ture is not necessarily a good beer. Questions of taste
enter into the judgment of beer, that is to say, the least
scientific thing in the world, the most variable, and the
most difficult to grasp. This complex taste, to which
each brewery accustoms its patrons, depends at the
same time on the original material used, on the yeast,
on the water employed in the brewing, and, in a much
greater measure than one would believe, on all the varied
processes of the manufacture. So that the problem
was not that of making a good beer, but of making
many good beers, differing each from the other, and re-
producing for each brewery the type to which its patrons
had become accustomed

Now, for this work of adaptation and detail Pasteur
lacked a very necessary qualification. He did not like
beer, and although, as the result of exercise and volition,
he finally succeeded in developing a taste for it and a
sufficiently trained palate, he remained insensible to
differences which the brewers extolled, and which he
was sometimes stupefied to see exquisitely appreciated
also by his friend, Bertin, who was his neighbor in the
Normal School, and who was frequently invited to the
laboratory for the tasting séances. At the joyous
railleries with which his friend sometimes plied him,
Pasteur was disconcerted, knowing that they were carry-
ing him into regions which he did not desire to enter,
and he might have renounced immediately this labor of
Sisyphus, if he had not had the imprudence to solicit
the pecuniary aid of a brewing school which was very
large and generous, but with which he had contracted
the moral obligation of succeeding in his enterprise.

It is not simply a bad play on words to say that he
has never become master of his subject, because he has
never been possessed by it. There was no longer that
profound absorption in his work so evident in his study

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