Boulder, Colorado’s Upslope Brewing has released Oktoberfest Lager, in time for fest season.
This brand new limited release, is described by the brewery as a “modern, malt-forward brew,” featuring Leopold Bros Floor-Malted Pilsner.
A sweet, fresh-baked bread nose is followed by light herbaceous hop character and a smooth finish.
In addition to the new beer, the brewery is hosting an Octoberfest at their Flatiron location. The event features the Oktoberfest beer, brats, a stein-hoisting contest and more.
We missed Orpheus Brewing’s Year Six celebration. The pandemic took care of that.
For a few anniversaries before this virus mess, I sat down with brewery founder Jason Pellet and we chatted about the previous year of running a brewery, beer trends, greek mythology, an music. We both play instruments so it’s easy to geek out, especially when it comes to classical music.
Maybe this year we can sit down again to do a little day drinking and do it all again. In the meantime, Orpheus Brewing celebrates their 7th year this weekend. In true Orpheus fashion they are releasing more than a handful of beers. Crazy long names in tact.
Here is the full list of release we got Orpheus to divulge. Cliff notes version – look out for a barrel-aged dopplebock, barrel-aged barleywine, a few wild ales, plus some barrel-aged imperial stouts. Fall is coming. It’s time to put the seltzers down.
An 8-bottle set is available now to purchase on Oznr. We are assuming individual bottles will be available day-of.
That said – here’s the release lineup. It’s big… Each link opens in a new window.
Zephyr Punch – Native Wild Ale. 75% spontaneous beer, & 25% native culture saison. A blend with Brick Store Pub.
While the Atlanta Braves head into fall trying to stay on top of the NL East, there’s something else going on at the Braves Stadium worth checking out.
Beers at sunset.
In 2017, the Atlanta Braves left Turner Field just south of downtown Atlanta and headed north to Cobb County. Regardless of where you land on that move, Truist Park and surrounding Battery Atlanta is new fun-land of restaurants, shops and apartments, plus a full distillery and a brewery- specifically Terrapin Beer Company. If beers, baseball and sunsets is something you crave, this is a unique ballpark experience you need to scratch off your list.
There are fewer ballpark breweries than you have fingers on one hand. Terrapin isn’t resting on that fact alone, and neither is Truist Park. So when the team is on the road, you can wander the home of the Atlanta Braves in a way you couldn’t any other time.
[See image gallery at beerstreetjournal.com] Terrapin’s co-founder “Spike” Buckowski randomly calls me sometimes to talk chat beer industry stuff, but on this particular day he wants us to come take the first look at a new Terrapin/Atlanta Braves fan experience that will be held on non-game days.
So just before magic hour, we meet Spike at the Terrapin’s taproom the park. We have a couple of pre-tour beers and head out on this “Twilight Tour.” Here’s the gist if you don’t have it yet – the tour is a behind the scenes look at the stadium, with beers, as the sun sets.
It may be the hottest part of summer in Atlanta right now, but 3 or 4 Terrapin Los Bravos Lagers really help take your mind off of it. It’s summer in the south after all.
Naturally the whole thing kicks off with a look inside Terrapin’s ballpark brewhouse. Next you head to the top of right field for a birds-eye view of the field as the evening irrigation kicks on. Oddly- even though there’s no game you still somehow smell hotdogs and popcorn. A short walk around to home plate side is a stop in the press box. We crack the tab on another beer and watch the sunset from here.
This next destination we didn’t expect. A stroll onto the the actual field. Today there’s no threatening security guard, or streaking required to do it. We walked freely onto the warning track and right up to first base, beer in hand. If you’re so inclined, you can step down into the Braves dugout. There’s always a new place to drink a beer and MLB dugout is a new one for us.
There is a piece of baseball history that makes the tour alone worth it – Hank Aaron’s actual 715th home run bat, touched by the god himself . Sadly we lost “Hammerin’ Hank” this year. The bat is currently on loan to the ballpark.
Now swanky club suites might not be your thing, but you still get to see where the high rollers hang out. Some suite holders maintain personal wine cellars for game-day consumption. There was a lot of Napa Valley locked up there.
The whole tour runs about two hours, and honestly it’s pretty damn cool. It’s a fun behind the scenes tour of the park, and you get to drink beer while you’re doing it. The Twilight Tour is a new way to connect the team and the brewery, or simply baseball itself as the sun sets over the city. It’s more than just the 82 at home.
It’s another way to be a part of it all. Win or lose.
Boulder, Colo.— With increasingly trendy fermented foods such as kimchi, sourdough, and kombucha growing more popular than ever before, The Fermentation Kitchen: Recipes for the Craft Beer Lover’s Pantry, the latest release from Brewers Publications®, is essential reading for the home cook, whether a foodie, craft beer enthusiast, or fermentation fan.
The Fermentation Kitchen includes recipes for breadmaking, pickling, cheesemaking, methods for making vinegar and kombucha, and how-to steps for making charcuterie.
“It’s not a coincidence that fermented foods and beverages are having a moment right now,” author Gabe Toth said. “The DIY-craze spurred from COVID-19 lockdowns created a fermentation boom that’s still going strong. The Fermentation Kitchen is part how-to guide, part cookbook, and part reference manual on how fermented foods work and what levers you can pull to tweak your recipe. With the details in my book, readers will learn how to use craft beer to ferment vegetables, kombucha, bread, sausage, vinegar, condiments, and more.”
Author Gabe Toth is a brewer, distiller, and journalist who spent 15 years studying and experimenting with fermented and live-culture foods. After a decade-long newspaper career, he moved into the craft beer world in 2010 at Santa Fe Brewing Company, subsequently moving between brewing and distilling and earning medals from Great American Beer Festival®, World Beer Cup®, the American Distilling Institute, and the American Craft Spirits Association. Today, he oversees operations at The Family Jones production distillery in Denver.
The Fermentation Kitchen is on sale now at BrewersPublications.com and available for preorder at book retailers. View the table of contents for a preview of the recipes here. From August 31 through September 7, Brewers Association and American Homebrewers Association members receive an exclusive 25% off the retail price of $19.95 and all BrewersPublications.com orders receive free standard shipping with the purchase of The Fermentation Kitchen.
Brewers Publications supports the mission of the Brewers Association by publishing books of enduring value for amateur and professional brewers, as well as titles that promote understanding and appreciation of American craft beer. With more than 60 titles to choose from, Brewers Publications is the leading publisher of contemporary and relevant brewing literature for today’s craft brewers, homebrewers, and beer enthusiasts.
Those interested in reviewing The Fermentation Kitchen: Recipes for the Craft Beer Lover’s Pantry may request a review copy here. To schedule an interview with the author, please contact Erin Key, Backbone Media. For more information, please visit the Brewers Publications website.
Rehydrate yeast in GoFerm and about 350 mL water at 100°F (38°C) and let sit for 15 minutes. Mix the honey with water using a wine whip and add O2 with a sintered stone for 60 seconds.
Atemper the yeast and GoFerm solution with about 50 mL of must every 5 minutes until it is within 10°F (6°C) of desired pitch temperature. In the first 24 hours, add another 60 seconds of O₂ and ⅓ of the Fermaid K. On day 3, add ⅓ of Fermaid K, and then add the remaining ⅓ on day 5. Be sure to vigorously wine whip twice a day in first 72 hours to degas. After the third day, I try to not form a convex cone so as to not draw O₂ into the must, but I do continue to stir for at least 7 days.
Non-alcoholic craft beer brewing pioneer Two Roots Brewing Co.™ announced today its continued distribution expansion with products now sold to grocery stores, liquor stores, bars, and restaurants …
At least two breweries – New York’s First Line Brewing and Georgia/Virginia’s New Realm Brewing have left tables set and poured beers for the 13 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan during a terrorist attack this week.
On Friday, First Line Brewing posted to their Facebook Page a reserved table with 13 beers for those that will never return. The brewery even re-poured the beers throughout the night to make sure they were fresh and cold, as if they were about to sit down.
“13 glasses will sit un touched at this reserved table all night for the 13 American troops who were killed in Afghanistan on August 26th. These brave courageous individuals paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country,” the post from First Line Brewing says. Additionally, First Line intends to make a donation or donations on behalf of the 13 service members.
This table will be reserved all night for the 13 military heroes we lost at the airport in Kabul, along with a round of beer for each of them.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families. In humble gratitude, we honor the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country, New Realm said in an Instagram post. The brewery set full dinner places in their Atlanta barrel room.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families. In humble gratitude, we honor the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country,” New Realm writes, echoing First Line Brewing’s sentiment – ” God bless their families and loved ones. God bless the United States of America.”
The observance is also known as the “Missing Man Table,” a memorial that is set up during US Armed Forces official dining functions. The table is a focal remembrance of those that have fallen, or missing in action. Many restaurants across the U.S., especially by those owned by veterans, maintain such a table year-round.
The names of the 13 killed in the attack:
Maxton Soviak, 22, Navy – Berlin Heights, Ohio
Kareem Nikoui, 20, Marines – Norco, California
David Lee Espinoza, 20, Marines – Laredo, Texas
Rylee McCollum, 20, Marines – Bondurant, Wyoming
Jared Schmitz, 20, Marines – St. Charless County, Missouri
Hunter Lopez, 22, Marines – Indio, California
Daegan W. Page, 23, Marines – Omaha, Nebraska
Ryan Knauss, 23, Army – Knoxville, Tennessee
Darin Taylor Hoover Jr., 31, Marines – Midvale, Utah
Many people have heard the origin of the term “honeymoon” being connected to mead. Although the historical accuracy is questionable, the story was alluring enough to be the impetus for my wife and me to create a mead to serve at our son’s wedding.
Kathy being a beekeeper and me a home meadmaker, we decided to put our hobbies together as a family gift to the newly wedded couple and guests at the wedding.
Beekeeping & Honey
Making a mead from a home hive requires flexibility. After all, the flavor of the honey is determined by the nectar the bees collect, which for most backyard beekeepers is out of your control. Available nectar varies significantly depending on the available blooms and specific time of year, so you don’t typically start out with a final product in mind as much as craft your mead depending on what you get. A typical honey flow in the Northeast, for example, runs from spring to the beginning of July.
I like to watch what blooms the bees are gathering on and the pollen color they are bringing into the hive. This gives me a sense of possible sources the bees are collecting nectar from. Pollen is used as a protein source to feed their brood (bee babies), while nectar is used as an energy source and to create honey. The bees collect nectar by sucking it up thru a straw-like tongue called the proboscis and storing it in a separate stomach called a nectar sac. Once filled, they return to the hive and begin to pass the nectar from bee to bee through regurgitation (yes, you read that right). As it’s passed from bee to bee, the nectar loses moisture content until it’s approximately 20% water. The reduced moisture nectar is then placed in a cell and fanned by the bees using their wings to reduce the moisture content below 18%. At this point, it’s now honey! At this point, it’s capped with beeswax the bees secrete from under their abdomen and is ready for various uses in the hive. This low moisture content and natural anti-bacterial properties of honey keep it preserved for extraordinarily long periods of time.
When the nectar flow ends, beekeepers harvest surplus honey from their hives and prepare to help their colonies survive the winter. A critical decision to make is when and how much honey to take. I know beekeepers who only remove a couple of capped honey frames at a time, spin it, and then return the drawn combs (empty honeycomb) back to the bees. Others like to wait and harvest all at once. The honey used for this mead was harvested all at once in the middle of July, which is considered a spring season honey. Spring honey is generally lighter in color and more delicate in flavor than Fall honey in our area.
Dialing in a Mead Recipe
Tasting our honey has been a surprising adventure for us throughout Kathy’s beekeeping. The contrast from year to year, even as the hives remain in the same area and flora and fauna remain relatively unchanged, is striking. The Spring honey we harvested for the wedding mead had primary flavors of cotton candy and vanilla with secondary notes of lemon and candied orange zest built into the finish and into the aftertaste. The bouquet was wonderfully expressive and flavor delicate yet still complex when you paid attention to flavor nuances. Kathy and I tend to bounce adjectives off each other when we first taste our honey, trying to refine and focus on what exactly we’re perceiving. This is an essential step in the meadmaking process and factors into my recipe considerations when trying to envision what the final product will be like.
The best man assists in bottling the wedding mead.
Kathy and I were enamored with the flavor of the honey we harvested from her hives, so I wanted to create a mead that would first and foremost showcase the honey. I decided against a melomel or the use of fruit as I felt that would overshadow the honey flavor. I also knew I wanted something on the sweet side and decided to make the mead at the upper end of standard strength (14% ABV) to gain balance and complexity from the various alcohols. While a traditional-style mead would have been excellent for this honey, I decided to add black peppercorns for some spicy counterbalance to the sweetness and added complexity. I tend to be a fan of Zinfandel wines, and one of my favorite commercial meads is “Murder of Crows” by Melovino Meadery, a wonderful blackberry and black pepper mead. Lastly, I chose to use Lavlin RC 212 to accentuate the mead’s pepper character and provide the target ABV I was shooting for.
I chose 66F for the fermentation temperature. However, I know some excellent mead makers who like to push the fermentation temperature of this yeast strain much higher. After crashing, stabilizing, adding the pepper, and then clarifying, I felt the finish on the mead was still a bit flabby even with the alcohol, pepper, and phenols, so I adjusted with tartaric acid which brought everything into balance and really made the honey character pop. One of the things I love most about mead is the ability to adjust the flavor in various ways, including adding acid or tannin, backsweetening, or blending. I enjoy the culinary-like aspects of mead making, tasting, and adjusting post-fermentation in real time for an optimal final product.
We bottled the mead in 375 ml clear Renana style bottles and created labels for both the front and back of the bottle with the “internet version” of the origin of the term Honeymoon to play up the wedding significance. Bottles were chilled and then placed on tables throughout the wedding. It was an excellent family connection and a fun activity for Kathy and me in preparation for the wedding. The process of harvesting the honey and making the mead, tasting and adjusting, and designing the final packaging together to serve to family and friends at a child’s wedding is an experience not soon forgotten.
About the Authors
Kathy has been keeping bees for several years, is currently pursuing Cornell University’s Master Beekeeper certification, and has been a science educator for over twenty years. Andrew sits on the Homegoverning Committee of the American Mead Makers Association, is a BJCP Grandmaster II w/mead certification, and is an Advanced Cicerone.
The mid 1890s were a tense time for New York brewers. The state legislature spent close to two years debating a “Pure Beer” bill which would have, in the name of consumer health, restricted the brewing of “standard” beer to just four ingredients: “pure barley malt, pure hops, or pure extract of hops, pure yeast, and pure water…and nothing else of any kind, name or nature whatever.” That’s right, five pures for four ingredients.
If a brewer used anything else under this law, their beer would have been legally designated as “inferior,” and they would have had to place a large sign with the word “inferior” on it in a conspicuous place within their brewery. They also would have had to stamp the word “inferior” on the label of every cask, keg, barrel, and bottle of beer that they sold, plus a listing of every extraneous ingredient used. Every retailer and wholesaler likewise would have needed to post a sign in their place of business, indicating whether they sold “standard” or “inferior” beer. And that was all on top of the inspections—this law would have required the State Board of Health to test samples of every brewery’s beer every three months to ensure compliance.
The bill was designed to filter out “adulteration” in the brewing industry: the controversial practice of brewing with basically any ingredients besides those typical ones listed above. In common discourse, adulteration ranged from outlandish ideas about crooked brewers throwing poisons and acids into their beer to the far more common practice of brewing with adjuncts like corn, rice, or glucose. By the time this Pure Beer bill came around, many brewers—including those in New York—were doing the latter.
Adulteration became a sticky topic in American beer throughout the late 19th century, and was one of many ways beer crossed paths with the wider public health debates of the era. The argument over what can and should go into beer, and whether any of it was dangerous, reflected a complex mixture of Americans’ growing concerns over the food they ate, mounting temperance propaganda, and the self-serving rhetoric of brewers themselves.
To tell that story, we need to go back a couple decades. The concept of adulteration wasn’t new even then, but it took novel form from the 1850s onwards, as American beer began its shift toward mass-produced adjunct Lagers, and as American food also gravitated toward mass production. And it started at the most fundamental level, with Americans having to decide what belonged in beer in the first place.
ALUM AND STRYCHNINE AND CHALK, OH MY!
“Adulteration generally at the time did not mean a state of, you know, having it on with someone else’s spouse,” says Maureen Ogle, historian and author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. “What it meant was you were adding something to a product that shouldn’t be there, and the assumption was that there was a nefarious reason for doing it.” Rather than the proverbial hair in one’s soup, this was more like a baker cutting their flour with sawdust to make more money.
But to break the rules is to first know the rules; or, in this case, establish the rules. As historian and former journalist Lee Graves tells me, brewing in colonial North America and the early United States didn’t stick to a particularly rigid formula. Nearly anything would do—backcountry homebrewers, usually women, used molasses, corn and corn stalks, spruce, pumpkins, and even peapods to make beer. Enslaved brewers also included ingredients like persimmons. The country’s few commercial brewers were of course far more traditional in their approach—emulating English styles and traditions in urban centers like Albany, Philadelphia, and occasionally elsewhere—but the range of ingredients in brewing was a more open field in early 1800s America than it would be later in the century. And Germans had a lot to do with that shift.
“But once the Germans came into America, it was noted quite distinctly that … this Bavarian Lager was all malt,” explains Graves. “It was a very interesting revelation. Here was a beer that was all malt. It didn’t have all these other things.”
As American commercial brewing picked up in the 1850s, with German Lager brewers claiming an ever bigger slice of the pie, those four classic ingredients listed in the Reinheitsgebot (though it wasn’t called that until 1919!) and German beer purity laws, in New York’s later Pure Beer bill, and in most basic overviews of beer to this day, became the default acceptable ingredients in beer. Sometimes the only acceptable ingredients in beer.
‘Adulteration generally at the time did not mean a state of, you know, having it on with someone else’s spouse. What it meant was you were adding something to a product that shouldn’t be there, and the assumption was that there was a nefarious reason for doing it.’
— Maureen Ogle, historian and author of “Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer”
Stateside German brewers themselves established that narrative during the 1800s. While they never outright committed themselves to German-style purity laws, they stressed that beer made their way was healthier, wholesome, nutritious, and overall superior to beer made any other way. The United States Brewers Association (known today as the Beer Institute) eventually became a champion of this narrative, publishing propagandistic surveys claiming brewery workers were healthier than average people despite drinking “an amount of Lager that would frighten ordinary people.” They also did things like send delegations of observers to Bavaria so they could report on how sober, orderly, and healthy a Lager-drinking society tended to be. This argument stemmed from both Germans’ ethnocultural beliefs and plain old salesmanship, but it was also a response to the omnipresent onslaught of anti-alcohol temperance reformers, who found adulteration to be one of their favorite drums to beat.
Reformers scoured commercial publications for information about the brewing process, then twisted what they found to portray beer as a “medley of poisons” that addicted, ensnared, and ultimately harmed hapless drinkers. Villainous brewers, the propaganda claimed, were secretly lacing their beer with chalk, sulfuric acid, alum, strychnine, opium, and many more dangerous adulterants, while “fogy chemists and physiologists” ran interference for the brewer cabal by convincing the public it was okay.
To be clear, many of the substances named had actually been used by brewers at some point, and in some way, like isinglass—a gelatin-like substance made from the swim bladders of fish, used as a fining agent to clarify the beer. But these lists were cobbled together from multiple cultures, techniques, and styles of beer. Temperance rhetoric omitted all such context to instead suggest that every brewer was recklessly tossing every manner of substance into every barrel of beer. This, naturally, led to some public confusion, and likewise led the German-American brewing community to double down on their counternarrative of wholesome and nutritious beer. Their tireless insistence, associated with purist Bavarian approaches to Lager brewing, and frankly the tastiness of early American Lagers, helped etch a strong impression into American minds about which ingredients made good beer good. This helped brewers in the near-term, but when American beer continued to evolve, the impression stuck.
WHAT’S IN YOUR GULLET?
After the Civil War came a second industrial revolution in the United States that greatly altered the way Americans ate.
As more food production moved into factories and urbanization lengthened the distance from farm to table, the fear that weird, unknown, or even dangerous substances might be finding their way into Americans’ food pervaded the public psyche. And not without reason—many producers really were putting new things into food, or else manufacturing it in new ways, or else creating new foods entirely. Some of it was not at all okay, but some of it was, and the public struggled to sort out which was which. These fears eventually led not only to investigative works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the horrific conditions inside Chicago’s meatpacking industry, but also to regulations designed to improve them, like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. But both of those were still years away.
Reformers scoured commercial publications for information about the brewing process, then twisted what they found to portray beer as a ‘medley of poisons’ that addicted, ensnared, and ultimately harmed hapless drinkers. Villainous brewers, the propaganda claimed, were secretly lacing their beer with chalk, sulfuric acid, alum, strychnine, opium, and many more dangerous adulterants, while ‘fogy chemists and physiologists’ ran interference for the brewer cabal by convincing the public it was okay.
“Canned foods were very problematic in the 1880s and 1890s,” Ogle explains. “Technology was fairly crude … people were like, what is in this? Why is the can kind of bulging a little bit? Why does it look weird? Why does the food look weird when I open it?”
A wave of concerned government legislators and self-anointed consumer watchdogs investigated these new foods with mixed results on all fronts. Some of them cared so much about making headlines that they made totally bogus claims. Others, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “poison squad,” took up the task of investigating these foods. “They [the squad] had very strict diet recommendations,” says Graves, “and they also consumed different chemicals that were used as preservatives at the time … and some of them got pretty sick.” As anyone who’s tried to discuss vaccines recently can appreciate, debating food safety was a war of rhetoric more than it was a rational discussion of the science.
Beer got caught up in this mayhem as well. Brewers were industrializing their products and changing their ingredients as much as anyone, particularly with adjuncts. As Pilsners, iconically pale and clear versus other Lager styles of the era, became more popular, American brewers came to rely on adjuncts like corn and rice to achieve the body and taste that drinkers demanded.
But this led to an obvious question: If a brewer put rice and corn in their beer, were they adulterating it? Between the public’s growing skepticism of industrial products and decades of rhetorical jousting with temperance reformers, the idea that “adulteration” equaled “bad” was pretty cemented by the late 19th century.
But where did benevolent innovation end and adulteration begin? There were … competing arguments.
MERE PUFFERY
Pro-temperance groups especially loved playing in the gray areas of the adulteration debate. In 1881, the Business Men’s Moderation Society in New York hounded the state’s brewers to fill out a questionnaire disclosing what ingredients went into their beer. Several answered, copping to using things like corn, rice, and grape sugar while denying that they used more outrageous substances like potato starch or molasses.
This makes sense—the use of cereal adjuncts and refined equivalents like glucose had gained wide acceptance in the industry over the past decade, especially among brewers chasing those paler, clearer Lagers. Trade publications readily celebrated the technical and operational benefits of adjuncts. Sure, some small upstart breweries were caught using the more questionable adulterants, likely trying to make a quick buck or shortcut efficiencies, but bigger operations decried such practices. They had too much to lose from shenanigans like that. But where they distinguished, critics generalized.
As Ogle recounted in her book, the BMMS treated every disclosure like a confession. They also conducted tests on various New York beers until they reportedly found one containing glucose, and made hay with that. They squared off with brewers for more than a year. The New York Times readily published every volley of the exchange, and every headline placed the words “brewers” and “adulteration” beside each other in bold type.
In 1877, a Cincinnati brewer named George Weber responded to accusations that local brewers were adulterating beer by daring any member of the public to show that his beer contained rice, corn, glucose, grape sugar, or any other ‘poisonous drugs.’ Weber was so confident that his beer was pure that he offered up a $5,000 reward—over $100,000 today—to anyone who did so.
This was primarily a PR war, after all. Temperance reformers scored victories not by being right but by sowing doubt, and they knew it. Government agencies often played supporting roles—official investigations into beer quality sometimes accused brewers of using dangerous adulterants without providing any actual evidence that they’d done so. The pro-temperance machine quickly converted those reports into damning headlines.
Brewers countered with their own propaganda, like the boastful USBA surveys mentioned above. Brewery advertisements regularly touted the purity of their products and described the care put into making them. But there was a pitfall to this advertising approach: Brewers competed with each other, too, and couldn’t resist throwing elbows from time to time.
In 1877, a Cincinnati brewer named George Weber responded to accusations that local brewers were adulterating beer by daring any member of the public to show that his beer contained rice, corn, glucose, grape sugar, or any other “poisonous drugs.” Weber was so confident that his beer was pure that he offered up a $5,000 reward—over $100,000 today—to anyone who did so.
But that’s not all. Weber also heavily implied that Cincinnati’s other brewers couldn’t make the same claim. And they didn’t like that. Eight of Cincinnati’s largest brewers put out a joint statement accusing Weber of disparaging their good names and of betraying German-Americans everywhere by “playing into the hands of the Temperance fanatics.”
Weber retorted with an 1850s throwback: that nothing he could say played more into the hands of temperance advocates than a brewer who adulterated their beer. Then he dared his fellow brewers to make his same promise—that they only made pure beer with no adulterants. It was, of course, a trick, because Weber knew that not all of his competitors could truthfully make that guarantee. When his challenge shut them up, Weber smugly concluded that “we don’t propose that our own good name shall suffer for the sake of an adulterator, whether he be located in Cincinnati or elsewhere.” And again, newspapers relayed every blow of this little spat—they even dubbed it “the Beer War”—to a public already skeptical about adulteration.
Less confrontational rhetoric from the brewing industry included mock conversations with doctors about the supposed health benefits of pure beer, backhanded comments from beer barons about how either corn or rice (whichever cereal they didn’t personally use) led to substandard beer, and reassuring statements about the cleanliness of their breweries. The back and forth went on for years, then decades, against a backdrop of ongoing skepticism about the quality of American food.
So amidst debates over whetheroleomargarine should be dyed pink or, eventually, learning about the horrors of the meatpacking industry from Upton Sinclair, Americans listened to constant and nebulous volleys between brewers and activists about whether corn and rice belonged in beer … and whether corn or rice were even the extent of it.
PURITY TESTS
That brings us back to the Pure Beer bill in New York. The state’s brewers fought tooth and nail against the bill, to the point of leveraging contracts with New York’s hop growers to try and extort their support. In the end they were saved by a veto from the governor, but it was a close call.
New York’s was one of many kindred bills that popped up in state legislatures during the 1890s, backed by a plethora of official government investigations into beer from the USDA and local health boards alike. The federal government even considered a national anti-adulteration bill in 1896, which would have limited beer’s ingredients to the same four ingredients. It didn’t pass, but getting onto the congressional docket was probably too close for most brewers’ comfort at the time.
As Graves notes, over 100 pure food and beverage bills were introduced to Congress between 1879 and 1906, though none of them passed until the Food and Drug Act of the latter year.
The ultimate irony of beer’s reluctant inclusion into adulteration debates can be found in the fact that the New York Pure Beer bill’s writers claimed they drew inspiration from Germany’s own beer purity laws. In other words, the paragon image of pure beer that critics wanted to enforce upon brewers was based on a narrative that brewers themselves had been pushing for years. It was the new wave of German-American brewers who, from the 1850s onward, insisted over and over that proper all-malt beer was clean, healthy, wholesome, and pure, and that the public shouldn’t accept anything less. Other public health controversies, like court cases over Lager’s intoxicating effects and debates over whether Lager caused or prevented cholera, cemented even further the public’s perception of how Lager beer should look, taste, and affect a person’s body. In short, brewers had championed the standard that they ultimately did not want to be measured against.
And yet, brewers maintained their message even when their own recipe modifications, industrializing, and incorporation of adjuncts muddied it. Doing so exposed them to accusations of adulteration according to their own standards. The decades they then had to spend on the back foot—persuading the public that adjuncts were acceptable, fending off temperance onslaughts, and answering regulatory questions—represented a long sleep in a bed they’d made.
Adulteration’s legacy still pops up from time to time. Remember Corngate a couple years ago? Anheuser-Busch InBev released a series of commercials blasting Miller Lite and Coors Light for being made with corn syrup, neglecting to mention that Bud Light utilized rice for essentially the same purpose. That situation got litigious really fast, and it showed how easily the beer industry can slip back into the same fights it’s been having for over a century.
It also shows how beer’s entanglement with public health concerns has always been a matter of when and not if. It is a pairing to be expected, respected, and prepared for. Beer’s effects on people’s bodies and brains will lead to consistent and legitimate questions about how social institutions must deal with that power, whether that meanslegally determining intoxication, deciding what belongs in beer to begin with,considering nutrition labels for beer, orgrappling with alcohol regulations during a pandemic.
And if history’s any indicator, these will be wars of words, not science.
Words by Brian Alberts Illustrations by Colette Holston
