History – Page 34 – A Good Beer Blog

Ontario: An Early Reference To The Kingston Brewery

The funny thing about Ontario is it started as a part of Quebec. Until the division of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, this was all the one unified colony that Britain took from France in the conquest of 1760. Settlers started moving in 1783 first from central New York in the first direct Loyalist wave, then over the rest of the decade from the eastern US seacoast as the losers of the Revolution filtered their way around up from New York, Nova Scotia and then down the St. Lawrence. An oblique reference in a land document for a Lieut. Mackay from 1794 gives an interesting hint as to the development of brewing here in Kingston, the commercial center of this new colony:

On May 27, 1794, a petition had been presented in Council on his behalf for “a Piece of Land about the usual Size of a Town Lot, situated on the West side of a Lot lately laid out for the Kingston Brewery, to be bounded on the North by the said Brewery on the East by a small run of Water, on the South by the Common, & on the West by the top Bank…”

The passage is from The Parish Register of Kingston Upper Canada 1785-1811, an online resource that also confirms that by 1797 it was managed by one John Darnley. That is it above shown on a map of my town from 1824. It is also shown on a map from 1865 and later additions are still there – as the 2003 photo at this post shows. There was earlier brewing in the colony but likely tied to taverns like Finkle’s in nearby Bath. Steve Gates, our comment leaver and author of the excellent book The Breweries of Kingston & The St. Lawrence Valley pegs the building of the brewery in 1793 by merchant John Forsyth but it is John’s brother Joseph who is more of the man about Kingston in the 1790s. But, as a garrison town and a depot supplying deep into the continent from the main colonial centre of Montreal, it is entirely likely that their Kingston business affairs overlapped repeatedly.

Creation of the brewery reflected some level of certainty after years of difficulty in ensuring the grain crops could supply the expanding colonial population. A 1796 letter noted in Preston’s Kingston Before The War of 1812 even speaks of the continuing infestation of Hessian Fly affecting the area. Building a brewery spoke to an expectation of peace.

“…107 Tons Of Beer And Six Tons Of Canary Wine…”

Later this summer, we are spending a few days in Baltimore. Looking forward to it in many ways including things beery… including brewing history. We know a bit about Baltimore and beer already. See, in the 1620s there was a brewery at the first Lord Baltimore’s colony at Ferryland, Newfoundland. And in their voyage of 1633-34, the Ark and Dove apparently carried 107 tons of beer and six tons of Canary wine to what would be the second Lord Baltimore’s colony at St. Mary’s City, Maryland. It would appear likely, then, that the pattern of settlement in the latter might include replication of provision seen in the former for that necessity for the community, brewing.

But can I find a list of the ships’ stores? Not a chance. There is a book The Flowering of the Maryland Palatinate from 1961 that appears to have a reference at page 15. There may even be a list of provisions in this article from the state’s historical society. But Lord Goog is either not so wicked or has not yet found a way to make a buck at displaying these full documents to me. Drag. You would think that lists of ship’s stores from early modern period trans-Atlantic sailing would be the hot item of the internets. The 1670s evidence is there for northern Canada. But Maryland? No. I blame Gen Y. I often do. I know it is easy but that’s why blaming them makes so much sense.

Book Review: Philadelphia Beer, Rich Wagner

3501 As recently discussed, the past is a foreign land when it comes to US beer history. More like another planet it seems sometimes. I am not sure why this is but I suspect it has something to do with the drive to be authoritative rather than innovative when it comes to so many of the beer books being published. Sadly, there is more than enough problematic high level description of various qualities out there but far too little of the more interesting and accurate detail.

Then one comes across a book like Philadelphia Beer by Rich Wagner – or rather just pages 17 to 34 – and all my despair falls away. Why? Because Mr. Wagner admitted and actually investigated a portion of that seemingly secret or perhaps oddly discomforting tale of pre-lager moderate to large scale ale production that not only existed but thrived in America from somewhere around the 1630s into the late 1800s. In those few pages, he identifies brewers and breweries by name, location, production and beer brands that existed not only before lager in the 1840s or so but he does the same for pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia, the city that becomes the first US capital. And in doing so, he adds credence to all that follows. I trust his writing on what comes later in the first German lager breweries, the later industrial macro-lager breweries and the craft breweries because of it.

Why have we found ourselves here? There may be a reason for this lack of collective long term memory. The introduction of lager roughly coincides with the expansion of the US from a coastal eastern nation built on a colonial footprint to the nation we know today, care of the Erie Canal and resolution of First Nation, French, Spanish and Russian control of large tracts of what are now the central and western states… and Florida. In a way, American ale was an Atlantic focused thing while lager is mid-western to Pacific. The path of lager, as Maureen Ogle so well describes, defines America as much as the wild west and California surfers so. It is in itself exceptional in all the meanings of that word. This burden of national history bears upon the topic. And it is in addition to the simple fact that a deeper longer view takes the sort of hard work that Wagner takes on himself and builds upon from the few earlier studies. Too often we only see what happens when one confuses facts as they were and the evidence that is available today.

Get yourself a copy of this book. Then, start thinking about how the structure of this small book, applied large, might change the way we see the extraordinary phenomenon that is American brewing. And might create a new tie between craft movement of recent decades and that small scale craftmanship of hundreds of years ago. And then maybe we’ll start seeing not only the similarities but maybe even the links. I had a Yuengling yesterday as it turns out.

Albany Ale: An Annotated Brewing Log From 1834

A bit of a question for you today. Above is a brewing log from just before the world of US brewing learned about lager. I won’t get into the details of whose log it is for now* as I am hoping you may be able to help draw out a few more details than I have. If you click on the image you will see my annotated notes. For the most part, I am clear on the numbers but would like to know more about the techniques involved. You will see that there are three beers made from a single mash but that the two stronger are recombined. That makes for what the brewer calls a double and a single beer. Here is what else I see:

♦ The double seems to have 104 barrels of liquor before the boil. A US barrel has 119 litres. So that is 12,376 litres.
♦ The 190 bushels of malt works out to 6460 lbs at 34 lbs a bushel of malt.
♦ The 220 lbs of hops would be local CNY Cluster hops
♦ The malt would also be local pale malt.
♦ This beer made 7 barrels of small ale and 60 barrels of double ale. I don’t understand how 68 and 36 barrels before boil makes 60 as a result. I ran the malt and liquor through a standard calculator and see the result is a 5.1% beer. But I am missing something. That much concentration should make a stronger beer. Or am I making an assumption.
♦ The notes on the opposing page for batch 140 say this is a Pale Stock NY ale. Also, it is noted that this is a particularly good batch.
♦ Unlike some other brews logged and also comments from the time, no salt is added.

Anyone handy with the abbreviations “HVG” and “HHG” at the tops of columns #10 and #12? I assume the G stands for gravity. Also, note that there are slightly different hand writing. The log is filled in over 9 or 10 days. So, the two numerals “6” in column #10 differ. Also, I am now thinking that the number in column #11 may actually be a “65” when I compare it to other numbers. That might make this a notation from degrees F rather than weight or quantity.

Anyway, all thoughts appreciated. This is part of a bigger project so I am hoping the power of the collective brain effect that the internets always promised will nudge us along. Let’s see.

*OK, it’s Vassar’s log.

American Brewing And The Pre-Lager Question

One of the odder things about the history of American brewing is the failure to get a handle on the extent to which pre-lager brewing existed before roughly 1840. Earlier this fourth of July, Jeff, who is pretty good with this stuff, described it in negative terms this way:

For centuries, it was an immigrant’s drink… Locals pretty much didn’t touch the stuff. In 1763, New England alone had 159 commercial distilleries, yet were only 132 breweries in the entire country in 1810. By 1830, the US had 14,000 distilleries, towns tolled a bell at 11 am and 4 pm marking “grog time,” and the per capita rate of consumption was nearly two bottles of liquor a week for every drinking-age adult. We only started drinking beer when another wave of immigrants, the Germans, brought it in the 1840s. Their lagered beer, in a time when no one understood the mechanism of yeast, was clean, tasty, and popular. We enjoyed a flowering of brewing in the following decades–German beer, brewed by immigrants. It was stubbed out by the great puritan experiment of Prohibition, which also says a lot about America.

Setting aside the question of who was a “local” in the pre-Revolutionary context – are we talking about Mohawks? – by any account, it is pretty clear that there was plenty of ales, beers and porters going around the US before the Revolution and even before that later lager revolution. Craig has mapped at least 18 identifiable pre-lager breweries in Albany, NY – one of the larger national brewing centres with a history there of beer that predates 1776 by about 150 years. Gregg Smith wrote an entire book entitled Beer in America: the Early Years – 1587-1840 which does not seem to get the attention it deserves. Heck, Ben Franklin himself welcomed Washington himself to Philadelphia in 1787 with a cask of dark beer.

As a Canadian, I am not sure why there is this national amnesia with our cousins to the south. Yes, there were certainly other drinks. I recommend highly the chapter on apples in Michael Pollen’s book The Botany of Desire which explains how apples were an important pioneer resource for milder cider, hard applejack as well as the sterilizing properties of alcohol. There was also a strong tradition especially at the frontier wherever it was found for home made fermentables and distilled booze. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s in western Pennsylvania is called that for a good reason. But there also seems, despite the available record of ale production, a need to link light lager introduced to America in the 1830s and ’40s as being somehow something of a more American brewing genesis – even though pale light lager was at the time an unwelcome immigrants’ beverage that led to its own share of troubles. We also forget how few Americans there were in the colonial and Revolutionary times and how little of the present US they had actually settled. Beer is always part and product of a larger and a peaceful sort of economy.

American beer history is 200 years older that some would say – and far more complexly interesting, too. Last night I got to annotate a brewer’s log for an 1833 pale ale that, with a little more research, could likely be drilled down to where the field where the malt was grown. With any luck, it will be made for sampling this fall. By a Canadian brewer with pre-Revolutionary connections I won’t get into now. With a bit more luck, more of these brewing account books and day logs will be found and the actual pre-lager history of the US can be described.

Albany Ale: Did The Hessian Fly Play A Role?

It has been a bit part of the puzzle for me. As I have mentioned before, Craig as taken more of an interest in Albany Ale as reflected in the 1800s industrial period where I am more interested in the pre-1800s experience. The weird thing has been that not only do the two eras reflect issues of scale but there is that back of the brain niggling question about how, prior to a certain point right around that date, they seem to shift from using wheat malt to barley malt as the base grain. I sense Craig may be less firm than me on this. He may think I am off on a tangent. Which might be right. I think I live at the tangent most days and I trust Craig’s opinion – especially as he actually works in the world of fact at the New York State Museum where I live in the world of rhetoric as a lawyer. But I persist and, pursuing that question, ordered a copy of The Dutch American Farm by D.S. Cohen to see if I could find anything that might help me. I think I might have.

To review, Albany is the capital of New York State. Craig lives there. One of the oldest cities in the US, it is an inland port that was settled by the Dutch in the first half of the 1600s as a fur trading centre. It sits where the Mohawk River, the eastern section of the Erie Canal, empties from west to east into the north to south running Hudson River, a couple of hours drive north of the city of New York, which itself sits at the mouth of the Hudson. As a Dutch settlement distant from other colonial settlements and, from the 1660 to the 1780, being culturally isolated from the British American experience around it, Albany took its own path for a significant period of time. Cohen states:

It is debatable, however, whether a colony in which the Dutch Reformed Church was the established church and the only religion that could be worshipped in public, in which there were large, tenanted patroonships and a company monopoly on the fur trade, and in which there was slavery, could be described as either tolerant or democratic.

As part of this singular colonial economy, Cohen describes the role wheat played in pre-1800s Albany and vicinity and includes that passage from mid-1700s traveler Swedish professor Peter Kalm that I posted earlier describing the malting of wheat as well as the volume of production. Wheat was a cash crop that was shipped south to New York city as early as 1680. Barley along with oats and rye were planted at no where near the volume of wheat. Yet wheat collapses as a Hudson Valley crop in the first half of the 1800s. In part this is due to the Hessian fly that was introduced to New York during the Revolution: “[t]he insect had apparently hitched a ride from Europe with some Hessian mercenaries employed as soldiers by the British, hence its name. First noticed in straw used at a military encampment on Long Island, the fly slowly extended its range, endangering the continent’s wheat fields for many years.”

So, there was change from pre-Revolutionary hinterland bubble of Dutch culture to post-Revolutionary national American project. And there was the transportation change from Albany as edge of Empire before the war to being just the left turn to the west after the building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s. But on top of that there was a pest that struck at wheat just as the records indicate that Albany brewers moved from making strong wheat beer in the old Dutch style to making barley based Albany Ale which was exported widely through the 1800s. Combined, all these factors explain the shift from one sort of beer to another. Which leads to the next problem of what each of them tasted like.

Oh, Look – Peter Gansevoort Needed Barley In 1798

After an intense amount of effort researching only the very finest digital archives, Craig (and not I) came across this sweet ad from 28 July 1798 from the Albany Gazette. He explains himself over at his blog how he was hot on the train of Edward A. Le Breton, Albany brewer in the first decade of the 1800s. This ad? Just something for me, for Al… Mr. 1600s and 1700s.

It’s interesting how we have separated our interests generally around the time of the fall of the Federalists. The time of the Federalists’ height of power in central New York frontier is set out in Alan Taylor’s excellent William Cooper’s Town. A failed dream of an American aristocracy to replace the Loyalist aristocracy that founded my town after the American Revolution, the Federalists are about to start on their decline soon after this advertisement appears in 1798. As we learn in 1969’s breakout best seller The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley, Peter Gansevoort would soon demolish the brewery in 1807 after a string of partners he had hoped would take over the operation run by his family for 150 years. He was a man with a new mansion. A Revolutionary war hero who now wanted income from rents, not the troubles of actually doing things.

But what does his ad tell us. He wants barley and not wheat. Only 45 years before, touring Swedish professor noted the local – and one might speculate – traditional Dutch use of wheat malt. Through the aftermath of the Revolution, central New York is flooded with first New Englanders and then other immigrants and suffers lose of its cultural isolation. The ad also asks for empties. Which quite the thing. Bottles indicate, you know, the use of bottles. Which indicates something other than bulk communal drinking from casks, doesn’t it. For me, it is an implication of that old theme of the strength of Albany’s brew.

But most interestingly are those six sorts of drinks on offer – three porters, table beer, ale and bottled ale. Clearly predates the ad man, the marketing guru. What is it that would distinguish an American porter from a London porter in the marketplace of Albany in July 1798? Were there the great great great great great great great great great grandfathers and similarly situated great uncles of beer tickers and style nerds arguing over the difference? We know so little about the tastes of those, in the big picture, so recently alive.

I Was Looking For The Moon Under Water Mug… Again

pewt1

So, you recall that I bought that rather swell Wedgewood 1940s sage green tankard? I seem to have caught a bit of a fever. And there is only one cure for that… a tankard you can play like a cowbell. For the record, here is the information which came with the online listing:

This quart mug which is of quart capacity, dates to around 1840, and is by the well known Birmingham makers Yates & Birch, whose mark is to the right hand side of the handle above “QUART”. There are three verification marks below the rim, two of which are a crowned VR over HB above H (Haslingden in Lancashire – see Marks and Marking of Weights and Measures of the British Isles – Ricketts & Douglas). ). There are two wrigglework cartouches to the front of the body which read “P. Pollard, Talbot Hotel” and “Old Talbot 1626”. The inscriptions suggest the mug was originally used in the Talbot Hotel, Oundle in Northamptonshire which was rebuilt in 1626, using stone and a staircase from the ruins of nearby Fotheringhay castle. Mary Queen of Scots was executed at the castle in 1587 which led to it being subsequently demolished by Mary Queen of Scots’ son and grandson. How the mug acquired verification marks for Haslingden in Lancashire remains a mystery. The mug is in good condition with general wear commensurate with age (see images) but no splits, holes or repairs, and would make a great display piece.

A mystery. Neato. Came in the mail today. Picked up at eBay, it ended up being $75 bucks all in for door to door delivery across the ocean. Best of all, it is a quart with plenty of interesting markings indicating that it was from this still functioning hotel in Northamptonshire from perhaps the 1840s. Definitely marked for the Victorian era. But it is old pewter so I may have to do a bit more research before I make it my primary drinking tankard. Never cared much for the look around the gills of any Victorians I have run across. But it does pose the prospect that a few more could be acquired with a good chance of having a thinking persons quart tankard drinking association. Extra points for showing up with one like this.

Book Review: But Are These Really Beer Books?

Beer books. I have read enough of them but they are not the whole extent of the books I read related to my interest in beer. One of the most interesting things for me about my interest in beer is how is it woven though the community and through time. On top up there is my recently acquired copy of 1969’s breakout best seller The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley. It does appear on Google books but not much of the text is available. Below that book us the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I am hoping each will be, in its way, a book about beer or at least a book that explains how we can think about beer.

First, the Gansevoorts. The most amazing thing about this family for our present purposes is that they gave up brewing in the early 1800s after the best part of two centuries of brewing… in North America. There is a lot to learn about the context of how brewing began and has continued for around 380 years in the capital city of New York state but the main thing to understand is that when the British finally took over the Dutch colony in 1674, it did not remove the population. In a way, it is like a mini-Quebec in that, through the Dongan Charterof 1686, the people of Albany were allowed a level of self-government that continued its Dutch political culture. In roads into that were only made after the French and Indian War of the later 1750s which led to the fall of New France. Interestingly, the indications I have seen of a indigenous strong Dutch wheat beer seem to fade along with that political culture replaced in the first decade of the 1800s with the ranges of small to XXXX ales more in line with the Yankees of neighbouring and expanding New England culture that lived on until swamped in turn by later German immigrants and the advent of large scale lager production. Earlier, under that cultural protection, the Gansevoorts can be traced back to the 1650s when a brewer had a daughter whose husband took up the brewing trade himself, passing the business on to their son, whose beer based position and wealth allowed his sons to prosper and lead the Revolution… and to run the brewery until it was demolished in 1807.

We have data. So much data. But it is out there in jangled family trees, in newspaper ads and in boxes on archive shelves which have remained unopened for years. How to find it all and how to put it into some order? I have an idea for an interactive timeline that effectively displays what otherwise could sit on a wiki like this. But I need help. Hence Tufte. I am thinking of his commentary on the 1869 graphically illustrated map of Napoleon’s doomed march into and out of Russia. Except it would be the Hudson River Valley and it would be about almost four centuries of of beer rather that one really poor military campaign. Something of a cross between that and the schematic diagram of the London Undergroundmight work. Maybe.

Beer books? Two wonderful books and each can tell me plenty about beer or about thinking about beer at least.

Now Twenty Years Since The Bosnian War Began

What a simple and strong tribute as reported on the BBC above. I have an odd three point connection to the Bosnian conflict as I lived in my former home of PEI when refugees were filtered through Canada’s smallest province to acclimatize them to a new home. In 1998, I played on a PEI soccer team with many Bosnians including one who had played first division football. And, years earlier, we were teaching in Poland when the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart in civil war. I saw TV twice in those months in late 1991. Once to see a soccer game and once to see the shelling of Dubrovnik. Also, in my former former home prior to PEI but after coming back from Poland in the mid-90s I met and even represented Canadian soldiers who were in the UN force that liberated Sarajevo with a proper vigor that the current Canadian government frankly seems to deny.

The stories from these three points in that decade combined giving me that sort of weighing awareness that made the news difficult to follow on one hand but saw me asking more. In the pre-pop-Internet world that meant maps and shortwave. Listening to the news fading in an out from Radio Belgrade, Croatian radio as well as B92 gave a sense. I remember when Arkan was killed a Bosnian friend inordinately connected came to my office to ask how that could have happened. I had to give him, a former Red Army soldier, a lesson on the SAS, vulnerability and other such things. He had no idea but told me much that taught me about the later NATO bombing of Serbia.

A red chair for each of the dead. Better than Yeats. Few signed up for a cause in the 90s.

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