STUDIES ON BREWING 189 



ture is not necessarily a good beer. Questions of taste 

 enter into the judgment of beer, that is to say, the least 

 scientific thing in the world, the most variable, and the 

 most difficult to grasp. This complex taste, to which 

 each brewery accustoms its patrons, depends at the 

 same time on the original material used, on the yeast,- 

 on the water employed in the brewing, and, in a much 

 greater measure than one would believe, on all the varied 

 processes of the manufacture. So that the problem 

 was not that of making a good beer, but of making 

 many good beers, differing each from the other, and re- 

 producing for each brewery the type to which its patrons 

 had become accustomed. 



Now, for this work of adaptation and detail Pasteur 

 lacked a very necessary qualification. He did not like 

 beer, and although, as the result of exercise and volition, 

 he finally succeeded in developing a taste for it and a 

 sufficiently trained palate, he remained insensible to 

 differences which the brewers extolled, and which he 

 was sometimes stupefied to see exquisitely appreciated 

 also by his friend, Bertin, who was his neighbor in the 

 Normal School, and who was frequently invited to the 

 laboratory for the tasting seances. At the joyous 

 railleries with which his friend sometimes plied him, 

 Pasteur was disconcerted, knowing that they were carry- 

 ing him into regions which he did not desire to enter, 

 and he might have renounced immediately this labor of 

 Sisyphus, if he had not had the imprudence to solicit 

 the pecuniary aid of a brewing school which was very 

 large and generous, but with which he had contracted 

 the moral obligation of succeeding in his enterprise. 



It is not simply a bad play on words to say that he 

 has never become master of his subject, because he has 

 never been possessed by it. There was no longer that 

 profound absorption in his work so evident in his study 



15 



