Page 15 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"I'm fine." He isn't fine. His eyes are watering and his voice comes out wrecked, half laugh and half genuine gasp for air. "A pinecone. Got mad at you."

"It's descriptive."

"It's insane. It's the single most insane tasting note I've heard in eleven years of doing this professionally." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, still catching his breath, and there's color high on his cheeks that the coughing alone doesn't explain. "Say it again."

"No."

"Say it again."

"It tastes like a pinecone got mad at you and took it out on my whole mouth. There. Are you satisfied?"

He isn't laughing anymore, not exactly, but something in his face has gone loose and unguarded in a way I've only caught glimpses of before, usually right before he catches himself and puts it away again.

"One more," he says, still recovering, and pushes the fourth glass toward me, the cloudy orange one that's been sitting there since he set the flight down, looking less like beer and more like something you'd pour over ice on a hot afternoon. "Wheat ale. Go easy this time. My heart can't take another pinecone."

I lift it slower, cautious now, and the smell hits first, soft and citrusy with something underneath that reminds me of a bakery early in the morning before anyone's turned the lights on. The taste follows a second later, bright and a little bit fizzy, with orange peel and something almost like bread dough.

"This one's friendly."

"Nobody's ever called one of my beers friendly before."

"Well, this one wants to be your buddy. The other one wanted to fight me in a parking lot."

"I'm never going to be able to unhear that description of an IPA."

"You're welcome."

This time he doesn't put it away fast enough, and Gunny, wiping down the bar three feet to my left, has clearly been watching the whole thing with the patience of a man waiting for exactly this.

"Well now." Gunny sets his rag down like the moment deserves his full attention. "I have worked for this man for six years. Six years, and I have never once seen him spray beer across his own bar."

"That's an exaggeration."

"You soaked the register tape. I watched it happen, and you lost whatever dignity you had left the second she said pinecone." Gunny leans both elbows on the bar, grinning at me like we're conspirators now, which apparently we are. "You know what this is, don't you? This right here. This is a man who's whipped."

"Gunny."

"Whipped. Fully, thoroughly, no chance of parole." He raises his voice slightly, pitching it toward the two regulars at the end of the bar who've clearly been enjoying the show. "Y'all seeing this? Rafe Montgomery, choking on his own beer over a hop joke."

"I have survived things you can't imagine," Rafe says, to nobody in particular, to the ceiling, to whatever god handles complaints from men being teased in their own taproom. "Combat. Deployment. Actual gunfire. None of it prepared me for this."

"Nothing does." Gunny pats the bar with obvious satisfaction and goes back to his rag, humming something that might be a wedding march, which earns him a look from Rafe that would probably stop traffic anywhere else in the building and does absolutely nothing to Gunny at all.

I decide the kindest thing I can do is change the subject before Rafe combusts entirely, and I ask the first thing that comes to mind, the flyer I noticed taped to the office window this morning with a pumpkin clip art border that looked like it survived several decades of use.

"What's Oktoberfest actually look like around here? The flyer made it seem like a big deal."

The relief on Rafe's face at the subject change is immediate and total, right up until the actual subject sets in and something closer to dread replaces it.

"It's the biggest weekend of the year. Whole town shuts down Main Street, we run the beer garden, there's a stage, food trucks, a pie contest that gets genuinely vicious. We do three times our normal volume in two days." He pulls a battered clipboard off a hook behind the bar, already flipping through pages dense with his own handwriting, checklists inside checklists. "Volunteer schedule's a mess. Tent company still hasn't confirmed the second tent. I need six more kegs than I budgeted for because Dot's convinced this year's crowd will be bigger, and Dot is never wrong about crowd size, which means I'm already behind."

"That sounds like a lot for one man with a clipboard."

"It's a lot for three men with clipboards, and I've only got the one, since Gunny's clipboard skills are theoretical at best."

"I have excellent clipboard skills. I simply choose not to use them."

Rafe's phone buzzes against the bar before he can respond to that, and he glances at the screen, mutters something about the tent company under his breath, and lets it go to voicemail without picking up, which tells me more about the state of his patience than anything on the actual clipboard does. He keeps moving down his list, muttering half of it out loud: decorations and banners, the string lights that need testing before they go up over Main Street, a stage that needs building, a schedule of bands that keeps shifting because one of them plays weddings on the side and weddings don't care about anybody's Oktoberfest deadline.