All my boddhisatvas appear on the streets of Staré Město.
We were on Dlouhá, close to Lokál, and Jonas was just waking up from his afternoon nap; I was wet from the rainstorm that had just passed. I was pushing his carriage towards a couple of errands and then home when I saw a friend from the Prague beer scene ahead of us on the sidewalk.
“How are things?” he asked, smiling.
“Good but busy,” I said. “I started brewing.”
“How much?” he asked.
I did some quick math. “Zero point twenty-two hectoliters.”
“And what kind of beer?”
“Well, the first batch was a saison, because it was 29 degrees in the apartment last week.”
“Perfect.”
“Yeah, it smells like black pepper. Tastes great. And today Jonas and I are going to brew a wit.”
“A wit sounds good right about now.”
“I’m looking forward to it. Do you know there’s going to be a new pub here, called the Prague Beer Museum, with something like 30 Czech craft beers on draft?”
“Where, around the corner somewhere?”
“No, right there on Dlouhá. There,” I said, pointing across the street. “Where the Tom Tom Bar used to be.”
“So something like Zlý Časy?”
“Yeah, only here in the center.”
“Great news. Oh, and before I forget,” he said, “today we’re brewing the Grodziskie.”
“Wow. Where’d you get the…”
“Yeast?”
“No, the malt.”
“We’re using smoked malt from Weyermann. But the yeast we got direct from Grodzisk.”
“So, in about a month?”
“Yes,” he smiled. “In about a month.”
And with that my boddhisatva said goodbye, shaking my hand and touching Jonas’s cheek before striding deeper into Old Town. And as we pushed off down Dlouhá towards our errands, and then home, both of us were grinning.
