***

There was Southern, I learned, and there was Florida Cracker. It was more than a beer I’d seen on the shelves at Publix. One of the men I brew beer with is such a person. Seventh generation, he’s told me. He used to delight in calling me Yankee. He’d throw an extra twang on when he said it and usually end his sentence with a I’ll tell you what or Hoo, boy. Sometimes it was both.

We were brewing one day and we were going to grill out after. I had chicken gizzards and livers in my fridge at home. They’re cheap and I needed cheap. I went and got them. On the way back I picked up buttermilk from the store. In his kitchen, I fried the gizzards and livers like I’d heard talked about. Dredged in flour, dunked in buttermilk, dredged again. I fried them in the cast iron skillet he keeps for his Civil War reenactments.

Everyone ate. I waited. There was a smile on his face.

“You’re sure as shit a Saltine, boy,” he said, clapping me on the back and laughing. I raised an eyebrow.

“Not quite a Cracker, but close.”

***

Sometimes, I’m allowed to come up with the beer recipes for the brewery. As a writer, they all have something to do with words. My first was Writers Bock. My next one, in honor of the literature that I read the most of, is going to be called Southern Gothic. It’ll be a Black IPA. Strong, dark, and bitter, everything a beer that calls to mind Faulkner and O’Connor and the rest of the canon should be.

“I want something that evokes the South,” I told him while I worked on the recipe. The air conditioning was off in the brewery and it was August in Florida. I had to lean back so I didn’t sweat on the keys.

“I was thinking smoked barley, for a tobacco nose. And then sugar beets, maybe.”

He suggested cane syrup from a man in Northern Florida that grinds it all himself. The man had a name I immediately associated with the backwoods.

I nodded, told him it sounded good.

“I just want to evoke Southernness,” I said. “Which may be hard seeing as I’m not, you know, from here.”
He made a noise of dissent.

“You can do it, Saltine,” he said. “Being Southern is really only a state of mind.”

With that he nodded, used the back of his hand to wipe sweat off his forehead, and went back toward the brew kettle.

 

Sam Slaughter has had fiction and nonfiction published, most recently in places such as Fried Chicken and Coffee, Revolution John, The Southern Literary Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. He brews beer and teaches English in DeLand, FL.