A Heady History of Beer

The Irish like it black, Czechs blond and Berliners white, with a dash of raspberry syrup. The British drink it warm, Americans cold enough to numb the palate. Expectant German mothers take it for nourishment, Nigerian males drink it to increase their virility and Malaysians wash their babies in it to protect them from disease. Scandinavians restrict its sale as an intoxicant, while neighboring Russians promote it as an antidote to drunkenness. It goes by many names--beer, ale, stout, piwo, fairy godmother and devil's brew--but whatever you call it, next to water, it is the most popular beverage on earth.

In 1970, the world drank 6.2 billion liters (almost 1.6 billion gallons) of the foaming brew, enough to float a navy. This is double the consumption of 20 years ago, but only half of what it is expected to be ten years hence. It has replaced sake, raki and pulque as the national drinks of Japan, Turkey and Mexico, respectively. It is making deep inroads in the traditionally wine-drinking nations of southern Europe. In Spain, which now supports 43 large breweries, production and imports of beer have doubled since 1960. Consumption in Portugal and Italy jumped 60 percent during the same period. When young recruits doing their military service in France requested beer with their meals four years ago, even the beermakers were shocked. "In my time, this would have been unthinkable," says the chief of the French brewers' syndicate. "The tradition of red wine with meals is as old as the French army itself."

The surging popularity of beer represents not so much a new taste as the return to an ancient one, for beer is older than recorded history. Beer pots and brewing utensils have been unearthed in excavations of neolithic campsites all over Europe. Sumerian tablets dating back 5000 years accurately describe the making of four kinds of beer, including dark beer, light beer, beer with a head on it and a sacred brew that could be served only by priestesses in temples. Babylonian inscriptions list "clarified beer" as one of the provisions taken aboard Noah's ark. An edict of King Hammurabi in 1800 B.C. ordered brewers who watered their beer to be imprisoned in their own vats and barmaids who overcharged for it to be thrown into the river. Egyptian Pharaohs used beer as medicine, sacrificed it to the gods and were buried alongside great pots of it to slake their thirst during their journey into the next world. Although, curiously, there is no mention of beer in the Bible, the Jewish sage Maimonides states that it was the customary drink of the ancient Hebrews. It is referred to frequently in the Talmud and at least three of the rabbis who compiled that tome were, themselves, professional brewers.

In medieval times, beer was a mainstay of the diet of northern Europe, where housewives not only baked the bread but did the brewing for their families. Saxon councils would make no important decision until they had deliberated the matter over beer. In Norse law, contracts made in the beerhouse were as binding as those made in court, while "beerhouse testimony" had the same weight as if sworn to in church. Every college at Oxford and Cambridge had its own brewery; British barons specified a standard measure for ale in the Magna Charta; German municipalities installed beer taverns, or rathskellers, in the basements of their town halls. Monasteries and nunneries found beer so profitable a source of income that in some places it became a monopoly of the Church. Many excellent German brews, such as Franziskaner, Paulaner and Augustiner, still bear the names of the religious orders that originated them.

The monks are also credited with developing the first "strong beers" (five to six percent alcohol) to help them get through their Lenten fasts without losing too much weight. Disturbed at first that the unwonted gaiety the strong beer induced might conflict with the austerity expected during the season, a Bavarian abbot in the 16th Century sent a barrel to the Vatican for an opinion. After one taste of the bitter brew, the wine-drinking Roman cardinals not only approved its use but actually commended the monks for the extra penance they imposed on themselves by drinking it. Ever since then, strong beer has been a springtime ritual in southern Germany.

Actually, the cardinals' revulsion may have been due as much to the viscosity of the beverage as to its taste, since it was as thick as barley soup. As an official test of purity, in England and Germany, beer inspectors or aleconners, wearing leather breeches, would pour the beer onto a wooden bench and sit on it until it evaporated. If the bench did not stick to their pants when they arose, the brewers were flogged.

Despite its shortcomings, beer was drunk in vast quantities by all classes of society. A certain lady in waiting at the court of Henry VIII was allowed a gallon at breakfast, a gallon at dinner, another at tea and a fourth before going to bed. Henry's daughter, Queen Elizabeth, favored beer so strong "that no man durst touch it." The Dutch burgher of the 17th Century is estimated to have drunk 360 liters annually, seven times more than his modern descendants.

The reason was as much hygienic as gustatory. Although people at the time had no way of knowing it, the heat of brewing killed the cholera and typhus bacilli that infested the rivers and canals. They simply knew that people who drank beer stayed healthier and lived longer.

To live without beer was unthinkable. The Mayflower Pilgrims chose to land on the barren coast of Massachusetts in 1620, rather than proceed to the lusher lands to the south, largely because they had run out of beer and thus "could not now take time for further search or consideration," as one of them wrote in his diary. They had brought cooper John Alden to make barrels, and one of the first structures they erected was a brewhouse. Presidents George Washington and James Madison owned breweries, while Thomas Jefferson sent to Bohemia for malters to relieve the local shortage. By the 19th Century, breweries had grown so large that eight people drowned in London when a 20,000-barrel vat burst. More fortunate were the oil drillers in Pennsylvania who struck a beer gusher in 1881, when they accidentally blasted into a storage cave filled with aging barrels.

Naturally, so flourishing an industry did not escape the attention of the taxgatherers. Beer taxes helped build the dikes of Holland in the 13th Century, finance Henry V's victory at Agincourt in the 15th and repel the Turks from the gates of Vienna in the 16th. The imposts have not always been suffered willingly. In 1848, when Louis I of Bavaria raised the tax on beer by a pfennig a bottle, to meet the lavish expenditures of his beautiful Irish mistress, Lola Montez, riots ensued that drove Lola out of the country and almost toppled the throne.

Thanks to its early start and great population, the United States is the largest beer-consuming nation on earth, although its annual per-capita consumption of 70 liters is comparatively modest. By comparison, the average Britisher drinks 100 liters yearly, Australians 124, Belgians 135, Czechoslovaks 132 and West Germans 139.

But if beer can be said to have a world capital, the honor must surely go to the state of Bavaria, which boasts one fourth of the world's breweries, over 1400, some of which have been in continuous production for seven centuries. The average adult Bavarian drinks 440 liters of beer a year, enough to fill a swimming pool.

The Bavarians have a different beer and beer festival for every season, culminating with the world's largest annual folk gathering, Munich's Oktoberfest, which for some reason actually begins in September. During its 16 days, 6,000,000 visitors, including many flown in by chartered planes, pack into tents the size of railroad depots to gulp down 4,000,000 liter-sized krags of beer, along with acres of white radishes, 800,000 pairs of sausages, 400,000 chickens and a herd of oxen roasted on spits. During other nights of the year, Munichers gather in the city's giant beer halls, such as the Hofbrauhaus and Salvatorkeller, each of which holds over 6000 people. Seated on long benches, they roar songs at the top of their lungs, as they sway to and fro with their arms linked, while buxom, dirndl-clad barmaids race up and down the long aisles bearing great armfuls of flowing steins.

By contrast to this boisterous Gemütlichkeit, the 66,000 public houses of the British Isles are bastions of individualism. The pub, or "local," is a second home to which to retire after the day's work is done, and the publican and his wife work hard to create a living-room or clublike atmosphere. Music and song are rare, voices seldom raised. In the tavern's back room, or "snug," a man can read, stare into space or write his plays or novels, as authors from Shakespeare to James Joyce have done, without being disturbed.

Entertainment in the pub is traditionally furnished by darts, billiards or shove-ha'penny matches and--although they are fast disappearing--ancient bowling games such as skittles. For greater excitement, there are beer-drinking contests. Some pubs have special yard-long, cone-shaped glasses to test the speed at which clients can consume a yard of ale. The sport is not confined to men. A Buckinghamshire youth recently offered ten shillings to anyone who could beat him in a fastest-pint duel and was outdrunk by a 168-pound blonde, who downed her glass in four seconds flat. Some competitions require greater agility. Students attempting the "King's Street run" at Cambridge must gulp down a pint of beer at each of the eight pubs along a 500-yard stretch of road in less than two hours.

The addiction to beer is not hard to understand. It is comparatively cheap, infinitely thirst-quenching, enjoyable with food or without and has sufficient alcohol to stimulate the senses, but not enough to lead to quick intoxication. Strong beers may contain as much as eight percent alcohol, weak ones as little as one percent, while some in Finland and Jordan claim to have almost none at all. Ninety percent of all beers consumed today, however, contain between three and four percent alcohol--as compared with 12 percent in table wines and 40 to 50 percent in hard liquors.

Until the late 19th Century, beermaking was a great gamble, a mysterious process that the brewers themselves did not understand. Brewers' yeast consisted of random mixtures of cultures that continuously varied. No new beer ever tasted quite like the previous batch. It was often ruined by wild yeast and lactic acid cells floating in the air, or it turned sour in the vats when temperatures rose. To keep the beer cold during fermentation, breweries installed huge ice cellars, stocked during winter with ice blocks cut from nearby lakes or imported from Norway and Sweden. They brewed as long as the ice lasted, then closed down until winter.

Small wonder that brewing was linked with black magic. Secular brewers recited incantations to keep evil spirits away; monks sang hymns and prayed to Saint Gambrinus (although he was actually not a saint but a 13th Century Flemish brewer named Jan Primus). All brewhouses bore cabalistic signs and slogans. A 16th Century brewer who discovered the trick of re-using his yeast to make his beer consistent was burned as a wizard, for conspiracy with the Devil.

Two of the men who finally killed the demons that spoil beer were German engineer Carl Linde, who improved refrigeration techniques for beer around 1874, and Louis Pasteur, whose 1876 classic work, Studies on Beer, explained the composition of yeast and defined the fermentation process. Although Pasteur's patriotic intent was to make French beer the equal of German brews, the entire world profited from his research. The difference in taste of beers today is more likely to result from the type of yeast strain used than from any other factor. A brewer's yeast is his most prized asset, cultivated in germfree laboratories and carefully guarded. Like a spark in a sawmill, a single wild yeast spore or lactic-acid germ can wreak havoc in a brewery, giving the beer a milky taste and appearance, rendering the entire batch worthless. To avoid such dangers, breweries must be kept as sanitary as hospitals. Ten times more water is used for cleaning and scrubbing than in the beer itself. There are no dusty corners, waste bins nor even dirty fingernails in a well-run brewhouse.

Although the basic production steps in making beer are the same throughout the world, there are almost as many variations of the process as there are breweries, which accounts for the difference in character between one brand and another. Danish and Dutch beers are generally the lightest-bodied in Europe; Belgian beer, highest in alcohol. To get the white color and acidy taste Berliners like requires the use of considerable rice. Other exotic flavors can be created by drying the malt in wood smoke, adding sugar for sweetening or making the brew entirely from wheat. Sometimes local tastes require brewers to vary their beers for different districts, although the labels on the bottles may be the same. A beer that is just right for Paris is not bitter enough for Alsace. Dubliners like their stout with a high "clerical collar" of foam, but the parsimonious drinkers of Limerick demand small heads, on the theory that the more bubbles, the less beer in the glass. "Is this the best beer you can make?" I once asked a Venezuelan brewer. "By no means," was his surprising answer. "But it is the best beer I can sell in Caracas."

Despite regional differences, beers throughout the world fall into two well-defined categories--Münchener and Pilsner. The former is a golden-hued lager, somewhat heavy-bodied but mild in flavor and alcoholic content; the latter, while lighter in color and body, is more alcoholic and tart in taste, with a notably creamy head. However, the München and Pilsen types made in other countries are apt to be quite different from those produced in the cities of their origin. By a law dating back to 1615, Munich beers must be made entirely of barley malt, without the admixture of the cheaper wheat, maize, rice and other grains used elsewhere. In Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, the law is even stricter. Since King Wenceslaus II founded the town in 1295, only Bohemian-grown barley and hops, water and yeast have been used.

In contrast to some of the ultramodern stainless-steel-and-glass palaces of Europe and America, where beer is made by white-coated technicians tending flickering electronic instrument panels, a trip to the Urquell (meaning original source) brewery in Pilsen is a voyage into the past. Urquell beer is still made as it was centuries ago, brewed in coal-fired boilers, fermented in giant 2500-liter oak casks that fill six miles of limestone caves underneath the city. No concession is made to modern tastes, production methods nor even to meeting the world's demand. "We spend two years studying each new brewing technique as it comes along--before rejecting it," says Ivo Hlavecek, a fourth-generation brew-master. The length of brewing time--15 to 25 weeks, as compared with three or four at most other breweries--and the amount of hand labor required make Urquell Pilsner the most costly beer in the world to produce. To most brew-masters, it is the king of beers.

The beers of the British Isles, although vastly different from those of the Continent, have an equally venerable tradition. But with over 2000 varieties from which to choose, they are as difficult for a foreigner to understand as the British monetary system once was. One principal type is stout, which is a very dark, heavy-bodied, velvety brew, strong in alcohol but weak in hops. The other major category is ale, which is amber in color and comes in a wide assortment of subtypes, including mild, bitter, light, pale and brown. The first two are draught beers, the rest are bottled, but the names are deceptive. Mild ale, for example, sounds like a weak beer. Actually, it is darker and more highly alcoholic than bitter, which is the same as (concluded on page 186) History of Beer (continued from page 114) pale, which, for variety, is sometimes called Burton--after the city where most of it is made. To add to the confusion, draught beer means ale drawn from wooden barrels, while keg beer refers to the same brew in aluminum barrels.

By tradition, beermaking is a happy industry. Brewery employees in Europe, who have always been among the best-paid industrial workers, received social-security protection, old-age pensions and medical and educational grants for their families long before such benefits were enacted into law. To add to their contentment, they are usually allowed to drink their fill of beer while on the job--six bottles daily in Denmark, 68 weekly in Bavaria. The same magnanimity extends to visitors. Most breweries maintain convenient taprooms where deliverymen, postmen, business callers and tourists are invited to have a glass on the house.

It would seem there is no end in sight to the beer boom. Breweries have proliferated from Tromsö in northern Norway to Punta Arenas on the Chilean tip of South America. "A national brewery is the first industry every new nation seems to want," observed a UN economic advisor. To meet their demands, European beermakers have opened plants abroad. Famous Danish brands are now brewed in Morocco and Turkey; Irish stout, in Nigeria and Malaysia; Dutch beer, in Baghdad and Curaçao, where, for the lack of any other source, it is made with distilled sea water.

Delighted as the brewers are with the increased sales, they are decidedly unhappy at the way their delicate brews are too often ruined by unsophisticated purveyors and consumers. Contrary to popular belief, beer is a sensitive, prima-donna beverage that must be treated with care. If too roughly handled in shipment, it can become bruised, bilious or seasick--to use the brewer's own terms. If exposed too long to light, it may be sun-struck. If too old, it can taste astringent, acidy or metallic. American beers are deliberately made thin enough to be drunk at near-freezing temperatures. But richer European beers, if chilled below 45 degrees Fahrenheit, are apt to lose their delicate flavor, turn cloudy or produce a sediment. British ale and stout require even higher temperatures, 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If drunk too cold, the carbon dioxide will not escape on the tongue but in the stomach.

Above all, beer should be drunk fresh and never more than six months old. It gains nothing through storage. Bottles should be kept in dark, cool places. If put in the refrigerator, they should stand upright, exposing the smallest liquid surface to the air in the bottle. If stored on their side, they will go flat much faster. If you prefer draught beer, frequent a tavern with the largest turnover, since a barrel that has been tapped for longer than two or three days loses much of its taste and carbonation. Ideally, it should be emptied within 24 hours.

The proper way to serve beer is with a head on its body. This can be done by splashing a little into the bottom of the glass, so that a foamy head is created that will protect the carbonation--wait a moment--then decanting the rest down the inside of the glass held at an angle. Or you can simply pour it slowly straight into the glass. (One exception to the rule is British stout, which may not form a head at all unless the liquid is poured against the side of the glass.) Grease is beer's worst enemy, destroying the foam in seconds. Beer glasses should be used for no other purpose and must be kept out of the kitchen, where they are exposed to greasy steam.

To the dedicated beer drinker, however, any beer is better than none, no matter what its condition or the circumstances under which it's drunk. When Irish rebels set up roadblocks during the time of the troubles, the only vehicles they allowed through were hearses, ambulances--and beer trucks. One of Sir Francis Chichester's greatest worries during his one-man voyage around the world, perhaps equal to wind and weather, was his beer keg, which had no gauge on it. Although his supply of suds turned warm as soup in the tropics, he lived in fear that every glass he drew might be his last. And when members of the British Trans-Arctic Expedition reached the North Pole over the ice, recently, they discovered that the beer they'd taken along to celebrate the occasion had frozen solid. Undeterred, they opened the cans and licked the frozen brew like Popsicles.