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HISTORY OF ALE PT 2
The history
of beer is largely a history of ale, since for most of human history that’s what we drank. Here I’m being a purist
regarding the definitions, if only for the purposes of this bit of history writing. Thus I define Ale as a top fermented brew
made from grains-- primarily barley, malted, mashed and dressed with yeast. It was unhopped until the 15th century, when it
became Beer (derived from Bier). So-- Beer was always a little fizzier than Ale, always hopped, and usually a little
lower in alcohol.
From the 15th century onwards the two
names have gradually become interchangeable, although I have the impression that calling the local Ale “beer”
in some parts of England circa 1550 could get you killed. People felt that strongly about the new “foreign”
style with its hop flavors and aromas.
First, let’s establish the historical context for
the development of modern styles of Ale.
In 1000 AD there wasn’t
a single town in northern and western europe with more than 15,000 human inhabitants. Trade was minimal, the seas were haunted
by Viking pirates. Things were a bit better than they’d been in depths of the Dark Ages, but the contrast with China
at this time would have been painful, had the Europeans even had any idea of what Song Dynasty China was like, with its vast
cities, enormous canals, high culture and relatively huge populations.
But China’s great civilization drank tea and rice wine. Japan drank sake, another fermented rice beverage. India, the
other major Asian civilization, drank relatively little alcohol in any form. The ancient centers of brewing, Egypt and
Mesopotamia had fallen under Islamic control with its cultural prohibition of alcohol. The brewing traditions there had either
died out or gone underground.
In sub-Saharan Africa the old ways continued,
but with relatively low populations, few towns and little industry, African brewing would remain a domestic, craft procedure.
In populous Central America and Mexico, a variety of liquors, including
alcoholic drinks, with or without infusions of
hallucinogens, were very popular, but that culture would be shattered by the Conquistadors of Spain, thus limiting its development
and cultural spread to the rest of the world. Today, of course, Tequila is entering a new, golden age, but even that was long
delayed by cultural limitations.
And thus, for the history of Ale, and by extension, Beer, we
have to turn to Europe, because that is where all the world’s popular modern styles evolved, from Brown Ales to Bitter
Ales, from Porters to Stouts, from Dark Lagers to Golden Pilseners, from Lambics to Wheat Beers, they all arose from the small
cities and towns that formed along an arc from Dublin, through London, to Amsterdam and points farther east, ending up in
Prague. One crucial extension on the beer belt presses south to Bavaria and Austria. Another extends north through
the English Midlands to lowland Scotland. This sprawl of little mediaeval towns and small cities was the heartland of
the art of ale brewing, and later of beer.
The Middle Ages saw a tumult of small wars spill
across this zone, none of which did lasting damage. For evidence of that, consider that these small states, bound together
by the dreams of feudal Christianity, mounted a number of expensive and arduous invasions of the middle east, known collectively
as the Crusades, from the 11th to the 13th centuries.
Two massive threats
to Europe’s steady evolution did appear. One was averted, the other struck with the force of a hammerblow.
The first was the arrival from the east of the Mongols around 1220 AD. No power on earth at
that time could withstand them. They would conquer Song Dynasty China and almost all of Asia before they were done. However,
the deaths of Gengiz Khan in 1227 and Ogedei Khan in 1240 interrupted their progress west and spared most of Europe from becoming
part of their empire.
The second was the Black Death, a form of bubonic
plague that spread from the Black Sea ports through Constantinople and on to every part of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Between
a third and a half of Europe’s population perished from the plague. The socio-economic effect was to degrade the remaining
structures of feudalism. A strangling labor shortage boosted wages and freed peasants from the land. Food shortages, which
had been the hallmark of the preceding century or so, faded away for a time.
During this period
the practise of brewing was largely in the hands of female brewsters in the villages, and monks in the monasteries.
Technological innovation was slow to spread, but a pair of key developments had taken place in Bavaria and were now to influence
the evolution of ale into beer.
The first was the practise of lagering,
or “storage,” in cool caves in Bavaria to prolong the life of their ales. The Bavarians were ale drinkers and
they faced the problem of pretty fierce summers, due to a continental climate. To keep ale from spoiling, and turning into
vinegar, meant finding ways to prevent acetobacter from growing and feeding on the alcohol in the brew. The traditional method
was to brew it as strong as possible, boosting the alcohol content to 8º or 9º by volume, a level that discouraged
bacterial growth. On its own this was not usually enough of a precaution in a culture that had no glass bottles, nothing
but wooden casks for beer storage and no real understanding of bacteria or even the ability to achieve sterile conditions
during brewing. Keeping ale as cold as possible was one partial solution, but the anti-bacterial actions of the oils
in hops were found to be even more effective. The combination of all three methods, brewing to strength, hopping the beer
as heavily as you could get away with and keeping it as cool as possible worked the best.
Lagering is said to have begun in 12th century Bavaria. The use of hops may already have been fairly widespread both there
and in Bohemia, which also had hot summers. In fact we can fairly say that by 1300 at the latest, the Bavarians had taken
the crucial steps that changed Ale into Beer.
By 1500 AD, Europe had finally surpassed Roman
population levels and developed a new, vital set of industries that were spurring further growth. Northern Italy was
the leading industrial center, but farther north, in the lowlands of Flanders, the Flemish weavers had invented a comfortable
style of light woolen cloth that brought immense prosperity to the Belgian towns of Bruges and Ghent. Along with London and
Paris, these centers represented the birth of a new zone of industrial civilization and trade. Coincidentally, they were also
centers where the brewing of Ales would attain a peak of sophistication and variety.
And while
Paris would always be a place where the consumption of wine would compete with that of ale, in Flanders and England, the every
day drink was ale in one form or another. There was a weak ale, with perhaps 2º of alcohol that was consumed in
place of the water that was usually unsafe to drink, and then there were ordinary ales at something like 6º and stronger
ales that ran up as high as the brewer could take them, some perhaps to 10º ABV.
But the spread of hops was bringing change. By using hops the brewer could produce a product that kept condition longer, and
might also retain more effervescence than the older styles of ale. More conservative customers might balk at the extra fizz,
or complain about the bitterness of hop flavors, but others took their places at the bar and hops were here to stay.
In Germany the lines between the new “bier” and the old ales were blurring. Some
of the truly old local styles in German beer have their roots in this period, such as Kolsch and Alt. Similar changes
were taking place in the Netherlands, northern France and in England, though old time ale drinkers there were slow to accept
the taste of hops.
In
1500, the towns and cities of Europe held about 2.5% of the total population reflecting the overwhelming agricultural nature
of the European economy. But change was accelerating. The boom in cloth production in Flanders had eventually helped begin
an English woolen industry. Trade soared, and with it went Amsterdam, and then London whose populations went from the
fifty to seventy thousand level to several times that number within a century and a half.
For brewing this brought on the beginnings of modern industrial brewing production. Whereas in the village almost every
single man was a peasant working on the land, and any woman could brew ale if she had the barley to hand, in the towns, men
and women specialized, whether they were bakers, tailors, or simply porters who moved stuff around. They didn’t have
the time or the resources to make their own ale and so they had to buy it from someone who did.
In some cities a monastery might be the primary supplier, but as these places grew so did their need for ale and beer and
they outgrew the monastic supply. Many early breweries grew out of Inns, which naturally had to supply their own beer
for thirsty travellers. In the city of London, brewing had become a fully commercial activity by the 12th century.
In 1305 the Brewers Company was given permission to use water from the Chepe conduit. In 1437, the Brewers Company,
a mediaeval guild, was granted a charter by Henry VI. By 1420 there were something like three hundred brewers in London.
They all brewed ale at a variety of strengths for different purposes.
People drank a lot of the stuff, as they had to, since the water was filthy with disease organisms. Hops were coming into
use in London, and would continue to do so despite the grumbles of traditionalists and occasional bloody riots too.
However, the brewers still kilned their malt with charcoal, and their control of the process was not
much more advanced than it had been in the ancient world. Malt is kilned, that is heated and dried, to preserve
the malt sugars that form in the barley before it grows the green rootlet and shoot. The kiln itself is a large room or space
protected from rain, with a lower level on which a fire can be laid and burned to heat the floor. Slots or gratings
in the floor can conduct the heat up from below.
A modern kiln has
a slotted ceiling above, so that the heat can be withdrawn by sucking the hot air out of the kilning floor, but kilns of the
16th century were rather more primitive.
As they grew in sophistication,
however, their main shortcoming remained, namely a lack of empirical measurement. Brewers had no thermometers, no hydrometers
either. They judged the dryness of the malt by taking a grain every now and then and chewing it. They judged temperature
by gut instinct or the judicious use of a thumb. For keeping time they did have the town clock, or perhaps a stately timepiece
installed in the brewery itself, and that was a big advance, but for heating the kiln they only had charcoal and that meant
a certain amount of smoke and it was difficult to kiln with charcoal and not “smoke” the malt.
This meant that all the malt for brewing ended up as “brown” malt. Where today’s
brewer has a wide variety of malts to call on, with different colors from very pale gold to deep, roasted black, as well as
different profiles of fermentable sugars and enzyme retention, the brewers of the 16th century had much less variety. They
might have options arising from the grade and condition of the barley that they began with. They could vary the amount
of heat employed by reducing or increasing the amount of charcoal, but charcoal itself was variable in quality and so real
temperature control was difficult to attain. They could also vary the length of time they dried and cured the malt,
but all of this was very much a “craft” practise, depending on a lifetime’s knowledge and understanding.
Making the same ale twice in a row was
almost impossible.
And
their lack of technology didn’t stop with the lack of tools to measure what they were doing. They had rudimentary notions
of cleanliness and sterility and no glass or steel vessels in which to brew anyway. Still, with tradition at their side,
plus some finely honed instincts they made plenty of ale and their business grew in step with the city of London itself, which
accelerated in the 17th and 18th centuries to become the largest city in Europe. Europe itself posted an increase of 30% in
population between 1600 and 1715 and finally began to look like a rival to China and India.
Europe had not only reached a respectable population base, but through the development of deep
water sailing vessels and large iron cannon had acquired the technology with which to dominate the other civilizations of
the world. For the next two hundred and fifty years Europe would be the prime mover of trade, industry and the arts.
The “beer belt” across central Europe in 1715 was weighed
down on the western end by the giant city of London, but the densely populated Netherlands added to that weight. Across Germany,
down to Bavaria and out east to Bohemia, populations were still rural, the towns and cities still inside their mediaeval walls
and
development held back by calamities such as the 30 Years War (1618-48). During this period German and Czech brewers
continued to make ales by their traditional methods, which included hops and lagering. The engine for technological progress
was now in London, in the hands of commerce.
The next set of major
developments there involved the invention and production of Porter, a beer with extra flavors derived from a portion of roasted
malt. Porter was commercially invented around 1720 and became the Londoner’s beer of choice quite quickly. At this time,
however, the English were in the grip of the deadly and deleterious gin craze. Cheap gin, often sweetened with a sugar cube,
was responsible for tipping much of the population onto its face on a regular basis. So
drunk were so many that the government
was quite concerned. At times it was feared that English society would entirely dissolve in gin and end up in the gutter.
By 1750, the worst of the gin madness was over, and as the English sobered
up, so they turned to hefty pints of porter for consolation. It has to be said that separating the English from all forms
of alcoholic beverage has been a non-starter since the nation formed circa 700 AD. In the 19th century, Porter begat Stout,
for the story of which please see our Porter-Stout pages.
The importance
of Porter in the history of ale lies with the use of different kinds of malt within a single commercial preparation. Roasting
malt was easier than the kind of finely tuned kilning that would come later in the 19th century, but it opened the brewer’s
eyes to the possibilities.
This article contributed by Chris Rowley.
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