The Ten Wrongest Myths / “Romantic Facts” About Beer
Although it doesn’t appear in the title, this is the sixth installment of my “Book of Lists” series. The inspiration came from a funny 1970s fascination with lists, culminating in a best-selling book of them. You may hate the internet, but imagine life before it! (Previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)
If you Google “beer myth,” you’ll find a bunch of stories that debunk claims like “dark beer is heavier than pale beer” and “all lagers taste the same.” These aren’t myths, of course—they’re just ignorance or common misunderstandings. A myth is something more artificial, a story built up around a fiction. When we delve into the realm of beer, I have suggested a different term, the “romantic fact,” which I recently discussed. These are myths of a kind—but ones we hold dearly and pass along like treasures to our friends. They aren’t just stories, they’re drops of wisdom meant to exalt beer and get at its deeper truths—never mind the details.
Take the first romantic fact on the list below. Medieval peasants didn’t refrain from drinking water while consuming a gallon of ale a day. It’s wrong, but it feels right because it hints at the darkness of the age. We love myths that celebrate our cleverness by highlighting the ignorance and poverty of past eras. It also contains a shocking fact that field- and factory-workers would down 8 pints a day—and we loved to be shocked with weird and wild tales. In short, a romantic fact isn’t just an incorrect statement; it’s a complete story with implied themes and lessons we want to be correct.
Since I published the “romantic fact” post last month, my crack team of researchers here at Beervana Amalgamated Sentences have been hard at work searching, sorting, and evaluating beer’s greatest romantic facts. They judged them on a series of criteria, including: how long they have been around, how many people repeat them, how well they have penetrated and corrupted official reference materials, how much they exist to smuggle in a lesson or moral, and how entertaining they are. Here are the results.
10.
Medieval peasants didn’t drink water and instead consumed a gallon of ale a day.
This is a well-established romantic fact, still commonly repeated. Variations may omit the bit about beer, include different amounts of beer drunk, and so on. That water was unsafe to drink in antiquity—particularly the medieval period—is almost universally accepted and repeated. And false. Throughout written history people discuss drinking water, and they understood it could be unsafe. As long water was clear and unscented, they thought it was fine to drink. We hardly need a historical record, however. Like many romantic facts, this one falls apart when you give it even momentary thought. A classic artifact of the “silly ancestors” form of present triumphalism, it doesn’t acknowledge that even today, in many places around the world, water isn’t uniformly safe. Yet people in these places don’t sup only alcohol—they’re just more careful about the water they drink. as they were 500 years ago.
As to the question of drinking vast amounts of beer, even small or low-alcohol beer? Martyn Cornell, in one of his cleverest debunkings, dug into the records about grain production to demonstrate that, based on the amount of barley they grew, they weren’t drinking anywhere near as much as many claim. History can have the excitement of a murder mystery, if you’re willing to wade through dry production tables. We’re really going to miss your keen mind, Martyn.
9.
Josef Groll (or Catholic monks) smuggled lager yeast into Bohemia to make the first pilsner at Urquell.
By the time I’d encountered this nugget, I didn’t really understand it. Groll was a Bavarian brewer, hired to make lager in Pilsen by the local burghers. Why would he need to smuggle yeast into the brewery? Who would have tried to stop him, or cared? In other versions of this story, the smugglers are monks, which adds romance to this myth, if clarifying nothing. (To add further evidence against the case, Evan Rail points out that Bohemia was already well on the way to becoming a lager region by the time Groll made the first pilsner in 1842, and a number of breweries had lager yeast.) It’s part of an old stew of romance blended with serious ignorance about the brewing process. Another of this ilk passed around until the 1990s was that bock beer was the dark, sludgy stuff that came from the bottom of vats. (What?) These kinds of myths lose their power to amaze when people know how beer is made.
8.
Ben Franklin said, “God made beer because he loves us and wants us to be happy.”
The internet has dented the popularity of this romantic fact, which feels correct in our bones—I mean, Ben was a famous lush, how could this not be right? And indeed, he did praise alcohol in a sentence written in a 1779 letter, but it wasn’t about beer: “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
7.
Brewing was discovered when people realized water-soaked barley would turn into “gruel beer” through spontaneous fermentation.
You’ll find this romantic fact peddled in the first edition of The Beer Bible, before archaeologist Merryn Dineley straightened me out. In my defense, this was a scholarly claim of long standing, one built around a dim understanding of the brewing process and the logic of technological evolution. In her own groundbreaking work, Merryn proved it was total hogwash. To get beer, you need malted barley. This actually makes the history more remarkable than the romantic fact, because it means brewers as long as 10,000 years ago knew how to malt.
6.
These hops are the noblest of all.
If you’re getting a little long in the tooth like I am, you’ll remember that there was quite a focus on “noble” hops thirty to forty years ago. A certain elite group—Saaz, Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Tettnanger, and Spalt—were elevated above the commoner varieties and designated the nobles of the hop kingdom. If you trace many of the romantic facts back to their source, you find a marketer, and so it was with “noble” hops. And, because the term didn’t apply to anything, other types tried to elbow their way onto the list.
A curiosity to the belief in the innate nobility of certain hops is this scientific addition: many decades ago, researchers noticed that the noble hops had low levels of cohumulone, one of the five alpha acid constituents in hops. This added a gloss of scientific justification, and it picked up steam, causing brewers and breeders to pursue low-cohumulone varieties. At least until IPAs came along and an entirely different category of hops became popular. People still nod to “noble-type” hops, but now it tends to mean old-school European lager hops that taste great in pilsners.
5.
Anchor Liberty Ale was the first American IPA (this myth sometimes also touts Liberty as the first all Cascade-hop beer).
The argument goes like this. “Liberty Ale is an IPA-ish ale first brewed in 1975. It uses only Cascade hops, the first modern American cultivar, released in 1972. Maybe it’s not an IPA by modern American standards, but at the time it was a revolutionary beer.” The problem is that the beer Anchor released in 1975 and the Liberty Ale we know today were not the same beer. The 1975 version was something like a porter, and Anchor owner Fritz Maytag hated it. During the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Anchor was making its annual Christmas beer, and in 1983 made a version like modern Liberty Ale. “And we suddenly thought, ‘Aha! That’s it!” Maytag said, recounting the history. “That’s Liberty Ale! We’ll re-do Liberty Ale. So today’s Liberty Ale is exactly the brew we made for Christmas 1983.” By the time the current version arrived on the scene, the first wave of craft breweries making heavy use of Cascade hops had already arrived, and at least two made beers that more closely resembled modern American IPAs.
4.
Irish red ale dates to [select one: the 14th century, 1702, 1710, 1733, etc].
This romantic fact has received some recent corrections, but it is still fairly intact. The Wikipedia entry, for example, begins with the usual blarney: “The true origins of Irish Red Ale are unknown. It is said that ale has been brewed in Kilkenny city, at St. Francis Abbey, since the 14th century.” Interestingly, like any living text, the kernel of truth is sprinkled in a few paragraphs down before transitioning back into nonsense (“Sullivan's claims it can trace it's lineage to a brewery on James's Street in 1702, which would make it the oldest branded red ale”). The real truth is more prosaic: it was invented by a marketing team about fifty years ago to cast the patina of age and respectability on their product. (For much, much more go here, here, and here. Fascinating stuff.)
3.
Porter was invented as a standalone style to replace the complex “three threads” of blended beer.
This is one of the best romantic facts because it’s so old—now more than 200 years. According to the legend, the blend contained thirds of ale, beer, and twopenny (that is, a low-hop ale, a highly-hopped ale, and a strong pale ale). Porter was engineered to replicate this blend in a single beer, originally called “entire-butt,” butt being the word for a large cask. All of this came from a writer who, like the folks who believed yeast needed to be smuggled into Bohemia, didn’t understand brewing: John Feltham, writing in 1802. It was a mash-up of misunderstanding, but it was the official story of one of the world’s best-selling, international styles, basically until Martyn Cornell found the source (oh, him again).The actual story of porter is far more interesting, and spans centuries.
2.
India Pale Ales were originally invented by a man named George Hodgson who realized that if he put a bunch of hops and alcohol in a beer, it would survive the trip to India, unlike other beers of the time.
This nearly wins our prize because it is so wrong and yet so detailed, and also a stellar example of the single-origin stories that used to infect beer histories. It’s also an example of how presentism can blind us to the ways of the past. Since the first efforts to untangle this romantic tale began around twenty years ago (Cornell, yet again rears his head), we have added many pieces to the fuller story, which I will condense as much as possible.
Pale ales had been around for a century before IPAs came along—a style with no single author. Now we think of English beers as weak, but that’s an inheritance of the World Wars. Some of those pale ales were already quite strong—and hoppy to, boot. In the 1820s, when beers called IPA were starting to emerge, the most popular beer style in the world was porter, and it also a big, boozy beer that was already being sent in large quantities to the colonies, including India. So strong and hoppy pale ales already existed and there was an active trade sending beer of different styles (successfully!) to India.
There is some truth to the business about hops helping beers survive the long journey. They do in fact perform an anti-microbial function in beer—but brewers understood that by 1760 at the latest, so they were already heavily-hopping the beers they sent to India. Hodgson wasn’t the first brewer to send IPA to India, but for a brief time he was the biggest name doing so—but many other breweries, particularly those in Burton, famous for its pale ales, soon supplanted the London brewer. The thing that really made this style succeed was when breweries started selling it in Britain as “pale ale as prepared for the Indian market” or similar descriptions. Locals thrilled by anything smacking of the Indian provenance fell in love with this romantic tale, and the rest is history.
1.
Brewers didn’t know yeast existed until Louis Pasteur’s microbiological work in the 1860s.
I briefly discussed this myth in my first post about romantic facts, but let’s go deeper. It tops our list because it isn’t debunked and forgotten, because it’s not just wrong but easily disproven, and because it says so much more about the people repeating it than it does about our ancestors.
A web search will take you to any number of versions of this myth, so let’s start with a description on the American Homebrew Association website: “[Until scientists’] discovery of yeast’s connection to fermentation in the 19th century (prior to that, many believed fermentation to be a magical process sometimes referred to as Godisgood), nobody knew microorganisms existed.” Here’s another from the Guardian: “Before we understood the fungal nature of yeast, traditions and superstitions had to be relied upon.”
It’s true that brewers didn’t know the precise microbiological nature of yeast, but they had a very good sense of what it was and how it worked. As I mentioned earlier, in medieval Germany, there was even a trade of professional yeast-wranglers. Another example: Reinheitsgebot has confused modern readers because it doesn’t list yeast, but this wasn’t an oversight. In 1516, they understood it to be an agent rather than an ingredient. You put it in to ferment the beer, and it precipitated out. Finally, we have written accounts from brewers throughout history, and Lars Marius Garshol did some excellent work documenting them.
This romantic fact again flatters our modern minds, so sophisticated are we to know about microbiology. But it also captures a not-entirely-misplaced sense of wonder that the ancients could make beer with so little technical knowledge. Long before they could make giant metal vats, people brewed. Millennia before they invented thermometers or hydrometers or steam engines or glycol chillers, they brewed. One of the things you find if you research old brewing techniques is not an amusingly crude world, but a clever one. Make the same beverage repeatedly over the course of decades, and you’re going to learn how to make it with sophistication. It’s true that understanding microbiology helped brewers get control of their fermentation in ways they couldn’t in earlier centuries. But what’s so cool is that even without the knowledge, they figured out how to make wonderful beer.
But wait, there’s more!
BONUS
Until brewers made the first hazy IPAs, American IPAs were bitter and not very aromatic.
This is a sentiment floating in the ether and slowly gathering the corporeality that one day may establish it as a bona fide romantic fact. The story goes something like this: American IPA was characterized by heavy bitterness, so much so that it led to a war over who could brew the bitterest versions. Then in the middle-aughts, New England breweries developed a new kind of IPA that focused on hop aroma and flavor, deemphasizing bitterness. This acted as a corrective, ending the focus on bitterness.
In fact, brewers across the country were all headed in this direction. The first of the new-wave hops came out in the late aughts and early teens, and breweries everywhere were figuring out how to coax maximum flavors and aromas from them. In 2015, I went on a 26-city book tour around the U.S., and wherever I went, I found the new breed of juicy IPA. Hazies were a distinctive, local version of this trend, but they had lots of company.