The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings #2) - J. R. Ward Page 0,38

depending on which one you used to ferment your mash, the flavor of your bourbon could vary tremendously. Yes, ethanol was always a by-product of the metabolic process, but there were countless other compounds released as the sugars in the mash were consumed by the yeast. Call it alchemy, call it magic, call it the touch of angels; depending on what strain you used, your product could range from the good to the spectacular … to the downright epic.

The BBC had been using the same strains in its No. Fifteen, Family Reserve, Black Mountain, and Bradford I brands forever.

But sometimes change wasn’t a bad thing.

Back when his father had died, Mack had been working on new strains of yeast, peeling molds from nuts and bark and soils from all over the South, growing the precious organisms in this lab, and analyzing their DNA among other things. Isolating the proper species, he had then toyed with small-batch fermentations to test all kinds of end results.

There had been a protracted delay in the project when he’d taken on the Master Distiller’s job, but over the last three months, he’d had a breakthrough—finally, after all this time, he had become satisfied with one of the results.

As he looked at all the glass containers with their tinfoil tops, the Petri dishes, the samples, the microscopes and computers, he found it hard to imagine that such beauty could come out of so stark a place. Then again, it was kind of like an IVF lab, where human miracles got a little help from science.

Mack went over to the counter and stood in front of his baby, the one bottle with the first new strain that was going to be introduced into a Bradford bourbon fermentation process in two hundred years. It was that good, that special, yielding an unparalleled smoothness with absolutely no sulfur overtones to the taste. And no one else, no other maker of bourbon, had claimed it yet.

He was going to patent the stuff.

This was the other reason the BBC couldn’t fail now.

The damn company had to stay alive long enough to get this on the market.

His little yeast discovery was going to change everything.

“You need to eat.”

It was past five o’clock by the time the police left, and Lane’s first thought, as he walked into Easterly’s kitchen, was more that he needed a drink. Miss Aurora, however, had other ideas.

As she set her strong body in his path and her black eyes glared up at him, he regressed in an instant back to being five years old. And it was funny—she looked exactly the same as she always had, her hair braided tight to her head, her U of C red apron tied at the waist around her loose chef’s whites, her take charge attitude nothing to trifle with.

Given her illness, the immortality was an illusion, but at the moment, he clung to the fiction.

And when she routed him into the staff hallway, he didn’t fight her. Not because he was tired, although he was, and not because he wanted to eat anything, because he didn’t, but because he had never been able to deny her anything. She was a law of physics in the world, as undeniable as the gravity that had pulled him off that bridge.

It was hard to believe she was dying.

Unlike the formal family dining and breakfast rooms, the staff break room was nothing but white walls, a pine table that sat twelve, and a wooden floor. It did have a couple of windows that looked out over a dark corner of the garden, although those glass panes were more to preserve the symmetry of the mansion’s rear exterior than out of any concern for the viewing pleasure of the people who ate there.

“I’m not really hungry,” he said to her back as she left him to seat himself.

A minute later, the plate that landed in front of him had about two thousand calories of soul food on it. And as he breathed deep, he thought … huh. Miss Aurora might be right.

Lizzie sat down next to him with her own plate. “This looks amazing, Miss Aurora.”

His momma took her place at the head of the table. “There’s seconds on my stove.”

Fried chicken done in an iron skillet. Collard greens. Real corn bread. Hoppin’ John. Okra.

And what do you know. After the first bite, he was starving, and then there was a long period of silence as he hoovered forkloads of the food he’d been raised on