The Lager Queen of Minnesota

by J. Ryan Stradal

Edith was only sixty-four years old, but if she died right then, she would’ve felt the most important things a Minnesotan, woman or man, can feel at the end of their lives. She’d done what she could, and she was of use. She helped. But life wasn’t done with her yet, and before long she’d come to regard everything that happened before July 5, 2003, like it was all just a pleasant song in an elevator. When the music stopped, the doors opened, and the light first fell in, it was in the form of her boss, a man she liked, running down the hallway at work, smiling, shouting her name, and waving a piece of newspaper in the air like a

Less than two weeks after making the list in Twin City Talker, after she’d believed it had all blown over, Edith was now making at least four pies for every shift she worked. But it had indeed brought nice things, too. People were visiting in numbers they never had before. The five o’clock dinner at St. Anthony-Waterside had been transformed from a quiet but well-lit thirty-five minutes into a boisterous social event, the kind where people of all ages lingered around tables hours after the sun set and the kitchen closed.

This was beer, the drink that her father craved at the end of a hot day. This is what her mother claimed would make Helen careless with her modesty and desires, and end up like a few local girls who’d been quietly removed from school. This was the stuff that her teetotaling Swedish grandfather claimed that one drop of, just one, would send her to hell. So, like any sensible person, she was intrigued.

Her mom carefully selected her memories to reflect her established opinions, and it turned her mind into a bowl of lettuce she believed was a salad.

Her grief was a forest with no trails, and she couldn’t guess how long her heart would walk through it, as her body walked other places. For half a century, she had seen or spoken with this man almost every day, so his life didn’t end when he died; it found its way into cereal aisles and intersections and post office lines and conversations she didn’t intend. When people asked, How are you?, sometimes, for a while, she’d say, Well, I miss him, and leave it at that.

For starters, had doctors or medicine forced him to live longer, he would’ve despised what the world around him became, because, among other things, he hated chain stores, pharmaceuticals, and bankers. He claimed to have spent one hour in 1948 trying to think like a banker and he said it was the closest he’d come to suicide. To him, a farm wasn’t a thumbtack on a wall map or a spot on a supply chain. Some years, shit just happens, and bankers don’t like it when shit happens, but they never cared to understand why it did, and why sometimes it had to. If he had more patience with people who had no patience, he might have died a richer man, but instead he died an uncompromised one, one of the last Helen knew.

Orval was more than brand equity and real estate and a respected, friendly man who could open doors in the man’s world of brewing. He wanted what she wanted, and the moments when he helped enable their shared dreams is when she felt, finally, the kind of love everyone on the radio sang about.

Frank Schabert had given her the important-sounding job title “cellar master,” but she was mostly still a glorified janitor, lugging around kegs, pushing mops and brooms, and lifting fat white bags of malt all day. Frank didn’t talk to her much, and neither did his humorless wife, Anna, but the two young dudes, Mo and Matt, were nice and did the grunt work right alongside her most of the time, instead of just ordering her to do everything. Now, much more often, she came home exhausted, but it was a ripe, enlivening physical exhaustion, hatched from productive effort. And even better, she was making money.

Over the next two days, they got Diana’s beer in every place she told the story, which ended up being nine bars, two restaurants, and a family-owned liquor store. It was like she was waving a magic wand. People were intrigued by some facet of the tale, whether it was Frank catching a kid stealing from his garage and turning her into a brewer, a nineteen-year-old girl creating an extremely good Midwest IPA, and/or the amount of work it took Diana to create it while helping support her grandma.

How could she have many friends when there were so few people like her? How could she consider a building and an industry full of people who wanted something from her as ideal places to make meaningful emotional connections? She’d lost count of the amount of times she walked into a room only to hear the abashed mumbles and see the flushed faces of a topic being abruptly changed. These are the people she was supposed to personally confide in?

She’d just put a price on her entire life, and even if she begged right now for the exchange to be reversed, they’d never do it. There was absolutely no confusion over who got the more valued asset. There never was, and that’s without Helen being sentimental, because she wasn’t. She had to sell while the place still had value to someone else, while her husband’s last name was still worth buying. — For Helen Calder Blotz, that was the end of Blotz Brewery.