Why I'm not on a plane to China tonight

Tonight I was meant to be somewhere over the Pacific.

Instead I'm here, at home, writing this. The bag's packed, sitting on the end of the bed.

The trip is to China. To brew, and to run five tap takeovers in five different cities. Two weeks on the ground, my beer pouring in every one of them. Tonight was the night I flew out. Then the beer didn't make it.

Not the brewing. The shipping. The container is delayed, and it won't clear customs in time to reach all five cities while I'm there. Five takeovers work a lot better with beer that's turned up. Without it, I'm a bloke flying city to city, pointing at empty taps, telling stories.

So my distributor, the people kind enough to be flying me over, made the right call and pulled the flight. Pushed the whole thing back three weeks, so the beer can clear, get out to all five cities, and be sitting in the lines before I land. You don't fly the brewer in ahead of the beer. I'd have made the same call. It still stings a little, sitting here tonight with nowhere to be.

While I wait, let me tell you who gets on that plane in three weeks.

A brewer. Epic, if the name lands for you. Twenty years of it, coming on twenty-one.

A brewer who's won a cabinet's worth of medals and lost count. A brewer who helped turn this country onto hops, and I'll tell you that to your face, because I'm all about hops and everyone knows it. A brewer who flew halfway round the world to stand in the fields where the hops grow.

In Yakima I've sat down to dinner with the growers and their families. I know three generations of them. I've walked their rows, and I know exactly where my hops come from. Which side of the valley. What the soil's like, what the climate does to it, the trouble each season throws at the people who farm it. I've felt the weight of a hard harvest and the lift of a good one, at the same table as the family it lands on. I know why they'll pull a variety that's stopped earning its keep and plant one that's showing promise, because I've sat there while they talked it through.

That is what it means to know where your ingredients come from. Not a word on a label. A family whose name you know, on a hillside you've walked.

Where does this come from? Who grew it? How?

I never stopped asking it. Not about hops. Not about the malt. And somewhere along the way, not about the rest of it either. The everyday stuff the rest of us swallow without a second look.

That question is the whole reason this site exists. It's why I want to know which farm the eggs came from, and what's hiding in a bag of flour. The brewer who flies to China chasing the perfect bitterness is the same person who wants to know who grew your breakfast. Same instinct. Different aisle.

For now, the beer sits in a container, somewhere it shouldn't be. And I sit here, somewhere I shouldn't be either.

Three weeks. The taps will pour. I'll make the flight.

Same brewer. Same question. A bit more patience than I had this morning.