Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer. My name is Gary aren't. And with me as usual is the brewers brewer, Mr. Bobby Fleshman say hi, but today we got someone new on the show. Or actually the first guest we've had on the show, Joel Hermanson. He is a teacher of history, a student of history, a lover of beer. And why don't you introduce yourself? If there's anything I missed.

No, I think actually you probably captured me in that, in that short introduction. No, I'm happy to be here. It's, it's as I was saying off air, it's intimidating sitting with you two I'm feeling a little, yeah, starstruck was the, was the phrase I used.

The reason we have you on this episode is because you literally teach a course here at McFleshman's on. The history of beer, which is your day job as well, being a history teacher.

Right.

So we wanted to talk about the history of beer. We've talked a little bit about the science of beer. We've talked about the origins of this particular establishment, but what we want to do in the next few episodes is get into the very simple question. Where did beer come from?

That is, that is a deep question. And ever since this idea for this podcast began to germinate, I've been thinking on that. So I've, I've, yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts to share today. I'm excited to be here.

More courses to come probably from the research. I expect.

Yep. And I would also point out, I don't know if I have this as a tangible fact, but I think we might be the only brewery in the United States that actually doubles as an academic institution.

Potentially, unless it's disputed.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if, Gary, are we?

I don't know of any, but I'm not in this industry, so. Right.

We have history classes. We have science classes. Which by the way,

and your graduation party's tied right in with the course. Right. So

Shameless plug there a lot of fun in the graduation rate is a hundred percent. So it's, it's a lot of fun.

So all right, let's, let's get started with this question: where did beer come from?

Well, I want to go back all the way back to the beginning and kind of touch on some things that, that Bobby had touched on. And I believe it was in episode number three. In looking a little bit. at the issues that were happening in the earliest societies as it related to grain cultivation, grain gathering. We do know that beer did not exist before, organized civilization. At some level, I mean, and I'm not, because civilization basically is a term that means gathered and living in a group. So the idea that beer existed outside of people taking grain and storing it in containers that were not watertight, it's not, it's not particularly realistic. Because that's where we think that the idea to ferment grain into beer came from, is the putting of grain into non-a irtight vessel, and then water is going to leak into that vessel, which is going to cause the grain to sprout. Again, if you were with us in episode three, Bobby talked at great length about malting and sprouting and draying. all sorts of fun scientific things. But it's very clear that when the, when the grain sprouted, that it became sweeter. And as it set, as it sat in, you know, the, this non airtight vessel, it, it acquired water, it began to ferment. And when that runoff was consumed, it had very early beer like qualities.

Was was this harnessed by no nomadic people or only after we settled down and started agriculture?

Yes, this this is the great question and and we could spend three podcast episodes on this one because there's a prevailing theory right now that agriculture in a systematic, organized way may have actually been done to satisfy the grain requirements for producing beer and not the other way around, which would really completely disrupt kind of the timeline that we have of, of things because the normal timeline that we have is that civilization emerged after people started systematically planting crops to control their food source you If you believe some of the current scholarship including one of your old professors at UC Davis has, has talked a little bit about this in some of his books, Charles Bamforth, that the idea of producing grain in a systematic way was advantageous for the production of beer, not the other way around.

And just to be clear, we're, this, This is not beer as we would know it today. Oh, this is like a proto beer, something grain based and there was alcohol and that's about it. It wouldn't have tasted or looked even kind of like what we think of as beer

And the grass seed. I assume would not have looked like modern barley be very small. It was before we selected out for for larger grain to make beer with,

Right. So and I think Gary's talked a little bit about this. I think it was an episode. one or two, I've been riveted to these episodes. It's been so exciting to hear these, but there's actually 56 different species of large grain grasses. And 33 of those were indigenous to Mesopotamia. So they were probably just grabbing, you know, different types of grain that were, you know, growing wild, soaking them, sprouting them, releasing the enzyme. What, give me the name of the enzyme that's released when you soak grain. You're gonna have to help me with this.

Well, when you get to the brewing level, after it's been malted, it's amylase. So the sugar is, there's different types of, starch breaking down enzymes and they're called amylase.

Cause that's really what beer is. Beer is grain that's been soaked and enzymes have been activated at various temperatures, which is where brewers have turned the production of beer from a soupy porridge into an art form. You know, even in Mesopotamia they had, there's estimates that they had, about 20 different colors of beer based on the amount of, of grain they would use. So in terms of the, the very, very early origin story, making some sort of a porridgey soup out of the grain, which would sweeten the grain, because some of the grains that we're talking about were not, they were not useful unless you tried to break them down with, with water and made them soluble.

Very starchy. Yeah. At South America, there's something called Chicha.

Yeah. The Inca used that.

Yeah. And that, that includes, you wanna describe how that, how that goes about?

Yeah. Before I do that, yeah. One, one of the, one of the really cool things about the story of beer is that everybody is developing it independently of one another. Because normally we think of, and I, and I think wine develops in, in many of the same ways, but distilling doesn't. Because if you're going to distill, that's, that's the technology that is, that is being shared across cultures. But we have evidence of brewing in China. We have evidence of brewing in the Near East. We have it in early Europe. We have it in societies in the Americas before the Columbian exchange before that moment of interaction. So it, to me, that's always been one of the cool things is that everybody was developing this independently because they thought of beer in many respects, the same way we do that kind of makes you feel fun. And it's, somewhat refreshing and it, it kind of acts as a social lubricant to be quite honest, even in that porridgey, sludge form. The Egyptians actually wrote quite a bit about that. But back to, the Incan beer that you were referencing in one of the beer history classes that we have here, we have a, a, a picture of that beer being poured and it, it, it's corn based because wheat was not indigenous to the Americas before the Columbian Exchange, so they would, try to break down corn and this is where I'm I'm going to flip it back on you because Is corn more or less soluble? Does it release enzymes easier to break down starches than, than

I'm not familiar with malting corn. Malting is where you really create those enzymes and you do that pre breakdown of the starches and so on, but in this case, at least in the chicha case, to the punchline, those enzymes come from our own mouths. Oh, for, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So our own, they, they would chew these and they actually in their, even today, as far as I know, there are places you can find where their teeth are worn down from that being sort of their, parallel occupation. They're chewing this stuff off.

Is that the only way to get enzymes out of corn?

No, I think not. I don't know the details of how you malt corn, but it has to be similar to when you malt barley. You, you have to hydrate it, trick it into germinating. It'll start to break itself down and then it would eventually sprout and grow a new plant. all that's happening across these different seeds, but I don't know the details. They've discovered they can, they can expedite the process.

And then was it about five, seven years ago, that dogfish head?

Yeah, they, they released one of these commercially. Anyone's grossed out by that. It gets boiled. Right. And this no one's saliva made it into the end product, but yeah, they hated working there for a couple of weeks. I think everyone was required to chew corn, certain blue corn from the south America.

To put a time on this. So the oldest megalithic structure that we know of that currently has been found. It's called Becky Tempe in Southern Turkey. I did an episode on this on my podcast and that dates back about 11, 000 years and it's really kind of rewritten what we thought about... Civilization because like you said, there's this notion that, Oh, agriculture developed. And from that we had everything else. But with gold Becky Tempe, there's no evidence of agriculture. There was nothing around there, but it is in an area that at the time it was believed had a lot of wild fields of grain. And the current theory is that they, people were nomadic. They would come here maybe in the fall, they would harvest this wild grain. Probably make beer or something close to it. And then over a period of centuries, they just built up this place that was probably like a festival center or something, but it, it basically predated civilization and it may have been due to beer. but 11, 000 years, as far as I know, is about as far back as we can date it right now with any reasonable accuracy where there may have been beer.

And something we've glossed over on several episodes so far is that one of the motivations for drinking anything alcoholic is because it's a stable, it's a sterile source of water. It's a way to survive. Yeah, we landed on beer in the modern context for that reason, but I think it must have been historically true as well at some point.

Well, I think this is probably a good time to Introduce a quote by your mentor, Charlie Bamforth, which is that, beer is the basic basis, excuse me, of modern static civilization. That almost everything that was generated by these early communities, whether it's the making of pottery, whether it's writing in some respects, because writing was done for very, boring reasons. Initially, they didn't just sit down and start

Accounting.

Yeah, it was for accounting purposes. It was for recording trade transactions. It was for recording agricultural surplus. And in many respects, it may have been used to write recipes, to take brewer's notes, if you will, about, you know, what they were putting in at different points in the process, because ultimately after a certain time, they weren't just sprouting grain, making a porridge, that had sort of a fizzy aftertaste to it. It was very cloudy and milky. They would start to actually secondarily ferment it. They would run off the, the grain, and they would pour it into a second clay vessel, which pottery was probably developed for this reason in many respects also. And then into that, they would add berries and herbs and nuts and honey and all sorts of things, which only kind of accelerated the fermentation process. It probably started to clarify the beer a little bit and it would certainly add secondary flavors. And I think one of the points where they probably started to drive things up as far as ABVs was the introduction of honey. Because those wild yeasts that, and I'll have you mention airborne yeast because I've always found that idea fascinating. The, the yeast that they were using was airborne and, honey is such a high, has such a high content of sugar that those yeast undoubtedly loved.

Yeah. Something you said, Joel, the, something that occurs to me as we're sitting here, there's a positive feedback here. We, we came together in order to produce to, we started arguably agriculture in the name of making beer, at least in part. And then we become in these, we, we live in these congested societies. Maybe getting over time and maybe we get annoyed with one another. Maybe our water becomes less potable and you start to see sort of positive feedback. So now we need to make more beer so we can socially lubricate our relationships. But also our water supply is is in jeopardy. So I can anyway that just occurred to me as you were saying that I think I've thought of it in those terms before. But comes back to me now. You're talking about honey?

Honey as, as an agent of, you know, driving up ABVs, clarifying beer, giving that yeast more more to devour. I feel like...

Yeah, without, without myself knowing the full history, it seems logical that it probably all began with honey because it's such a, it's all there. Everything you need is you have sugar, you have yeasts, And with a bit of hydration, you, you, that's it. There's nothing else you have to do and you have mead. The, this yeast was airborne, you say wild. It, it was just carried by the bees as, as the pollen and, and the nectar, I would imagine. So you, so you get everything just naturally occurring. We have a love affair with bees here incidentally at the brewery. Yeah, so it seemed very natural. And then if somebody figures out that you can replace that sugar source when you run deplete of honey with grape pressings or barley grass or whatever it may be, you, you, you can see where we end up with all these modern different alcoholic drinks that potentially spurred from, from bees in the very beginning.

Right.

I know the Romans used honey to sweeten wine, but I don't know if they used it prior to fermentation because the Romans also watered down their wine and it was considered uncivilized to drink wine that was straight. And you may know more about this, but I, I don't know if like in the middle ages or whatever, they, the, the alcohol content of, of beer was necessarily that high, that children drank beer, it was something you drank in the morning, it was something you drank all day long and that it was just enough to kill whatever, you know, pathogens were in the water, but if it was a super, you know, if we were drinking 547 all day long, most people wouldn't be able to function.

No, that's, you're, you're a hundred percent right on that. 547. What a, what a masterpiece.

But, there's a recreational slant on how we do beer these days, right? So we can, we can drink high ABV and then dilute it back down with water because we can trust our water, right? So you have to have something that you can drink all day. If you go back at certain times.

And I think this comes back to that Bamforth quote, though, that so much of the technology that was developed ultimately found its way, you know, into brewing. The development of, of early bronze kettles, you know, probably enabled them to, to maintain a more consistent temperature. Because if you've ever done any home brewing, you know, If the biggest challenge in a homebrew situation is not having all of your wort boil off, you know, onto your grass or, you know, heaven forbid onto the kitchen counter and whatnot, because you're, you're, you know, revving that the, the heat so high, the heat is what will extract further enzymes from a higher content of grain, which is going to drive up the ABVs. So. In the case of Mesopotamia, with their 20 recorded beer styles, they had beers that were much darker. They actually would make loaves of kind of chunked barley that they would bake twice and then store those and then crumble those into basically a wart. And the higher the grain content plus the length of time of the boil, there's an equation for this. I think it's written on the wall downstairs in the brewery, but that's going to equal, you know, higher ABVs. And then they also did water their beer down too. And they probably had, dare I say, children's beer, I would imagine, where they would drink.

Yeah, I can't imagine that again, that your water could be dependent on once that was discovered to be the case, of course, your kids would have it too. And I think that hits sterility at a fairly low level, not giving them 12 percent barley wines, but yeah.

Right. I think governments also came from, in many respects, from beer, because, you know, governments, the, the initial purpose of governments were to organize irrigation projects, it was to organize the protection of, of arable land, it was to organize the the, the, the maintenance of a surplus, and undoubtedly beer factors into, into all three of those components.

Someone listening to this might be skeptical because when they think of the ancient world, maybe they'll think of people eating bread egyptians ate a lot of bread. Everybody ate a lot of bread that lived in a wheat producing area Why do you think that it was beer probably and not bread that drove much of the very early civilizations?

Can I tell you that when I first met bobby back in 2014 2014 The first words that I heard him say out of his mouth. He was giving a speech at Lawrence on the physics of beer. He said, and I quote, and I still have this recorded, someday when I work on a Wednesday I want to have this lecture playing to the masses, but you said that in seven ancient languages the word for beer and bread are the same word.

Yeah, don't ask me which one of, which of those languages they were, but, yeah.

Well, one of them is Egyptian. The hieroglyph for bread and beer are the same. Right.

And I think that's because, like you said, I think this bread is making its way into the mash. It's becoming the beer. And the beer can be used to make the bread. There's actually a cyclical. You can actually utilize the beer itself...

To get into the chicken and egg aspect of it. What do you think came first? The

beer or the bread? Precisely. I don't think I think it had to have been beer.

I would agree because beer making that sludgy porridge. It's simpler. Is an easier process.

Yeah.

It is an easier process.

Yeah, I agree with that.

The grinding that's involved with bread and the leavening process, even if you don't leaven it actually, but the baking of it making beer is just simpler in some ways can happen by accident, whereas it's harder for bread to happen by accident.

This is true. Yeah. It seems a little bit more industrial when you put it in those terms.

In Germany, don't they refer to a beer as four slices of bread?

Oh, good point. I don't.

That's a Christoph thing. We'll have to check. We'll have to get Christoph on. We'll touch base with Christoph. Yeah. Yeah. McFleshman's resident German and see if we can't get clarification on that.

As civilization move forward, not every place was a beer producing place. They're kind of developed a, regional differences. And one of the best is, you know, around the Mediterranean wine became predominant. But in Northern Europe, beer remained predominant because it wasn't a grape growing region. And in fact, you can still see today that there is a very, kind of definite line that goes through Europe as to whether or not beer or wine is the preferred beverage of choice and it actually dates back from. Ancient Rome. One of the things I, I, I found it again, doing this for my own podcast is that beer was known in ancient Rome, because of their contact with Germanic tribes and everything. It just, it was considered more of a high end thing because wine was so common. Wine was what everybody drank. They had lots of wine, but beer was something that was only for the elite because it was so difficult to, make. for them because they didn't have the ingredients and it was so it just wasn't made as much.

Rare is good, right? Wherever we, wherever we live, whenever we live, something harder to get must be better.

Well, and you know, one of the things about Greece and Rome as an example, historically, Greece had a very difficult time. producing an agricultural surplus. Their soil is not particularly fertile in Greece. Now, the one thing that grows really well in Greece is olives. So, they would basically trade their olive oil for grain in and around the Mediterranean. And Rome is a better cereal grain producing region than Greece, but not nearly as good as, as it is once you hit, you know, France and, and, and Germany and certainly Belgium. Belgium is obviously one of the founding places of the beer that we know. But yeah, it, I can see why scarcity would, would be an issue there.

Another thing when, when dealing with ancient beer that, you know, we don't have to deal with is storage. We have refrigeration. Beer back then would have had to have been consumed much faster. Right. Than it is today, right?

Yeah. If you didn't, if you brewed a batch of beer, and we'll, we'll put it in Rome, if you brewed a batch of beer in Rome, and you didn't drink it within, maybe 72 hours? You're going to end up with a sour

Sure

The beer is going to sour and

Yeah and I'm sitting here thinking of all this history of beer in sort of two phases one in which we're handling these raw ingredients and we're germinating them potentially or maybe by other means or extracting sugars And then then I'm also then thinking about sort of this modern process by which we brew you know that it goes from boiling You can actually make beer with little to no boil, you know, there, there are ways to do that. I should say that's part of what makes beer sterile is that it's been boiled. Even if there were no alcohol, that's part of the story. And so, yeah, I'm thinking about that in those two, in those two terms. But yeah, back at the, in those times, they wouldn't have had a full understanding of biology and, and they would have had soured beers in three days. Yeah, and everywhere they would have.

And that's why when you go, and this becomes a climate issue, when you go farther north, you know, into the northern reaches of Germany and around the North Sea and, and so on and so forth where they would have a longer, cold season, they, they had the capacity to, to brew different things. Whereas in Greece and Rome with this, you know, Mediterranean climate, which this is maybe the first time in history that anyone has ever criticized a Mediterranean climate because it's fabulous, but it is not great for, for producing beer. And if you listen to episode,

The raw ingredients, nor the beer itself, right?

Right. If you listened to episode three, like when you guys were talking about the ice bach I mean, you, you can do so many different things. at colder temperatures when you have the capacity to, to manipulate that variable. And they had an inherent advantage in the northern part of Europe as opposed to the Mediterranean region.

And I'm sure we'll open the whole box up later, but we're talking, when you start thinking about modern industrial brewing, it really hinges on artificial refrigeration because you're talking about the storage and the distribution of the finished product, but you also you're talking about silos of grain that has to be held at a certain temperature and moisture level so you can brew throughout the winter and not have to deal with these stored sour beers in the cellar. Yeah, there's there's a lot of different quantities. There are eras and that's one of the major ones refrigeration.

Can I ask you a quick question?

Sure.

So you, ever since I first met you, you've been talking about a Spanish cider.

Well, technically it's the Basque region of Spain. But the ciders in Spain are in the north. Okay. Asturias, Galicia, and the Basque country.

So that, that climatically is probably, I mean, it's still kind of in that Mediterranean zone. No, it isn't. Oh, it's not?

Because it's in northern Spain. It's on the Atlantic coast. These were Celtic people. Okay. So it's close. It, it, it points towards Britain and the waters are much colder than what you're going to see in the Mediterranean. Okay. And that was, that is, they do grow wine there. it is a wine producing region, but I think that the ciders there are far better than the wines and that you have to go further East and South in Spain to get better wines.

So here's yet another connection between temperature and the quality of a product.

Oh, the variation. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I there are people in Wisconsin that are trying to make wine and I, I, I wish them well, but. I don't think this is the place to be making wine. I think this is an excellent place to make ciders. And I'm surprised more people don't do it. And I think it's because we'll be talking about this in a future episode. But this is not a wine growing place. And cider actually was one of the. things that was popularized in the early United States, not beer.

Yeah, we, I was going to bring it up right now actually is that we've been talking about three groups, right? Really cereal grains and, and grapes and honey. And we should be talking also in that same context, apples for sure. Especially it's American history.

All right. Well, we can get into that in a future episode, cause we're gonna be talking about a little bit more history.