One Brewer's Story

Well we're in full summer swing down here at 690 brewing like madmen and bringing beer to the people. We're a pretty tight crew, we work together, drink together, we're the ones in the trenches taking grenades, so most people don't have a really good idea who we are or where we come from. We like it that way. Oh I suppose we can be cordial and social when pressed, but it's not easy to crack into our little brewer circle. This is why I've decided to use this forum to let you, the curious and the intrigued, get to know who we are. I haven't the time nor the energy to explain the story of each man today, that will happen eventually, so if I'm to divulge one guy's secrets to the world I feel I should start with my own.
My name is Jacob, I'm the short hairy guy of the bunch. I've been brewing here for about 35 dog years. I was born under a new moon in a camp of bedouin spice merchants, the small island of Boolanjari was swallowed by the sea that night. For the first eight years of my life I plodded through incense, camel dung, and sand until I befriended a merchant mariner who took me to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. In Sardinia I quickly got a job on a rocky farm milking goats, it was a good gig, I stayed on for two years. But I had bigger dreams, Sicily was a stone skip away and they had sheep. Oh how I dreamed of Sicily and milking those sheep. Well, as you may have guessed my boss had a little flat-bottom boat and eight months later I had widdled me some oars and high-tailed it outta off to Sicily. I was closing in on the age of eleven when I landed on those soft, sandy shores where the sheep udders hung heavy. "I've finally made it" I thought to myself "the top of the mountain". But life is funny sometimes, I just couldn't find a job, not one udder to milk. Well you know what they say, when life gives you dry udders, make vinegar. So that's what I did, it wasn't too bad really. So four years pass, I'm fourteen now and was actually getting paid with real money instead of rooster feathers. Well what's a fourteen year old kid with a few lira in his pocket gonna do? You guessed it, get a plane ticket and go to Sysketon North Dakota, USA. So there I was eating dust and drinking vinegar, when I heard a real cowboy singing by the roadside. It took me several moments to realize what he was singing about, this thing called beer. "What is this magical beast you name as beer?" I finally asked. "It dwells not in this soiled land, but only in a pure heart" was his slurred response. So I spent the next nine years searching for this moment of purity which is called beer. Then, while canoeing the outer shores of Lake Michigan, I happened upon a place, an odd kinda place, with a light on inside and voices spilling out. "Here" I thought to myself "is a place to get yak meat, a place where a man can get a sack of real sand for his pillow". What I didn't realize was this was a place where beer lived. I had finally found, beer. So I hid in the rafters every night for fourteen months, after a lifetime of wandering I had found the end of my search. I got a job shortly after, when the owners talked me down from their rafters. My job was to make and tame this magical beast called beer. So there ya go, that's my simple little tale. If it bored you I apologize, but next time you see me at the pub enjoying a beer, realize a moment of magic is happening, I'm drinking beer.