How much do you enjoy beer? If you are reading a magazine devoted entirely to beer, you are already pretty exceptional in your enthusiasm. But does it transcend mere devotion? Do you harbor a true passion for beer?
On this, the 21st anniversary of All About Beer Magazine, we asked a collection of our stalwart authors, no slouches in the beer passion department themselves, for tales of extraordinary commitment. What had true beer lovers done for beer? With beer? In beer? People have gone to extremes to make beer, to protect beer, to mourn beer, and to await the return of beer.
(Kinsley Dey)
Here is passion, indeed.
The Indiana Jones of Beer
International intrigue, a royal court, smuggling, and industrial espionage–topics associated with paperback thrillers but rarely with brewing, an industry with an almost staid demeanor. But once upon a time, there was a frantic race across the borders of eastern Europe that rivaled the best spy novels, and the hero was a young Danish brewer named Christian Jacobsen.
It was mid-1883. Five years earlier, Jacobsen succeeded in isolating yeast in a lab at his family’s Carlsberg Brewery. He and co-worker Emil Hansen speculated that a pure batch of yeast could be grown from a single biological cell. They correctly reasoned that such a process would yield a higher quality of beer.
As work progressed, they identified dozens of yeasts. Which would work best? They weren’t sure, but eventually they decided on a simple solution. They’d seek out the best lager beer available and culture from it a pure strain of lager yeast. Their plan led Jacobsen to Munich.
Gabriel Sedlmayr of Munich’s Spaten Brewery was regarded as the most accomplished brewer of his day. An innovator in his own right, he had transformed the Spaten Brewery into a state-of-the-art facility. Without question, his lager beer was considered the best in the world. Jacobsen went there to find his perfect yeast.
Jacobsen met with Sedlmayr, studied his techniques, and better yet, obtained a sample of Spaten’s coveted yeast. With that, the adventure began. Between Jacobsen and his lab were hundreds of grueling miles, international borders, and worst of all–heat.
Lager yeast works best when kept cool; when heated, it soon expires. Jacobsen not only had to get his sample back to the lab quickly; he had to shield it from both menacing border guards and the heat of summer. Concealing the sample in his hat helped to insulate it, and with every stop, he chilled the hat in the nearest spring, hoping to keep the yeast healthy.
On arriving back in Denmark, he and Hansen lost no time in getting to work. First they identified the cell responsible for Sedlmayr’s famous beer, then, from a single cell, built up a viable colony suitable for brewing. With the royal family’s permission, he fermented the first pure batch of lager beer in cellars under protection of Copenhagen’s ramparts.
Only three years later, Carlsberg sold a sample of yeast to Schlitz and Pabst breweries. Few recall the story of Jacobsen’s headlong race across Europe, yet millions enjoy the crisp, clean taste of pure lager beer. Braving all manner of hazards, Christian Jacobsen fashioned the greatest of all brewery adventures and, with it, became the Indiana Jones of beer.
–Gregg Smith
New Beer’s Eve
America’s collective passion for beer was never more in evidence than at midnight on April 6, 1933. At precisely 12:01 a.m., beer drinkers enjoyed their first taste of legal brew after more than 13 years of Prohibition. A brewery–any brewery–was a good place to be on that historic evening.
In St. Louis, 25,000 spectators were on hand as the world-famous Anheuser-Busch plant came back to life. CBS radio broadcast the ceremony live to the entire nation. Brewery head Gussie Busch presided over the festivities, thanking President Roosevelt for his “wisdom, foresight and courage” in bringing back beer. Busch concluded his rather lengthy oration by proudly announcing, “Beer is now being served.”
Big city beer plants weren’t the only spots of celebration. At the old Ripon Brewery in Ripon, WI, the plant’s steam whistle was blaring full blast. After what seemed an appropriate duration, annoyance at the whistle’s persistence began to spread throughout the otherwise sleepy community. A representative of the brewery was soon dispatched to the scene to quiet the disturbance, only to find the town’s mayor at the whistle rope.
Just up the road, the Stevens Point Brewery was selling beer faster than it could be bottled. With the brewery’s bottle-labeling machine out of commission, anxious patrons rolled up their sleeves and helped paste labels on by hand.
At the Renner Brewery in Akron, OH, officials planned to wait until daybreak to release their supply of beer. But when a crowd of 2,000 raucous beer drinkers stormed the plant at midnight, owners were compelled to reevaluate their strategy.
The night that came to be known as “New Beer’s Eve” did not go down in history as one of America’s defining moments. But, for those who partook, it was a night not soon forgotten.
–Carl Miller
Brewing in a War Zone, Part 1
In 1997, a far-sighted policy maker studying quality-of-life issues for the US Army persuaded top brass that good beer and good food could improve morale. The government hired Thomas Burnes II as this country’s first government brew master and sent him to make beer 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea.
Burnes was sent to Camp Casey, a site he says was chosen for two reasons: “First, it was one of the farthest outposts of the Army with concerns about quality-of-life issues, and, second, if it failed, no one would know!”
Burnes encountered predictable problems dealing with a military organization and with superiors who knew little about craft beer and didn’t care for drinking it. His bosses wanted the brewery up and running in a couple of months. “They didn’t understand that beer is not tea; you can’t make it today and drink it tomorrow.” They wanted a Miller-type beer; the brewery under construction was suited for ale.
Ultimately, Burnes sold his bosses on the idea of different beer styles. Over their objections, he priced the beer brewed at Reggie’s, the Camp Casey brewpub, at a level that was competitive with the American light lagers on offer.
And remarkable things happened. “The beers with the most flavor outstripped all the others,” said Burnes. His beers comprised nearly 70 percent of total beer sales. “We’re talking about very young people, with little or no college education. These kids didn’t make a lot of money. They couldn’t have been further from the usual image of the craft beer drinker.”
The top seller was an amber ale. The traditional Irish-style dry stout was a close second. Working alone, Burnes brewed around 3,000 barrels in 15 or 20 different beer styles each year. Ingredients were shipped from well-known US suppliers, and Reggie’s still made money. He kegged beer to supply other bars.
After two years, Burnes returned home. A Washington, DC, decision compelled Reggie’s to change to extract brewing to save money. But it’s a good bet that the 13,000 troops who rotated out during Reggie’s golden age came home with a passion for good beer.
–AAB
Brewing in a War Zone, Part 2
In 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, Daoud and Nadim Khoury moved from the United States to found the Taybeh Brewing Co. in the village of Taybeh, near Ramallah in Palestine. It was a gesture of faith in the peace process, a hint of the expatriate capital that might flow back to a Palestine at peace, and a daring business move in the predominantly Muslim–and therefore, teetotal–community.
Master brewer Nadim Khoury has been brewing a golden beer, a light beer and a dark beer, all in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot. The beer was so well received that it was brewed under contract in Germany.
Now, sadly, Reuters reports that production has been hit hard by the renewed fighting between the Israeli and Palestinian sides, with Ramallah in the heart of much of the strife.
–AAB
Real Ale Reaches the North Sea
In the early, almost-prehistoric days of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), Scotland was a wasteland, awash with pressurized, pasteurized ale known as “keg,” and a thin, flavorless apology called lager. Real cask-conditioned beer made such slow progress that Scotland didn’t even make an appearance in the first edition of the Good Beer Guide.
Then, because oil was found in abundance in the North Sea off the Scottish coast, the area around the port of Aberdeen saw a great influx of English people, many of whom demanded real ale. I happened to be in Edinburgh when a pub in Aberdeen got through to Scotland’s then regional organizer, Roger Preece, with a frantic call for a cask “o’ that stuff called real ale.”
So we set off, the two Rogers and Preece’s two dogs, in a station wagon with a cask of Theakston’s Best Bitter in the back. It was a long, slow drive, with snow blanketing the hills and mountains. We set off after breakfast and made Aberdeen by late afternoon as snow was falling in earnest.
We found the harbor side pub and rolled the cask of ale inside in triumph. Roger Preece explained in detail to the manager that the cask contained living beer. The cask would have to be tapped and vented and the beer allowed to settle before it could be served. “It’ll take at least 24 hours,” he said.
“Och, no, it won’t,” said the owner. “It’ll be on sale tonight–I’ve advertised it and there’ll be crowds in here.”
He then introduced us to the Scottish method of serving beer. None of your venting pegs and all the rituals of soft pegging and hard pegging to control the escape of natural gas. To our horrified eye, he upended the cask, drove a long tube through the bung hole, and attached it to the serving lines.
“As soon as the first few inches are clear of sediment, we’ll start serving the beer,” he declared. And so he did. All evening he pulled pints of beer, somehow keeping ahead of the sediment–much to the astonishment of the two Rogers, but giving a mighty boost to the fortunes of good beer in Scotland.
–Roger Protz
