The Book of Lists: 7) Technological Innovation
This is the seventh installment of my “Book of Lists” posts. I take inspirations from a series of apparently wildly popular books first published in 1977 that functioned as pre-internet topic-surfing. People love lists (pre- or post-internet) and it is exactly the kind of material blogging was invented to showcase. Which got me thinking. I can do lists. Hell, I can do definitive lists. (Previous entries: one, two, three, four, five, and six.)
Brewing is a simple enough art: make a tea of (sometimes malted) grain and ferment. It goes back ten thousand years or more, and this general prescription has never fundamentally changed. But in those millennia, brewers have been constantly refining the process, adding heated stones, pouring wort over pipes with cool water to cool it, or genetically modifying yeast so it tastes like hops.
Some of the (dubious) innovations have fallen along the wayside, while other (ingenious) ones have become so entrenched it’s impossible to imagine making beer without them. But which were the most important? In today’s edition of Book of Lists, Beervana Amalgamated Sentences’ team of Harvard PhDs present the greatest technological innovations of the past 10,000 years. They have been busily making beer with stones and without, attempting to assess the temperature of a mash with their elbows, and brewing with bark, eggs, beans, and chimney soot all in an effort to discover which interventions most impacted the trajectory of brewing. Herewith, we present their definitive findings. (Editor’s note: this is a narrative fancy; there are no researchers, and if there were, Beervana Amalgamated Sentences could only afford the ones from Acme Correspondence College.)
The innovations I’ve mentioned are the ones that fundamentally changed the way beer was made. They don’t all still exist, but that’s only because the technologies improved—the innovation itself still exists. (We use electricity today, not steam, but we use power in our breweries.) And one note as you glance at the list: you will see that it’s dominated by improvements not in making beer, but keeping it from souring. Fully half the innovations are related to preventing spoilage, which has always been a central goal in commercial brewing.
10.
Steam Power (circa 1785 in breweries). Before the Industrial Revolution, breweries had to move water, grain, and barrels around with human- or horsepower alone. Brewers originally adopted steam power as a cost-saving measure, but soon realized that it also allowed them to produce far greater quantities of beer annually. For the first time, breweries were no longer limited to the beer they could sell locally. Industrial-scale breweries churned out porter that traveled around the world, creating an international market. The size of breweries skyrocketed, as did the giants’ impact on a local market. All that shipping meant that for the first time styles traveled outside their home region to become rooted elsewhere.
9.
Wooden Casks (circa ?). The history of the cask is a bit murky—at least based on a fairly quick survey of available sources. The confounding issue is what they put in the barrels. Barrels made for wine go back well before the common era, but it’s not so obvious when beer went into them. In any case, it was an important innovation, because it allowed the beer to not only mature, but carbonate. Traditional beer is often served very young, when it is still fizzing with fermentation. Fully-fermented beer can be kept still to mature, or bunged to produce carbonation. In both cases, the barrel creates a mechanism for producing mature, fizzy beer. Barrels were also important in commercializing beer because it could be shipped, stored, and served in volume.
8.
Attemperation (circa 1800). Throughout brewing history, the summer heat was deadly to cooling and fermenting beer. In Britain, breweries learned that they could “attemperate” (lower the temperature of) wort with cool water. They ran hot wort through small pipes embedded inside larger pipes filled with cold water to bring it down to fermentation temperature in a matter of minutes and to pitch (or add) yeast quickly after boiling. By cooling the wort more quickly, it gave airborne yeasts and bacteria less opportunity to infect the beer—and made year-round brewing a safe prospect.
7.
Bottles (early 1600s). Bottling was a rare technology that itself required innovation to take root. Initially introduced in the late 1500s in England, hand-blown bottles couldn’t reliably handle the carbonation that inevitably built up inside (even if brewers didn’t prime the bottles to activate the yeast, the beer was often infected with wild yeast that kept fermenting). By the early-to-mid 17th century, they were able to make sturdier bottles, and we have accounts of their purchase from commercial breweries. The whole packaging technology was a slow burn, though, remaining a fairly marginal portion of the beer market for the next couple centuries or so. A luxury product, bottled beer was mainly used in export; the mass of drinkers continued to go down to the tavern for their beer. Eventually, of course, bottles (and their successor, cans) would come to displace draft beer almost everywhere, radically changing the way we consumed beer.
6.
Lager Beer (around 1400, maybe?). If bottles (#7) were a slow burn, lager beer was a glacially slow one. Sometime around 1400, Franconian and Bavarian (and possibly Bohemian) brewers began doing something very strange, at least as far as the rest of the world was concerned. They dug cellars out of the hillsides and rolled their barrels into their cool interior. Brewers were already well aware of the ravages of summer’s warmth on their beer. Many places had prohibitions on brewing in the summer, and even an unseasonable warm snap could cause a barrel of beer to sour. Storing beer in a place that stayed cool year-round was a clever innovation, but it produced an even more important innovation, if only by accident. Because brewers preserved and repitched yeast from the best batches of beer, they eventually began inadvertently selecting for cold-tolerant strains. The rest is history. Now 90%+ of the beer brewed in the world is a lager.
5.
Refrigeration (circa 1870). Heat has always been beer’s biggest foe. Attemperation was great in the brewhouse, but it didn’t help in the cellar or during storage. With the introduction of refrigeration, breweries got yet more control over heat, no longer having to rely exclusively on chill weather, cellars, and blocks of ice inside the brewhouse. It was equally important for storing finished beer, preserving its brewery-fresh quality longer and retarding oxidation. Refrigeration also made mass production more viable, because beer could be kept relatively fresh and unspoiled for months.
4.
Hydrometer (circa 1780). The hydrometer allowed a brewer to determine the amount of dissolved sugar in solution, in both wort and finished beer. As a tool, it gave breweries a way of gauging their efficiency and improving their techniques, creating a ripple effect throughout the brewery. But it also changed the way breweries made beer. For example, the hydrometer revealed to London breweries how poor brown malt was in the porter-making process and led to the use of pale malts in the grist to improve mashing and fermentation. It is hard to imagine making a beer today without knowing its gravities.
3.
Hops (circa “it’s complicated”). An argument could be made that no innovation in the history of beer more transformed the beverage or the market for beer than hops. To palates first encountering them, they taste weird—that’s still true today—and they had to overcome the flavor barrier. But as strange as hops taste to the untested palate, they are superior to spoiled beer, which is what they prevented. As to the timing, we know a monk writing in 822 documented their use, but they didn’t really get a lot of play for the next three hundred years. (Maybe the weird taste.) Then commerce intervened.
Sometime around the late 12th century, commercial breweries in Bremen started making their beer with hops. Bremen was a Hanseatic League city, so that beer went out across northern Europe, to Holland, the Baltic countries, and Scandinavia. And lo, once it arrived in those cities, it stayed fresh longer than the local product. Hamburg got in on the action, and pretty soon local breweries elsewhere were complaining about the dominance of this imported stuff. So naturally, they had to start making beer with hops as well. Except for some local, traditional styles, all beer in the world is now made with hops.
2.
Thermometer (circa 1760 in breweries). Before the thermometer, breweries had no way of consistently reaching the same mash temperature batch after batch and could only gauge liquor temperatures with their bare hands or by assessing the amount of steam. The difference in a few degrees was the difference between a well-made beer and a failure. (Decoction mashing, which our scientists considered including on this list, was an ingenious method of making excellent beer without a thermometer.)
1.
Pasteur/pure yeast (1857 and 1883). Although brewers had for centuries understood the mechanism of yeast, prior to Pasteur’s work they didn’t understand why beer went sour. Not only did Pasteur clarify how beer was fermented, he pointed out why lagers typically had fewer problems with spoilage (refrigeration and pasteurization were technologies that harnessed Pasteur’s insights). The effect Pasteur had on brewing was stark and immediate. Lagers, a small minority of all beer prior to his publication, would come to dominate the global market within a few decades.
Extending Pasteur’s microbiological work, in 1883, working at Carlsberg, Emil Christian Hansen isolated the first pure strain of yeast. It may be hard to appreciate how revolutionary this innovation was because using pure strains has become an almost universal practice. Prior to Hansen’s work, yeasts contained multiple strains along with other microorganisms. While brewers were clever enough to figure out how to use them to make good beer, they were finicky and would often cause problems. Breweries today still get infections from outside sources, but they don’t have to worry about them inside their yeast.
Post Script. Our researchers (sometimes known as the voices in my head) also debated whether malting should be included on the list. It was the most important innovation in making barley beer because barley beer can’t be made without it. But for that reason, it seemed more like a precursor technology to brewing than a brewing technology. You may debate this decision in comments.