Innovations

The eighteenth century also saw numerous innovations in beer production, although as a rule, these were slow to reach America. One illustration has to do with what is typically called porter. During the period, working men in England would often order ale and a few other beers mixed together in a tankard, and tavern keepers came to dread the extra time and effort required to satisfy such a request. Eventually, however, several of these brews were being mixed together in a single cask with extra hops. The resulting dark, strong, beverage was called porter, after the London laborers (“porters”) who popularized it. It was during this period as well that many of the familiar English beers, such as Courage, Whitbread, and Guinness, were born.

Another significant technological innovation in beer brewing was glass bottling, which came into widespread use in the eighteenth century. Glass bottles made beer easier to transport and store and, after the advent of sealed bottles, extended its shelf life. But because the Industrial Revolution was first an English and European phenomenon (and because of British mercantile restrictions), glass bottling in America began in earnest only after the Revolution. Glass bottles enabled people to store and consume beer at home with greater ease and, perhaps coupled with the growth of alternative beverages, diminished the role of the tavern in the social life of towns.

By about 1750, coke and coal were providing maltsters with greater control over the roasting of malt, which made possible the brewing of pale and amber beers, and a classification system to differentiate these from the dark stout and porter brews became an important issue. Later in the century, thermometers and hydrometers added more control to the different stages of the brewing process, and in 1817, a “patent malt” was developed that made stout and porter brews lighter than they had previously been - beginning a trend toward less-alcoholic beer that continues to this day (McGee 1984).

Brewing in the Modern World

In the nineteenth century, beer brewing was revolutionized by a process that had originally been discovered back when hops were just beginning to find their way into ale on a regular basis. Until about 1400, “top” fermentation had been the procedure used. However, at about that time in Bavaria, the process of “bottom” fermentation was developed - “top” and “bottom” indicating where yeast collects in the vat. Bottom fermentation permits the manufacture of a lighter beer, but it was not until the 1840s that the technique spread from Bavaria first to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and Copenhagen, Denmark, and then to the wider world. “Pilsner lager” became the prototype of modern beers, with only England and Belgium persisting in the use of top fermentation.

Yet even before the spread of the new lager beer, the nineteenth century had begun to witness the rise of large-scale commercial breweries. These were encouraged by the growth of cities, which provided mass markets and rising wages for an ever-growing urban working class. By 1800, brewers in England, such as Whitbread and Barclay Perkins, were producing 100,000 to 200,000 barrels of beer per year. The largest brewer, Arthur Guinness, held a virtual monopoly in Ireland (Hawkins 1979:14).

At about midcentury, German immigrants set about completely transforming the brewing industry in the United States. It was in 1844 that Frederick Lauer - a second-generation brewer in Reading, Pennsylvania - introduced the new lagering process, and the business of beer exploded. During the 1850s and 1860s, under the direction of other German immigrants, both Milwaukee and St. Louis became the major centers of the lager industry, with Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz becoming giants in the former and Anheuser and Busch in the latter. Companies that came into being outside of these centers around this time were Hamm in St. Paul, Heileman in La Crosse, and Stroh in Detroit. Almost overnight, the Pilsner-style beers edged out the darker and richer beers that had first reached America with the English colonists.

More innovations came along to improve them. The development by Copenhagen’s Carlsberg brewery of an absolutely pure brewer’s yeast - which would end brewing failures - occurred in 1883. With the turn-of-the-century development of airtight kegs and carbonation, America’s beers became bubbly, Pilsner-style beers, and in 1935, the Krueger company of New Jersey introduced the first canned beer (Trager 1995).

The Anheuser-Busch company may be said to embody the story of American beer. Formed by German immigrants Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch in the mid-nineteenth century, it capitalized on improved transportation and aggressive marketing techniques to the extent that, by 1901, the company was producing more than 1 million barrels of beer annually and had become the first to mass-market bottled beer. To provide the freshest beer available, Anheuser-Busch formed its own refrigerated railcar company and was one of the first brewers to employ pasteurization techniques (Smith 1995: 114-15). The company survived Prohibition by producing “nearbeer” and malt for home brewers, maintained and even updated its brewing equipment, and emerged aggressively from those difficult times to become the giant it is today.

One reason for the popularity of lager beer in the United States is that hot summer days seem to call for ice-cold beverages, and the heavier beers did (and do) not lend themselves well to chilling. Presumably this explains why the British and many other Europeans drink beer that is at room temperature or perhaps cool but not cold. Another reason, however, is taste. Many believe that chilling removes taste, and in fact, most non-Americans do not particularly care for American beer, which they find to be uniformly bland in taste and lacking in character. European Pilsners contain less in the way of chemicals and generally more in the way of alcohol than American beers. On the other hand, Americans in general - and not just those in the United States - enjoy cold lagers; in fact, Mexico and Brazil are among the world’s top beer-producing countries. Mexican breweries in particular make a wide selection of light-tasting lagers, with perhaps Corona, along with Dos Equis (a dark Pilsner), among the best known (Pepper 1996).

It was. Americans who introduced Foster’s beer to Australia in 1888 and did it “American style” with refrigeration, bottom fermentation, and bottling - in the process creating a product that became Australia’s national drink. In Jamaica, by contrast, the famous Red Stripe continued under English influence to be a dark, alelike brew until 1934, after which it finally was transformed into a light-tasting lager (Trager 1995).

Beer was brought to East Africa by the British in 1922 and is brewed there today mainly by East. Africa Breweries in both Kenya and Uganda. Kenya Breweries, a subsidiary of East Africa Breweries, produces the Tusker lagers, some of the best-known beers in Africa (Pepper 1996: 135). Nigeria and South. Africa, however, are the major beer producers on the. African continent. Most of Nigeria’s beer is brewed by Guinness and Heineken (both of which have major stakes in Nigeria), along with several indigenous breweries. South Africa’s beer is produced by South African Breweries and is almost entirely in the lager style (Pepper 1996:135).

Lager beer reached Asia in 1904, when German and British entrepreneurs established a Western-style brewery along the coast of northern China, producing a brand known as Tsingtao. The Dai Nippon Beer Company of Japan acquired the Tsingtao Brewery in 1916 and retained it until after World War II. In 1932, Japan continued the spread of lager in East Asia by constructing another brewery in Manchuria and introduced breweries into Korea as well. The Dai Nippon Beer Company, along with Kirin, dominated the Japanese beer market until broken up by American occupation authorities in the aftermath of World War II (Laker 1986:60,1987: 25-8).

Throughout the twentieth century, the trend has been toward ever larger commercial brewers. In the United States, for example, the number of large breweries has decreased from more than 200 to less than 50. Today, it is mostly lager beers that are consumed globally, and these are produced by big corporations for large markets - often international ones. Although European and American lagers tend to dominate the world market, one exception to this trend is Singha, a lager from Thailand, which is one of the few Asian beers that enjoy a wide degree of export to the West, especially as Thai restaurants continue to grow in popularity (Pepper 1996: 130).

The exceptions to the dominance of mass-produced, globally marketed beers are the products of some “microbreweries” (but not those connected with the giant brewing companies) that found a ready market in the 1980s and 1990s, when entrepreneurs began distributing innumerable beers that were produced either in a “brew pub” or in a small brewery. Microbrewers offer a uniqueness not found in mass-produced beers, crafting their microbrews in a fashion reminiscent of earlier days, when beer production was confined to monasteries, village breweries, or to the home itself. Generally priced higher than their mass-produced counterparts but with a more refined appeal, microbrews have established a niche among the more affluent consumers in America and Europe.

Phillip A. Cantrell II