August Schell Brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota and the Dixie Brewery in New Orleans. They had never known that such exotic beers existed. When we left them with an assorted six-pack of America's finest, the folks who had literally helped us out of a hole said, "This is our lucky day."

Months of intense planning, preceded by years of fermentation and maturation, had led to the moment of truth when I looked to my right, got the final thumbs up from the co-pilot, checked over my shoulder to the dog settled in her perch on the rear platform. This was it. Ignition! The Great Beer Trek had begun.

From our origin in Scituate, Massachusetts we drove through downtown Boston, then north on Interstate 93, then north on 89. Then, north on 91. North, north, and north to the wilderness, to the sudsy frontier. We took the exit for Norwich, Vermont and Hanover, New Hampshire, then stopped at the first friendly place, a sprawling general store called Dan & Whit's.

Dan & Whit's is an institution in Norwich, Vermont. In 1978 it became the very first stop on the very first day of The Great Beer Trek. (Funny, I was there recently and there's no commemorative plaque.) This is a general store that rambles on forever, and where you might find something on the shelves that you thought had gone off the market ten years ago. May have, too, but it can still be on the shelves at Dan & Whit's where terms like "inventory turns" and "sales per square foot" are irrelevant.

They sell beer at Dan & Whit's, but they sell everything. Our stop had little to do with beer. We were lost.

"Lost" does not accurately describe our status. A year prior I had come into the possession of a little booklet called "Mountain Brew." Published somewhat clandestinely by Miller Pond Books of Strafford, Vermont (the town adjacent to both Tunbridge and Norwich), the book described the frothy misadventures of the brewing underground in the green hills of Vermont.

Homebrewing was illegal at this time, a felony offense. I had corresponded with the author of Mountain Brew several times, my queries answered with short, cautious responses on stationery that carried no specific address beyond "Thetford Center, Vermont" and no telephone number. After informing Mr. Matson about the purpose of The Great Beer Trek, I had received a vague invitation to visit, but no directions. I understood his wariness; wouldn't the Feds like to bust someone who was publishing information about how to "grow your own?"

Strafford, Vermont didn't sound like too intimidating a place. It would probably just be a matter of going into a general store and asking them to point us in the direction of the mountain brewer. The person behind the register at Dan & Whit's, however, looked at me crooked when I inquired about Tim Matson. She wanted to know was I looking for Strafford or South Strafford, and was I familiar with the back roads. Uh-h-h-h. Maybe this was not going to be as easy as I had thought. I walked back to the van, explained the situation to Laura, then took one of those long, stupid silences when you have absolutely no idea what to do next.

As I held a pose of ponderous stupefaction a man walked over, pointed to The Great Beer Trek signs we had on the sides of the vehicle, offered his hand and said, "I'm not sure why I came over the mountain this way today, but I figure you must be looking for me. I'm Tim Matson." Yes, this trek would be blessed!

Mountain Brew, all thirty-two pages of it, reads in its dedication "For all the drunks who didn't make it home." This was a book for lovable outlaws who live with danger. The mountain brewers endangered only themselves. (Please, don't lecture me on drunk driving now. Wait until the appropriate chapter.) The beer they brewed was, by today's standards, primitive. It wouldn't stand a chance in the competition at the Great American Beer Festival. The recipes relied exclusively on Blue Ribbon malt (the only brand available at a store like Dan & Whit's), sugar, Fleischmann's bread yeast, and whatever else was in the cupboard--raisins, honey, corn syrup, prunes, steakbones. But, it successfully got you "blissed," the relaxed state of spiritual harmony that is brought about by beer. It inspired great conversations and made good friends, a great social alternative to pot. Homebrew bubbled with life. It was real beer.

We followed Tim from Dan & Whit's to his home, a citadel on a hillside, built with his own hands. A warm, spring afternoon slipped by as we discussed important topics related to beer and philosophy. We didn't drink any homebrew that day, but his first of the season bubbled close-by in an earthenware pot. We were just a few weeks early.

When we bid our adieux, he directed us to a roadhouse, where we could experience the local style of beer drinking. It was a wild place, with flannel-shirted, bearded mountainfolk, old and young, dancin' and hollerin' to a boogie-woogie band. It was lotsa fun. That night as we set ourselves up to sleep underneath the Green Mountain stars, we knew the Beer Trek was off to a good start.

Many months later, when the Beer Trek was a mountain of notes waiting to be assembled into coherent thoughts, the most amazing thing happened. I was offered a job in Vermont, barely two mountain ranges over from where I had first met Tim Matson. The Gods of Beer were clearly at work. I took the job and moved north to dwell amongst the mountain brewers. It is in this North Country that I have matured (gotten old), raised my children, and mellowed like a barley wine.

I see Time from time to time. He still lives in the house he built. Over time he became more writer than brewer, taking on a variety of subjects that have as a common theme how Man, in a rural setting, can take control of His life. He has written about hearth light and pig tractors, building and gardening. His book, Earth Ponds, is a minor classic of country living. I see Tim from time to time. He's grey now (so am I). We're always cordial and enthusiastic to see each other. We always say we'll get together for a beer, but we never do. There's never enough time.

Tunbridge, Vermont is a town of green hills, dirt roads, and stooped backs. For such a tiny burgh it has several impressive claims to fame. It is the home to Fred Tuttle, a lifelong dairy farmer who became an unlikely film star in John O'Brien's independent film Man With a Plan. (Celebrity ensued for Fred, but ended at the state line. )

For most, Tunbridge is the site of the annual World's Fair. Held on the third weekend in September, this is the last gasp of summer in the first part of America to see it go. By Tunbridge Fair time Vermonters have already fired up the wood stove a time or two.

The World's Fair, like miles and beers, is another way to measure time. It is a stage, and all the men and women of the surrounding hillsides are players who strut and fret their minutes upon its tatty midway. Amidst a blurry backdrop of country music and rock 'n roll, French frys (the way Vermontahs spell it, don't you know?) and onion rings, puffing steam engines and the clicking of cloggers, slamming hammers and ringing gongs, clipclopping horses and twock-twocking helicopters, corn dogs and sausage rolls, the gentry pay their respects to summer, enjoying a respite of carefree bliss before a winter of enslavement to the almighty wood stove.

In the years I have been attending the fair, the event has changed as much as I have. The Fair was once known for its rowdiness. Motorcyclists, attracted by the sleaziness of the girlie shows, converged on the fair as an excuse for nightlong drinking where only the strong survived. Decent folk didn't go to the fair on Saturday nights. During the Reagan era the town fathers managed to dump the sleaze without sanitizing the event.

The Tunbridge Fair is a timepiece, just like a watch, but one whose interval is annual. You can watch the progression of your life by what feature of the fair interests you most. As a tyke, the kiddy rides are the biggest thrill. In prepubescence the livestock barns with their massive oxen and exotic lop-eared rabbits hold the greatest sway. As a pre-teen, junk food and the midway provide the perfect background for peer bonding. You might be tempted to ask that special someone to join you for a ride on the merry-go-round.

Full-fledged teens enjoy the scary rides, but the highlight is the demolition derby where you might even know some of the contestants. Next come the beer hall years. You drink because you can. The friendly gauze of beer enhances every feature of the Fair. The lure of the beer hall becomes less as you enter the years of entrenchment. You discover parts of the Fair that entirely escaped you as a callow youth. Up on the hill are displays of tools and tableaux from Vermont's past. The ancient Larkin Dancers dance a sprightly contra. You look above the midway crowds to the surrounding hills, still cloaked in green but with sharply focused flashes of color that tell the story of the death of summer. It's enough to make you go down to the beer hall.

The leaves may scream and die, but just as surely they will be re-born. You, too, complete the cycle when you bring your own offspring to the Fair and experience it through their eyes. Before you know it you will be warning them that if they go into the beer hall, they better arrange for a ride home.

The beer hall at the World's Fair is a spare, unadorned space beneath the grandstand, far from the flat, hard, e-z to clean surfaces of America. On a crowded night you stand in line for the beer hall just as you would for the most popular ride at Tomorrow Land. There, the similarity ends. (Actually, since it's probably about thirty-three degrees and drizzling, with no giant Mickeys or Goofys dancing about, there was never any similarity.) You are herded in and seated at picnic tables lined in long rows. You don't select your companions, fate does, but it works out. For a short while you down as many brews as you can, bantering boisterously with folks you'll never see again. Then you are herded out. Some people get back into the line to start the cycle anew.

The prize vegetables in Central Vermont are displayed in Floral Hall at the Tunbridge Fair. The prize heifers, and lambies, and piggie-wiggies are shown and judged. It follows naturally that a brewer worth his or her malt would want their creations displayed to the world at the fair. Not so fast. Beer is more than a beverage; it's a business. Money changes hands, and when that happens the government gets involved, people get greedy, and the spirit of community often falls prey to bare-knuckled competition. Big breweries that have access to markets try to maintain the status quo.

While everything about the Tunbridge World's Fair is exceptional, the beer is not. The choice of brews for years has been cold fizzy regular and cold fizzy light. Budweiser....Miller? Who cares? Bring on the beers. If Liz Trott and her partner Janice Moran have their way, the World's Fairs of the future will offer a selection of hand-crafted, flavor-bursting tonics that bring as much stimulation to the palate as does the midway to the remaining senses. Liz and Janice are two of the newest soldiers in the revolution that has taken place since The Great Beer Trek passed through central Vermont. That there would someday (and in our lifetimes) be a brewery in Tunbridge when we visited Tim Matson would have been beyond our most frothy dreams.

There are two businesses on Dickerman Brook Road that were inconceivable at the time of the original Trek. The first is the Vermont Organic Cow Company, a dairy that has made the commitment to produce milk without chemicals such as bovine growth hormones. When I was a lad we accepted anything that could enhance production as a technological step forward, never questioning consequences. People are too smart for that now. Time has made us smarter. We now know that milk isn't milk; there's real milk and the other milk. On this day the brightly painted boxes of the company's semis were mired in goo, and a stream had pushed its way right over the driveway. I laughed. Vermont was leaking from every pore. Vintage Mud Season! I was enroute to the second inconceivable business, the Jigger Hill Brewery.

The directions I had been given were typical for central Vermont: go about four miles north of the Fairgrounds, find an unmarked road, follow it until you're sure you're lost, and there you are. Mud Season, a six-week period when the frigid Vermont landscape turns to a flaccid gel, a mountainous chocolate pudding, had defeated my initial attempt to reach the brewery. One sinkhole was so bad, Liz told me later, it swallowed three loads of 1" stones.

Where do the stones go?

This was my second attempt, and I approached from the opposite direction. It was an outrageous April Saturday, the kind that leaves you sputtering for adjectives. Friday had been a curtain of grey. In the morning, slush fell from the sky. Later it turned to rain, but then, in time for the commute home, the precipitation became unidentifiable. It fell in fat pellets, making a fearful splat on the windshield. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and held on for dear life. This is not April. This is not Spring. This sucks.

Ah, but the following day--my Saturday--waxed soft, a semblance of spring. On the paved road approaching the Dickerman Brook turnoff nearly six inches of slush remained from grey, dismal Friday. I tried to guess why the road had not been plowed. Either the road crew figured the slush would quickly melt, their funds for snow removal were exhausted, or perhaps they despaired, having turned their attentions from snow to mud. I pictured them sitting around the dispatch office, disheartened and morose, needing the consolation of beer. But the despair of the previous day, viewed under sunlight, now became hilarious. The driving was still a mucky challenge, but isn't this what life is about? Isn't this why I lived in Vermont?

I took heart, feeling a spurt of the intrepid hormones that had fueled the original odyssey. Onward, fool! Onward Virtual and Virtuous Beer Trek of the New Millennium! Ain't no mud gonna stop me now.

The brewery is housed in a small barn beside a modest home. A small sign by the driveway identifies it. A hand-scrawled sign on the door admonishes "Don't let the cat out." The structure is utterly unremarkable except that this is 1997, and the same building that was housing a welding shop in 1978 is now a little brewery, in the middle of nowhere, run by two women. In 1978 there were no little breweries, they weren't anywhere and they weren't run by women. There were only forty-two breweries, and counting. The sole microbrewery was Fritz Maytag's Anchor Steam; there were no brewpubs (the word didn't even exist); homebrewing was illegal; and there hadn't been a new brewery start-up in years.

Today, however, the opportunity is in beer, not welding.

A revolution has occurred, and the beer drinker has apparently won. There are so many brewery start-ups that an accurate count seems impossible, but the 2000 mark will be reached soon. One can find good beer being made in the most Appalachian reaches of Vermont. Handcrafted beer can be found in convenience stores, for chrissakes. Is this more than a victory, perhaps a rout?

The original brewers were women, called "brewsters." By "original" I mean in the 1500s, when the human species commenced its climb out of the swamp called the Dark Ages towards what we now call modern civilization. Brewing was a domestic pursuit, ministered around the hearth and stored in the cellar. The beauty of beer has always been in its simplicity. Water, malt, hops, and yeast. Recite it as a mantra as you wash the bottles.

Liz Trott has the look of a woman who can deal with anything. One can tell instantly that she is intimidated neither by neither machines nor Budweiser. She came from the Flatlands (in her case Rhode Island) in the 1970s, attracted to Vermont as much by the good skiing as the promise of a more independent life. She settled into the hills around Tunbridge, earning a living as a ski instructor at nearby Suicide Six, and learning practical survival skills essential to life in rural Vermont. If something breaks, fix it or do without. Living in Vermont is great training for being a brewer.

Her partner Janice isn't involved in the brewery day-to-day, but uses the business as an antidote to her day job as a computer programmer. She likes the mindless ritual of routine work, such as putting labels on bottles. "It's the perfect counterbalance to the rest of my life," she says.

Liz held a series of jobs, but realized her future would not be in an office. On brewing day she wears baggy green pants, a leather belt that protrudes at least five extra inches beyond the loop, and a beeper that alerts her to when her services as a volunteer emergency medical technician are needed. The obligatory flannel shirt and logo ballcap complete the outfit, a statement in the triumph of function over form.

Liz is the first professional woman head brewer in Vermont, and the first brewer in the state to put out a bottle conditioned beer (meaning that the beer goes directly from the fermenter to the bottle without filtering. Bottle conditioned beer continues to ferment in the container, resulting in a liveliness that some beer drinkers find irresistible. The flavor bonus, however, can be at the expense of clarity, and results in an accumulation of yeasty sediment that is a natural part of beer, but one that the plastic surgeons of professional brewing have removed. "I wish I had the guts to do it," one of her fellow brewers in the state told her in reference to bottle conditioning. American beer drinkers have come a long way, but the majority still demand beer that is clear.)

She is training Michael Brown, a young buck with a shaved head (except for the braided pigtail off the back) and four piercings in each ear. (Wouldn't have seen the likes of him back in '78, either.) He will provide backup to the brewery's other assistant brewer, Walter Hastings. Liz is walking him through a minor maze of hoses, clamps, and dials. She shows him how to tinker with a valve to get the wort cooler to run at precisely 65 degrees. She teaches him how to use brewer's terms, like "trub" (the leftover solids from the brew kettle) instead of "stuff."

The process is a mixture of high and low tech. The wort (unfermented beer) is actually stirred by a wooden oar! There's not a computer to be seen. The environment is antiseptic, as it must be for brewing, but the process is less than rocket science. Keep the equipment clean, pay attention to your measurements, and the temperature. Keep simple, but meticulous records. You'll brew good beer.

The Jigger Hill Brewery has a four-barrel system built in Montreal by Pierre Rojotte. The entire brewery is housed in a 700 square foot former welding shop that is distinguishable only by where it is, and what goes on inside. The company makes five brews--Ox Pull Stout, Covered Bridge IPA, Telemark Mild, World's Fair Special (not approved for sale at the World's Fair at the time of my visit), and Sap Brew, a pleasant concoction that is not simply flavored with maple, but which is actually brewed with maple sap. Unlike so many other micros where more emphasis is given to graphics and catchy names, Liz and Janice do the creative work themselves.

The atmosphere in the brewery is not unlike a sugarhouse--warm, steamy, with a sweet smell. Liz, with her thick boots and black-turning-grey ponytail, could be a farmer's wife, but she's not. She's the only professional woman brewer in Vermont!

Are there any advantages or disadvantages to being a woman in what is still overwhelmingly a man's world of malt and hops? Not in Liz's mind. A brewer is a brewer is a brewster. Well, on second thought, there's a certain finesse that is part of brewing, and maybe that comes a little more naturally to a woman. She admits that women have a different approach to business than men, and watching her train Michael, I find her to be effective, with far less posturing than would occur between males.

But, more important than gender, is the fact that this is a small business, struggling to achieve a foothold in a rocky terrain that doesn't make things easy for newcomers. More important than issues of race, locale, or gender is whether or not you brew good beer. Liz tells me stories of her Yankee parsimoniousness. "The manufacturer says to use six ounces of yeast. That's just because they want to sell lots of yeast. I find it works just as well with three and a half ounces." This has the look of a business that will survive through sheer tenacity. This is a perfect keeper of the Mountain Brew flame.

There are now eighteen professional breweries in Vermont, a state with a population of only a half-million people. It's a land with no natural market, and yet it nourishes new business start-ups like no where else in the nation. On a whim, I ask Liz if she knows Tim Matson. "Oh yeah," she answers, "We brewed on the same mountain. I'm sure I've had a few of his brews. Can't say I remember much about them. Those days are a bit cloudy in my memory. Lot of cloudy days back then."

Ah-h-h-h, but for a Great Beer Trek they are as clear as the water from Liz Trott's well.

I hear from Liz several weeks after our meeting. The Tunbridge Fair has just approved her beer for sale at the Fair. Another sanctuary invaded by real beer! The Revolution continues.

Here's a story I tell my kids to make a point about time. They are sick of it, but they still don't get it. In the mid-eighties, we bought a VCR, the first in our little Vermont valley, for $1200. It was second hand. There was no local source of pre-recorded tapes, no video stores. We "scored" tapes from a friend-of-a-friend, a certifiable video fanatic who lived in Tampa, Florida. When our shipment of new tapes arrived, the word spread through the town, and everyone gathered at our house on Friday night to watch whatever had arrived.

Today, my sixteen year old son, staring vacantly at the screen, remote control discharging channels as fast as his thumb will allow gives me a blank stare that says "Shut up, Dad. I've heard this story a ba-zillion times." He doesn't understand that there was, not very long ago, a different video reality and unless you have been on the other side of the present reality, you don't know squat. He'll learn.

Time passes. Beer changes, and yet beer survives. To know a nation's beer is to know a nation. True then, true now. The new journey begins.