Beer’s Persistent Romantic Facts
Last week, VinePair published an article about the birthplaces of famous beer styles. It included some hinky information that was later amended, but not before becoming the subject of discussion on social media. It offers the opportunity to explore an important topic I’ve alluded to in the past, the “romantic fact.” That is, a story shot through with fascinating, possibly nostalgic details that turn out to be hogwash.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating. In 2012, Sally and I were lunching with Matthias Trum, the sixth-generation owner/brewer of Bamberg’s famous Schlenkerla rauchbierbrauerei. Trum is a very smart, well-educated guy, and his knowledge of Franconian beer—its history and culture, but also its science—was comprehensive. He has a professorial manner, and like all the best professors, wraps his knowledge in fantastic stories and anecdotes that keep you asking more questions.
At one point in our conversation, I made reference to what I thought was a fact—that medieval brewers didn’t know what yeast was. Writers and brewers had passed this bit of “wisdom” back and forth so long that many of us accepted it without much critical interrogation. Trum pounced. I could tell I wasn’t the first American to mention this to him, and he had the real story at the ready. “In the middle ages, they had a profession called the 'hefner’ (hefener?). The hefner’s job was to harvest the yeast from the batches, to press out as much remaining beer as possible, and then the yeast was added to the next batch. So they knew exactly.”
I had been writing about beer for over a decade, and I was in the second year of a contract to write The Beer Bible. In other words, I should have pretty well sorted out the facts from beer’s fictions. Ah, but beer’s fictions are legion. As I would learn in the process of writing that book, trying to separate the very established, very old, and very wrong myths from accurate history was challenging precisely because they had been repeated so often. They had become “facts,” even if they weren’t true.
Romantic facts.
A good romantic fact is a little like early AI art—it looks good at first glance, but once you study it a bit, the faults and incongruities catch the eye. The yeast myth shouldn’t have made sense to anyone who had ever brewed beer. During fermentation, the yeast cells reproduce exponentially and produce a massive white layer of … something. Sure, brewers didn’t understand the mycological complexity of yeast, but they knew exactly how it functioned in the beer. They knew yeast existed.
Romantic facts rely on two things: some fantastic, seductive element you want to be true, and repetition. The yeast story is seductive because it plays to our vanity as modern people. “Oh, isn’t it quaint that those old brewers didn’t know what yeast was?! The past, truly, is foreign country.”
Of course, people were just as smart four hundred years ago as they are today; or put another way, people today are no smarter than they were 400 years ago. Old brewers were not halfwits. They had a sophisticated sense of the craft they’d been practicing for millennia, and of course they knew what yeast did. Equally, modern people are still gullible enough to think that brewers didn’t understand yeast 400 years ago.
Repetition is also important. We are much more likely to cast a gimlet eye on a fact presented the first time. But one repeated constantly?—not so much. The best example of this in the beer world has to do with the history of porter. Today, most accounts get it right, but up until 10-15 years ago, we were repeating a romantic fact that had been around for centuries. The late, great Martyn Cornell was the man who finally figured out why.
In 1802, a man named John Feltham published a funny book about London’s past. He didn’t know anything about beer, and offered an incredible account of porter’s origins that soon became the canonical history repeated and republished for the next 200 years, until Martyn decided to investigate. He writes:
“It was Feltham who first linked porter to an attempt to replicate a beer called three-threads, which he said consisted of a third of ale, a third of beer and a third of ‘twopenny’ (strong pale ale); Feltham claimed that about 1730 ‘a brewer by the name of Harwood conceived the idea of making a liquor which should partake of the united flavours of ale, beer and twopenny. He did so and called it Entire or Entire-butt, meaning that it was served entirely from one cask; and as it was a very hearty nourishing liquor it was very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained the name porter.’”
A fantastical claim (old-timey brewers making a convoluted blend) and repetition; generations fell for it. It was a perfect romantic fact.
Beer is by its nature prone to tall tales. People tend to repeat stories about beer while drinking it, when they are not at their peak of discernment. Breweries are repositories of hand-me-down stories passed along through the generations. And of course, marketers are happy to accentuate the odd detail, sometimes blowing it up into an entirely new, invented realm. Here we have monks smuggling lager yeast into the Czech lands to make the nascent style of pilsner, there we have breweries creating bock from the dregs of concentrated, old beer.
Many of them have been debunked over the years, but as last week’s VinePair article illustrates, fragments of the old wives’ tales still lie like landmines, waiting to explode under the feet of the unwary. I worry that artificial intelligence will reintroduce romantic facts back into the world, perhaps inventing them out of whole cloth. We might be in for a new generation of preposterous claims invented by algorithm. To forestall that eventuality, I’ll do a follow-up post with a list of the most outlandish examples. In the meantime, tread carefully. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”*
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* He didn’t. That’s a romantic quote.