Why Are We Magnetized By Beers of the Past?

On Monday, archaeologists revealed evidence of a 5,000-year-old Chinese brewery. It got picked up quite broadly and for good reason--it's pretty cool. (Follow the link if you missed it.) What was odd was that I had just returned from a junket to Copenhagen, where the Carlsberg brewery was unveiling their own project involving old beer--recreating an 1883 beer they found in their extensive cellars. Over the past couple decades, breweries and archaeologists have made a cottage industry of recreating lost beers, and we are always, without fail, magnetized by it. Serious question: why?

One of the actual
bottles.

The Carlsberg experiment was a case-in-point. Conceptually, it was very cool. The brewery found these old bottles and realized they dated to a period of bottle-conditioning. (I got to take a trip down to one small part of the cellars and came across a different box of dust-encrusted old cage-and-cork bottles of very distant vintage. They're apparently laying all over the place.) Even after 133 years, they managed to rouse the yeast enough to get it to propagate, and they decided to make a beer from it.

Old brewing logs are great about some things and bad about others. Recipes from the era made it easy to replicate the water, and they went to a seed bank for old varieties of barley, which they had floor-malted at a distillery. (Later, to give the malt the proper 1880s color, they kilned it a bit more.) Hops were more of a mystery. They had some evidence of the provenance--Hallertau--but nothing about the variety or alphas. They decided to use Hallertauer Hallertau and guessed at the bitterness. It took a couple years to get everything in place, and the brewery went into high drive to celebrate its release. You can see a video they put together here, along with a cameo by Martyn Cornell. And of course, they flew me and dozens of members of the media in from all over the world to try the beer.

They finished it off in a wooden barrel for a week--though strangely, an unpitched wooden barrel, which would not have been typical of the day. We were given a tour of some of the technical facilities in Copenhagen (the main brewery is no longer located there) and then joined the brewery for the big unveiling.

The night before, Pete Brown made an obvious point that I think eluded the brewery. They'd set up sort of a no-win situation. Either the beer was going to be sublime, which was the ostensible expectation, or it would be a dud. If it were a dud--well, that's obviously not good. But if it were sublime, it would cast an odd shadow over the brewery's 21st century beers. Carlsberg, which is run by a foundation that diverts some profits into technical research, has a heavy R&D bent. The project itself, whatever the beer tasted like, was going to be interesting as a science experiment. I'm sure they learned a great deal. (Not the least of which was that 133-year-old yeast is still viable.)

But on the big day, we tried the beer and .... Well, care to guess? Here's a picture:

And here's the ceremony:




Guesses? Guesses? It was ... all right. And now we come back to the the question from the top of the post. The beer had an antiquated quality. It was brownish and heavy, quite sweet and undercarbonated. Pale lagers were in the midst of taking over the world, and they were replacing old brown beers. And they were replacing old brown beers, presumably, because they weren't as tasty. We always romanticize the past, thinking that industrial precision and agricultural manipulation have surely brought us to a benighted state. And that's not entirely without merit--heirloom apples taste a lot better than giant supermarket fruit.

But I think it's wrong with beer. I've had the opportunity to sample a few recreations, and they always taste weird and un-modern. Attenuation was terrible, so they're usually heavy and sweet. I don't think recreations tend to capture the microbiological capriciousness of old beers, either. Technology has given us the tools to make the beer we want now, and much more ably and precisely than at any time in the past. The idea of time-traveling through our tastebuds is alluring, but it's foolsgold. I'm convinced the past didn't taste very good.

Danish Hay Beer--and Lots of IPAs

Four weeks ago I received an email about visiting Copenhagen to try a beer made with 133-year-old yeast at Carlsberg brewery (and on their dime). Two weeks ago I actually had travel plans, and a week ago I got on a plane for Denmark. All of which is to say I didn't have a huge amount of time to prepare for the trip. (One of my first surprises was learning Denmark's not on the euro.) My knowledge of Danish beer extended as far as Carlsberg and Mikkeller, and in the two weeks of preparation, I developed the tiniest of inklings that there was something called "New Nordic" out there. Could it apply to beer?

The phrase comes from new Nordic cuisine, pioneered by Noma restaurant's René Redzepi and Claus Meyer. You may have heard the name Noma before--it was regularly voted the best restaurant in the world (though I think they've slipped to third or so recently, the poor bastards). New Nordic cuisine involves a hyper-local, seasonal approach, and the Noma chefs were famous for foraging their ingredients. (As with any movement more than a few minutes old, it has also been declared passe.)

The "hay" beer--and the sole example of New Nordic
brewing I discovered in Denmark.

And indeed, the notion has been extended to beer. Elements of New Nordic beer seem to revolve around the presence of local ingredients, the absence of hops, and something to do with local yeast. It's an odd way to invent a tradition--coming up with the concept first, and then hoping something tasty and commercially successful might emerge from it. This is not typically how beer styles are born, and put me down as a doubter that it will work in Denmark, either. I managed to get to a couple of good beer bars and two Mikkeller outposts, and in the 120+ taps I saw, only one could be called New Nordic. It was a beer made my inoculation with hay (possibly the one Martyn described in the link at the top of this paragraph). It was funky, tart, hazy, headless, and flat--a nice beer, but strange.

Beer and cuisine are in many ways similar--they are constructed by people. They reflect culture, history, and place. When talking about this similarity, I often point out how France and Germany have extremely similar climates and agricultural products--but wildly different cuisines. Much like German and French (or better still, Belgian) beers differ wildly. But they are dissimilar in other ways. Beer is a lubricant as much as a consumable. We drink it in part for the flavor, but at least as much for the effect. Beers that are weird, strongly-flavored, and demanding only rarely become pub faves, and even more rarely in the modern era. We like beers that we can enjoy but which don't interrupt the conversation. Hay beer seems at best a longshot to displace Carlsberg. Or, it turns out, the other beers that seem to be rising in popularity.

As a category I would say they had a distinctly ... American quality. At none of the places I visited (Fermentorum, Taphouse, Warpigs, or Mikkeller) did I find a taplist that would have looked even slightly unusual to the American eye. IPAs were very popular, as were various tart ales and saisons. Even when the beer style in question was nominally European--a gose, for example, it was invariably prepared in the American fashion, with limes and mint or something un-German. In fact, you'd be much more likely to find a straight up weizen or helles in Portland than the four pubs I visited.

My own sense of cognitive dissonance started at Warpigs, the joint project of Mikkeller and Three Floyds. It is self-consciously modeled after an American craft brewery. They brought in Kyle Wolak from Indiana to run the brewery. They installed a Texas barbecuer. And they brew lots and lots of very modern, super juicy IPAs (plus a few familiar favorites like Zombie Dust and Alpha King). When we got the tour, our guide Jacob Alsing told us that they "wanted to bring an American brewery to Denmark."

Fermentoren

I was prepared to chalk that up as a one-off, but going to the 61-handle Taphouse had the effect of confirming rather than dispelling the sense.  Even asking for a "characteristically Danish" beer left the bartender scratching his head. He pointed to local breweries, but couldn't find another beer that had a Danish streak. Finally, at Fermentoren on my last full day (beer list here), I had a nice kettle-soured tart made with vanilla and just accepted that the mood of the moment is American. Maybe this is not surprising. Danish craft brewing isn't much older than a decade, and if you were to time travel back to 1990, you wouldn't find too many beers in America that seemed American. We did have beers like Sierra Nevada Pale, though, and these suggested a future in which our vivid IPAs would be so impressive they would be brewed by Americans in Copenhagen.

Which, come to think of it, may argue for the hay beer after all. Let's check back in twenty years and see if the New Nordic has become old hat--and hay beers are the wave of the present.

Greetings From Copenhagen

A photographic tour of my trip junket* thus far.

Arrival.

At War Pigs, a joint venture of Mikkeller
and Three Floyds.

 (More after the jump.)

To Copenhagen

This afternoon I will hop on a flight to Copenhagen. My first stop is Chicago, where Stan Hieronymus joins me to get on an SAS flight to Europe. We and a number of other writers have been invited by the Carlsberg brewery for the following event, paid for entirely by Carlsberg:

Recently, scientists at Carlsberg Laboratory made an extraordinary discovery in the old cellars of Carlsberg in Copenhagen, Denmark. They discovered a very old Carlsberg bottle that surprisingly still contained living yeast cells. They grew and analysed the cells, and, as it turns out, the bottle was one of the very first beers brewed with original pure yeast dating back to 1883.

Presently, the scientists and brewers at Carlsberg Research Laboratory are re-brewing the world’s first quality lager in the most authentic manner by using the exact same ingredients, recipe and brewing techniques as used more than one hundred years ago. On May 18, 2016, the special brew will be ready, and for the first time in more than a hundred years, men and women will be able to taste beer, that not only is the forefather to most lager beers today, but also represents a ground-breaking beer discovery. 

The beer is brewed to celebrate Carlsberg Research Laboratory’s 140-year anniversary. Carlsberg Research Laboratory is home to some of the most extraordinary discoveries of the past century, ranging from Professor Dr. Emil Hansen’s method for purifying yeast to the discovery of the pH scale, the structure of proteins and the synthesis of enzymes that enable low temperature clothes laundering.

I saw a list of invitees, which numbered 17, but I don't know how many of them will actually be in attendance. I've finagled an extra day at the brewery so I can do some further interviews and tours in hopes of putting together an article for All About Beer. We touch down on Tuesday and it's wheels up on Friday, so I will see very little of Copenhagen nor get to delve into the local beer scene. But not none of it. I'm told Stan has hatched a plan to visit War Pigs when we land, and I'll tag along.

Dunno how much blogging I'll do from Denmark, but I have scheduled a couple posts. Until next time--