In 1814, Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery was the victim of some very bad luck. Or maybe just
poor engineering. At the time, massive storage vats were en vogue in London’s breweries,
and when one of these large vats burst at The Horse Shoe Brewery, it led to over a hundred
thousand gallons of beer flooding the surrounding area in a veritable brew-nami. The surge led
to the collapse of two nearby buildings and the loss of eight lives. Over the years, rumors
even popped up that unconscientious ale-lovers had flocked to the scene of the accident to
consume the runaway beverage. Yikes.
Contemporary accounts suggest there’s not much substance to those rumors, but it’s
easy enough to see why people would believe them. People really like beer. Behind water
and tea, it’s thought to be the third most widely consumed drink on Earth. It helped
shape civilization as we know it, and I’m not just talking about those commercials where
the guys say “whassup?”. No I didn't want to say it that way, it's embarrassing. I HAVE to??
Whassssupppp. *angry mumble*
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the story of the world’s most-widely consumed
intoxicating beverage is shrouded in legend and half-truths. Was beer brewed to make water
potable? When did hops enter the picture? And what do the Budweiser Frogs have in common
with Captain Jack Sparrow? The short answers, respectively, are “no,” “the 9th century,
at the latest,” and “Gore Verbinski.” But the long version is more fun. Let’s
get started.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. As we talked about in our last episode, Ancient
Sumerians were cultivating grains thousands of years ago. But we didn’t actually get
into what those possibly-first sedentary people were doing with the grains they grew, and
there’s actually some debate on the matter. According to one theory, the grains were used
to make beer before bread ever entered the picture. The discovery of ancient tools potentially
designed for beer brewing supports this. That would mean beer was part of the origin of
agriculture, which is arguably what allowed humans to build civilizations, which led to
the development of new technologies, which made it possible to brew even more beer. This
is some Inception level history stuff.
In 2018, archaeologists from Stanford announced they had evidence that people in what is now
Israel were brewing something like beer around 12,000 years ago, which they noted predates
“the appearance of domesticated cereals by several millennia in the Near East.”
The archaeologists speculated that it was likely a thin gruel possibly consumed for
religious purposes.
Beer, by the way, is any fermented, alcoholic beverage made with cereal grains such as wheat
or barley. There was a time when beer and ale were considered two different beverages,
with beer defined by the presence of hops, but we’re going to proceed with more modern
usage, where the two words are basically interchangeable.
We'll get to hops pretty soon, though. By which I mean, in about 11,000 years.
Early beer was likely made by crushing up grains, heating them gradually in water, then
possibly baking them, and steeping them again. This process encourages fermentation. Grains
contain starches, and heating up grains helps break these starches down into their simple
sugar components. Fermentation happens when yeast microbes consume these sugars and convert
them into alcohol, flavor compounds, and carbon dioxide. It’s sometimes said that Louis
Pasteur discovered yeast in the mid-1800s, but that’s a little misleading. Sure, single-celled
organisms like yeast are invisible to the naked eye, but when millions or billions congregate
in the beer-making process they can be seen and manipulated.
In Richard Unger’s Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he points to several
indications that brewers began to intuit the vital role of yeast hundred of years before
Pasteur’s time. Rather than relying on wild yeast in the air, a 15th-century brewer in
Munich received permission to use a specific source of yeast from the bottom of his brew.
In 16th century Norwich, England, brewers recognized the value of skimming off excess
yeast for use in bread-making and further brewing. They actually donated some of that
yeast to charities. Even without Pasteur’s experiments defining the biological processes
that result in living yeast turning glucose into ethanol—what he dubbed alcoholic fermentation—people
evidently knew that fermentation made beer bubbly, flavorful, alcoholic, and generally
much more fun to drink than plain barley water.
Beer was among the Sumerians’ most influential contributions to the world, right behind written
language and a formal number system. And the Sumerians knew they had come up with something
big. They even had a goddess of beer and brewing named Ninkasi. In the year 1800 BCE, a hymn
was written for Ninkasi that doubled as a beer recipe. Because it was written in song,
the recipe was easy for the average beer drinker to memorize if they didn’t know how to read.
It’s also the oldest beer recipe ever discovered. Here’s an excerpt:
“Ninkasi, You are the one who handles the dough with a big shovel....you are the one
who waters the malt set on the ground....You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, the
waves rise, the waves fall...You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed
mats, coolness overcomes.”
If the Sumerians penned a similarly poetic cure for hangovers, it hasn’t been discovered yet.
The Ancient Egyptians were also fanatical about their beer. They believed that beer
brewing knowledge was a gift from the god Osiris, and they incorporated the drink into
their religious ceremonies. It infiltrated other parts of Egyptian culture as well. Beer
was so common that the laborers who built the pyramids of Giza were given daily rations
of one and third gallons, or about 10 pints of the stuff. It was also served at celebrations,
where over-imbibing was not only accepted, but encouraged. As far as etiquette was concerned,
leaving a party when you could still walk straight was the Egyptian equivalent of not
finishing your meal. Man these guys knew how to party.
But one component that’s found in virtually all beer today
took a while to enter the picture. That would be hops, the ingredient that gives beer its
bitter, floral taste. Though it's more noticeable in IPAs, the vast majority of beers depend
on hops to balance out their sweetness. And hops, by the way, isn’t the name of the
plant; it’s the name of the flower or “cone” that comes from the plant. The plant itself
is called Humulus lupulus, which means “climbing wolf” in Latin.
During the Middle Ages, Catholic monks supported themselves by selling homemade goods like
cheese, mustard, and in some cases, beer. These monks were likely the first people to
make beer with hops. In the mid-800s, a German Abbot from the monastery of Corvey in Germany
referred to the use of hops in brewing. Shout-out to YouTube commenter Timo Kramer for mentioning
this abbot, Adalard of Corbie, in the comments of our last episode, sending our fact-checker
down a hoppy rabbit-hole trying to pinpoint whether the reference was made from Corvey
in present-day Germany or Corbie in present-day France. Either way, as Timo pointed out, the
abbot was cousins with Charlemagne.
Our next episode is all about candy corn. If you want to be featured in it, drop a fact
below about the, let’s just say...polarizing treat in the comments.
Anyway. Hops. A few hundred years after that first written reference, German abbess and
eventual Catholic saint Hildegard of Bingen wrote, in her book Physica Sacra, that hops
“make the soul of a man sad and weigh down his inner organs.” OK, but you say that
like it’s a bad thing, Hildergard of Bingen.
According to beer scholar William Bostwick, her description was actually so scathing that
it helped launch a beer war between Catholics and Protestants. Partly inspired by Hildegard,
Catholics ditched hops and fully embraced gruit, which was the mixture of herbs and
aromatics used to flavor most early beers. This made hoppy beer anti-Catholic, so naturally
Protestants claimed it as their own. Martin Luther himself was even a proponent of the
beverage. During the Reformation in the 16th century, the rise of protestantism helped
boost hops’ profile in Europe. Hops had another advantage in the beer wars. The ingredient
contains beta acids that delay spoilage and act as a natural preservative. Monks weren’t
aware of this property when they first added hops to beer, and it when it did become clear
centuries later, that was the final nail in gruit’s coffin.
Beer was a popular drink of the lower classes from Ancient times through the Middle Ages,
but there’s some confusion as to why. You may have heard that peasants drank beer every
day because it was more sanitary than the water they had access to, and it makes a certain
amount of sense. Brewing generally involves boiling the unfermented beer, or wort; this
would theoretically kill off pathogens. Once fermentation takes place, the alcohol itself
would presumably provide further disinfection. But while it’s hard to say that beer was
never looked at as a healthier alternative to water, the theory doesn’t stand up to
much scrutiny as it relates to the Middle Ages. The truth is that clean water wasn’t
that hard to come by, even in poorer communities. People could get free water from wells and
streams, and some places like London even had cisterns by the 13th century. A more likely
explanation for beer’s popularity with poor and working class people is that, beyond its
intoxicating effects, it was viewed as a cheap source of nutrition. If you were a worker
in the Middle Ages, an afternoon pint provided a measure of hydration and quick calories
at the same time. Though I don’t recommend using that logic to justify drinking on the
job today. Nah I'm just kidding this is a fake beer. It's a cartoon. Come on it's 11:30
in the morning who do you think I am.
Today the craft brewing industry skews heavily male, but women have likely been making beer
for thousands of years. Female brewers during the 16th and 17th century may even have given
rise to some of the iconic imagery around witches. From the cauldrons they brewed in,
to the pointy hats they wore (perhaps to attract customers), to the cats they kept to deal
with grain-loving rodents, some writers have drawn a line connecting alewife entrepreneurs
and what would eventually become witchy iconography. While it’s difficult to source accusations
of witchcraft levied at brewsters, there does seem to be overlap in assertions of duplicitousness,
for example— perhaps as a method to drive women out of a field that was quickly becoming
dominated by men.
For good and ill, beer-making took some big steps forward during the Industrial Revolution.
Emerging technologies like steam power and refrigeration led to a tastier, more consistent,
and easier-to-brew beverage.
Industrialization and globalization also paved the way for the widespread consolidation of
the modern beer industry. When Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired SABMiller for more than 100
billion dollars in 2016, the resulting conglomerate contained over 500 beverage brands and accounted
for over a quarter of global beer market sales, according to market research firm Euromonitor
International. Many of the “craft beers” you know may very well belong to a conglomerate
like this. Because these giant beer-makers are also giant beer-distributors, with a big
say in what brands up on store shelves, critics accuse them of reducing competition from independent
producers and potentially stifling consumer choice. InBev would presumably argue that
their scale and history in the industry allows them to operate more efficiently, and honestly
I’m a bit out of my depth to weigh in, but I do think it’s interesting to note that
you could buy a bottle of Budweiser or a bottle of Goose Island Bourbon County Stout and be
supporting the same bottom line.
Which seems as complicated and good a time as any to ask: what’s your favorite beer?
State your preference proudly in the comments below: remember, I’m not here to yuck anybody’s
yum, unless your yum is the phrase “yuck your yum,” which, let’s face it, is objectively
off-putting. And because beer is so context-dependent, tell me what situation you would enjoy your
quaff of choice. Put me down for a Miller High Life, the champagne of beer, watching
Jeopardy at my favorite bar, Do or Dive. Although full disclosure: I’m more of a cider guy.
I can’t wrap up without following through on that complete throwaway line I had up top
about the Budweiser frogs. If you’re not familiar with them, it means you’re younger
than me, or that you live in a country whose popular culture isn’t shaped by advertising
campaigns launched during the Super Bowl. During 1995’s big game, a commercial featuring
the three talking amphibians—Bud, Weis, and Er—aired, and for some reason, America
fell in love. That spot was directed by Gore Verbinski, who would go on to direct the American
remake of The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. The frogs were brought
to life by artists at Stan Winston’s studio, the same legendary company that helped create
the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and The Terminator’s titular cyborg. That’s five combined Academy
Awards and billions in box office success, all in the service of selling a beer whose
chief selling point, as far as I can tell, is… “it’s beer.”
Mass-produced beer made from hops, grains, and yeast is standard today, but the brews
of the past haven’t disappeared completely. Resurrecting ancient beer recipes has become
a popular pastime among home brewers. Even some commercial breweries have joined the
trend. New Belgium makes gruit ale, and Dogfish Head collaborated with a molecular archeologist
to recreate a beer based on residue collected from what may have been King Midas’s tomb.
But the truth is, no matter what beer you reach for, you’ll be drinking something
that connects you to the very beginnings of civilization. Thanks for watching, and cheers.
I'm gonna go have a real beer now, not a cartoon one. Oop! It's still fake,
I taste nothing.