Travels with Barley (12 page)

Shakespeare at least lived in the proper age to experience one revolution in British tastes—the introduction of hops to British brewing. One theory has it that the Brits, soldiering in the Low Countries, developed a taste for hopped Dutch beer and began importing hop vines by the early 140Os, more than 300 years after they had been widely used in the rest of Europe. Xenophobic Britons at first rebelled, calling the hops an “adulteration” and “wicked weed” and outlawing them for a while. The Brits came to their senses and by 1700 British beer was thoroughly hopped. In fact, by the 182Os the now mad-for-hops English were shipping thousands of barrels of the strong, hoppy beers known as India Pale Ale to the Subcontinent.

In the early 1840s, the world beer road would suddenly diverge when brewers in Pilsen, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), introduced lager that was for the first time as clear and golden as much beer is today, a style that would come to be called Pilsner. The development of pale malt was a major factor, together with the fact that lager yeast, unlike top-fermenting ale yeast, ferments and settles out at the bottom of brewing vessels and can thus more easily be removed. Coupled with the startling invention of clear glass for drinking ware (until that time, beer had been drunk in stone, ceramic, or metal vessels), beer was no longer simply nourishment and a mood elevator: it was beautiful.

American beer would be some derivation of British ale until lager reached these shores with the German brewing invasion starting in the 184Os. Since early colonists could hardly rely on British imports for all their beer needs they began immediately to brew their own. Virginia colonists were making beer with corn as early as 1587; in 1609, America's first “Help Wanted” ads appeared in London newspapers seeking brewers to come to Virginia. In 1613, Adrian Block, a Dutch explorer, set up a brewhouse in a log cabin at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, gaining credit for establishing the first brewery in the New World.

American colonists plotted revolution in their New World taverns. The famous Boston Tea Party of December 1773 inspired colonial rebels to converge over pints in Fraunces Tavern in New York City to plan a similar raid on British ships in the Hudson River. (You can still order a pint of British ale there today, or you can have a Budweiser.) Beer, in fact, had become as contentious as tea. As early as 1750, colonists had organized boycotts of British beer, accusing the Brits of dumping cheap ale on the colonies to suppress the nascent American brewing industry. George Washington was said to be fond of a new British style of beer called porter (a rich, dark ancestor to stout) but publicly agitated for his fellow citizens, in one of the first “buy-American” campaigns, to drink American-made porters. (One irony: porters have virtually disappeared from Britain but are being kept alive by numerous U.S. brewers, including Yuengling in Pennsylvania. In fact, America, thanks largely to the craft brew revolution, has become a kind of ark for numerous international beer styles that are no longer being made in their native countries.) During the War of Independence, Washington and his troops drank a concoction called spruce beer that was indeed beer flavored with an extract made from boiling spruce twigs (in lieu of hops). However it tasted, it offers one explanation for the term “spruced up”—for surely the world to Washington's soldiers looked brighter and snappier after they had drunk their daily quart allowance.

Beer took off after the Revolution and by 1810 there were 132 commercial breweries pumping out 185,000 barrels of beer a year for a population of about seven million. That same year, President James Madison entertained a petition to set up a national brewery in Washington, D.C., the petitioners explaining that not only was beer good for American commerce but it was a foil against a rising demon stalking the land—whiskey and other forms of hard liquor that were growing in popularity. But Madison demurred after his advisor on the matter, Thomas Jefferson, pointed out that private enterprise seemed to be handling America's beer needs just fine.

Beer was an early example of the industrialization of a popular commodity; the first American steam engine was installed in a brewery in Philadelphia in 1819 and brewing was largely a mechanized industry by the time of the Civil War, when the number of breweries had grown to more than 1,250. Beer was also an extremely lucrative business; Matthew Vassar, a self-educated man who became both a brewer and barley-malter, had done so well by 1861 that he donated 200 acres of land plus half of his ale fortune—$408,000, a huge sum for the times—toward the founding of the nation's first high-quality women's college. Though now coed, it is still called Vassar College and its students still occasionally break out in grateful song, to wit:

American beer's first truly golden commercial age still awaited it, however, and its foundations were laid by the arrival of an estimated one million or more German immigrants fleeing the royal revolts and counterrevolts, high taxes, and scarce land of the fatherland—and bringing their newfangled beer style with them. The beer, of course, was lager in the Pilsner style and the first American lager brewery is said to have opened in 1840 in Philadelphia. In less than three decades, immigrant Germans whose names would live long in American brewing would join the lager fray. In 1842, the Schaefer brothers opened a commercial lager brewery in New York City; in 1844, Jacob Best founded a lager brewery in Milwaukee and later bequeathed the operation to his partner and son-in-law Frederick Pabst. Jacob's son, Charles Best, also operated a Milwaukee lager brewery known as the Plank Road Brewery but sold it in 1855 to a newly arrived young brewer named Frederick Miller. Joseph Schlitz, who had worked as a bookkeeper for Milwaukee brewer August Krug, took over management of the brewery when Krug died in 1856 and two years later married Krug's widow. He renamed the operation the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. (and, alas, drowned in a shipwreck a year later). In St. Louis, a well-to-do soap manufacturer named Eberhard Anheuser bought out his partners in the small Bavarian Brewery in 1860 and a few years later put his son-in-law Adolphus Busch to work there. Adolphus later took over the brewery and changed the name to the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association.

By 1872, the year Adolphus Busch first began bottling beer for shipping in a nascent and novel quest to build a national brand, lager was beginning to chase ale from the American beer scene. A surge in population and the popularity of this new, pale, easy-to-drink beer had pushed the number of breweries in America to 4,131—a record never since surpassed. That number is understandable given that beer didn't yet travel well; it was still mostly unpasteurized and stored in and poured from wooden kegs in taverns, bottled brew being yet a novelty. By necessity, then, beer was a localized enterprise, with breweries springing up on the fringes of working-class neighborhoods in easy access to the numerous and thriving saloons that served those workers. New York City alone once supported seventy-five breweries; Philadelphia and Chicago had more than fifty each (though Chicago had many fewer after a certain incident involving Mrs. O'Leary's cow). Meanwhile, Milwaukee, the self-proclaimed “Beer Capital of the World,” staked that claim not on brewery numbers but on the basis of being home to many of the nation's largest breweries, including Blatz, Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz.

The neighborhood brewery model was soon rendered obsolete with the coming of ubiquitous railroad transportation, which made shipping easier and faster, and the development of mechanical ice-making machines and refrigeration, which was critical to the storing, shipping, and serving of lager, which needs to be kept and drunk cold. And not least, also, was the process of pasteurization developed by the brilliant French biologist and chemist Louis Pasteur. Having already shown that unseen microbes spoiled beer (and milk and wine) and could be eradicated by applying heat and pressure, Pasteur in 1876 rocked the beer world by publishing his treatise,
Studies on Beer
, proving definitively for the first time that distinctive strains of yeast were responsible for fermentation. (Pasteur had hoped this knowledge would get his fellow Frenchmen interested in beer but it was the Germans, of whom Pasteur was not fond, who took advantage of it.)

In this new beer universe, where pasteurized, refrigerated beer could travel great distances, Adolphus Busch's notions of a national brand didn't seem so far-fetched. A single large brewery could operate on economies of scale heretofore unknown, and replace a dozen neighborhood ones. Wave after wave of closings and consolidations followed, and the first rounds of the Lager Wars saw the number of breweries fall to about 2,800 by 1880 and to about 1,500 in the decade before Prohibition in 1920. (Among consolidation's victims was Matthew Vassar's ale brewery, which simply declined to make lager and went out of business in 1896.) By 1933, the end of Prohibition, that grand, failed experiment in temperance, there were only about 750 breweries left in the U.S. America would come out of World War II with fewer than 500—whereupon another round of consolidation would begin.

Prohibition, however, did give America a new approach to distributing beer: the Twenty-first Amendment which rolled back the Eighteenth Amendment and ended Prohibition, also effectively ended the “tied house” system through which brewers previously controlled bars and other outlets. The amendment cleared the way for Congress and the states to create what is known as the Three-Tier System, a highly regulated class of independent beer distributors to act as middlemen between the brewers and the retailers. One consequence of this has been the making of a resilient and potent grassroots political base for beer. (More about beer politics later.)

From the time of the German lager invasion through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the end of World War II, American beer underwent not only further changes in style but also changes in perception. Many of America's early German lager brewers had brought with them a solemn adherence to the
Reinheitsgebot
, the German Purity Law of 1516, which mandates that all beer be made solely with malted barley and hops (and later amended to include yeast, once yeast was discovered). But early on, so-called adjuncts began to find their way into beer production, with brewers adding starchy grains—corn was popular, while Anheuser-Busch used rice—to their malt. Brewers saw two advantages of this: first, it produced a beer even paler, drier, and lighter-tasting than the original Pilsner model most brewed. Second: adjuncts also significantly shaved brewing costs by adding an inexpensive starch to the fermenting proses—i.e., they were a cheap way to achieve alcohol levels. The move to adjuncts gained momentum during the Great Depression, and later during World War II, when beer makers were forced to find cheap alternatives to survive or because of shortages. Even when the shortages eased, many brewers, fond of the cost savings of adjuncts, never went back to pure malt beer. By the 1950s, this light, adjunct-adulterated style had a name: American Standard.

But it wasn't simply that lager had become paler and lighter and even easier to drink or that beer had become big business. Where once beer had been the beverage of kings, pharaohs, gods, and goddesses; where once the Founding Fathers of the new nation had expressed their fondness for beer as publicly as the tinker and the soldier, beer by the 1880s in America began to develop a distinctly working-class aura. The nineteenth-century beer hall became the favored meeting place of the rising trade union movement, a movement that, though it unquestionably improved the lives of millions of American workers, also had at its fringes a violent and hooligan side.

In 1882, beer saw its first high-profile alliance with sports when the relatively new game of baseball underwent a schism and a group calling itself the American Association broke off from the National League. The issue: the National League had just doubled ticket prices, banned Sunday play (the working stiff's day of leisure), and, worse, prohibited the sale of beer at games, all in the hopes of attracting a better sort of fan. Franchise owners in major beer hubs like St. Louis and Philadelphia revolted and started their new league with rolledback ticket prices, Sunday play, and plenty of cold, cheap lager for sale. The league, ridiculed as the Whiskey and Beer League by the opposition, didn't last long but the equation—sports + beer = fun and working-class camaraderie—endures even now.

Of course, the working-class affection for beer had a dark side—the intractable problems of alcoholism and public drunkenness, both considered moral failings in the nineteenth century—and starting in the 187Os, there were many organizations happy to point that out. One was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, whose most famous member would be the six-foot-tall, saloon-smashing Carrie Nation, who once said: “Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils.” The Anti-Saloon League, formed in 1883, would join forces with the WCTU and others in the long and inexorable run-up to Prohibition.

Big Beer helped arm them. Given what a cutthroat business beer had become, numerous big beer companies engaged in rather appalling practices to both lock up large numbers of saloons to sell their brands exclusively, and devious incentives, like free lunches based upon beer purchases, designed to relieve the working man of his hard-earned money and send him home drunk and intemperate. The Anti-Saloon League, made up mostly of Eastern and Midwestern elites, many from the clergy class, conducted a particularly vigorous public relations campaign that painted beer joints as dens of crime, prostitution, and the debauchers of the morals of American youth. In one measure of how far beer was heading down the class-ladder rung, consider the remarks by Richard P. Hobson, an Alabama congressman, in his vote in favor of an early form of the legislation that would eventually banish beer and booze from America for thirteen years. Its essence: that beer and moderate drinking were in fact
more dangerous
to the public health than drunkenness and whiskey.