Bygone beers

Whoa! That is a mouthful.

Cheers to you!

 

I found a few different articles in American Brewers' Review which I thought were pretty interesting/entertaining and had some food for thought relevant for this thread.

The first article is just intended for reference as it is written by A. Haeussermann, brewmaster of Decatur Brewing Company in Illinois. The next one is written by a mr August Haeussermann from a 1897-1898 edition describing the requirements for brewing a pale and mild beer. In it he mentions that:

Recommending an original gravity of 13-14%, and to not go below 13% is quite the departure from adjunct brewing these days (and higher than would be normal in Bohemia at the time for Bohemian type beers). The hopping is of course also clearly elevated compared with nowadays but he recommends that in order to keep the beer mild the hop addition should be about 0.7 lbs which compared with today is of course a healthy amount of hops still. In another article written by Aug. Haeussermann from a 1896-1897 edition he notes that:

Another article from an 1896/1897 edition (author unknown) on page 370 deals with the hop market situation:

Another article is found (author unknown) in the same 1896/1897 (page 427) edition, also dealing with the hop market situation:

Lastly I found this article written by Max Henius on the brewing of Extra Pale beers to be interesting in that it gives a start to finish overview of brewing compared with the more abbreviated version in their book.

At 13.9% gravity and 1 pound of hops per barrel that's a beer with some heft to it (like the recipe presented by Hauessermann quite different from Bohemian gravity bands, being more similar to those of Vienna and Bavarian lager beers instead). I find it interesting that he suggests that the impetus for the use of adjuncts in producing pale beers was the too dark color imparted by all malt brewing, whilst later also mentioning the added benefit of increased stability as a benefit of adjunct brewing. A revisionist claim perhaps, but still food for thought I thought.

 

Speaking of Pabst and all-malt beers I came across the label below for Pabst Kaiser Beer, "brewed exclusively from Montana barley and coast states hops" which looks like it's from the turn of the century. Montana being one of the states that Pabst bought barley from according to Cluss, and it seems two-row was fairly common in Montana at one point. Also interesting that an all-malt beer would be using only domestic hops, which as per Schwackhöfer was the case with Schlitz's lager beer in the early 1890s (using New York state hops only, coast states hops I would take to mean Pacific coast hops as opposed to state hops or New York state hops).