The Brewer's Tale: A History of the World According to Beer

217 Pages·2014·1.38 MB·English

by  Bostwick

THE
BREWER’S
TALE
A History of the World According to Beer
William Bostwick
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Babylonian
2. The Shaman
3. The Monk
4. The Farmer
5. The Industrialist
6. The Patriot
7. The Immigrant
8. The Advertiser
Epilogue
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
My senses aren’t above reproach, but they’re all I have. I want to see the whole
picture—as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of “good” and
“bad,” and limit my vision. If I used the term “good” on a thing I’d lose my
license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t you see? I want to be
able to look at the whole thing.
—John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle
INTRODUCTION
A guy walks into a bar. It’s the oldest setup there is. But what happens next?
I was at my local pub contemplating a water-ringed beer list, a wall of tap
handles, and a packed fridge. I saw a pale ale brewed 20 million gallons at a time
and a triple IPA made in a jerry-rigged turkey frier in a garage down the street. I
saw a traditional, light-bodied British porter and an extra-strong, cacao-infused
imperial stout stored in bourbon barrels. One beer was brewed with hours-old
hops, freshly plucked in an Oregon field; another had been aged for eighteen
months with acidic bacteria—critters more common in vinegar and pickle brines.
There were pilsners and ambers, red ales and browns, wheat beers and rye beers
and spelt beers; there were three-dollar happy hour specials and thirty-dollar
vintage bottles, corked and foil-wrapped like fine Champagne. Bitter or sweet,
smooth or strong, fruity or dry, dark or light, it was all there, in dizzying glory.
So—the bartender tapped his fingers—what’ll it be?
This should have been an easy choice. I was in my element, after all.
Drinking is my job. I’m a beer critic. I cover beer for the Wall Street Journal and
a few food and style glossies. That means when I drink I’m on duty. I put on
blinders to context, story, and place. I tune out the ads, cover up the label, and
focus as best I can on taste alone. My job is to translate flavor to prose, not to
wonder why but to describe, clearly, what. That is, what does the beer taste like
and, most important for my readers, is it any good? I’m a guide, a personal
shopper. My palate is sensitive, my thesaurus well thumbed. I can flag a dirty tap
line, I can distinguish tropical Calypso hops from citrusy Cascades. To me, beer
is more than dry or sweet, strong or light. Not simply dark, but smoky like a
campfire in a eucalyptus grove. Not just fruity, but tropically spiced like a
papaya ripening in pine boughs.
There’s joy in leveling judgment, sure, but I get more kicks in the describing.
Flavors are rich, and it’s fun to write about them, turning tastes into poetry. But
staring at those taps, and my spreadsheets of tasting notes, I felt I was missing a
deeper story. In my hunt for objectivity I was, ironically, getting too abstract. In
ignoring context I was missing meaning. I wanted to know more than taste—I
wanted to know its origins. I was done with the what. I wanted to know the
where and why. Why does beer taste the way it does? Whence that papaya?
Where did those styles, those flavors—where did beer itself—come from in the
first place?
I knew that beer has been here as long as we have. What to drink? I
shouldn’t have been embarrassed I didn’t have a good answer. We’ve been
asking ourselves that question for ten thousand years. Humankind was built on
beer. From the world’s first writing to its first laws, in rituals social, religious,
and political, civilization is soaked in beer. Some historians even think that beer
gave us the crucial vitamins and nutrients—not to mention a source of purified
water—to keep us healthy as we turned from meat-centric nomads to a settled,
agrarian diet. Beer was foundational stuff, a building block of human existence.
But while so much else has changed, oxen to John Deeres, wood hearths to
nuclear reactors, beer has remained. How has it lasted so long, I wondered. How
has it evolved, and how has it stayed the same?
What we drink says something about us, from the guy who bellied up next to
me at the bar and whispered for the bitterest IPA they had, sheepishly, as if
asking for the fattiest foie gras, to the folks who recoil at the thought of anything
hopped—or, as my mom calls it, “flavorful.” “I just want something light,” she
says. Some beers are revered like wines, calling drinkers on pilgrimages to
Belgium just to get a taste; other are hawked on NASCAR billboards and
slugged by keg-standing bros. Ever since we’ve been asking ourselves what’s for
dinner, we’ve also been asking what to drink with it. And it’s never been an easy
question to answer, even for our ancestors. Babylonian tablets recorded twenty
kinds: black, red, sweet, even “beer to lessen the waist.” Egyptians had rough-
hewn peasant beer and beer flavored with dates and honey for the pharaohs.
Dark-age tribes had spice cabinets full of henbane, ergot, and other bog-grown
oddities. What we drink reveals who we are. Can it also tell me who we were?
So I kicked aside my style guides—I shut my thesaurus, I hung up my flavor
wheel—and hit the history books. I traced those tap lines back to their sources. I
followed IPAs into the holds of Calcutta-bound Indiamen; goblets of strong
Belgian beer back to spartan tables in drafty monasteries; peppery saisons to hot
days on Wallonian farms; and beer itself back, back through the murk to the
beginning of time.
I couldn’t just read about the beer, of course. I’d have to taste it. Which
meant I’d have to make it myself. As lengthy as the bar’s tap list was, I didn’t
see any henbane on it. To brew these beers I needed a guide. I was looking, after
all, not just for a taste but for a story; I needed not just the beer but the brewer.
Because if beer’s essence can be distilled to one idea, it’s this: beer is made.
Our first recorded recipes were for beer because beer was the first thing we made
that required a recipe, our first engineered food. Wine, for example, just
happens. A grape’s sugars will ferment on their own, without a human touch;
even elephants and butterflies seek out rotting fruit. But grain needs a modern
hand to coax out its sugars and ferment them into alcohol. Brewing beer
demands thought and skill. It demands, in a word, a creator.
As beer says something about the drinker and his tastes, it also reflects the
man (or, more often, in the past, woman) who made it. Those tap lines trace back
to a person. And so I couldn’t just drink the beer—I’d have to cross over to the
other side of the bar, to meet the Babylonian temple worker, the Medieval
alewife, the monks and farmers, industrialists and immigrants who first brewed
the beers over which I pondered.
So I refilled my glass and grabbed a pen. Like all the best journeys, mine
took shape on coasters and cocktail napkins. A road trip through time, with eight
stops along the way. I lined up eight drinking partners. The Babylonian servant,
brewing liquid daily bread for the empire-building masses; the Nordic shaman,
keeper of herb-infused portals into the spirit world; the monk, fueling his
brothers’ Lenten fasts; the farmer, turning the dregs of harvest into rustic
refreshment; the London industrialists, whose factories churned out dark, rich
porters and high-class, sparkling pales; the first American settlers, making due
with pumpkins and parsnips; and finally their heirs, the German immigrants
bringing lager to a thirsty nation and the admen taking beer into the modern age.
I augmented what recipes I found in the history books with advice from
today’s top pros—masters of the styles I was re-creating, experts in their eras, or
simply brewers who could best translate their stories—who best understood their
deeper significance. People such as Sam Calagione, who turned a 2,700-year-old
potsherd into Midas Touch, the most popular honey-based booze in the country,
or Brian Hunt, a modern-day shaman in the Sonoma redwoods.
And I fired up my brew pot. What bubbled up were flavors I’d never tasted
before—I didn’t have the vocabulary even to describe them. I was, now, out of
my element; my flavor wheel was useless. Down again came the thesaurus:
sweet and sour like Chinese takeout; savory spiced like mincemeat pie; viscous
and tannic like the smell of fresh tar. I was an explorer mapping unknown
territory. These were flavors, I thought, we hadn’t tasted in millennia. Some
we’ve missed—the rye-bread snap of a good old-fashioned saison—others,
maybe, are best left where they rest.
Bringing these beers back to life, and sharing them with ghosts, those
changing flavors told of changing times. Dark, spicy medieval beer was a warm
blanket against the drafty chill of monastic life; bright flowery IPAs a respite
from the soot of the industrial age; cloying pumpkin beer a taste of American
independence from British rule. Flavors born of necessity—barley was a hassle
in early America but pumpkins were plentiful—and of choice. Each new flavor
told a story. Brewers are flies on the wall of history, and beers are their time
capsules, each pint glass (or flagon or sheep stomach) filled with the culture,
politics, and habits of its age. Tell me what you brewed and drank and I’ll tell
you how you lived, and when. Beers are mirrors of their times because beer is a
mirror of our selves. And so it’s no wonder it’s changed so much. We have too.
And yet . . . in other ways, the past didn’t feel so far gone. The tastes were
new but the stories they told were familiar. The further back I went, the stronger
the sense I got that, though what we’ve drunk has changed in big ways, the
reasons why we drink and brew come around again and again like a barfly’s bad
jokes, told and retold with each new pint. From the start we’ve used beer to bond
with friends and make up with enemies, toast our accomplishments and drown
our sorrows, honor our gods and forget our troubles. Beer has been high class
and low brow, sacred and profane, rustic sustenance and a rare treat. Beer tells
us how far we’ve come and how little we’ve changed. Stories about ritual and
transformation, about place and identity, about politics and religion. Stories,
above all, about community—about how beer, varied as it is, has nonetheless
always brought us together.
Brewing these beers, meeting these brewers, didn’t just transport me to a
former time; it bonded me to it. At first, when I looked at that long list of taps, I
saw divisions: the hop head, the sour snob, the Coors-swigging frat boy. All
those flavors felt like lines in the sand. How bitter can you handle? How strong
is too strong? But tracing beer back to its sources simplified it for me. Beer
transforms—grain to sugar, sugar to alcohol, raw to cooked, sober to
enlightened, man to maker—and, as it transforms, it connects. It connects us to
where we live and what grows there, it connects our present to our past, and it
connects us to one another. Brewing made us human—we drink therefore we
are. This isn’t just my story, or beer’s story, it’s the story of us. This is the world
according to beer, a brewer’s history of civilization.
THE
BREWER’S
TALE