He embarked on vast voyages to the great breweries of France and here he questioned everybody from the brewmaster in his studio to the lowest workman that cleaned out the vats. He journeyed to England and gave advice to those red-faced artists who made English porter and to the brewers of the divine ale of Bass and Burton. He trained his microscope on the must of a thousand beer vats to watch the yeast globules at their work of budding and making alcohol. Sometimes he discovered the same kind of miserable sub-visible beings that he had found in sick wines years before, and he told the brewers that if they would heat their beer, they would keep these invaders out; he assured them that then they would be able to ship their beer long distances, that then they would be able to brew the most incredibly marvelous of all beers! He begged money for his laboratory from brewers, explaining to them how they would be repaid a thousand fold, and with this money he turned his old laboratory at the Normal School into a small scientific brewery that glittered with handsome copper vats and burnished kettles. But in the midst of all this feverish work, alas, Pasteur grew sick of working on beer. He hated the taste of beer just as he loathed the smell of tobacco smoke; to his disgust he found that he would have to become a good beer-taster in order to become a great beer-scientist, to his dismay he discovered that there was much more to the art of brewing than simply keeping vicious invading microbes out of beer vats. He puckered his snub nose and buried his serious mustache in foamy mugs and guzzled determined draughts of the product of his pretty kettles--but he detested this beer, even good beer, in fact all beer. Bertin, the physics professor, his old friend, smacked his lips and laughed at him as he swallowed great gulps of beer that Pasteur had denounced as worthless. Even the young assistants snickered--but never to his face. Pasteur, most versatile of men, was after all not a god. He was an investigator and a marvelous missionary--but beer-loving is a gift that is born in a limited number of connoisseurs, just as the ear for telling good music from trash is born in some men! Pasteur did help the French beer industry. For that we have the testimony of the good brewers themselves. It is my duty to doubt, however, the claims of those idolizers of his who insist that he made French the equal of German beer. I do not deny this claim, but I beg that it be submitted to a commission, one of those solemn impartial international commissions, the kind of commission that Pasteur himself so often demanded to decide before all the world whether he or his detested opponents were in the right....