Sales sucks. It’s my job, and I love my job, but the irreducible truth is that sales is terrible. It’s a racket, a shit show, a rat race. People who intentionally endeavor to careers in sales are typically sociopaths at best, but it’s relatively few who ever saw their lives ending up this way, just as it’s the rare person on the meatpacking line who ever saw that particular vocation in their future, much less desired it. Sales has none of the quiet dignity of meatpacking. Sales is what sluices through the grated floor beneath the meatpacker’s rubber galoshes.

Beer sales is a slightly different (albeit closely related) story. Selling beer usually consists of “outside sales,” which is the type of sales that happens — get this — outside, and as a bit of business jargon indicates pretty well the capacity for creative and abstract thought endemic to the sales environment. While there’s an entire benighted underclass of “tel-sell” reps tasked with hawking beer by phone, most beer sales reps are indeed outside, where the proverbial action is. Beer is sold everywhere beer is consumed, and lots of place that it isn’t (or shouldn’t be). Beer reps go from place to place and account to account (liquor store, bottle shop, beer bar, restaurant, carryout, etc.) selling bottles, cans and kegs. It’s not that much different from selling knives or insurance or bibles, and the beer rep endures a lot of the same indignities inherent to any kind of outside sales job: suffering fools to live, mostly. And making them feel important.

The key difference between selling CutCo and, say, Sierra Nevada, is that many people already know, want and like Sierra Nevada. The beer rep has a natural leg up on many other vendors: lots of people love beer. Few people are so enthusiastic about cutlery. Beer sales jobs seem outwardly really fun, and they often are, which is why they’re pretty desirable, as far as that goes. But that popular impression masks the pitiless eternal drudgery that is at the heart of all sales.

Here’s why sales sucks: you can never win. Every incremental gain is a potential future failure; every day that you “absolutely crush it in the market” marks a day on the calendar a year hence when you may be compared to your past self and be found sorely, pathetically wanting. Every day in sales, Mucho Maas might say, is another defeat. Largely this is due to the fact that sales success is quantified Year Over Year (YOY), meaning the numbers you put up this year will be expected to show growth from the same arbitrary period last year. If you’re paid on growth (and lots of people are, eternal growth being the ideological god of late capitalism, determining much of our social existence, let alone the beer business), doing great right now only means your life will be that much harder later. Additionally, beer sales is a business of relationships, and relationships are slippery, tenuous, mercurial human things. The key to your awesome success in sales one week or month or quarter or whatever might be someone you worked with for years and considered a friend and man it was incredibly sad that he had a heart attack or walked in front of a bus but the YOY numbers do not tell that story and do not give a fuck about your human relationships, even though they depend largely on them. The YOY numbers exist on a plane where there is no weather, sex, illness or death, just an insatiable need for growth and your humanity, reduced and represented by a red or green number. It’s the worst part of beer sales.

Which brings me to one of the best parts: draught work. Draught work — the maintenance, troubleshooting, modification and sometimes even installation of draught beer dispensing systems and equipment — is a small though at times crucial complementary part of beer sales. It might be my favorite part. If sales is full of uncertainty, draught work is blessedly binary: the draught system either works, or it doesn’t. The beer pours clear or it pours foamy. It tastes clean or it tastes off. The solution to a problem in draught work is definite, knowable, and achievable. The successful pouring of draught beer does not depend on a consumer’s brand impressions, or a bar manager’s feelings toward a particular brewery. In the parlance of our times: draught systems don’t care about your feelings. Snowflake.

An unmitigated disaster.

Which is not to say that people don’t care about draught beer. It’s precisely because they do that beer distributors and bars spend lots of time and money on draught systems and getting them to work properly. People think of draught beer as special, and will still (sometimes) show up for special keg tappings, even at this desensitized late date. Pouring a keg of a limited or rare beer has a certain je ne sais quois that serving the same beer out of a bottle or can just doesn’t. Which is objectively pretty silly: a can of beer is essentially a miniaturized keg. But there’s something about beer from the tap that transcends the quotidian vessel from which it’s served. It’s a bit of practical magic: open this faucet, and beer comes out. How? Who the hell knows.

But of course, if you’re running a bar, you should know, and so, ideally, should your beer rep. The relationship of many bar owners to their draught systems is akin to that of many drivers to their cars: they just need them to work when expected, and their ignorance of the inner workings and mechanisms by which they function is reinforced by their incuriosity. This is most definitely the relationship I have with my car: I try to take good care of it, but I’d rather pay someone else to fix the alternator (or whatever). The difference between a car (mine, at least) and your average beer bar draught system is that the latter is both a sizable investment and an engine for profit. When it’s not working, or not working properly, you’re actively losing money. Part of what makes pouring draught beer such an attractive proposition for publicans are the awesome profit margins. Consider that from a $170 1/2 barrel of IPA (a fairly average price, these days), one can ideally pour ~120 $6 pints, netting a tidy $550 profit — a 76% margin. For this idealized equation to work, though, the beer has to be served correctly: no excess foaming, the correct amount of head, no off flavors. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times it takes some work.

Draught work is defined by a paradox, in that serving draught beer is pretty damn simple in principle, but there’s a lot that can go wrong. Draught beer falls under the general category of bulk beverage dispensing, which can encompass lots of things: soda, wine, milk, juice, cider, kombucha, etc. can all be poured from one large vessel as individual servings, saving on container waste and potentially increasing profitability. Regardless of what kind of bulk vessel is being used (from a keg to a serving tank to a plastic bag), some force is required to push the liquid from the container to the faucet, and that force is typically supplied by pressurized gas, usually a blend of nitrogen and CO2.

To pour beer correctly, a draught beer system must be in balance, and achieving that balance is the heart of draught work. The variable components of said balance are temperature, pressure and resistance: the temperature of the beer (as determined by the temperature of its environment: beer coolers should be at 38F), the applied pressure of the serving gas (this differs depending on draught system, gas blend, and style of beer), and the resistance of the serving system (the cumulative effect of distance, elevation, beer line diameter, faucet type, etc.). What I love about draught work is the certainty that if something’s fucked up, it’s (almost) always there in those variables — that or equipment failure. Or humans.

Neil Witte, Master Cicerone and glorified draught tech, teaches humans about the joys of draughtwork. Formerly of Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City, in 2016 Neil struck out on his own under the banner of Craft Quality Solutions, his own consulting business focused on providing training and knowledge in the area of “field quality.” Neil’s work sees him interacting with all three tiers of the American beer world, working with breweries, wholesalers and retailers to make sure they’re getting the most out of their draught efforts. “Most of my work now comes from retailers,” Neil says, “but I still do work in all tiers. I’d probably say brewers are the most invested in draught quality… there are so many brewers who don’t pay attention to the condition of their beer after it leaves the brewery. This isn’t a knock on distributors and retailers either. There are some really fantastic players in all tiers as there are bad ones.”

One of the unfortunate and seldom-acknowledged truths about the past decade-or-so of phenomenal growth in craft beer is that while there’s more good beer in the world than ever, there’s also more bad beer than ever before. And even a talented brewer or established brewery can put bad beer out in the market. Asked what he sees as the biggest impediments to draught beer quality in our industry, Neil doesn’t hesitate: “Line cleaning, out of code beer and system design; in that order.” Draught beer lines need to be cleaned regularly, generally every two weeks at a minimum, as the sugary solution filling them is the ideal growth medium for bacteria and yeast. Dirty draught lines can ruin the best beer in no time flat. Line cleaning, with specifically-designed caustic and acid chemicals, is perhaps the most important part of draught work. Some high-end and especially savvy beer bars will clean their own draught lines; most retain the services of either a beer distributor or professional draught service tech (like Neil). “[Some people] think that line cleaning is just a retailer’s responsibility or that it’s just a distributor’s responsibility. Brewers play a role too and it’s everyone’s responsibility to see that it’s done properly.”

The object of draught work is good beer, served properly, and it’s a pleasing if somewhat utopian notion that it exists as a kind of shared social responsibility among disparate parties. If a brewery produces a fantastic IPA, the distributor picks it up, keeps it cold, and delivers it fresh to a bar who then taps it on a dirty draught line, does the end consumer know (or care) where the breakdown happened? Likely not. And brewers, beer reps and bar owners who jump to assign blame are missing the point, in Neil’s estimation. “The bar manager should know how his or her draught system works and how to fix basic issues if they come up. They should know how to clean lines properly, even if it’s not his or her responsibility. He or she should know how to identify basic off-flavors that can be produced from poor storage/handling. A good beer rep will know these things too. I consider them essential, although my saying so doesn’t mean the average bar manager or beer rep knows them.”

The essence of draught work, as of man, has the form of a question: why isn’t it pouring right? Answering that question has been some of the most rewarding work of my beer career. Neil agrees: “I love troubleshooting systems,” he says. “The problem-solving part is fun to me.” I’ve found it peaceful, too, and weirdly soothing. In the quiet stillness of a walk-in cooler, insulated, literally, from the nebulous uncertainties of a sales day, the beleaguered beer rep can find a few moments of focus, if not solace, to carry with her back out into the market. But she should wash her hands first. Those coolers are gross.