The Quiet Revolution in the Jar

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a jar breathing — the small wet click of an airlock)
Zymology. Fermentation. Controlled rot, performed on purpose, in the dark.

[Verse 1]
Nobody invented this. That's what I want to establish first.
It was happening in fruit on the ground before anybody watched,
and some ancestor of ours ate the fallen apples, and felt strange,
and came back the next day, deliberately, and that is civilisation.
Bread, beer, cheese, wine, yoghurt, vinegar, soy, chocolate, coffee —
all of it is something being eaten by something too small to see.

[Chorus]
The quiet revolution in the jar! Nobody's supervising!
You put the lid on and you WALK AWAY and it does the work!
Millions of them in there, eating the sugar, breathing out
the exact gas that makes the bread rise and the beer sing!
The quiet revolution in the jar. Unsupervised transformation.
Somebody studies this. Somebody named the yeasts.

[Verse 2]
And it took us until Pasteur to know what was doing it.
Ten thousand years of brewing before anybody knew it was ALIVE.
People made beer, reliably, industrially, at national scale,
by keeping a lucky stick and stirring the new batch with it,
which worked — genuinely worked — because the yeast lived in the stick.
The whole technology was a colony living on a piece of wood.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There are breweries in Belgium that don't pitch yeast at all.
They open the roof. They let the local air fall in.
And what lands is a specific microbial population that lives
in that valley, in that building, in those beams, and nowhere else,
and it cannot be moved, and it cannot be bought,
and that is why the beer tastes of a PLACE. It's the air's beer.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the airlock clicks, twice)
Leave it alone.
Just leave it alone. It knows what it's doing.