Let’s talk about beer.
It’s Labor Day weekend, a time when people sometimes get together and have a brew or three. Here’s some facts, some history, some trivia, and a song about this golden beverage. When you’re standing around with friends and neighbors, drinking beer, you can say something like, "Did you know beer has four ingredients?" or "Did you know there are only two types of beer?" or "Did you know Hammurabi had a law about beer?"
Hey, it’s better than discussing the weather.
What Is Beer? It’s Basically Yeast Poop.
The four ingredients necessary for beer are water, grain, hops, and yeast. Theoretically, you could omit the hops, but the beer might not taste very good.
You add water to the grain (usually barley) and boil it. The starchy grain water becomes a sugary liquid called "wort". Cool it down and toss in some yeast. The yeast converts the sugar molecules into alcohol molecules. The little yeast guys eat the sugar and poop out alcohol. Oops, I almost forgot. You need hops, too, in small or large amounts. You can use different types of grain (Budweiser has some rice in it), different types of water (various minerals affect the process or the taste), different species of hops, or different species of yeast.
There are hundreds of different types of beers, but they all fall into only two broad categories: tops and bottoms, more commonly known as ales and lagers.
Are You a Top or Are You a Bottom?
There are only two basic types of beer – top fermented (ales) and bottom fermented (lagers).
Lagers are sometimes called "cold fermented beers" or "bottom fermented beers," because they’re made with yeast that thrives in cooler temperatures and sinks to the bottom. Lagers are often made with Saccharomyces pastorianus yeast.
Ales are "warm fermented" (aka "top fermented"). Ale brewers often use a yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae – which likes warmer temperatures and floats to the top during fermentation.
How warm and how cold? Ale (top fermenting) yeast prefers temperatures in the range of 60-75 degrees Fahrenheit – which we might call room temperature. So, in ancient England, they could make ales all year long. You just needed a building at room temperature. On the other hand, when you make a lager, the (bottom fermenting) yeast would rather have a temperature between 45-55 degrees. Then the secondary fermentation happens around 32-40 degrees. Think about Germany in the days before electricity (meaning, before refrigeration). In the summertime, it was too warm to make beer. In the spring, they’d clean out the vats (and make Bock beer) and shut down until the fall. Then, when the weather cooled down, they’d go back to beer making.
I googled Oktoberfest and learned that the first one happened in 1810, as a celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig. But I suspect its roots go back to the Middle Ages. When the weather cools down it's beer-brewing time in Germany. What better reason for a celebration?
Which Tastes Better: Ale or Lager?
Here are some generalizations that are not always true. Ales are often sweeter and heavier, lagers are crisper and lighter. Ales tend to be darker in color, lagers are not as dark (but they can be). The English (and Dutch) brew a lot of ales, the Germans (and Czechs) tend to make lagers. In the U.S., most mass-market beers (Bud, Miller, Pabst, etc.) are lagers. Many American microbreweries and brewpubs make ales (although there are some lagers, too).
I prefer lagers, but that’s just me. Ales (especially a chewy Stout or Porter) can be delicious, although I usually only drink one or two before switching to a crisp lager. Lagers I like include Pilsner-Urquell, Peroni, and Heineken (if I have money) or PBR (if I don’t).
Chacun à son goût. Each to his own taste.
Beer Caused Civilization
You might argue for the importance walking upright or the invention of language or fire, or even that whole thing about thumbs and tools. I’m not saying I'm against walking, talking, burning things in moderation, or making tools. Mark me down as a fan of those things; they’re nothing to sneeze at. You can have my opposable thumb when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.
But, according to the people at beerinstitute.org, beer led to civilization. What? There’s a Beer Institute? If they’re an institute (a think tank? a drink tank?), they must know what they’re talking about:
Dr. Solomon Katz theorizes that when man learned to ferment grain into beer more than 10,000 years ago, it became one of his most important sources of nutrition. Beer gave people protein that unfermented grain couldn't supply. And besides, it tasted a whole lot better than the unfermented grain did.
But in order to have a steady supply of beer, it was necessary to have a steady supply of beer's ingredients. Man had to give up his nomadic ways, settle down, and begin farming. And once he did, civilization was just a stone's throw away.
After civilization got rolling, beer was always an important part of it. Noah carried beer on the ark. Sumerian laborers received rations of it. Egyptians made it from barley, Babylonians made it from wheat, and Incas made it from corn.
I found another quote saying essentially the same thing, but it was from National Geographic. I’d prefer to get my quotes from the Beer Institute.
And if you believe that God created the earth approximately 6,000 years ago, just ignore the above section.
Laws about Beer
You might have heard about the German Beer Purity Laws of 1516, which said that beer can contain only barley, water, and hops (and, presumably, yeast). Germans have a history of worrying about purity (Martin Luther, for one example off the top of my head). They're also pretty good at making rules. And beer.
But according to legendsofbeer.com, the oldest known laws about beer came from The Code of Hammurabi:
Many brewers and bar owners at the time would water down their product or use inferior grains to maximize profit, which greatly disgusted the ancient ruler, so he put forth a law forbidding brewers or merchants from doing this. The punishment? The offending party was to be forcibly drowned in the swill that he created, in true Hammurabi fashion.
I oppose the death penalty, but I’ll make an exception for people who water down their beer. If it's good enough for a dictator from Mesopotamia/Iraq, it's good enough for me. I’ll bet no one ever suggested tort reform to Hammurabi.
Ben Franklin in London
In Ben Franklin’s autobiography (which is public domain and available in many places on the internet), he tells this story about working at a print shop in London:
At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been us'd to in America, where presswork is mix'd with composing. I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer. He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.
Think about that – A beer before breakfast, then one with breakfast, then beer all day long. I recommend this book. Not once does he mention getting his face on the hundred dollar bill.
Quotes About Beer
These are randomly harvested from the internet, so I suppose some of them might be apocryphal (or even just plain made up), but I don’t care. They amused me, so I’m including them.
"You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are." (Colonel Adolphus Busch)
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"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." (Frank Zappa)
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"People who drink light ‘beer’ don't like the taste of beer; they just like to pee a lot." (Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI)
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"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, ‘It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.’" (Deep Thoughts, Jack Handy)
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"Alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems." (Homer Simpson)
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"The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully." (Russian proverb)
Adolphus Busch is the guy who started what is now Anheuser-Busch. Adolph Coors founded the Coors brewery. Has anyone else noticed that parents don't name their children Adolph anymore? It's one of those names that's fallen out of favor (Benito and Judas are a couple of others I can think of).
Let’s Finish With A Song
What the heck, let’s listen to a song about beer. I thought about The Beer Barrel Polka – or Tears in my Beer (Hank Williams Sr.) – or Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer (Bessie Smith) – or even John Barleycorn (Traffic) – but I decided to go with George Thorogood’s version of One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer (recorded in Germany, apparently). John Lee Hooker also did a great version of this song.
He starts with a story about getting evicted from his apartment, plus his girlfriend left him, so he goes to the bar to get some drinks. And, boy howdy, can he squeeze some pretty notes out of that guitar.