By the Same Author
Dedication
1 The Nature of Beer
2 Barley
3 Water
4 Hops
5 Yeast
6 Reinheitsgebot
Acknowledgements (and Disclosure)
Bibliography
Index
Supporters
Copyright
Pete Brown is a British author, journalist, blogger and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially the fun parts like beer and cider. His broad, fresh approach takes in social history, cultural commentary, travel writing, personal discovery and natural history, and his words are always delivered with the warmth and wit you’d expect from a great night down the pub. He writes for newspapers and magazines around the world and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme. He was named British Beer Writer of the Year in 2009, 2012 and 2016, and Fortnum & Mason Online Drinks Writer of the Year in 2015. He lives in London.
petebrown.net
@petebrownbeer
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer
Three Sheets to the Wind: One Man’s Quest for the Meaning of Beer
Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer that Built the British Empire
Shakespeare’s Local: Six Centuries of Everyday Life Seen Through One Extraordinary Pub
World’s Best Cider: Taste, Tradition and Terroir, from Somerset to Seattle
The Pub: A Cultural Institution – from Country Inns to Craft Beer Bars and Corner Locals
The Apple Orchard: The Story of Our Most English Fruit
To Liz,
who now drinks beer even when I’m not there.
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
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Founders, Unbound
‘Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.’
C. S. LEWIS, MIRACLES, 1947
A friend of mine works for one of the UK’s biggest brewers. They make some very nice beers, and one or two really special ones, but their main product – the one that pays everyone’s wages and pension contributions – is one of the biggest standard lager brands in the UK. It’s adored by those who drink it, but regarded with disdain both by people who see themselves as knowledgeable and passionate about beer and by those who don’t care for beer at all. It’s the kind of beer that’s often referred to as ‘cooking lager’, synonymous with British lads out on the lash, trading banter with their mates before popping off for a balti or a cheeky Nando’s.
It’s the kind of lager that used to be smart and funny, great ads on the telly that were all about the good times out with your mates, big logos at Premiership footie matches, pictures of bad boy rock stars in the papers with their arms round each other at some festival, peace sign on one hand, tin of lager in the other. But these days it seems to have lost its golden lustre. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the perfect pint for when ur smashing it wiv your brev Gaz who is a total ledge and the Archbishop of Banterbury, but for the twenty-first-century lad, who doesn’t really think of himself as a lad any more anyway, come to think of it, it’s not necessarily the drink you want to be brandishing on your first date with Emma from Accounts, or the quiet pint with your boss to discuss your first serious promotion.
So this lager, along with most others like it, has been looking for a change of image. It wants people to see it now as more of a quality, premium product. If it saw itself in the mid-nineties as a Bantersaurus Rex with a Liam Gallagher haircut and simian gait, by the second decade of the twenty-first century it wanted drinkers to see it as some combination of George Clooney and Professor Brian Cox.
Which is why my mate found himself behind the two-way mirror familiar to anyone who has worked in marketing, watching a focus group of young beer drinkers respond to ideas for new ads that were being shown to them by a moderator.
This new campaign was designed to appeal to people who rejected the lager, to persuade them that maybe it was better than they’d always thought. As a precaution, they were also showing the ideas to people who already drank it, just to make sure nothing changed their mind about the beer they loved. So here were the Archbish, the Bantersaurus and their mates being shown posters that focused on the ingredients of the beer in question. The lead poster was very simple: a background of clear blue sky and golden fields shining in the sun, and in the foreground a strong, manly hand gripping a dew-frosted pint, hoisting it from the field into the sky, a gender-reimagined Lady of the Lake brandishing a modern Excalibur, illuminated by a very simple line, no gag, no clever wordplay, just a statement of fact:
MADE WITH 100% BRITISH BARLEY.
‘Ugh,’ said the Archbish, ‘I don’t want plants in my beer. Can’t you go back to making it with chemicals like you always used to?’
This story, which is true, illustrates how most of us have looked at beer – whether we drink it or not – over the last forty years or so. Beer is honest, down-to-earth, democratic and approachable, and that’s what makes it so appealing. Sit down over a beer and it removes hierarchies, uncomplicates situations and liberates us from reserve. But that can easily flip over into regarding beer as common and unsophisticated, a simple commodity that’s less important than the great times that happen around the drinking of it. Beer itself is often an afterthought, taken for granted even by the people who love it. The oddest thing about beer – and there’s much that’s odd about beer – is that even some of its most ardent drinkers are not only unaware of what it’s made of, they don’t actually seem to care.
The ‘chemicals’ line is one that’s often thrown at industrial beer as an accusation, but it can also be part of beer’s perceived appeal. In The Football Factory, the frequently misunderstood* author John King writes, ‘the lager tastes like heaven. Cold and sharp against the throat. Chemical bubbles brewed quickly for lager louts’, which manages to make it sound appealing – in context, and to my ears at least. That moment King describes is referred to more diplomatically by the beer industry as ‘first-pint refreshment’, and for the lager drinker nothing else quite beats it. The anticipation of that prickly hit, a sensation that comes close to delicious pain if you drink quickly enough, is what keeps you going through a day of hard toil, and beer as reward remains one of the fundamental tropes of lager advertising around the world.†
Sometimes you can destroy the magic of a thing by taking it apart to see how it works. Part of the appeal of beer is its straightforward simplicity. Would it spoil that first-pint perfection to be thinking about what’s actually in the glass? Does the simple dismissal of ‘chemicals’ actually help preserve some magic?
Maybe. For some of us, some of the time. But I still think the extent of our collective ignorance about beer is strange. The ‘100% British barley’ campaign ended up running on the sides of bus shelters. The brewer received complaints from loyal fans saying the beer no longer tasted as good now they were brewing it with barley. But it has always been brewed with barley – it’s just that people didn’t know until they saw the posters.
Unless I’m talking to a fellow beer geek, it’s very unusual to find someone who knows the main ingredients of the beer they’re drinking. Pretty much anyone who has been in contact with them knows that bread is made from wheat, wine is made from pressed grapes, cheese is made from milk and cider is made – in theory at least – from crushed apples. But ask someone what beer is made out of – and I’ve done this a lot – and the most popular answer is ‘Um … hops?’
OK, but what are hops?
‘I haven’t a clue.’
Anything else?
‘What, you mean as well as hops?’
Yes.
And a much smaller group of people will say, ‘Blimey, er … wheat?’
Well, sometimes, but it’s not one of the main ingredients.
Then, with recovering certainty, the third and final guess will invariably be, ‘Chemicals.’
I spend most of my professional life persuading people to drink beer, and to drink better beer. I do this because I’m passionate about beer myself, about its history, its cultural significance, its power to bring people together and make things better, and also about the incredible variety and complexity of flavours and sensations you can get in the glass. Increasingly, I’m not alone. Beer is undergoing a renaissance, and even people who never drank it before are realising that there’s more to beer than John King’s chemical bubbles brewed for lager louts. Beer is capable of outstanding beauty, grace and elegance. There are beers that belong in champagne flutes or brandy balloons rather than pint glasses. The right beer can feel comfortable on the fine dining table as well as in the pub snug. At a time when many people are increasingly concerned or just curious about where their food and drink comes from and what’s in it, the ignorance around beer seemed increasingly odd. And then, a few years ago, I found myself in a hop garden where I realised that my own knowledge was limited, and that this had to change.
* Misunderstood – usually by people who haven’t read him – as part of the football hooliganism glorification/exploitation scene of the nineties, King’s books are actually powerful studies of working-class male relationships and the disaffected alienation that informs them.
† Even now, after years of beer exploration and with a cellar and two beer fridges full of luscious, aromatic IPAs, barrel-aged stouts, Belgian Trappist ales and sharp, sour red ales, and with an informed appreciation of what makes them so special, and in the certain knowledge that drinking straight from the bottle rather than a glass means I lose the aroma and therefore a good deal of the character of a beer, if I’ve been doing physical work, an ice-cold lager downed from the bottle neck is still the only thing that will do.
‘What makes English hops so special is that their flavours are distinct – there are fruity and woody notes present – but no one note is predominant. The effect is that you want to have another drink of the same beer. There’s no need to change to another brand.’
Dr Peter Darby loves hops. I thought I loved hops. But no one loves hops as much as Dr Peter Darby does.
‘English flavour is like a chamber orchestra, the hops giving simultaneously the high notes and the bass notes. In comparison, a Czech beer is more like a full orchestra with much more breadth to the sound, and an American hop gives more of a dance band with more emphasis on volume and brass. The recent New Zealand hops, such as Nelson Sauvin, are like adding a voice to the instrumental music.’
See? I told you.
Peter Darby is one of the world’s leading hop breeders and the public face of the British Hop Association. Among his many duties he’s the curator of the National Hop Collection at Queen Court Farm, near Faversham in Kent, where old varieties are preserved and new ones raised. Peter is a short, slight man with thick, wavy grey hair and a full moustache. When he talks about hops, his face lights up and his body fizzes with enthusiasm. He’s not only excited about his subject; he’s thrilled with any opportunity to share his passion.
The British National Hop Collection takes up an acre of land and is paid for by local brewer Shepherd Neame. There are 250 different hop varieties planted here – the earliest dating back to the 1700s, the latest, Sovereign, named in 2010. The tufty, springy grass is soft beneath our feet. The hops grow on bines, long, vegetal ropes that twist around coconut strings and rise in curtains either side of us, growing in thick columns up towards taut wires running along the field about 20 feet above the ground. Stand between two of these rows and look down the tunnel they form, and it’s like nature has tried to create an ornate passageway to some sun king’s palace, a green Versailles. I half expect a faerie trumpet blast to summon me from the other end. Has a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ever been staged in a hop garden? It should be.
It’s not just the way they look; the smell of a hop garden creates a heady atmosphere. ‘All the aromas of the field come into the beer,’ Peter is saying, as if reading my mind. I drift away, enraptured by the hops themselves. The varieties here were chosen to help ‘understand the heritage of the British hop industry’, and I’m immediately fascinated by the range. A hop flower is bright green, shining against the darker leaves of the plant. It’s fat at its base, where it hangs upside down by a stalk, and on the bine it tapers down to a point in layers of overlapping, scaly leaves. Some varieties are short and heart-shaped. Others are long fingers, almost like okra. The Fuggle – one of the two most famous British aroma hops – has a long, square cone, and takes its name from the man who discovered it growing as a chance seedling in 1785.
At Peter Darby’s urging, we crush hop cones in our hands, rubbing them with the heels of our palms to release their essential oils, cupping our hands and breathing in deeply. The Fuggle is distinctly peppery, with notes of herbs and wild garlic. Sovereign is fresh and grassy. Wye, a new hop, has vivid lemon and white pepper aromas.
Because this is a museum garden rather than a commercial farm, the hops have remained on the bine long past the time they should ideally have been picked. They’re overripe, browner and yellower than they should be, but still impressive enough to quieten a group of brewers and journalists who’ve had a boozy lunch and were quite jocular on the bus on the way over here. The more Peter talks, the more reverential we become, standing amid the green cloisters. When these hops are finally harvested, the entire plant will be cut at the base and dragged down off the wires that support it. Now, the plants are top-heavy. Having climbed through late spring and early summer, twisting their way around coconut string to reach the wires, over the past two months they’ve bunched out and swelled in size. The bases of the bines, totally unable to support the weight of the plant without this elaborate structure of poles, string and wire, trail uselessly above the ground, so individual plants look like green ghosts floating through the air.
‘Hops make beer uplifting,’ Peter is saying. ‘They interact with alcohol dehydrogenase in the body to give more of an effect. So for example if you compare Challenger and Admiral hops, you’ll feel the alcohol more with Challenger.’ And then he jumps straight from this to an explanation of how the surname ‘Hopkins’ came to be.
Like a ship’s captain, I get the impression that Peter Darby is not quite happy unless he’s here, in his element, at his station. He holds forth like a father presenting his talented children. And maybe the nautical analogy is not entirely random. Surrounded as I am by Challenger, Sovereign, Target and Admiral, it strikes me that hops are often named in the same spirit as ships of the Royal Navy, with as much heart-swelling pride and unconditional love.
I wonder why this is. Even now, enraptured by a hop field, I find it curious that hops came to be the poster ingredient for beer, the only ingredient most beer drinkers can name. It’s not the first time I’ve thought this, and it’s not the first time I’ve been around people who are admiring or even out-and-out worshipping hops.
There’s been a change in my non-beery friends, too, as the craft beer revolution gathers pace. I get sent quite a lot of beer, more than I can drink, especially as I do most of my drinking away from home. Every year, we have a summer barbecue and a Christmas party where we ask people to bring anything they want except beer, and we try to clear my cellar. Ten years ago I would have to grudgingly go out and buy some mainstream lager because most people wouldn’t touch the range of golden ales, best bitters, pale ales, porters and stouts I put out. Seven years ago, they were happily drinking those beers, even asking questions about them. For the past five years, those same drinkers have looked at the range of beers I’ve been sent, sniffed, and said, ‘Haven’t you got anything with Citra hops? Or Nelson Sauvin?’
Hops are working for beer in the same way a focus on grape varieties helped Britain fall in love with wine over the last thirty years. We may not know much, but we know our favourites. And I realise there’s a story to be told about hops – about their cultivation, characteristics, varieties and flavours, and about people like Peter Darby who raise them and nurture them. Threads of different experiences I’ve had over the years – an insane hop festival in the Czech Republic, a hop expedition to Slovenia that turned into a horrible Man v. Food moment, a session rubbing and sniffing different hops with a brewer until my front was coated in green and yellow dust – suddenly tie together in my head.
And then I realise it’s happening again: I’m being seduced by the glamour of the hop. It’s one of four main ingredients in beer. Historically it’s the most recent addition, and is, arguably, the only one of the four that you don’t technically need in order to make beer. I want to praise the magic of hops. But I also want to put them in context, and shine a light on beer’s other ingredients – the ones even my craft beer drinking, Citra-loving party guests struggle to name. Because while hops possess all the glamour in both the modern and traditional sense of the word, there’s magic in beer’s other three primary ingredients too.
Our ignorance about beer doesn’t seem to be much of a barrier to most people who drink it, and there are an awful lot of them. But that’s precisely why I find the lack of knowledge to be particularly bizarre – because beer is, by some distance, the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world.
As a species we drink more water than anything else. Between 60 and 65 per cent of an adult human’s body weight is accounted for by water. We’re losing it all the time, and if we don’t replenish it we’ll probably die within three or four days. But there are two problems with water. One is that to drink the required amount of 2 to 3 litres (3½ to 5 pints) a day to remain fully hydrated can become a little monotonous. Second is that you can’t always be sure your water supply is perfectly clean.
To solve the first issue, humans add things to water to make it taste more interesting. To solve the second, for thousands of years we’ve been in the habit of boiling water to sterilise it. Do both, and you can make tea and coffee – the two most popular drinks in the world after water itself. But for far longer than we’ve been making these hot beverages, we’ve been mixing water with an assortment of grasses, weeds and fungi to make beer.
We know and accept that tea is made by picking leaves from small bushes and steeping them in water, and coffee is made by picking beans that grow on shrubs, fermenting, roasting and grinding them and steeping them in water. But it probably comes as quite a shock to most drinkers to think of beer as grass, weeds, fungus and water.
I’ll concede that ‘grass, weeds, fungus and water’ is perhaps not the most appealing description of beer you’ve ever encountered, and I could understand if, given that as an option, you felt more comfortable with the ‘chemicals’ narrative. But these are pretty special types of grass, weeds and fungus. And even the water is more than it seems.
The industrial aspect of brewing helps prevent the average drinker from associating beer with the same romance or exoticism as wine. Think of wine and you think of vineyards in Provence or Tuscany. Think of beer and the best you’ll conjure up is a redbrick Victorian factory somewhere in the Midlands. The process of beer making – the diagram laid out in every book and chalked up on every craft beer bar wall – doesn’t lend itself to fascination and wonder. But the ingredients – the seemingly ordinary, natural substances that make beer – are each miraculous, individually and collectively.
Grass, yeast, fungus and water are brought together by what is, to many, the greatest miracle of all: fermentation. Yeast loves to eat sugar. When it does, it reproduces at a rapid rate, and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as by-products. Sugar occurs naturally in nature, and, wherever it does, yeast will be there, trying to eat it.
This is a process that is carried out by organisms invisible to the human eye, was inexplicable until recently, and caused great arguments between the world’s leading minds in biology and their opposite numbers in chemistry. The transformation of water into wine (or possibly beer if you examine the original language of the gospels) was the first miracle Jesus performed. For centuries, brewers referred to the mysterious catalyst of fermentation as ‘godisgoode’.
Yeast needs sugar to produce alcohol. In grapes and other fruit, this sugar is relatively accessible from a microscopic predator’s point of view, and their orgy of consumption and reproduction gives us wine, or cider. But beer is made from grain – usually barley – which is wise to the schemes of yeast and has built elaborate defences against it. Brewing beer starts with the collusion between man and microbe to trick barley into surrendering its sweet stash, and that process seems almost as miraculous as fermentation itself.
Brewing and fermentation – and the process of malting that precedes it – can’t happen without the barley being submerged in water, and there’s far more to this clear, seemingly pure substance than it merely being the medium that allows everything else to happen. While we might think of beer styles as being determined by the nature of the hops and barley that give it its flavour, water in any given region is shaped by the land it falls on and runs through, and has been instrumental in evolving our most important beer styles in the places where they emerged. Hops gain their allure by doing things no other plant can, but they can only do them for a brief time – their glamour begins to fade almost as soon as it appears. And finally the catalyst, yeast itself, doesn’t just perform a miraculous feat: everything about its existence is awe-inspiring to both a microbiology novice such as myself and to people who have spent their lives studying it.
At the start of my journey through the ingredients of beer, I set aside everything I’d learned so far and approached it as if I knew nothing. I was right to do so. ‘Raw materials’ is what brewers call the stuff they make their beer from. That’s understandable, but it does an injustice to the extraordinary amount of work and expertise involved in bringing each of these materials to the brewery door. All four of beer’s basic ingredients are perfectly natural, but each one has been carefully modified, each subjected to a long history of scientific exploration. On a day-to-day basis, malted barley (grass), hops (weeds), yeast (fungus) and brewing liquor (yes, they even have a fancy word for water) are all subject to painstaking care and analysis, each kept in specialised, carefully controlled conditions.
There are miracles in each of beer’s four key ingredients, and when you string these miracles together, the straightforward, supposedly simple drink that emerges is in fact an extraordinary cocktail of natural wonders and human ingenuity that is underrated even by its most ardent fans. And perhaps the greatest miracle of all is that we’ve been doing most of this for thousands of years longer than we’ve actually known what we’re doing or why. We need to explore the origins of brewing and the processes that surround it in order to figure out how we harnessed the power of enzymes and microorganisms millennia before we knew they existed, and how we learned to influence genetics before we had the slightest idea what they were.
This book is split into four main sections, one for each of the primary raw ingredients. I’ve made it very easy for you to dip in and read first about the ingredient that interests you most, which is probably hops, but I wouldn’t recommend that.
The order of the book follows the introduction of each ingredient to the brewing process. I’m not going to talk a great deal about that process, because this is not a book about how to brew beer. If you want to know more about that process, there’s no substitute for seeing it in action.‡ This may well be a book about why we brew beer, in part, possibly. But it’s mostly about the elements of beer, the processes and ingredients that come before the brewhouse. If you’re a fan of superhero movies or comics, think of it as beer’s origin story. If you cook at all, think of it like building a recipe in a saucepan. It wouldn’t make much sense to think about adding the seasoning before you’ve even chopped your onions and garlic. In beer, as in any other form of cooking, we start from the base and build up. Each ingredient that’s added works in relation to what’s already there. And so we really have to start at the beginning: not just the beginning of the brewing process, but the beginning of brewing, and even the beginning of civilisation itself.
‡ Big breweries offer scheduled guided tours, but while these are interesting, you don’t often get to see beer actually being made. If you know your local microbrewer you could always offer to ‘help’ at a brew day, which will mainly involve you digging out the mash tun. There’s a relatively new chain of brewpubs called Craft Brew and Kitchen currently enjoying a rapid expansion across the UK. They offer brew days where you and your mates can be guided through the brewing process and make your own beer, which you can then collect and take home once fermentation and conditioning have been completed.
‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’
GUSTAV MAHLER, quoted on the website of Schlenkerla, the Bamberg brewer of smoked beer
I’m a firm believer in magic. But rather than it being the action of supernatural beings, I just think there’s stuff that obeys laws of science and nature that we haven’t yet discovered. And while in some cases such laws may have been worked out by certain rather clever members of the human race, if you’re not aware of their work, or you don’t understand it, the phenomena they describe can still seem magical. To explore the miracles of brewing, I need to address my relative ignorance of science.
At school I passed my O levels in chemistry, biology and (eventually) physics, but I always saw these subjects as quite dull compared to the arts. I was one of those bedroom-bound teenagers who saw in literature, music and black and white films with subtitles something deeper and more profound than my mundane existence, whereas science – the way we were taught it at any rate – reduced the world to elements and equations, hard and incontrovertible, with no room for dreaming or escape. Until now, my interest in beer has always focused around its cultural and social roles, its history, the way it brings us together, how we use it to help define who we are. I really wasn’t as interested in how it was put together or what it was made from. And that was my loss.
I was completely wrong about science, as anyone who has thought properly about it for more than ten minutes knows perfectly well. If you want to see wonder, if you want to contemplate the miracle and meaning of existence, the stuff that lies behind those seemingly dull equations and observations offers as much beauty, as much emotion, as much awe, as the first Smiths album playing on a tinny stereo system in a smelly teenage bedroom. Some would argue even more.
The benefit of my ignorance is that, as a middle-aged adult, I’m enjoying learning about science with such a naïve, childlike amazement that I’m almost glad I left it so late. It’s making me feel young again. Obviously, I have a lot of catching up to do.
It starts with biochemistry. Our eventual unravelling of the magic of alcohol was delayed by the fact that biology and chemistry look at the world in quite different ways. It was only by looking at both that people were finally able to explain the process of fermentation, by which yeast ingests sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide.
This is one of the simplest and oldest biochemical processes on the planet. It’s possibly the most miraculous fact in this or any other book about drink, and we’ll be raising a glass or three to it later on.
But before that transformation is possible, you need the sugar itself. Sugar is one of the most important substances in nature. The competition for it, the complex interplay of plants, animals and microscopic fungi, ultimately gives us alcohol. So to fully understand fermentation we have to start with the source of that sugar. The kind of plant it comes from is the basis of the distinction between beer and other drinks.
Plants absorb water and carbon dioxide, and with the helping hand of sunlight and a few enzymes§ convert these into oxygen and sugar, via the process of photosynthesis. The GCSE version of this process is summarised as follows:
When you express this in the chemical symbols for each:
the miraculous notion of being able to create sugar out of water and thin air makes a bit more sense because you can see photosynthesis is merely reconfiguring a collection of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. But there’s nothing ‘mere’ about it. This simple equation is the source of all the sugar in the world. It’s how plants live, and it starts the food chain that keeps animals alive. Run the programme for long enough, and the plants that don’t get eaten ultimately become the source of all our fossil fuels, too.
This means the demand for sugar in nature often exceeds supply. This may be hard to believe when you look at the ever-expanding waistlines of the developed world, but sugar in nature is a scarce resource and, historically, the most sugary foods are the hardest to obtain and the most difficult to make. The domestication and refining of sugar goes back thousands of years, but in the West we’ve only been adding refined sugar to everything since the eighteenth century.
Plants create sugar so that they can grow, and, at certain stages, so they can make fruit or seeds to give birth to new plants that ensure the survival of the species. A new seed cannot photosynthesise and create its own energy until it has grown leaves or shoots, and, usually, roots to anchor it in place and draw other nutrients from the soil. So the parent packs up its seed with an abundant source of sugar to help the baby plant survive and grow until it’s big and strong enough to create its own sugar.
There’s an important difference in how grain and fruit do this. Sometimes, the fruit or kernel surrounding the plant embryo has a cleverly customised role. If you’re a tree, you don’t want your kids settling too close or else you’ll soon be competing for nutrients and sunlight. So, many fruits have evolved a symbiotic relationship with animals. They attract wandering beasts or insects with sugary, aromatic flavour compounds. Animals find the fruit nutritious to eat, then carry the indigestible seeds away from the tree and deposit them in a fertile pile of manure some distance away.
If this doesn’t happen quickly enough, microorganisms will swoop in, and, when the fruit starts to rot, they’ll claim the sugar for themselves. Yeast is everywhere, especially in hot summers when fruit is ripening, and it’s always ready to claim vulnerable parcels of fermentable sugars. When it digests sugar it creates carbon dioxide and alcohol as by-products, a process which we refer to as fermentation. This is a wonderful result for humans and other higher order mammals, but not so great for the seeds that are left on the floor to die without their food parcels.
Grain is, in some ways, much cleverer than fruit, and has built sophisticated defences against yeast. Because it’s smaller and lighter, it can be blown by the wind and doesn’t need as much distance from the parent plant, so it doesn’t have to put itself on show the same way apples or cherries do. And that means it can be smarter about how it packages the sugar for its offspring. Grains such as barley are like armour-plated, souped-up alternatives to fruit. A grain kernel, when it is ready to leave the plant, has a skin so hard no microbe or insect can get through it – even humans have to employ stone or metal mills if we want crush the outer shell of a grain efficiently. And even if we succeed in doing that, the fuel within has further levels of protection: it’s stored not as simple sugar, but as long-chain starch molecules that are too big for microorganisms to attack. If a sugar molecule is a brick, starch is a wall. When the unstoppable force of yeast meets the immovable object of mature barley grains, nothing happens.
And so, some of the simplest and some of the most complicated organisms on earth form an unholy alliance to separate the barley embryo for its sugary stash. Humans harvest and modify the grains to allow yeast to attack the sugars, and in return the yeasts create the alcohol humans love. Of course, the yeast can’t even know of or comprehend the existence or role of its human partners in crime. And for most of the time we’ve been doing this we’ve had no idea we were collaborating with yeasts either. We were in an alliance in which neither party knew the other existed. While on the human side we sort of knew what we were doing, we had no idea how, or why, it worked. We’ve been converting barley by ‘malting’ it before brewing for thousands of years. We’ve known why we’re doing so for less than two hundred.
§ We’ll get to enzymes and explore them in more detail on page 26, but for now think of enzymes as biological agents of change, the catalysts that make stuff happen in nature.
This is the basic difference between wine (or cider), made from fruit, and beer, made from grain. Mash up some grapes or apples and, in the crudest way, wine and cider will make themselves. To make beer, grain needs to be ‘modified’, and to make that happen we influence the behaviour of the enzymes in the grain.
When I announced that I was writing a book about the four ingredients of beer, one brewer told me he felt that enzymes were the fifth. Enzymes are biological catalysts that help convert certain molecules into different molecules, thereby allowing cells to metabolise at a rate fast enough to support life. They don’t really change the result; they just make it happen much, much faster. There are thousands of different types – the human body contains at least 2,700 – and we’d be dead without them. We use them to digest food (and alcohol), to replicate our DNA, to regulate the body, even to make our muscles move. Outside the body, we use them in everything from biofuel manufacture to laundry detergent. And in barley grains, when the time is right, they dismantle the sugary bricks from their starchy wall.
Although scientists began to work out that some kind of secretions helped break down food in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it wasn’t until 1833 that French chemist Anselme Payen discovered the enzyme diastase, by analysing a solution of brewing malt. Diastase breaks down starch into smaller, simpler sugars like fructose and, in barley’s case, maltose.
When a barley grain is ready to germinate, it releases diastase to convert stored starch into the simple sugars the embryo needs to grow. That hard shell softens so that the seed can sprout rootlets, and if some bastard were to intervene at this point, taking the germinating seed out of its cosy, natural environment, they could manipulate the process and trick the enzymes into converting all that sugar so yeast could finally have its way. Beer is born in savage conflict. There are casualties.
I’ve just explained the relationship between fermentable sugar in nature, the basic biochemistry of fermentation by microorganisms, the storing of energy as starch molecules in barley, the conversion of starch to sugar during germination, and the hijacking of that process as the basis of beer fermentation. It’s pretty complex stuff. And yet we’ve been doing it for over ten thousand years. And for over 98 per cent of this time we’ve known absolutely nothing about enzymes, starch or yeast. So how on earth did early brewers figure out what to do?
When you get down to it, the basis of our civilisation is grass. Crop grass down to the ground and it will grow back more vigorously than before, so if you’re farming cattle, so long as the rains come, you have an infinite food supply for them that you need do little to replenish. But the basis of organised farming – the trigger for the transition from a subsistence-based, nomadic existence to one where only a small number of us need to work to provide food, so the rest of us can get on with creating art, philosophy, poetry, football, Facebook, warfare and beer – is the noble grasses we call cereals: wheat, millet, oats, maize, rice and barley. One or more of these grasses is at the base of every civilisation in the world.
Before we cultivated any plants, we gathered them in the wild. Human beings tens of thousands of years ago were just as smart as we are now, but learning about how the world worked was painstakingly slow and took thousands of generations.
We have no idea when our ancestors figured out that gathered grain, if not eaten straight away, could start to sprout in the right conditions. In his book Plants in the Service of Man, written in 1971, Edward Hyams reckoned it was around 6000 BCE, because, at the time of writing, early tools such as sickles had been found that dated back to that period. Since then, carbon-dating techniques and new excavations have been able to push that back by at least another 6,000 years. Whenever it was, it seems to have been thousands of years earlier than the propagation of vines or fruit trees by primitive grafting techniques.
There is, of course, a big difference between cultivating grains as seeds to eat and processing those grains to make them into something else. Understanding the nutritional value of grasses is not the same thing as switching from a nomadic to a settled existence. Even after we understood the principles of agriculture, we could (and probably did) plant cereal fields in different locations, knowing we had stashes of food ready all across the routes of our nomadic peregrinations. The first towns – and the first farms that supplied them – emerged as the result of a desire to make grain into something else rather than just eat it straight away.
A constant, steady supply of food and drink is at the very heart of most early mythologies and religions, from the Garden of Eden planted with every tree that bore fruit that was good to eat, to the ancient Greek notion of the Happy Isles, where fruit trees were heavily laden all year round.
If gathered and stored, plants will eventually either rot away as microorganisms break them down, or sprout into new plants. Pretty much every significant innovation in food – cooking, baking, drying, salting, pickling and fermenting – arose in large part as a way of preserving food beyond its natural shelf life. Agriculture didn’t develop in isolation: in the lands known as ‘the Fertile Crescent’, which stretched across the Middle East and had a climate quite different from that of today, humans were able to graze and hunt just fine without it, gathering grain, lentils and chickpeas as they grew wild. Agriculture developed because we wanted to transform and store foods, to ensure a steady supply, as a labour-saving exercise – and ultimately, to improve upon and refine the flavours nature offered.
The earliest domesticated grains were wheat and barley. The earliest transformations of those grains were into bread and beer. The question that preoccupies many archaeologists is, which came first? At the moment, there are strong arguments either way. Of course I want to believe that beer came before bread – and I argued as much in my first book, Man Walks into a Pub. Bread is often assumed to be far more nutritious than beer, but beer is a good source of carbohydrates and vitamins. And, of course, alcohol also intoxicates and that’s a very pleasant feeling, and an aspect of history that’s often overlooked because it seems less serious than staying alive, inevitably frivolous in a profound debate about our survival and development as a species. And yet alcohol and intoxication were central to many ancient religious ceremonies, and remain so in many cultures around the world – not least the Catholic Holy Communion.
But brewing requires a great deal more than simply a source of fermentable grain. You need pottery in order to store the grain, to mix it with water and to allow it to ferment. You need a mill, or at least a mortar and pestle, to grind the grain. And you need the right temperatures for yeast to be happy to work. When you take all these into account, they appear in the archaeological record at roughly the same time, around 7000 BCE. It would have been far easier to make flat, unleavened bread from wheat than beer from barley. The difficulties of modifying barley and getting it to ferment mean that some crude forms of wine and mead were almost certainly made before beer.
Any attempt to account for the origin of brewing is, at best, informed speculation. The standard hypothesis among beer historians is that someone probably gathered some grain in a clay pot and accidentally left it in the rain to get wet. The grain got mushy, yeast descended and the pot began to bubble. Someone tasted it, liked it, and subsequently enjoyed a rather wonderful buzz. But there’s a huge flaw in this theory: without malting, the grain wouldn’t have converted starch to sugar, and no fermentation would have taken place. That hypothetical accident may have produced a tasty, nutritious gruel, but it would not have been alcoholic. It would not have been beer.¶
If the grains had been encouraged to sprout before going into this hypothetical pot, they would have become a ‘green malt’ that could have been fermented by wild yeasts. But for that to happen, the grain would have had to have been harvested and then given the right conditions to germinate, which would have involved it first being wet, then dry enough to sprout, and then for the sprouted grain to be immersed in water again. It sounds unlikely that all of this could have been purely accidental.
But there is another way. Diastase isn’t just present in barley: it’s also one of the enzymes in human saliva that helps begin the digestion of food before it reaches the stomach. If you were to chew a mouthful of barley grains, you’d soften them and introduce the enzyme that begins the starch conversion without malting having to take place. In parts of Central and South America, chicha beer is still made by chewing mouthfuls of corn and spitting them out, forming them into slimy balls that are allowed to dry out while the enzymes go to work. Thrown into a traditional maize brew, these balls will then convert the starches to sugar ready for fermentation. In the early days of sake brewing, people did something similar with rice.
A few years ago, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head brewing in Delaware, along with Professor Patrick McGovern, the world’s leading expert on ancient fermentation, and Dr Clark Erickson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, attempted to make chicha the traditional way. They very quickly discovered that it helped if you ground the corn with a mortar and pestle before chewing. Even then, they found it labour-intensive and deeply unpleasant. If this really was the origin of fermentable cereals, the first brewers must have been looking for an alternative pretty much from day one.
That alternative was traditional floor malting. It’s quite an involved process and requires careful attention to understand even today. How the first city-dwellers managed to figure it out 10,000 years ago is miraculous in itself.
Traditional floor malting consists of three stages. First, the grain is soaked in water to bring its moisture content up. Second, it’s arranged in a bed on a flat floor to germinate and sprout. This malting floor is the defining characteristic of the traditional process and needs to be smooth and well ventilated. This is where the enzymes activate, ready to convert – or ‘modify’ – the starch to sugar. Finally, the germination of the grain has to be arrested, otherwise the modification will complete and the plant will use the sugar itself to grow. This is prevented by drying the malt, which now happens in a kiln, but could have been done – in the right climate – on hot rocks in the sun.
The success of the germination process depends on getting an even temperature spread, and keeping the rootlets from getting tangled into a big lump that would eventually rot. Both of these imperatives mean the bed of grain has to be turned at regular intervals on the malting floor – that’s why this floor must be smooth and firm.
Smooth floors, often made of stamped earth or clay and sometimes using lime plaster – a labour-intensive and complex technology – have been discovered at various archaeological sites across the Fertile Crescent. These floors show signs of having been repaired multiple times, and appear to have served some specialised function. They’re often accompanied by evidence of fire pits, hearths, sickles and grinding equipment and frequently have impressions of grains embedded in them. The oldest of these finds recently discovered have been dated to between 10,000 and 12,000 years old. This means we have strong circumstantial evidence of barley malting in some of the earliest permanent human settlements yet discovered. If we settled down not just to cultivate grain but also to modify it, as seems likely, then it’s quite possible that malting barley was a key impetus in the establishment of permanent settlements.
¶ In 1993, Canadian palaeontologist and brewer Ed Hitchcock attempted to recreate the ‘happy accident’ that might have given birth to beer. His plan was to soak some grain until it sprouted, then pound it to a pulp, leave it to dry in the sun and then attract wild yeasts to ferment it. After no more than a day of soaking, however, wild bacteria had infected the pot, which bubbled, grew mould and gave off foul gases. So that’s almost certainly not how beer first happened.
As we’re going to be talking about raw ingredients, we need to have a little chat about the T-word, so it’s best that we do it now and get it out of the way.
Terroir