War and Wort, part 1

Dear reader,

A month or two back, our head brewer Stephen declared his intent to brew a very interesting British dark lager, a historical recipe. As this was about the time that the blog you’re now reading was starting up, and since the suggestion box was still open (I’ve since jammed it shut with a combination of gum and whole-cone hops), he suggested I do a post exploring the effect that the World Wars had on beer, since they indeed had a massive effect.

I was about 0% excited, because it’s a massive topic with a million potential sources, and an Ayn Rand-length book could be written about it, but alas, my fate was sealed since it was an exceptionally on-brand topic and a clever bit of marketing, and so here we are. You’ll pay for this, Stephen. Get ready for a 100% Smoked Rye Malt and Simcoe SMaSH Brut IPA.

But before we get into the obvious and non-obvious ways in which the first World Wars and the crucial 30-ish years they encompass led to some positively radical changes in the beer world (Prohibition is neatly sandwiched in there, for example), we’ll lay the groundwork with a very brief history of beer up to the turn of the century, slowing down as we approach the 1910s. And as a brief disclaimer, this is going to be largely UK-focused, but of course this period affected every beer-brewing nation pretty significantly, and certainly irreversibly.

The lead up, in short

While the medieval era saw the widespread use of Gruit, a proprietary mix of a number of local herbs and sometimes even hops, a number of factors eviscerated their use, including Duties plainly outlawing their use in the early 18th century and probably a dash of Reformation-era disdain of the potentially mildly hallucinogenic effects of certain Gruits, but my guess is that it was the longer shelf life and more subtle, palatable character of hops that sealed the deal. In any case, without a doubt by the turn of the 20th century, beer was, while hardly monochromatic or bland in any sense (indeed, the same range of colors existed in beers as they do now, including the vivid reds of Krieks, say, which interestingly predates the use of hops apparently), a beverage that consisted of Hops and, largely, malted cereal grains, chiefly Barley.

While Wheat has been in use for centuries as a brewing ingredient in Germany, it is virtually nonexistent in British Brewing, especially of the period - in Ronald Pattinson’s excellent historical repository Let’s Brew!, I could only find a single recipe that employed Wheat, and at less than 20% of the full grain bill if memory serves, which is quite honestly startling, and for which I have absolutely no justification. I can only imagine it had to do with a perpetually limited crop of Wheat that was meticulously set aside for bread, but I’m unaware of any other country that was so puritanical in this regard.

But, interestingly, while the lager brewers of 19th century America used adjuncts like Corn and Rice to dilute the high protein content in early (read: 19th century) American-grown Barley, the British, with no such limitation, still made fairly heavy use of any number of adjuncts, from Flaked Maize and Rice to various sugar products, including Caramel, odds and ends like Lactose (milk sugar) and Glucose, and, yes, Invert Syrup (my source here is a manual examination of the “Mild” section of Let’s Brew!). Now, while the use of sugars in brewing doesn’t shock me, since many early American beer recipes call for the use of sugar products like this famous one, and due to its low price due to the efficiency of the triangle trade, the inclusion of Flaked Maize (the more common of the two) does take me a bit aback. I don’t know when they started using it, or why, and trust me when I say that I can’t find a lick of documentation or even a posited theory, so I’ll merely propose that its heavy use in the United States must have sparked curiosity in the British brewers; its low cost couldn’t have hurt, either.

Anyway, the thorny and intricate issue of fermentables aside, it’s also worth noting, in part as a segue into the next section, that until the 1880s, every brewery was, through a complete lack of choice in the matter, employing mixed cultures of yeast and in some cases bacteria. In Lars Marius Garshol’s insanely cool Kveik talk here, he covers a few relevant bits of this story, namely that its plausible to get a mixed culture consisting of yeast without bacteria due their being “outcompeted” for resources, namely sugar here; and that consistency would have been decent, but a bad batch here or there would have been pretty likely. Thus, a pre-1880s British Ale would have probably contained one or more standard “beer yeast” strains, as well as potentially Brettanomyces, perhaps of the Claussenii variety, as the currently available commercial strain was, indeed, isolated from Stock Ale at the turn of the century.

Beyond that, and as an interesting quirk noted in Smoked Beers, if beers were universally smokey or mildly tart, a smokey and mildly tart beer that had a plum note may have just been described as a beer with a plum note, as that would have been the only “unique” characteristic, making the characteristics of British Ales at the time on the average remarkably elusive.

Tech transforms beer

As alluded to, the end of the 19th century changed the game for several of the points above. Not one, not two, but three technical advancements radically transformed beer in this period, namely yeast isolation and propagation (let alone, you know, their discovery), refrigeration, and a kind of “polishing up” of malting and kilning. 

Yeast propagation basically “solved” the problems described above - it allowed breweries to take a sample of their yeast, isolate a few strains, pick their favorite one, and then simply regrow new yeast from that original sample whenever needed. This technique, which was so obviously a good idea that virtually every brewery in the world had adopted it within a year or two (source: that Lars video), resulted in extremely predictable, high quality, and consistent fermentations. Today, worthy of noting, there’s been a growing movement/regression towards mixed fermentations, with the obvious explosion of sours, as well as with an increasing number of open-fermentations (which may start with pure strains, but at least afford for the intrusion of others as fermentation proceeds) like this insanely good beer and, of course, this one, and the highlighting of breweries that still employe their traditional yeast mixes, like in this article (shoutout to mom for that article).

Refrigeration, brought online in the 1870s specifically for beer, actually, was a similarly obvious and profoundly important invention which spread like wildfire. Shoutout to Spaten - one of my favorite beers, remember? And to my mind, the biggest transformation here, since Winter, you know, kind of already made stuff cold once a year, was the effective divorce of brewing from the seasons, which is really more of a revolution than I usually see argued.

Finally, malt kilning advancements allowed for the efficient production of malt on a massive scale, as well as, and I have to claim this without proof since I can’t for the life of me find the source, the production of Crystal/Caramel Malts in the 19th century (?). The former has to do with the nitty gritty of malting, and isn’t worth explaining; on the latter, I’ll merely remark that Crystal malts are kind of the last piece of the malt puzzle, and after that, and in concert with Flaked Grains, the game was over - I don’t think there’s a single malt that we use today that didn’t exist at that point.

There are other footnotes, like the birth of Bottling (you can thank Newcastle for both that innovation, as well as the re-introduction of the term “Brown Ale” and the implicit cold-blooded murder of the Dark Mild which, you know, is what that is, but as Alton Brown says, “that’s another post”), the rise of Beer Engines and their eventual replacement by Draft Beer as we know it, etc..

Styles available

So that’s the bigger picture, but what styles were available at the time? And popular? Roughly speaking, the following:

• English Styles

  • Porter, which saw a hefty reduction over the 19th Century

  • Bitter

  • Mild

  • Pale Ale/IPA

  • Note: while Lagers later came online, I don’t believe they were really brewed until after WWI, so you’ll have to wait a second!

• Scottish Styles

  • The full range of Scottish “Shilling” beers, including:

    • Light and Mild beers

    • Pale Ales

    • Exports (like King’s Taxes! There’s the tie-in)

    • Strong Ale

  • And Lagers, apparently

• Irish Styles

  • Stout, obviously

  • Lager, to some degree

  • Though as far as I can tell, Red Ales are new

Did I miss any reasonably big styles? Let me know!

The Coming Changes

While I’ll leave a discussion of original gravities ‘til next time, I hope I’ve set the stage for the revolutions to come in the 20th century. Beer as we know it was essentially canonized, but some dark days were about to come, which would prove wildly difficult to reverse. Stay tuned!

Cheers,

Adrian “That’s a lot of links, bro” Febre