Listened to a recent beersmith podcast with Randy Mosher “Historical Beer Myths”. Thats going to ruffel some feathers! Dig it up if you have some time. Some of the stuff that caught my ear was that the story of saison being a beer brewed at farmyouses for the season workers… not true. And Anchor Steam… not a steam beer. Its the first American craft beer and they named it Steam.
EDIT: I see now that he’s talking about historical beer styles, not process stuff. So I digress in the second half of this:
Mosher is awesome. He’s really right, you know. There’s a bazillion myths out there that just never die. And I know he does, like, a TON of research. He’s read all the old history books and spent a lot of time at libraries, or something. The rest of us haven’t. Mosher, of anyone, would know the truth. I have no doubts. Ron Pattinson, also!
And then there’s the process myths, of course, which Marshall Schott, Denny Conn, and others have been working so hard to dispel. How I brew today compared to how I brewed 10 years ago is… reasonably different, based on what I’ve learned. It’s got to be super friggin confusing for brand new homebrewers to try to make sense of anything, when they are handed a copy of Papazian or Palmer as the “bibles”, but then they come on forums like this one or join a club, and everyone tells them “oh no, that’s all wrong, everything you know is wrong”. It’s crazy how much this hobby is growing right now. Ten years ago, or 20 or 30… so many friggin myths have been generated in recent history that just might never die because books last forever. It’s going to be a friggin mess 100 or 200 years from now when someone tries to figure out what was known and learned during the American homebrew renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s, because man… we’ve totally flip-flopped the common knowledge probably 100 times on 100 different topics. It’s a mess!!
I believe he also hinted at much of the history of the IPA (actual English India pale ale) being heavily marketed.
I think his comments on belgian beer history may be fodder for some heated discussion out there in the interwebs. I was multitasking and not taking notes, but the summary take away I got was that we have it in our minds that all belgian beer has been brewed that way continuously for hundreds of years. But when you look at all the time periods that they were a battlefield or under napoleon, etc… then look at all the post ww2 influences from england and Scotland and Germany, its not quite as much of an unbroken thread as we imagine.
That’s all been said before though Jim. Stan touched on it in BLAM and his Beersmith episode. As a matter of fact, the beers we drink now probably differ from even the pre-WW2 versions. This is of course talking Trappist.
It stands to reason that some of the regional beers are still brewed more or less the same as traditional.
Oh I have no doubt. I haven’t read brew like a monk. Theres not too many belgian beers that trip my trigger enough to brew them. Saison is about it.
Great read. Highly recommended.
Randy also gave a talk during the 2015 National Homebrewers Conference on these sorts of myths. AHA Members have access to the audio and power point presentation. It’s the first seminar under 2015.
Jean DeClerck had a huge influence on Belgium Beer after WW2. He is buried on the grounds of Chimay for that reason.
For those interested in dispelling historic beer myths, Ron Pattinson’s daily blog is a terrific read.
I was about to point that out. He gave the same talk for the Dixie Cup milliconference in October.
One thing that caught my ear that I’m sure Mark (S. Cerevisiae) and perhaps quite a few others would very much disagree with… Mosher was talking about brewing lagers and how it’s not possible to do in caves in mountains because the temperature of the earth is too warm there. They quoted 56 F.
Randy references Ron a fair amount in his talk.
How could I have forgotten Mr. Pattinson? Editing my earlier post now to include him.
Block ice was cut from lakes and rivers and used to drop the temperature more. Block ice can last a long time. I have been in a closed brewery’s lagering Keller in at the brewing museum in Bamberg. They packet it with block ice.
My wife asked me what I might want for my upcoming birthday and I didn’t really have an answer for her. There is stuff I want but don’t really need. I may have to ask for the red, bound edition of DeClerck’s book from Siebel. I would never buy it for myself and I have wanted it for some time now.
Thats too warm for mine. I would need a cave that would adjust to my actual beer temp 52F, then ramp to 65-68F when I needed it to.
But I heard that part too. I think it would be more dubious, not because of temps, but trying to picture sandle footed monks with barrels of beer on donkey carts coming off the side of a mountain. Its quaint but not practical. I live in a fairly mountainous area, and in about 1850 Capt McClellan took an expedition of soldiers around the foothills of Mt Adams. They were able to go about 2 miles per day. Its not as easy to haul freight on mountain trails as it looks in the movies. Did they lager in caves in the valley? Probably, and I imagine they still do in some rural areas.
I think that brewing based on the time of year was key, too. The storage in caves with block ice was for the summer months, most likely. Randy Mosher’s talk at NHC was great - wish I was there in person. He’s very entertaining.
Basing his argument solely on cave temps is faulty, I’ll give you that. For example, near where I live, on the McClellan trail there is an ice cave. I’ve been there many times. I was there this past August and it was over 100 outside, but about 20’ down in the mouth of the cave it was near freezing. Great place to cool off on a summer sightseeing trip.
Google guler ice caves for photos and info.
Something to consider about myths vs. dispelling myths is that brewing was not monolithic in any European community until the late 19th century forward as large brewing operations squeezed out the majority of smaller local breweries and home/farm/village brewing practices. We can’t act like what was true in one part of a region was necessarily the way all brewing occurred and that is absolutely true when comparing urban versus country practices in any given area. A good example of this is the belief that lager brewing in Germany only occurred during cool months. That may be true in urban areas where breweries were heavily monitored and taxed but in rural areas where regulation was lax or nonexistent brewing occurred as needed and those lagers may have been bottom fermented in cold months but top fermented in warmer months, suggesting either the use of a mixed culture or the ability for lager yeast to ferment comfortably at warmer temperatures. (See Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance)
Can we definitively say that beer was never aged in caves anywhere in Europe? Doubtful. There would have been abandoned natural and mining caves available. Were all of these difficult to reach? Probably not. For brewers in rural areas with access to abandoned caves it might have been an easy opportunity to store beer without taking up space in cellars or barns. It would take quite a bit, in my opinion, to exclude the possibility that any region found brewers aging or fermenting lagers in caves.
We do have to exclude marketing stories and brewer’s lies along with would-be brewing historians who merely repeated marketing tales or whatever some prior author had written but we also do not do ourselves any favors replacing a marketing fabrication with a fabrication that treats brewing as though there was only one way it was done.