This is another book from Brewers Publications that bridges the worlds of brewers and drinkers. As with Stan’s excellent For The Love of Hops, the book provides context, history, categorizations, practical application of the topic in brewing and plenty of evidence of sheer enthusiasm. That being said, a few initial quibbles:
⇒ The advent of pale malt did not occur in the late 1600s as suggested at page 15. Coke is used to dry malt first in 1642 and straw dried malt goes back well before that, probably as a folk skill unrelated to commercial enterprise or estate management. Makes sense. After all, grain-drying was known in the medieval centuries as a means to preserve a damp crop and preference for better beer was known to the hipsters of the 14th century.
⇒ Beer on English ships goes further back than described at page 19. It was present on board Elizabeth’s navy during the second half of the 1500s. Here is the wooden tankard from Henry VIII’s Mary Rose from the 1540s. Unlikely beer on ships was key to the instigation of 1700s beer exports from Britian.
⇒ The trade in beer by ship described around the same point predates the suggested time frame by centuries and was not created by England. Unger shows how Wismar of the Hanseatic League – in what is now Germany located on the Baltic coast east of Denmark – barred the import of beer by sea in 1356.¹ What creates the opportunity for the Burton beer trade to Russia as much as anything in the latter end of the 1600s for England is the usurpation of Dutch dominance of Baltic shipping.²
Let’s be clear. There are nothing wrong with the facts were they just characterized as a little less conclusive but rather more part of a pattern in a larger flow. And the choices made are done so in support of the narrative. And to create that narrative levels of abstractions are used by necessity to achieve a consistent voice. So, these are quibbles only but they are ones that get noticed if you are looking for this sort of thing. And the audience is not meant to be looking for this sort of thing, is it.
Worth noting is how the book’s introduction is an amazing “who’s who” of folk thinking about beer these days, most of them thinking intelligently. I found the statement that Martyn and Ron had fact checked the material in the book odd as it, at first, gave me that sinking feeling that we were facing authority by reputation. As we know, like the Gospels, Michael Jackson can be cited for any proposition that might be wanted to be made in relation to good beer these days. I would hate for such a fate to be extended to others. But – and note I did say “at first” two sentences back – we are blessed with a bibliography that includes each of their writings as well as, blessings fall upon the head of Mitch Steele, actual footnotes. These give you the ability to see whose work was relied upon for each sentence in certain sections allowing you to judge accordingly as well as provide the reader with the tools to undertake some follow up reading.
Much of what is written above focuses on a limited portion of the history of IPA as described by Steele and should give you a sense of the engagement with his topic he offers the reader. Unlike this review, the book spends most of its time discussing variants of IPA across time and continents up to and including gag-reflex tickling evolutionary dead end of White IPA: “…effectively a blend of the Belgian Wit and the American IPA.” I would have liked to see a discussion of IPA as brand in which anything hoppy can have the “IP” slapped on as a prefix and, voila, a style is born. I would have also liked to see a bit more of a discussion on how IPA as we know it now is a bit of revisionist concept a bit decontextualized from its relatives pale ale and the variants.³ But this is an enthusiast’s text, not a critical study. Nor should it be.
Bottom line? Another excellent volume that should satisfy the intermediate and experience beer nerd. It should also be mandatory bedside reading for any brewer or aspiring brewer.
¹See: Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, (Fenn, 2006) at page 73.
²See Peltries or Plantations, (John Hopjins Press, 1969) at pages 63 to 71; see also Holland on the Hudson, (Cornell, 1986) at page 209.
³For a similarly structured book that accomplishes this better if in less detail, see Pale Ale by Terry Foster from 1990, from the same publisher’s, Brewers Publications, earlier generation of style guides.
[Original comments…]
Stan Hieronymus – February 26, 2013 10:15 PM
http://www.appellationbeer.com/blog
Should also be required for anybody writing the “history” of IPA for the back of a label (or a brewpub menu).
Alan – February 26, 2013 10:30 PM
Yes! That is a good point. Maybe, as with Cicerones and beer waitering, we need to create a masters course in beer-label-ology.
Jeff Alworth – February 27, 2013 12:34 AM
http://beervana.blogspot.com/
That pale malt thing isn’t so bad, methinks. There were “wind malts” and apparently the Egyptians sun-dried their malt, too. (An unchecked fact I toss out.) But I think we can sometimes let technical accuracy obscure meaning. Coke was a big deal, and improved techniques allowed for lighter malts that people were really using. It was a big enough deal that what we think of as pale ales weren’t really getting made until those techniques came along.
I’m ready to be skewered for this–corrected–but it seems we’ve gotten a bit pedantic about it.
Alan – February 27, 2013 7:54 AM
Actually, if I were to be a pedant on something it would not be over pale malt. There is nothing I have read that tells me coke radically increased the percentage of pale malt so much as it was part of the revolution of scale, centralized production and maybe even preserved it given the shift in fuel sources away from bio-mass. It certainly did not represent the invention of pale malt.
See, I understand access to coal and coke were technically limited in the 1600s generally as its there were no steam pumps yet – meaning it was all surface mining and controlled by landowners at a scale that did not yet allow for wide ranging export. These were just not as common fuels as they would become in the 1700s. Combine that with the brewing and malting still also awaiting urbanization, centralization and production at scale and you have not a matter of a technique not yet coming along but industrialized brewing as we know it not yet coming along.
So, when we have descriptions of how to make pale malts in household guides like the one I cite, we have to remember there are just not the other scales of manufacture occurring in the 1500s and early 1600s. We have to obey the chronology in that respect.
Jeff Alworth – February 27, 2013 7:14 PM
http://beervana.blogspot.com/
The word “obey” makes me disobey. I’ve always been that way. Therefore, I reject the thesis and declare Mitch’s history kosher!
Alan – February 27, 2013 7:29 PM
Give me another 57 or 98 minutes. I have another 1,500 words on pressures related to coke in the late 1500s.
Can’t help you with your obedience issues. Just remember the line from electricity interconnection agreement negotiations: you have to obey the electrons.
Mitch Steele – March 30, 2013 5:29 PM
Thank you for the very thoughtful review. As you mentioned, I tried very hard to make sure my facts were correct before going to editing and publishing, and I appreciate your perspective.
Regarding Pale Malt, I found some references to sun and wind dried malt, but I really think the industrial revolution, and the growing influence of using coke as fuel drove the “widespread” growth of pale malt, so that was my focus. Certainly pale malt was brewed with before, but on a pretty limited basis, maybe?
I remember Alastair Hook at Meantime told me a story about a very hoppy, pale beer brewed many hundreds of years before the “advent” of English Pale Ale, in Europe. I looked hard to find an official reference to that beer, and came away empty handed, unfortunately!
I love learning more about brewing history, and I thank you for the points you’ve made here!
Alan – March 30, 2013 5:38 PM
Hey Mitch! Thanks for popping by.
My suspicion is that pale malt made with coke mirrored the industrialization of brewing. Prior to industrialization, folks were making the stuff and brewing the simplest beers and ales there were but there is no evidence that there was a lack of the taking of pride in good quality work – it’s just that it is cottage production or home production rather than commercial production at a scale. So, when you look at the outfitting of ships in the 1600s, as in the Hudson Bay in the 1670s or, oddly, the Hudson River in the 1670s the process of beer making is both simple and pale is valued.
And if this is a process of beer brewed for a group of people known to the brewer and there is a chance and to make it less fouled by smoke, well, the person who knows how to do that is going to be given the task.
None of this makes you wrong or me clever. I just think we have yet to establish the implications of the transfer of brewing from the household / cottage scale to the early industrial one.