- [Narrator] Germany, 1539.
The table at Martin Luther's home seats 50 people
and nearly every seat is full.
He's in fine form tonight.
He calls the Pope the antichrist, refers to the church
as a brothel, and discourses
about the noxious farts previous popes have let off.
Real rebellious talk.
As he speaks his wife, Katharina,
a former nun, fills his stein.
She makes the beer herself,
thousands of liters a year in the Luther's personal brewery,
and it's good, lubricating these table sessions,
plus the beer is hopped, itself an act of rebellion,
as hops currently are an untaxed weed,
different from the spice mix.
the Catholic monks use in their brewing.
As Luther continues, one listener takes notes
and will publish these remarks
in a book called "Table Talk".
Others will create beer steins showing the Pope
as the antichrist.
It would seem that Catholicism's monopoly
on Christianity and brewing is falling apart
over's Katharina's fine beer.
(cheerful music)
Thanks so much to Curiosity Stream
for helping us brew up today's historical tale.
When we left off, alehouses, taverns,
and inns had come on the scene,
and just as important, people had started hopping ale,
a method that properly turned to the beverage into beer,
creating a more complex tasting product that could be made
in larger batches without spoiling, shipped,
and to a certain extent, even branded.
Indeed, hops was the first true step
in turning beer into a viable commercial product
and as the 14th and 15th centuries wound on,
certain breweries started becoming famous for their beer.
One major center of brewing was Munich
where the Augustiner Brewery, run initially
by Augustinian monks formed in 1328.
Soon, they were experimenting
with a new type of strong beer known as Bock.
Much as France was already famous
in the Medieval era for its wine.
Munich became known
for its quality beer, a reputation they tried to protect
by passing a beer purity law in 1516
declaring that the only ingredients
in beer could be water, barley, and hops,
yeast being considered part
of the production rather than an ingredient.
While this was not the first beer quality law,
in the Holy Roman Empire,
nor did it apply outside of Bavaria,
it was a masterful exercise in branding,
declaring to the European market
that Munich cared about its beer.
Not everyone though was so excited about hops.
The English in particular considered hop beer
repulsive and unhealthy, a drink for foreigners,
while unhopped, fermented ale was best for them.
Even Shakespeare weighed in, having his heroes drink ale
not beer and no wonder,
for his father was an official ale taster,
but beer was becoming more common in England.
By 1574, 36% of London brewers had switched
to hopped beer, leading to a competition
between the two drinks.
Unable to compete on longevity or its array of flavors,
English ale brewers began tinkering to increase the amount
of alcohol.
London's beer brewers retaliated until England was awash
in high proof mixes given hyperbolic names
like Dragon's milk and English beer became thus known
as both powerful and coming in a huge variety of flavors.
In fact, the English market was huge
with a large number of independent brewers.
This was partially because,
when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries,
their brewing operations got turned over to layman,
creating a thriving professional industry
large and respectable enough to form guilds,
but not everyone was happy about that.
For something like seven millennia, brewsters,
female brewers, weren't just at the center
of beer manufacturing, they were beer manufacturing
and provided they only sold to neighbors,
it stayed that way,
but when beer became a fully fledged industry,
women could no longer participate.
To do that, they would have to hire
and manage a staff, participate in guilds,
travel away from the home to ship goods,
and represent the brewery and sign contracts,
all things women at the time were barred
from doing.
Still, a few did, largely widows who showed
up at Guild meetings on behalf
of their family until children came of age,
yet that became less common over time.
Women were still part of the cycle,
but now they were the ones serving the beer, not making it.
Meanwhile, another group was starting to worry
about the effects of all this brewing,
the leaders of church and state.
At first, their concerns were centered around taverns.
In 1400, when Chaucer set his "Canterbury Tales"
in a tavern, a space where a knight could rub shoulders
with a miller, nuns, a pardoner, and a wife of bath,
he was reflecting the reality of his time.
Taverns were a secular space where,
by tradition, class distinctions were set aside
and people could speak freely.
This not only made it a congregating space
to rival that of churches
and clerics often complained of people being on a bench
in a tavern rather than on their knees in a chapel,
it also was a political center,
one that could be used to criticize the crown
or engage in sedition, especially because with enough beer,
things just kind of slip out like Martin Luther at his table
or the gunpowder plot, hatched in a series
of London taverns.
So yeah, they weren't really
off the mark on that sedition thing,
but there wasn't really much they could do.
Beer was a staple of life
and by Elizabeth's time,
London had a public house for every 125 residents,
meaning this boozy genie was well out of the bottle.
Leaders also increasingly worried
about drunkenness, a social ill that became more concerning
as European society professionalized
and became more advanced.
See, here's the thing about medieval peasants,
they didn't do a lot,
like they had to plant one season, harvest another,
keep animals, and get to church,
and that was kind of it.
They even had a lot of religious holidays,
meaning that if some were drunk here and there,
it wasn't that big an issue,
but then society started developing more specialist
artisan trades, ones with business dealings
where they had to fulfill contracts and to be places
on time, meaning being drunk became a bit more detrimental.
Some of the first concerns
around problem drinking centered around young students
at 13th century universities who were infamous
for imbibing mass quantities of wine
and terrorizing the residents of the town.
In both Oxford and Paris,
arguments over tavern bills broke into deadly rioting.
In Paris, it led to a two year student strike
after authorities killed several scholars
and after the townspeople of Oxford finally had enough,
formed mobs, and hung a few students,
a group of faculty and scholars fled
and formed a new university.
They called it Cambridge.
However, one part of the world had already acted
on this problem.
In the seventh century,
after a series of incidents among his followers,
the prophet Muhammad had decided
to outright ban Muslims drinking alcohol,
but Christianity wasn't exactly into that.
Not only did Jesus drink wine in the Bible,
one of his signature miracles was turning water into wine.
Plus in the Catholic church,
wine is a sacred part of communion
and lots of monasteries made money for the church
and the poor by brewing.
On the Protestant side,
they'd been instrumental in spreading the adoption of hops.
Again, a substance that was not taxed
and differed from the blend of spices monks used.
And while he did lament the drunkenness beer brought
at times, Luther himself loved a good brew
particularly if it was made with medicinal spices
to help his constipation.
In other words, beer had become an institution,
a substance so important
to European life, finance, and culture,
it could not be acted against.
So, it was informally agreed upon that instead
of banning the substance itself,
civil and church leaders would essentially tell people not
to go overboard.
Instead more scorn was heaped
on the newly created distilled spirits discovered
by alchemists.
Originally sold in single shot glasses as medicine,
they were increasingly being drunk for pleasure.
There was however, an outlier, one anabaptist reformer dared
to call on fellow Christians to abstain
from even beer and wine.
Drinking, he argued, inevitably led to sin.
His fellow Protestants promptly beheaded him.
But the 16th and 17th centuries were not only the era
of reformation, they were also the era
of exploration as the Spanish conquered Central
and South America and the Portuguese went to Asia.
They also discovered new worlds of alcohol.
In Peru, they found the Incas making maize beer.
The Aztecs, meanwhile fermented agave sap
into a cloudy beer like concoction which,
once distilled with European technology became mezcal
and tequila.
In China and Japan, sailors encountered fine rice wines.
Wherever they went,
they found drinks made from fruit, tree bark,
and palm sap,
but when the English landed in North America,
they contacted a people who,
while they fermented alcohol out of mesquite pods
and maple sap, depending on their region,
had not encountered stronger grain-based alcohols.
The settlers decided to change that,
so join us next time as we enter the age of revolution
where American rebels plot in taverns,
Catherine the Great swigs Russian Imperial stout,
and a long sea voyage puts the India into pale ale.
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(cheerful music)