Science – Page 5 – A Good Beer Blog

Book Review: Alcohol and its Role in…, Ian Hornsey

That is Alcohol and its Role in the Evolution of Human Society by Ian S. Hornsey. I had no idea. In a work of beer writing that is still trying to find its way, seeking to evolve from fanboy gushing or trade focused boosterism or underdeveloped efforts at business journalism, Hornsey’s 2004 book A History of Beer and Brewing stands where few others do as a successful description of the broad scope beer and western society. So, it was a gigglefest when I put his name in the the hands of Lord Good to find out that there was this 2012 publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry exactly one credit card charge and international cross-Atlantic postal service away from me. Joy.

The index alone is enough to make you faint. The Taxonomy and Genetics of the Common Oat are described at pages 273 to 277. The Drunken Monkey hypothesis is described over five pages in the 540s. Interesting to note that, like the stylings of beer, I learn from page 164 that wheat classifications too have suffered from excessive splitting. And now, on page 223 to 224 I have a description of eight classes of sake. Excellent.

This is not really a review. It’s more like a plea for understanding. If you care about beer and don’t have the works of Horsey – and Unger for that matter – by your Laz-e-boy in the basement, you have a treats unimaginable awaiting. It may be a matter of $300 to have four or five of these sorts of books delivered but they form a strong shield against the woop and warp of propositions that may be posed these buffeting times. And they are a great natural source of footnotes.

Who Is Afraid Of Facts On Beer Bottles?

Interesting if light-ish article from the publication The Drinks Business on the question of labeling beer with their caloric content:

According to public health minister Anna Soubry, officials have been in talks with the drinks industry about the possible inclusion of calorie content on labels. Ministers are hoping that displaying the calorie content in beers, wines and spirits could encourage those who are watching their weight to drink less. Most manufacturers already include information on units of alcohol on labels in a voluntary agreement with the Government. A recent study by the Drink Aware Trust has linked the large amount of calories in alcoholic drinks to people being overweight and obese.

Makes perfect sense to me. Every box of crackers in the cupboard tells me how many calories are in a handful already. I can look up the calories in meats and other ingredients because they are fairly standard measure as these things go. But a beer is not a beer is not a beer. Who knows what people are sticking in there and what it means over the long term? Some of the big bombs out there might as well be mugs of piping hot icing and should be handled with great care. And the drive to have more proper sessionable low alcohol beers might get a kick if the truth about stronger stuff were wildly known. Makes sense.

And why stop there? One thing that drives me a bit nutty are abstract standards like the UK’s absolutely silly use of “units” as a measure of alcoholic strength. What we need on a bottle is the actual ml of pure alcohol. A 500 ml can of 7% of semi-DIPA has 35 ml. Two of these innocent pals are well within the ball park of a 750 ml corked top bottle of that swell 10% beer but far less, err, red flaggy. Is it too much to ask for a universal standard based on a standard that is basically universal?

Is there pressure to keep this sort of information away from the beer buying public? Or do you actually just not want to know. Are they, like price, things of no interest to the… umm… passionate?

Friday Bullets For Your Labour Day Weekend

You better be meditating on the benefits we all share from the labour union movement this weekend. “Sure, I’ll take the day off but don’t you dare think for a minute that I like unions.” I can hear you. You hypocritical holidaying ingrates. Me, I will be singing “The International” and all my Billy Bragg 45s and calling everyone I meet comrade or maybe even Leonid.

⇒ WATCH OUT! SPACE JUNK!!!

⇒ Glad that’s cleared up. Italians are now “ethnics” under the rural overlords world view. Next, Scots and Irish and soon New Brunswickers.

⇒ Ernie Eves busts out against those Ontario Tea Party Tory bastards: “I don’t think it was fair and I don’t think it was loyal and I don’t think it was compassionate and I don’t think it’s honest.” Crime: voting for someone. Now, that’s a Tory: anti-democratic and proud of it.

⇒ I have no idea how sad it must be to be a Blue Jays fan. I mean, it’s like they think the team doesn’t suck. See, being a Leafs fan, I know they suck.

⇒ Do we now feel a twinge of guilt for reveling in Conrad’s fall? I will give him this – there is no one else reporting honestly on the state of the back end of the justice system like he is.

Ahh… long weekend. I needed it. I earned it. Really did. Didn’t I. I didn’t? Who says?

So – When Was Lager Invented… Discovered… Evolved?

This is either just a bit weird or I have completely missed something. Apparently some scientists have been looking to find the yeast strain that started lager… and they think they have found it:

When the team brought the yeast to a lab at the University of Colorado and analyzed its genome, they discovered that it was 99.5% identical to the non-ale portion of the S. pastorianus genome, suggesting it was indeed lager yeast’s long-lost ancestor. “The DNA evidence is strong,” said Gavin Sherlock, a geneticist at Stanford University who has studied lager yeast but was not involved in this study. But Sherlock wondered how S. eubayanus could have traveled the nearly 8,000 miles from Argentina to Germany. “We all know that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” he said. “Lager was invented in the 1400s. It’s not really clear how that progenitor would have gotten from South America to Europe.”

Whazzates’sayin’?!?! Look, don’t get me wrong – yeast is interesting stuff. But to say lager was “invented” in the 1400? Now, if I dip into my copy of Hornsey, I don’t run into lager until the 1800s at page 485. Yet this story I posted in 2008 speaks of lager yeast evolving in the 16th century in a Bavarian cave which gets us in the ball park in terms of centuries. Maybe it’s the use of the word “invented” in the article that threw me off.

Most interesting of all, Gavin Sherlock posted a comment at this here blog back in 2008 as did Drs Dunn and Sussman all involved in this project. I will stay well away from the term “egg head” this time and invite some direction on their work and the implications for the lagered time line.

That Persnickty Barley Carbon Absorption Rate Thing

I spent the whole day thinking about this barley and carbon thing. Mainly because I am bad at science but it didn’t distract me from the challenge. It just seems weird to me that someone can say that “the growing and processing of hops and malt into beer and whisky producing 1.5 per cent of Britain’s greenhouse gases” while another beer study seems to show that the net benefit of barley to the planet is not included in the greenhouse calculation. How can that be? I usually don’t fight these things. I usually line up, close my eyes and accept these things with an… err… open mind but you read stuff like this and it gets you thinking:

Over a 20-year lifecycle, the right species in the right conditions can absorb over 40,000 tonnes of CO2 per square kilometer. So a plantation of 100 square kilometers can absorb 4 million tonnes of CO2 over 20 years.

Which means that 100 square km can absorb 200,000 tonnes in a year. Or 2,000 tonnes per square km per year. Or, given that there are 247.1 acres in a square km, 8.1 tonnes per acre a year. Then there is the retention rate. If you look at footnote 24 (warning .pdf) , you’ll see that the equilibrium level of carbon in cropland soils ranges from a minimum of 17 tons per acre to a maximum of 36 tons per acre (the mean is 24 tons per acre). A mature forest, by comparison holds 140 tons per acre which makes sense if you think of the trunks and branches of trees as a carbon sink.

So, crops like barley retain about 17% of the carbon that a forest does. Do they absorb at the same ratio? I couldn’t find that fact. So, I am going with the 17% ratio for now. Which means that barley may well absorb 17% of 8.1 tonnes per acre per year. Or 1.377 tonnes. That’s a lot. And what does it have to stack up against? One acre of malt barley will make about 540 cases of beer and a 60-case pallet of beer produces more than one metric ton (a tonne) of greenhouse gases which means that an acre’s worth of beer production generates about 9 tonnes of carbon. But of that brewing production only 8.1% is due to the barley or 12% for once the barley is malted. Or 1.08 tonnes per acre. Which looks like to me that barley absorbs more carbon (1.377 tonnes) than it takes to get it into the malted state (1.08 tonnes).

Point? You don’t get beer from looking at a bag of malt. But the closer you do, the less and less beer looks like a drain on the environment than the 1.5% might indicate. Planting enough forest for a perfect carbon off-set looks interesting as that 8.1 tonnes a year carbon debt to an average of 240 tonnes carbon credit per acre of mature forest could give a brewery a little under 30 years of 540 cases or 25 barrels of annual production. Which means Sad Adams would have to plant 80,000 acres to off set 30 years of its 2,000,000… (sorry)… 1,999,999 barrel production. Or 2,666 acres a year. Or 10.78 square kilometres a year. Sounds like a lot. Until you consider the scale of tree planting in British Columbia.

I am sure that is all wrong. There must be an easier way to determine all this other than, you know, relying on me.

Yuck! That Yeast Is Flocculating Itself Again!!!

When I was a home brewer – as opposed to a person who has home brewing supplies and equipment in the house but never does anything with it all – I used to be concerned about flocculation. Flocculation is the word that describes the capacity of a yeast (or other stuff for all I know) to clump. It is a fancy pants word for clumpiness – but is more about the propensity to clump as opposed to the clump itself. I think. If a yeast strain floucculated too much it could cause precipitation leading to poor attenuation due to separation of yeast and wort. Yet if the yeast was under flocculating there would be difficulty in settling out and creating a bright beer. I think.

So, it is comforting to know that all my half baked understanding of yeast clump-a-bility is actually related to a massively important scientific moment:

A team of scientists at Harvard University reported last week that they isolated the single gene that allows yeast to stick together. That gene allows the normally solitary yeast cells to shield themselves from toxins in their environment by banding together in protective balls. Since one of those toxins is the ethanol that the yeast themselves produce, grouping together allows the yeast to survive in the alcohol-rich environment that results from brewing. What’s more, the gene has a built in social value system that prevents yeast cells without the gene from taking advantage of the yeast flock’s protective sphere. That social control mechanism is an example of how single cells can regulate function in larger units.

Excellent! I knew that something about beer was out there promoting social values…or is it promoting socialism!?!?¹

The point? As Kevin Verstrepen, one of the eggheads in white lab coats² – a Haavaad man no less – notes: “You can look at it as a model of how single-cellular organisms can cooperate, taking a small step toward multicellular life.” A-ha! No, not the Norwegian 80’s band…I mean “a-ha” as in light-klicky-on, as in “EUREKA!!!” So not only was the creation of civilization dependent on beer but the core zymurgystic fact of beer is also the same core fact of complex life as we know it. See? Without the making of alcohol, we are all single cell amoeba… amoebae… amoebas. I think. Which leads me to my amoeba joke: “two amoeba leave a bar and look up at a bright light. One says to the other ‘is that the sun or the moon?’ to which the other replies ‘I dunno. I don’t live around here.'” Get it? That is what we would have to put up with were it not for the flocculating powers of yeast. And nobody wants that.

^¹Cue the theremin music!
^²…and let’s not have a repeat of the whole “sensitive yeast scientist” thing this time, ok?

More Yeasty History, More Yeasty Science

It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that I was learning about yeast history through science. Oh. It was just a couple of weeks ago. Now, instead of reaching back just four centuries, science is taking us back through over 400,000 centuries of yeastiness:

Why is it, even though there are 38,000 results for the Google search “Raul Cano beer“, that I have never heard of this? Look – it even has a website. You never tell me anything. More about the back story here but the interesting thing is not that it is done so much as it is not done more. Think about this. If dormant yeast can sit in the belly of a bug enclosed in amber, it must be lots of other places. I recall seeing some history show about medieval life in which the historian in charge of some European farming community site explained how, when they wondered about how they could figure out what food grains had grown there, they realized it was all around them in the deepest layers of the thatched roofs.

Hornsey describes how pot shards from pre-historic digs are studied for chemical residues to confirm their use in brewing. So, what is like a thatched roof and like amber that could hide a yeast that just happened to be used in the porter breweries of 1700s London or a dark ages monastery? Where can dormant yeast hide? Can it be sitting in a deeply buried layer of turf hibernating next to the old brewery wall or in a dried up goo residue that long ago seeped its way into the cracks in the beams of a 1400s ale house? Can it be identified that closely? And what do you call that search – is it yeast forensics? Or is it more like microbial archaeology? Is someone out there doing this right now? Are you holding back about that, too?

Two Lager Yeast Strains, Two Homecaves

I am sure I will get this wrong and that Ron will be able to clarify but it appears that two forensic yeast researchers have determined that lager yeast came into existence twice during two separate events:

…the team discovered that it happened at least twice in two separate locations in Europe, giving rise to the two different lager families…The hybrid, which makes lager instead of ale, probably evolved in Bavarian beer-brewing cellars during the 16th century. The team also found that Saaz yeasts have a single copy of each parent yeast’s genome, whereas the Frohberg yeasts have an extra copy from S. cerevisiae. They believe this difference affects the flavour of the lager, as well as how quickly the yeasts can ferment the hops.

OK, so the egg heads in lab coats don’t know that hops do not do the fermenting. Forgive them. Take a breath. There, that’s better. Apparently, that there are Saaz and Frohberg strains of lager yeast has been long known. But what was not known was that they developed independently from each other – as this article in today’s New Scientist explains in further detail. Sadly, they cannot trace back to which Bavarian cave gave birth to which strain and when. Even more detail here including this interesting tidbit:

Studying the spread of the two groups provides a genetic snapshot of lager brewing in Europe during the past 600 years: one lineage is associated primarily with Carlsberg breweries in Denmark and others in what is now Czechoslovakia, while the other group localizes to breweries in the Netherlands, including Heineken.

Neato. The team’s full research results will be published tomorrow by Genome Research.

Did Franklin Know That Much About Beer Goggles?

I doubt not that moderate Drinking has been improv’d for the Diffusion of Knowledge among the ingenious Part of Mankind…drinking does not improve our Faculties, but it enables us to use them.

Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, No. 12, 1722.

Franklin was 16 or 17 when he wrote that under a pseudonym. Smart kid. You know, quoting Franklin on beer can be dangerous stuff but, in this case, you know that is it true because you can read it for yourself on the internet. When I read that passage above in the introduction of Salinger’s book, I thought not about Franklin or his sayings but beer goggles. They were in the news lately, as this piece from CTV reminds us:

Anyone looking for a mate in a bar, take note: Beer goggles really do make people appear more attractive, British researchers say. Scientists at the University of Bristol found that study subjects who consumed alcohol considered people to be about 10 per cent more attractive than did people who did not consume alcohol…Both the male and female subjects not only found members of the opposite sex more attractive, they also found members of the same gender more attractive, too…The researchers also found that men deemed women to be more attractive for up to 24 hours after they consumed alcohol.

See, it’s that last bit that Franklin’s words mirrored – the continuing effect of the alcohol upon the faculty of the mind, an effect that lasted long after the alcohol ceased to exist in the body. Does the moderate drinker see the world through sunnier lenses generally? I wonder. I have had occasion by times to abstain for days on end – hard as it is to imagine – and it is in those times when find my imagination a little less vital, the roses passed sometimes unnoticed. Those are sad times. Pete Brown wrote the other day, by contrast, about how an introduction to craft beer opening the doors of perception to a whole new way of thinking about drink…but maybe it goes further than that, as Pete himself may be implying in his nod to good old Billy Blake, Franklin’s junior by half a century, who wrote:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

Isn’t that what the wee dram (or whatever the scientists of Bristol gave their human guinea pigs) did? Did it not cleanse the mind and reveal beauty? Is that no what Franklin saw when he was but a lad?

Why Don’t They Study Slam Dancing And Health Anymore?

Another day, another bunch of odd academic studies from lab coated laboratorians or policy documents from lobbyist trying to tell us all what beer does with you or what you do when you are with your beer. From France we learn, first, that “when the music gets loud, we tend to drain our mug of brew faster”:

Researchers staked out two bars in the west of France and observed drinking habits of 40 patrons. With permission from bartenders, the scientists pumped up the volume of a Top 40 station from 72 to 88 pounding decibels. In this earsplitting din of pop-music, patrons drank more in less time.

Is it possible that people who like to drink slowly and have quieter habits do not patronize places where Top 40 stations are played at 72 to 88 pounding decibels? Or maybe are they drinking to numb the pain? This article from here in Canada, next, seems to suggest that university age female drinking is new:

“You’re just an amateur if you can’t drink as much [as the guys] … you’re kind of like a sissy,” says Smith. “It’s not even always how much you’re drinking but what you’re drinking. Like, if a girl is drinking a stereotypical man-drink like whisky or dark rum or beer, it’s like guys are attracted to her or that it’s more impressive.

If they are suggesting this is new, well, that would be news to everyone I know in the mid-50s to early-40s bracket who were at college in Maritime Canada 25 to 30 years ago, who roamed in packs earning nicknames like “The Girls Who Said Woo”. Sure there were dumb, sad or bad incidents to all sorts of kids but risks and dangers were mitigated by group dynamics and common sense – designated drivers, not inviting jerks along and people just watched out for each other, like the time one evening’s overeager drinking buddy was stitched up by last night’s one from the med frat. Heck, on any given evening large lads like me were pointed at by a few gals as they said I was their boyfriend while I scowled a bit. If that does not still occur, that would have nothing to do with the drink so much as a sad loss of good manners.

Finally, US College basketball executives are considering an end to beer advertising during the “March Madness” national championship basketball tournament. Currently:

The NCAA’s advertising policy on its face…specifically prohibits ads for cigarettes, sports wagering, gambling, nightclubs, firearms and weapons, athletic recruitment services, and depictions of any student-athlete group in a degrading, demeaning or disrespectful manner. “Impermissible” ads also include NC-17-rated motion pictures, television programming or interactive games, and alcoholic beverages. But, ads for malt beverages, beer, and wine products that do not exceed six percent alcohol by volume are excepted, with limitations.

This is no small business as we are told that two beer marketers — Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing — spent nearly $30 million to advertise during the 2007 NCAA national basketball championships. But are these breweries advertising to the young or the old glory-days guys who pretend to themselves that they were as good back in the day?

I don’t pretend that there is not some degree of common sense or academic value in clever people noting these sorts of things but I am not going to join the new dries anytime soon, either. Sometimes in these matters we only hear of the sort of common sense that sees only one side of the matter and not the kids who like to sweaty slam dance to loud music, the gang of kids looking for safe dumb fun or the sofa surfers who just like to watch those ads for Bud with speaking frogs or with the guys who say “Wazzup?” How much money has A-B or Miller given to higher education through these ads or even otherwise? How many noisy slam-dancers just had a good time – again – and got home safe? How many of my pals met their spouses over pitchers of beer and now have nice, slightly Oldie Olson lives with quite faithful marriages?

Too bad there is no well-funded “Institute for the Realistic Contextualization of Studies and Statistics” which could help with those questions.