Katie Kirgan asked a customer at Draught Works brewery on a recent Tuesday evening if she wanted a piece of paper with 12 spaces for words, a spelling sheet for that evening’s adult spelling bee.

“Do I have to go onstage?” the woman asked.

“Not unless you do well!” Kirgan said.

Kirgan, a volunteer grader for the evening’s competition, wasn’t sure how difficult the words were going to be, but she knew “drought” would be one of them. Paul Marshall, co-owner of Draught Works, wanted to throw that one in there since it’s draught with an O.

Two enthusiastic announcers sat at a table next to the stage. Torrance Coburn wore a tan jacket, maroon button-up and tie. Rich Buley wore a white wig and a bright purple graduation gown. Coburn kept things running, reminding participants not to cheat and that the bee would start at 6 p.m.

Coburn would say the word, give a definition and use it in a sentence.

“You might want to quiet down so you can hear,” Coburn told the crowd.

And then it was 6 p.m. The first round was open to anyone to participate.

First word, “doubt.”

“Is it doubts or doubt?” a lady asked.

Second word, drought.

“That doesn’t look right,” the same lady said. “I have doubt!”

Draught Works held its first adult spelling bee in 2019. Following two Covid years, Marshall wasn’t sure what the turn out would be this time. “People were rowdy,” he said later.

Jeff Grant, co-owner with Marshall, said Draught Works does a lot of off-the-wall events. The brewery doesn’t do a weekly trivia night common at other bars, he said, but it hosts an adult spelling bee to semi-align with the Scripps National Bee that happens in the spring.

The idea was that it would be something quirky and fun, which for Draught Works, turned out to be a hit, Grant said.

The third word bumped up the difficulty level to “pasteurize.”

Next word, “alopecia.” A hair loss disease.

Dichotomous. Archetypical.

Lindsey Wallace attempts a word at Draught Works’ adult spelling bee while announcers Rich Buley and Torrance Coburn track her progress at a table offstage. (Keely Larson photo)
Lindsey Wallace attempts a word at Draught Works’ adult spelling bee while announcers Rich Buley and Torrance Coburn track her progress at a table offstage. (Keely Larson photo)
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“Oh fuck,” someone said.

“Chauffeur.” A collective, exasperated sigh fluttered through the room. Those damn French words.

“Kinesiology.” People’s faces turned into surprised frowns.

“Imbroglio.” The room went silent as Coburn defined imbroglio. “Is it an E?” someone asked.

“Impuissance.” Lacking in strength.

“Hurry up! I gotta pee!” a guy said.

“Abecedarian.” Someone learning their letters.

“SAY IT AGAIN!” shouted a table in the center of the room.

“A…b…c…” the woman with doubts started writing her attempt. “It’s like librarian…”

“How do you spell abecedarian?” the guy who had to pee asked a bartender.

“I don’t fucking know,” he replied.

The last word of the open round was “coulomb,” a standard unit of electricity. The brewery was silent, except for the clinking of beer glasses.

A bartender moved through the room, collecting empty glasses and stacking them to a precarious height. Spelling bee volunteers collected people’s papers, and Kirgan started grading to determine who would compete on stage. The beer line lengthened. Everyone who tried got a free beer.

Kathy Schneider was trying to recall all the words and save them in a note on her iPhone. The words got harder as they went on, but she felt pretty good about nine or 10 out of 12. Schneider’s table included three other women who drank cocktail-inspired seltzers and ate a boat of French fries.

“We’re ridiculously competitive,” Schneider said.

Schneider wanted to get up on that stage. “I remember the words I got wrong,” she said of past childhood spelling bees. “I got “bouquet” wrong.”

Only a dozen or so made it onstage. The spellers thinned out as misspelled words were spoken into the mike. Heads tilted upward, searching the ceiling for answers, wondering if the word they were given was in fact a real world.

The final three included Lindsey Wallace, dressed in a blazer that she just happened to wear to work, not as a power move for the bee. She told the crowd her childhood spelling saga.

In the fourth grade at Sequoya Elementary in Scottsdale, Arizona, Wallace beat a fifth grader in the school bee and went to regionals. At regionals, she got out on the third round. The announcer pronounced “amplitude” like “emplitude.” After she got the word wrong, her mom reassured her that another mom was also mad about the pronunciation.

Wallace felt like she made up for her youthful error by making it to the final three at Draught Works. After her wistful story, the crowd was in Wallace’s corner.

Wallace asked for all the time savers—definitions, repeats of the word, etymology and use in a sentence. The final three spellers went back and forth for multiple rounds.

“I can’t take it!” Nicko Lannan, creative manager at Draught Works, said at a table in the crowd.

Lannan felt Wallace’s pain of missing amplitude in the fourth grade. When she was 12, she went to a county-wide spelling bee. “I was pretty proud of myself,” she said. “I beat the whole school, all the eighth graders and stuff, to go to county and then I missed on the easiest word ever.”

“Tennis.”

A guy in a flannel and a bureau-inspired hat missed his word, and then it was Wallace’s turn. It was her and one man standing. “We might have to declare a tie,” Coburn said. “We’re running out of words!”

Wallace stepped up to the mike. She took her time spelling and searched the ceiling for answers.

“WRONG!” Buley, in his purple gown, shouted. The crowd sighed in commiseration with Wallace’s defeat.

Michael Arnone, her competitor, won the adult bee with “gesundheit.”

“Bless you!” Arnone said in response to Coburn’s reveal of the final word.

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