During that week of my ‘training’, I began to realize what was going to make this experience decidedly ‘Chilean’ rather than what I was used to in Michigan. For starters, Ernesto, the brewer for Szot and my trainer, speaks pretty much exactly as much English as I speak Spanish – namely, some random vocabulary only used in the present tense. Our conversations began and still continue to be a strange hybrid of Spanish and English, with me understanding his Spanish by repeating in English, and vice versa. I’m amazed at how well it works and we both get language practice in the process by learning from one another. If nothing else, it proves how easy communication can be between two people even when the verbal form is far from concrete beyond simple commands – the goal between both sides remains just learning and understanding. It only works with patience, which Ernesto and I seem to have a lot of.
The other employees at Szot are three women that quite professionally run the bottling line (an almost 100% manual four-head filler, for anyone interested) that Ernesto lovingly calls the ‘Chicas’ or, more lovingly, ‘Chicillas’. The Chicas speak no English and our lunch breaks together are interspersed with random questions about anything and everything as they offer me their delicious homemade tomato salads and a portion of their daily 1.5-liter bottle of peach juice. I have enormous respect for these women, as they are always great workers and are constantly in a good mood. I can hardly communicate with them, but their constant cheerfulness and great work ethic is contagious and certainly welcome as an outsider.
During my first day while cleaning the spent grain out of the lauder tun, I saw Ernesto run around the corner to yell at something trying to get through the front of the warehouse-style doors to eat the spent grain sitting in blue barrels. To my surprise it wasn’t a dog or person that he was yelling at, but a small white horse that comes to try to get some free food when it smells the cooked grain wafting through the air. Ernesto had some choice words for the pony that is an almost daily annoyance as he tried pushing it back through the large doors. Little does the pony know, barley is very hard for it to digest due to its acidity and thus pretty bad for it to eat. Nevertheless, as the days have gone by the pony still shows up at the same opportune moment, but with a new fence covering the front door to keep him out, he leaves a large pile of crap as an effectively simple “F-U” to us keeping him from his free lunch. He obviously hasn’t heard our axiom that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, but in his mind I’m sure he’s thinking, “there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get what I want”. He’s not very pleasant, to say the least.
I found it hilarious that a horse could be a pest like this, but this adds to the Chilean experience where there is a fine line between the ultra-modern and the working-class traditional. The rural area of San Bernardo and its dirt roads and many Galpónes (small warehouses) tends to be on the latter side of that line in contrast to urban Santiago just to the north, but it’s here where life seems to be more culturally interesting.
Case in point: the man we were saving the spent grain for from the over-zealous horse is a youthful old man named Don José that feeds his numerous chickens with it on his family-run ranch. “Don José is a very interesting man” is Ernesto’s enormous understatement for this rapid-speaking Chilean (even by Chilean standards) who is eager to tell a story and share his life, connecting it all with his overarching philosophy of life: live well and you will be well. Don José asked me straight-away what age I thought he was, to which I honestly replied ’60 or 65 at most’. Don José is 80. Don José’s father died a few years back, he tells me, at 104 years old after having twins at age 102 with a 22 year old woman. This, Don José insists, is because of the health of his family from eating off of their own land and from their own work – but never too much of either. Their longevity and, as Don José made abundantly clear, their (extreme) potency reflects this simple philosophy of healthy living. Don José went on to tell Ernesto and I that he was the personal driver for the decisive presidents Alessandri, Frei, and, most importantly, Salvador Allende of the 1960s through the early 70s. He also is a world champion dog trainer for the Chilean police force (Carabineros) as well as a horse trainer that has led him through every part of Chile, to every South American country, as well as most of Latin America. He has five children, all in the military or Carabineros, and something tells me he isn’t done (especially if he wants to beat his father’s record). I shoveled the spent grain into the plastic-lined trunk of his old Chevy car and he gave Ernesto a burlap sack full of unwashed, fresh-laid eggs as well as two emptied 2-liter bottles of Coke full of fresh peach and plumb pulp in exchange. He complimented me on my good work in contrast to what he heard that Gringos were all lazy and fat – using hand gestures to make this point abundantly clear. “Nada todo, pero alguna” (‘not all, but some’) was my nondefensive response in bad Spanish, to which he responded with a boisterous and infectious laugh.
The first book I read on the start of this trip was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel so rich in detail and characters so complex to the point of being mythical and/or magical (hence García Márquez’s style being deemed Magical Realism), that it won him a Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a coveted “one of the best books I have ever read” honor from me. I cannot help but make a parallel between Don José’s storytelling and a character from a García Márquez novel because no matter how hyperbolic or unrealistic Don José’s accounts may seem, it’s in the way he tells them that makes it seem realistic and, in turn, not really matter if they turn out to be fake. Because you can tell that they mean so much to him by the way he speaks of them and how they relate to his underlying philosophy, they have the same effect on the listener. That is why Ernesto’s characterization of Don José is so understated and why for me as an outsider he seems to be such an significant cultural figure that I was lucky enough to have met, even just for the five minutes we talked – it’s in the way a culture can produce a family and an individual as comprehensively interesting as him. Although Gabriel García Márquez is a Columbian and Don José (most proudly) a Chilean, there is a connection just under the surface that ties their lives as Latin American storytellers, and what makes them culturally distinct from us Norteamericanos that I can not help but be fascinated by. They by no means represent all of Latino culture (if such a thing exists), but as distinct figures they leave you with a dynamic impression of the importance of cultural difference among the seeming monotony of modernism.
The week after my vacation was Ernesto’s vacation, which left me at the helm of the brewing system. Kevin, the owner and an immigrant Californian who had married a Chilean, was there for most of the days assessing the earthquake damage for the insurance company to work out, but he remained mostly in the vicinity in case I didn’t remember what I had learned from Ernesto’s expertise. Day 1 was full of small mistakes ranging from temporarily breaking the grain mill to dropping part of the hose nozzle into the kettle, but by the end of the week I was fully confident and made almost zero mistakes making two batches each of their Negra Stout and Rubia Vapor Lager. Almost.
On Thursday, my last day of brewing for the week, while running the second to last cleaning cycle on the tanks (the CIP Acid cycle to break down the minerals left from Chile’s extremely hard water), a tiny drop of acid flung into my eye while pouring it from its container to the measuring cup -- a freak accident that you avoid by always wearing eye goggles (which I was unaware that they had any). It hurt like hell. I immediately flushed my eye out with the hose for quite a few minutes while the Chicas looked on in absolute worry. I finished the acid cycle on the tanks as well as the third cycle of sanitizer to finish out the day, but my eye remained a pretty enormous (and red) concern. I finished, told the Chicas that all was OK so they wouldn’t worry, took the bus and metro back home (a 45 minute to an hour daily commute), and came home to ask Molly’s expertise on my bright red, but not too painful at that point, eye. She of course wanted me to go to the hospital that is right by our place on Parque Bustamente. An intense flushing and cleaning by an Ophthalmologist, 2.5 days of wearing a patch over my eye, 2 prescriptions, and 3 appointments later, I’m back to normal as the acid had hit the white part of my eye – luckily unaffecting my vision. Had I done nothing, the Ophthalmologist said, I would have a lazy right eye because the acid would have kept corroding. Thank you, Molly. Lesson learned: always wear eye protection.
As this experience working in Chile doing my favorite type of work I’ve ever had in my life in brewing goes on, I realize that I’m getting much more of an experience than I could ever hope to fit in a couple lines on a résumé. Yes, I know that it will look great for a future employer or a banker for a start-up loan that I have this international experience under my belt. However, the brewing system is largely the same that I could find in the US or Europe, and the same steps are taken in Chile as in anywhere in the world to make beer – it’s a relatively simple, but enjoyable, process. What makes me excited for the weeks ahead working at Szot is not to just hone in on these ‘employable skills’ that I have gained or to make any kind of money, it is what else lies out there that can make my work an enjoyable part of my daily life. It’s in meeting Don José, working with Ernesto and the Chicas, and dealing with the horse that I will really take from this job that mean the most because I so enjoy what I’m doing and the surprises each day brings (even if it is a drop of acid in the eye – never again, though). Making beer is enjoyable work in itself no matter where I am, but it is nothing compared to what it offers as a daily experience working in Chile – and it is for this that I am extremely lucky and grateful.
