The Naked Pint (8 page)

We can guarantee you that if you walk into a beer bar after taking basic Beer 101, you will outshine every other joker in the joint with your newfound beer manners. Not that this is a competition, but we all like to feel sexy and special, and competing for best outfit in the bar is a bit passé. The best way to stand out is to start dropping your beer lingo, to know what you want, and to ask for it directly. This intelligence and confidence is sexier than the blink of a skirt that model is wearing at the end of the bar.

Okay, you’ve passed Beer 101. Easy. How do you feel? You should feel like beer has been demystified a bit. You are now way ahead of most of the drinking public, and as you learn more about the beer styles and can pick out specific flavors, you will see the craft beer list begin to lose its mystery. You will start to group the beers together in your mind based on flavor and style guidelines, and you will know where to go when you want a bitter beer and how to find a sweet one. You’ve begun the Beer Journey. It only gets better from here ...

In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer.

—ALAN JOHN PERCIVALE TAYLOR, BRITISH HISTORIAN

G
reat beer is indeed an art form: Part science, part creativity, part perfect palate, and a special dose of a certain je ne sais quoi. One must have a strategy to create a great beer. The masterful brewer will lay out quality ingredients, make a specific recipe, and execute each step with great care and attention. She or he must, of course, use what is available, and the brewers from years past did the best they could with their environment, working with and sometimes combating wild yeast, wide temperature variations, failed crops of hops, or disappointing yields of barley. Whatever the circumstances, they brewed on. The great brewer will approach all of these setbacks with a quick change of plan, sometimes leading to unique beers—happy accidents that take on a life of their own. It’s important to be able to recognize this great effort when tasting your way through the craft beer world, to know when you are drinking a work of art.

After all, a Beer Journey isn’t just about drinking every style, it’s also about having a creative approach to your beer choices. It’s about understanding what makes certain beers stand out among others and asking yourself why. At this point, you should be forming some opinions and beginning to differentiate between beers based on flavor notes, giving your own personal opinion some gravitas, and anointing your palate to a higher calling. The following chapters break down the flavor profiles and history of different beer styles, from Hefeweizens to Barleywines, and this chapter arms you with the knowledge and skills needed to formulate an approach when evaluating a variety of beers. Now that you have mastered Beer 101, it’s time to examine the intricacies of tasting beer—the mouthfeel, the carbonation—to revere beer’s great history, and to seek out the deeper questions posed by each pint.

B
eer is old. We don’t mean Sistine Chapel old, we mean
old
old. We’re talking people-carving-notes-to-each-other-in-stone old. We’re talking sacrificing-goats-at-parties old. Beer is, in fact, arguably one of the oldest of all alcoholic drinks. Scientists have been able to date beer back to around 7000 BCE from remnants in ancient pottery found in what is now Iran. The Sumerians seem to have been the first to have made detailed notes about beer, one of the most famous pieces being “The Hymn to Ninkasi,” their goddess of alcohol.

No, the hymn doesn’t provide specific malt measurements, but it does mention familiar beer ingredients like water and grain. In fact, beer probably came about from baked grains (a sort of dough, porridge, or bread) that were wetted with water (which released sugars in the grain, making it sweeter) and left out for storage. Enter wild naturally occurring yeasts, and the concoction becomes an early, albeit strange, beer. In those days, there were no hops to be found, so spices, fruit (like dates), honey, and herbs were added to make the funky beer more palatable.

Beer happened all over the globe to many types of grain that were used to make dough or other mash: in China it was wheat, in Japan it was rice. Everyone found a way to turn the gift of harvested grain into a happy beverage.

Beer soon became a thing of ritual throughout history. The beverage is sometimes even given props as the savior of humanity. Without safe drinking water, beer often became the only sanitary beverage around. It was a choice between beer-o’clock around the clock or water that offered a cholera or dysentery bonus. And beer’s ingredients made it a substantial food at times. Beer has a lot of minerals, fiber, and antioxidants, which added a huge health benefit to the diet of early civilizations. There is also an argument that beer played a part in people’s settling down to plant and harvest instead of roaming and hunting. The idea being that as soon as they found beer, they stopped in their tracks and began planting and harvesting grains for the revered beverage. Sounds logical to us.

Beer even shows up in the first set of laws. Around 1780 BCE, Hammurabi created his code (in which is the origin of the famous “eye for an eye” punishment) and included in it rules for fairly pricing beer. He places responsibility for this on the tavern keeper (sometimes referred to as female). If the beer was overpriced, the tavern keeper would be drowned (Hammurabi was a bit of a hard-ass).

The Egyptians have been praised for their reverence of beer for centuries. Pharaoh Rameses II had a large brewing operation during his reign. Their god of beer was Osiris, and beer became a huge part of ritual in their society. Beer was offered as a fine gift to pharaohs, priestesses, and gods and was included among the possessions of those entering the afterlife (“Here’s to your ghost” was a popular toast). It is thought that in Egyptian culture, if a woman drank beer offered by a man, they were then married (think of all the people you’d be married to if that were still true, ladies). Beer was also used as medicine to treat patients and sometimes as payment for laborers instead of money.

Around 330 BCE, beer moved from Egypt to the Greeks, who had mainly been wine drinkers. The Greeks called their beer
Zythos
and were slow to embrace beer with open arms because they associated the drink with less-refined segments of society. The Greeks most likely taught the Romans how to brew. Romans are known for their love of wine, but they happily added beer to their beverage list. Our modern word
beer
comes from the Latin
bibere
, which means “to drink.” Pliny the Elder, a prolific Roman who wrote on many subjects, included notes on beer in his works. Julius Caesar was said to be a fan of a good brew, and legend tells that he toasted the crossing of the Rubicon with a cup of ale. The Romans then probably passed their beer recipes on to the Britons around 55 BCE, and the Britons would grow to love it more than wine.

The early Christians really took to beer. The monks got into brewing and found a certain calling, so to speak. The monastery was often the brewery and inn of the olden days. Pilgrims passing through town were offered a pint and a room by the monks as a respite from their journey. Beer in medieval times was a currency, sometimes used as a payment or tax. While good beer was considered a gift from the heavens, bad batches of beer were seen as the devil’s work because the science of beer was not yet fully understood. In the 1500s, women were burned if they were thought to be brew witches, satanic souls who were responsible for bad beer (can you imagine a man tasting the beer, declaring it was sour, and then perusing the drinking crowd for a poor lady who would be deemed responsible?).

The Pilgrims included beer among their necessities, and running out of beer was one of the deciding factors for stopping at Plymouth Rock, as we learned from William Bradford’s
History of Plymouth Plantation
: “We could not take much time for further search, our victuals being much spent, especially beer.” Female Pilgrims homebrewed for the family, using whatever ingredients they could find in the new land. Native Americans introduced corn to the Pilgrims, and this became a useful ingredient when barley was scarce.

During the 1500s, hops started to be regularly added to beer, and recipes began to take on more variety. (Though hops had been used for a long time in certain parts of the world, it wasn’t yet commonplace or required.) With hops, beer got better (fewer beer witches were burned, thank God). The hops were revered for their preservative quality, and the hopped beer started to replace the beer made with
gruit
, an herb mixture used to flavor beer. As some countries tried to hold on to the tradition of hop-free beer, the public found new love for the drier drink. The Germans, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, passed the famous Reinheitsgebot, requiring all beer be made with only malt, water, and hops (they didn’t know about the details of yeast yet). The Germans also began to lager beers, storing the beer at cool temperatures and creating a style that would become the new favorite. In the 1840s, the first Pilsner was born in Plzen, Bohemia, and the lager style flourished. In America in the 1800s, the influx of German immigrants brought with them new styles, like the Weiss beer and the lagering method of fermentation. Americans soon began to brew these lighter styles instead of the common Porter of the time.

In 1876, Louis Pasteur brought beer forward by describing the basis for fermentation in his work
Etudes sur la Bière
(Studies on Beer). In it, he determined that beer was fermented not by chemicals but by microorganisms—that is, yeast. He noted that bacteria, mold, and wild yeast were often responsible for the sour beer that plagued France and other countries. With this new understanding, he and other scientists began to refine techniques that could contain impurities like bacteria, and thus quality control for beer could be effectively implemented. The process of killing such bacteria and stabilizing beer would come to be known as pasteurization.

As brewers began to understand how temperature and bacteria affected their brewing process, lagers and ales could be shipped, and beer became an even bigger business. When the Industrial Revolution gave birth to improvements in road and railway transportation, and with the invention of automatic bottling, a beer could be shipped far and wide. In the 1870s, Adolphus Busch perfected a design for double walled railcars that could keep the beer cool using ice.

By 1880, there were more than 2,000 breweries in the United States alone. Compare that to the early 1990s, when five breweries produced almost 90% of the country’s beer, and you can see how competition increased and circumstances changed for beer in our country. One of these circumstances was economic. World War I and the Great Depression made quality ingredients for beer hard to come by, and this is when a lot of lower-quality adjuncts like corn and sugar entered the beer scene in a big way. And the start of Prohibition in 1920 didn’t help things (everything good is forbidden at some point in time). This forced many breweries to shut their doors due to a lack of business.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, only 160 breweries survived in America. The beer that emerged in modern times was the pasteurized lager, and the companies that mass-produced this beer made huge profits. Around 1960, Budweiser was selling around 10 million barrels a year. Pasteurized light lager was popular in many countries other than America; it remained the dominating beer in the business. By the 1970s, about 44 breweries were operating in America.

The craft/microbrew revolution began in 1976 in Sonoma, California, at a brewery called New Albion, founded by a passionate homebrewer. Though this brewery lasted only six years, it set fire to other homebrewers, who began to follow suit and open small operations. The 1980s were a time for microbrew pioneers (and big hair and shoulder pads), experimenting with styles far more varied than the light lagers dominating the market. The late 1990s were good for American craft beer, as breweries gained in profit, and by 2000, there were about 1,400 breweries in America.