Beer Back in the Day

As I become a.little more sophisticated in my brewing process , moving on to all grain, buying more and more equipment, etc., I can't help but think about how beer was made way back in the day. Obviously they didn't have Lowes, a fancy mash tun, didn't have star san, fridge for temp control, etc. I'm no beer historian, but surely they made great beer without all this crazy stuff...Or are we just way better these days with all our fancy stuff?

 

I suspect home-brews back in the day weren't as good as what we're making now. Now, we can replicate trappist ales to some extent, and make our own lagers.

My sense is that it seems like they were just trying to get something safe to drink that would make them feel a little better, so I'm not sure they cared too much about taste. Sort of like old world food, it was pretty basic stuff.

 

We're way better.

Typically a brewery way back when would only make one beer style, suited to the conditions and equipment they had available. Light beers where there was soft water, ales where it was too warm to lager, etc.

Nowadays we can replicate any style with our fancy equipment.

 

I first brewed back in 1980. My equipment consisted of an old enameled roaster and a trash pail. Sanitized with hot water and bleach. No hydrometer, yeast from the health food store, pre-hopped malt extract. Made several brews that were Pretty good compared to the limited stuff you could buy at the liquor store back then. Today I brew with a semi automated HERMS system in a dedicated brewing room and make great beer but sometimes get that nostalgic feeling that takes me back to simpler and less complicated times.

 

That modifier is where you go astray.

They've made beer throughout history. By modern standards we likely would not consider it to be great.

Historically, all beer went sour. Some of it likely unpredictably. Much of it was likely oxidized. They got poor conversion. They got poor hop isomerization. They didn't understand yeast, or sanitation.

Of course, humans are a smart bunch, and figured out ways to get passable results out of what they did know, and since Pasteur's work and the understanding of pure strain fermentation, the quality of beer likely improved very rapidly after that up to where we are today.

If you look at historic recipes, you may not always find them pleasant. For a long time, the only avaible malt was brown, and probably very smoky from being dried over wood fire. Because that was the malting technology of the time (in the days before the creation of pale malt).

So if a sour, dark, smoky beer is not your cup of tea, don't look to ancient brewing for inspiration

 

I was watching Chef's Table on Netflix and it got me thinking. Many contemporary chefs are going back to traditional ways of cooking and preparing these stunning meals.and flavor. I wonder if this is a lost cause with beer or if there are methods that we have overlooked. I guess its time to look into the history...

 

If you want to look into beer history, I highly recommend perusing through this site: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/

Ron Pattinson is one of the best beer historians I am aware of. Now, his expertise is primarily beers of the British Isles, and German beers. But it's a fantastic resource for accurate, well sourced historical information.

 

Historical beer varied ENORMOUSLY from region to region and from time to time so probably you would've loved some of it and hated some of it. Any sweeping statements about what it was like are wrong because of all the variety.

In the old days a lot of people malted with straw to keep the smoke flavor down and beers were generally brewed with all one kind of barley malt, ranging from pale-ish to brown often with quite a bit of other kinds of grains as well (have seen old recipes with stuff like 50% oats).

However from reading about and drinking some survivals of pre-industrial brewing I think a lot of it was pretty good once you acquired a taste for it. The farmhouse makgeolli (Korean sour rice beer) should be pretty much the same stuff as was produced way back in the day and it's pretty damn good, generally a good bit better than the commercial stuff.

In the old days a lot of beer was aged for quite a long time, but I'm willing to guess that for a lot of peasants they just didn't have the money to buy enough barrels to bulk age a whole season's worth of beer so a lot of them would brew something fast and drink it fast. That way even if there was some bacteria in it, the bacteria wouldn't have enough time to contribute more than a touch of sourness and there'd still be a lot of residual sweetness to balance it. I remember back as a newbie tasting all of my fermenting beers every day and the batch that got infected took a while for the sourness to take hold, I think a lot of peasants back in the day dealt with bacteria by simply beating it to the punch and drinking the beer before it got truly sour.

A late survival of this type of beer would be West Country White Ale. Would taste fairly worty and green with a touch of sourness but I think it'd be pretty decent if made by people who've made the same thing a hundred times and know all the ins and outs.

 

Forgive me for the following 4 large pictures. It's a pretty cool first-hand discussion of early prohibition homebrewing. I copied this from an online issue of The American Mercury. The article itself was published in 1935, so the related experiences were likely 1920's.

I highly recommend reading it. You might be surprised at how much things haven't changed in 100 years.

 

Nice read, thanks for posting!

 

Nice stuff, PassedPawn! Thanks for sharing.

 

I'll have to read that when I'm on a computer my phone is to small. My grandfather brewed beer back on the 60s-70s. I was to small to get any but since I've been brewing I often wonder what his process was and how his brew tasted. No records of how he did it and nobody left to give me any insight. The only equipment left was an old bottle capper that I occasionally use. Cheers to you grandpa.

 

It's funny how we look back at the past through sepia-colored glasses. The language is a bit different, but not all that much compared to how we speak today, and the writing was hilarious. I particularly loved how he referred to the phase of the moon as a factor in fermentation time; I know I'm not the only one who's ever said it, but I'm delighted that someone giving a tongue-in-cheek postmortem of his brewing career eighty years ago made the exact same joke.

I'm saving those images to my computer so that I'll stumble upon them every once in a while for five minutes of giddy reading.

 

The answer depends on how far "back in the day" you want to go.
Food and beverage products are now produced on a massive industrial scale with computer controls and analysis of almost every ingredient including the water. The huge companies would like to keep it that way, but beer, wine and cider production used to be carried on in every household that wanted to drink. If there was a thermometer in the house no one was going to risk breaking it by putting it in the beer. There was no ABInbev or any of the big malt or yeast companies, everything was produced locally for local use. I have a book that shows how to jam straw in the bottom of a barrel to use as a mash tun. The straw was used to strain the grain from the wort. Sanitation? Their water was mostly contaminated, so how did they sanitize anything?
Was their beer any good by today's standards? I doubt it. Tastes have evolved. Beer drinking isn't about getting totally smashed for many people these days. The modern craft brew revolution is about taste and complexity.
But back to the original point, do you need a fancy brewing rig to make great beer? Nope. A pot, heat source, some kind of mash tun, basic instruments like a thermometer and hydrometer and you can make great beer if you know what you are doing. I believe the fermentation step and using the right ingredients are more important than being super fussy with your mash or sparging technique, but everyone has their own way. So "back in the day"
they could have made great beer, we'll never know for sure.
George Washington was a brewer and distiller, probably a cider maker as well, here's an article about one of his recipes, don't have time right now to find a readable copy of the recipe, but this is interesting:
http://refrigerators.reviewed.com/news/would-you-try-this-300-year-old-beer-recipe

 

I've read articles about country brewing & such. A half barrel on top of another one with straw in the bottom & a sort of plug that could be turned to allow flow through. And all the colorful descriptions of barrel sizes & a scoop of this with a goodly amount of fine that. Besides all the different ways of producing the malts. Recreating historic beers isn't easy. But once you get it close, it's really cool to experience.
That said, I agree that fancy brew bling isn't needed to produce a good beer. That fancy stuff can make the job easier, but at a high cost.

 

Yeesh, the poor bastard would've saved himself so much trouble he he'd just waited a bit more than three freaking days to bottle the damn beer.

 

Men have been known to crack during these anxious hours

Things haven't changed. Is my beer ok?

 

I'm still using the same kettle and mash tun I used back in the early 90's (although I'm thinking about going electric). I made good beer then, I make good beer now. I would say that I'm more consistent now, but I've worked on my process a lot a couple of years ago. I'm a BJCP National Judge and the major difference I see is that there are fewer terrible beers, but there aren't any more great beers at competitions. A score in the 40's is just as rare now as it was 20 years ago.

The biggest difference between then and now is a much wider range of ingredients is available and the knowledge is easier to come by. Liquid yeasts had just become available to us then. Dry yeasts sucked. Hops are better stored now and there are so many more available. The grains were pretty much all domestic although the DWC Belgian malts were becoming available.

 

Great snippet of history Passedpawn!

A book I found back in the 90's when I first started brewing, was Early American Beverages published in the 1960's. Now I don't know how accurate the information is, and I've never bothered to make any of the brews/drinks in the book, but it's an interesting and fun read in my opinion. You can still get copies from Amazon for around $10~12.

(Bubble and Squeak, as well as possets are in the recipes, which is where I first heard about them.)

 

I dunno. So much praise has been written about beer throughout history that I find it difficult to believe it was a s horrid as some are convinced.

 

Oh I dunno, you ever seen any 20's and 30's "porn" photos? Someone, somewhere, thought those chicks were smokin' hot.

 

Context. Given their frame of reference it was probably good in their eyes.

And that's not to say there wasn't potentially good stuff produced. Just that "they did it like that historically" isn't necessarily justification for continuing to do so today.

 

Also a lot of stuff is just an acquired taste. Makgeolli (Korean sour rice beer) often gets dismissed as "nasty sour snot" by people having it for the first time but it really really grows on you, certainly my favorite Asian drink (except maybe hot sake when you're coming in from the cold), and the best thing in the whole world after a long hike on a hot day. Don't think there's one unified standard of "tastes good" but I think that brewing the same broad style a hundred times and being taught by someone who's done it a hundred time provide a lot better quality control than newbie homebrewers with modern equipment.

 

Ahh the good old days when men were men and "beating the wife" was an appropriate response to long yeast lag times...

Jeez..... We have come a long way! Fascinating article though!

 

@passedpawn great article!

Here in Denver we have Prost, who brews on an antique system imported used from Germany. They make fantastic beer. I think that beer is better overall today, much more science in it, but would loved to have been able to see the huge automated breweries over a century, century-and-a-half ago.

I have also had lots of crap modern beer, actually, it seems to be more common these days rather than less.

 

Thanks passedpawn, great read

 

Umm... What? There are plenty of photos of pretty women from those decades.

 

Industrial-scale brewing has been around since the 18th century. The big London Porter brewers produced hundreds of thousand of barrels a year using a crefully controlled process. They brewed on a much bigger scale than even a big modern brewery like Stone. Of course they could produce palatable, consistent beer. That's why they got to be so big.

 

I sent a link to Charlie Papazian; his reply is below. Also, see link to 1st Zumurgy. Funny, looking through it. Check out the ads and stuff. Note that 1978 was when Carter legalized homebrewing in the US.

"This was the cover story for our first issue of Zymurgy in 1978. Also Ziesler was the father of our first editor of Zymurgy. - Charlie"
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