|
HISTORY OF ALE-- AND BREWING
Part
1 Ancient Brewing-- from Porridge to Ale to Beer.
By Chris Rowley
Which
came first, beer or civilization? Probably beer, and most likely the brewing of “bread-loaf” beer began
as soon as agriculture itself.
First, we must make the point that the term “beer”
came into existence in the later middle ages to describe ale that was flavored and preserved with hops.
Before that, everything was ale of one kind or another. So the first five or six thousand years of brewing history, is all
about ale.
The earliest brewing was accomplished without mashing or boiling a wort. Instead
loaves of dough were made, left to rise, were slightly baked, but not enough to kill the yeast, then broken up and mashed
in water. This process produced enough fermentable sugars from the unmalted grain to allow the yeast to produce a few
degrees of alcohol in the brew. It was nowhere as efficient at producing fermentable sugar as the malting process, but
it was much less demanding in terms of equipment and technique.
In this time period, boiling
water wasn’t easy. You had to do it with the hot rocks method, that is, you had a container, of wood most likely, since
metal was rare and limited to copper. You filled it with water and you heated rocks in the fire until they were red hot and
then you maneuvered them into the water. The Bronze age was still thousands of years away, and Iron another thousand beyond
that.
At this point, around 8,000 BC, people in the “fertile crescent” of the middle
east were slowly shifting from hunting and gathering to more and more farming, because the game was disappearing under the
hunting pressure of a growing population of humans, and the gathering was getting harder too, for the same reason. As people
farmed, they bred the wild grains of the region, emmer wheat for instance, and turned them into higher yielding, predictable
crop plants. Barley, specifically Hordeum
Vulgare, and crucial to brewing appears to have been domesticated around
8,000 BC in the region centered on Israel/Jordan going by archaeological evidence from ancient sites like Jericho.
One of the things in Barley’s favor, was that it was drought resistant. Another was that before it sprouted,
it converted its starch to sugars,the process that gives us Malt. Ground up for flour, malted barley is very rich, and sweet,
and thus it was perfect for the earliest style of brewing.
We should also note that fermentation
by yeasts added some of the amino acids and vitamins that are missing in grains, such as lysine, niacin, thiamin and riboflavin.
In addition, fermentation breaks down the concentration of phytate in the grain, which normally binds minerals and prevents
their absorption in the intestines. In other words the fermented product was not only fun, because of the alcohol, but a better
food.
The earliest civilizations arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Northern
China. They all brewed ale, in the form of “porridge beer”-- a mildly alcoholic food. By the time we have actual
descriptions of this kind of beverage, during mid-to-late Sumerian history, there was a well established way of consuming
it. A tall pot, filled with porridge ale, from which one or more consumers sucked the stuff up through long straws, probably
cut from the reeds that were a ubiquitous material in theculture of mesopotamia.
Porridgey beer
is still popular in parts of eastern and southern Africa, is sold in cartons like milk and drunk through a straw.
Homebrewis
equally popular, and is drunk in much the same way that the Sumerians drank theirs, with long straws from a communal pot.
In South Africa, among the Xhosa nation, Umqombothi is the term for homebrewed mealie beer. Better known is Sorghum Beer,
commercially brewed, which before 1962 was the only beer South African blacks were allowed to buy. The
reasoning went
that this was a traditional brew and that the alcohol rarely went above 3%, thus making it safe for the suppressed african
majority to consume.
More recently S.A.B. Miller introduced an up to date, clarified Sorghum beer
called “Eagle” for the South African market. However, traditional murky sorghum beers still sell well amongst
the Zulu, Xhosa and so on. Descriptions of these brews emphasise the low alcohol content, the grainy, porridgey aspect, the
absence of hops and malt plus the sour flavors reminiscent of yogurt.
Of course, simply straining
the brew would get you something more like a drink and less like breakfast, and it seems quite likely that ancient brewers
used herbs, grapes and other sweet fruits, plus honey and other natural sugars too, both to raise alcohol levels and to sweeten
the product to make premium and specialty brews. In that world, sweetness was a rare treat, and likely to command a high price.
Mesopotamian civilization arose on the back of massive flood control projects and irrigation. The
crops grown were wheat and barley, and the society was organized from the top down. In the small cities, with populations
of 10-20,000 everyone was on the dole. Kings and Priests were at the top, and from the central granaries food and ale was
dispensed to the entire urban population. The same was true of Egypt. The great mass of the people were self-supporting peasants,
and those who lived in the small cities were fed by the state for whom most of them worked.
And in these civilizations ale, flavored or otherwise, and most likely of the porridgey kind, was the beverage of choice for
most people.
As the mantle of leadership passed from the ancient zones of Mesopotamia and Egypt
to Persia, then Greece and finally Rome, so ale drinking culture was submerged beneath the wine drinking culture that grew
out of Greece, spread across Italy, southern Gaul and Spain. The Greeks planted grapevines wherever they started colonies.
Some of these vineyards flourished, elsewhere, as in Egypt, conditions were too hot for successful viticulture and wine had
to be imported. Still, while the Greek
colonists drank their wine, the native masses continued to drink their ancient
style of ale.
In China, where a vast unitary state eventually arose under the Han Dynasty, no
clear pattern of alcoholic beverage dominance seems to be visible from the literature, except that from quite early on, the
Chinese began to drink Tea in large quantities, displacing alcoholic drinks entirely. Instead of a culture that exalted ale
from barley, or wine, the Chinese shifted to one that made Tea, and caffeine, quite central to life. Alcohol didn’t
go away, but took a secondary role, and distillation of low alcohol brew into spiritous liquors began very early on.
The brewing history of Mesopotamia and Egypt came to a halt in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, when Arab
invaders brought Islam and a complete prohibition on the consumption of alcohol. I can find very little material on what kind
of brews the ancient culture had produced by that time, since the coming of Islam tended to bulldoze the earlier culture and
bury it.
In Europe things went otherwise. The Romans brewed beer, but never regarded it as highly
as they did wine, something that remains true of Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean regions. But in northern Europe,
where the Germanic peoples mingled with the Celts, the culture was a brewing one. There is evidence from Ireland of
a strong grain brewing tradition there that goes back to 2500 BC, or earlier. In this case the brewing vessels were hollows
in the rocks, the mash was boiled with hot rocks and fermented probably with wild yeasts out of the air. It is known
that the Celts were fond of drink, and brewed mead and cider.
However,there does not seem to have been an Ale brewing
tradition among the Celts of Gaul or Britannia. Then there were the Picts, who brewed a kind of ale and flavored it with heather.
What grain they used for this is difficult to determine, but it was most probably barley, which is also cold resistant. The
Picts are a mysterious people, with a mysterious end, somewhere during the 10th century they seem to have been submerged
under Scots and Vikings and lost their own identity.
And so we come to the Germanic peoples--
the Saxons, the Angles, the Franks, the Friesians, the Bavarians, the Swabians, all from Germany proper, and also the Norse,
including the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians, for it is among this group that Ale really came of age and after about a thousand
years evolved into true Beer. Their term for what they brewed varied from Ol, in the North, to Ealu, further south.
Some Saxons referred to it as “woet” (pronounced weet),
which probably gave rise to the modern term “wort.”
They made it from malted barley, kilned over charcoal, boiled, either
in an iron vessel or with red hot stones in a
big wooden tub. The stone method led to some interesting caramelization around and on the stones, which would later add to
the flavor of the brew.
At this stage -- the dark ages-- circa 500 AD, the use
of hops was very limited and mostly unknown. Indeed much about the culture of the Germanic peoples at this time remains unknown,
because they were illiterate and conditions where chaotic. The Roman Empire disappeared, too brittle and expensive to survive
during a period when climate appears to have grown cooler, while plague and other diseases spread. The population of Europe
shrank by as much as a third between 200 AD
and 600 AD when it bottomed out. Slowly, new institutions, nations,
small states, began to build out of the chaos, but it would be another four hundred years before the towns returned to anything
like the size they were in late Roman times. During this period ale, the staple drink of northern europe, was brewed by two
groups-- village women, and monastic men.
Since brewing was something that required
a fire, and a certain amount of attention during a period of a few days, and was also carried out in or around the home, it
was a natural extension of woman’s work. During the early mediaeval period most village brewing was done by women, and
those women that made really good ale might sell it to their neighbors.
The
monasteries arose soon after the spread of Christianity across the northern tier--beginning in the 4th century. They fitted
themselves into the evolving feudal system and they took up brewing on an industrial scale. In fact monastic brewing may well
have been the first real industry to return to life following the collapse of Rome.
Early laws from the new Anglo-Saxon realms in Angle-lond (eventually England), demonstrate that ale was important enough to
be addressed by Kings and regulated. King Aethelbert of Kent, who converted to Christianity in 597 and became notably
pious, seems to have begun the long, notably ineffectual effort by English authorities to control rowdy behaviour in Ale houses.
In 616, shortly before his death, Aethelbert promulgated a complex code of rules and laws with the object of improving the
behaviour of his subjects. Among many other things, Aethelbert’s laws listed the payments required to make restitution
to
those who were injured by those who were drunk. In 694, King Ine of Wessex, got involved in another ageold struggle,
when he decreed that Alewives (brewers) that sold inferior ale at premium prices should be submerged in a water trough and
their ale confiscated and distributed to the poor.
Ale brewing, whether by a female village
brewer, or by the monks at the nearby abbey, grew steadily more sophisticated as time went by. For example, these brewers
didn’t waste any recoverable fermentables. After sparging the wort the first time, to make their best brew, they
nearly always cooked it up again and made a second, weaker brew from what was left over. This would usually have no more than
3º alcohol and little body, but as “small beer” it was safe to drink, at a time when water was dangerous,
unless boiled. Again, every year as spring drew on, brewers would make the strongest possible Ol, and put it away in the coolest
place they had, with a view to keeping it drinkable-- and safe from acetobacter, the vinegar producing bacteria that just
loves to eat alcohol-- during the hot summer months. These strong Ales ran to as much as 10º alcohol, which involved
using twice as much malt as went into ordinary beers.
This practise lives on-- in the modern beer styles of Saison
from Northern France and Belgium, and Maibock from Germany.
It is likely that brewers used these strong seasonal
ales to both strengthen and freshen up their ordinary summer ales by topping up a cask of ale that was starting to go off,
for instance. The extra shot of alcohol might stave off vinegar producing bacteria for another day or so, and allow the brewer
to sell off a brew that otherwise would
have been undrinkable.
However, the problem of coping with the summer
heat in a world without refrigeration, or any real understanding of bacteria, was beginning to produce a revolution in brewing,
one that would in time change ale to beer and transform drinking patterns across northern Europe and eventually across the
world.
The agent of the revolution was the Hop plant- humulus lupulus.
The sweet
green shoots of the hop had been eaten by the Romans as a spring vegetable, but were only slowly adopted by brewers.
Hops contain an alpha acid that not only turns ale into bitter beer, but also inhibits bacterial growth.
The acid is produced among the soft resins in a gland on the hop flower. The Greeks and Romans were aware of hops’
antibacterial qualities,
even if they didn’t understand that it was bacteria they were out to attack, because
they employed solutions made from Hops to treat sores and rashes. However, they do not seem to have employed hops in brewing.
We have a record of their use in brewing from 822 AD, from the Abbot Adalhard of Corbie,
near Amiens in what was then the Empire of the Franks and is now France. This appears to be our first written record of Hops
in the practise of brewing. The use of hops to preserve beer through the hot summer months became common first in Bavaria
and Bohemia, where the central European climate, involving hot summers, made it very hard to keep ale drinkable through the
summer.
From there, their use spread slowly, generation by generation north and west. By 1067
AD, Abbess Hildegard of Bingen was writing of their use in ale prepared from oats. Bingen is set on the eastern edge of the
Rheingau, the famous vineyard for Riesling, and at least two hundred miles north of Bavaria.
By the
13th century, hops were in widespread use in northern Germany and in Friesia and Holland. Their use spread to England in the
14th century, and though resisted by many, who preferred their ales with natural sweetness (that English sweet tooth manifested
itself early on) they brought with them a powerful commercial incentive, since it was far less expensive to brew ale to a
strength of say 6º alcohol and hop the brew to help keep it drinkable, than to brew ale to 9º or 10º alcohol
and hope that the extra alcohol would keep acetobacter at bay.
And as hops became commonplace,
so did the term “bier” or Beer. Strictly speaking, unhopped brews were Ales and hopped brews were Beers, but in
practicaly terms this definition was lost along the way. Most, if not quite all, Ales are hopped and remain Ales, but
of course, they are also Beer.
The story of how Ales spread around the world,
and evolved into the modern range of Brown, Country, Belgian, Bitter, IPA and so on, is the subject of Part Two of this article.
|
