Beer’s Rosetta Stone: National Tradition
In the 44 years since Michael Jackson wrote The World Guide to Beer, people have become much more sophisticated in the way they understand and describe our favorite malty substance. The subject is incredibly complex, and over that span we have collected, classified, taxonomized, and shared information, refining what we know along the way. This effort has produced a shared (if disputed and endlessly debated) vocabulary and conceptual framework for discussing beer. For the most part, people have identified and developed the big concepts and we now focus on refining them.
I was therefore surprised to discover a huge dynamic in beer that hasn’t gotten the classification/codification treatment: national tradition. I stumbled across it on my European tours of 2011-‘12 when doing research for the first Beer Bible. It’s unmistakeable when you travel from one country to the next, touring a dozen breweries in each and listening to master brewers describe their philosophy and processes. Whether a traditional English brewer is making a mild or bitter, strong ale or stout, they approach the beer in a specific, highly cultural way no other brewers on earth do. You really see this when styles migrate, as when Belgians became enamored of British styles a century ago. They didn’t recreate them—they made totally weird Belgian interpretations no Mancunian would recognize.
Beer, like cuisine, is a constructed beverage made of ingredients through specific choices the brewer makes in the brewhouse and cellar, the application of heat and chemistry, and the brewer’s beliefs about how beer should taste and be consumed. Belgium and Germany share a border and grow many of the same crops, yet because of the invisible hand of culture, their cuisines are radically different. And so it also is with their beer. Culture, more than any other influence, drives both the differences among beer region to region and also the similarities of beer inside a given region. It is one of the most important things to understand about beer, and something I explicitly call out in the second edition of The Beer Bible.
It’s not like people didn’t recognize and hint at this feature of brewing. Jackson himself wrote The Great Beers of Belgium as a way of fleshing out this dynamic in his favorite tradition. Yet even today, brewers and drinkers fail to register just how important brewing traditions are in creating the distinctive flavors in each style. If they know one tradition well, they tend to refract other traditions through that knowledge. It’s how you end up with Brussels-brewed “Scotch” ales that taste more like saisons than anything from Edinburgh.
Another example, which I raised on Twitter, was how few American breweries make credible and tasty examples of British styles. Perhaps because they seem so similar to American ales, many breweries use all the wrong ingredients and techniques, inevitably resulting in beers that leave Britons rolling their eyes.
Understanding National Tradition
I hope you buy the new edition of The Beer Bible and read how I characterize this concept. More than that, I hope to forward this framework as a way of understanding beer styles as emanations of these larger national traditions. Belgians are crazy about fermentation and yeast. Every brewery tour of traditional breweries (that is, not blandly industrial beer like Jupiler) will end in a warm room, where the beer is refermenting in the bottle. This is not only unique to Belgium, but absolutely essential to understand why Belgian beer tastes the way it does. Every Czech brewhouse will contain a vessel for decoction. It’s not the only country where you’ll find that vessel, but it’s the only one where you’ll find it everywhere. It is so much a part of Czech culture that it is a legally protected part of their heritage. And so it goes, to Germany, the UK, Austria, Lithuania, Japan, Scandinavia and beyond.
Most of these traditions are ancient. The last time one emerged as a distinctive local specialty was probably in the years after Josef Groll made the first pilsner 180 years ago. We have the extremely good fortune of watching a new one being born right in front of us. The American tradition, which like so many others was a riff on an older one, involves the use of unique ingredients (American hops) and techniques (all the weird ways Americans use them). The hoppy ales developed here are made unlike any beers before them, and certainly taste like nothing brewed in the last 12,000 years. And, like monumentally successful beers of earlier eras—London porter, pilsner, Bavarian lager—they are now traveling around the world and getting reinterpreted in other countries where local brewers will twist and distort them as their own cultures intervene.
For this reason, we’re living in the most exciting time in beer in a century and a half. It is breathtaking in its transformation, and we will enjoy its development over the rest of our lifetimes as it reverberates around the world.
Yet if we don’t recognize all these beer styles as products of culture, if we fail to see that American hoppy ales are all united by the way Americans think about beer and make it out of their local ingredients, we’ll miss the gravity of this transformational development.
Excerpt: British Tradition
Let’s use the big Twitter discussion as an entry point for why Americans often don’t make tasty or authentic British ales. It’s not because they can’t—a pub bitter is actually one of the easier and most forgiving styles to brew. It’s because Americans don’t understand the way British brewers think or make their beers, so their British ales go through a cultural distortion field before coming out all misshapen and odd. How should an American brewer make a good approximation? The following excerpt from the second edition of The Beer Bible (preorder your copy today!) should offer some clues.
Traditional cask ale is made by simple single-infusion mashing on typically imprecise, antiquated equipment, fermented in square vessels often open to the air, and served “living” on cask in a format that causes the beer to change hour by hour. It is beer made to be drunk in volume on draft, pint after pint, giving rise to that other famous cultural institution, the British pub. The following elements are critical to understanding the British cask-ale approach to brewing:
Varietal malts. Cask ales, particularly bitters, are characterized by a balance of flavors that begin with a warm nutty or bready malt layer. These flavors come from native styles of barley grown and specially malted to impart distinctive character. Maris Otter is the most famous variety, but there are a number of choices: Pearl, Tipple, Halcyon, Golden Promise, and Optic form an incomplete list. Some are more nutty and others breadier; some are sweeter and others drier; some have notes of toffee, figs, or porridge.
English hops. The varieties grown in England reflect the terroir of that green and pleasant land, with flavors that have gentle qualities of jams and dark fruit, forests, and tree blossoms. Their delicacy harmonizes perfectly with British malts.
Fruity, characterful ale yeasts. Yeast colonies are, of course, alive, and when they are reused time and again over decades by breweries, they evolve and adapt. British ale strains typically exhibit pronounced esters redolent of quince, Mandarin orange, and plum.
Hard water. The water profiles of much of Britain and particularly the two most famous brewing cities, London and Burton upon Trent, are famous for their hard minerality. This chemistry helps give cask ales a spine of stiffness that offsets the rounded malts, fruity yeasts, and floral hops.
Brewing sugar. Not every cask ale is made with sugar, but many are. In some countries, sugar provides extra strength to beer, but that’s not why British brewers use it. In this case, it lightens the body and gives the ales a drier, crisper finish, even in beers below 4% ABV.
Cask-conditioning. The most important signature of the British tradition is packaging ales while they’re still fermenting in casks so that the carbonation is produced naturally. This is not an incidental practice that Brits have failed to update; it’s absolutely central to making these beers sing with life. The rich malts, fruity yeasts, delicate hops, and stiff water all express themselves in the relatively warm environment (roughly 55°F) of the cellar. When served fresh, pints of cask ale taste fuller, more vivid, and more lively than they do in any other presentation.
It’s a little arrogant to think you’ve seen something that other, smarter people missed. And in many ways, I haven’t. National tradition is something every brewer and many drinkers instinctively know. Yet we haven’t used it as a framing concept for understanding beer—or guiding brewers when they range into making styles from afar. It should be. Understanding that people think about and make beer differently depending on where they are transformed the way I thought about beer. I believe it could be very helpful for others as a kind of Rosetta Stone for grasping so much about why beers taste the way they do.