Let's talk about beer.
What is beer?
The history of beer dates back thousands of years - maybe even so far as 9,500 BC. Here's an example of a liquor store receipt for beer which dates to 2,050 BC. Beer has been around for quite awhile - much longer than a hipster.
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| "6-Pack, cigarettes + tax = 11 shekels" |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alulu_Beer_Receipt.jpg
Beer is, first a foremost, a carbonated alcoholic beverage, created via a fermentation process, in which sugars transform over time into alcohol. It is the third most commonly consumed beverage on our planet, after water and tea.
Beer consists of several core ingredients, including: water, hops, grain, malt and yeast. How much / what kind of which ingredients, mixed over what period of time, conditioned at what temperature, produces a large assortment of choices of different kinds of beer.
In medieval times, with the lack of knowledge concerning germs and the proper treatment of drinking water, it was actually safer to drink beer.
On November 30, 1487, the Reinheitsgebot, or beer making purity laws, were decreed in Germany. It set the stage for ingredients, fair pricing, and competition with bakers -- for grains also needed to make bread. Those in violation of these German 'purity' laws could be fined, or have all of the barrels containing their beer confiscated without recompense. Make a note of that.
Beer is featured in a quite a few of the impressionist paintings from the 1800s by Edouard Manet, so I will plug them in here and again to add some color.
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| A good glass of beer - Manet |
The process of beer making includes boiling a large amount of water, steeping cracked grain [the husks are soon removed], adding malt and hops over the period of the boil [>/= one hour], cooling and adding yeast, and then storing in a container of some sort while the fermentation process ensues [yeast consuming the sugars and producing alcohol as the by-product].
Water - is water. However, for the beer making process, it is normal to use water which contains whatever naturally occurring vitamins and minerals are contained - in other words, avoid tap water with it's added toxins fluoride and chlorine, but don't use distilled water either.
Grain - for the most part, for making beer, you are using barley. However, depending upon the type of beer you are making, you could also be using oats, wheat, rye or even corn [maize]. You wouldn't use rice - rice has almost no flavor, it's cheap, and it's more customary for making Saki in Japan.
Malt - without going into too many details, malt is an extract which is created from grain - normally barley. It's the sugar used in the fermentation process - the yeast is going to react with the malt and create alcohol. Malt can be used in a dry powered form, or in a thick, syrupy, molasses type state.
Hops - hops are the female flowers of the hop plant, Humulus Lupulus. They have an extremely pleasant aromatic smell - a bit like pine - or commonly expressed, like the scent of really good marijuana. Hops have been involved in beer making for centuries, and it is believed that this is more-so because of the stabilizing effect, preventing the beer from spoiling and also increasing it's alcohol content. There are many, many different varieties of hops - but they generally break down into three essential types, based upon their purpose in brewing - bitters, flavors and finishers.
Yeast - It's a microorganism classified as a fungus - you already know that. There are a few different types of yeast used in making beer - the most common is the same one used in making bread. Interestingly enough, back 500 years ago, people didn't know what yeast was and would simply allow this process to begin naturally, by leaving their large vats of beer open to the air, and adding their yeast by luck of the draw - also known as 'spontaneous fermentation.' This practice still exists today.
As a segue, the type of yeast and method of application largely determines what kind of beer you are making.
Types of Beer
While there are many, many different kinds of beer, they can essentially all be classified as one of two different types - Ales and Lagers. The difference between these two is largely the yeast and temperature of fermentation - Ales are top fermenting, Lagers are bottom fermenting. To give you an idea of how many different kinds of ales and lagers there are, here's a small list:
Ales - Ambers, Belgians, Alts, Bitters, Barleywines, Blacks, Browns, Darks, Reds, Blondes, Pales, India Pales, Lambics, Porters, Stouts, Whites and Winters.
Lagers - Bocks, Mai-Bocks and Pilseners.
All of these different types of beer have rich histories associated, and that history is primarily European in nature, dating back in many cases hundreds of years, coming from countries like: France, Ireland, England, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Germany and Belgium.
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| The beer drinkers - Manet |
United States - 1980s
When I first started to drink beer, I discovered that I had no taste for any traditional American styled beer - I couldn't stomach it. I could only drink beer which was imported, primarily from Canada, Holland or Germany. Over time, and with the exploration of different liquor and beer stores, I was able to find a larger variety of choices, and try different beers from all over the world - Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Scotland, England, Czechoslovakia, India, Japan, and China to name only a few. 'Imports' as they were called back then, could traditionally be found in a certain section of your local liquor store - and that section was not traditionally very large, or very diverse, and they were always more expensive than domestic brands.
So let me be clear here - in terms of choices, it was limited. Maybe there were some 8 different kinds of beer available at your local bar, or restaurant, or liquor store - but they were pretty much all Pilsners, and they all tasted the same. 4% alcohol, yellow, and watery, with hardly any flavor. Your bartender or barmaid would rattle them off in staccato fashion, with their eyes turned inwards and upwards, reciting a litany of the same old crap - flavorless yellow carbonated water one, flavorless yellow carbonated water two, flavorless yellow carbonated water three, etc.
Hmm...is that a bottle of Bass Ale on the bar on the far left and far right?
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| A Bar At The Folies-Bergere - Manet |
The King of Yellow Carbonated Water
Who said that yellow carbonated water was beer? How on earth were people so fooled? Well, marketing had a lot to do with it, as did power and money. Budweiser, Miller and a handful of other breweries dominated and owned the market [this was before Coors managed to launch a fleet of refrigerated trucks across the Country]. Plus I have to say, if you never traveled outside of the US, anywhere in Europe in particular, you would have been painfully ignorant as to what real beer was.
Edward McClelland of Salon says that from its inception, Budweiser was a "triumph of marketing over quality."
The quality was questionable: Adolphus Busch, the company's founder, called his beer “dot schlop" and preferred to drink wine and St. Louis drinkers were not fans of the drink either, but the Busch family still bought licenses and paid rent for bar owners in exchange for serving the product.
Budweiser had its glory days in the 1950s when Anheuser-Busch helped strengthen its national brand by sponsoring shows featuring Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, and Frank Sinatra. It also promoted its beer by sponsoring sporting events and branding stadiums. By the 1980s, Budweiser was synonymous with American culture.
When Bud raised it's price, everyone raised theirs as well. They were the market leader for decades. And they did it primarily through marketing and shaping the brand, spending millions. Here's one notation to give you an idea, using just the SuperBowl alone, from 2002 to 2011, AB spent $246M.
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2012/02/01/the-eight-brands-that-wasted-the-most-on-the-super-bowl/3/
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| Not a Manet |
Let me expound upon a few things I said earlier concerning how beer is made -
The process includes boiling a large amount of water, steeping cracked grain, adding malt and hops over the period of the boil, cooling and adding yeast, and then storing in a container of some sort while the fermentation process begins.
Here are a few of the differences - to make cheap, watery, yellow colored carbonated beverage which is 4% alcohol by volume [abv], and make an enormous profit, what would you do?
1. Use more water
2. Use less ingredients
3. Expedite the fermentation process
4. Substitute cheaper ingredients
5. All of the above
If you were the 'King of Beers' you'd chose #5 - all of the above. This is about >50 years of a large corporation leveraging extensive marketing and market control to create the effective illusion that they have been producing 'beer.' It reminds me of an old Ivory soap commercial - while expounding on the many positive properties of the soap [it floats!] and why it is the best, a young girl chimes in with, 'I didn't know there was any other soap.' Hard to make a fair comparison without anything to compare with.
And even despite the recognition by the public at large concerning the perception of what is beer, and what isn't - there is still some sort of tradition and stigma around continuing to drink Budweiser, because it's part of being American - an age old American tradition. It's not even an American company any longer dummy! They blew it, and it was bought [ironically], by the Belgians in 2009.
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| The beer drinkers - Manet |
The 1980s continued
There was a very small hole-in-the-wall type place in Greenwich Village - the custom was to buy a bottle of beer, the clerk would brown bag it, open it, and then you would wander the quaint streets surrounding Washington Square Park, enjoying a bottle of this or that style of beer. The cops left you alone - and no one asked how old you were. The selection in this one place - can't remember if it was on Sullivan or Thompson, was quite good, and it was built along the lines of singles, as opposed to 6-packs [oftentimes the experimental investment in a 6-pack of beer you'd never tried before could lead to disaster]. Open the cooler door, and there were some 100 brands to chose from - all single bottles. And it was here in 1983 that I had New Amsterdam Ale for the first time - cue the music.
New Amsterdam began in 1982, brewed in Utica, NY by the FX Matt's Brewing Company. It was amazing. It was as if someone had purposely attempted to go back in time and re-introduce the concept here in the Americas, of what beer was supposed to look, smell and taste like. It was like an explosion of flavor, and it went great with chocolate, which was odd.
And another great memory from those days was the Anchor Brewing Company, which had been in business here in the US since 1849, and their Liberty Ale, introduced in 1975. Note their write-up.
The champagne-like bubbles, distinctive hop bouquet, and balanced character of Liberty Ale® revives centuries-old ale brewing traditions that are now more relevant than ever. First introduced in 1975, Liberty Ale® is brewed strictly according to traditional brewing methods, and uses only natural ingredients — pale malted barley, fresh whole-cone Cascade hops and a special top-fermenting yeast, and water.http://www.anchorbrewing.com/beer/liberty_ale
Within the US, Samuel Adams began to become popular around this time, and a renewal process began here in America, like a religious revival, as more of what was called 'Micro-breweries' began to emerge. People began to recognize two things - one, what real beer was really all about, and two, that they had been duped into drinking yellow water.
It was very slow to spread, however, and many times, the best you could do in any given restaurant or small liquor store was Heineken. This was the emergence of the era of the micro-brew, and it was a long time in coming. New beers were coming to market from all over the Country - and in the style of the traditional ales and lagers which had been around for hundreds of years! I found different places with larger selections, and started to collect the bottles of all of my favorites - I would amass a collection of some 200 or so different kinds of bottles, toss the entire collection into the recycling, and start over. Today I still know some 10 great locations to go to, and I'm easily in the thousands of different types of beer sampled.
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| In the cafe - Manet |
The emergence of the Micro-brew and homebrew
So the micro-breweries began to emerge. Many failed over time and are no longer with us - and it's really a shame. Some were just too early for the curve - New Amsterdam, by way of example - now just a memory. With the emergence of micro-breweries also came a new term, 'Craft beer.' Rhymes with 'crap beer.' I don't know who created this term, but personally I think it sucks. There is actually a difference between the term 'Micro-brew' and 'craft beer'
http://cabmgmnt.hubpages.com/hub/The-Difference-Between-a-Craft-Beer-and-a-Micro-Brew-Beer
however, the trend at the moment is to ignorantly lump them all together and call them 'craft beer,' when in reality - they should all be called 'REAL BEER.' What's this got to do with Hipsters? Again - not a goddamned thing. In the beginning, there was beer. The United States beer market turned the concept of beer here into piss water. Beer is back. It's flourishing. Now when the bartender rattles off their list of beers it actually includes beer in the list.
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| Corner of a Café-Concert - Manet |
Home Brewing
I am going to say it was in the 1990s that the home brew concept became popular. Again, a lot of it revolved around people that were interested in making real beer. Yes - there was the cool side to it, that you were actually making it yourself - there could be an economical factor to it as well if you paid attention to what you were doing, and like the Reinheitsgebot, there were laws - not concerning purity or ingredients, but around how much beer any homebrewer could legally produce in a given year. But in the 1990s, many stores opened up, creating a booming new market.
I was fairly early to the homebrew game. My first introducton to it came by way of a gift and I think it was 1992 - it was a DELUXE starter kit - containing two 6.5 gallon buckets, a 3 lb can of [pre-hopped?] malt, a packet of yeast, sanitizer, priming sugar, tubes, brushes, bottle caps and a capper.
You can still buy this type of kit, and a similar recipe can also be found - but now it is called 'American Lite Ale.' For laughs:
(Makes 5 gallons) A lite beer similar to the major American brands. Not much flavor, not much bitterness, not much of anything to tell you the truth. A good beer for general mass-consumption. Uses dry rice extract as part of the base.http://morebeer.com/products/american-lite-ale-extract-beer-kit.html
This kit does not contain any grain, only Liquid Malt Extract and Dried Rice extract. No grain bag is needed.
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.035
Estimated Alcohol Percentage: 3-4%SRM (Color Range): 3.3
With only three pounds of malt, these other meager ingredients, and 5 gallons of water, I made weak flavored, yellow colored, carbonated water with a very low alcohol content.
Get it? Lot's of water + little ingredients and you get Budweiser. It's cheap, it's easy to make in mass quantity and it's not really beer - in the time of the Reinheitsgebot the entire plant would have been simply shut down and contents confiscated.
Horribly disappointed, but not discouraged, I went to a local brew supply store [at this time, I had three in my immediate area]. I went in and explained my experience to the store owner, who was quite busy brewing up a batch and testing it while we talked. He laughed at me. Three pounds of malt! Of course you made Budweiser! The standard for five gallons of water would be around SEVEN pounds of malt - more than twice the ingredients included with the beer making starter kit.
One point I missed until now - all of the traditional American yellow beers fall into an alcohol percentage by volume [ABV] of somewhere between 3 - 4%. That is great if you are on a diet, or want a light beer at lunch. Normal beer, as it's been brewed for centuries, as it's been made in Europe for hundreds of years, is going to be north of that - say, 4 - 6%.
The sad part to this story is that all of the home brew stores in my area eventually shut their doors. With the expansion of the internet, it made it unnecessary to travel to a store, when you could just as easily purchase a kit, or make your own, online.
One example I have used in the past is Midwest supplies.
http://www.midwestsupplies.com/
I began making beer in earnest, producing some 17 batches over the next few years. I made a red, a barleywine, a pale, a winter - but mainly, I made IPAs. And the ingredients didn't include rice. Normally I went somewhere between 6 - 9 pounds of malt [dry and liquid combined], and 4 to 6 ounces of hops, including bitters, flavors, finishers and sometimes fresh hop flowers to add to the batch as it fermented, in a method known as 'dry hopping.' It 'warnt' cheap. Some of my IPAs were quite successful, and I say this largely based upon the opinion of others. I still make an IPA on occasion, but to do it justice, it takes know-how, the right ingredients, money and time. You can't quickly churn out an IPA every 3 weeks, and you wouldn't want to - because 3 weeks is too short a period for a real beer like an IPA to condition.
At one point in time, Budweiser was promoting the 'freshness' of their beer, citing yesterday's date stamp on the packaging as the proof! Similar to wine, beer has a fermentation cycle, including a peak. Unlike some red wines, beer is not built to last for years and years and improve with age [with the exception of Thomas Hardy Ale and maybe a few others], but at the same time, it needs time to ferment and condition - as in, one month minimum. As a standard, I put aside a stack of 'testers' in 12 ounce bottles, and crack one every week to get an idea where I am. Usually you hit a nice peak somewhere after a month - and then to stop the fermentation clock, you refrigerate all the beer, and enjoy.
IPA - India Pale Ale
Let's go a bit more in-depth on one ale in particular, which is my personal favorite, the India Pale Ale. The first known use of the phrase in recorded history, as per Wiki, was in 1829, as an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.
While this style of beer was created in England during their occupation of India, the myth associated was that became a popular new style of beer due to the high amount of hops which were added to the barrels, in order to protect the beer from going bad during the long voyage from Britain to India - unfortunately, probably not the case. A quote taken from Wikipedia:
The term pale ale originally denoted an ale that had been brewed from pale malt.[3] The pale ales of the early 18th century were lightly hopped and quite different from later pale ales.[4] By the mid-18th century, pale ale was mostly manufactured with coke-fired malt, which produced less smoking and roasting of barley in the malting process, and hence produced a paler beer.[5]IPA is really the peak of beer making - introducing a strong, light colored hoppy styled beer. There are many, many fine examples of IPA, with a number of distinctions on the variety and volume of hops used. On the market today are hundreds of different kinds of IPA.
Among the first brewers known to export beer to India was George Hodgson of the Bow Brewery, on the Middlesex-Essex border. Bow Brewery beers became popular among East India Company traders in the late 18th century because of the brewery's location and Hodgson's liberal credit line of 18 months. Ships transported Hodgson's beers to India, among them his October beer, which benefited exceptionally from conditions of the voyage and was apparently highly regarded among its consumers in India.[7] Bow Brewery came into the control of Hodgson's sons in the early 19th century, but their business practices alienated their customers. During the same period, several Burton breweries lost their European export market in Russia because of new tariffs on beer, and were seeking a new export market for their beer.
At the behest of the East India Company, Allsopp brewery developed a strongly hopped pale ale in the style of Hodgson's for export to India.
Recommendations
Here's a short list of some of the better IPAs I have tried
1 Heady Topper - The alchemist
2 Avery IPA - Avery Brewing
3 90 Minute - Dogfish Head
2x IPA - Southern Tier
Gemini - Southern Tier
Stone IPA - Stone Brewing
Barton Baton - Dogfish Head
Raging Bitch - Flying Dog
Jai Alai - Cigar City
Tupper's Hop Pocket - Tuppers
Terrapin Hopsecutioner -Terrapin
Hoppy Boy - Twisted Pine
Big Eddie Imperial - Leinenkugel Brewing Company
Hooker IPA - Hooker
Racer 5 - Bear Republic
If you've never tried an IPA before, may want to start off with one of these:
Hopnotch IPA - Uinta
Flower Power - Ithaca
Harpoon Ale - Harpoon Brewery
Goose Island IPA - Goose Island
One more recommendation, an American Pale Ale, which has a very solid mix of malts and hops, is 'Live' by Southern Tier.
Conclusion
People come up with bizarre and oftentimes stupid labels to identify larger trends - it's normal. The actual 'hipster' trend really began when the term was originally coined - back in the 1940s? As it stands today, it is so generic that people find it hard to even describe what a hipster is... Good beer, meanwhile, has been around longer than the fork - it's just been in hiding here in the US.
At first, the big US Dominated
breweries failed to notice, or capitalize on this new trend. People
were getting fed up with drinking piss - they wanted real beer. So they
began to invest in small micro-breweries and in making beer for
themselves. The big boys tried to cover - late to the game - creating
new labels, new marketing, buying microbrews to rebrand - but they were too late. Their
stranglehold on how they had defined, owned and controlled the concept of cheap yellow carbonated water as 'beer' had ended.
You can be a baby boomer, a Generation Xer, a Hippy, Yippie, Yuppy, Puppy - whatever it is that some clever moron came up with to look to try to ID and group a large population together with a label - it's not relevant. The emergence of the change in perception around what we know here in the US as 'beer' has been happening since the 1980s. I think that the real proof of this transition is obvious from the choices on the menu today in a restaurant and the selection you can find in your local liquor / beer store / supermarket, in addition to the failure of Anheuser-Busch to maintain it's market lead, and to remain a US owned and operated business.
Good beer doesn't discriminate against anyone that appreciates it - maybe as opposed to making hollow jokes, you ought to give it a try.
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