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The Daily Beer

Written by Anette Pedersen

The Importance of Beer

Beer was food. Before the potato arrived in Northern and Central Europe, barley, rye and oats were the main sources of nutrients. Of these, barley was the easiest and most robust crop. Barley isn't that good as bread or porridge, so almost the entire harvest was brewed into beer. Beer was—and is—made from boiled water and grain. The unrefined products brewed at the time contained a large part of the grain's nutrients, much more so than the refined products of today.

Most meat and many vegetables were preserved by salting them in various ways, and the salty food meant that large amounts of liquid were needed by everybody. Water, however, was not safe to drink unless it was boiled first, and even boiled water would spoil if it stood around at room temperature for too long. So beer was both a nifty way for getting the nutrients from the barley and for preserving the boiled water with alcohol and various added herbs.

Beer was what everybody drank regardless of their age, sex and status. Not for its alcoholic content—in fact it was barely considered alcohol at all. Whenever people at the time spoke about drunkenness it was wine or spirits such as Aqua Vita they talked about. With neither clean water, tea, coffee, milk nor juice available to most people, you could easily drink six pints of beer a day and still be considered a sober teetotaller, by yourself and by your neighbors. For a farm-worker, eight pints per day were the norm, and four pints were the average for children in boarding schools.

Of course, most of the beer drunk was small beer with a very low alcoholic content. Also, beer was often cooked into dishes, which made the alcohol evaporate.

Brewing Beer

Beer may be brewed from any kind of grain. Barley was, and is, merely the most common. Wheat beer would be most common in the southern areas, where this grain thrived, while rye and oat beer served mainly as variations.

Most beer was, and is, flavored with hops. Hops are the dried flowers from a climber related to hemp. They grow in a zone from Italy to Denmark, with northern France and southern Germany as the best areas. If you could not grow your own hops, you could buy them from the itinerate hop-traders, or use various other herbs such as bog-myrtle and juniper berries instead. These additions were not just to help the taste. Most would also aid in preserving the beer. Keeping the beer from spoiling and turning sour was always a problem, so very little beer was brewed without some kind of attempt to prevent this, a task complicated by the lack of knowledge concerning bacteria, fungi and fermentation.

Brewing was done both as home-brewing and by professional brewers, but in either case the basic method was the same.

The first step was to soak the grain in water to make it ready for sprouting. In homes this would be done in a tub or barrel, but in breweries there would often be an outdoor soaking basin for this, where the sacks of grain would stay until completely soft. Usually this basin would be placed close to the wall, just below the malting and drying room in the attic. A pulley system was used to raise the grain directly from the basin and up to the next step in the process.

The second step was to spread out the grain to sprout and become malt. In private homes this could happen on trays placed on the rafters below the roof, but this frequent damping of the rafters wasn't good for the wood. If the household was big enough to have a room set aside for brewing, this might well be the sole room in the house with a floor covered with stone or tiles, just so the malting could take place there. In breweries there would certainly be at least one room with stone or tile floor. This room would often be in the attic, and it would have plenty of shuttered openings to let in fresh air and to control the humidity and temperature, while keeping out the sun.

Once the malt had sprouted to exactly the right stage—that is: root sprouts but no leaves sprouting—it had to be dried as fast as possible. If making white malt, this would happen on the floor with as much air blowing through as possible, often with men throwing the malt into the air to ensure an even drying. A faster and less space-demanding drying could happen in the fireplace, either in a box or on a tray placed above the fire, with or without a stone shielding it from below to keep it from roasting. This method gave the malt a smoky flavor, and it was very important that only the right kind of wood or coke was burned. Using oak or conifer wood would taint the flavor of the beer. In homes, the last heat in the oven after the weekly or monthly baking could also be used to dry the malt.

The fourth step was crushing the malt or grinding it coarsely, which could be done by hand for a small household. It would more often be done either at the professional mill or in a small farm mill by a local creek.

Next, the crushed malt would be mixed to a mash with warm water in a big tub, and allowed to stand until the "bran" or mash residue sank to the bottom. How much water to each measure of malt would determine how strong the beer would become, and thus how well it would keep. As there was no way to measure the alcohol content in the brewed beer, most towns and nations had laws concerning the maximum amount of beer that could be brewed from each measure of malt. This was partly to prevent unrest caused by swindled customers and partly to make it less attractive for the merchants to import a better quality of beer from abroad.

Once the mash residue had settled on the bottom, the liquid part, the wort—which would now contain the nutrients, starch and sugar of the grain—had to be sieved into the brewing-kettle. Some professional breweries had real sieves for this, but scalded bundles of straw were used just as often. The wort would be boiled in the kettle with hops and whatever else the brewer wanted to add to spice up the brew.

The mash residue would be mixed with water again and sieved to produce a second batch of wort. This was used to brew the weaker middle beer. The process was repeated for a third time, which would produce the weak and easily-spoiling small beer. Finally, the spent mash would be used for animal fodder.

After boiling with hops and the other flavorings, each batch of wort had to be cooled before the yeast could be added and the actual brewing take place. To prevent wild yeast from infecting and spoiling the brew, the cooling had to happen as quickly as possible. Big flat tubs or trays were used in breweries to cool the wort before transferring it to the fermenting tub. In private homes, the wort would usually be allowed to stand until it had cooled on its own. The phases of the moon or a silver coin in the tub was relied upon to preserve the beer from evil influences in these homes. A pair of trousers—especially from a male servant—draped over the tub was also believed to work to prevent spoilage.

Yeast would be saved from brew to brew, often as a yeast-ring made of wooden spikes. This ring would be dipped into the fermenting brew and then dried and kept until the next brewing day. In breweries where new batches might be started several times a week, yeast could just be skimmed from a brew and kept damp in a jar.

When the wort was the temperature that the brewer thought was right, the yeast would be added. Within a few hours a layer of yeast would cover the surface of the tub, and the beer could be transferred to barrels where it would continue fermenting for a day or two.

The barrels could not be closed while the fermenting went on, due to the pressure that would build and to allow most of the floating yeast to bubble out. Once fermenting stopped, most commercial brewers would transfer the beer to fresh barrels to rid it of most of the sediment caused by the fermentation. This might or might not happen with home-brewed beer. The last dregs in a barrel could be extremely thick and murky when the beer was not transferred to a different barrel. At this stage, the beer would contain very little carbon dioxide and be quite flat by modern standards. Usually a bit of after-fermentation would take place after the barrels were closed.

Brewing is a long and complicated process that allows the enzymes of the sprouts to make sugar from the starch of the grain, and then the yeast cells to turn this sugar into alcohol. It is also a process with many variations and professional refinements.

Types of Beer

Aside from the three grades of beer (strong, middle and small), which would always come from the three different batches of wort, the brewer needed to make quite a few choices to determine the nature of the brew. Different types and amounts of malt, water, hops, spices, yeast, transfers and temperatures all worked together to make a specific type of beer.

The type—or combination—of malt-types would determine whether the beer would be pale or dark. The pale beer would be made from the air-dried white malt, while the dark gained it's color and smoky flavor from malt dried over a wood fire. During the Thirty Years' War, the preference was for dark beer, which also tended to keep better due to the smoked malt. As this was the case, malt would also sometimes be air-dried and then lightly smoked, when labor was cheap but fuel expensive. Malts that were roasted, with or without being smoked, were used in many brews for added color and flavor. The really black beers such as porter and stout were a later invention, as was the pale pilsner beer so popular today. The term white beer would usually not refer to the color, but indicate a beer brewed from wheat, and might not be especially pale.

The amount of malt used to brew a barrel of beer would determine the alcohol content. Most brewers would brew an especially strong beer for Christmas, Easter and Harvest. Most breweries near a harbor would also make something extra strong to sell to far-traveling ships, where the need for the beer to keep would be of utmost importance. A barrel of malt as well as several pounds of hops would be used for a barrel of the strongest beer, while a quarter or less of the raw materials might be considered enough for the common types. This not counting the middle and small beer brewed from the same mash.

The water preferably had to be soft with a low chalk content. Many of today's old European breweries are situated near a spring or other water source with water especially suited for brewing, but many household brewers just used the water from the local pond.

Not all hops are exactly the same. Several European areas were famous for their hops and would grow far more than what was needed locally. The extra crops would be bought by hop merchants, who would then sell them to breweries as well as urban households. A large ...