Tapped out on ale-ing U.S. market

Hilde G. Lee Daily Progress correspondent
Published: September 2, 2008

I had mixed feelings about the purchase of Anheuser and Busch by the Belgian-Brazilian firm InBev SA.

Even though brewers of European origin founded the well-known names of Busch American beers such as Budweiser, Michelob, Becks, Lowenbrau and Busch, they are part of American tradition. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too disappointed by the Belgians acquiring Anheuser and Busch, as Budweiser long has advertised its Belgian ties by featuring the Belgian Clydesdales horses in their advertising.

Some form of beer making has been part of America since Colonial days, but the making of beer goes back much further in history. The Roman writer Pliny stated that the people of the barbarian provinces drank beer while the Romans drank wine. In the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, beer continued to be an important beverage in much of Europe.

During the Middle Ages, monasteries brewed beer for themselves and for nearby settlements. It may have been the most healthful liquid around. Many waterways were contaminated by human waste, but the water in beer was boiled after soaking the malt and before fermentation. The final beer was sweet and alcoholic enough to discourage many harmful microbes.

Common alehouse

By the ninth century, alehouses had become common in England, with individual owners brewing their own. Until 1200, the English government considered ale (a heavy style of beer) to be a proper food and did not tax it.

Later in the Middle Ages two great inventions made beer largely what it is today. These were that hops were used to preserve and flavor the beer. Also lager or “bottom-fermented-yeast” beer was developed in Germany. For centuries a mixture of spices had been added to beer to give it flavor and to help daily spoilage.

Hops were introduced into beer around 1100 AD. Hops made weaker beers possible by doing some of the preservative work of sugar and alcohol, and gave beer its familiar bitter taste.

Bavarian style

Bottom fermentation (also indicates where the yeast collects in the tank) was developed around 1400 in a Bavarian monastery. This eventually gave beer a lighter flavor. Unlike hops, this technique remained distinctly Bavarian until the 1840s, when the special yeast and techniques were taken to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and to Copenhagen. Pilsner lager, with its lightly roasted malt, is the prototype of most modern beers.

England was slow to accept hops. Since northern Europeans made their hopped beer lighter, the English suspected hops

were used to disguise and encourage poor quality. A popular saying at the time summarized the English attitude toward northern European innovations.

“Hops, Reformation, Bays (a type of cloth), and beer came to England in one bad year.”

Beer, a word of Germanic origin, denoted a foreign beverage that was hopped. It was not until 1700 that ale was hopped and ale and beer became pretty much identical.

The English tardiness in accepting hops was balanced by their pioneering in the making of bottled beer. Ordinary beer or ale was fermented in an open tank and lost all of its carbon dioxide to the air. The bubbles simply rose to the surface and burst. Some bubbles would remain in the beer barrel, which lost most of its gassiness as soon as the barrel was tapped.

Around 1600, it was discovered that ale kept in a corked bottle would become sparkling. The discovery was attributed to Alexander Nowell, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. By 1700 glass-bottled beer sealed with cork and thread had become popular.

Most beer was drunk flat from barrels. With the development of airtight kegs, of carbonation (around 1900), and the increasing tendency to drink beer at home instead of at the tavern, bubbly beer became the rule.

Some food historians say that the United States is known for its light and often characterless beers. The colonists were not able to transplant refined English beer making techniques to this country. They relied on England for raw materials or on barely acceptable substitutes.

There was at the time no strong national tradition in the matter of beer. The majority of the Scots and Irish who arrived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries preferred whiskey to beer. Thus the way was clear for German immigrants to set the taste style for American beer. In 1844, Frederick Lauer, a second-generation brewer in Reading Pa., introduced the newly revealed German lagering technique to the United States and the distinctive brew caught on.

Both Milwaukee and St. Louis were quickly established as centers of lager brewing; in the former, Pabst, Miller, Schlitz and Blatz; in the latter, Anheuser and Busch. They all got their starts in the 1850s and 1860s.

These names, their light beers and now their low-calorie beers remain dominant today. The darker, richer brews of the English appeal only to a small number of beer connoisseurs.

Even though there are many mini-breweries and boutique beers, the only indigenous American style of beer we have is “steam beer,” a rare relic of the California Gold Rush. Without the large supply of ice necessary to make lager beer, San Francisco brewers used the yeast and techniques appropriate to cool bottom fermentation, but brewed at top-fermentation temperatures. The result was a gassy beer that gave off a lot of foam or “steam” when the keg was tapped.

Today, most American beer is blander and more uniform. The number of major breweries in this country has fallen from more than 2,000 to less than 100.

The formulas include less malt and hops than they did 25 years ago. The logic seems to be that the more beer resembles water, the more of it we can and will drink — a sad trend from the fine and distinct beers of the turn of the 19th century.