Brew Ha Ha
Civilization's Fascination with Suds Just Keeps Fermenting
One day, many tens of thousands of years ago ­ perhaps on a Tuesday ­ a man in ancient Babylon took some water from the Euphrates River, germinated some barley in it, fermented it with, and tasted it.
“Hey,” he said to himself (in Sumerian). “This would taste pretty good with pizza.”
Unfortunately, pizza would not be invented for several thousand years. In the meantime, he and his fellow Babylonians drank his creation with other meals, at celebrations, and on Friday nights after a hard week of toiling away at creating codified laws and inventing indoor plumbing and whatever else ancient Babylonians toiled away.
The creation was called beer.
Beer, which transforms even the most bashful partygoer into the Lord of the Dance. Beer, which transforms even the most sedate sports fan into an epithet-hurling boor. Beer, which transforms even the most unappealing dance floor partner into the sort of person with whom you might like to have breakfast tomorrow morning.
You can’t help but love the stuff.
Great brews in history
The age and influence of beer is impressive. The brewing of beer is described on Babylonian clay tablets dating as far back as 4300 B.C., but in fact beer was brewed and consumed all over the ancient world, and likely discovered in several lands simultaneously. The ancient Chinese, the Assyrians, the Incas ­ they were all beer drinkers. The ancient Roman historians Pliny and Tacitus quaffed brew with the Saxons and the Celts. A few years ago, an English brewery made a batch of beer from a recipe found in one of the temples of Queen Nefertiti, who ruled Egypt along the sandy shores of the Nile in the 14th century B.C.
As the world turned and civilizations rose and fell, beer persisted. It found its way into northern countries with climates too unforgiving to cultivate grapes and thrived there, safe from competition with wine, another fermented drink that had gained a foothold farther to the south. By the 11th century A.D., German brewers were adding hops to their beer, giving it a more bitter tang and elevating its sedative effect. By 1420, the beer family tree had two distinct branches: ales and lagers. By the time the Mayflower landed on the shores of Massachusetts 200 years later, German beer was being sold in bottles. In 1935, the G. Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, N.J., began selling their beer in steel cans.
To many, Germany still dominates the beer trade, with its dark, turbid brews that take whole minutes to pour into a glass. But one look in the refrigerator of a good tavern shows that brewing is still a worldwide trade: Labatt’s from Canada, Corona from Mexico, Grolsch from Belgium, Guinness from Ireland, Tsingdao from China.
America’s mug
But in America, beer is truly the people’s beverage, the drink of the masses. The ancient world may be the birthplace of brewing and Germany may be where it matured to adulthood, but America is where beer has settled comfortably to raise kids and maybe buy a minivan.
Consider these figures: In 1993, retail sales of beer in the United States exceeded $45 billion. The U.S. ranks as the 13th country worldwide in total gallons of beer consumed, and produces 20 percent of all the beer consumed in the world. That’s more than any other country on Earth.
Beer grew in northern countries like Germany because the local weather didn’t allow for the cultivation of wine grapes. It took a foothold in American pop culture for the same reason, says Thad McDonough.
“In our society beer is served more than wine,” he says. “Our climate doesn’t permit us to have any vineyards or excellent wineries.”
As manager of Al’s Tavern on Eighth Avenue, McDonough slides dozens of battles and glasses down the mahogany each night. Beer, he notes, can be brewed anywhere; wine requires a sun-drenched valley in central California. Where people in France guzzle wine in their off hours, people in Pennsylvania and New York and Chicago and Atlanta down yeast-fermented barley and hops.
But the reasons for the continued popularity of beer are manifold. For one, it’s cheap. Many of McDonough’s patrons sidle up to the bar and ask for a price list. A glass of Coors Lite goes for less than a couple of bucks, and many bars and restaurants offer quarter-draft special nights.
Also ­ and this may come as a surprise ­ beer is popular because of its low alcohol content relative to wine and liquor. You can go to a bar with friends, down five Yuengling Porters and, though your ability to drive home may be impaired, you’ll still be standing up and moderately coherent. After the same amount of Jack Daniel’s of Peppermint Schnapps, you’re more likely to pass out shirtless in your boss’s bed of prizewinning peonies.
Beer is also popular for the same reason cookies and detergent and soda pop are popular: It’s heavily advertised, on television, in magazines, on billboards, and just about anyplace else Madison Avenue can slither its way into. Beer is one of the most-advertised products on television ­ certainly the most-advertised alcoholic beverage ­ and its catchphrases are instantly recognizable.
Think about: Tastes Great, Less Filling. How to Speak Australian. Wassuuuuuuuuuuuuup.
And more and more advertisers are trying to pull younger drinkers in ­ hence Budweiser’s “wassup” campaign. In the past decade or so, the younger crowd has been ordering Coors Lite after Coors Lite, says McDonough. Bud wants to pull some of those drinkers into its own camp, he surmises. The theory: Get ‘em as soon as they’re legal.
“Bud is trying to get back some of the drinkers they’ve lost,” he said. “Their goal is to have those drinkers for life.”
And despite the variety of pilsners, stouts, IPAs, hefeweisens, porters, lambics and marzens on the market (a list of beers brewed in Colorado alone reads like a list of endangered species in a rainforest) most drinkers still lean toward the old standards: Coors, Bud, Miller. In 1997, Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors were the top three sellers in the United States, followed closely by other familiar brands like Genessee, Rolling Rock and Pabst. Anheuser-Busch, the creators of Budweiser, sold a little over 91 million barrels of beer in ’97, or 2.8 billion gallons, or about 30 billion cans of beer. That’s five cans of beer for every man, woman and child on the planet.
Wassup, indeed.
The great microbrew explosion
But most folks don’t think about how many options are available to them when they order a pint glass full of suds. Since the ‘90s, microbreweries have abounded in the United States, appearing and disappearing like quarks in a particle accelerator, some making it big nationwide ­ Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a good example ­ and some dying as quickly as they were born.
Like most of pop culture’s memorable flourishes, it all began on the West Coast, where a few beers drinkers got sick of the weak brews offered by Milwaukee and Colorado and decided to invest some dollars in the small local breweries. Eventually, the trend spread east, producing hundreds of relatively tiny yet hugely successful microbreweries like Weyerbacher in Easton Brooklyn Brewery in New York.
Mark Bloom is one of the guys that wasn’t interested in Coors and Bud. A few years ago, when he was working in Colorado, he was short on cash. He couldn’t afford good beer, so he moved to Pennsylvania, nearer to his family, and began brewing his own.
Bloom brews his ale in a small section of an industrial warehouse in Phillipsburg. He sells bottle of his signature recipe, Jed’s Red Ale, in 10 different bars.
A few bars sell Jed’s Red on tap. Soon, he’ll release Queen Bee Ale, lighter in color and brewed with a touch of honey.
He’s been brewing since 1998, and his effort is a grassroots one. If you’re drinking a bottle of Jed’s Red, don’t be surprised if Mark Bloom approaches you, shakes your hand and chats with you about suds for a few minutes.
Whenever he goes to a party, he brings a few six packs. He’s happy to show his operation to reporters and offer a taste of the latest batch.
His is a beer for connoisseurs.
“I’m not marketing to the people that like light beer to begin with,” he says. “I’m not putting the beer into bars where it’s two taps of three taps, and there you’ve got Genny, Coors and Bud.”
He’s working on an oatmeal stout fermented with plums for the holidays, dark and sweet and malty. He’s also thinking about a brown ale for the future, and a hefeweisen, or wheat-based beer. He delivers the beer to bars himself, including the one bar in Philadelphia that carries Jed’s Red. He’d release the new recipes right away, but he’s got to get approval from Pennsylvania’s notoriously fastidious Liquor Control Board, and he’s got to pay $75 a year for each new title.
Pennsylvania is a hard state for the small brewer to get started in because of the state’s tough alcohol laws and macrobrew-loving clientele. But that doesn’t stop the state from having a rich brewing history. In 1829, the year that Andrew Jackson replaced John Quincy Adams in the White House, a German immigrant named David Yuengling dug into a rocky hillside in Pottsville and built a brewery from the ground up. Three years later, the brewery burned down and was rebuilt in the middle of town. Today, Yuengling is the oldest brewery still operating in the nation and one of the most popular beers in Pennsylvania, all without the aid of a heavy advertising campaign.
“You’ll probably see it go nationwide,” says McDonough.
Make beer and influence people
But while some Pennsylvania brewers choose to go for the big time, others keep it simple. Todd Gustafson is a Juniata College botanist who teaches a class called “Applied Enzymology and Fermentation” ­ in layman’s terms, home brewing.
“W try to balance the art and science of it, as well as the home economics, the kitchen work,” says Gustafson. The class isn’t about drinking beer ­ it’s about the chemistry of yeast and how it turns a mixture of hops, water and barely into stout, porter, and lager. There are prerequisites and extensive lab work. Students openly use words like “attenuation” and flocculation.” In short, it’s not a class for just anyone.
When Gustafson was 10 years old, he made a batch of brewed cider on the sly. Today he’s almost always got a batch going, mostly stouts and other dark ales. He likens the comparison between home brews and store-bought brands to eating fresh pineapple versus canned: Canned is tasty, but there’s a crispness to a freshly sliced fruit that can’t be preserved.
And after thousands of years of brewing and hundreds of years of bottles and cans, beer ultimately comes full circle, to a man in Huntingdon who add hops and malted barley to water and ferments it in yeast, and enjoys the result with pizza, which fortunately was invented a little over a hundred years ago.