Brewing an Authentic Copy

Welcome back, y’all

This week, we’ll be talking about the flavor spectrum of modern hops, and which tropical juices to drink with Better Days....psych! We’re talking about old beers again. Always. Every time. Brace yourself.

My mom recently sent me a very strange, think-y article about...well, briefly put, about the strange world craft beer finds itself in, in which, to use one example, we’ve reinvented IPA so many times that new craft beer drinkers may not even think of them as bitter, which was formerly so much the hallmark of the style that there was a virtual IBUs arms race right around when I started drinking beer (for whatever reason, this beer sticks out in my memory as a remarkable example, and reminds me warmly of my old craft beer haunt whose name I now forget). And further, the history of the IPA reveals the odd truth that the style wasn’t even called IPA at its inception, or for years afterward, which touches on the crux of the article - copies of beers without an original, or simulacrum. It’s a whole thing, you’d have to read the beast.

But for our purposes, it begs an interesting question that I’ve wondered to myself since first thinking about 18th century beers at GABF 2018, namely: can you brew a faithful 18th-century beer in 2020, and if so, to what degree can you do so with off-the-shelf ingredients?

Malt, malt quality, and smoke flavor

Put quite simply, malting is the process whereby, through the addition of heat and water, we trick barley kernels, say, into thinking it’s time to wake up, while halting that waking up at the opportune moment. While the goal hasn’t changed, technological improvements, mainly indirect kilning mean less-smoky and more-efficient malt (see the Smoke Post for a bit more on this). The following are some further differences between the malts of yore and those now, and their effects on the beers brewed over time:

• Better efficiency (this has no real impact on styles, though higher gravity beers become cheaper)

• Lighter color becomes possible, i.e. lighter than amber/brown (huge impact - see Pilsners, etc.)

• Around that time, pretty much any malt color through and above charcoal becomes possible (four times darker than, in fact; from Malt: “If you are not careful, black malt can go from 600˚L to 150˚L in about a minute.” Staggering.)

  • For reference, a typical Porter might be 5% malts in the ~350˚L range (L being Lovibond), so a grain as dark as 600˚L could conceivably be two in every 100 grains in a mash, which explains its, again, immediate and complete adoption for brewing dark beers, given the relative economy of pale malts over “amber” or “brown” malts (different things)

• Higher consistency, and probably better quality, product

• A focus on farming practices and efficiency may have meant the culling of less-efficient local varieties, some of which are coming back through craft malting - Barke is a wonderful example, and my brew house’s Pilsner malt. I doubt I’ll buy anything else except floor-malted Bohemian for Czech Pilseners

At MacLeod, for instance, we employ a massive range of malts and grains from flaked corn to the quintessentially British Maris Otter, from Light Caramel to Dark Munich, Pale Chocolate to Roast Barley, and even Spelt and other oddities for our contract brewing. This range would have begun to be possible at the very end of the 18th century, but probably not in the continental US except for port-adjacent breweries (full disclosure: this is conjecture).

Hops

Hop is a crop (like grain), and as such, three big goals have driven its evolution: yield, disease resistance, and flavor. These have resulted in the culling of old, though quite possibly not fantastically flavorful, hop varietals. So be it. Whole cone hops are still available (that is, the whole and largely unprocessed hop flower, vs. modern pelletization, which basically threshes hops into small pellets for bittering efficiency and other reasons). The bottom line is that while exact hop varietals from yore are gone, I personally don’t think that makes a lick of difference in your ability to make accurate period beers given the existence of old-world varietals like East Kent Goldings and Hallertauer.

I’ll again list the effects of historical changes on beers brewed over time, and I’ll frame the rest of the components as such without note

• Hops with higher alpha acid loads mean bittering becomes easier and cheaper, though these hops are not considered appropriate in traditional styles. Though as noted, old-world hops are still produced en masse.

• There’s been a huge variety expansion through cultivation, meaning a larger pallet of hop colors, in particular:

  • Citrus

  • Pine

  • Tropical fruit

  • Other oddities, like melon and mint

• Pelletization doesn't make a huge difference flavor-wise but does mean the internationalization of hops (longer shelf-life, kind of), and the better economy of highly hopped beers through less wort absorption/lower losses (coupling with the first point - through this lens, IPAs were inevitable)

• Traditional practices of aging hops for sour beers still very much a thing; varietal changes aside, the only big change in that department being an upgrade in quality

At MacLeod, we certainly employ old world hops in our beers, like Hallertauer in Van Ice and Fuggles in most of our British Ales, but also hops from all over the world and an experimental hop whose name is a string of numbers. Interestingly, the British had a wartime habit of buying malt and hops from anywhere and everywhere, but to my understanding this was always done out of necessity, and not, for example, due to the high quality of French Oak in particular.

Water

The big change here is simple: choice. Originally, you were stuck with well water wherever you were, and thus the ability of one brewery to make an exceptional light and dark beer was basically...non-existent, hence Burton on Trent making excellent pales vs London's dark ales, etc. This has been played with for centuries, through boiling (which drops out temporary hardness) and, somewhat more recently, the addition of simpler salts (“Burtonization” was coined in 1882, and that’s roughly the start of the modern water chem game in brewing - source).

Now, that's changed completely, with reverse osmosis and the availability of food-grade salts, acids, and bases. It’s not uncommon for a single brewery to have IPAs, light lagers, and rich stouts on their menu - in fact, it’d be surprising to find a brewery without a light and dark beer. Beyond this, though, it's not like we've unlocked totally new beers. Pilzn has had insanely pure water forever, so the full spectrum has always existed.

Tech

Technology in general has exploded since the 18th century across the board, and has led to advancements in every brewing ingredient and process, with no exceptions, such as the following:

• Obviously, labor and general expense are down

• The use of copper as a metal source is gone, which means less oxidation and longer shelf-life probably; no substantial flavor difference, though, given copper’s use in wort chillers

• Chilling is done without coolships, reinforcing the next point - yeast purity

• Beers are kept cold and steady, meaning potentially lower ester production, or at least the annualization of quality beer, which is new and had a huge impact on continental brewing pre-late-19th century

• Oxidation is lower, thus extending life; ditto sterilization

• Besides the impacts of economy and the virtual elimination of weather as a constraint (and thus consumer tastes being the sole driver in beer availability), the big one here is just cleaner, better product that lasts longer

  • But, at the loss of funk and character to some degree

  • As well as the loss of the interesting game of brewing quick beers to avoid souring, and brewing big, hopped beers for aging purposes - an 18th century tavern would have to have the calendar in mind when planning beers as much as a year ahead

Yeast Control and Kveiks

This is a massive topic, so suffice it to say that all brewing “yeasts” used to consist of multiple well-behaved strains, but Pasteur came along and we now have almost exclusive pure-strain use. His was such an obvious improvement that adoption of it, like refrigeration, was almost instantaneously complete. As noted above, while this offers insane consistency, it also means the lack of natural funk, furthered by the more-or-less complete elimination of coolships (some British breweries and a few interesting US breweries still use them.

As an extreme example of life before this practice, see Kveiks, my new homebrew darling - they're fast, operate at high temps, and happily survive for years and years in dry form. This practice (as the use of the yeast was just part of a larger semi-ritual) was almost killed by modern brewing, and seems to be how most of northern europe (particularly areas with low crop yield, hence sporadic brewing, hence these properties) got their beer.

Finally, though it's not too hard to find wild ales now, brewing with pure yeast means the massive underuse of fascinate bugs like Brettanomyces (though Lactobacillus is obviously starting to capture massive market share, for good reason - see Saticoy Sour).

Setting

Nowadays, we drink beer at baseball games, parties, the beach, and just a million other places, so while we haven't lost many drinking places (for example, bars replaced taverns essentially one to one), a few do come to mind.

Government, particularly in Germany though also in the US and UK (and I’d guess everywhere else that makes more beer than wine), has a history intertwined with that of beer. For example, you can still find taverns in Germany called Ratskellers, or Rathaus Kellers, or Town Hall/Council’s Cellars. Rad name, rad idea, I’m into it. In Philadelphia, as was the case across the early US, taverns were essentially secondary government buildings in that official business was discussed and, if memory serves, occasionally functioned as courts (don’t call me on that). There are also cases where taverns became government buildings, then taverns again, and the whole history is long and interesting. Suffice it to say, that’s basically gone in the US, though to some degree I suspect this lives on in DC’s bars and restaurants.

Early ships relied heavily on beer and wine as a source of clean water, and that’s basically gone, at least from a military perspective (why early? rum keeps forever, beer and wine both go bad - early trading vessels used as much as a third of their storage space fo beer and wine).

Speaking of, the military! The early US' military was made or broken on beer allowances (“One of George Washington’s first acts as Commander of the Continental Army was to proclaim that every one of his troops would receive a quart of beer with his daily rations”), and while alcohol and militaries aren't completely divorced now, the role of beer as a guarantee in military life is kind of gone.

Bastardization i.e. other ingredients

We’ve been adding “stuff” to beer since day one, but to lesser and greater degrees, and largely as a function of the availability of the good stuff - grain. Germans, for example, had the luxury of quality concern when they launched the Reinheitsgebot, but poorer countries at that time (1500s initially) had no such luxury.

Early Americans, for example, lived through a semi-perpetual grain shortage for about a century, and used anything that would ferment, especially products from the triangle trade, notably molasses, in their beers. George Washington's small beer recipe, for example, is basically a molasses cider with enough wheat bran for some head retention (and maybe the only recipe that’d be super easy to brew now). Further, once the porter game got going, people began dosing their beer with dark sugars in order to get their beers in porter range (a partial list from Porter: “capsicum, ginger, quassia, ... coriander, … allium and salt, opium…).

Interestingly, while this died out more or less completely after the world wars and prohibition, it’s back in fuller force than ever with things like Lucky Charms beers, fruit beers, gruits, stale bread beers...literally everything beers. The extent to which non-grain adjuncts, as they're called, are making their way into beer is unprecedented, but also fairly interesting. For the sake of this piece, the relevant bit is that every conceivable (safe) addition that would have been made, is being made now.

One interesting example is, again, bread - early beer making sometimes involved the par-baking of barley breads, a kind of proto-mashing, and right now there's a growing movement in the UK to the same end, though for entirely different reasons.

Conclusion

Beer has changed a ton, and any claim of authenticity comes with a big asterisk, but the only real reason that it's tough to make old beers now, is that the technology is just too advanced. To make the right malt, you have to talk a maltster into making bizarre diastatic brown malt, or air-dry your own wheat malt, and even then you have to somehow apply smoke, which even then is an approximation of wood-driven kilning. Hops and yeast are essentially solved problems, though, and with a bunch of free time, some buckets and pumps, and a dehydrator or smoker, I see no reason why you couldn't make remarkably accurate 18th century beer, or perhaps even any century's beer, then, in the 21st. And while this guy thinks they’re doomed to taste bad, the mission statement of my beloved “1786” [a bar concept I am working on] is to brew exceptional beers with largely period-accurate ingredients (if fully modern techniques, malting aside), so stay tuned for that! And grab a set of 18th century garb now - you’ll need it to get in.

Cheers,

Adrian “These Seem More Like Chapter than Blog Posts” Febre