Dimethyl Sulfide in Beer Land!

In those early days, when I first got to Saigon, the tap room, it seemed that it wasn't really a cohesive idea yet. They saw the business opportunity, got an investor on board, hired a chef and a brewer and figured the rest would come later. And it did.

Mai and Don quickly put together a great menu of both American and Vietnamese bar treats at the taproom. Hand made spring rolls and fried noodles paired well with the lighter brew offerings. Mai sourced the best chicken wings in Saigon. The locals prefer the whole wing and they were breaded with this amazing Viet shake and bake and then deep fried. You pretty much had to wash them down with the IPA.

Mike and I whipped that little brewery into shape as well. I worked really hard to dial in the details and to keep the chemistry on track. The boys were machines but from time to time, they would get thrown off course.

I remember one afternoon in particular. We were at the boil stage of the brew. The boys had eaten lunch and were lounging in the hammocks adjacent to the brewery. I had gone about 20 feet away in my bedroom to work on the computer.

Mai had given the boys a cell phone to use and I heard it ring. Then, I heard Tha answer, have a short conversation and hang up. I heard the boys moving around and then it was quiet. From time to time, she would ask them to harvest greens from the garden that would be used in the menu at the taproom. Or sometimes she needed them to inventory things and she would often just ask them directly, without involving me. It wasn't uncommon. What happened next, however was.

I heard a screeching sound. And it was loud and it was unhappy. What is going on? I thought and I ran out of my room to see what the commotion was. The boys had one of the pigs from the enclosure at the back of the property. It was huge and pink and squriming. They had it tied up on a table in the breezeway next to the brewery. Tha had a knife in his hand.

Oh, hell no, I thought. They are not going to butcher this pig while we are in the middle of a brew. I tried to tell them to stop. “Stop! Stop!” I yelled. They motioned to me and laughed. I ran to my office to get my phone. Was I going to use the translator? or the camera? I had no idea. I ran back into the breezeway. By now, the boys were at the point of no return. I opened the camera just in time to record Tha slashing the hogs throat.

Let me take a moment to elaborate here. In Vietnam, this is a huge treat. My boys all grew up on farms in rural areas and there weren't grocery stores or malls. While Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian, most are not. If you wanted pork, this was how you got it. Tha knew what he was doing. It was obvious that they had done this before and he used a conscious technique. He slit the pigs throat and then stuck the knife in to puncture the heart. It seemed very humane and I was hungry.

What wasn't cool about these events though, is that they were happening twenty feet from our boiling brew kettle and I'm a published microbiologist. Butchered carcasses are about as germy as things can get. I wasn't against them butchering a hog in front of me, it's that we needed to have waited until the beer was knocked out and the brew day was finished for those activities to begin.

Mai had called them and said they needed pork for the taproom. She asked them to get it done so they immediately hopped up out of their hammock as did. There's that work ethic. After the excitement had died down, I took two of the boys to finish the brew with me and left the other two to finish with the butchering.