08-04-2009

Lets imagine, if you will, a scenario. Imagine you wake up for work, like always; shower, dress, eat... It's a normal day. You ride your bike to work, it's a beautiful morning and you are ready to do your job because after 30 years, your training and experience has allowed you to do your job PERFECTLY.

You walk into your work place and notice that it smells different. The kind of "different" that you can't get used to. You almost feel sick so you head to the restroom but it's no longer there. It's just a wall where a bathroom used to be. Then you start to notice that the entire place is off, just slightly different than you remembered it to be yesterday.

You find your office. It's been rearranged, organized differently, illogically. You can't find any of your files on your computer because the file names have been changed. You walk into the hall to find that you are not the only one who's head is about to explode from confusion. A panic sets in.

Walking outside to clear your head from the smell and chaos, you notice that their are others, from neighboring businesses, confused and panicking. Your boss calls you over and explains that you, as well as everyone else in the city, need to be retrained and as fast as possible.

What businesses can afford this sort of loss in efficiency? Especially in this economy. Imagine who much money would be lost, how many businesses might have to shut down. Scary don't you think?

Well, this could happen in Portland if all of a sudden the water supply were to change chemically by filtration. The "confused worker" is the workhorse of the brewing process: yeast. Those "businesses" are the breweries who have trained their yeast to work as efficiently as possible in "workplace" the live in.

All of the great beer being brewed in Portland is 95% water. Would you gamble, unnecessarily, with over 30 years of brewing culture, a culture that is the life-blood of this town, to hunt down a microbe that hasn't been found in the water supply to begin with at the cost of almost $400 million dollars? What if the same "hunting" could be done using UV, at a quarter of the price? I read that it can.