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The Dawn of Darkness in Beer
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o understand the emergence of dark lagers in the history of beer, we must first take a brief look at the history of ales! This might seem unorthodox in a book about dark lager brewing, but there is a logic behind this seeming contradiction, because virtually all brews made by humans for the past ten thousand years or so, since right after the dawn of civilization, have been ales and not lagers; and their color was probably some shade of amber or pale, and not dark. After all, barley, wheat, spelt, and other brewing grains are naturally golden to amber. Thus, so should be the beers made from them.
As explained in this chapter, dark ales most likely evolved in the so-called Dark Ages — although the beer color, obviously, had nothing to do with the naming of that period. Likewise, as explained in chapters 2 and 3, lagers evolved only during the past five centuries or so, initially as dark, then as blond lagers. In order to tell the story of dark lagers, therefore, we must first understand how and why some beers turned dark (and, incidentally, somewhat smoky, too). Then we will examine how and why some dark beers stopped being ales and became lagers instead.
The First Beers of Humanity: Pale Ales? Most archaeologists and anthropologists place the first beers made in history into a region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. They do so because they found kernels of malted grain in sites dating from at least 9,000 years ago! This region is now part of Iraq. When the Greeks occupied that land under Alexander the Great, in 330 BC, they named it Mesopotamia, which means “between the rivers,” a name that has stuck to this day. The early brewers between these rivers were Sumerians, the first humans, to have abandoned their hunting and gathering ways — the normal way of life of our nomadic ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years before. They became settled Chapter 1 • The Dawn of Darkness in Beer | 1
to raise crops and cattle. With this monumental act, the Sumerians had stepped out of the fog of pre-history into the bright light of civilization! We now call this step the Neolithic Revolution — though some researchers claim that the Chinese were contemporary revolutionaries with the Sumerians, or at least not far behind them. As part of the new, sedentary existence, the Sumerians developed new ways of cooperating with each other in all spheres of life. They worked together to dig irrigation systems to secure plentiful harvests. They set up civil administration to coordinate their collective affairs and to keep records. This spawned the beginnings of money, which replaced barter as a means for the valuation and exchange of goods and services. Already some 6,000 years ago, they also developed the earliest known system of writing, the cuneiform script, which they often used on clay tablets. The cuneiform characters derived from pictographs and other symbols that represented trade goods and livestock. As Sumerian society became more complex, it spawned many path​breaking innovations. The Sumerians invented pottery which could be used for many purposes including making and storing large amounts of beer. They developed smelting techniques. Specialized occupations became the foundation of an economic division of labor and of social stratification. One of the most prestigious occupations was that of brewer, or, more precisely, brewster, because most Sumerian beer makers were women, who also ran taverns. Random settlements grew into organized clusters of dwellings around public buildings and communal spaces. A concept of private property became established, which, in turn, required a system of laws to settle disputes in a just manner. As the Sumerians became focused on the raising, storing, and distributing of their plant- and animal-based foods, they established social norms and customs, civil rituals, and religious beliefs and practices. All of these sociological, political, economic, and technological developments meant that the Stone Age was gradually giving way to the Bronze Age. One of the key benefits of this epochal transition of Homo sapiens from nomad to settler was the replacement of an ever-present, survival-threatening scarcity of nutrition with a state of relative surpluses, as well as the beginning of leisure time. The Sumerians not only enjoyed food security — a luxury rarely known to nomads who must haphazardly chase the stag 2 | Dark Lagers: History, Mystery, Brewing Techniques, Recipes
and collect the wild fruits and grains — they even raised more grain than they needed for their own consumption and for the alimentation of their cattle. At times, historians and archaeologists assure us, they grew twice as much grain as they needed for their subsistence. Importantly, archaeologists now consider the Sumerians’ need to preserve their surplus grains as the driving force behind the evolution of two critical food processing techniques: baking and brewing! Michael Pollan, the author of Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, explained in a keynote address to the Craft Brewers Conference in Denver, Colorado, in April 2014, that he considers beer and brewing one of the key driving forces in human evolution and civilization. To Pollan, the ability to cook food is arguably the largest change from great ape to Homo sapiens. In Pollan’s unusual take, cooking is a form of pre-digestion outside the body, which gives humans — unlike any other creature — the time and energy to engage in activities other than just hunting for food, digesting food, and sleeping; and he reminded his audience not to forget that, after all, “beer is food.” Because brewing is an art that involves fire, water, air, and earth, “beer,” according to Pollan, “is at the very pinnacle of the human art of transformation.” In other words, quoting Pollan, “brewing is a part of the larger journey of cooking ... It defines us as a species.” The Sumerians used grain — most likely barley, but also spelt, einkorn, and emmer — to bake bappir, a kind of hardtack biscuit, that stored well. To the best of our understanding, Sumerians used this bappir mixed with moist green malt from the same grains for beer making. There is also a possibility that the green malt was air-dried. In these mixed mashes, the barley malt’s active enzymes would have converted both grain and bappir starches into fermentable sugars, just as they do today in modern, adjunctladen brews. Sometimes, the Sumerians also fortified their brews with a few grapes and dates and perhaps a little honey, all of which, no doubt, harbored lively colonies of S. cerevisiae. The Sumerians fermented their Mesopotamian beer drinkers depicted on a clay seal from approx. 2600 BC. It shows two gentlemen, perhaps in a pub, sucking beer from a common pitcher through straws to filter out any floating particulate.
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mashes in large crocks with a bung at the bottom. There was no lautering or boiling involved. Once fermentation subsided, they simply drained the now-alcoholic liquid from the mash into another crock, while leaving the spent grain behind. They drank the finished beer through long straws. We have some idea of how Sumerians made beer because of a find of a clay tablet with cuneiform characters from about 1800 BC. Archaeo logists have deciphered the writing as an ode, which they call the Hymn to Ninkasi. She was the Sumerians’ chief goddess, whose name meant “she who fills the gods’ mouths (with beer).” This supreme ruler of the Sumerian beyond, at the top of the Sumerian mythological pecking order, was in charge of fertility, carnal love … and beer. And the hymn to her contains an elaborate set of beer making instructions. A Mesopotamian beer ration tablet from roughly 3100 to 3000 BC, on display in the British Museum, London. The cuneiform characters are imprinted with a stylus made of reed on a clay tablet while it was wet. It was then dried in the sun. The characters, the experts tell us, indicate the daily barley beer rations issued to a temple worker.
There are virtually no sources of color associated with the Sumerian beer making method, except perhaps for the addition of fruit or a small portion of black barley, which is known to have been cultivated in antiquity, both in the Fertile Crescent and along the banks of the Nile. Black barley, however, has not been able to carve out a foothold in humanity’s brew houses. This is not because of Darwin’s theory of natural selection of the fittest, but because of the world’s brewers’ practical selection of what works. Black barley has one brewing disadvantage: it has no hulls, that is, it is naked. Hence its scientific name of Hordeum vulgare nudum. A mash of such barley simply does not have the filtration characteristics that would make for efficient lautering. From all the Sumerian sources that have come down to us, we can conclude with some certainty that most beers brewed in antiquity in the Fertile Crescent were what we would now call unhopped pale to amber ales. It is not clear, how much alcohol the Sumerians were able to produce with their beer making method.
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Much depended, as we now understand, of course, on the temperatures they were able to achieve during their malting and mashing to activate the right starch-converting enzymes. The Egyptians, too, were early brewers, probably no later than by the 4th millennium BC. They made beer very similar to the Sumerians, from both bread and malted grain, as we can surmise from the many depictions of brewing during Pharaonic times, on murals in vaults, pyramids, and sacrificial chambers. One particularly revealing artifact about Egyptian brewing comes to us from the tomb of Meketre, a high administrator under King Mentuhotep II, who ruled the land of the Nile for half a Models of ancient Egyptian century, from roughly 2050 to 2000 workshops, including a bakerybrewery, were found in the tomb B.C. When Meketre died, around of Meketre, a high official from 1975 BC, he was mummified and about 2000 BC. his contemporaries placed a collection of miniature wooden figures in his tomb. These depicted Egyptians at work. There was a carpentry shop, an abattoir, a kitchen, a couple of river boats, a granary, and a bakery-brewery. Part of this find is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Beer brewing in the Middle East declined gradually as this part of the world was overrun by successive waves of wine-drinking conquerors. First came the Greeks, in 330 BC, under Alexander the Great, and then the Romans, in 30 BC, under Octavian. Under Roman rule, much of the grain of the Nile was turned into the bread of the Tiber. All alcohol production, however, came to a terminal end in the 7th century AD, after the so-called Arab Conquest, which extended Islamic rule from the Arabian Peninsula to Damascus (in 634), to Jerusalem (in 638), to the whole of Egypt (in 642) and to Mesopotamia and Persia (in 651) — and the Koran insists that holy warriors do not drink alcohol!
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As Beer Dies in the Middle East, It Is Born in Central Europe While beer making declined in antiquity in the lands around the Mediterranean, it seems to have taken a firm hold among the Celtic and Germanic tribes of Central Europe. There is a debate as to whether beer making knowledge traveled overland from the Middle East to Central Europe or if beer arose autonomously in both locations. Either way, the earliest known evidence of beer making in continental Europe is an amphora dating from about 800 BC. It was discovered in 1935 in the burial mound of a Celtic chieftain from the Celtic Hallstatt culture. The site is in northern Bavaria, near the Franconian village of Kasendorf, some seven miles (barely 15 km) from Kulmbach. The object in question is an elegant pottery crock containing a residue which has since been identified as belonging to a wheat ale flavored with oak leaves. The artifact is This Celtic beer crock from about now on display in the Kulmbach 800 BC is the oldest known evidence Beer Museum. of beer making in Central Europe. Beer obviously acquired great social importance in the tribal cultures of the place we now call Germany. This is attested to by the Roman writer and historian Publius Gaius Cornelius Tacitus. In his book De origine et situ Germanorum (About the origin and the location of the Germans), which he apparently completed in 98 AD, Tacitus tells us sarcastically that the German tribes brewed a liquor from barley, which had some similarity to “corrupted” [infected and turbid?] wine. (Potui umor ex hordeo aut frumento, in quandam similitudinem vini corruptus). He then tells us that the Germans’ thirst was beyond temperance (Adversus sitim non eadem temperantia). Thus, if you let them indulge in drunkenness, as much as they desire, he suggested, they can be defeated more easily by their vices than by any enemy’s weapon. (Si indulseris ebrietati suggerendo quantum concupiscunt, haud minus facile vitiis quam armis vincentur.) However, the Romans eventually seem to have made peace with the “corrupted” Germanic drink from grain. We know so from the 1983 find of a Roman (yes!) brewery in Regensburg, Bavaria, just a few hundred feet from the banks of the Danube. The remains of the structure have 6 | Dark Lagers: History, Mystery, Brewing Techniques, Recipes
A reconstruction of a direct-fired medieval kettle and a wooden lauter tub commissioned by the Weyermann® Malting Company for the authors’ experiments.
been dated to 179 AD, when Regensburg was called Castra Regina and was an outpost of the Roman Empire, housing some 6,000 thirsty legionnaires and an untold number of Germanic and Celtic servants, slaves, and whores. One of the startling discoveries in that brewery is a square space dug into the floor in one corner (see center of photograph, next page). Archaeologists believe that this was a malt kiln that was heated indirectly by a wood-covered flew of hot air generated by an adjacent fire pit, a praefurnium in Latin. If this interpretation is correct, this brewery contained the earliest known malt kiln in the world … and it would have produced fairly pale malt, which made pale beer, because the kiln was heated by hot air! This feature makes the Roman kiln super-modern, considering that malt kilns became indirect-fired again only in the middle of the 19th century. It took the Industrial Revolution and the invention of pneumatic malting technologies before the indirect-fired malt kiln could make a comeback. Chapter 1 • The Dawn of Darkness in Beer | 7
The remains of a Roman brewery in Regensburg, Bavaria, dating from 179 AD, when Marcus Aurelius was emperor, is considered the oldest known “modern” brewery in the world. It has a deep well, a steeping basin for grain, a malt kiln, and a fireplace for a brew kettle that was probably made of metal. The kettle has never been found, probably because it was eventually melted down for other uses, after the Regensburg brewery had fallen into disuse.
How Darkness and Smokiness Got into Beer Malt — and thus beer — became dark only after humans started to use direct-fired kilns, probably to speed up the slower, more labor-intensive, and invariably more expensive air-drying of malt, which would produce only pale malt. In air-drying, the moist, sprouted kernels are spread out in a layer, out in the open or in a well-aired attic. It then had to be shoveled by hand for days, until it was dry. The constant manual turning of the malt was necessary to accelerate the drying process, to dissipate heat, and to keep the malt from spoiling or becoming moldy. We do not know exactly who came up with the idea of a fire-heated malt kiln, nor do we know where and when it happened. We do know, however, that such kilns must have been commonplace in the most advanced monastic breweries, at least by the 9th century. The best evidence for this is an architectural drawing from the 830s of the Benedictine Abbey 8 | Dark Lagers: History, Mystery, Brewing Techniques, Recipes