Medieval – Page 5 – A Good Beer Blog

Book Review: A History of Brewing in Holland 900 – 1900

I started reading my copy of A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900: Economy, Technology and the State by UBC professor Richard W. Unger, published in 2001. Careful readers will recall that I had ached after this book ever since I reviewed his 2004 publication Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but was a bit depressed about the sticker price of this one. Divine (or at least professorial) intervention, however, landed me the prize of a review copy.

I am only about 70 pages in – up to the 1400s – and am fascinated all over again by the precision and detail of the research yet also by how readable Unger makes understanding his work. So far, in a nutshell, he has taken medieval tax and shipping records and then traces how the semi-autonomous cities and towns within and neighbouring the Low Countries produced traded and consumed beer. He shows how Holland’s success in leveraging the new fangled hop that arrived from the south-eastern North Sea shipping trade in the 1300s led to the replacement of gruit as a flavouring in beer, triggered a shift in taxation and public regulation while expanding commerce through the ability of hops to stabilize the beer to allow it travel farther while maintaining its good condition. This portion of the book mirrors some of what was included more detail in his other book – for example, how taxes were based first on granting a monopoly to supplying an ingredient (ie counts farming to local towns the right to control the gruit trade) then on the production of beer (excise tax based on production provided more than 50% of Lieden’s revenue in the early 1400s) then on control of shipping of beer (through tolls, holding periods for trans-shipped casks and special import duties). The general information on the medieval economy is also interesting – like the fact that the Black Plague led to the marketplace for labour after it passed through as the survivors could decide what to do with their skills and thereby their lives.

I will add to this post as I move through the book but, again, I am struck how I would love to find a current text of this detailed quality in relation to the economics of English, American or any other region’s brewing but, other than Hornsey’s more scientific and encyclopedic A History of Beer and Brewing, know of none.

Book Review: A History of Beer and Brewing, Ian S. Hornsey

I have been working thought my review copy of this 632 page paperback published by the Royal Society of Chemistry for the best part of a month now. It is fascinating. Likely the best book on beer I have ever read. Clear, comprehensive and incredibly well-researched, this book contextualized beer and related beverages in the cultural and scientific world contemporary to any given era from pre-historic cave dwellers to the modern era and CAMRA. Yes, insert your joke of convenience now…

It is this latter aspect, the context, that really is a treat. As we learn how beer and brewing evolved, we also learn about about such things as potting techniques, movements of peoples across continents as well as how scientific advances such as in the Enlightenment came about. I had no idea that Ancient Egypt was pretty much a society on the bottle all of the time or that the Stuarts in the 1600s were the originators of much of the alcohol related law that still exists today – including taxing drinking as a mechanism for reducing drunkenness…outside of the Egyptian-esque Court of King James I, that is.

This is such an expansive work that it is really hard to write a review of this length. It has a certain scale others I have read do not. For example, Hornsey describes 15 different peoples between the Israelites and the Celts over almost 50 pages to trace the likely route of beer making from its birthplace in Egypt and Babylon to north-eastern Europe and Britain at the time of Christ. In addition to such anthropology, there is plenty of archaeobotany where the stuff in the pot found in the grave or the newly uncovered early medieval basement as well as review of primary documentary sources going back to the beginning of writing. Also, this is a peer-reviewed sort of scientific text which both adds to its trustworthy completeness compared to some of the recent pop histories on beer as well as to its practical status as a benchmark against which other histories are measured. For the casual reader, it should serve as either a dispute settler in itself or at least as a pointer, though its extensive bibliography, to most solutions to the questions that can arise between nerds.

I may think of more to add later as I get through the last third of the book but I can leave it here by saying this is the best history I have encountered to date.

Reason #17 As To Why We Need Sponsorships

This is what I am talking about. I would love to get a copy of this book but – wow! – one hundred and fifty-four clams. Don’t get me wrong. A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900: Economy, Technology and the State by Richard W. Unger (2001) would fit very nicely beside his next following text Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance reviewed back here with great gusto. In have a review request in to the publisher in Holland but am not holding my breath given that it is five years old. Yet access to this sort of research is vital to the workings of A Good Beer Blog.

So should you see an ad pop up sometime, this is why. Just saying.

Book Review: Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Finding this, for the beer nerd who also likes book with footnotes, is something of a moment, a wee glimpse of nirvana. The author, Richard W. Unger, is a professor of the history of the medieval period from the University of British Columbia who has also written texts about shipping and brewing from the perspective of pre-1800 Holland. Serious writing about a topic that deserves a serious approach.

What can I say about this? First, it cost me 75 bucks at the World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. Like any academic text with a short run and a limited market, it is not a cheap book. And, if you do not think you are going to find something interesting in the discussion of the effects of 15th century taxation policy on North Sea coastal trade, well, maybe this is not going to be the book for you. But if the idea of a seventeen and a half page bibliography of source material on medieval brewing – not to mention thirty-nine pages of endnotes – is your type of reading, well this is the book for your next holiday weekend.

Really, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is not so much about beer as the effect of the hop on trade in beer which caused the first industrial revolution in beer through the southern North Sea trade routes from roughly 1350 to 1550 – the second being triggered by the porter boom of roughly 1760 to 1840. The main concept is quite simple actually. Hops preserved beer. Once beer is preservable and can last more than a few days, long enough to be moved, then it will be moved and sold for a premium price as a luxury item. After it comes to be understood, it will then be copied as a local product which over time drives out the previous locally made unhopped ale. Later, it loses out to the next following luxury items as well as a general economic downturn both of which conspire to lowers its central role in the economy.

Unger traces the development of trade in beer largely with a focus on the Low Countries through analysis of tax records, municipal by-laws, guild creation, shipping records and other evidences of the huge role beer played in medieval society. He does so aware of the vastly different context in which beer is places in contemporary culture. This the first paragraph of the book’s preface illustrates that distinction neatly:

The mention of the history of beer always brings a laugh or at the very least a snicker. The histoty of beer for most people is not a serious topic of study. It seems to them frivolous and hardly worth more than a few diverting minutes of anyone’s time. Beer, after all, is a drink for leisure, for young people, generally men, and associated with sports and student life. That perception of beer is a case of historical myopia, of an inability of many people at the beginning of the twenty-first century to convince of a world different from their own. The prevailing presentism makes it difficult for many to comprehend a world where beer was a necessity, a part of everyday life, a drink for everyone of any age or status, a beverage for all times of the day from breakfast to dinner and into the evening.

Not to worry that you will not appreciate how this detailed focus on a relatively short period as Unger leads you into the medieval with a description of fermented drinks of preceeding periods and also carries on after the main discussion showing how innovations in the gin and wine trades as well as the tropical beverages of tea, coffee and cocoa replaced beer in may social settings and therefore in the economy.

I may add a bit to this later but suffice it to say if you enjoy a good read about the history of beer and have read more popular histories like Beer: The Story of the Pint or Man Walks into a Pub, I would say it is time to take on this more purely academic text.

Medieval Ale Drinking In London

An exhibit opens this week in London, England which provides evidence as to the drinking habits of the locals from around 1300 AD:

Experts have uncovered evidence that 12th century Londoners drank ale by the gallon, starting at breakfast time, due to poor quality drinking water. Exhibits at the Museum of London, including a selection of old Toby jugs, depict tubby men with beer bellies. London’s many drinking dens entertained ‘immoderate quaffing by fools’, according to a writer of the time.

Here is the website for the museum’s new exhibit. That would be an interesting place for a correspondent to visit. Any takers?