- [Narrator] Paris, 1876.
Louis Pasteur is one of the greatest
scientific minds in Europe,
and he's turned his attention toward two things,
beer and vengeance.
16 years earlier, he'd unlocked a millennia old secret
by proving that yeast, in the absence of oxygen,
is what ferments sugar into alcohol.
And then he thought he was done with beer
until the war, the Franco-Prussian War,
where France lost its hops-growing region
of Alsace-Lorraine.
For French pride, for French beer,
he must again delve into the secrets of brewing
in order to create what he calls,
"A beer of national revenge."
What he discovers this time are the specific microorganisms
that make beer spoil or go sour,
and he finds that bringing it to near boiling,
pasteurizing it, like with milk, will kill these organisms,
and increase the beer's stability and shelf life.
Though this discovery will not remain French,
it will inaugurate a new era, the age of scientific beer.
(cheerful music)
Thanks so much to Brilliant
for helping us ferment this historic tale.
When we left off, beer was going global,
and industrialization was about to turn regional breweries
into the massive beverage corporations we know today.
Troops in British India,
previously sickened in large numbers by local drinks,
were now sipping on IPAs brewed in the UK.
Viennese style Pilsner was being produced in Mexico,
and the twin forces of trade and colonialism
we're bringing European beer to foreign shores
and founding some of the largest breweries
of the modern era.
In 1869, a Norwegian American opened a brewery in Yokohama,
which would eventually become Kirin.
Seven years later,
the Meiji government founded Sapporo Brewery
and what would become Ashai followed in 1889.
China had an active beer brewing culture
for thousands of years,
but when grains like millet fell out of the diet,
brewing shifted to rice.
Yet, as European powers carved out pieces
of the Qing dynasty in the 19th Century,
foreigners began reestablishing Chinese beer.
Poles, Germans, and Czechs started breweries in Harbin,
but it was in one particular city
that a joint English-German concern found success,
when it founded a brewery in Qingdao in 1903.
Today, China is the world's largest beer consumer,
and Tsingtao is the second most popular brew in China,
surpassed only by Snow beer,
which traces its origins to a brewery
established by Kirin in 1936
in what was then Japan's Manchurian puppet state.
But, things were brewing back in Europe too,
specifically Northern Europe.
In 1847, a young Danish man named J.C. Jacobsen
founded a brewery outside Copenhagen
using steam power and other new industrial technologies
to produce Danish Pilsner.
With his eye on the future,
he named it after his five-year-old son, Carl,
thus Carlsberg was born.
17 years later, it gained some competition,
when a 22-year-old bought an outdated 16th Century brewery
in Amsterdam determined to modernize it.
He hired a student of Louis Pasteur
to find and culture new types of bottom fermenting yeast
and he christened both the brewery and his beer
with his own name, Heineken.
Together, these rivals kickstarted the scientific age
of brewing.
Both Carlsberg and Heineken approached beer
like a research project,
establishing in-house laboratories
where scientists experimented with new techniques,
equipment, and ingredients.
Beer got clearer and more carbonated.
Meanwhile, the area that would become Germany
was going through its own seismic shift
that would have major echoes far across the Atlantic
in America.
Now we know we haven't talked much about the United States
in this series,
partially it's because for thousands of years
it didn't exist.
Amazing, I know.
But it's also because, well,
American beer was just sort of fine.
Sure, it was always there and often affecting history.
For example, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock
because it ran out of beer,
and taxes on brewers helped fund Washington's army.
But America's drink was whiskey,
which was made easily from barley and corn,
lasted longer, was easier to transport,
and had a higher exchange value
with the young country's largest trade partner,
Native American tribes.
In fact, colonial Americans drank only a third of the beer
modern Americans do and much less than their British cousins
at the time.
In fact, as an apprentice in London,
Benjamin Franklin was scandalized
by how much his British colleagues consumed.
Until the 1840s,
most U.S. beer was produced in the Northeast
and consisted of English style ales and porters,
yet America's laissez-faire economic freedom
did make for mediocre brew.
While most European countries had high standards
for licensing breweries and quality control legislation,
none of that existed in the United States.
Beer was a product, not an art.
But a revolution was coming.
Specifically The Revolutions of 1848,
a largely failed series of liberal uprisings,
which convinced a whole generation of young,
largely middle class Germans,
to immigrate to the United States
and take their brewing knowledge with them.
But when they arrived they found
the older German communities on the east coast too crowded,
especially for brewing.
So instead they struck out for the newly founded cities
in the Midwest, where the land was literally free,
cereals and hops grew easily,
and the cold winters meant ice for lagering beer
was abundant.
There they founded large and expanding lager breweries
and brought the German drinking culture of beer gardens,
with their friendly, visible,
and community oriented intoxication to America in 1855.
Serbian immigrant, Friedrich Muller, arrived in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin and purchased an existing brewery to modernize,
christening it with his Americanized name, Miller.
The next year, Joseph Schlitz arrived in the city
and married a brewer's widow,
taking over the business and naming to himself.
But then when the great fire of 1871 destroyed Chicago,
torching most of the rival breweries,
he donated beer to get the city through,
earning his brew the nickname,
"The beer that made Milwaukee famous."
And then there was Frederick Pabst,
who took ownership of his father-in-law's brewery
and decided, as a branding exercise,
to tie a blue ribbon around the bottles of the beer
he'd named for his father-in-law, Philip Best.
That's right, Best beer with a blue ribbon around it.
And though Pabst Blue Ribbon had never actually won
any awards, well, he just never corrected anyone
who assumed it had.
Miller, Schlitz and Pabst, collectively known as,
the Beer Barons, became hugely wealthy,
building enormous mansions,
and funneling their money into everything from resorts,
to some of the country's first amusement parks.
But while they competed, they also banded together.
During the Civil War when Lincoln rolled out new taxes
to pay for the conflict,
they convinced him that clean, well made,
and healthy German lager should pay only 60% of the taxes
that other beers did,
giving them a major competitive advantage.
But even so, all of them were about to be usurped.
Adolphus Busch exited the Civil War,
both as a corporal in the Union Army,
and newly married to the daughter
of St. Louis based brewery owner, Eberhard Anheuser.
During the war, where 200,000 Germans served in the US Army,
he must have observed the popularity of lager beer
amongst the ranks.
When he bought his way into the Anheuser-Busch brewery
he used every modern technology he could find,
from refrigeration to break reliance on winter ice
and produced Pilsner year round,
to pasteurization that killed the microbes in beer,
to industrial bottling machines,
to refrigerated rail cars
that shipped his product country-wide.
He also pioneered branding and marketing,
sending branded art and goods like ashtrays to bars
and convincing them to stock only his signature beer,
a beer inspired by the brews from the Czech town of Budweis,
or as we of course know it Budweiser.
By 1900 Busch was the king of beers in the Midwest.
And America usurped Germany as the largest beer producer
in the world.
Anheuser-Busch was well on its way to becoming
the planet's largest brewing company,
yet trouble was coming.
See, for decades concerns had been rising
about America's drinking problem,
and beer, which often flew under the radar,
landed in the crosshairs
because the largely white, Protestant,
long-established families who tended to favor temperance
often didn't like what they thought of as immigrant drinks,
the Irish with their whiskey, Italians with their wine,
and especially after World War I,
these German tycoons showing off their wealth
gained from an empire of drunkenness.
And that wave of anti-immigrant panic
helped sweep prohibition into law in 1920.
Ironically though, prohibition ultimately proved good
for the big breweries.
See, they weathered the storm by producing soft drinks
while smaller brewers perished.
And by killing the competition,
it left the macro breweries in a position of dominance
that's only changed in the last few decades.
And that's how we got to the world we know today.
How beer went from something made in neolithic baskets
to a massive product shipped and consumed around the world.
But before last call let's have one final toast across time.
Come on, everybody in the past and present,
whether you're a Beer Baron, peasant ale wife,
Sumerian Ninkasi worshiper, colonial Minuteman,
Inca emperor, Apache warrior, German monk,
pyramid builder, or scientist,
let's all raise a glass.
Here's to the drink that lubricated the gears
of human history.
Beer! (glasses clank)
Cheers, everyone.
You know, before we did this series,
I had no idea the amount of science
that goes into brewing nowadays,
which got me thinking maybe I should finally graduate
from simply doing my own research in my own lab
to taking that chemical reaction
or computational biology course I've been thinking about
over on Brilliant.
You know, one of the things we really love
about our EC community
is that a lot of us are lifelong learners.
People who are super passionate
about leveling up our knowledge,
but also like doing it on their own schedule,
which is why we think Brilliant,
the interactive learning environment focusing on science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics,
you know, the whole STEM set,
is perfect for learning at your own pace.
Replacing traditional lectures with hands-on,
interactive lessons complete with visual examples
and a storytelling approach that is super engaging.
Case in point,
Jeff has been brushing up on his fundamentals
having already worked his way through
some foundational computer science courses
and is about to jump into some statistics and probability.
Whereas I've been really enjoying channeling
my inner Mr. Spock and strengthening my analytic muscles
with their multi-part courses on logic and deduction,
because I want to be able to roleplay
my next D&D character as more of a Holmes than a Watson
if you catch my drift.
So if you are a curious learner,
professional or inexperienced,
you can find out more about Brilliant
and buff your brain by going to brilliant.org/ExtraCredits
and signing up for free.
Ooh, and the first 200 people that go to that link
will also get 20% of off an annual premium subscription,
which, added bonus< also helps out our channel
in the process.
I mean, if that's not a no brainer I don't know what is.
The biggest EC thanks to Ahmed Ziad Turk, Alicia Bramble,
Angelo Valenciana, Casey Muscha, Dominic Valenciana,
Joseph Blaim, Kyle Murgatroyd,
and Orels1 for being fantastic, legendary patrons.
(upbeat music)