"Taste of Summer"

I promise not to keep inundating you with commentary about this Lacambre text I've been reading this week--though I won't promise this is the last post. But one thing is too juicy to let pass. Lacambre was writing in 1851--just six years before Louis Pasteur published "Mémoire sur la fermentation alcoolique," his revolutionary paper that identified the role of yeast in fermentation. Lacambre, a brewer himself, knew that environmental effects played a pivotal role in the quality of fermentation. Everyone knew that warm weather was bad, and during hot snaps in the Belgian summer, breweries knew to take the day off.

Unlike British and French breweries that were by the mid 19th century using wort chillers, Belgians were still cooling all their beer in large pans known as "coolships." Lacambre emphasized that a "viscous fermentation" came when the temperatures were too high.

“The cooling of the containers must be prompt, the condition is most essential, especially in summer because that is very likely to alter it in the hot season. The taste and smell, which are spread by contact with the greatest ease...from a profound alteration suffered by some of the wort often on the end of cooling.”

He relates an experience he had as a brewer when during a summer storm, a batch of cooling beer "became disturbed"--I think by crashing thunder, but it's not clear--and had become bubbly. He tried to save the beer, but it was putrid. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he knew the result of contamination was highly contagious worth that would spoil other wort it came into contact with. This is what he concluded:

“The result was strongly affected the taste and the more or less nauseating odor which is the true character of this kind of alteration. The smell is so characteristic that an experienced man can easily...recognize this kind of alteration simply smelling beer that has received the slightest breach of versoemer or taste of summer.... This kind of alteration, which always produces the bad alcoholic fermentation which many brewers have given the name of wild fermentation, because it still offers the symptoms unrelated to a good fermentation.”

Lacambre was convinced beer, or at least wheat beer, needed to rest in coolships to "release nitrogenous material"--whatever that meant. He classified different types of fermentation based on their qualities: "the alcoholic fermentation of glucose, lactic acid, acetic acid, viscous and putrid." He was so close to having figured it out himself. In just six years, Pasteur identified the mechanism:

"In 1856, a man named Bigo sought Pasteur's help because he was having problems at his distillery, which produced alcohol from sugar beetroot fermentation. The contents of his fermentation containers were embittered, and instead of alcohol he was obtaining a substance similar to sour milk. Pasteur analyzed the chemical contents of the sour substance and found that it contained a substantial amount of lactic acid instead of alcohol. When he compared the sediments from different containers under the microscope, he noticed that large amounts of yeast were visible in samples from the containers in which alcoholic fermentation had occurred. In contrast, in the polluted containers, the ones containing lactic acid, he observed "much smaller cells than the yeast." Pasteur's finding showed that there are two types of fermentation: alcoholic and lactic acid. Alcoholic fermentation occurs by the action of yeast; lactic acid fermentation, by the action of bacteria."

The "taste of summer" was buggies, allowed more time to infect a more slowly-cooling wort. Less poetic, but a revolution in understanding how beer ferments.

Deeper and Deeper Into the Surreal World of Belgian Brewing

Okay, I have now completed my survey of non-lambic beers produced in mid-19th century Belgium. The tour guide was one G. Lacambre, a man in possession of prejudices but lacking an editor. He would sometimes discredit certain styles of beer, some he even admitted were renowned, and offer biting commentary about the methods of the brewers. It goes without saying that Lacambre was himself a brewer, and this is exactly the kind of thing you expect (modern brewers are just the same). But he was also strangely imprecise, offering conflicting data or using different measures across styles. (Hops, for example, were sometimes measured by the barrel, sometimes by the hectoliter. Fair enough, except that barrel sizes weren't standardized.) All that accepted, he highlights some absolutely amazing stuff. To wit:

• Every beer style he mentioned spent time in a coolship. The procedure varied a bit--sometimes beer would get filtered first, sometimes not. Usually breweries pitched yeast, sometimes (Leuven dobbel gerst, Hoegaarden wheat ales) not. (Sometimes he didn't specify.) But here's the point: no beer sits overnight in coolship without picking up scads of bugs. Every beer was infected in 19th century Belgium.
  
• Lacambre lists about 18 styles and sub-styles, and the average boil length was nine hours. Only four of those were boils of three hours or less, and five were over ten hours (the longest was twenty).
• Only one style--a cluster of three substyles from Leuven--was made entirely from barley. Two others were usually 100% barley, but often had wheat and oats. Nearly all of the beers had wheat, and a large number (11) used oats. One beer, the saison from Liege, was usually made with a majority of spelt.
• It seems the Belgians were into poorly-modified malts that resulted in pretty sweet beers. Lacambre doesn't give a lot of final gravities, but the ones he does give are in the 1.020s and 1.030s.
  
• Blending, as in gueuze, was common, and many styles had blended variants. The act of blending beer was “a special art entrusted to special men who should have a truly exceptional palate.”

Below are the beers Lacambre details, with very brief comments:

• Antwerp Barley Beer. An aged beer that was blended with young beer and sounds much like modern gueuze.
  
• Uytzet. Came in two strengths, ordinary (about 4%) and double (6%). One of the famous beers Lacambre slagged, saying “uytzet is an amber beer, fairly dark yellow, and very good quality when well prepared but but ordinary uytzet generally has a particular dry and more or less sharp taste."
  
• Flemish Brown Beer. The beer boiled up to twenty hours, similar to uytzet but darker. Locals loved it, and for this reason Lacambre begrudgingly admitted it might be an acquired taste. For his purposes, "far from being very pleasant indeed, for it is bitter, harsh and somewhat astringent."
  
• Leuven biere de Mars, enkel gerst, and dobbel gerst. These were the beers Lacambre made himself, and shockingly, he thought they were the best. Made from all barley, and divided into four runnings of the same mash. The first two made dobbel gerst, the final two biere de Mars, with enkel gerst being a blend of the two.
  
• Biere de Maestricht. A brown beer made largely in Holland about which Lacambre was vague. Popular.
  
• Wallonian barley beer. An amber to brown beer that was boiled to sharp bitterness.
  
• Bieres blanche of Leuven. Light, refreshing beers that sound like a cross between lambic and witbier.
  
• Peeterman. Similar to Leuven white beers, but brown and made with gelatin usually taken from fish skin. Tasty! Lacambre: "“viscous, very brown-coloured and has a slightly penetrating and aromatic bouquet." One of the more famous of the lost Belgian styles.
  
• Biere de Diest. A strong golden ale (1.066-1.082) that sound sweet and delicious. Lacambre offers this left-handed compliment: “a very sweet and pleasant taste; their creamy flavour slightly sweet, and has something honeyish which is highly sought after by aficionados, amongst which we must count the majority of women and especially wet nurses who find in them a drink which is comforting and nutritious, as well as healthy and pleasant to drink.”
  
• Mechelen Brown Beer. This sounds like a precursor to the sour ales of Flanders (which is to the west of Mechelen). They were aged up to two years and blended with a quarter to a third fresh beer--much like modern-day Rodenbach.
  
• Hoegaarden beer. This is effectively a lambic--a spontaneously-fermented partially-wheat ale. Strangely, it was served fresh, not aged, apparently to great effect. Lacambre: “This beer is very pale, very refreshing and strongly sparkling, when it is fresh; its raw taste has something wild which is very similar to that of beer from Leuven which it resembles in many respects.”
  
• Lier Beers (two versions). A stronger, paler export version and a darker version for locals. Not a lot of info.
  
• Liege Saison. A beer often made largely of spelt and aged at least four months and often up to two years. Lacambre didn't like the methods of brewing and seemed to regard this as a crude beer whipped up by bumpkins.
  
• Liege Biere Jeune. A lighter version of the saison served fresh after a couple weeks.

I must now leave the translation Randy Mosher made of these texts and delve into the one I made via Google Translate--which though less elegant, is remarkably coherent. I am especially interested in his thoughts on "lambicks." He also discussed the beer of other countries, which also ought to be interesting.

And You Think Belgian Beers Are Strange Now

I have now left the island of Great Britain, traveled across the English Channel and found myself in 19th century Belgium--metaphorically, at least. After several months reading the past practices of British breweries, it is phantasmagoric to dive into the Belgian archive. The old British brewed more or less like the current British. Even strange old techniques like parti-gyling and the use of Burton union systems hasn't died out. But Belgium? Wild, wild stuff.

Take for example the practices described by G. Lacambre, whose 1851 Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières is the source for much of what we know:

"Boiling of these beers is longer and stronger than uytzet: commonly the boiling of these beers is 15 to 18 and even 20 hours in many breweries."

"When the colour is produced purely by a long boil, there is certainly no great harm, but unfortunately there are many breweries today that reduce the boiling time and force the colour using lime which is sometimes, as we have seen, very detrimental to the interests and even the health of consumers."

Or my favorite, which is just the second of six paragraphs on the mash schedule for Leuven white beer:

"As soon all the liquid has been extracted, they remove the baskets, of which there are eight to ten for a tank of 100 hectoliters, and by the underback, they refill the mash tun with completely cold water in summer and lukewarm water.... Once there is enough water in the mash tun it is stirred again very strongly, then they extract the second mash in the same way as I have described the first, and it also goes in boiler no. 1. Once there is no more liquid on the top, the liquid contained between the two funds is drawn off, then, always through the underback, a third infusion is added. The water used for the third mash is drawn from boiler no. 2, which is at this point filled with boiling water. The third mash is mixed until the warm mixture is perfect, then by means of baskets, and operating in the same manner as the first two mashes, they extract the slightly white wort which is poured into boiler no. 1 until the liquid reaches 40 or 45 centimeters from the top; the rest of the mash being drawn from the bottom of the mash tun, is placed in the clarification tank."

In sum: breweries regularly boiled their beer for 8-20 hours to achieve a darker color (or other mysterious, unidentified qualities) unless they dosed them with toxic calcium hydroxide. This followed mash schedules (in some beers) so baroque they took dozens of steps and required six vessels. I guess you can see why the lime seemed like a good idea.

Study questions:
1. What happens to hops after a twenty-hour boil?
2. Had they never heard of dark malts in Belgium or did they just like that tweaky lime buzz?
3. Extra credit: was the production of lambic a short cut for slackers tired of 29-hour brew days? (Provide corroborating evidence.)