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Overview
So a guy or a gal walks into a bar and orders a . . . what? A Belgian lambic? A German Hefeweizen? An American barley wine? Today, with thousands of beers being made in the US and many imported ales and lagers available at taverns and retailers, the once-simple decision to have a beer may feel a little like drowning.
Drinkology Beer to the rescue. James Waller’s book is written especially for beer lovers who have no idea what “sparge” or “IBU” might mean.
After covering the basics of brewing, Waller provides an informative, witty, and accessible compendium of the globe’s beer styles, ranging from Abbey Ale to Zwickel. With special features including a roundup of “beer culture” (such as beer songs and movies about beer), notes on touring breweries, and a selection of beer-cocktail recipes and food dishes you can make with beer, Drinkology Beer is a beer book completely unlike any other.
“The budding beer aficionado in your life will smile when you hand him a gift-wrapped copy of James Waller’s Drinkology Beer: A Book About the Brew.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781584798514 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abrams |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 6.60(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Basically Beer
(Beer History and Beer Making)
In the beginning was the beer.
In all probability, beer was the first beverage — besides mother's milk and, of course, plain water — that human beings ever drank. Our word beer probably derives, at some remove, from the Latin verb bibere, "to drink," which neatly illustrates the primacy of the relation between beer and human existence. For human beings, "to drink" means "to drink beer."
And it's meant that for an awfully long time.
Beer Through a Straw
Talk about a keg party. In 879 BC, Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria, threw a ten-day-long bash to celebrate the completion of his palace in the new Assyrian capital, Nimrud. Seventy thousand people came. (Ashurnasirpal invited only 69,574, but you've got to assume there were a certain number of crashers.) To feed the partygoers, the king did some grocery shopping — laying in a thousand cattle, a thousand calves, ten thousand sheep, fifteen thousand lambs, a thousand ducks, a thousand geese, and a multitude of other livestock, birds, and fish. To quench his guests' thirst, he placed an order for ten thousand jars of beer. (These were not small jars.) Now, Ashurnasirpal II was not really what you'd call a benign ruler. His reign was mostly marked by the merciless suppression of various revolts. But for those ten days, he was a very, very popular guy.
Beer rocked the cradle
The city of Nimrud stood near the contemporary city of Mosul, Iraq — a spot better known, of late, for getting literally rather than figuratively bombed. But make another geographical note: this area of present-day Iraq sits nearly smack-dab in the center of the so-called Fertile Crescent. You remember the Fertile Crescent, yes? It's the scimitar-shaped swath of territory — stretching northeastward from the Nile Valley, in Egypt, and curving around through the area demarcated by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers until it reaches the Persian Gulf — that high school history textbooks tend to refer to as the "Cradle of Civilization." What those textbooks tend to leave out, however, is that the Cradle of Civilization was, in all probability, also the Birthplace of Beer. In fact, it was beer that rocked that cradle. And, by the time of Ashurnasirpal's housewarming party, it had been rocking it for several thousand years.
We say that the Fertile Crescent was beer's birthplace "in all probability" because no one is really certain where beer was first made. It may even be that there was no "first" beer making — no singular beer-making event from which all subsequent beer making has descended. Instead, basic methods for making beer may have been discovered independently at several — or even many — different locations over the course of thousands of years of prehistory.
What we do know is that beer appears very early on in the written records of the first civilized societies — those of the Mesopotamian city-states (and, just a little later on, those of Egypt). In fact, it's fair to say that beer appears in the "record" even before the invention of writing. For example, a pictograph discovered at a Mesopotamian site called Tepe Gawra — and dating from around 4000 BC, hundreds of years before the first surviving written texts — depicts what scholarsare certain is a beer-drinking session. How do they know? Well, this little image shows two simplified human figures, one on either side of a large clay jar; two bent lines connect the figures' heads to the mouth of the jar. The whole setup looks almost exactly like later, historic Mesopotamian depictions of beer drinking, which show people sitting around big earthenware jars, sucking out the beer from inside these communal vessels through long straws.
Drinkology's mother always warned us about drinking beer through a straw — her hand-me-down theory being that you'd get drunk too quickly if you did. But, hey, Mom, the Mesopotamians drank their beer through straws. Originally, they used straws (made of reeds) because the straws prevented debris in the beer — the flotsam and jetsam of the brewing process — from reaching their mouths. But they continued to drink beer through straws even after they'd learned to filter it, and throughout ancient Mesopotamian history they continued to drink from communal jugs — giving such images the look of hookah parties.
We'll be mentioning various important moments in the history of beer making throughout this little book, but let us dwell on Before Christ–era brewing for a little while longer. The ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians thought of beer as a gift from heaven (in this regard, they weren't all that different from Homer Simpson), and the Mesopotamians even had a goddess, name of Ninkasi, whose wonder-working portfolio specifically focused on gifting human beings with the divine beverage. One surviving early Sumerian text — the Sumerians being the makers of the first of the several great Mesopotamian cultures — is a hymn to Ninkasi, portraying her as setting down for humankind the step-by-step instructions for transforming barley into beer, which, in the words of the hymn, then pours out of Ninkasi's vat "like the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates."
What's interesting about the "Hymn to Ninkasi" isn't the hyper-bole of its language. (All hymns to gods and goddesses are gushy.) It's that this song of praise isn't just a praise song; it's also a recipe for beer making and therefore revelatory of Sumerian brewing methods. For instance, one line of the hymn addresses Ninkasi as the one who "bakes the bappir in the big oven." What bappir is, it turns out, is a flat, hard, twice-baked loaf of bread that was used by the Mesopotamians for beer making. The Egyptians also made beer from bread that was baked specifically for brewing purposes, and they also identified beer with a goddess (the cow-horned Hathor). This association of brewing with female deities is telling. Not only were ancient beer-makers often or even primarily female (as Egyptian figurines of brewers at work show), but the brewing of beer would, for millennia after its discovery, remain an activity performed mostly by women. If you've ever heard the English word alewife without being quite certain of its meaning, take note: an alewife is, or was, a woman responsible for brewing the beer for her community, and it's possible that alewifery — or its ancient equivalent — is actually "the oldest profession."
As old, perhaps, as the practice of human beings gathering in permanent settlements and raising their own food, which they may have done for the express purpose of ensuring themselves an uninterrupted supply of beer. Agriculture, of course, predates recorded history, so the reasons why people first abandoned the nomadic, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle in favor of tending crops — which required them to live together year-round in villages near their fields — remain mysterious. That said, it's clear that cereal grains — ancestral varieties of wheat, barley, and so on — were among the first plants to be domesticated. Now, cereal grains have to be cooked in some way to make their carbohydrates amenable to the human GI tract — their indigestible starches have to be converted to usable calories. One can do this by making porridge or, for a more culinarily interesting result, by baking bread or brewing beer. There's no scholarly consensus about which — bread or beer — came first. What's undeniable is that beer ranks among the first foods people made from grain. (An aside is needed here: The intoxicating drink we call beer is also a nutritious, carbohydrate-rich food — something that wasn't lost on the ancients. The Egyptian roughnecks who constructed the pyramids were, for example, sustained by the beer they received as payment for their labor.)
Becoming Human
It's been said that what really separates humans from other animals is — of all things — cooking. Animals (e.g., chimps, crows) use tools; animals (e.g., gibbons, songbirds) produce sounds that, even if they don't rise to the level of language, are language-like in purpose. But we're the only creatures that don't eat all our food raw. And the ancient Mesopotamians seem to have recognized that cooked food — especially beer — is a marker dividing the human from the animal worlds.
We cook; chimps don't
If you happen to have read the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh in a college history or literature-survey class, you may recall one of the pivotal points in that ancient book's plot: the moment when the character called Enkidu becomes human. Enkidu, you may remember, has been created by the gods to be a companion to Gilgamesh, the king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, whose deeds and derring-do the epic recounts. The problem is that when Enkidu is first deposited on earth, he's a "wild man"— he thinks he's an animal and spends his days in the fields and forests, romping with the local gazelles and taking his refreshment from their watering holes.
Hearing news of this strange creature's appearance in the countryside outside Uruk and wanting to capture him, Gilgamesh (who's not in on the gods' plan to provide him with a buddy) hires a practitioner of the other possibly oldest profession — a harlot named Shamhat — to go out from the city, set up camp in the place where Enkidu has been sighted, and entice him to hook up with her, which she dutifully does. After having great sex (for six days running), Enkidu begins to notice that he's not really a gazelle — a point underscored when his erstwhile friends the gazelles take one sniff of Enkidu's postcoital b.o. and promptly run away. In the words of the epic, Enkidu's "understanding had broadened."
But he's not yet quite fully human. For that transformation to be finalized, Enkidu — mightily hungry and thirsty after all those days in the sack — must eat human food and drink human drink. Shamhat therefore leads him off to a shepherds' encampment, conveniently located nearby, where the obliging shepherds present him with loaves of bread and seven jugs of beer. Enkidu eats the bread and is "sated." He drinks the beer and becomes "expansive" and "elated"; his face glows and he sings out with joy. Yeah, the bread's great. But the beer ... the beer is something else. It's what makes Enkidu a person.
Simple Stuff?
So what is beer, anyway? On the very simplest level, beer is very simple stuff. It's easy to imagine how our ancient ancestors discovered beer making. And beer — all these thousands of years later — remains simple.
Sort of.
At its most basic, beer is an alcoholic beverage made from fermented grain. But that tidy definition is, in fact, too tidy. Human beings, you may have noticed, have a talent for making simple things complicated — and that's as true of beer as of anything else. So we'll begin our exploration of beer by expanding on that bottom-line definition. Take heed, however. As we expand the definition, things will become clearer, but they'll also become a little cloudier. That's because beer making, over brewing's long history, has changed. And there are now untold thousands of beers made in hundreds of ways that differ from one another — sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.
The Gang of Four
Most beer (that is, most of the beer of the past five hundred years or so) is made of just four ingredients — a kind of Gang of Four of brewing:
Grain Water Yeast Hops
There. We've just expanded our original definition. So we've clarified things, right? Well, not quite, as we shall immediately see.
Nipped in the Bud
Let's look first at the first item on the ingredients list above: grain. As you already know, there are numerous varieties of the domesticated grasses we call grains. Some are widespread and familiar (wheat, rice, corn), others less so (spelt, sorghum, quinoa). Theoretically, beer might be made from any of them, but it generally isn't. Most beers are based on just one kind of grain: barley. And, yes, Drinkology can hear your objection. But what about wheat beers and rye beers? Well, here's the thing: even in beers named for other kinds of grain, barley is usually the predominant grain in the mix. Some reasons for barley's premier role are explained in the sidebar on this page. (And do note, if you haven't already, that we keep using words like "most" and "mostly" and "generally" and "usually"; that's because, when it comes to beer, there's almost always some exception to the general rule. Depending on your temperament, you'll either be fascinated or frustrated by this.)
So beer is made, first of all, from grain, and the grain from which most beers are mostly made is barley. True enough, but there's a crucial piece of information missing from the previous sentence. And that's that beer isn't made from barley per se; rather, it's made from barley malt — barley that has been processed in a particular way. You'll also find more on malt and the malting process in that sidebar on this page, but, in a nutshell, what happens is this: The barley kernels are moistened, which causes them to begin to sprout. (They are, after all, seeds, and sprouting is what they were put on earth to do.) Then, just as the little buggers are coming to life, they're bumped off — by being heated, which dries and (to a lesser or greater extent) roasts them.
Why go through the trouble of malting — of activating the barley kernels and then deactivating them? It all has to do with what the yeasts that will ferment the beer do and do not like to eat. In their unmalted state, barley kernels are composed largely of starches — long, relatively complex organic compounds that yeasts find indigestible. When barley kernels begin to sprout, however, enzymes are produced that begin breaking down the starch molecules into simpler sugar molecules. The barley kernel's aim — if it can be said to have one — is to create an energy source that the germinating plant can readily use. The aim of the maltster (that's what a malt maker is called) is to jump-start that process but then to nip it in the bud, so to speak, thereby creating food for the yeast.
JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE
For if you do but taste his blood,
'Twill make your courage rise
—"John Barleycorn" (Robert Burns version)
Many beer drinkers doubtless consider drinking beer to be a sacred experience, but the anonymous writers who penned the lyrics to the traditional English/Scottish ballad "John Barleycorn" took the idea of beer's sacredness to a whole 'nother level. The ballad, which exists in several versions (including one adapted in the eighteenth century by Scottish poet Robert Burns, lines from which are quoted above) and which was a standard of the British folk-music revival of the 1960s and '70s (recorded by Traffic, Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, and Fairport Convention, among other groups), is a brutal allegory of the life, death, and resurrection of John Barleycorn — a Christlike personification of the barley plant. Poor John Barleycorn, a true man of sorrows, is subjected to multiple and violent ordeals by his human torturers —"wasted o'er a scorching flame," "crushed ... between two stones," and heaved "into a darksome pit / with water to the brim"— and finally killed ...
So that he might be reborn as beer. The ballad turns beer making into a kind of Passion of the Grist, and beer drinking into an Everyman's Eucharist.
The Naked and the Hulled
While we're on the subject of religion: There's something about the barley – beer connection that could almost make one believe in Intelligent Design. One of the many cereal grasses domesticated by human beings, barley isn't very suitable for making bread (its kernels don't contain enough of the gluten that gives wheat breads their structure), but it is perfect for making beer. Perfect. Barley kernels aren't just rich in starches (the carbohydrate compounds that will be converted to sugar and ultimately to alcohol in the several stages of the beer-making process), but they're also hulled — enclosed in little husks, or skins, that help keep the individual grains of malted barley separate during that step in the brewing process called the mash (see this page), thereby aiding in the extraction of sugar from the malt. Wheat kernels, by contrast, are "naked" (hull-less) and therefore tend to stick to one another when wet, risking what's called a stuck mash, or set mash (in which too little sugar gets extracted from the grain to make a satisfactory beer). That's why it's extremely difficult to make a beer wholly from wheat and therefore why so-called wheat beers almost always contain a fair proportion of barley.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Drinkology Beer"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Thumb Print New York, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Part 1 Basically Beer (Beer History and Beer Making),
Part 2 Beer Bestiary (An A-to-Z OF Beer Styles, with Several Digressions),
Part 3 Beer and Culture (And Beer Culture),
Part 4 Beer Bash (Serving Beer, Making Mixed Drinks with Beer, Cooking with Beer, Home Brewing, and Lots of Other Stuff),
Index of Search Terms,