THE FLAVORS OF IRELAND
Howdy Pardners!
Saint Paddy’s Day is not just a celebration of Irish American culture, but a massively important day for any brewery that brews even vaguely UK-centric styles, and as such it’s accompanied by a small wedding-sized week of planning, pomp, and excitement at MacLeod. And yet, while I came into this post with a decent grasp on the history of dark beer in Ireland, before doing the research for this piece, I couldn’t have told you when or why Irish Reds hit the scene, or what in the heck Corned Beef has to do with Ireland in particular. No longer! And if you’re curious, I’ll share the (blessedly summarized) results of this research with you too, so that you can slam back that Cut & Dry or Paddy McGinty’s Goat with awe and respect - it deepens the experience, trus me.
(Oh, and we’ll return to the dour topic of brewing and the environment soon enough, worry not!)
Irish Brewing - Ye Olde Dark Beers
As we’ve discussed before, most beers used to be dark. Thus it should come as no surprise that beers like Porter, Dark Mild, Brown Ale (is this a distinct thing? Yes and no), and, indeed, Stout, have long histories. But among those, it was Porter that came to dominate the UK beer scene, picking up steam in the 18th century and waning only with the World Wars (well, more like the latter half of the 19th century, but who’s counting).
It was precisely Porter’s popularity that led to its expansion from London to the whole of England and eventually Ireland. Telling the whole tale would take an entire book or two, but the salient points to this article are these:
The Irish became notable, in their brewing of Porter, for their use of simple grists. Modern Guinness is brewed using only pale malt, flaked barley, and roasted barley - that’s it (see the graphic below for the historical angle)
In fact, it’s the use of roasted barley in particularly (most commonly unmalted barley that’s roasted like coffee) that is commonly used as a delineator between Stout and Porter among the reductionists among us, which is to say that I think this definition overly prescriptivistic and simplistic, but nonetheless common knowledge
Why do I keep saying “Porter” when it’s Stout we’re talking about? Stout means strong, so Stout came about simply because, since Porter was such a bedrock beer style, variants sprang up (as with the modern IPA), and “Stout” Porter implied a stronger version of Porter’s than a brewery’s default product (“extra,” “plain,” “export,” “single,” “double,” and more were also used to mean various things, pretty universally referring to strength)
Finally, whence the “Dry” part? And the nitro?
Dry is the easy bit - as far as I can tell, it’s called that because it’s...dry, in the tannin-y red wine sense. Word is, the ideal Dry Stout has a pleasant twang of minerality, but that’s a subtlety.
And as for the nitro, once again we turn to Guinness - in order to replicate (or simulate, or create a simulacrum of) cask ale, they added nitrogen to the beers in order to create that classic rich head atop a largely flat beer. And, you know, I personally prefer the cask version by a mile, but it’s not too far off target.
Back to the Future - Red Ales
The history of Irish Reds turns out to be truly fascinating and borderline stunning in its simplicity. The one British-made beer to break into the Irish beer market, so says Ron Pattinson, was the Pale Ale (or, in this telling, the Bitter), and the origin of Irish Red (per the second link) was, again, one of the creation of a simulacrum: in order to replicate the color of a Bitter at home, without the use of Crystal malts (bedrocks of the Bitter), the Irish turned to a familiar tool for coloring: roasted barley. Wild! Using this malt grants the beer its deep amber hue, and it’s this, along with a much lower hopping rate than traditional in a Bitter, and a whistle clean malty smoothness which define the style.
MacLeod’s - We Have the (Irish-American) Meats
Bonus story!
Our head brewer mentioned in a meeting that he had heard that Corned Beef wasn’t really an Irish thing strictly speaking, but a result of the intermixing of Jewish and Irish peoples in 19th century New York, and that turns out to be largely true.
(First though - Corned Beef? One of the older definitions of “corn” is a small, hard thing, like the corns of salt used for curing Corned Beef.)
Long story short, pork used to be the meat of choice in Ireland, with Beef holding a sacred and symbolic position in Irish culture; its consumption was limited to animals that couldn’t produce milk or work, akin to Coq au vin. Then, you guessed it, those bastard Brits rolled in and transformed the landscape of Ireland, creating a beef factory for the production of Corned Beef. Here, it’s worth noting that Corned Beef certainly did exist since about the 12th century, originally cured with sea ash as opposed to salt. But it was the industrialization of Corned Beef and beef production in the 17th-19th centuries that turned Ireland into a massive beef producer, which ironically drove the price of beef up so high that the Irish couldn’t afford to eat it, by and large, hence potatoes as a core dietary staple, which obviously resulted, in the long run, in tragedy.
In part as a result of this famine, there was an exodus of Irish people to the New World where, in purchasing meat from kosher butchers, they began using brisket as a default cut for Corned Beef (speaking of this cultural connection, Bloom, the central character in Ulysses, is of Jewish and Irish parentage). This, coupled with beef’s lower price in America, led to the replacement of Corned Beef for Irish Bacon in the traditional Bacon and Cabbage combo, hence the Corned Beef, Potatoes, and Cabbage combination so thoroughly associated with Saint Paddy’s Day (speaking of anglicization, that’s Pádraig to you).
And while our St Patrick’s Day pizza is sold out, you can still positively crush 4-packs of Dry Irish Stout and Irish Red Ale at your leisure
Cheers,
Adrian “I forgot to wear green” Febre
