The Cold Chain

Why your best work is judged after you stop touching itThe one-star review arrives at 11pm. It says the beer tastes like a skunk that lost a fight with a wet cardboard box. The brewer reads it twice. He knows this beer. He knows its gravity, its pH, its dissolved oxygen at packaging, the exact hour the hops went in. That beer left his building in a state approaching grace. What he does not know, because nobody tells him, is that the pallet spent nine days on an unshaded dock in Phoenix in August, then three weeks in a fridge that was really a display case with a light in it. By the time it reached the reviewer, it was not his beer anymore. It was a chemistry experiment with his logo on it. He still gets the one star. That is the part worth understanding. The physics of being ruined by someone elseBeer has three natural predators and none of them work at the brewery. Light is the fastest. Ultraviolet radiation hits riboflavin, which cheerfully passes the energy along to hop compounds,…