A 4 x 8 U-Haul trailer, filled with plenty of hay, is a convenient way to take old Wilbur on his last ride. But getting Wilbur into the trailer creates a quandary. Pigs are not only tasty: they’re smart. And a cornered hog will do just about anything to avoid getting into the trailer, like dig a huge hole beneath the ramp, squeeze out from under the other side of your truck and then force you to chase it around the pen. Mr. Houghton, a Massachusetts farmer from whom I used to buy my pigs, found this incredibly entertaining.

I’d also suggest you don’t tell the U-Haul guy what you’re doing with his trailer, which would be sticking a 200-pound porker in it to take the hog from the farm to the slaughterhouse—unless you want to do the dirty work yourself—and then, with the pig cleaned and sawed in half snout to tail, from the slaughterhouse to your backyard. It helps if you keep the kidneys, too. Because then you can tell the age-old butcher’s joke:

“How do you cook the kidneys?”

“You boil the piss out of ’em.”

And, just a friendly FYI here, people will look at you funny when you walk across the donut shop parking lot with a bagful of crullers while said trailer is pitching from side to side, like a packet ship of pork in high, heavy seas.

But if you can handle the public scrutiny, a U-Haul is the way to go—and if you’re the type of person who prefers to spend an entire autumn weekend making your own pork chops rather than, like, buying them at the market, public scrutiny, shame or even ridicule probably have little effect on you.

Of course, you could always buy the donuts before picking up the pig. But live and learn.

Try This at Home: We’re Not Professionals, Either

The other problem with butchering pigs—perhaps the bigger problem—is figuring out which beer you’re going to drink that day, and on all the succulent days to follow, after you’ve turned Wilbur into thick pork chops, tender grilled loins, nutmeg-and-sage flavored breakfast sausage that fill your home with the spicy, intoxicating aromas of autumn and winter, and the smokiest, saltiest, most savory and most amazing hams you’ve ever had.

Beer and meat were made for each other—arguably the two most important food sources in human history. And that’s where I come in. I’m a semi-pro beer drinker, part-time pig butcher and full-time meat lover. Pairing suds with sausage is more than a hobby. It’s a tradition in my family, one that unfolds each year the way normal families might rent a summer beach house and grill hamburgers and hotdogs.

It’s also a tradition that connects us to an era when winter sustenance didn’t come in a shrink-wrapped package at the Mega-Mart, but from the work of your hands at harvest time, once the weather was cool enough to safely process meat outdoors.

Most beer lovers today, especially home brewers, appreciate the fact that it was only a couple centuries ago that beer was something you probably made at home, rather than purchased elsewhere.

The evolution of meat into a packaged consumer good is even more recent. If you’re middle-aged today, you’re among the first generations in history that grew up purchasing packaged chicken parts, for example, rather than whole chickens that were carved up at home. And as recently as the World War II era, when more than 40 percent of the U.S. population still lived in rural areas, Americans were as likely to butcher their own pigs as they were to purchase packaged pork.

So we make our own hams and bacons for many of the same reasons home brewers make their own beer: it’s more authentic, it’s more rustic, it’s more innately humane than buying beer or sausage made in stainless steel tanks at a modern factory.

And for my beer-and-meat loving family, our pig-butchering tradition has another appeal: we can trace its origins to the famous brewing town of Bamberg, Germany.

Bavaria’s Other Specialty

My father-in-law, Ray McConnell, was a young dentist and an officer in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. While the Vietnam War raged, he landed a plum assignment at the American base in Bamberg—the same Bamberg famed for its gorgeous 1,000-year-old cathedral, for its timbered town hall hanging precariously from a bridge over the Regnitz River, and, of course, for its spectacular Franconian lagers, especially smoky rauchbier and dense, unfiltered kellerbier.

Bob Barker couldn’t have given away a more perfect prize: a four-year, nearly-all-expenses-paid trip to the historic heart of Bavarian man-town.

In addition to world-famous suds, the area around Bamberg, like most of Bavaria, has other culinary specialties that get decidedly less attention from beer lovers, but are just as deserving: an amazing variety of savory local meats you’ll rarely find anywhere else. There’s weissewurst, the Bavarian breakfast sausage speckled with onion and parsley; a smoke-cured beer-friendly beef snack called zwetschgenbaum; thin, dried hunter’s sausage called landjaeger, the Bavarian equivalent of beef jerky; and lebekase, a succulent pork and veal meatloaf, to name just a few. If anything in the world tastes better together than Bavarian beer and sausage, the gods of gastronomy have yet to share it with me.

These local specialties are served in the gasthofs of Bavaria, often sliced thin and placed on slabs of tree trunk turned into serving platters, or they hang tantalizingly in butcher-shop windows, the carnivore’s equivalent of the glass-walled brothels of Antwerp or Amsterdam, with naked flesh begging for attention.

Ray and his army buddies, often with families in tow, spent their free time touring the countless breweries and bierstubes in and around Bamberg, while feasting on the local delicacies. He would often bring my future wife, Lee, then just 5 years old, to the metzgerei (butcher shop) to translate and barter with the proprietors. She learned English at home and German everywhere else. Like most children, she soaked up languages more quickly than her parents.

Ray’s dental assistant at the base was a Bavarian girl whose family owned a farm where they raised pigs and made sausage. A do-it-yourselfer by nature, he’d visit the farm to learn tips of the trade from Franconian sausage-makers.

Back Home, with Something Missing

When they returned to the States in the early 1970s, Ray and his wife, Marilynn, bought a large spread in rural Rhode Island to raise their four children. They also raised cows, chickens, pigs and horses, filled their own root cellar with homemade pickles and sauerkraut, grew grapes and hops, and shot the occasional turkey and deer that ventured into the yard.

But something was missing from this idyllic little corner of New England: the bier und wurst of Germany. So Ray taught himself how to turn the family’s pigs and cows into everything from New England-style breakfast sausage to Old World-style headcheese. He was aided by a guide he ordered from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Farmer’s Bulletin No. 2265: Pork Slaughtering, Cutting, Preserving and Cooking on the Farm…great read), the tips he learned from the farmers back in Bavaria and a very patient wife (a trait passed on to their daughter, Lee).

Beer worthy of his creations remained a problem. So Ray opened his own brewery, Emerald Isle Brew Works, in the 1990s. Instead of German-style lagers, he made something more typical of old New England: frothy, unfiltered, cask-conditioned ales that he sold to pubs around Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but more often than not shared with friends and family.

Meanwhile…

About the time my future in-laws were brewing beer and making homemade pickles and sausage, my family and friends were firmly entrenched in our own meat- and beer-filled tradition, one with a distinct American flavor: hosting a big outdoor tailgate breakfast each Thanksgiving morning.

The party precedes the local high school football games, which kick off at 10 a.m. and are as much a part of Thanksgiving tradition in New England as turkey and cranberries. If it once walked, swam, flew, jumped or crawled, we’d cook it and eat it. Alligator, venison, rabbits, ostrich and moose all made appearances at the Pigskin Gala, as we call it. Breakfast was always washed down with thick, bitter, unfiltered pints of India pale ale (and the occasional nip of schnapps) that we’d pick up from a local Boston brewery and tap, amid great Pomp and Circumstance, at the rooster-cackling hour of 6 a.m.

In most cases, sharing tales of an event that basically consisted of eating exotic animals and drinking beer before sunrise on a frosty November morning is not the way to impress a young woman.

But when I told Lee, my future wife, of my family’s plans for Thanksgiving, it all seemed so, well, normal to her. Her German had disappeared over the years. But her love of wurst, cultivated bartering in the butcher shops of Bavaria, had not.

A Family Tradition

A pair of disparate family traditions soon evolved into a rustic celebration right out of Colonial America or Old World Bavaria.

The tradition today begins in mid-autumn, amid the famously colorful blaze of New England’s orange oaks, yellow elms and flaming-red maples. With little more than a meat saw and a few sharp knives, we butcher the season’s pigs outdoors, with German fest beers, Paulaner and Hacker-Pshorr most notably, or the occasional Mahr’s Brau kellerbier, lubricating the affair. Chops, loins and shoulders are wrapped fresh in freezer paper and stored away. Hams, hocks and pork bellies are stuck in huge crocks of salt-and-brown-sugar brine. Loose meat and pork fat is ground into sausage, flavored with nutmeg and fresh sage cut from the herb garden. We always fry up a few right away—just to test this year’s batch, of course.

The tradition continues on a chilly November weekend, with the heartiest last leaves clinging to grey branches. We huddle around the smokehouse for three days, feeding fresh-cut New England maple logs into the firepit, turning the briny slabs of pork belly and pig butt that hang from wooden beams into reddish-brown hanks of bacon and ham, and pouring clean, smoky brown pints of Schlenkerla or Spezial rauchbier into steins brought from these famous Bamberger beer halls to lend an authentically Bavarian flavor to the occasion.

The tradition reaches its climax throughout the late autumn and winter—the Pigskin High Holidays, I call it, for the neatly wrapped package of football and family festivities that define the season. First, there’s the beer-soaked breakfast of the Pigskin Gala on Thanksgiving morning. Once, we’d eat anything. But today the event is flavored almost exclusively by homemade sausages and bacons and by traditional, unfiltered New England-brewed ale poured from the wooden tap of a firkin and spiced with a bag of Boston-grown hops picked from my backyard each summer, dried and stuffed into the barrel.

The Pilgrims ate venison at the first Thanksgiving, just 30 miles south of the Pigskin Gala, so we do the same. On ham-smoking weekend, we grind fresh rich-red venison, add thick beef fat, spice the meat with white pepper, ginger, nutmeg and sage, stuff the flavored mixture into lamb intestines and smoke them for several hours to a deep, dark brown. The smoky venison links are fried in a cast-iron skillet on Thanksgiving and then throughout the winter, often alongside our nutmeg-flavored pork sausage, creating an aromatic meritage you’ll simply never experience with bland, store-bought meat.

Forward to Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when we pound mugs of sticky, bitter golden-cranberry-hued Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale while ripping shreds of meat from a big ham that, as it bakes, yields a black-and-brown tar-like sludge of salt brine and pork fat that’s so intoxicatingly flavorful it buckles your knees.

The tradition concludes on Easter, when the smoky aroma of the year’s lone remaining ham fills the house for the last time until autumn, bocks and spring ales washing down the final remnants of savory pork for the season.

But pork, like hope, springs eternal: somewhere in New England this March, there will be a new little piglet named Wilbur fattening up for the ride in October.

Dark Horizons

Evidence of brewing in German goes back about 2,800 years, coincidentally to the area known as Franconia, in the north of Bavaria. Kulmbach, Franconia has the most traceable history, and the most traditional dark lagers, with documentation of monastic brewing there since 1349. This is not to say that the rest of Germany was a contemporary brewing wasteland: rather that the beers of Kulmbach were simply beter and more well-known. Other regions of Bavaria were prodigious in their own right, with mention of lagerbier in Munich brewing documents from the 1400s. But dunkel, as a distinct beer style, can be tracked to the 16th century, and is directly tied to the legendary Reinheitsgebot, the Bavarian Beer Purity Law of 1516.

The law was decreed by the Wittelsbachs, who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918, and besides being royalty, were also brewers and held an omnipotent hand in much of the commercial decisions in the region during their lengthy reign. As much as the validity of the Reinheitsgetbot may be debated today, it was at the time an important protective verdict that ensured the purity and safety of not only the product, but also protected the livelihood of the farmers and brewers in Bavaria at the time. In essence, it inadvertently mandated the refinement of the local product by stating that beer could be made only with barley, hops and water (and later yeast, which was thought to be the wand of Providence).

As the local beer was dark, and lagering practices were already in place in chilly grottos of the hillsides, dunkel brewing flourished and improved. Add to this the notion of terroir as it related to hops and barley, a landlocked and somewhat isolated location relative to great exporters like the British, and local malting techniques, and one can see how a style took its intuitive identity. Germany was well ahead of the proverbial curve as far as hop cultivation and utilization was concerned, further adding to the distillation of design.

Dark Circles

Dunkel would not move towards its present form until three centuries post-Reinheitsgebot, when several innovations and one peripatetic visionary, Gabriel Sedlmayr II, brought the style into the modern world. An indirect-heat malt kiln, similar to a coffee roaster, was invented that early in the 19th century. It afforded entire control over the color and properties of the primary brewing component, malt. Having traveled to Britain and seeing the possibilities of this contraption and its ability to create pale, uniform malt, Sedlmayr extrapolated that he could still produce his dark, base malt but with even greater precision. That malt today is known as Munich malt and that which gives dunkel its profile; all of the color and character without the spurious smoky flavors of yore.

Sedlmayr, a member of the venerable brewing family that had recently taken over operations at Spaten, was a student of all things beer. He took a particular interest in the emerging science of yeast microbiology and cultivation, yet another arrow in his legendary quiver that helped delineate his brews even more. This technological convergence culminated with the invention of refrigeration, making lagerbier brewing a year-round, entirely controllable endeavor.

Munich dunkel enjoyed great popularity until the end of the 19th century, when some of the market gave way to paler beers. Many of these pale beers, specifically Munich helles, were brewed alongside the ever-popular dunkel, and as a result, may have ushered in, or at least popularized, the notion of multi-style brewing at a given brewery. Festbiers, pilsner and bock followed at many of them. Even in light of the movement towards pale beers over a hundred years ago, dunkel was unassuming and appealing enough to keep the interest of beer drinkers. That alone should be proof enough of its charm.

Dark Art

The soul of a dunkel, maybe more than any other beer, comes from its heavy reliance on a single malt. As stated earlier, it is a product of precise kilning, and one that was used in Munich to preserve the anachronistic quality of the brew. Even before the drum kiln was invented, beers were often made from a single batch of malt (directly heated, with wood or coal as the fuel). While this is not uncommon today, the difference lies in the control, and desired consistency and subtleties imparted therein. An ancient batch of malt would be smoky, probably harsh and a bit inconsistent. The modern kiln allowed degrees of malt to be made that would produce distinct beers that bear the name of the malt itself (pilsner, Vienna, pale ale and of course, Munich), but each successive dark malt would be much different than the other and could be used alone to produce each beer. The length and intensity of the kilning determines the final color, but also introduces a continuum of reactions that further resolves the unique profile.

As Munich is the darkest of the lot, it would differ the most from the original pale malt. This is especially true because of reactions that form melanoidins, a combination of protein and carbohydrate, and is responsible for the intense malty flavors and aromas. The result is a base grain that is less fermentable and therefore more full-bodied or dextrinous, but also an opulent one, full of malty, toffeeish, bready and caramelized notes in both the palate and nose, a deep brown color tinted with garnet and ruby and soft, supple contours.

A dunkel could be made exclusively of a dark version of Munich malt, as the beers of Sedlmayr were, to showcase the vast complexity that a single component can lend to a brew. Many are augmented with some caramel malt, or softened with Pilsner malt, but nonetheless a great dunkel gets by primarily with its bill of Munich malt. Such is the art of producing a beer and, in this case, creating a single descriptive, formulative entity as a means to the end. Brilliance in simplicity. All of these traits may be even more accentuated if the brewer employs decoction mashing.

Dunkels are hopped with reserve, though a hint of noble German hops should be evident, to display the malty platform on which this brew performs. Dunkels are rounded out with a cool fermentation and long cold-conditioning period typical of all lagers, lending a smooth, soft character without the brusque edge typical of many dark beers. Modest in strength, at around 5 percent ABV, dunkels can be considered a session beer and one that offers more than many others.

For a dark brew, Munich dunkel is satisfying across a broad spectrum of whims. Expectedly, they are rich, yet not heavy. Surprisingly, they finish with a quenching crispness. Moreover, the paradox of complexity from simplicity is apparent from aroma to finish, a manifestation of malting artistry and understated panache. It is a beer appropriate enough for the languid days of summer or the cuddle of winter.

They told us about a special place—a land of lager and lederhosen, where the Dunkel flows like the Danube. Of Munich and monasteries. Of Rauchbiers made of smoke and gardens filled with beer. This is Bavaria—the alpine home of Bock and Beethoven. Of hops and Hallertau. Of killer Kellerbier, shnappes and Stammtisch….and so much more.

Our correspondents have all filed their reports. So, if you’re ready, the bus is now boarding…)

In Quest of Beer Paradise

by Horst Dornbusch

Every religion and mythology seems to have a place in which everything is in a state of perfection…call it paradise, nirvana, Mount Olympus, Valhalla, utopia, or the Holy Grail. For beer lovers, no doubt, this place is Bavaria!

No other area has spawned a greater variety of beer styles. Where else could you get an authentic taste of a potent but gentle doppelbock, a turbid and rich kellerbier, a velvet hammer called an eisbock, a smoke bomb called a rauchbier, a black and alluring schwarzbier, a malty and satisfying dunkel, a complex and spicy-spritzy weissbier (hefeweizen) and a dainty, delicate helles—all within easy walking distance? The Bavarians even distill a clear, easy drinking schnapps from beer.

Other brewing superlatives in Bavaria include the oldest and most famous brew university (Weihenstephen, near Munich), which also happens to be the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world. It has been making beer since 1040. A decade later, the Benedictine friars at Weltenburg got their brewing license, making this cloister the oldest still-operating monastery brewery. The world’s oldest malting plant (built in 180 A.D.) is in Regensburg along the Danube. Franconia in northern Bavaria has the greatest density of breweries anywhere—some 100 of them within a 50-mile radius around Bamberg. Kulmbach has the world’s longest uninterrupted brewing tradition, as evidenced by a 2,800-year old Celtic beer fermenter found nearby. And, of course, there is always the Oktoberfest, the largest beer party in the world, and the Hofbräuhaus, the Mecca of all beer halls, smack in downtown Munich. Bavaria is the ultimate beer reality show!

So, when the Bavarian Brewers Federation and the Bavarian Department of Agriculture beckoned about a dozen leading North American beer journalists coming over for a look-see, everyone heeded the call. It was my privilege to take them around, and here are some of their impressions…

The challenge in beer-making, unlike in wine-making, is to break down the grain’s complex carbohydrates (starches) into simple ones (sugars) that the yeast can ferment. Fruit carbohydrates are already sugars and wine can thus be fermented without any intervening process. But in grain, starches are converted into sugars by enzymes that become active only in warm, moist environments—such as the ancient beer-maker’s bake oven or the modern brewer’s mash tun.

Though we know about these two beer-making ways, oddly, we have next to no idea how ancient brewing metamorphosed into modern brewing, except—just perhaps—for a few tantalizing clues, hidden in an unassuming, sleepy archaeological dig in Bavaria, at the northern-most bend of the river Danube. Ignored by the world, this obscure site probably bears witness to one of the most profound revolutions in the art of beer making. To put this argument into perspective, first some historical background.

Beer Making in Antiquity

As soon as our hunter and gatherer ancestors stepped out of the fog of pre-history and settled down to farm, they also started to brew. The Sumerians were the first to do so, some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, in the flood plains between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in what is present-day Iraq. We know from Sumerian drawings and cuneiform scripts that these ancient brews were made simply from half-baked, moist loaves of bread crumbled into crocks of water and fermented spontaneously by airborne yeast. The result was a murky alcoholic quaff full of crumbs and floating husks.

The illiterate Celtic/Germanic tribes of central Europe, too, made their beers this way when they started to brew, probably sometime between the second and seventh millennium BC. We know so because of the discovery, in 1935, of an amphora-shaped crock of black wheat beer found in a Celtic burial site from the eighth century BC near the Bavarian city of Kulmbach. When unearthed almost 3,000 years later, the crock still contained traces of bread. It now ranks as the oldest evidence of beer making in Europe.

Beer Making in Modernity

Nowadays we make beer very differently. Instead of fermenting grain solids immersed in water, we produce a clean extract from malted grain and then ferment that. In that process, we steep raw grain in water, let it partially germinate, and then dry it in a kiln. This activates enzymes that convert unfermentable grain starches into fermentable sugars. Chemically, a similar reaction occurred in the baked loaves of the ancients but with much less efficiency. For brewing, we mill the grain, infuse it with hot water, and draw a sugar-rich extract, which we flavor (usually with hops) during a boil and ferment when cool.

The first written records of this modern beer-making method have come to us from medieval monks of the sixth to the 11th centuries. One of the most complete such descriptions was penned by Ekkehard IV, a Benedictine Abbot of St. Gall (in what is now Switzerland), the biggest monastery and brewery of the Dark Ages. In his chronicles of 1060, Ekkehard described how his monks threshed the reaped grain; moistened it until it sprouted; dried it in a kiln; crushed it in huge, water-powered mortars; mashed and boiled it in direct-fired kettles; and finally ladled the wort with wooden buckets through pressed-straw filters into flat wooden fermentation tubs.

For lack of earlier accounts of modern malting and brewing, it is generally assumed—though not proved—that the monks also invented the process. This paradigm, however, merely begs the question: How, where, and when did the ancient method of making beer from bread—as evidenced in the Kulmbach amphora—evolve into our modern method of making beer from wort? This question is one of the great unsolved mysteries of brewing history.

The Missing Link

Strangely, a puzzling archaeological find excavated in 1978 along the banks of the Danube River in Bavaria may hold the key to solving this mystery. The dig is inconspicuously tucked away between two family homes on a little street named Kornweg, in Grossprüfening, which is a quiet residential suburb of the city of Regensburg. A 30-foot walkway leads from a simple enamel sign, which reads enigmatically, Wirtschaftsgebäude (“economic building”), to a rarely visited, locked, 26-by 43-foot pavilion that was erected in 1983. It has glass walls on three sides through which visitors can view a cluster of excavations. The significance of this “economic building” for the history of beer making has gone all but unnoticed to this very day.

Within an oblong set of stone foundations are arranged—clockwise—a deep well; a water-tight basin at ground level; a kiln with a fire pit and a flue; and a stone-ringed fire place, about 3 feet in diameter. The probable date of the site, according to Dr. Andreas Boos, chief archaeologist at the Regensburg Historical Museum and keeper of the pavilion’s key, is the last quarter of the second century AD, when Regensburg was called Castra Regina, the largest Roman military camp in what is now Bavaria.

The Romans arrived in Regensburg and environs around 80 AD as part of their geopolitical expansion into central Europe. Initially they set up just a small military outpost. Regensburg was at the endpoint of a natural depression through the Bavarian Forest—a natural invasion route of Germanic tribes from the northeast in Bohemia. Emperor Marcus Aurelius decided to turn Regensburg into a serious bulwark. He constructed Castra Regina, completed in 179 AD, as a walled-in encampment for his Third Italian Legion of some 5,500 to 6,400 heavily armed Roman elite troupes.

Settlements soon grew up outside the walls of Castra Regina, one of which, about 2.5 miles from the Castra, was the village that has since become Grossprüfening. In these settlements, indigenous tradesmen, merchants, artisans and veterans from all over the Roman realm and, most importantly, innkeepers and ladies of easy virtue, supplied the Roman military machine with all the necessities—and frivolities—of life.

The archaeologists digging in Regensburg’s past had unearthed wells, water basins, kilns (mostly for drying flax), and fireplaces before, but they had never found these structures grouped together within a single workshop. Says Boos, “The combination of elements at the Grossprüfening site is unique and there is no piece of evidence that would tell us conclusively what the building was used for. Scientifically, we simply cannot be certain. Instead, we must treat the nature and arrangement of the components as circumstantial evidence and then draw logical inferences from the site’s layout and from what we know in general about Roman and Celtic/Germanic life at Castra Regina at the time.”

In the absence of proof positive, archaeologists have proposed—and discarded—many theories about the workshop’s purpose. One interpretation suggests that the site was a winery. But why would anyone need a well, a kiln, and a fireplace for pressing grapes and fermenting juice? “Besides,” says Boos, “there is only conclusive proof of wine drinking, not of grape growing and wine making, around Regensburg in Roman times.” Other archaeologists have suggested that the basin was used to blanch fruit and that the kiln was used to dry it. But this theory, too, is hard to sustain, because the basin is sunk into the earth like a small swimming pool and has no fire source.

Finally, a theory emerged that gave meaning to all four components at the site and to their arrangement. The interpretive signs inside the pavilion now claim that the building was used as a malting plant and brewery. Elaborates Boos, “Archaeologists, of course, are rarely experts in beer making. Consequently, most of my colleagues still regard the malting and brewing theory as highly speculative. Without firm knowledge based on hard evidence, however, this interpretation seems to me to be by far the most logical and persuasive of all that have been proposed to date.”

A Tantalizing Hypothesis

To the trained eye of a brewer and maltster, the site does indeed contain all the components of a modern malt and brew house, combined into one operation. But Roman? We have some evidence that the Romans occasionally flirted with beer making, but not on the systematic scale suggested by the Regensburg site. If their writings are to be believed, most Romans disliked beer. Instead, they preferred to haul casks of wine from Italy across the Alps to their military outposts—a colossal logistical undertaking.

There was probably never enough wine in Regensburg for the 12,000 troops and civilians who lived there. The Romans may not have liked Celtic/Germanic beer, but there was no practical alternative to it. When faced with the choice of either abstaining from or improving upon the local quaff from grain, they probably opted for the latter.

It is very likely that the Kornweg site was built by Romans but staffed mostly by Germans, simply because the Romans possessed the needed architectural and engineering superiority, while the Germans, who learned stone construction from the Romans, possessed the needed knowledge of brewing from raw materials. The Romans were probably able to de-construct the traditional Celtic/Germanic bread beer process and enhance it. By this hypothesis, modern beer making is a happy marriage between Celtic/Germanic knowledge of grains and Roman technological savvy.

Perhaps the initial impetus for a change in beer-making techniques was aesthetic. The civilized Romans might have wanted to eliminate the soggy crumbs and floating husks from the finished product. They probably discovered, however, that raw grain dunked in water does not ferment well, because, as we now know, yeast cannot metabolize raw grain starches. By trial and error, they must have stumbled upon the fact that gentle heat changes the outcome completely (because, as we know today, it stimulates the development of enzymes). At the Regensburg site, the well and the steeping basin could easily have served that purpose, with heated stones supplying the needed warmth. The basin was made of three layers, as only the Romans could have built it: an outer support of fist-sized, crushed limestone; a middle sealant of lime and gravel mortar; and an inner lining of impermeable cement-like limestone plaster. The basin probably functioned much like a modern steeping vat and germination box, with a moveable wooden cover to regulate the temperature and moisture.

Because moist grain spoils quickly in storage, the Regensburg maltsters dried it in the kiln. The kiln walls have a narrow ledge that probably supported a floor made of organic material. An open fire pit and a praefurnium (a work area for stoking the fire) are in front of a covered flue that sent hot air into a hypocaustum (a heat chamber) under the kiln floor. By modern standards, this design is rather sophisticated. In the Middle Ages, the hot-air kiln was “forgotten” and medieval maltsters used direct-fired floor malting instead, which often roasted, or even burned, the grain and always gave it a slightly smoky flavor. The indirect-heat kiln was only “re-invented” in the early 19th century in England.

The Regensburg brewers probably re-moistened their malt in a metal kettle placed over a fire, possibly suspended from chains. They then drew an extract, the wort, from the mash. The same kettle was probably used for both mashing and wort boiling. The kettle was never found. Because of the value of metal in antiquity, it was probably reworked into other items after it had fallen into disuse.

There is no evidence of fermentation at the site. An interpretive sign states that fermentation took place in a “warehouse that has been excavated further west.” Boos confirms that three Roman cellars have been unearthed within a few hundred yards of the presumed brewery but these are not visible or accessible to visitors. The Regensburg brewers probably collected the wort in containers and fermented it in these cool underground places. Once fermented, this extract beer was probably superior to all the primitive bread beers of old. It certainly could be made in quantities greater than the amount of wine the Romans could import.

Rewriting the Beer History Timeline

The Regensburg workshop is simply too well planned to have been a pure accident or a unique arrangement. It contains, in rudimentary form, exactly the same infrastructure that you still find in any modern malting plant and brew house anywhere in the world. Fundamentally, not much has changed from the processes employed in that tiny site along the Danube to the installations used by today’s multi-billion-dollar international malting and brewing industries.

The brewing methods had probably become standard by the time the Roman Empire collapsed. By 260 AD, the mighty Rome could no longer defend its far-flung borders. Castra Regina’s end came in the fifth century AD, when it fell into German hands for good. In 476 AD, the Germanic general, Odoacer, deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and Roman power all but disappeared from history. Roman achievements, however, left the societies they had touched transformed—and modern beer making is probably one of the least well known of these achievements.

If the above interpretation of the Regensburg site is correct—and we have good reason to think that it is—we can state that modern beer making with malting, mashing, and lautering existed in Bavaria, and probably in most of Germany, at least half a millennium earlier than anybody has hitherto imagined—and long before the Germans became Christianized and built their first monasteries in the fifth and sixth centuries. It means that medieval monks probably did not invent modern brewing methods but rather adopted and perpetuated them.

An interpretive panel at the Regensburg site seems to confirm this view: “This unusual Roman economic structure contains all the installations required for making a simple beer—just as in medieval monastery breweries.” The monks, however, deserve much credit for having preserved these techniques through the five centuries of intellectual and technological stagnation that we now call the Dark Ages. Without them, the achievements that Regensburg represents might have been lost.

This brings us to a momentous conclusion: Modern malting and brewing have always been considered a German invention, but they just might have been a Roman one, too. Within this context, the significance of the inconspicuous archaeological find at Kornweg in Regensburg could hardly be overstated.

Holland was an independent country until the 16th century, when it joined with the northern and southern Netherlands in an unsuccessful fight against the Spanish Empire. The Spanish king became the “Count of Holland.” In 1830 the southern Netherlands, now known as Belgium, became independent. The northern Netherlands and other counties (the present-day provinces of Drente, Groningen, Friesland, Gelderland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Brabant and Limburg) joined to establish the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Of course, the people and the language are referred to—in English, at least—as Dutch.

Now that nomenclature is as clear as a glass of pilsner, we can talk about Dutch beer.

Pilsner Is King

As in most countries in northern Europe—and the world, for that matter—the pilsner style of lager is the beer of choice for most Dutch beer drinkers. Within this small, densely populated area (the highest population density in Europe) live 15,981,472 mostly lager drinkers. The beer style of choice has started to change in the last 20 years or so, but just a little. Pilsner sales make up about 90 percent of all beer sold in the Netherlands. And Dutch brewers brew a lot of beer—just under 25 million hectoliters (21.3 million barrels) in 2001. Although this maritime nation, with a rich and highly successful trading history, exports a great deal of the beer it brews (think Heineken and Grolsch), the Dutch still consume 86.4 liters (22.8 gallons) of beer per capita per year.

Dutch Brewing History

Like all of Europe, until the lager revolution of the mid-1800s, Dutch brewers brewed top-fermented ales. By the end of the 1800s, pilsners had taken over. World War II devastated the Dutch brewing industry. Breweries were dismantled or destroyed by bombs, and there was almost no barley for making malt. By the late 1940s, Dutch brewing was once again on its feet, with most brewers operating in the southern provinces of Limburg and North Brabant. These old family brewers continued to make a few top-fermented ales, but in the 1950s, they either failed to make a go of it or were bought out by Heineken, a brewery uninterested in ales and small brewery operations.

By the 1960s, only a few independent breweries remained in the south. In Limburg, there were Lindeboom, Gulpener, Alfa, Leeuw, Brand and De Ridder (the last two now owned by Heineken). In North Brabant, there were Budelse and Dommelsch (the latter now also owned by Heineken). By the late 1970s about 16 breweries operated in the Netherlands: a few major players such as Heineken, Grolsch and Bavaria, and a few regional independents.

At this point in time, approximately 99 percent of all beer sold in the Netherlands was pilsner. The only exceptions were the traditional strong Dutch version of a bock (often spelled bok) beer produced each autumn and possibly an Oud Bruin (Old Brown). Gulpener Dort (a German-inspired Dortmunder-style beer) was an extremely rare exception.

Modern Changes

The time was ripe for some changes in Dutch beer culture. Just as a generation of US Baby Boomers returned from studies and travels abroad (primarily in Europe) in the 1960s and 1970s to shake up American complacency with bland tasting wines, beers, coffees, teas, bread, cheeses and other foods, a generation of young Dutch people in the late 1970s returned from visits to their southern cousins—the Belgians—where they had discovered wonderful-tasting beers. Dutch entrepreneurs who noticed this trend began importing Belgian beers.

The first imports were Duvel, Westmalle Tripel and De Koninck, three beers that to this day remain on the beer lists of cafés throughout the Netherlands. The first Dutch cafés bold enough to stock these Belgian imports were Jan Primus in Utrecht, De Beyerd in Breda, In de Wildeman in Amsterdam, and Locus Publicus in Rotterdam. These four cafés remain in business today and are among the best of the best for beer lovers.

A consumer movement began at this time as well. Just as the Campaign for Real Ale in the United Kingdom formed as a grass-roots organization in the 1970s to save the tradition of cask ale in the British Isles, a group of beer lovers formed in the Netherlands to promote good quality beer. Vereniging Promotie Informatie Traditioneel Bier (PINT) formed in 1980. Now with 3,000 members, PINT is a force to be reckoned with in the Netherlands. Its stated goals are 1) Promoting beer as a cultural heritage in the Netherlands; 2) Informing the beer enthusiast on developments in the world of beer; and 3) Guarding the interest of the beer enthusiast. PINT publishes PINT-nieuws and an Internet site, Nederlandse Bierpagina’s (www.pint.nl), under the artful hand of editor Theo Flissebaalje; produces beers festivals; and sets up visits to breweries for its members.

The ancient Egyptians had a separate hieroglyph for ‘brewer.’ This maker perfect sense if you consider all the pyramid building they accomplished. I mean, nowadays, nine holes of golf on a sunny day is enough to send your average hack racing down to the pub for a quaff. It’s quite surprising that the Egyptians, after a hard day’s work—and boy were their days’ work hard—didn’t decide to replace King Tut with the brewer as the object of their laborious adoration. History may have taken a distinctly more convivial turn if they had.

As a matter of fact, the earliest records of fermentation, circa 10,000 BC, are from Sumeria, which was in the northern regions of the Middle East, in the area of modern Iraq. But some zymologists and even early Greek historians agree that the fermentation process was honed and perfected in Egypt, on the African continent, before following the belligerent anti-clockwise sweep of civilization around the Mediterranean Sea. Ironically, the only beer found in Egypt today is, for religious reasons, non-alcoholic.

Whereas the Greeks and Romans frowned upon beer as a poor substitute for their fermented grape juice, African societies continued to brew and savor the rich and cultured beverage whose properties were supposed to elevate the drinker’s soul and no doubt liven up many a moonlit tribal gathering.

Traditional Diversity

There are literally as many varieties of traditional African beer as there are tribes and clans in Africa. Some of the more popular strains are brewed using mielie (maize/corn) meal, others with sour milk (maas).

The tropical central African climate yields a particularly sanguine form of fermentable cereal known as sorghum. Sorghum beers differ widely, however, not only from region to region, but between neighboring households. Each family has its own traditional brewing methods, its secret recipes, and the beer produced is used in rituals ranging from weddings to medicine to ancestor worship.

To this day, even urban Africans mark a special occasion by slaughtering a goat and drinking sorghum beer. For some occasions, Western-style ‘clear’ beer just won’t do. The sorghum beer, brewed almost exclusively by women, is usually transported over vast distances by rural relatives who still practice the traditional brewing methods. And in the Johannesburg gold mining hostels, the call for sorghum beer is so great that mine unions order that the women be accommodated near them to provide the inimitable, indigenous homebrew.