By John Mattingly Behold a field of ripe brew barley: Its long, bearded grain heads swaying hypnotically in a gentle breeze … we think of the yeoman farmer who planted and tended it to maturity where it ended up as beer that became a can or two that led to a teenage driving death, a domestic beating, a robbery, a sloppy incoherence or a dung-faced expression. Behold a field of wheat: Golden in the setting sun … we again think of the Jeffersonian farmer out there, the one Thomas called the “incorruptible peasant,” who nurtured the staff of life that ...
