(Don’t) Get That Corn Outta My Face
Hey there ho there,
As much as I’d like to write another four posts about the joys of coopering (cooperage?), I thought it more befitting to celebrate the return of Van Ice cans and a general glut of canning with a post that’s been written time and time again, a sort of rite of passage for all beer bloggers and writers, namely: an informal history of corn and rice in American lagers.
Germany’s Song (Movin’ Out)
As literally everyone knows at this point, lagers originated in Germany (and by that I mean both strains of lager yeast, as well as the practice of cold conditioning beer, which, as mentioned, is also kind of a Scottish thing).
But what fascinates me, as the future proprietor of 1786, is this: plenty of beer was imported into the young America, particularly due to a chronic shortage of both beer and beer-making ingredients (my copy of this is in storage, so you’ll have to buy that or take my word for it!), but when did the American brewers start to brew certain styles, like the German ones? Porter and some sort of Brown Ale (i.e. Mild, i.e. Stock Ale depending on strength and common usage of these terms, “Brown Ale” dying and then coming back with, interestingly, Newcastle) would have probably been early candidates, but at what point was there sufficient variety of ingredients and demand that other fringe beers would have been brewed? God knows.
And because I don’t know, but because I will be serving, oh I don’t know, a Kottbusser and some sort of proto-Bock (see this for some wacky ideas), I need to have a convincing story, and that story is this:
Hessian soldiers, a considerable number of whom actually just...kinda stuck around after the Revolutionary War, would have created a sizeable demand for any German beers that would have survived shipment, meaning something sour like Kottbusser (was this sour? Debatable, but let’s say yes), and something strong, like a rough early Bock (an unfiltered, mixed-fermentation, barrel-aged Kellerbock to venture a precise guess)
Further, it’s plausible, given the large number of troops, that one or two would have brought with them “old world” brewing expertise, and thus may have been able to start a brewery, or expand the offerings of a local brewery. This would be a stretch (especially because I’d need a decent pitch of yeast to survive the trip, beating the first recorded shipment by like 50 years), if not for what actually came next: the absolute explosion of German brewing in America by precisely this mechanism
(oh, and there were apparently a solid number of German immigrants before the Hessians came, further bolstering demand for homeland beers)
The German Lager Boom
Again, this topic has been written about (here’s the very long version), so I’ll give you the beats:
German Lager yeast arrives in the States around the 1830s
The arrival of more German immigrants, including some brewers, drove demand for Lagers up, while simultaneously providing the talent to brew it
Hey, what do you know! Lagers are, we all collectively discover, the best beers in the world (@ ME BRO), and they quickly dominate the local beer market, infusing their breweries with cash, furthering their hold on the market, cash, market capture, etc. etc..
The end of this part of the story is visceral - there were under 100 breweries in the US at one point. Wanna guess what they made? No, not Nut Brown Ale or Hopfenweiße
But there’s a problem with the Barley
And here we pump the brakes, because this little Barley issue was shockingly consequential. Accept without question (jk) that if you leave enough protein in beer, it’ll be hazy. That’s fine when you’re drinking through pewter mugs, but remember this bad boy? The rise of glass, my friend, lest we ferget: clear good, hazy bad (still true imo FIGHT ME BRUH).
So haze bad, and thus protein bad - is that a general problem? Well, brewing 101, a quick Cold Break and Hot Break (don’t worry about what that is, or do and read the article) knocks out a maximal amount of protein, but there’s a limit - if you brew with steak, your beer will be hazy no matter what
Okay, great story, how does that apply? Well, it turns out that the German barley varieties had a lower protein content than the infamously high-protein American 6-row variety, and as such, the early lagers came out a bit hazy, which you’ll know was immediately unacceptable if you’ve ever watched, like, any war movie. So what can be done?
To drinkers of modern American Light Lagers, the answer is, even if just subconsciously, obvious: dilution. Indeed, since Corn and Rice contain fermentable sugars but very little protein (no protein? I mean, no complete proteins, but yes amino acids...I haven’t taken Orgo yet, ease up), those German brewers took a page out of the British playbook (evidently my blog list is getting quite long) and traded out some malt for adjuncts, in this case, famously, corn and rice.
And that’s the story: the desire for clear beer was what initiated the use of corn and rice in brewing, two famous ingredients in modern light lagers the world over, actually. And thus it was that our yester-brewer threw some flaked corn onto the Van Ice grain bill, and why that beer feels perhaps warmly familiar to you, if you didn’t already know it was brewed with corn.
Conclusion
Long Live Lagers, and swing by on Friday (1/22) for something entirely different - a Winter-Spiced Pastry Sour. Our brewer, if you were wondering, is a hybrid between Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy and Will Ferrel’s Elf when he puts on his VNBC shoes, and I have no intention of suggesting vegetables.
Cheers,
Adrian “This dude drinking beer like its the 50s” Febre