What Role Does Geography Play in Beer's Evolution? Two Professors Explore the Answer in a New Book

I find this approach quite interesting and may get the book.

 

Be prepared for sticker shock.

 

I'm beyond shock, I've been married.

 

The more places we have traveled and the more beers we have drank, the more we appreciate the idiosyncratic viewpoint Belgians have regarding beer—that classifying beer within the parameters of a given style takes away from a beer’s own identity and individuality, and thus, its distinctive geography.

I do not agree with this. The taxonomy of beer is important for no other reason than to educate the consumer on what they are getting. If every beer was a thing unto itself, buying beer would become monstrously frustrating.

 

We don't need $10.00 words on this board!!!!

 

It is worth remembering that what we call styles began as names used by brewers, often loosely and indiscriminately . Many beers have been called different styles by different people or different places. Brewing has no authoritative body and in any case things change. Who brews a massively hopped Scotch Ale such as my grandfather would have enjoyed?

 

Naming things had to start someplace and everything had an origin, so even though some names may have different meanings and those meanings may change, they still have them.

 

Yes but it gets involved when names mean different things or get mistakenly used. You can still see posts from people who don't realise that Stout and Porter or Pale Ale and Bitter are synonyms.Or that IPA comes in widely different guises from Green King IPA at 3.6%ABV and around 30 IBU to the brews made elsewhere

 

I think you touched on it in your response. The name isn't the issue. Knowledge about said moniker is.

 

Damn.That word costs $12.99 here. It's that three tiered dictionary!. I knew that word, but I'm going to read this because I am fascinated by place, place of origin, and everything that has peopled a place.

 

As a beer geek and geographer, this is a book right up my alley. It looks like my local library will come through yet again in helping me avoid book sticker shock. Maybe that's an option for you.

 

I can't stand these stories about people being saved from water born diseases (cholera in this case) by drinking beer instead of water that lack detail. How many of you folks drink only beer and not water also? You cannot live drinking only beer considering it dehydrates you, unless you're drinking a beer with an extremely low alcohol content (under 2%). I see no reason to believe that most of the beer being consumed in 1845 England would've been under 2% alcohol by volume, so people would have needed to drink water also and thus would not have been protected from contracting cholera.

 

If the subject is interesting for any of you, suggest adding Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography to your book list, It's enlightening geo-politically and demonstrates how despite modern global networking, it always comes back to the map. Beer styles and the cultures surrounding them should be no different.

 

Geography, culture and even politics have played their role through out history but I think geography has had the largest impact.

 

Also, since cholera is transmitted via fecal-oral transmission, it is not just the water that is a concern, but overall hygiene. That said, clean water is a pretty large part of limiting diseases like this.

 

Seems that people, places and culture are so closely associated that it would be no surprise that the many different manifestations of beer around the world would be connected to geography. People used the materials they had available and no doubt tailored them to a product that was pleasing.

 

Picked up a used copy of this book (at less than half cover price - ABE lists quite a few copies). Seems to be an attempt at a sort of M. Jackson's World Guide to Beer, updated for the 2010s but it is somewhat frustrating and some errors in the short "US" chapter makes the rest of the info suspect (for me, anyway).

It's pretty much a coffee table book, with lots of full-color pictures (the photos made Jackson's book a must-have even today, even though much the info is obviously dated) but too many are generic - lots of Alamy, Shutterstock and Getty Images credits. The US section is a mere 2 dozen pages and yet there a post-card-ish half page photo of a Colorado mountain scene - unrelated to beer. One full page photo of 4 DC Brau's tap handles. 3 different US maps which offer very little usable info. Lots of vague, nonspecific "history".

Some dubious/incorrect quotes just from the US chapter:

This is nonsense. There was nothing preventing "entrepreneurs" or anyone else from making regional beers (the couple of dozen existing local and regional breweries made them) before the change in the homebrewing regulations, and nothing in that change allowed breweries to "serve them to the populous" - before and after, that always required Federal and state brewing licenses.

Huh? They seem to get cream ale and steam beer* (*I don't know, from a historical source, I'd expect that term to be used despite Anchor's contemporary trademark claim) confused here. Obviously the first cream ales in the US (not all were adjunct-brewed) were top-fermented with ale yeast, not lager yeast.

I've never read of any suggestion that shallow fermenters were used for cream ale (c'mon, "lager yeast...shallow fermenters" - that's steam beer history) and, more importantly I've never seen a source that claimed it originated in eastern PA - one would think they'd name the brewer if that was the case. Certainly lots of ale brewers all over the northeast were making sparkling ales, present use ales and cream ales by the last half on the 19th century - given the brewing history of the region, I'd suspect New York or New England originated "cream ale" - certainly Albany's Taylor was using the term as early as the 1830s.

Well, they leave "large" undefined (the largest US breweries at the time - AB, Pabst, Schlitz - were between 1- 2m bbl/yr) but lots of small breweries also survived to re-open after Prohibition, some made near beer and malt syrup, some produced other products and others were just moth-balled during the period.

Well, it took "decades" for Utah perhaps, but for "the region", Colorado's Boulder Brewing Co. would be among the very first microbreweries, opened in 1979. Fisher itself had been purchased by General Brewing Co.(aka Lucky Lager) in 1960 and was operating as a Lucky Lager brewery when closed.

There have been no "multinational buyouts" of Coors. The family-owned brewing company did merge with Molson and they did, briefly, form a joint venture with SABMiller-owned Miller Brewing Co., MillerCoors (now wholly-owned by Molson Coors) but neither event can be described as a "buyout".

Samuel Adams Boston Lager did not hit the market until 1985 and, technically, there were no real "doors" to open, since it began as a contract brew via Pittsburgh Brewing Co. Seems to me to note it's "#2" status, one should note the Brewers Association changing "craft brewer" definition, which allowed the old-line, adjunct-brewer Yuengling to become #1, even though BBC still sells more when its FMBs, seltzers and ciders are counted.

The US-based Carling Brewing Co. (then wholly-owned by Canadian Breweries [later Carling-O'Keefe]) did buy the Arizona Brewing Co. but that was 1964. Two years later they sold it to the National Brewing Co., and then National merged with Carling in 1975. Four years later, Heileman bought Carling-National and operated the Phoenix brewery until they shut it down in 1985.

(No comment).

Yeah, OK - some of the these examples might strike some as petty nit-picking (my specialty! ) but my point is, if it is this easy to find vagueries and errors, much of the rest of the info in the book can be trusted?

 

Ken Grossman gave an excellent talk at HomebrewCon. He pointed out that Boulder Brewing opened before SN, but he showed that they opened a brewery in a former goat shed. He showed a picture of the brewery, and a goat was in the foreground.

Just something that was humorous, thought I would share.

 

They've got a goat photo on Boulder's own website, so I guess they're not ashamed of it.

Somehow, they also resisted brewing a Goat Milk Stout...

Might have been pic #2 below, 4 photos showing that none of the early "micro breweries" were much to look at...


Can't think of a photo of Anchor previous to their move to their current site (a former coffee roasting facility) but here's a wire service pic from 1960 of new owner Larry Steese skimming a batch of Anchor Steam Beer - doesn't look like too impressive a brewery, either.