January 4, 2017 • 33 mins
Erik Lars Myers, founder, CEO and head brewer at Mystery Brewing Company, talks about the history of beer, including how it connects to charity, nutrition and humans' first development of agriculture.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Bee Wilson, and Holly Fry is on
a very very well deserved vacation today. So I have
(00:21):
a special guest with me. That is Eric Lars Myers.
He is founder, CEO, and head brewer at Mystery Brewing Company,
president of the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild, and co
author of North Carolina Craft Beer and Breweries. And if
you have not guessed already, he is here to talk
to me today about the history of beer. Hi, Eric, Uh,
(00:43):
I'm very glad to have you on. Eric is also
a friend of mine, so just to put that out
there at the beginning, so thank you so much for
being on the show today. Eric. I'm excited to talk
to you about the history of beer. I have questions
that some of them are questions that I've been curious about.
Some of them are things that listeners have asked us
about on the show before. So I'm very happy to
(01:04):
have somebody Uh on the show. He was very knowledgeable
about this. So a while back, we did a podcast
on the history of cheese and one of the things
that we talked about in that podcast was about how
to make cheese. A civilization has to have animals that
they have in a pasture that would produce more milk
than their own young needed to survive, and the civilization
(01:26):
would also have to know how to milk those animals
and how to have some way of storing the milk
to make cheese out of it later. So how does
that compare to what a civilization needs to make beer. Well,
in a lot of ways, it's not that dissimilar. What
it really needs is grain. Beer is and has been
for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, of grain
(01:46):
based alcoholic beverage. So really, at the end of the day,
what people needed was grain and water, uh and someplace
to let it sit so that it could go through
a natural fermentation process. And so without um, without agricult
for with that fields of grain, it's hard to have
enough grain to actually do that. There's a lot of um.
There's a lot of theory that says that why humans
(02:09):
settled down and stopped being a nomatic culture in general
was because they had figured out how to make beer.
And you know, it's really heavy to carry around giant
pots of water, and so in order to sit down
and really get good and drunk, you needed to do
it in one place, and so that's why they started villages.
I think that there's just as much evidence that says
that they figured out how to you know, have agriculture
(02:31):
and a consistent food source, and so that's probably why
they were hanging out. But I think Peter was probably
a great secondary to that. There's a good motivation, absolutely yeah.
And once people figured out how to domesticate grain and
actually have this around for for use, I can imagine
that the mistake of making beer, which would you know,
(02:52):
sort of imagine this is grains sitting in a jar
somewhere that gets left out during a rainstorm. Uh, and
then somebody doesn't really necessary really want to clean it up.
Very quickly it ferments, and you know, maybe an animal
goes and drinks it, and then somebody realizes that animal
is having a great time, or maybe even tries it themselves. Uh.
You know, that seems like a maybe not an easy
(03:15):
mistake to make right away to discover how to make beer,
But I imagine I can imagine a world in which
had happened. So do we have any idea of who
that was that made that first mistake an invented beer
or how long ago it was. Uh So, there's theories
usually talk about eight to ten thousand years ago, really
right around when people were actually settling down and you know,
(03:36):
stopped being a nomadic culture in sort of the Fertile
Crescent area of the world. Um. In terms of you
know what civilization, you can go back to ancient Sumerians,
uh and this kind of thing, but it probably predates
any sort of organized um, you know, cities or cultures.
(03:56):
Uh So, there are in several culture or gods and
goddesses of beer or of brewing. Do you do you
have any cool stories about these figures in mythology? So
the one, well, I guess the real thing that comes
to mind. Most of the gods in in history that
(04:17):
have to do with beer are actually goddesses. Um. Nankasi
comes to mind from Sumerian culture in which Nankasi was
the goddess of beer. A lot of the other gods
and goddesses through history. We're also women because women were
really the people that made beer for a really long time,
all the way up until the Industrial Revolution, making beer
was women's work. Uh, you know, it was the stuff
(04:39):
that you had to do in the home and and
uh and around the kitchen. It was using a lot
of the same ingredients that you were using to make bread.
So h it made a lot of sense to have
female goddesses for for beer. The ones that come to mind,
UH in particularly in in sort of Christian tradition is St.
Bridgid in Ireland. She's the patron saint of Ireland and
(05:02):
and she's one of the one of those appropriated saints
that sort of got picked up as the as the
church was spreading because she actually her existence predates uh
Catholicism or Christianity in Ireland. But she is rumored to
have actually made a lake of beer to feed the
poor and uh and turned water into beer for a
lepren colony. There's all kinds of really great stories in
(05:25):
which she spontaneously created beer in all of these places,
which is in a lot of ways kind of what
brewers do on a daily basis, turned water into beer.
She also has a really great poem about how in
heaven there's a lake of beer, which is which is
the outstanding The thing that I really want to point
out though, UM is that there's a lot of theory
that says that when you're reading the Bible, a lot
(05:49):
of what is referred to his wine is probably beer
because the area in which the Bible is actually set
in in history is actually more of a grain based
culture than a based culture. Uh. You know, people weren't
really making a lot of fermented fruits. They were probably
making fermented honey and fermented grain beverages. So for the
most part, what you're looking at when you're looking at
(06:10):
a translation of the Bible was something that was done
in classic cultures like Italy or Rome, where they had
a very wine heavy history. So most of the time
when you're reading something about about wine in the Bible,
they're probably actually talking about beer or meat or some
sort of blend there rather than sort of the traditional
you know, there's always these ideas of somebody drinking red wine,
(06:32):
whether you know, somewhere in uh in the Fertile Crescent,
which seems really inaccurate. I had never thought about that,
but that makes a lot of sense, like that the
climate there is not quite as suitable to growing a
bunch of red wine grapes. Yeah, And you know, you
look at you look at pictures, particularly classic paintings of
(06:56):
biblical times, and there's always this idea that people are
in this incredibly fertile environment with all these grapes and
and there's wine and this kind of thing, but in
the grand scheme of things, that really would not have
been the case. You're talking about a grain culture and
in an area that it had grain based alcoholic beverages
for thousands of years before the time of Christ. So
(07:19):
you were just talking about how for a really long time,
making beer was women's work. But there's also this association
between beer and monks and monastic life. Where does that
come from? Um, So, the the history of monks and
beer really goes back to this idea of of charity
and helping travelers and the poor when it comes to
monastic traditions. So a lot of people were a lot
(07:42):
of monks were creating beer not only to sustain themselves
and just have uh, you know, a really important source
of water and liquid within their own monastery, but the
ability to be able to help travelers and help the
poor's charity, to give something up as a nutritional value
for people. For a long time, beer was really closely
related to food, and really it still is in a
(08:03):
lot of ways, because it was a really great way
to make sort of you know, liquid bread. It had
a lot of good nutritional value. It what probably wasn't
as alcoholic as we really think about these times in
these days, but it it did have something that people
would prize as both the source of nutrition and a
source of hydration. So you know, in a lot of
ways it was charity work. It's turned in now to
(08:26):
this really great thing, particularly in Trappis monasteries in Europe. Um,
and there's also one in the US where the funds
from beer making actually go to a lot of charity
work or to keeping the the you know roofs on
the buildings at the monastery, and um, all kinds of
great stuff. So it's um, it's always sort of been
an arm of charity in an arm of food and
(08:48):
beverage is just a normal way of operating through life
rather than those monks you know just really like the
to get super drunk use of hops started in the monastery.
You know, all kinds of great stuff like this, but
in the grand scheme of things, it was really about
being and then um, you know, having a big party
(09:09):
all the time. Uh. So you just mentioned that beer
in the past was a lot more related to food.
I know listeners have asked us before about how there's
this perception that, you know, the founders of of of
the United States were basically drinking beer all the time.
And does that mean that they were just kind of
(09:31):
drunk all the time, or was the beer that they
were drinking a lot different from the beer that there
is today or is that whole idea just a misperception.
I would actually say it's probably a little a column
in a little column. B Uh. There was certainly a
lot of alcoholic consumption throughout history, and and I think
that the idea that people were just a little bit
(09:51):
drunk all the time for the most part was probably
not that much of a reach. Um. Yeah, you're talking
about times particularly is the founding of this country, in
which an essential handful of people decided to fight against
the largest empire the world had seen at that point. Uh,
in the British Empire. I feel like you've got to
(10:11):
be a little drunk to, you know, decide to go
through boxes the t up the side of a boat.
But um, beer would have been a lot different. Um.
As you get closer to our time in history, it
is really becoming more and more like the beer we
have today. But the farther you go back, the more
it is a really fast fermented beverage that is probably
(10:33):
fairly low and alcohol for the most part um, and
it's gonna be consumed for nutrition and probably not really
for buzz. You're gonna get some beer that's a little
bit higher in alcohol. Particularly by the probably seventeen or
eighteen hundreds, of people had a much better idea of, uh,
you know, how to make beer that was that was
you know, high in alcohol and really consistent. But before that,
(10:55):
when you're talking Middle Ages and upwards, it's it's um,
it's it's much more of a guess. You know, people
didn't really know what was happening during fermentation. It was
the seventeen hundreds before our eighteen hundreds, before people knew
that the East was a thing. Up until then, they
just called it God is good. They would put the
ingredients into the same vessel that it was before, and
then bubbles would happen, and then that would get them drunk,
(11:17):
and that's really great, um, but it's not a really
fantastic way to make a really consistent, well worn beverage.
So uh, yeah, I think a little columby, a little columby.
I think there was a lot of drinking, you know.
I think you can look at the history of a
lot of European cultures that shows that. Uh. You know,
there's probably a period in which pretty much everybody in
England was consuming gin all the same time. Um uh so, yeah,
(11:41):
people were probably a little drunk, but you know, probably
not in the same types of ways that we think
about it now. All right, well, before we move on
to some more questions about beer history, we're going to
take a brief pause for a word from a sponsor. Okay,
(12:03):
to get back into our discussion about some beer history. Um,
there's this story that is widely repeated that's about how
pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock because they were out of beer.
Is there any truth to that? There? Absolutely is. This
is one of my favorite stories to tell on my tour.
(12:24):
Um So, basically because beer was such a great source
of nutrition in water. Uh. It was the thing that
people tended to keep on boats for a long ocean voyages.
See when you put water in a cask in a
in a big barrel and put it in in the
hold of the ship. And go across the ocean, that
water is gonna go ranted pretty quickly. You know, water
(12:46):
is the building block of life, as it's a great
substrate for bacteria and mold to grow in. And when
you're putting water inside of a barrel, no matter how
great and clean that barrel is, there's a certain amount
of rock that's gonna sit into that wood and things
are gonna grow. So it was a great way to
get people sick. Um, and it's you know, it was
very clearly before the times of reverse osmosis and desalination.
(13:08):
So when you're looking for something to keep you hydrated
throughout an ocean voyage, the most sensible way to do
that was beer, particularly because beer has hops. Hops are
an antibacterial, and of course there has alcohol, and alcohol
is somewhat of an antiseptic and will actually stop a
lot of harmful bacteria will growing in it. There are
(13:28):
few to know human pathogens that can live in beer.
So um, it turns out to be a really great
safe source of drinking water for these long voyages when
you couldn't actually bring water with you. So when they
were on their way across the ocean, they packed enough
beer to keep them going on their trip. But when
they got to you know, they're planning on a fourteen
(13:49):
week journey or something like this. But when they when
they got there, they realized that not only were they
running out of beer, but they had to really plan
for the oncoming winter so they could make sure that
they had beer to keep them going. Um. So when
they landed, they did so out of necessity. You know,
they probably, if they had more beer, could have gone
around and found a much more temperate and nice place
to live in New Hampshire. Um, it's probably those Uh
(14:11):
New Hampshire is lovely, but for the first winters there
were probably real cold. Um. So they really had to
get on land and find a good source of water,
good sources of running water so that they could actually
build a brewery and have a good source of water
for the winter. Uh. So we've talked a lot about
(14:33):
people making beer in monasteries and women making beer in
the kitchen winded. Making beer really turned into an industry
like everything else with the Industrial Revolution. Thanks Industrial Revolution,
Yeah right, it's done so much for us. Uh. Yeah.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, beer was really something that
happened in the home. It was it was happening in uh,
(14:56):
in manor houses and farmhouses and all kinds in different
places where basically you were looking for a good way
to preserve some sort of grain for a longer time,
and of course preserve a source of hydration as well.
So there's a famous German beer purity law that people
still follow today. That's the Ryan High School Boat. Tell
(15:19):
me about how that was originally set down and why
it has become so prominent even still today. So the
Ryan High School boat is really interesting because in general
it's sort of a trade restriction more than it is
a beer purity law. UM. At the time in Germany
you had an area which was growing a lot of
(15:40):
barley and a lot of wheat. UM. And barley is
particularly well suited for brewing because of it's it's pricking
content and it starts content, and wheat is not because
it has a high protein content uh and uh, and
it does not have enough enzymes to convert its starts
into sugars. And without getting really nerdy into science, UM,
(16:01):
suffice to say that weaks better for bread, barley is
better for beer. So uh. At this point in history,
there was a lot of local grain production in Um
but not a lot of restrictions on where things were going.
And so the Rheinhand School, but it was one of
many trade restrictions that popped up, just sort of control
where ingredients were moving from a trade resetrich and standpoint.
(16:23):
So the the fifteen sixteen Purity Law, which is what
the Rhinehand School both the people referred to, defines that
beer must be made out of barley hops in water
and that's it. Um. It also defines how much beer
should be sold for one finic per mosse. It defines
you know, like uh, where it can be sold, and
(16:45):
all kinds of wonderful things that have nothing to do
with the actual ingredients of beer. It because it was
referred to as the beer purity Law, I think people
tend to look back at it with this sort of
nostalgic idea of like, oh, this is when beer was great, um,
you know, but you gotta understand that that's before they
(17:06):
even knew what yeast was, right, like yeast isn't in
the rhyn Head schoolte they had to amend the rhine
Head skoobote in the eighteen fifties to put east into it.
Uh and I just totally made up eighteen fifties. I
have no idea if that's true, but it was really late. Um.
It was after the East was discovered by Louis Pasteur
at the Carlsberg Brewery in Germany. Uh, that they said, oh, well,
(17:31):
I guess we have to put that into the law too,
or otherwise we can't make beer. But it's it's been
a pervasive law. It was actually a law in Germany
until the formation of the EU. UH. And once the
EU came in, it's still considered a you know, a
great way to make beer, but it couldn't be something
that defined beer for other countries within the confines of
(17:52):
the EU, and so they had to allow other ingredients
and beer. The hilarious part about it is that there
are plenty of classic styles from Germany that don't meet
the Rene high school boat and people have just found
ways around it. You know, you could get dugal permission
to make beer with wheat uh and all kinds of
stuff like this. Uh. There's there's lots of beers in
(18:14):
Germany that have you know, salt added and coriander and
all of these you know, other things that are that
are added to the beer. But somehow people sort of
ignore the fact that that you know, those don't fall
under the rhine Head school but they're still wonderful classic
German styles that taste delicious. In America, we tend to
um fromanticize it quite a bit in our breweries here,
(18:37):
particularly the German style lager breweries, in which you know,
this beer can't get more peer than this, and um,
and it's a it's a wonderful romantic ideal that is
doesn't really bear truth to the rest of the world,
because you've got a world full of brewing cultures in
which putting all kinds of other things into beer is
perfectly fine, and those things can make amazing flavors, uh,
(18:59):
you know, without the rhne Heads. But we wouldn't have
rye beers, and we wouldn't have most of our Belgian styles,
and you know, you'd never have a fruit beer, uh,
and all of the great stuff that we innovate and
create in America would not exist, um with the rene
Heid school boat in place. On the other hand, it
is the base of all beer. All beer is made
with the four ingredients of barley, hops, water, and um yeast.
(19:22):
And it's the it's the simplest, easiest way to make beer.
So all of those other things are are additions, not
instead of right. So you just mentioned these wonderful beer
styles in in Germany and uh in Belgium. How there
are so many vastly, vastly different styles of beer today
(19:45):
that tastes so much different from one another. How did
all of these different styles come about? So, you know,
there's there's a lot of fun stories out in the
world about how different styles were created, and most of
them are just story race. Uh, there's not a lot
of evidence that shows that any particular style was invented
here or there. Most of them grew out of local
(20:08):
brewing traditions, just brewing with what they had local locally
available to them, the type of water that they were
brewing within their local rivers, and that the grain and
hops and um and ingredients that were growing near them
in the world sort of came together naturally to create
the types of beers that eventually became associated with styles.
(20:29):
So a lot of styles are sort of works backwards. Um.
I think that My guess is that until homebrewing became
a really prevalent hobby in the US, that people didn't
really think about a lot of styles up until then.
We have a tendency to categorize things. In America. We
really like to put things in boxes, which is funny
(20:50):
because we tend to like to break out of those
boxes as often as possible. But UH, I suspect that
for the most part, a lot of the defined styles
that we deal with today are UH sort of modern
inventions UH by way of meaning that the reason we
call them is that sometime in the past, if you
(21:11):
do a hundred years, somebody said, oh, we should carry
these things in a certain way. UM, not because any
one thing was intended as an invented style. UM. The
only couple that come to mind are Pilsner or kell
is the sort of archetypical Pillsner. It's the It was
the very first pillsman in the world, and it was
made first in pills in the Czech Republic, basically because
(21:34):
there was a brewer there that was making making headway
with the new malting process that didn't leave the malti
ter darker smoky. So it was the first time you
had people really bright light sweet malt, and pills in
the Czech Republic has incredibly soft water, and of course,
a lot of local hops in the Czech Republic and
putting those all together really made the first beer of
(21:57):
its type, this this really bright, clear, uh hoppy but
not bitter pilsner beer. And it's called the pilsner because
it originated in pills Czech Republic, and from there people
really liked that beer instead of repeating it, and it's
essentially how we have. Most of the light loggers that
we have in the world today are built off of
that sort of archetypical pilsner style. But for a really
(22:20):
long time, any given beer made in Germany was named
after the town that it was from, or in Austria
or Bohemia, which is why you have a Dortmunder or
um Uh. I'm gonna remember other things Vienna lager or
Munich lagger um, all kinds of these great styles just
(22:41):
built out of the fact that they were made in
a town using what was local, rather than something that
somebody tried to invent specifically. So I have a few
more beer questions. We will get to you after another
quick word from a sponsor. So to get back to
(23:02):
our beer conversation earlier, we were talking about how beer
used to be really made primarily by women, and today
at least in the United States, the beer industry seems
to be pretty male dominated, and beer is heavily marketed
towards men, with uh sometimes beers for women being marketed
(23:22):
as like girly beers. How did that transition come You
sound very chagrined. Now did that transition come about? Well,
it really does come down to the Industrial Revolution, when
when people were starting to you know, create factories. Factories
were not a place for women for the most part,
and beer became a really big business. As soon as
(23:43):
you could make it in really high quantities and move
it around you could, um, you could sell it and
make a lot of money. Um. And so it became
an industry just like so many other things in our history,
and really moved out of the home and into the factory.
It's really take and until probably the last decade or
so for for women to really get back into the
(24:05):
brewing industry in a really meaningful way. I think if
you were to look at the brewing industry now as
opposed to five or ten years ago, you would see
a significant higher, much more significant number of women in it. UM.
I know from my experience. My staff at my brewery
is about eighty five percent women. Uh, and not because
I you know, particularly try to hire women so much
(24:27):
as those just we're the best people for the job. UM.
So there's just a lot more women interested in the
industry now. Women are particularly good tasters, um. And a
lot of the professional tasters in the industry are women
because they have very delicate and very good talents. UM
among the best you know, sort of blenders in the
new sour beer industry and um our women. Uh. And
(24:50):
a lot of the you know, most storied brewers in
our country are starting to be women as well. It's
really nice to see it sort of coming full circle
and becoming more of a co ed industry because it
really is where it started. So it seems like every
year or so, uh, somebody finds an old beer in
a shipwreck, either decides to drink it or decides to
(25:12):
use the ust to make a new beer. We've talked
about these we do. These episodes are unearthed episodes at
the end of every year, and it seems like we've
told that story a couple of times. Uh. This this year,
we're not. We have one that's about a surprising discovery
of how early um barley was being used to make
beer in China, which is earlier than people previously thought. Um,
(25:33):
but like it's it seems to be just a very
frequent thing of Oh, here is a shipwreck with some beer.
We're either going to drink this beer or we're going
to make uh, we're gonna gonna try to get the
east and make a new beer out of this beer's yeast.
How often does that actually turn out to be a
good idea? I would suspect that drinking the beer is
probably not a great idea. Uh, you know, even though
(25:55):
it's been cold and pressurized and um, you know and
down there, it probably just doesn't taste very good. It
could it could be great, but I suspect that what's
mostly happened in that bottle is a lot of yeast death. Um.
When yeast die, they burst, and um, you end up
getting the contents of the cells inside of the beer.
(26:17):
And it sort of tastes soy, saucy. It's a very
humummy kind of brothy flavor, which is just not always pleasant.
It can be very good, but you know, for the
most part, beer, particularly really old beer from hundreds of
years ago. It was really meant to be drunk fresh
rather than aged. Two hundred years in the bottom of
the ocean um. The yeast, on the other hand, if
(26:38):
they're surviving, yeast cells will almost definitely allow new beer
to be made. And I have not read about any
successful beers being made from old recovered bottles, but I
have heard about yeast being recovered from amber from prehistoric
times sacrimcey strains that have been used to make beer,
(26:58):
uh and getting so of like I believe it's like
Dino beer something on the West Coast where somebody's actually
grew yeast strain that was that was trapped in amber
and I was able to make beer with it, So
it's definitely been done. I think that they have some
particularly neat flavor profiles, but they're not that widely known
(27:21):
about are used quite yet. Awesome. So the last question
that I have for you, I know this is a
question that you love to answer. There is a very
famous quote about beer that has attributed to Ben Franklin,
which that beer is proof that God loves us and
wants us to be happy. Yeah, it's one of the
things that you know, it's so pervasive in the beer industry,
(27:42):
and it's such a wonderful sentiment that it's hard to
be really angry about. But I'm kind of a really
pedantic nerd when it comes to a lot of things,
and so this is one of the things that that
kind of kind of bugs me, particularly because Ben Franklin
didn't say that. Actually actually have the quote that he wrote. Um,
(28:03):
and so I'm gonna read it to you, even though
it's gonna take a minute. Here we have the conversion
of water into wine at the marriage, and kind of
as as of a miracle. But this conversion is through
the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes
behold the rain which descends from Heaven upon our vineyards,
and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed
into wine, a constant proof that God loves us and
loves to see us happy. So he was really saying
(28:25):
that about wine. Ben Franklin didn't really like beer all
that much. He was he didn't. Yeah, that's true. I mean,
he's he's sort of, you know, a wonderful historic curmudgeon,
but he actually thought of beer as a sort of
very lazy man's beverage. Um. He used to work in
a printing house in uh in London, and the people
(28:47):
that drove him the most nuts were the people that
were drinking beer. Uh. He they were the people that
you know, we're sort of uh, what is There's another
quote from him that says, um uh. They wanted to
see from this in several instances that the water American,
as they called me, was stronger than themselves who drink
strong beer. We had an ale house boy who attended
always in the house to supply the workman, my companion
(29:09):
at the press drink every day a point before breakfast,
a point at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a
pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a
pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another one
he had done his day's work. I thought it a
detestable custom. Got a lot of points. Yeah, well, and
it is. You know, there was probably going back to uh,
you know, whether or not people were drunk all the time. Yeah,
(29:31):
they probably were. Um. And you know, particularly in some
points of America or history, when you're living in an
urban setting, it's not going to be the best smelling
or wonderful place to be. And you know, there's probably
a certain amount of escapism to be had. But he
was just not a big fan of beer at any time.
So it's Um, it's always one of those things that
(29:52):
kind of drives me nuts when you see him quoted
that way, not because it isn't a beautiful sentiment and
one that he actually meant. Uh, you know that you
can look at it another way, right, God makes rainfall
upon the fields of gross barley that fontaneously turns into beer. Um,
but that's not what he said. It's a great sentiment.
It's kind of like those those wonderful uh, you know
(30:15):
memes on the internet that say you shouldn't believe everything
you read signed Abraham Lincoln if you read on the internet. Um,
it's been attributed because it's sort of close. But I
think we should take men Franklin out of beer. Uh So,
is there anything else about beer that you just want
to make sure and a beer history that you want
to make sure that our our listeners know about before
(30:36):
we wrap up? Oh gosh, if I would have been
prepared for that question, I probably would have something. But uh,
but no, I think this has been a lot of
fun and and and really great. Thank you so so
much for being on the show. Eric. So once again,
that was Eric Lars Meyer's founder, CEO, and head brewer
a mystery brewing company company, among a lot of other things.
(31:00):
And instead of our normal listener mail today, I am
actually recording this from our Atlanta studio, which is not
typical anymore. Uh Eric is joining us by a Skype.
I have some long overdue shout outs to people who
have sent things to us in the mail, after just
embarrassing long time of getting them getting through everything that's
(31:23):
on my desk. So thanks to Christina for sending a
bookmark with a picture of beautiful Estonian lace on it
after hearing my disaster story about my shawl that did
not come out the way I intended in our knitting episode.
Thanks to Ashley for sending hand silk screen cards that
say Happy Cake Day. They are delightful. Thank you to
Blaze for sending handmade hats and necklaces. Also after our
(31:46):
nipping knitting episodes. Uh Kara sent a copy of In
All Its Theory, which is the book of first person
accounts of the Blizzard of eighteen eighty eight that we
talked about in that episode. Uh Marla from Hair Books
sent us a series of books that she wrote. An
illustrated Ethan sent a documentary he made called Ghosts of
the West End of the Bonanza Trail, and Talia sent
(32:09):
us some adorable crochet animals. They are a bunny and
a kitten. My apologies for just an embarrassing delay and
thanking all these folks. Uh and if I accidentally duplicated somebody,
Holly has already thanked on the show, because she is
very often our our male thank you person. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, where a history podcast at how stuff works
(32:31):
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sorts of information, including a lot about the science of beer.
(32:53):
You can also come to our website missed in history
dot com to find show notes for this and all
about other episodes. We have a link to where you
can find Eric's book about North Carolina craft beer and breweries.
You will also find show notes for all of the
episodes Holly and I have worked on, and some videos
we have been been putting up recently from our recent
trip to Boston, Massachusetts. You can do all that in
(33:16):
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss in history dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Bee Wilson, and Holly Fry is on
a very very well deserved vacation today. So I have
(00:21):
a special guest with me. That is Eric Lars Myers.
He is founder, CEO, and head brewer at Mystery Brewing Company,
president of the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild, and co
author of North Carolina Craft Beer and Breweries. And if
you have not guessed already, he is here to talk
to me today about the history of beer. Hi, Eric, Uh,
(00:43):
I'm very glad to have you on. Eric is also
a friend of mine, so just to put that out
there at the beginning, so thank you so much for
being on the show today. Eric. I'm excited to talk
to you about the history of beer. I have questions
that some of them are questions that I've been curious about.
Some of them are things that listeners have asked us
about on the show before. So I'm very happy to
(01:04):
have somebody Uh on the show. He was very knowledgeable
about this. So a while back, we did a podcast
on the history of cheese and one of the things
that we talked about in that podcast was about how
to make cheese. A civilization has to have animals that
they have in a pasture that would produce more milk
than their own young needed to survive, and the civilization
(01:26):
would also have to know how to milk those animals
and how to have some way of storing the milk
to make cheese out of it later. So how does
that compare to what a civilization needs to make beer. Well,
in a lot of ways, it's not that dissimilar. What
it really needs is grain. Beer is and has been
for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, of grain
(01:46):
based alcoholic beverage. So really, at the end of the day,
what people needed was grain and water, uh and someplace
to let it sit so that it could go through
a natural fermentation process. And so without um, without agricult
for with that fields of grain, it's hard to have
enough grain to actually do that. There's a lot of um.
There's a lot of theory that says that why humans
(02:09):
settled down and stopped being a nomatic culture in general
was because they had figured out how to make beer.
And you know, it's really heavy to carry around giant
pots of water, and so in order to sit down
and really get good and drunk, you needed to do
it in one place, and so that's why they started villages.
I think that there's just as much evidence that says
that they figured out how to you know, have agriculture
(02:31):
and a consistent food source, and so that's probably why
they were hanging out. But I think Peter was probably
a great secondary to that. There's a good motivation, absolutely yeah.
And once people figured out how to domesticate grain and
actually have this around for for use, I can imagine
that the mistake of making beer, which would you know,
(02:52):
sort of imagine this is grains sitting in a jar
somewhere that gets left out during a rainstorm. Uh, and
then somebody doesn't really necessary really want to clean it up.
Very quickly it ferments, and you know, maybe an animal
goes and drinks it, and then somebody realizes that animal
is having a great time, or maybe even tries it themselves. Uh.
You know, that seems like a maybe not an easy
(03:15):
mistake to make right away to discover how to make beer,
But I imagine I can imagine a world in which
had happened. So do we have any idea of who
that was that made that first mistake an invented beer
or how long ago it was. Uh So, there's theories
usually talk about eight to ten thousand years ago, really
right around when people were actually settling down and you know,
(03:36):
stopped being a nomadic culture in sort of the Fertile
Crescent area of the world. Um. In terms of you
know what civilization, you can go back to ancient Sumerians,
uh and this kind of thing, but it probably predates
any sort of organized um, you know, cities or cultures.
(03:56):
Uh So, there are in several culture or gods and
goddesses of beer or of brewing. Do you do you
have any cool stories about these figures in mythology? So
the one, well, I guess the real thing that comes
to mind. Most of the gods in in history that
(04:17):
have to do with beer are actually goddesses. Um. Nankasi
comes to mind from Sumerian culture in which Nankasi was
the goddess of beer. A lot of the other gods
and goddesses through history. We're also women because women were
really the people that made beer for a really long time,
all the way up until the Industrial Revolution, making beer
was women's work. Uh, you know, it was the stuff
(04:39):
that you had to do in the home and and
uh and around the kitchen. It was using a lot
of the same ingredients that you were using to make bread.
So h it made a lot of sense to have
female goddesses for for beer. The ones that come to mind,
UH in particularly in in sort of Christian tradition is St.
Bridgid in Ireland. She's the patron saint of Ireland and
(05:02):
and she's one of the one of those appropriated saints
that sort of got picked up as the as the
church was spreading because she actually her existence predates uh
Catholicism or Christianity in Ireland. But she is rumored to
have actually made a lake of beer to feed the
poor and uh and turned water into beer for a
lepren colony. There's all kinds of really great stories in
(05:25):
which she spontaneously created beer in all of these places,
which is in a lot of ways kind of what
brewers do on a daily basis, turned water into beer.
She also has a really great poem about how in
heaven there's a lake of beer, which is which is
the outstanding The thing that I really want to point
out though, UM is that there's a lot of theory
that says that when you're reading the Bible, a lot
(05:49):
of what is referred to his wine is probably beer
because the area in which the Bible is actually set
in in history is actually more of a grain based
culture than a based culture. Uh. You know, people weren't
really making a lot of fermented fruits. They were probably
making fermented honey and fermented grain beverages. So for the
most part, what you're looking at when you're looking at
(06:10):
a translation of the Bible was something that was done
in classic cultures like Italy or Rome, where they had
a very wine heavy history. So most of the time
when you're reading something about about wine in the Bible,
they're probably actually talking about beer or meat or some
sort of blend there rather than sort of the traditional
you know, there's always these ideas of somebody drinking red wine,
(06:32):
whether you know, somewhere in uh in the Fertile Crescent,
which seems really inaccurate. I had never thought about that,
but that makes a lot of sense, like that the
climate there is not quite as suitable to growing a
bunch of red wine grapes. Yeah, And you know, you
look at you look at pictures, particularly classic paintings of
(06:56):
biblical times, and there's always this idea that people are
in this incredibly fertile environment with all these grapes and
and there's wine and this kind of thing, but in
the grand scheme of things, that really would not have
been the case. You're talking about a grain culture and
in an area that it had grain based alcoholic beverages
for thousands of years before the time of Christ. So
(07:19):
you were just talking about how for a really long time,
making beer was women's work. But there's also this association
between beer and monks and monastic life. Where does that
come from? Um, So, the the history of monks and
beer really goes back to this idea of of charity
and helping travelers and the poor when it comes to
monastic traditions. So a lot of people were a lot
(07:42):
of monks were creating beer not only to sustain themselves
and just have uh, you know, a really important source
of water and liquid within their own monastery, but the
ability to be able to help travelers and help the
poor's charity, to give something up as a nutritional value
for people. For a long time, beer was really closely
related to food, and really it still is in a
(08:03):
lot of ways, because it was a really great way
to make sort of you know, liquid bread. It had
a lot of good nutritional value. It what probably wasn't
as alcoholic as we really think about these times in
these days, but it it did have something that people
would prize as both the source of nutrition and a
source of hydration. So you know, in a lot of
ways it was charity work. It's turned in now to
(08:26):
this really great thing, particularly in Trappis monasteries in Europe. Um,
and there's also one in the US where the funds
from beer making actually go to a lot of charity
work or to keeping the the you know roofs on
the buildings at the monastery, and um, all kinds of
great stuff. So it's um, it's always sort of been
an arm of charity in an arm of food and
(08:48):
beverage is just a normal way of operating through life
rather than those monks you know just really like the
to get super drunk use of hops started in the monastery.
You know, all kinds of great stuff like this, but
in the grand scheme of things, it was really about
being and then um, you know, having a big party
(09:09):
all the time. Uh. So you just mentioned that beer
in the past was a lot more related to food.
I know listeners have asked us before about how there's
this perception that, you know, the founders of of of
the United States were basically drinking beer all the time.
And does that mean that they were just kind of
(09:31):
drunk all the time, or was the beer that they
were drinking a lot different from the beer that there
is today or is that whole idea just a misperception.
I would actually say it's probably a little a column
in a little column. B Uh. There was certainly a
lot of alcoholic consumption throughout history, and and I think
that the idea that people were just a little bit
(09:51):
drunk all the time for the most part was probably
not that much of a reach. Um. Yeah, you're talking
about times particularly is the founding of this country, in
which an essential handful of people decided to fight against
the largest empire the world had seen at that point. Uh,
in the British Empire. I feel like you've got to
(10:11):
be a little drunk to, you know, decide to go
through boxes the t up the side of a boat.
But um, beer would have been a lot different. Um.
As you get closer to our time in history, it
is really becoming more and more like the beer we
have today. But the farther you go back, the more
it is a really fast fermented beverage that is probably
(10:33):
fairly low and alcohol for the most part um, and
it's gonna be consumed for nutrition and probably not really
for buzz. You're gonna get some beer that's a little
bit higher in alcohol. Particularly by the probably seventeen or
eighteen hundreds, of people had a much better idea of, uh,
you know, how to make beer that was that was
you know, high in alcohol and really consistent. But before that,
(10:55):
when you're talking Middle Ages and upwards, it's it's um,
it's it's much more of a guess. You know, people
didn't really know what was happening during fermentation. It was
the seventeen hundreds before our eighteen hundreds, before people knew
that the East was a thing. Up until then, they
just called it God is good. They would put the
ingredients into the same vessel that it was before, and
then bubbles would happen, and then that would get them drunk,
(11:17):
and that's really great, um, but it's not a really
fantastic way to make a really consistent, well worn beverage.
So uh, yeah, I think a little columby, a little columby.
I think there was a lot of drinking, you know.
I think you can look at the history of a
lot of European cultures that shows that. Uh. You know,
there's probably a period in which pretty much everybody in
England was consuming gin all the same time. Um uh so, yeah,
(11:41):
people were probably a little drunk, but you know, probably
not in the same types of ways that we think
about it now. All right, well, before we move on
to some more questions about beer history, we're going to
take a brief pause for a word from a sponsor. Okay,
(12:03):
to get back into our discussion about some beer history. Um,
there's this story that is widely repeated that's about how
pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock because they were out of beer.
Is there any truth to that? There? Absolutely is. This
is one of my favorite stories to tell on my tour.
(12:24):
Um So, basically because beer was such a great source
of nutrition in water. Uh. It was the thing that
people tended to keep on boats for a long ocean voyages.
See when you put water in a cask in a
in a big barrel and put it in in the
hold of the ship. And go across the ocean, that
water is gonna go ranted pretty quickly. You know, water
(12:46):
is the building block of life, as it's a great
substrate for bacteria and mold to grow in. And when
you're putting water inside of a barrel, no matter how
great and clean that barrel is, there's a certain amount
of rock that's gonna sit into that wood and things
are gonna grow. So it was a great way to
get people sick. Um, and it's you know, it was
very clearly before the times of reverse osmosis and desalination.
(13:08):
So when you're looking for something to keep you hydrated
throughout an ocean voyage, the most sensible way to do
that was beer, particularly because beer has hops. Hops are
an antibacterial, and of course there has alcohol, and alcohol
is somewhat of an antiseptic and will actually stop a
lot of harmful bacteria will growing in it. There are
(13:28):
few to know human pathogens that can live in beer.
So um, it turns out to be a really great
safe source of drinking water for these long voyages when
you couldn't actually bring water with you. So when they
were on their way across the ocean, they packed enough
beer to keep them going on their trip. But when
they got to you know, they're planning on a fourteen
(13:49):
week journey or something like this. But when they when
they got there, they realized that not only were they
running out of beer, but they had to really plan
for the oncoming winter so they could make sure that
they had beer to keep them going. Um. So when
they landed, they did so out of necessity. You know,
they probably, if they had more beer, could have gone
around and found a much more temperate and nice place
to live in New Hampshire. Um, it's probably those Uh
(14:11):
New Hampshire is lovely, but for the first winters there
were probably real cold. Um. So they really had to
get on land and find a good source of water,
good sources of running water so that they could actually
build a brewery and have a good source of water
for the winter. Uh. So we've talked a lot about
(14:33):
people making beer in monasteries and women making beer in
the kitchen winded. Making beer really turned into an industry
like everything else with the Industrial Revolution. Thanks Industrial Revolution,
Yeah right, it's done so much for us. Uh. Yeah.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, beer was really something that
happened in the home. It was it was happening in uh,
(14:56):
in manor houses and farmhouses and all kinds in different
places where basically you were looking for a good way
to preserve some sort of grain for a longer time,
and of course preserve a source of hydration as well.
So there's a famous German beer purity law that people
still follow today. That's the Ryan High School Boat. Tell
(15:19):
me about how that was originally set down and why
it has become so prominent even still today. So the
Ryan High School boat is really interesting because in general
it's sort of a trade restriction more than it is
a beer purity law. UM. At the time in Germany
you had an area which was growing a lot of
(15:40):
barley and a lot of wheat. UM. And barley is
particularly well suited for brewing because of it's it's pricking
content and it starts content, and wheat is not because
it has a high protein content uh and uh, and
it does not have enough enzymes to convert its starts
into sugars. And without getting really nerdy into science, UM,
(16:01):
suffice to say that weaks better for bread, barley is
better for beer. So uh. At this point in history,
there was a lot of local grain production in Um
but not a lot of restrictions on where things were going.
And so the Rheinhand School, but it was one of
many trade restrictions that popped up, just sort of control
where ingredients were moving from a trade resetrich and standpoint.
(16:23):
So the the fifteen sixteen Purity Law, which is what
the Rhinehand School both the people referred to, defines that
beer must be made out of barley hops in water
and that's it. Um. It also defines how much beer
should be sold for one finic per mosse. It defines
you know, like uh, where it can be sold, and
(16:45):
all kinds of wonderful things that have nothing to do
with the actual ingredients of beer. It because it was
referred to as the beer purity Law, I think people
tend to look back at it with this sort of
nostalgic idea of like, oh, this is when beer was great, um,
you know, but you gotta understand that that's before they
(17:06):
even knew what yeast was, right, like yeast isn't in
the rhyn Head schoolte they had to amend the rhine
Head skoobote in the eighteen fifties to put east into it.
Uh and I just totally made up eighteen fifties. I
have no idea if that's true, but it was really late. Um.
It was after the East was discovered by Louis Pasteur
at the Carlsberg Brewery in Germany. Uh, that they said, oh, well,
(17:31):
I guess we have to put that into the law too,
or otherwise we can't make beer. But it's it's been
a pervasive law. It was actually a law in Germany
until the formation of the EU. UH. And once the
EU came in, it's still considered a you know, a
great way to make beer, but it couldn't be something
that defined beer for other countries within the confines of
(17:52):
the EU, and so they had to allow other ingredients
and beer. The hilarious part about it is that there
are plenty of classic styles from Germany that don't meet
the Rene high school boat and people have just found
ways around it. You know, you could get dugal permission
to make beer with wheat uh and all kinds of
stuff like this. Uh. There's there's lots of beers in
(18:14):
Germany that have you know, salt added and coriander and
all of these you know, other things that are that
are added to the beer. But somehow people sort of
ignore the fact that that you know, those don't fall
under the rhine Head school but they're still wonderful classic
German styles that taste delicious. In America, we tend to
um fromanticize it quite a bit in our breweries here,
(18:37):
particularly the German style lager breweries, in which you know,
this beer can't get more peer than this, and um,
and it's a it's a wonderful romantic ideal that is
doesn't really bear truth to the rest of the world,
because you've got a world full of brewing cultures in
which putting all kinds of other things into beer is
perfectly fine, and those things can make amazing flavors, uh,
(18:59):
you know, without the rhne Heads. But we wouldn't have
rye beers, and we wouldn't have most of our Belgian styles,
and you know, you'd never have a fruit beer, uh,
and all of the great stuff that we innovate and
create in America would not exist, um with the rene
Heid school boat in place. On the other hand, it
is the base of all beer. All beer is made
with the four ingredients of barley, hops, water, and um yeast.
(19:22):
And it's the it's the simplest, easiest way to make beer.
So all of those other things are are additions, not
instead of right. So you just mentioned these wonderful beer
styles in in Germany and uh in Belgium. How there
are so many vastly, vastly different styles of beer today
(19:45):
that tastes so much different from one another. How did
all of these different styles come about? So, you know,
there's there's a lot of fun stories out in the
world about how different styles were created, and most of
them are just story race. Uh, there's not a lot
of evidence that shows that any particular style was invented
here or there. Most of them grew out of local
(20:08):
brewing traditions, just brewing with what they had local locally
available to them, the type of water that they were
brewing within their local rivers, and that the grain and
hops and um and ingredients that were growing near them
in the world sort of came together naturally to create
the types of beers that eventually became associated with styles.
(20:29):
So a lot of styles are sort of works backwards. Um.
I think that My guess is that until homebrewing became
a really prevalent hobby in the US, that people didn't
really think about a lot of styles up until then.
We have a tendency to categorize things. In America. We
really like to put things in boxes, which is funny
(20:50):
because we tend to like to break out of those
boxes as often as possible. But UH, I suspect that
for the most part, a lot of the defined styles
that we deal with today are UH sort of modern
inventions UH by way of meaning that the reason we
call them is that sometime in the past, if you
(21:11):
do a hundred years, somebody said, oh, we should carry
these things in a certain way. UM, not because any
one thing was intended as an invented style. UM. The
only couple that come to mind are Pilsner or kell
is the sort of archetypical Pillsner. It's the It was
the very first pillsman in the world, and it was
made first in pills in the Czech Republic, basically because
(21:34):
there was a brewer there that was making making headway
with the new malting process that didn't leave the malti
ter darker smoky. So it was the first time you
had people really bright light sweet malt, and pills in
the Czech Republic has incredibly soft water, and of course,
a lot of local hops in the Czech Republic and
putting those all together really made the first beer of
(21:57):
its type, this this really bright, clear, uh hoppy but
not bitter pilsner beer. And it's called the pilsner because
it originated in pills Czech Republic, and from there people
really liked that beer instead of repeating it, and it's
essentially how we have. Most of the light loggers that
we have in the world today are built off of
that sort of archetypical pilsner style. But for a really
(22:20):
long time, any given beer made in Germany was named
after the town that it was from, or in Austria
or Bohemia, which is why you have a Dortmunder or
um Uh. I'm gonna remember other things Vienna lager or
Munich lagger um, all kinds of these great styles just
(22:41):
built out of the fact that they were made in
a town using what was local, rather than something that
somebody tried to invent specifically. So I have a few
more beer questions. We will get to you after another
quick word from a sponsor. So to get back to
(23:02):
our beer conversation earlier, we were talking about how beer
used to be really made primarily by women, and today
at least in the United States, the beer industry seems
to be pretty male dominated, and beer is heavily marketed
towards men, with uh sometimes beers for women being marketed
(23:22):
as like girly beers. How did that transition come You
sound very chagrined. Now did that transition come about? Well,
it really does come down to the Industrial Revolution, when
when people were starting to you know, create factories. Factories
were not a place for women for the most part,
and beer became a really big business. As soon as
(23:43):
you could make it in really high quantities and move
it around you could, um, you could sell it and
make a lot of money. Um. And so it became
an industry just like so many other things in our history,
and really moved out of the home and into the factory.
It's really take and until probably the last decade or
so for for women to really get back into the
(24:05):
brewing industry in a really meaningful way. I think if
you were to look at the brewing industry now as
opposed to five or ten years ago, you would see
a significant higher, much more significant number of women in it. UM.
I know from my experience. My staff at my brewery
is about eighty five percent women. Uh, and not because
I you know, particularly try to hire women so much
(24:27):
as those just we're the best people for the job. UM.
So there's just a lot more women interested in the
industry now. Women are particularly good tasters, um. And a
lot of the professional tasters in the industry are women
because they have very delicate and very good talents. UM
among the best you know, sort of blenders in the
new sour beer industry and um our women. Uh. And
(24:50):
a lot of the you know, most storied brewers in
our country are starting to be women as well. It's
really nice to see it sort of coming full circle
and becoming more of a co ed industry because it
really is where it started. So it seems like every
year or so, uh, somebody finds an old beer in
a shipwreck, either decides to drink it or decides to
(25:12):
use the ust to make a new beer. We've talked
about these we do. These episodes are unearthed episodes at
the end of every year, and it seems like we've
told that story a couple of times. Uh. This this year,
we're not. We have one that's about a surprising discovery
of how early um barley was being used to make
beer in China, which is earlier than people previously thought. Um,
(25:33):
but like it's it seems to be just a very
frequent thing of Oh, here is a shipwreck with some beer.
We're either going to drink this beer or we're going
to make uh, we're gonna gonna try to get the
east and make a new beer out of this beer's yeast.
How often does that actually turn out to be a
good idea? I would suspect that drinking the beer is
probably not a great idea. Uh, you know, even though
(25:55):
it's been cold and pressurized and um, you know and
down there, it probably just doesn't taste very good. It
could it could be great, but I suspect that what's
mostly happened in that bottle is a lot of yeast death. Um.
When yeast die, they burst, and um, you end up
getting the contents of the cells inside of the beer.
(26:17):
And it sort of tastes soy, saucy. It's a very
humummy kind of brothy flavor, which is just not always pleasant.
It can be very good, but you know, for the
most part, beer, particularly really old beer from hundreds of
years ago. It was really meant to be drunk fresh
rather than aged. Two hundred years in the bottom of
the ocean um. The yeast, on the other hand, if
(26:38):
they're surviving, yeast cells will almost definitely allow new beer
to be made. And I have not read about any
successful beers being made from old recovered bottles, but I
have heard about yeast being recovered from amber from prehistoric
times sacrimcey strains that have been used to make beer,
(26:58):
uh and getting so of like I believe it's like
Dino beer something on the West Coast where somebody's actually
grew yeast strain that was that was trapped in amber
and I was able to make beer with it, So
it's definitely been done. I think that they have some
particularly neat flavor profiles, but they're not that widely known
(27:21):
about are used quite yet. Awesome. So the last question
that I have for you, I know this is a
question that you love to answer. There is a very
famous quote about beer that has attributed to Ben Franklin,
which that beer is proof that God loves us and
wants us to be happy. Yeah, it's one of the
things that you know, it's so pervasive in the beer industry,
(27:42):
and it's such a wonderful sentiment that it's hard to
be really angry about. But I'm kind of a really
pedantic nerd when it comes to a lot of things,
and so this is one of the things that that
kind of kind of bugs me, particularly because Ben Franklin
didn't say that. Actually actually have the quote that he wrote. Um,
(28:03):
and so I'm gonna read it to you, even though
it's gonna take a minute. Here we have the conversion
of water into wine at the marriage, and kind of
as as of a miracle. But this conversion is through
the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes
behold the rain which descends from Heaven upon our vineyards,
and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed
into wine, a constant proof that God loves us and
loves to see us happy. So he was really saying
(28:25):
that about wine. Ben Franklin didn't really like beer all
that much. He was he didn't. Yeah, that's true. I mean,
he's he's sort of, you know, a wonderful historic curmudgeon,
but he actually thought of beer as a sort of
very lazy man's beverage. Um. He used to work in
a printing house in uh in London, and the people
(28:47):
that drove him the most nuts were the people that
were drinking beer. Uh. He they were the people that
you know, we're sort of uh, what is There's another
quote from him that says, um uh. They wanted to
see from this in several instances that the water American,
as they called me, was stronger than themselves who drink
strong beer. We had an ale house boy who attended
always in the house to supply the workman, my companion
(29:09):
at the press drink every day a point before breakfast,
a point at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a
pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a
pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another one
he had done his day's work. I thought it a
detestable custom. Got a lot of points. Yeah, well, and
it is. You know, there was probably going back to uh,
you know, whether or not people were drunk all the time. Yeah,
(29:31):
they probably were. Um. And you know, particularly in some
points of America or history, when you're living in an
urban setting, it's not going to be the best smelling
or wonderful place to be. And you know, there's probably
a certain amount of escapism to be had. But he
was just not a big fan of beer at any time.
So it's Um, it's always one of those things that
(29:52):
kind of drives me nuts when you see him quoted
that way, not because it isn't a beautiful sentiment and
one that he actually meant. Uh, you know that you
can look at it another way, right, God makes rainfall
upon the fields of gross barley that fontaneously turns into beer. Um,
but that's not what he said. It's a great sentiment.
It's kind of like those those wonderful uh, you know
(30:15):
memes on the internet that say you shouldn't believe everything
you read signed Abraham Lincoln if you read on the internet. Um,
it's been attributed because it's sort of close. But I
think we should take men Franklin out of beer. Uh So,
is there anything else about beer that you just want
to make sure and a beer history that you want
to make sure that our our listeners know about before
(30:36):
we wrap up? Oh gosh, if I would have been
prepared for that question, I probably would have something. But uh,
but no, I think this has been a lot of
fun and and and really great. Thank you so so
much for being on the show. Eric. So once again,
that was Eric Lars Meyer's founder, CEO, and head brewer
a mystery brewing company company, among a lot of other things.
(31:00):
And instead of our normal listener mail today, I am
actually recording this from our Atlanta studio, which is not
typical anymore. Uh Eric is joining us by a Skype.
I have some long overdue shout outs to people who
have sent things to us in the mail, after just
embarrassing long time of getting them getting through everything that's
(31:23):
on my desk. So thanks to Christina for sending a
bookmark with a picture of beautiful Estonian lace on it
after hearing my disaster story about my shawl that did
not come out the way I intended in our knitting episode.
Thanks to Ashley for sending hand silk screen cards that
say Happy Cake Day. They are delightful. Thank you to
Blaze for sending handmade hats and necklaces. Also after our
(31:46):
nipping knitting episodes. Uh Kara sent a copy of In
All Its Theory, which is the book of first person
accounts of the Blizzard of eighteen eighty eight that we
talked about in that episode. Uh Marla from Hair Books
sent us a series of books that she wrote. An
illustrated Ethan sent a documentary he made called Ghosts of
the West End of the Bonanza Trail, and Talia sent
(32:09):
us some adorable crochet animals. They are a bunny and
a kitten. My apologies for just an embarrassing delay and
thanking all these folks. Uh and if I accidentally duplicated somebody,
Holly has already thanked on the show, because she is
very often our our male thank you person. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast, where a history podcast at how stuff works
(32:31):
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com
slash missed in History and on Twitter at miss in History.
Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com
and our pinterest is pinchest dot com slash mists in History,
which we could also find us on Instagram at miss
in History. Come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff works dot com, where you will find all
sorts of information, including a lot about the science of beer.
(32:53):
You can also come to our website missed in history
dot com to find show notes for this and all
about other episodes. We have a link to where you
can find Eric's book about North Carolina craft beer and breweries.
You will also find show notes for all of the
episodes Holly and I have worked on, and some videos
we have been been putting up recently from our recent
trip to Boston, Massachusetts. You can do all that in
(33:16):
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss in history dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
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