Brewing – Page 6 – A Good Beer Blog

What Does A Critique Of Beer Culture Look Like?

I’ve been thinking more and more about the framework of the beery discourse and what has gotten us to this point. Still no comprehensive US history of beer. Still we live with the very language of beer controlled by organizations with middle managers, accountants and committees. And a growing trend such that, like things polysynthetic, the task of learning and describing the state of good beer appears to include a lot of creative writing – as in creation of the thing purported to be the subject of study. Not sure these are good things. There are stands being taken. I keep coming back to a post Jeff wrote a few weeks ago called “I Feel A Veto Coming On” in which he announced his rejection of a certain sort of beer:

…I must institute a similar policy with any experimental beer using crazy ingredients. I’m going to start from the position that anything that might plausibly be sold as a candy bar, salad, or entree is not worth drinking.

See that? That’s a position being taken. And one that makes sense. If you think about it, if the experimental beer is based on the adding of “not beer” to “beer” it is clearly a distancing of itself from beer. A dilution. A covering up. A distraction. One need not inaugurate the Protz Shield and Papazian Cup to point out the weakness in a trend or a shape shifting of the market. So, I take up Jeff’s policy and ask you to consider doing the same thing. Maybe 2013 is the year we can put the focus back on the beeriness of beer.

Can You Make Wild Beer In A Vineous Mono-culture?

Like most things, Canadians are about half a decade behind so it is no surprise that a group of Ontario brewers have decided to take a kick at wild beer or that some in the Canadian media reacted to the invitation as if they had no idea what was going on in the wider world of good beer. Which is nothing against those directly involved. It’s a great idea. Hope it is yummy and not sold for twenty bucks a glass. Experiment on your own dime, brewers.

Wild indigenous wine yeasts are one of the current things. Like Citra hops. Craze that might be a fad. Here today and gone tomorrow. Yet the yeast is itself. From the photo up top from the Macleans magazine article, you can see the brewing is done in a vineyard, an agricultural monoculture. But is it a monoculture of yeast even if the plants are all clones? Apparently not. We learn that our mutual friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae is certainly on the grapes but only on about 1 in 1,000 berries. What else is in there? The beer will tell. Could be tasty. Hopefully.

PS: get a coolship, wouldja? Wild inoculation via narrow topped vessels might be less than optimum if the history of beer before a hundred or so years ago is anything to go by.

That Odd Tension: Wishing To Find Any Answer But Beer

That’s footnote 27 at page 134 of New Sweden in America which is exhibiting something between a quibble and a theme. It’s actually in a chapter in that book, “Lenape Maize Sales to the Swedish Colonists: Cultural Stability during the Early Colonial Period” by Marshall Joseph Becker in which there is a lot of very interesting stuff. For example, in 1654, there was an effort to expand trade products with the Lenape, the local nation, from mainly corn to hops as well. Like the colony, it was a flop but who knew the colonial Swedes were gathering hops in the mid-17th century Delaware. There’s more. In another document, the same Becker shows that New Sweden’s outpost at Tinicum Island had a brewhouse: warning pgf and elsewhere we read that

Swedish women in Delaware made beer not only from pompions (pumpkins) and corn but persimmons and watermelons.

So, with all that evidence that there was plenty of beer and brewing in colonial New Sweden during its existence from 1638 to 1660 why is there a suspicion that the brew kettle was being used for something other than producing beer? I haven’t cataloged it but, just like a Shakespeare play presented in Victorian accent, there seems to be a tension over time, in this case a presumption that beer was not as pervasive in northern western culture prior to a certain point in industrialization as we also seem to know it was. It may be that we don’t want to know or that we can’t take on just how much was drunk by how many. The more I read about these earlier points, however, the more I think I should be surprised to find a sober official, a dry town.

Was This The Earliest Brewing In English Canada?

Sneath, Pashley and Rubin all mention the 1600s brewers of New France – Hebert (1617), Ambroise (1646) and Talon (1670). But I just came across this reference in a footnote in the Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671-1674, published by Toronto’s Champlain Society in 1942, describing payments being made on 16 February 1674 for goods supplied to the ships of the Hudson Bay company:

John Raymond, “By Severall quantities of Ship Beere at 40s p. Tonn Strong beere at 12s, 9d a barrell & Harbor Beere at 6s 6d p. barrell with Malt & Hopps dd. Capt. Gillam, Morris and Cole”, £ 79.

A few months later, a committee of the Hudson Bay Company on 6 July 1674 directed payment to the same John Raymond £ 30 on account of “”Beer and Malt. dd. on board the Prince Rupert.” These items appear among a long list of payments for other necessary goods for taking aboard the ships Prince Rupert, Messenger and Employ. You will see in footnote 2 to this post on a blog by Norma Hall subtitled “Northern Arc: the Significance of Seafaring to Western Canadian History” that these three ships were sailing between England and Hudson Bay in the first half of the 1670s. The Prince Rupert and Messenger, at least, over wintered.

There are loads of interesting questions and observations from these passages from the Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671-1674 including why are they shipping malt and hops separate from barrels of beer. If these ships overwintered and carried malt and hops it is pretty obvious that they must have been brewing. We know the British brewed on ships in the Arctic in 1852 so why not in 1674? But also – what is “harbor beer”? It costs about half of “strong beer” and we know from Gate’s work on Kingston that in 1825 “small or ship beer” was being sold in Kingston. But most of all the question is this – was this the first brewing of beer in English Canada? Or did other earlier over wintering ships brew, too?

Is This The Gold Standard Of Brewery Tours?

I have been on a lot of brewery tours. In Halifax in the early 1980s it was a euphemism for college kids being locked into a room at the brewery and given all the beer they could down in a Friday afternoon hour. More recently, it’s the chance to hear craft brewers explain their processes. At one Japanese brewery, however, it’s now a chance to test out their equipment and your own ideas:

Soon they called our group, and we entered the brewing room. Our brewmaster sat us at a picnic table and brought us more beer. She asked us to taste all of their standard brews and choose one to use as a base for our own beer. We chose an amber ale and increased the alcohol content by adding more sugar, in the form of grain, for fermentation. We also increased the amount of hops added to bring up the bitterness and add more flavor. The whole process took about four hours and we did all the important things ourselves. We measured out the grain, milled it, threw it in a pot and boiled it. There were even tasks — as our brewmaster warned us — that, if done incorrectly, would allow bacteria to contaminate our beer.

I like this concept – even if the cost of $235 for a delivery of 15 litres of beer seems a bit much. But for all I know that might be the cost of a donut and coffee there, too. The brewery in question is no dud – the Kiuchi Brewery in central Ibaraki Prefecture is the maker of the Hitachino Nest line of craft beer imported into North America like this stout and this wit I had a few years back.

Could it happen here? I don’t know. There are likely 15,387 regulations between here and there but what a great way to reach out to your customers and to let them know how your business works.

Why Did A Brewer In Kingston In 1815 Want Rye?

kgazkbrh1 The ad is from page 4 of the Kingston Gazette, 6 January 1816. You can see at the bottom that it was placed on 15 December 1815. So many questions. What were Messrs Robinson and Gillespie up to? Why is rye placed between barley and hops in the large font while oats sit down there with the peas? Also, is “strong beer” something separate, something identifiable to the Kingstonian a year after the war with America? You will recall that a few months later in April, Albany strong beer is for sale. It also comes just a month after Richard Smith’s notice for plain “beer” – so was “strong beer” something they had the taste for still, almost 40 years after having to flee from their central NY homes at the beginning of the American Revolution? And why is it not “ale” when described in the Kingston papers?

I just finished The Lion, the Eagle and Upper Canada by Jane Errington, a historian over at Royal Military College – they of the old school base ball. The book is well reviewed here but, short form, it’s an interesting view of early Upper Canada (1790s to 1820s) based in large part by review of early newspapers. In it, Errington suggests something of a window between the end of the War of 1812 in 1815 and, a few years later, a clampdown in trade and other contacts with the US towards the end of the decade. But even with her level of detail about the community, trade and industry, there is not much about beer itself. Meaning I am left unsure if beer was being traded within months of the end of a war, perhaps as a stop gap until local product restarted… if it was interrupted by the war… which is another question.

So, I was very happy to read in the comments that Steve Gates has published his history of brewing in the city and in the region. I couldn’t get out of the door to go get a copy but will tomorrow. Hopefully it will shed some light on what Robinson and Gillespie were up to.

Where There Is Beer There Is Peace Revisited

When I was growing up, Ethiopia was one of those nations with the hallmark of being incessantly near collapse. Civil war unending. The famine. Now there is beer:

The Beemnet bar is one of those places in Addis Ababa which attracts Ethiopians of all ages. Increasingly locals are going here for breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks – a sign of the country’s increasing purchasing power. On Friday and Saturday nights, the terrace and bar is packed with people drinking beer and trying out their new dance moves before heading to a club after midnight. Beer is becoming increasingly popular among the growing Ethiopian middle class. In fact beer consumption in Ethiopia – Africa’s second-most populous country, is expected to grow by about 15 percent every year for the next five years. According to a report carried out last year by Access Capital, an Addis Ababa-based research group, this growth in consumption is very much in line with Ethiopian population levels and economic growth rates.

As in the Mid-east, in Sri Lanka and in the southern Sudan, this rise in beer production and consumption in Ethiopia is a hallmark of peace. Even as – or is it because – they seem to prefer the “jumbo” size glass.

A little oddly, the US Embassy did a study of the Ethiopian beer market in 1998 at the time the breweries were denationalized. It notes that it was the Czechs and Slovak Velvet Revolutionaries back in 1993 who created the Bedele brewery Heineken recently bought, outbidding Carlsberg. You can allegedly find the beer in Canada, a nation not known for its fondness of monkey gibbon… or lemur… well, it’s very likely a Coquerel Sifaka branded beer. [Update: unless the connection is about Zaboomafoo!]

So, How Was That Beer George Made Anyway?

Some buzz around the beer news that the Coney Island / Shmaltz Brewing Company is brewing up a recipe of George Washington’s beer for a charity gig… and a cheater version with roasted malts for those who might want to pretend. Here is the recipe entitled “To Make Small Beer” as set out by the Gothamist:

Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses (sic) into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask—leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working—Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.

The recipe is in the New York Public Library‘s collection and dates from 1757 – when George was still a Loyalist and a couple of years before Jeffery Amherst’s spruce beer from a couple of colonies to the north. Interestingly, each uses 3 gallons of molasses to thirty gallons of brew. The real difference is that George says hop to taste while Jeff boils seven pounds of spruce until the bark comes off. Neither look all that appealing. And I am not sure what George meant by the “Bran Hops.” Is the sentence supposed to be “Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste” or is there a missing punctuation mark so that it would read “full of Bran – Hops to taste”? Or were “bran hops” something that meant something to someone somewhere?

This report suggested that the Washington beer would work out at 11%… hardly small beer. And Amherst states that his beer can be bottled to keep “a great while.” I dunno. Were these desperate beers for desperate times? In a way, maybe they were the predecessors of commodity beer – a means to an end.

Mmm… What I Need Is A Big Bowl Of Thick Beer!

I knew this. I think I knew this anyway:

“This process is much like how you would do in a fourth-grade germination science project, where the grains would be soaked in water for about 24 hours, drained and then laid between sheets of cloth until they sprouted,” said Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student helping Armelagos with his research. After germination, the grains were dried and then milled into a flour used to make bread. Streptomyces bacteria most likely entered the beer-making process either during the storage or drying of the grain or when the bread dough was left to rise. Nubian brewers would take the dough and bake it until it developed a tough crust, but retained an almost raw center. The bread was broken into a vat containing tea made from the unmilled grains. The mixture was then fermented, turning it into beer. The final product didn’t look much like the pint of amber you sip at your local watering hole. “When we talk about this ancient Egyptian beer, we’re not talking about Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Armelagos said. “What we’re talking about is a kind of cereal gruel.”

I knew that. Not that bacteria stuff. No, not that. Forget all that medical properties stuff. Look at that word “gruel”! I think there was reference to the thickness of 1500s gruel beer back in Martyn’s Beer: The Story of The Pint which I am surprised to now read that I blogged about seven and a half years ago. There is stuff in Hornsey about beer as gruel as well. Boozy porridge. So, how is it when we are presented with these supposedly authentic ancient beers, well, they pours like water or least an IPA?

More to the point, don’t you want to try some breakfast gruel beer? Couldn’t we make it like it was enjoyed back then? Not the contemporary southern African version for 12 to 20 but the big vat whole dang community serving sized pot o’ Quaker Oats meets Budweiser. If we look again at “Village Kermis With Theater and Procession” by Pieter Bruegel the Younger (discussed in in 2007 in terms of the pub game in the lower left) we see in the lower center the making of a big mess of something being sucked back by the crowd, right across the street from the joint I’d guess was the tavern. Have a look at the painting Bruegel maybe ripped off and the detail is even better. I am not suggesting we need to get all deep about this stuff but does anyone do a village kermis with gruel booze anymore – other than, say, in rural Romanian where I am pretty sure I will never find myself? Would people folk to such a legitimate recreation as much as for another thinly veiled faux stab at brand buffing? Apparently the children’s games scholars are already at it.

What The Heck Was “Albany Ale” In 1847… Or 1807?

So I am nosing around looking for India pale ale references on Google news archives when I spot this one in a newspaper from 1847’s Newfoundland to something called Albany ale. In hogsheads no less.

What the heck is it? It is listed in the The Public Ledger of 12 Oct 1847 amongst other imported goods from around the world – even Gourock canvass from the Old Country. In 1853, there is notice again in The Public Ledger of Newfoundland as being “just arrived” in a 50 barrel lot. It looks like an import. Albany ale is listed in the Hartford Courant as far back as issues from 1806 and 1807. In 1846, its for sale in New Orleans and, in 1854, there was a fire at the agents of an Albany ale manufacturer in New York City according to The New York Times. It’s even a drink at a church supper in Adams County, Pennsylvania in 1850.

But what the heck is it? Is it a style? Or is it just an ale from Albany, NY? If so, why is that the pale ale that makes it all the way to Newfoundland?