Story by Mikey Lowe
The history of beer up until the late 18th century should be characterized as the tortoise in Aesop’s fables. Slow, but it gets there in the end, thanks to the industrial revolution.
Brewers weren’t making the leaps and bounds then that the witch doctors of today’s malty climate are. Back then, tradition seemed to wear down the very capabilities of the producers, and they were swamped by rules and regulations. One of the harshest of these against new forms of beer was the German purity law or Reinheitsgebot of 1487. This ordered that genuine pilsners must be all malt and cannot contain rice, corn, wheat, or any grain other than malted barley. And yet we see a remarkable explosion of German brewing linked to a few key facts: the industrial age gets underway, bringing mechanised glass making, railroads, and the mass emigration to the New World.
Industrial London, in the era between 1790 and 1870, was a time where society transitioned from hand manufacturing and cottage industries to machine manufacturing. It was along with this efficiency came the advent of the popular porter style of beer, claims beer writer Randy Mosher.
Beers of this day in this period had little to offer in ways of colour and clarity. Cloudy and opaque are often determinants of impure or poorly filtered beers, but then again would you really care when you were drinking out of crockery steins, metal tankards, wooden mugs or even leather jars? Far from todays standard of glassware prominently featured in bars, glassware back then was an elitist item, reserved only for the upper echelons of society.
But was porter all that these cats were drinking?
The advent of the industrial age also brought the railroad. Far and away, over on the Continent beers were as luxurious as ever. Railroads carried bountiful beers — and importantly, the clear style of lager and pilsner — from Bavaria, Prussia, Vienna, and Berlin. Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver suggests that the advent of efficient mechanized glassmaking allowed glassware to move into the middle class and “once the middle class were sat down in their beer gardens with the sunshine sparkling through their golden clear glasses of beer, they were hopelessly smitten.”
Local brewers, faced with these pretty foreign beers, were forced to clean up or clear out. Pilsners as such became a luxury item as their finesse gave imperfections nowhere to hide.
Once smitten, these beer styles spread around the world, taking up root in the United States, and dominating global beer sales ever since.
Such an uplifted item was soon to carry across the waters to the New World with the mass emigration of Europeans to America’s shores.
Etched in the very spirits of these people were recipes for brewing that had been passed down to them through the generations. The remnants of these recipes and their effect is right in front of our eyes — just look at the sales figures of the top beers in America and even around the world: they bear European heritage.
If you don’t believe me then take a look online and research the history of Budweiser, Busch, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Yuengling. Remarkably Germanic names, am I right?