What makes this a first "round" puzzle is that--as suggested by the clueing in the text such as "barely making ends meet," "wrapped around a twelve ounce bottle of Rolling Rock," "cut off," "tape," and "keep it around, but only reconstruct it"--the way to solve it is to print out the block of text, cut it into strips, tape the strips end to end, and wrap the whole thing around a twelve-ounce bottle of Rolling Rock.
When you do, one column of text contains the letters highlighted here in red, and another contains those in bold:
The answer is LABORATORY. The hidden bigram is KE.