The #1 winter seasonal beer1 returns with a crisper and brighter recipe and festive inspiration for holidays spent at home
BOSTON, MA, Nov. 9, 2020—Samuel Adams brewers recognize the winter season will feel different this year, with many Americans taking “home for the holidays” literally. To spread some holiday cheer when drinkers need it most, Samuel Adams celebrates the return of the #1 winter seasonal beer1, Samuel Adams Winter Lager, with a crisper and brighter remixed recipe and new ways to enjoy holiday favorites from home.
‘Tis the season for holiday gear inspired by beer! Samuel Adams has teamed up with holiday apparel company Tipsy Elves and bakeries Top Shelf Cookies and Brewscuits to bring home the ultimate collection of holiday flair to enjoy with family, friends, and even canine companions. From toasting with seasonal brews to wearing matching dog-and-me festive attire, drinkers will have everything they need to eat, drink, and be merry from home, Winter Lager in hand.
Toast the Holiday Season with New Samuel Adams Winter Lager and Seasonal Brews Samuel Adams brewers have reformulated the storied Winter Lager to bring drinkers a crisper and brighter experience with every sip. Featuring an enhanced crisp bock recipe and amplified orange notes inspired by the season, the deep ruby brown beer features hints of seasonal spices that complement its rich, caramel maltiness with just a touch of bitterness and a hint of citrus in the finish that brings a festive flavor to any holiday celebration.
“As one of the first seasonal beers we brewed over 30 years ago, Winter Lager was inspired by the unique flavors and festivities of the holiday season that bring drinkers together,” said Jim Koch, Samuel Adams Founder and Brewer. “Constantly optimizing our recipes in pursuit of better beer, Samuel Adams brewers revisited the complex profile of this long-loved beer to create a crisper and brighter Winter Lager that boasts the spice and citrus flavors of the season with a malty finish and greater drinkability.”
Spicing up the Winter Classics Variety Pack is Samuel Adams Holiday White Ale, the new perfect plus-one for the holiday season. Blending orange peel with holiday spice for a golden, hazy beer with a slightly sweet, herbal, spice, and citrus aroma, Holiday White Ale complements any festive occasion. Delivering a true wintery remix, the Winter Classics Variety Pack also features bold and hoppy American IPA and dark and robust Holiday Porter alongside flagship Boston Lager and smooth and crisp Sam ’76—ensuring there is no shortage of ways to keep drinkers’ spirits bright this year.
Winter Lager and Holiday White Ale are available nationwide in six-pack and 12-pack 12-oz. bottles and in Samuel Adams Winter Classics Variety Pack, which is available for purchase in 12-pack and 24-pack 12-oz. bottles. To explore all the Samuel Adams winter seasonal styles near you, visit samueladams.com/find-a-sam.
Get Cozy with Limited-Edition Holiday Apparel from Samuel Adams and Tipsy Elves Drinkers can cozy up with Samuel Adams this holiday season thanks to a limited-edition Tipsy Elves collection fit for all remixed at-home celebrations. The festive apparel is specifically designed with comfort and convenience in mind, including a holiday-inspired jumpsuit, pocket sock with matching bottle opener, koozie mitten, and even a dog-and-me matching holiday sweater set. All pair perfectly with a cold Samuel Adams Winter Lager in hand and no worry of frostbite. The collection will be available for purchase at tipsyelves.com/sam-adams and the Samuel Adams Tap Rooms, while supplies last.
Enjoy Sweet Seasonal Treats with Friends, Family and Pet Plus-Ones Samuel Adams wants to ensure no one drinks alone this holiday season. With shelters, rescuers, and breeders reporting an increased demand as Americans try to fill quarantine voids with new canine companions this year, Samuel Adams found even more ways to help drinkers enjoy the season at home with their old furry friends or new pandemic puppies. In addition to the ultimate Tipsy Elves dog-and-me matching holiday sweater set, Samuel Adams has created a dog-friendly treat inspired by the flavors of the beer you know and love.
Samuel Adams partnered with Brewscuits, a small business that bakes handcrafted dog biscuits, to create a special pet-friendly biscuit inspired by the flavors of Samuel Adams Winter Lager and made with spent beer grain and sweet potato with orange peel, ginger, and cinnamon. Humans can take a bite out of Winter Lager, too, thanks to Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream bakery and Boston’s own Top Shelf Cookies. A limited-edition cookie, Winter Lagerland, is a Winter Lager-infused brown butter cookie with white chocolate chips and accents of orange peel, cinnamon and ginger to bring out the enhanced flavors of Winter Lager while capturing the essence of the holiday season.
Perfect for holiday gifting, Samuel Adams X Brewscuits dog treats will be available at brewscuits.com, while supplies last. Winter Lagerland cookies will be available at the Samuel Adams Boston Taproom and on topshelfcookies.com as part of their holiday lineup.
No matter how you spend the holidays, Samuel Adams has the perfect Winter Lager pairings for you and your crew to stay festive all season long.
ABOUT SAMUEL ADAMS Samuel Adams is a leading independent, American craft brewer that helped to launch the craft beer revolution. The brewery began in 1984 when Founder and Brewer Jim Koch used a generations-old family recipe to brew beer in his kitchen. Inspired and unafraid to challenge conventional thinking about beer, Jim brought the recipe to life with hopes drinkers would appreciate the complex, full-flavor and started sampling the beer in Boston. He named the flagship brew Samuel Adams Boston Lager in recognition of one of our nation’s founding fathers, a revolutionary man of independent and pioneering spirit. Today, Samuel Adams is one of the world’s most awarded breweries and remains focused on crafting the highest quality beers through innovation and experimentation in the relentless pursuit of better. Samuel Adams remains dedicated to elevating and growing the American craft beer industry overall, including providing education and support for entrepreneurs and fellow brewers through its philanthropic program, Brewing the American Dream, which helps others pursue their American Dream. For more information, visit www.SamuelAdams.com.
ABOUT TIPSY ELVES Tipsy Elves’ mission is simple: They transform moments that matter into memories that last a lifetime by creating apparel that makes life more fun. Tipsy Elves skyrocketed after being on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2013, and since then has had several holiday collaborations around Christmas and Halloween, celebrating every holiday in between. From Taco Bell to Slim Jim, Tipsy Elves continues to partner with reputable brands in the industry, creating extraordinary moments throughout the year. Tipsy Elves hopes to pull out the extrovert in everyone through unique apparel with a touch of humor. Whether that’s the greatest “ugly” Christmas sweater, a Halloween skeleton onesie, or keeping you decked out for the Fourth of July, Tipsy Elves has something for every celebration under the sun.
1Source: IRI MULO Total U.S. + C; Winter Lager season 10/28/19–12/15/19
As soon as one call ended, another would immediately come in to fill the momentary lull.
Tony and Kat Ochsner scrambled to fall into the rhythm of ring tones, voicemail notifications, and email pings.
It was the beginning of the pandemic, and business shutdowns had started taking their toll on the economy, so they were both grateful and baffled by the onslaught of orders for brewing equipment and ingredients coming into Micro Homebrew, their shop located in Kenmore, Washington, just outside Seattle.
Although winning the award has been a coveted honor since its inception four years ago, clinching the accolade this year carries an extra bit of weight due to the many challenges small businesses have had to endure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since grit and community building are intrinsic parts of running a homebrew shop, the lineup of praiseworthy contenders was as impressive this year as ever. To bring the best of the best to the forefront, throughout the spring, AHA members were encouraged to nominate their favorite homebrew shops for the award, sponsored by BSG Handcraft.
The shops with the most nominations were evaluated based on their support for their local homebrew communities, education efforts, customer service and engagement, public promotion of homebrewing, and their commitment to implementing responsible business practices.
In all, 54 shops were nominated. As the winner, Micro Homebrew took home a pallet of BSG’s Rahr 2-Row Malt. Also, John Calhoun, one of the dozen people who nominated the shop, was selected at random to receive a $1,000 gift certificate to spend at Micro Homebrew.
Tony says the award is validation that he is doing things right despite not investing heavily on e-commerce.
“I’m really passionate about hanging out with people who brew, learning from them, and helping people get started,” says Tony. “When I was starting out, I remember going into a homebrew store after I got my Mr. Beer Kit for Christmas and knew I wanted to do more. It was intimidating, and the store wasn’t as helpful as I wished it would be, so when we opened our shop, we wanted it to be a place where people could find answers, not just ingredients. Maybe it’s not too smart of us to focus so much on in-person stuff since when the pandemic happened, the other local stores were selling through online ordering systems. It would have been nice to have a system like that, but we just posted on our Facebook page that we weren’t letting anyone in the store, that they needed to call ahead and come out here when their order was ready. My wife and I did it that way for three or four months before letting anybody in the store. People just kept calling and emailing.”
Despite the Ochsners’ best efforts, the wait time for getting an order filled would sometimes exceed three hours, which is a long time to sit in a parking lot, especially for customers who were used to spending most of their shopping time inside the homebrew shop trading fermentation tips and philosophical takes on brewing.
“Sometimes we’d get behind on orders, and the customers just didn’t care,” recalls Tony. “They kept supporting us. It was great, and their kind words in nominating us have been nothing short of humbling.”
The Ochsners credit the success of their pandemic business experiments on their customers’ loyalty, patience, and flexibility.
The initial pain of having to furlough employees at the beginning of the pandemic has alleviated now that customers are once again dropping in and chatting in-person with advisory team members, the title Tony uses to address his employees.
“When you’re getting started, you need face-to-face contact with somebody who brews,” says Tony. “Stores like ours fill that niche. I think getting people started is a big deal. People who have been doing it for a while, maybe they benefit from online stuff. It saves them a little time, but ultimately, most people who start homebrewing do it because they know someone who does it or they found a shop that takes care of them. Maybe it’s a throwback, to a certain extent, but I think it’s the nature of what we do. Plus, beers are meant to be shared in person anyway. It’s the whole reason we make them.”
Tony and Kat are looking forward to bringing back in-person brewing workshops soon, and plenty of beer sharing is in the forecast.
About the Author
Efraín Villa is a photographer, actor, writer and global wanderer whose endless quest for randomness has taken him to more than 50 countries in five continents. His writing has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Good Men Project, TravelWorld International Magazine, Zymurgy, as well as Spanish language publications. While not running his consulting firm in Albuquerque, he is busy devouring exotic foods in faraway countries and avoiding adulthood while wearing the least amount of clothes possible. His travel stories dealing with the messiness, humor, and beauty of cultural collisions can be found on AimlessVagabond.com.
Fresh Fruit From the Farm Ciders Plus a Special Oyster Fest & Fish Fry & Oyster Stout Release Highlight Weeklong Cider Celebration!
Central Virginia’sStable Craft Brewing at Hermitage Hill, an authentic working farm brewery and winery, will kick off Virginia Craft Cider week with a week-long cider celebration featuring an array of fresh from the farm ciders starting on Friday, November 13 through November 22, 2020.
Stable Craft will also be offering a festive Oyster Fest & Fish Fry on Saturday, November 14. An Oyster Stout will be released and available to enjoy as well.
Here is the complete calendar of events including cider releases, Oyster Fest, Sunday brunch, Sunsets & S’mores and so much more:
STABLE CRAFT’S VIRGINIA CIDER WEEK CALENDAR OF EVENTS
According to Stable Craft Brewing owner, Craig Nargi, “We’re excited about the continued growth in popularity of our ciders. We’re looking forward to showcasing our arsenal of ciders to help celebrate Virginia Craft Cider week.”
Stable Craft Brewing’s rural location offers acres of open farmland with multiple covered and uncovered outdoor locations to keep guests physically distant while enjoying craft beer, cider, wine and food. Several other safety measures have been implemented to provide guests with a safe and fun experience while complying with Virginia’s Governor Northam’s guidelines.
Stable Craft offers private igloos for outdoor dining at its best. The heated igloos are available by advance reservations only and come with a private server. The igloos seat up to eight guests and have panels that can open up and help adjust airflow inside. Reservations are for one hour and 45 minutes. To book a private igloo experience online, visit https://stablecraftbrewing.simplybook.me/v2/.
Add 7 gallons water at 166°F to mashtun for 60 minutes. Temp was then 148°F. Sparge with 3 gallons at 161°F for 60 minutes. Temp should be around 151°F. Boil for 60 minutes. Add 1 oz Chinook at 60 minutes. 0.5 oz Chinook at 45 minutes. Add 0.75 oz Centennial at 30 minutes. Add 0.5 oz Cenntenial and 0.5 oz Cascade at 15 minutes. After 2 months in Primary, dry hop for 5 days, with 1 oz Chinook, 1 oz Centennial, 1 oz Cascade. Bottle, using 0.75 cups of priming sugar added to bottling bucket.
“It may burst a man, but it will not make him drunk.”
So said Solomon Keyser’s expert witness. The Petersburg, Virginia saloon owner stood trial in summer 1855 for keeping a disorderly beer hall, a fancy way of saying he’d sold Lager beer the wrong way and violated local liquor laws. But the public wasn’t really interested in what Keyser had or hadn’t done. The real defendant in his trial—and the actual mystery everyone wanted to solve—was Lager beer itself.
Keyser’s defense was straightforward, if a little strange. He claimed that liquor laws didn’t really apply to him because those laws regulated intoxicating beverages, and that Lager beer—the only alcoholic beverage he sold—didn’t intoxicate.
Hence the expert witness, who spent a great deal of time explaining to the jury exactly what this new, mysterious drink was, and how it was made. Then he concluded that no matter how much Lager a person drank, they’d never get truly drunk. His evidence: He knew of “ladies” in New York and Philadelphia who often drank 17-20 pints of Lager at once without feeling a thing. That’s up to two-and-a-half gallons, and it’s also one of the more conservative testimonials that Lager drinkers would offer in court that decade.
A quirky argument in a court case is a novelty. But dozens of independent cases, spread out over a few years and thousands of miles? That’s a trend or, more to the point, a craze.
During the 1850s and beyond, the so-called “question” of whether Lager beer could intoxicate a person repeatedly went to trial. Brewers and saloon owners were hauled into courts urban and rural, eastern and western, big and small as a wave of Lager beer crested over the United States—and as the early prohibition movement tried to stem the tide one block at a time. They shaped one of the first debates on the health effects of American Lager beer during the 19th century, but hardly the only one. I’ll look at more of those debates in the future, but right now there’s a big question to answer: When Keyser and others argued in court that Lager beer didn’t intoxicate … did their gambit work?
Yes. And no. These cases, like the other Lager debates of the 1800s, were proxies for larger concerns over a shifting American drinking culture, public health, urbanization, immigrant inclusion and, depending on whom you asked, the moral soul of the nation. Americans responded to Lager beer in highly subjective ways, but not just because of the product itself. These challenges and conversations also offered fresh attempts to answer a much older question—of whether beer is good for us in the first place.
In other words, everyone prosecuting or defending Lager beer in court during the 1850s went in with a lot of baggage. Prevailing ideas about alcohol’s medical and scientific properties; beer’s broader health implications; and politicized class, ethnic, and community relationships all informed public reactions to a new, weird style of beer called Lager.
INTOXICATION NATION
That baggage was decades in the making. For one thing, alcohol was everywhere in early America. Adults drank more than three times the quantity of alcohol they do today, usually in the form of distilled liquors and hard cider. According to historian Maureen Ogle, they drank every day of the week, at all hours of the day, and that’s why drinking could be seen as such a problem. “And frankly, I have a fair amount of sympathy for that,” she says. “If you were living in, say, New York City at the time, which had a population of not quite a million … in the 1840s and 1850s, you were exposed to intoxicated people all of the time, wherever you went.”
All this alcohol made workers less productive; disrupted social order; and encouraged people of different races, ethnicities, and genders to get a little too close to each other—at least, that’s how the rich and powerful saw it. They were desperate to steer and control alcohol consumption as a way to steer and control society as a whole. And to do that, they needed to explain the effects of alcohol in the first place.
As Ogle explains, medical knowledge was incomplete and ‘fuzzier’ during the 19th century, and so researchers often expanded their comments into a ‘huge kind of meta argument … that alcohol in general is bad for you. It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for society. It makes people behave in degenerate ways. It breaks up families.’
But doing that was tricky. As Ogle explains, medical knowledge was incomplete and “fuzzier” during the 19th century, and so researchers often expanded their comments into a “huge kind of meta argument … that alcohol in general is bad for you. It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for society. It makes people behave in degenerate ways. It breaks up families.”
Alcohol use was often associated with behaviors like laziness, fighting, or, in extreme cases, suicide. It was linked with physical maladies ranging from gout to insanity. Alcohol’s effects were also aggregated into social issues like crime, hunger, and poverty, among others. And all of these determinations were heavily politicized and prone to bias. Of course, alcohol use does have real physiological and societal effects—those effects continue to be studied, and both politics and bias can still come into play. But these historical associations simmered through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries until bias became prevailing wisdom.
A particularly important tenet in early America was that the stronger the drink, the worse the consequences. Toddies and punch might just make a person lazy, but rum and whiskey led to anarchy and murder. Beer and cider, on the other hand, were viewed as moderate and less harmful. If consumed sparingly, they were even considered nourishing and strengthening by some. In other words, there was an imaginary line between allegedly good and bad alcohol consumption, and beer straddled it.
This line, and the perceived connection between alcohol and wider behavioral and societal effects, would linger in American minds throughout the 1800s. But a significant evolution in the politics of alcohol was taking place right around 1840, when Lager first appeared in the United States.
OBJECTIONS
“There’s one reference to it as tasting like tobacco juice and another one that it tastes like a jar of soap suds that a pickle has been put to soak in.”
According to historian and former journalist Lee Graves, Lager made a mixed first impression upon its arrival to the United States. It was, at first, the drink of German immigrants, but it was also more than that. It served as a near ubiquitous expression of German-Americans’ ethnocultural beliefs about work/life balance, social bonds, leisure, pleasure, and the cultivation of a fully lived life. They didn’t just view Lager as an alcohol delivery system. Many German immigrants, particularly those from Bavaria, saw Lager as literally nutritious. Germans fully understood that Lager was alcoholic, and thus a person could overdo it, but culturally speaking they generally didn’t drink to get drunk. Observers of German picnics, celebrations, beer halls, etc, often remarked on how little drunkenness they saw in those spaces. From the German immigrant perspective, intoxication had almost nothing to do with Lager.
But the rest of American society, those watching German immigrant communities from the outside, didn’t always pick up on that. Ultimately, German-American drinking culture would take decades to fully reconcile with broader American culture. In the meantime, there would be growing pains, especially with anti-immigrant partisans called nativists and the anti-alcohol temperance movement.
“People are always also asking themselves what role do immigrants play in American society and how willing are we to embrace them into our culture,” Ogle points out. Whiteness in American history has always been an arbitrary construct with dire consequences, and in the 1850s neither German nor Irish immigrants were considered white by Anglo-American society. Their religion, their politics, their public behavior, their food and music, everything they did seemed strange, if not offensive. And for Germans, beer was so present in all these aspects of their lives that it became a ready target.
Lager ‘stultifies, stupefies, and brutalizes,’ a prominent temperance magazine announced in 1858. ‘The man who drinks half a pint of raw whiskey is not guilty of the same self-degradation as the fellow who pours down five gallons of disgusting bitter swill, tinctured with alcohol.’
The temperance movement began targeting beer like never before during the 1850s. Before that time, temperance reformers had often relied on moral suasion to reduce drinking, a tactic which worked well on imbibers of traditionally “bad” liquors like rum and whiskey. But few Americans wanted to give up alcohol completely, and public perceptions of beer had always straddled that line between good and bad. So reformers moved the goalposts by demanding total abstention from alcohol, or teetotalism. And if people wouldn’t give up alcohol voluntarily, reformers would use the rule of law to force them.
“There were literally thousands of attempts around the country using local option laws,” Ogle says, “which meant that people in a county or even a township could vote to limit … how much access people could have to alcohol.”
Short of outright bans, nativists and temperance reformers could seek other limitations that focused mainly on immigrant drinking. “It was really a practical idea for the legislators to attack [Lager beer] in court rather than any other way,” Ogle says. “And so they pass laws, said you can’t sell intoxicating beverages on Sunday, and they try to enforce it.”
In a vacuum, Lager beer might have slotted into that earlier spectrum of good and bad alcohol quite well. It was lower in alcohol and largely associated, at least among German immigrants, with moderate consumption habits. But the political landscape had changed that equation entirely.
Lager “stultifies, stupefies, and brutalizes,” a prominent temperance magazineannounced in 1858. “The man who drinks half a pint of raw whiskey is not guilty of the same self-degradation as the fellow who pours down five gallons of disgusting bitter swill, tinctured with alcohol.” Facts like those, they also said, “would never be doubted anywhere, except in a New York Court.”
They weren’t wrong about that last part. By 1858, New York courts already had years of waffling over Lager beer under their belt.
PERIPATETIC BEER VATS
Long before national Prohibition in 1920, the temperance movement temporarily succeeded in getting some dozen states to pass prohibition laws called Maine Laws (named for the first state to enact one). New York passed its own in spring 1855, and soon snagged its first victim: John Berberrich, a Poughkeepsie saloonkeeper charged with selling Lager beer. Like Solomon Keyser, Berberrich readily copped to selling the beer, but he claimed he was innocent all the same because Lager beer didn’t intoxicate.
It sounds silly, but there was a certain logic to this defense. As Ogle explains, it helped differentiate beer from the problematic hard liquors of the period, and did so by playing on commonly held beliefs about gradations between alcohol types. It stoked the exact mindset that the temperance movement was trying to change, frustrating their efforts.
Next, as Graves points out, it forced the prosecution to prove a difficult point. “[T]here was no standard of what constitutes intoxication,” he says. “There was no 0.08 blood alcohol level or whatever some of these states [say] about what constitutes … if you’re drunk or not. So it was just a matter of interpretation.”
Without hard science or legal standards to fall on, many of these cases hinged on testimony. In other words, a witness would get on the stand, swear to drinking Lager, and say whether or not they got drunk when they did. Of course, some local barfly claiming he took a sip and felt fine wouldn’t exactly help the defense, so some of these witnesses ended up saying they could drink ridiculous amounts of Lager beer without ever getting drunk.
In Berberrich’s case, a physician testified not only that Lager beer wasn’t intoxicating, but that he could drink 20 glasses in a single sitting without feeling drunk. One Christian Clause, a reportedly stout man, swore to the court that he drank 60 pints of Lager within 12 hours without feeling a thing. The courtroom audience laughed out loud when he said so, and the press dubbed him a “little walking beer cask” and a “peripatetic beer vat.”
It sounded silly, but it worked. The jury in Berberrich’s case halfheartedly convicted him but sidestepped the question of intoxication. It was enough grounds for an appeal. The case wound up before the New York Supreme Court, who ruled in Berberrich’s favor and struck down the state’s shiny new prohibition law in the process.
Of course, not everyone was buying it. A New York Herald reporter covering the story suggested that Berberrich must be cheating his customers with watered-down beer, and suggested locking a “jury” of Germans in a room for 12 hours to confirm they could drink that much, but the media spectacle didn’t change the verdict.
OVERRULED
Barred from a statewide solution, New York temperance reformers reverted to local option tactics. In early 1858, they finally convinced the mayor of New York City to enforce a Sunday ban on liquor sales that basically everyone ignored. According to Graves’ research, several police officers were sent to patrol Brooklyn on a Sunday night and began asking Lager beer vendors—including concert halls and beer gardens as well as saloons—to close shop for the night. It was such a controversial move that about a dozen reporters followed the patrol to observe what happened. Some venues complied but others, like a Brooklyn saloon run by proprietor George Staats, refused. And Lager beer went back to court.
Staats’ case in Brooklyn followed the same basic pattern of Berberrich’s, only magnified. Same argument—that he was innocent because Lager didn’t intoxicate—just with more witnesses. A professor testified that Lager, at roughly 3% ABV at the time, was therefore far less intoxicating than other forms of alcohol. A physician then took the stand to say that Lager beer was the “nearest thing to nothing a man can drink.” They were followed by a string of local Germans, each claiming to regularly drink 20, 40, 60, even 80 glasses of Lager a day without problems. One Jacob Haas boasted that he could drink 106 glasses of Lager in a single sitting, and had in fact drunk 22 that very day before appearing in court … at 11 a.m.
Newspapers had a field day. The story was reprinted around the country until readers in just about every state knew how much Lager a group of random New York Germans could purportedly drink. As one paper said, “It is sworn to, but we don’t swallow it, nor do we believe anybody else will.”
A professor testified that Lager, at roughly 3% ABV at the time, was therefore far less intoxicating than other forms of alcohol. A physician then took the stand to say that Lager beer was the ‘nearest thing to nothing a man can drink.’ They were followed by a string of local Germans, each claiming to regularly drink 20, 40, 60, even 80 glasses of Lager a day without problems.
Except the jury. Staats was likewise acquitted when the jury ruled that, as far as New York City law was concerned, Lager beer was a non-alcoholic beverage. To be clear: that’s since been reversed.
Lager beer trials weren’t confined to New York City. Similar trials took place in upstate New York; rural Wisconsin and Indiana; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Massachusetts, among other areas. And humblebrags about drinking gallons of Lager didn’t always convince juries. Verdicts shifted with locations as politics did. “[I]t’s going to be like pornography,” Ogle points out. “I’ll know it when I see it. But the people who are seeing it are jurors, and jurors in Iowa would have been completely different than jurors in say, New York City or Washington, D.C.”
Lager was declared non-intoxicating in Washington, D.C., but not in Washington, Indiana. New York struck down its prohibition law over a Lager beer trial, but the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld its own. Interestingly, an Ale brewer tried to ride the Lager beer hype to get their 8% Strong Ale declared non-intoxicating in Burlington, Vermont. It didn’t work.
All the while, the media fed a nationwide frenzy with the debate over intoxication. An Ohio paper quipped “much information has been gained as to the capacity of the stomach of lager bier-drinking Dutchmen,” as Germans were derisively called at the time. When a Richmond, Virginia man was arrested for drinking beer and subsequently passing out in public, the paper winkingly remarked that he “rather upset the theory adopted in New York Courts” about Lager. Though the hype died down as the Civil War loomed, the periodic Lager beer trial would dredge up familiar arguments (and wisecracks) over the next 20 years.
Temperance literature tried to make real hay out of the controversy, publishing (among other things) rambling essays that blamed German culture, Germans’ bodily health, and even the state of their government on their affinity for Lager beer. But for all the bluster, the temperance movement didn’t win this battle.
CONTINUANCE
Lager beer wasn’t given a complete legal pass in American courtrooms, but these trials kept the game going. Debates over Lager beer’s intoxicating effects went unresolved, and the Prohibitionists’ game of jurisdictional whack-a-mole dragged on while more and more Americans grew fond of Lager beer. In the near term, Lager beer trials and the wider political debates over alcohol that they contributed to provided support for an industrializing brewing industry.
But, as we also know, political debates over alcohol would only intensify with time and led, many years later, to national Prohibition. Paradoxically, the Lager beer trials contributed to that process as well by spilling the question of whether beer is good for a person into yet another arena of the human experience. It helped teetotalers chip away at the old-school spectrum of good vs. bad alcoholic beverages, and put an enormous spotlight on the alleged healthiness of a rapidly proliferating style of beer.
Around the same time as these trials, temperance reformers ramped up accusations that beer could help spread disease, damage a person’s health, or else contain “adulterating” substances ranging from questionable to outright dangerous ingredients. As trials faded into memory, these accusations would only increase later in the 1800s.
Words by Brian Alberts Illustrations by Colette Holston
Join Annie Johnson as she explores the magnificent symbiosis between beer brewing and sparkling wine production. Discover how you can use the traditional Champagne method to produce amazing Champagne-inspired beers.
The directions to Khaya Maloney’s startup hop farm read like the first clue in a treasure hunt.
“Just set your GPS to Constitution Hill parking garage. When you get there, the security guard will point out where I am.”
This is not where anyone would expect to find a flourishing farm. Originally constructed as a fort, Constitution Hill in Johannesburg is best known as a prison—both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were incarcerated here during the apartheid years. Today, the low-rise, red-roofed complex is a museum, made up of the 19th-century fort; the Women’s Jail, with its castle-like facade; and the stark cells known as Number Four, where Black male inmates were held.
Away from the main building sits the car park, a near-empty garage with nothing to single it out but a gently snoozing security guard and a dark doorway tucked away in a shaded corner. That door leads to a rickety staircase that climbs upwards. Here, on the roof, Maloney meticulously tends downtown Johannesburg’s first hop farm.
His is a (literally) lofty project that began in the most mundane way: with a spot of Sunday night TV. Four years ago, Maloney was rounding off his weekend with an episode of the investigative journalism show “Carte Blanche,” a South African institution that covers everything from small-town scams to international poaching rings. On that day in 2017, the subject matter was more lighthearted: rooftop gardening in New York City.
“I studied civil engineering, and after a year or so working in corporate, I realized there was no mobility,” Maloney says. “I’d been looking into agri-entrepreneurship and then I saw this report on hydroponic gardens, where the produce was being sold to local restaurants. It just made so much sense to me.”
He began to research potential crops to work with and settled on something notoriously difficult to grow without the right climatic conditions: hops.
“While I was researching possible crops, someone happened to mention that hops are only harvested once a year, and I thought, ‘Why not grow hops? How difficult can it be?’” he says. He shakes his head and laughs. “Little did I know.”
GAP IN THE MARKET
Although South Africa lies just outside the optimal region for hop cultivation—generally thought to be between the 35th and 55th parallels—there is a small hop industry here. Previously, hops had been imported, but when World War I interrupted supply, South African Breweries (SAB) began researching how to grow them locally. The local focus was on bittering hops until the early 21st century, when breeders started experimenting with aroma hops, releasing local favorites like African Queen and Southern Passion. Today, the country’s main hop farms are found in the area deemed most suitable for the crop, thanks to its fairly temperate climate and comparatively long day: the valleys around the city of George, located on the country’s southern coast.
Khaya Maloney does not farm near George. Instead, his rooftop hop farm, Afrileap, is some 750 miles from South Africa’s commercial hop-growing region. But Maloney is not the sort of person who gets fazed by such details. He came into this work a complete novice, not only without hop-growing experience, but without any farming background at all.
While I was researching possible crops, someone happened to mention that hops are only harvested once a year, and I thought, ‘Why not grow hops? How difficult can it be?’
— Khaya Maloney, Afrileap
“I had looked into the local craft beer industry and realized that South African brewers lacked choice when it came to hops,” Maloney says. “Either they import hops at great expense or they have to buy from SAB.” SAB—now part of Anheuser-Busch InBev—owns the rights to its cultivated South African hop varieties, and the hop farmers of George are all contracted to SAB. The bulk of the crop is, of course, used in SAB’s beers, but a steady supply also goes to local craft brewers and homebrew stores.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if a local entrepreneur could come up with a way to grow hops specifically for craft brewers?” he asks.
Maloney isn’t the type to spend his time sitting around. Once the idea of rooftop hop-farming had fixed itself in his mind, he started seeking funding—and knowledge. He chased grants and sought out programs looking to support urban farming. Finally he found a local organization called Wouldn’t It Be Cool (WIBC). A business incubator with a focus on sustainability, WIBC operates the Urban Agriculture Initiative (UAI), whose aim is establishing 100 farms on 100 urban rooftops around Johannesburg.
Maloney secured a spot with the UAI and began a three-month scholarship, learning the business side of agriculture, as well as the ins and outs of hydroponics. Furnished with 10 hop plants and some simple plastic containers, he set up a demo farm next to Mad Giant Brewery in the middle of the city.
“At first it was a small-scale experiment to see if hops could grow in Johannesburg,” he says. “After a year or two of my crops dying and coming back to life, I learned a lot about hop-growing. I learned reverse engineering, about the temperatures and climatic conditions. And I learned that you can’t go away on holiday for a few days and expect them to still be alive when you get back.”
Despite those early missteps, Maloney was able to prove that hops could successfully be grown in the unlikely location of downtown Johannesburg. It was time to scale up.
“I started applying for grants and entering contests, all the time studying and reading, and taking courses on entrepreneurship and agriculture,” Maloney says. Eventually he won a prize from SEED, a UN-backed organization promoting sustainable development and entrepreneurship in partnership with Indalo Inclusive, a local nonprofit. The prize was a much-needed €10,000 (about $12,100)—though it did come with a few strings attached.
“I was so happy until I realized the award was part of a training scheme. I got the money in installments as I completed certain modules,” he says. As it turned out, he hadn’t fully read the small print. “I thought it would be immediate. By this stage what I was really looking for was rent money!”
FREEDOM TO FARM
Eventually, the funding came through, and it was time to pick a rooftop. Maloney selected an auspicious spot, although it doesn’t really look it. The parking garage is in a part of downtown Jo’burg that can feel eerie: Many of the surrounding buildings have long since been abandoned, but their heritage status means they can’t easily be revamped, so the broken windows and boarded-up doorways remain. At the center of them all is Constitution Hill, the prison-turned-museum that serves as an important reminder of South Africa’s troubled history.
“This is a building where people were fighting for freedom, for human rights. And now their offspring are here growing crops on the rooftop,” Maloney says. In his case, that means a 3,230-square-foot (300-square-meter) urban farm.
His choice of location wasn’t all about honoring his predecessors. Constitution Hill is an important stop for those visiting Johannesburg. Maloney hopes to capitalize on that importance, with plans to offer tours of Afrileap once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted and tourists return. A bigger dream is to offer educational visits to inner-city school children.
After a year or two of my crops dying and coming back to life, I learned a lot about hop-growing. I learned reverse engineering, about the temperatures and climatic conditions. And I learned that you can’t go away on holiday for a few days and expect them to still be alive when you get back.
— Khaya Maloney, Afrileap
“A passion project that I want to work on is to get young Black kids into agriculture,” he says. “It’s so important for kids to see someone who looks like them doing something like this. It makes it a more realistic goal. Once restrictions allow, I would love to have school groups here on a tour.”
And it is a pretty fascinating tour. Maloney is a captivating storyteller, knowing exactly when to hit his audience with a twist or a cliffhanger. His manner is studious and somewhat serious, though there is a constant sparkle in his eyes as he recounts the hustle that got him here.
Once funding was secured and the location found, the next hurdle was sourcing hop plants. Importing hop rhizomes—root cuttings of the hop bine—was prohibitively expensive and extremely time-consuming, so he looked for a local solution.
“I couldn’t afford the rights to South African hops,” he says. “So I did what anyone seeking something with no idea where to start would do: I took to the internet. I spent hours searching on Google, Reddit, Facebook, trying to find someone with their own cultivar. I joined hop-growing groups and talked to anyone that would listen, until eventually I found Gert Van der Waal.”
Gert Van der Waal owns a small hop farm north of Pretoria, where he grows two varieties: Kracanup, a high-yielding but little-known Australian hybrid, and NAK, a local strain of unknown parentage named for his own farm, Nog-a-Klip (meaning “another rock” in Afrikaans, in reference to the less-than-optimal terrain). Van der Waal agreed to supply Maloney with 550 rhizomes to get the rooftop farm off the ground. More than that, he offered support throughout the process.
“I didn’t immediately realize this young man had so much ambition and tenacity, but there’s no stopping him,” Van de Waal says. “To grow a first harvest in just three and a half months just demonstrates the potential for hops to be cultivated in diverse environments. I believe Khaya’s venture is going to improve South Africa’s craft beer industry tremendously, and I’m very proud to be involved with this project.”
CONTROLLING THE CLIMATE
Two days before my visit, Maloney had finished his first mini-harvest: 18 pounds of NAK hops, which were packaged and shipped to Soul Barrel Brewing Company near Cape Town, destined for the brewery’s South African Pilsner. It’s a pretty small harvest, admittedly, but this yield came from just one row of hop bines. And more will follow soon: Hydroponic farming allows for four harvests a year, compared to just one on a traditional hop farm, offering an impressive yield in a small space.
“Hydroponic farming allows you to completely control the climate conditions,” Maloney says. “I use fans when it gets too hot. I can trick them into thinking it’s nighttime or I can lengthen the day with lights when needed. There really are a lot of pros to the process. It’s sustainable, it’s low-emission and it’s water-wise.”
I will go anywhere and I will talk to anyone who is willing to listen. I want to let the world know that there’s a young black farmer in urban Johannesburg growing hops on a rooftop all year round.
— Khaya Maloney, Afrileap
Speaking of water, I notice an abundance of it: My flip-flopped feet are soaking wet. Is this a part of the hydroponic process?
Maloney laughs.
“Ah, no,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of rain recently and it turns out we have a bit of a drainage problem up here. On the upside though, the water attracts dragonflies and they eat any potential pests, so I’m quite happy with it.”
Maloney’s current plantation can only produce about 1,400 pounds of hops per year, which makes it hard to understand how it could be financially viable. Is there a side hustle that’s helping him to make ends meet? He laughs again.
“This is the side hustle,” he says. His day job in cryptocurrency and business development helps to keep him in hop production, he says. But this rainy rooftop is not the end of his dream.
“This is just the pilot, the experiment, showing the world that it’s possible,” he says. “The end goal is to have 250 acres under glass.”
Would that also be on an inner city rooftop?
“Anywhere,” Maloney says. “I will go anywhere and I will talk to anyone who is willing to listen. I want to let the world know that there’s a young black farmer in urban Johannesburg growing hops on a rooftop all year round.”
The Virginia Beer Company (Williamsburg, VA) will mark the holiday season with the return of their seasonal Spiced Milk Stout, Evil Santa.
“Since the first winter we were open back in 2016, Evil Santa has been one of our most sought after recipes,” reminisces Co-Founder Robby Willey. “The branding is playful, the time of year is festive, and the style is perfect for a cold winter night.”
Evil Santa – a 7.0% abv Spiced Milk Stout brewed with Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Allspice, and Milk Sugar – was originally released as a draft only release during the brewery’s first holiday season in 2016. The recipe was so popular that the brewery brought it back the following year and added a can release to the festivities.
“This is the fifth year we’ve brewed Evil Santa and the fourth that it’s been available in cans,” notes Director of Sales Michael Rhodes. “The past few years we’ve added some limited variants to the annual release. Some draft-only, some in cans, and a fan favorite in bottles.”
Limited variants from year’s past include Vanilla, Peppermint, Hot Pepper, and Mocha. For 2020, the brewery will be releasing four variants, including two brand new recipes: Vanilla Latte and Hazelnut Truffle. The most popular variant – Double Evil Sana – was first released in 2018.
“Since this is our take on a Winter Warmer, we figured why not amp it up a notch,” laughs Co-Founder Chris Smith. “Our Brewmaster decided to brew an Imperial version of Evil Santa in 2018 and we aged it in Bourbon Barrels for 6 months before releasing it on Black Friday that year. Since then it’s always been available in 500 ml bottles annually starting on Black Friday, and this year we’re mixing it up by releasing it in 16 oz. cans.”
This year’s Evil Santa releases include:
Evil Santa
Style: Spiced Milk Stout ABV: 7.0% Description: Evil Santa only comes ’round but once a year. And each year he brings a fleet of 16 oz. cans for all the good girls & boys to enjoy! With hearty additions of flaked oats + lactose, and dashes of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, this warming stout is smooth with a hint of spice + everything nice on the finish. Sure to be enjoyed throughout this festive season…whether you’ve been naughty or nice!
Vanilla Latte Evil Santa
Style: Spiced Milk Stout with Vanilla Beans & Espresso ABV: 7.0% Description: Even Evil Santa yearns to make the Nice List from time to time. Vanilla Beans soften the spice of our smooth & creamy seasonal Milk Stout, and locally sourced coffee from our neighbors at Column 15 provide a pinch of perk. While this version of Evil Santa may not be spicy enough to kick you down the slide, it still has enough mischief mixed in to give Billy Bob a run for his money.
Hazelnut Truffle Evil Santa
Style: Spiced Milk Stout with Hazelnuts & Cacao Nibs ABV: 7.0% Description: Evil Santa has quite the list to check (twice, even) and when he’s done, he needs more than milk and cookies to reward that hard work. The sweet, nutty, and chocolate flavors in this limited Spiced Milk Stout variant help to get the job done — Hazelnuts and Cacao Nibs blended together are perfectly suited to create a smooth and decadent winter warmer perfect to enjoy before settling in for a long winter’s nap.
Double Evil Santa
Style: Imperial Spiced Milk Stout Release Date: 11-29-2020 ABV: 11.3% Description: Since 2016, Evil Santa has been coming to town once a year to ring in the holiday season. In celebration of the annual return of this seasonal Spiced Milk Stout, we ask our jolly friend to stick around for multiple variant releases culminating in the return of DOUBLE EVIL SANTA on Black Friday. Double Evil Santa is an Imperial Spiced Milk Stout with a 11.3% ABV suited for the coldest of winter nights. A stronger version of our Evil Santa Spiced Milk Stout that has been aged in Bourbon Barrels for six months. Nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice are complemented by the caramel and vanilla notes that arise from extended barrel aging. Available in cans for the first time in 2020!
Evil Santa and associated variants can be enjoyed on draft in Williamsburg at the brewery’s taproom. In addition, limited draft and 4-packs of 16 oz. cans will be made available throughout Southeastern Virginia, Central Virginia, and Northern Virginia at purveyors of fine craft beer throughout much of the Commonwealth.
“And for the first time ever, Evil Santa will be making a trip across the pond as part of Beer52’s advent box, making its way throughout the United Kingdom starting in December,” comments Co-Founder Robby W. “2020 has been a tough year, so we figured whey not expand the Nice List as far as we could.”
More information, including where to find Evil Santa, can be found at www.VirginiaBeerCo.com. For more details, please reach out to Robby Willey ([email protected]).
