May 27, 2017 • 48 mins
In this week's SYSK Select episode, at long last, Josh and Chuck take on perhaps their most important topic ever. Learn about the history of beer, how it's made -- the whole shebang, basically -- in this watershed episode of Stuff You Should Know.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, folks, this is Chuck and welcome to this week's
s Y s K Selects edition, How Beer Works. Uh
not a long intro for this one. It's how Beer Works.
So that was my pick. Why not rerun this one? Right? Enjoy?
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
(00:22):
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast Bottoms Up, etcetera.
Take off your shirt? Is that what beer equates to
in your book? Take off your shirt? Uh? Well, I
take off my shirt when I drink too much beer. You,
(00:45):
Lucy neal Belt, take off the shirt. Close the blinds.
Neighbors don't want to see that, I want to point out, No,
they don't, uh that? Um. Guest producer Maddy today just
a little seren dip. He is brewing his fur batch
of beer right now. And he was like, man, it's
not like just preparing food, he said, is this? You know?
(01:07):
It's like serious chemistry going on, because I think he's
he's shooting for the stars here. He's not starting out
with an easy brew. I think. No. You know, as
you know Maddie, he's not one to just dive into
something lightly. He goes full bore. Yeah, so you should
see how how he got into the zeitgeist something I
(01:27):
think he's thinks bring a porter? Is that right, Matt Stout?
But stouts and porters, as we I learned, have been
very much mixed throughout the years. I believe porters and
they were named after river porters because that's what they
like to drink in London, the River Porters, Allen River Reporters,
dark darker beers. Yeah, yeah, although the kind of take
(01:51):
what they can get. Yeah, that is one fact about
a thousand that you're about to hear. So also, I
want to mention aumis in my friends. Stewart is in
a band called Superhuman Happiness and one of his bandmates
is making his first beer right now. It's his first
and they're calling it Superhuman Happiness. Nice where they out
in New York, out of Brooklyn support, of course they are. Yeah,
(02:14):
so Stewart has promised to save a six pack. Great,
I'm pretty psyched about it. Is there music good? Oh yeah,
they're really good. He's he's very good. He's in UM.
He's one of the founding members of Anti Ballis. Have
you heard of them? No? Do you know that UM
show faila No, the Failer that was on Broadway. It's
a musical about Fayla Coutie, the Nigerian afro beat, the
(02:37):
one that you went to. Yes, yeah, a new about it. Okay,
that guy he arranged that he's good man. Okay, he
when we saw him with um uh not buying princip
Billy the other guy. Yeah, you hate Bonnie principally, I
don't hate him. What's the other guy? The other guy?
Oh yeah, Sam Beam, Yeah, he played with him. Cool
(02:58):
when they came through last those guys too. So do
you want to talk about beer ever? Yeah? Seriously, we
got a lot to cover. We shouldn't have wasted that
minute of your lives. Sorry everyone. So, um, what Stewart
and Matt are engaged in isn't millennia long tradition of
brewing beer? Yeah, c o a first, really quickly, you
must be twenty one to drink alcohol. Oh yeah, and
(03:20):
don't don't really take off your shirt and drink responsibly.
So we're certainly not encouraging anyone to go out and
uh that's underage to get the delicious, delicious beer and
drink it all right, So as old ass. Since people
could walk around, it seems like they wanted to start
brewing beer. Well it's as old as civilization, is what
(03:41):
they think. So not you know, some they could walk around.
But since they discovered that moldy bread did funny things. Yeah,
and they think that it's possible that it was um
an accident at some piece of bread got wet and
um inadvertently fermented. Like all the everything was there just right,
and I guess back then they didn't waste anything, so
they probably were like, let me drink this nasty thing
(04:04):
or everything was new and they're like, what does this
taste like? Well, this dude, to me, they had tried
um magic mushrooms before and we're like, I will eat
anything now. You never know what you're going. They were
still figuring things out. They're in the figuring things out phase. Um.
So yeah, it's possible it was a piece of bread.
It could have just been a piece of grain or something.
Because there's a school of thought that we have bread
(04:28):
as because we have beer. Yeah. I love that theory.
Because they figured out that you could bake bread and
easily mash make a mash out of bread and water
um to produce beer, and that this was all very
portable and anybody could kind of keep some bread in
their homes, so it's possible we have we have bread
because of beer. I love that theory. Um. But the
(04:50):
point is is that, yeah, bread, beer is as old
as civilization because one of the first grains. One of
the first things we did was domesticate grain, and you
need grain to make year and we figured it out
pretty quickly. But the oldest record of brewing is I
think six thousand years old and sumer Yeah, ancient Sumerians
have a seal um that was had a hymn on it,
(05:15):
the hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing and him.
Not only was it him, but it was him about
making beer. It was a recipe for beer. And it
wasn't like use one chord of but it was it
was very broad. Um the recipe. Have you read it?
There's I think dog fish Head Brewery remade it using
(05:39):
that recipe. Yeah, I've got one of theirs. They remade
this ancient Chinese thing too. Um. I don't think it's
the same thing. No, it's very much. It's more in
the tradition of wine or brandy than beer. Um. But yeah,
this this one, this hymn to Nankazi is definitely beer
for sure. Um, and that just kind of kicked everything off,
(06:00):
just right out of the gate. Yeah, the earliest reports
where the beer would make you feel exhilarated, wonderful and blissful,
and so people are like, how do I get my
hands on this stuff? Yeah, and they figured out very
quickly how you got your hands on this stuff? Choke.
Because beer came about at a period of transition to
(06:21):
um a grarian societies from nomadic hunter gatherer societies to
graian societies. And there is another school of thought that
not only do we have um bread beer to thank
for bread, but civilization itself. That civilization, that beer attracted
nomadic groups to civilization because that's who had the beer, right,
(06:44):
That's how you got the beer. You domesticated grain and
you made it. Yeah, and this hut over here, they're
really good at making beer. So let's live near them.
And then in circle that hut, and then that circle
grows and all of a sudden, everyone's just sitting around
getting drunk exactly. And then somebody's guests are plus grain,
so they're in charge, and um, people end up doing
(07:04):
work and religious groups start up. But that's this is
kind of Um, immortalized in the epic of Gilgamesh inky Do,
the wild man who represents the hunter gatherer tribes the nomads.
Um is given beer because it is the custom of
the city, yeah, the civilized people. And he drinks like
(07:25):
eight glasses of it, and while he's drunk, he washes
himself and became a human being just like that. So
he moves from the wild into civilization via beer fastward
a little bit to Babylonia or Babylon. Yeah, and I
gotta get out of Babylon, man. Yeah, they had They
had twenty different types of beer, and I believe they
(07:48):
even invented the can that turns blue when it's cold.
I'm not mistaken. It was priceless. Is that Babylon? I
think it was. Okay. Um, there's also a question I
could not find a definitive answer for. But supposedly the
Babylonians took brewing so seriously that if you made a
bad batch or tried to sell a bad batch, your
(08:10):
punishment was to be drowned in it. Yeah. I wonder
if that's true. I found it all over the place,
but it was everybody. Nobody had a good definitive source.
Sell I present it as a rumor. Early beer Josh
was unfiltered, cloudy had chunks of junk in it and residue,
so they would actually drink it through a straw sort
(08:30):
of as a filter. Um, so they wouldn't get the
stuff in their mouth. It was really bitter. Um. Hammerabi
very important lawmaker back in the day. Yeah, why do
we just talk about him in the eye for an eye?
Code don't remember it was? Was it Noah's Ark? Maybe
I don't remember, but yeah, he was the guy who
came up with the eye for an eye, was like
one of the earliest set of laws. And a beer
(08:52):
for a priest, well, it turns out actually five beers
for a priest. Well five leaders. Yeah, that's right a day. Yeah,
that was his beer, rah, And that was one of
the first laws that established Um, a normal worker got
two leaders, civil servants three, and then administrators and the
high priest five leaders a day. Now, that is what
(09:12):
I call a social contract. That's that's worth sticking around for. Um.
So yeah, Hammurabi's wasted. Um, then we're gonna fast forward
a little more. The Egyptians keep it going. Um. They
had their own hieroglyph. They did for brewer. And then
everything comes very very close to being disrupted, disrupted forever
(09:34):
um with the arrival of the Greece of the Romans,
because they drove alvos and listen to NPR, and all
they cared about was wine. To to the Romans especially uh,
beer was barbarian drink, Like you only drank beer in
(09:55):
the most the remotest outposts of the Roman Empire. U
to make it wine to a certain degree, don't you think? Sure? Yeah,
I mean wine is very big around Greece, but so
is Greek beer. No, but I'm talking about period all
over the world. Like you know, you generally think of
wine as being high society. And the construction worker kicks
back with the corpse light. Can't we all just drink both? Yes,
(10:19):
maybe even mixed together. No, Okay, that's um. But yes,
I agree with that that point of view. I think
it does kind of carry on to day and I
guess that's where it finds its roots. Yea, the snobby
Greeks interesting in romans Um. Luckily there was a remote
outpost of the Roman Empire that was like, I don't
care what you say, man, we're making beer. We're going
(10:42):
to dedicate our society making beer, of course. And today
we call those people the Germans. Yes, God bless them
and their efforts. Back then they were called Twotons. Yeah
and uh. Tacitus wrote about the ancient Germans and said,
to drink the Teutons have a horrible brew for a minute,
(11:04):
from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a
very far removed similarity to wine. The only thing that
had in common was that you drink it and it
messes you up. Yeah, you know, yeah. Aside from that,
it was couldn't be any more different, right, And the
Germans have been making uh beer since at least eight
hundred b C. That's the earliest record we have of
(11:25):
beer drinking in Germany. UM. And I don't know if
it it probably spread from the Tutons to the rest
of northern Europe um. But you see beer pop up
in very ancient um Northern European texts like the Finnish
saga the calla Walla, Yeah, CALLI walla. There there are
(11:46):
four hundred verses dedicated to beer, two verses dedicated to
the creation of the earth. That's that's that's a society
that takes it to beer. Seriously. Yeah, and the Nordic Uh,
I kind of thought it was called the Nordic epic eda.
Wine was for the gods, beer was for mortals, and
mead for the inhabitants of the realm of the dead.
(12:07):
You ever had mead? Uh? No, I never have. It's
like honey based right for minute honey. Yeah, it's like
honey water for minute honeywater. It's doesn't sound like good.
I had some hippie in uh in Virginia, give me
some mead one time that he had made. You took
mead from a hippie, stayed with him one night. It
was one of those deals. Yeah, going through town. Okay,
(12:29):
Now you just a friend hooked us up for a
place to stay. Did you have a bindle? Now he did, though,
and he even had a house. He had homemade mead.
It was gross, was it? It wasn't very good. I
didn't care for it. I'm sure it's an acquired taste. Um.
So yeah, mead kind of falls off here, right yeah, um,
except for hippies in Virginia exactly. Uh. Wine kind of
(12:52):
stuck into the Mediterranean, but beer just continued to spread
and take hold. Yeah, like barley, I mean of course
wine spread itself as well, and we have it in
France and californ on you and everything. But but around
this time it was fairly localized to the Mediterranean area. UM.
And as as we enter the medieval age, UM, the
(13:12):
Dark Ages first and then medieval times, UM, the monks,
Christian monks got really really good at brewing UM. And
the reason they took it up is because this was
a place of like science and agriculture and abbey was
and UM could also support their abbey exactly, which is
(13:32):
now what Trappist monks are. If you if you drink
Traffis Dale and it says brewed by Trappis monks. This
is a tradition that's well over a thousand years old.
It's pretty cool monks supporting themselves by doing something for
the community. And some of them threw beer. Another tradition,
which is rampant sexism, took place when women, uh were
(13:56):
the ones that brewed beer in the medieval times. And
not only that, but they said we want only hot
women brewing our beer. Well, it was so important that
only beautiful women could brew beer. But can you believe
that way back then they were like no, no, no,
I don't want know ugly chicks making my beer. I
can you believe that's yeah, the earliest form of sexism
(14:17):
I can think of. I'll bet it goes back further
than that. Well, but there's a feminist twist it later on. Well,
because I got really good at making it. Yeah, people
who were women who were um, you know, well known,
like as if you were a medieval wife, Um, one
of the things you did was brew right, um. And
(14:38):
if you were good at it, eventually your family may
come to bear the name Brewer or brewce Stir. That's
where your name comes from, exactly. It means that you
haven't a female ancestor who landed your family a surname
through her brewing skills. That is feminism, asked me. It
might have been the st poly girl herself. Maybe, So
(14:58):
do you think she's a feminist icon? I don't think so.
So where are we took? We are in the fifteenth
century and something pretty cool happened in uh Germany. Um.
And to me this is the fact of the show.
Just because I did not know this. The Rheine heitzkbault
A fifteen sixteen was a beer purity law basically said
(15:20):
you can only make beer out of four things. Water,
malted barley, malted wheat, and hops. So that is wrong,
that's not right. It's three things. I don't know where
this source got the fourth the four ingredients, but there's water, barley,
and hops are the only three things you can put
in beer. Okay, wheat wasn't included, Okay, regardless, that's still
the fact of the show. The Rheine Heights boat is
(15:42):
the oldest non religious legal standard of food production and
the oldest consumer protection law on the planet was beer
because beer. It's fifteen sixteen. That is crazy, and it's
still around. It is, it's still enforced today, Like, don't
try to make a beer in Bavaria using anything but
at those three ingredients. You make beer in Bavaria with
corn and rice, you got a one way ticket on
(16:05):
the bullet train out of town, right, or you'll get
caned publicly. That's right. Um. And there are a couple
of reasons why this law was passed. One, people used
to put crazy, crazy stuff in beer, like um, hallucinogenic
roots or poisonous roots that could make you do crazy
stuff like hemlock and things like that. Um, So it
(16:28):
was for it was a purity law. It was also
to control prices. If you read the purity law, it's
like you can't sell a beer for more than this.
And then thirdly, also is to make sure that um
important grains like wheat got diverted to important things like food.
They didn't want people going crazy like using wheat, which
is why you why that wheat was wrong. It's barley water.
(16:50):
But wheat beer obviously came along in rye beer later on. Right,
So let's go to America, Man, Usa, Virginia again. Yeah,
beer's been around in the US since before the US
was around. Maybe it was that hippie. Maybe he was
a descendant of the original brewers a beer in the US.
Maybe so in fifties seven. By this time, colonists already
(17:12):
making beer flagrantly ignoring the Ryan Heights Kabbat by using corn.
They realized very quickly that this makes a terrible beer
and uh. In sixteen o nine, the first ads appear
in London newspapers asking for brewers to move to the
Virginia colony. They needs some beer over there in the
New World, and uh. In sixwelve, the first brewery set
(17:34):
up in New Amsterdam by Adrian Block and Hans Christian
Anderson now Hans Christensen and uh. I thought this was
interesting too, same place where the first well, it says
the first non native American, but I guess it's the
first American because America wasn't there yet. This is new answer.
(17:55):
That was Dutch colony. So it's the first the first
non native American born in North America that wasn't who
wasn't like of an indigenous group, which was gen vision
vision e viny And he became a brewery. Yeah, he
was born in the first brewery. Crazy, Yeah, I mean
(18:18):
he kind of had to become a brewer under those circumstances,
didn't he Well in America just had to become a
nation of beer lovers because of this, I think, yeah,
And boy did we love it so like researching this
and other researchers I've done, America used to be a
ten times more in an awesome place. I can't remember
what what episode it was. It may have been prohibition
(18:40):
where we were talking about like if you look at
lists of things served at like colonial funerals or weddings
or whatever, it'd be like five five kigs of rome,
and it's fifty kigs of beer and all that, but
there's only like sixty people there. And then the fact
that the word cocktail referred to a drink that you
(19:02):
drink in the morning, and that the old whiskey old
fashion was the original cocktail. Um. Yeah, we used to
drink a lot more in this country. So like in
eighteen what is it, seventy three, Yes, we we hit
our peak number of breweries four thousand, one d and
thirty one breweries supplying uh population of just fifty million people. Yeah,
(19:26):
our peak back then, of course. Yeah, because now there's
a renaissance, there is craft brewing, and now there are
more breweries than since the eighteen hundreds. That's awesome. Um.
I did a little research on craft brewing and in
the in the nineteen seventies, there were only forty consolidated
breweries in the US, and experts thought that that number
(19:47):
would fall to as little as five And it was
all this homogenous light lagger that Americans grew to love.
In World War Two, Yeah, because prohibition hit and there's
like a beer evolutionary bottleneck. You couldn't survive unless you
were one of the big big ones, right, and you
had to do you had to make other things, including
(20:08):
non alcoholic beer. But so you come out and there's
just a few breweries operating, right, and um. Then World
War Two hits and that caused the other reason that
beer became homogeneous in the United States. Men went off
the war, women became the market for brewers for beer,
and they um preferred a lighter style beer. So in
(20:31):
America almost for decades after World War Two, the only
beer you can find pretty much was that um American
style pills near Logger. Yeah, it was like this through
the nineteen seventies. Uh, and then nineteen eighty I'm sorry,
nineteen seventy six, the first craft brewery, the new I'll
(20:52):
Be i'll be On Brewery in Sonoma, California, open and
they were like, we want to start making some good
old beer again, like some ales and some ambers and
some stouts. Uh. They were only open about six years,
but they inspired hundreds of others to take it up,
and that's generally looked back as the New Renaissance started
in seventy six. So in nineteen eighty there were eight
(21:16):
craft breweries, in nineteen ninety four there were five hundred
and thirty seven, and in two thousand and ten there
were sixteen hundred's beautiful, and I think over nineteen hundred
in two thousand eleven, so they went from literally almost
being extinct like twenty something years ago or thirty years ago,
to like booming, big time booming. But that's still half
(21:39):
of that eighteen seventies number nineteen hundred, So yeah, you're right, half,
but that's the highest level since that time. But consider that.
Think about how much beers in this country right now.
You've got nineteen hundred breweries get yet plus supplying three
hundred million people. Back then we had forty one hundred
breweries supplying fifty million. Yeah. Crazy, well, and let's not
(22:01):
kid ourselves. I think the craft brewers are supplying about
four by volume and about six percent by by dollars.
And the three, you know, Miller, Anheuser, Bush, and Course
are the three big daddies. I prefer to fool myself
in this circumstance. But you are right. I mean, there's
(22:21):
a renaissance going on. Um, so let's talk about what
these people are doing during this renaissance. You want to
talk about how beer is made? Yeah, and I've never
done it, surprisingly, I never have either, but I'm going
to oh yeah, yeah, we'll bring me somewhere. This has
inspired me. I just need to collect friends who brew
their own beer so I don't have to do it
any exactly. Uh. Barley, water, hops, and east are the
(22:45):
basic four ingredients and the UM I like how you
put this The whole idea just to extract sugars from
the grains. Usually barley yeast eats it up and it
poops out alcohol and CEO two and that's beer. It's
that simple. And you've just described two steps. There's two
big categories of this process. There's brewing and then there's fermenting.
(23:07):
And the brewing part is pretty simple. It's taking um
malted barley or malted grain, which is like dried and
cracked and um heated so that the sugars start to
come out a little more. Um. I guess caramelized is
another way to put it. And then you take that
and you steep it in a basically a T and
the t that you've just made is called worked and
(23:30):
that's called mashing. Right, Yeah, so mashing, yes, taking them
taking the malted grain and steeping it, that's mashing's right.
But it produces a sticky, um sweet substance pre beer
as it were called word imagined wort in Germany. Probably
uh and you uh, you take that word and your
(23:51):
brewing process is done. When you put it in a
tank with yeast. You've just started the fermentation process. Yes,
and that's where things get groovy. Uh that you boil
the vert for about an hour. You add the hops
and depending on what kind of beer you're gonna make,
is uh really going to depend on what kind of
hops or how how much hops? Yeah, we haven't started
(24:13):
fermenting yet. I jumped the gun. You have to add
the hops with to the worked Oh, oh, yeah, we
did jump the gun. But Budweiser, let's say, has about
eight to twin I b U s, which are international
bitterness units. That's how you measure hops. Are you like
happy beer? I am a big I p A and
pale ale? Yeah, I'd like beer that's so happy it
makes me sneeze. Well that's pretty happy. Um. A thirty
(24:37):
uh stout has about thirty to fifty I b U s,
and a double I p A or an I p
A could have up to a hundred dog fish head
D and twenty minute has a hundred and twenty IBus. Well,
I like the sixty and the ninety. The one twenty
is actually kind of hard to find a lot of
times because they don't make a ton of it. Um.
(24:57):
But interestingly, pale ale. You know where Indian palel comes from,
the I p a India, Well it does. Uh. British
soldiers were stationed over there, and when they started setting
up trade with India back in the day, were colonizing it.
It's just one, that's one way to put it. And
they were like, boy, were really thirsty and we kind
of miss our old beer back in England. So they
(25:18):
would send over their pale ales and they wouldn't um
really make the voyage very well, the sea voyage. It
would show up flat and kind of gnarly. So they
added a lot more hops because hot sex is a preservative.
Thus India pale ale. Nice. Yeah, nice, that's the story
I got. I'm gonna be really embarrassed, No, I think
(25:39):
if it's not by that one, that's what's the kind
of story here in a bar? Yeah you know yeah,
um yeah, that's the story you see in a bar
gets you free beer. We should try that. Um. So
you've got you've got the worked that's boiled. Um, it's
all sugary and um, you add east to it and
(26:00):
put in a tank and now it's fermenting and like
like we said, the yeast just eats all the sugars
and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products. And
depending on the kind of beer you make, um, well
it really depends on the kind of yeast you use.
Um you're either going to be waiting around for a
(26:20):
few weeks to a couple of months. So um, if
you were making um something called a an ale, you're
going to be doing all this. You're gonna ferment um
using tough fermenting yeast at room temperature, and then after
a few weeks your beer is gonna be ready to drink.
(26:40):
If you are making a logger which in Germany, which
in German is a verb meaning to store, Um, you're
going to it's gonna take a few months, um, and
you're going to store this stuff. You're gonna let it
ferment um at near freezing temperatures and it's gonna ferment
at the bottom the yeast is Yeah, they would put
(27:00):
it in caves. It's called lager ing. Yeah. It was
the stort and cave cold caves because for those hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of years that they were making beer.
They kept they kept being like, this beer is messed up,
and it happens to be summertime. What's wrong with this beer? Oh,
it's it's all the summertime. And then finally somebody figured out,
wait a minute, we're making the best beer in the
(27:21):
winter time. And they didn't quite know why, but they
figured out a process to replicate it. But of course
now we understand that UM, the wild yeast and bacteria
in the area that was prevalent in the summers of Germany,
UM was messing up the fermentation process, souring the beer.
(27:44):
It's the stuff using yeasts that survived in winter months
in the cold. UM produces really clean, crisp, very awesome beer.
Taste of the Rockies. Yeah, exactly. That's now called the Lagger.
That's right. We actually forgot something too. And I know
there's homebrewers right now going you can't forget carbonation. Uh,
(28:04):
skipping back a bit after you. After you do have
the bottle beer, it's not carbonated yet, very flat, so
you need to carbonate it. And I imagine the big
breweries UM forced carbonate like sodas do and uh, if
you're a traditionalist though, and I wonder about craft breweries
that I need to know more about this if they
do that or not. Well, I think it usually I'll say,
like bottle conditioned. So bottle condition means it just waits
(28:28):
and you wait it out for the yeast to do
its thing naturally. And that's where you're gonna get your
your phone and your good bubbly goodness because it produces
carbon dioxide. Is a waste product, takes a while. Waste product.
You say, waste product, I say bubbly goodness. Okay, Um,
So you want to talk about gravity? Uh? Yeah, gravity
(28:48):
is um. Gravity is how much alcohol is in your beer.
And the brewers measure the gravity before and after the
fermentation process, and they calculate the difference uh in the
out of alcohol by volume and represented by a percentage.
So like the higher the percentage, the higher the gravity
of the beer. Yeah. And you know nowadays with the
(29:09):
craft beers, you're gonna get all kinds of percentages, like
you know, six to nine to right, that's a pretty
heavy duty beer. Oh definitely. What is like get your
average Budweiser? What is that? Five? Five? Is it? There's
a law in Georgia for a while that was you
couldn't sell beer over five point five. Do you remember
when they repealed that law that beautiful time in the nineties.
Do you remember that? Actually? That was Wow. They had
(29:32):
a lot to do with crapper reis in Georgia too, Definitely.
UM say the stuff about the lambic so, I thought
that was really interesting, okay, um. So lambics are um
a type of spontaneously fermented brew. I've had it. I
didn't know this though, the same problem that the um
old Germans had um with you know, local stuff getting
(29:53):
in there the UM. I guess the French when they're
producing this, these Lambics or the Belgians um French, and
they're they're basically just leaving their stuff out to be
exposed to wild yeast that grows in the area. It's
crazy spontaneous fermentation. And I've had, Like I said, I'd
tried lambic in the past, and I didn't know what
made it so special that that was it. I don't
(30:15):
care for it a whole lot. It's kind of has
a sour aftertaste, its fruity sort of cider almost. Yeah,
not enough hops. Oh, no, I like, what's your favorite beer? Actually?
I mean to asking that. So I'm a pretty big
fan of um anything New Amsterdam puts out. Yeah, they're great,
um fat tires point of the all time best. Yeah,
(30:36):
our friends that we have friends fans at Brooklyn Brewery.
Yeah and New AMSTU. Remember they sent us like a
bunch of beer. They were the first ones they did.
Thanks again, guys. Um, Yeah, we have fans at Brooklyn Brewery.
They sent beach towels and other swag they did. Uh.
We had a fan who sent us some Shiner Bach once,
but I don't think he was related to them in
any way. He was just from Texas. Yeah, that's a
(30:58):
Texas beer, right, Um, my all time favorite. It's just
it's never been toppled. Like I've had plenty of beer.
I'm like, this is really good, like innocent gun. Have
you ever had that? Oh my god, it's like ambrosia.
It's the most amazing thing ever. But you you can't
just drink like one after the other if you're in
such a mood. It's just it's just a lot. It's
(31:19):
very rich. But my so my favorite beer, that's just
no one's ever topped all day is Sierra Nevada pale Ale.
I'm right there with you. It's just the best beer.
I think that's anyone anyone's ever made. It's delicious and nutritious,
it's refreshing. Yeah, I want to go to their brewery. Um.
I like the dog Fish had stuff. Um, but I'm
I'm in to try. And you know, we have these
(31:40):
stores here in Atlanta now and Indicator where I live with,
you know, all the myriad craft beers, and I'll try
any kind of any kind of pale ale or I
p a. Have you been to Ale? Yeah? I have,
that's yeah. And they have the growlers there, which is
always kind of fun. Yeah. You just get something on tappen,
drink it out of a jug like an old pirate.
And I also have to say our local boys at
(32:02):
Sweetwater are killing it too. Like there's like as far
as pale ales go, Sierra Nevadas and the four twenty
very very close four twenties good. I will always go
for that if it's um, if they don't have the
seer on them. And I remember my first beer very distinctly,
do you Yeah, Because I, as everyone listens to the
(32:23):
show NOWS, I was a very good, good Baptist boy
growing up, So I didn't um, I didn't drink or
anything like that until I was older. And I remember
the first time I tasted beer. I had only had
soda as far as a carbonated beverage, and that's the
only thing I could like expect, And I just remember thinking,
this is so weird tasting. It's like it's fizzy like
(32:44):
a soda, but it wouldn't taste anything like a soda.
And I'm like, oh, how do people drink this stuff?
And then like thirty seconds later, you're trying it again, like, oh,
why can't I stop? I want to stop? Yeah? Um,
first beer, huh, I don't remember mine? Remember there was
a long gone. I think you're probably younger than I was.
(33:06):
I don't remember. I mean my dad drank like old
Milwaukee tall boys, and I'm sure like I tried like
a sip of his when I was a kid. Or see,
we didn't have beer in the house, so that it
was just winn't around. Um alright, so where are we chuckers?
We could talk about some of the older beers in existence. Yeah,
so there's like actual old beer. It's like over a
(33:27):
hundred years old. Like that that particular bottle of beer
was manufactured like a hundred seventy eight years ago. And
there's two shipwrecks that had beer on them that ironically
are competing for the oldest beer in the world. Um,
and they both went down in. I know, it's maddening. Um.
There's one in the Baltic Sea. There was a shipment
(33:49):
of beer and champagne from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg that
went down in. And then there's a shipwreck in the
English Channel UM in eighteen and a guy in named
Um Keith Thomas. He was a microbiologist, I believe. Um.
He got his hands on some of the bottles of
this beer that is still around and Um tried it
(34:10):
and was like he vomited, and he's like, maybe I
can figure out some other way to do this. So
he got the yeast from this beer, and UM got
a colony going of the living yeast, same same yeast.
It's not like a descendant of it, like this is
the yeast. And Um he got it going again and
found like an old porter recipe and now he makes
flag Porter, which in and of itself is one of
(34:33):
the better beers around. Oh I also want to say,
I like just about anything Sam Smith does too. I
don't know that Sam Smith like oatmeal, stout and winter welcome. Yeah,
Sammy Smith. Sorry, sure they're Uh they had the Shakespeare
stout yea when that Sammy Smith, that's rogue. Yeah, that's rogue.
But I've had that. Guy Ale is awesome. Man, I'm
(34:55):
getting thirsty. Uh. Dogfish Head has revived a recipe that
they claim is the and that's what we're talking about earlier.
Is he the guy from dog fish had claims it's
the oldest known ferminted recipe in the history of man.
And uh it was from a Neolithic burial site in China,
and it is called they brew it now. It's called
(35:17):
Chateau uh jiaho uh j i h h j i
a h u from seven thousand b C. And they
decoded it, uh molecularly from Clay Potts founded a Neolithic
burial site and have brewed this stuff. And um, they're
also the ones they get a little crazy. You know,
they did the Midas touch brew that was supposedly King
(35:39):
Midas's um recipe or from his tomb. And we have
people right in But I love what they're doing over
there at dog Fish Head. They also did the one
based on the hymn to Nick Cancy the what the hymn?
Didn't cantye that to marry in one right? Um? So
there's also some brewers that have been around for a while,
(36:01):
like Stella Artois. If you look on the label, you'll
see that, um, it has some mention of thirteen sixty six. Man,
that's when it was. That's when they started brewing that supposedly.
Oh yeah, I like a nice summertime beer for me, agreed. Um.
August Steiner was um began in probably the oldest beer
(36:24):
in the world as far as like brewing. The recipe
um is uh winehan Staffen. Did I get it? Yeah?
Vahan v han Stefan. Oh nice. So those are brewed
by Ben Benedictine monks. That beer has been brewed since
(36:45):
the seven hundreds. But the weinhan Staffen Uh the guys
brewing that also operate the oldest um continuously functioning brewery
in the world, which opened its doors in ten party
and it's been going ever since. That's awesome. It's about
to celebrate its thousandth anniversary. That's so cool. Um, what
(37:08):
else a man named Arthur Guinness and seventeen fifty six
did a very smart thing by signing a nine thousand
year lease on a building in Dublin and they have
been making the old delicious Guinness beer there since then.
And I enjoyed at our south By Southwest event at
Fedoe Irish Pub. I enjoyed myself some Guinness at that
(37:29):
a bit love me some Guinness. It's Gonnas sponsoring you, now, No,
none of these people are. But why are you wearing
that leather eight bulb jack with Guinness patches all over it?
The Schlitz story I thought was kind of interesting. Yeah.
I searched the story up because I had remembered hearing
it you back, and I was like, we gotta mention now.
So what was the deal? They were making good beer
(37:51):
for a long time, We're one of the top three,
and then they changed their recipe in the late seventies
and just screwed it all up. They wanted to be
number one and they were, they were number two. Wanted
to be number one, so they decided that they were
going to um just change it, and they changed it
in a really lazy, cost efficient way. Instead of malt,
(38:11):
they used corn, syrup, high fruit toast corn syrup. Such
a bad idea. And then they didn't filter it as
much either, So you had this really weird tasting chunky
style beer. And this is in the seventies. What by
Schlitz's market share was one It went from the number
(38:32):
two selling beer in America to within just a couple
of years, one percent of the market. I think more
than one person lost their job on that that move.
Oh yeah, they may have like killed those people. Um.
So they discontinued the brand altogether at one point, didn't they. Yeah,
it went under and then Strows, which I also remember
from my childhood, Um was, uh, what said, well, you
(38:54):
know what we're gonna buy you guys. So they bought
Schlitz and then, um, they just bought the label. They're like,
we don't want that. Keep your keep all this leftover
chunky beer. Um, but they bought the label and apparently
rolled out the classic sixties formula, which I have not tried.
I have not either. We do want to shout out
to Yengling as well. Um. In nine David Yengling opened
(39:16):
a brewery in Pennsylvania in Potts Bell and it is
still open today. The oldest operating brewery in the United States,
still in the Yngling family, And uh, they're black and
tan is very delicious to me, and it's a very
popular beer. People seek it out. I think one of
the reasons why is because it's tradition and it's delicious,
(39:37):
and it has cute puppies in their labels and marketing materials. Yeah.
And I want to ask Budweiser, if you are the
makers of Budweiser and you're listening, bring back the bullet
bottles and you'll thank me later. Do you know who
makes um Budweiser? Anheuser Bush? Right? Uh? You know who
owns Anheuser Busch um in BEV. They're a European company, really,
(40:00):
as something as American as Budweiser is owned by the Europeans. Now, well,
and Heisa isn't exactly American, you know what I'm saying.
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that, neither as Bush.
But yeah, the bullet bottles, do you remember those? They
were short, little stubby No, those are the barrels that
these were bullets. They were short and kind of went
(40:22):
up and then just graduated up and they were guarantee
you people would buy those the classic Budweiser Fallus bottle,
Well Miller High Life came back with their old school bottle.
I haven't said, oh, yes, yes, I know exactly what
you're talking. Remember the old bullets. Yeah, they were cute
and uh, I think if Budweiser brought those back, people
(40:43):
would really jump on that because if you know, everyone
likes that old school stuff, you can look like you're
in the seventies again or eighties seventies. Yeah, you can
send your thanks by check to Chuck Annheuser Busch money
starts rolling, or just a case of the bullets. So, um,
this is kind of unusual. We don't usually throw out
(41:03):
cool random facts at the end, but there's some cool ones.
You go ahead, Okay, I'm going to start with the
London Brewery of eighteen fourteen. Yeah, so there was a
hundred thousand gallon tank fermenting tank of ale uh in
London at a brewery and it exploded and when it
did it killed eight people and destroyed a pub nearby.
(41:25):
It actually killed nine people. The ninth guy died the
next day. Because when these hundred thousand gallons of ale
flooded the streets, people started drinking it. One guy drank
so much that he died of alcohol poisoning. Wow, isn't
that crazy, Josh. According to statistics, the Czech Republic leads
the world and beer consumption per capita. I have been there,
(41:48):
and I can tell you they love their beer. It's
cheaper than their water. I have been there too, and
it is delicious. Over a hundred and fifty six liters
per year per person. That's for everyone that they don't
just say like twenty one year old, uh, you know citizens.
So that is four and thirty nine beers a year.
Twelve ounces, right, they're probably sixteen ounces over there, or
(42:10):
are they twelve? I don't know. I don't know how
they broke that downs. So that is eighteen cases of
beer per person, about a case and a half five
s a leader a half leader. I think it's like
a tall boy can a big can. Well. I think
most of Europe it's like that, because I remember being
in London for the first time in thinking, man, you
(42:32):
guys have his tall boys and they're like, what's a
tall boy? Oh wait that was Australian that was neither
actually pretty close Matt's and they're laughing at my hackneed
attempts uh best symbol. Yeah, the red triangle famous. It
was registered as a trademark in eighteen seventy six. It's
the world's oldest trademark. Pretty cool. And the beer Stein.
(42:53):
You have been to Germany, Yeah, the beer gardens there,
it's exactly what you think you're gonna get. You're to
get a four and a half foot tall German woman
with four arms as big as your waist, carrying like
five of those big, huge mugs of beer in each hand.
And it was exactly what you want if you're going
(43:15):
over to your beer grou And I was like, Wow,
I'm so glad it's like this. And my buddy Brett
and I actually had a very fun night in Germany
drinking with this ah old fat German dude that didn't
speak any English and I spoke a little bit of German,
but we all love the Beatles, and we drank with
this dude for like three hours, singing Beatles songs in
(43:38):
both English and German. And Carl and I have a
picture with this guy still. It was one of my
great great memories of traveling abroad. Well tell him where
the beer stein came from? Oh, the beer stein comes
from the bubonic plague. They're like, we need to put
lids on these things so we don't get any disease
in there. Until they came up with the beer stein. Yeah,
(43:59):
and what was it to the pottery? Was they were
there were advancements in ceramics, right. I think the money
fact is the bubonic plague created beer steins, so that's it.
But I didn't get steins in Germany. You know, it
was just a big mug. It's like is you know,
it looks like a half gallon of beer. I'm not
(44:19):
sure how much it is, but it was good doomkalee stuff.
Nice man, Matt, do we get anything wrong? He said,
We're pretty good. That's good enough. I'm sure that there's
some homebrewers that will take us to task. But we
did our best. Man. We want to hear about it. Um,
do you have anything else right now? I'm done? Okay,
So that's it for beer. You can type beer into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com. Remember,
(44:41):
as Chuck said at the beginning, don't go out and
drink beer if you're not twenty one. UM in the
United States and drink responsibly. Yes, don't be a goin.
Don't ever drink and dry it. It's just dumb, agreed
chuck a little older and you realize that the commercials
are all right, that's just a stupid thing to do.
Um and uh so that's it for beer right now? Um,
(45:02):
I said, search for how stuff works dot com. I
think so it's time for listening. That's right, Josh. And
you know the other reason why you get a little
older and you say drink responsibly is because you do
a lot of stupid stuff. If you don't, oh man,
and you will be the butt of many many jokes.
Even if no one gets hurt, you will. You will
act a fool and end up with like toothpaste up
(45:26):
your nose because you've passed out at a party. If
that's what happens in your world when you drink too much,
you know, you've seen a pass out at a party,
and people like draw stuff on your face and take
pictures of you and put it all over the internet.
Plus you feel crutty the next morning. Yeah, exactly, see
our hangovers podcast for that. All right, um, I'm gonna
(45:46):
call this a pretty cool interesting email from an attorney
about doing guys. I just got done listening to your
podcast on duels. I thought you might like to know
that I and I am sure many of your fans
enjoyed the podcast with a twinge of sad This because
alas I cannot duel. Why you ask, I am an attorney,
and one of the states in which I am licensed
(46:07):
is Kentucky. And when an attorney in Kentucky is sworn in,
he or she swears an oath. And when I was
sworn in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it contained this additional tidbit.
In order to practice in the Commonwealth, I had to
swear that I would not participate in any duels. She
still has to say. This isn't that crazy, It's pretty cool.
(46:28):
What's more, as I listened to the podcast, I realized
that I had been preparing to duel my whole life.
During college, I worked as a serving wench at Medieval Times,
watching jousts each night and twice on Saturday's. My senior
year of college, in order to fulfill my pe requirement,
I took fencing, which was actually really interesting and more
athletic than I expected. So sadly, no matter how much
(46:48):
experience we may have, neither I nor my fellow members
of the Kentucky bar come stuff. You should know. Fans
can use the information we clean you from your podcast. Uh.
There was talk in the last few years of uh years,
of removing that particular clause from the oath, but as
far as I know, newly minted Kentucky attorneys are still
required to abstain from dueling nuts. It just seems logical.
(47:13):
I think we should add that to just about anything,
like when you go get your driver's license you have
to check a box that says I won't do or
in your marriage vowels. Yeah, there's there's just a lot
of places where we could insert that. And that is
from Rebecca right in Sincentucky, Ohio. Really that's what she signed.
It is No, she signed it Cincinnati, but I like
to say Sanantucky. Uh. Well, let's see. Oh, if you're
(47:37):
a homebrewer, we want to hear from you. Um. And
by hear from you, we mean it's into some of
your weares. Chuck said that, not me, um, but he's right. So, uh,
we want to hear from you via Twitter at s
y ESK podcast. We wanted to hear from you on
Facebook at facebook dot com, slash of you Should Know,
(47:58):
and We want to get emails from you, and you
can send those Two Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff Works dot com.
Hey, folks, this is Chuck and welcome to this week's
s Y s K Selects edition, How Beer Works. Uh
not a long intro for this one. It's how Beer Works.
So that was my pick. Why not rerun this one? Right? Enjoy?
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
(00:22):
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast Bottoms Up, etcetera.
Take off your shirt? Is that what beer equates to
in your book? Take off your shirt? Uh? Well, I
take off my shirt when I drink too much beer. You,
(00:45):
Lucy neal Belt, take off the shirt. Close the blinds.
Neighbors don't want to see that, I want to point out, No,
they don't, uh that? Um. Guest producer Maddy today just
a little seren dip. He is brewing his fur batch
of beer right now. And he was like, man, it's
not like just preparing food, he said, is this? You know?
(01:07):
It's like serious chemistry going on, because I think he's
he's shooting for the stars here. He's not starting out
with an easy brew. I think. No. You know, as
you know Maddie, he's not one to just dive into
something lightly. He goes full bore. Yeah, so you should
see how how he got into the zeitgeist something I
(01:27):
think he's thinks bring a porter? Is that right, Matt Stout?
But stouts and porters, as we I learned, have been
very much mixed throughout the years. I believe porters and
they were named after river porters because that's what they
like to drink in London, the River Porters, Allen River Reporters,
dark darker beers. Yeah, yeah, although the kind of take
(01:51):
what they can get. Yeah, that is one fact about
a thousand that you're about to hear. So also, I
want to mention aumis in my friends. Stewart is in
a band called Superhuman Happiness and one of his bandmates
is making his first beer right now. It's his first
and they're calling it Superhuman Happiness. Nice where they out
in New York, out of Brooklyn support, of course they are. Yeah,
(02:14):
so Stewart has promised to save a six pack. Great,
I'm pretty psyched about it. Is there music good? Oh yeah,
they're really good. He's he's very good. He's in UM.
He's one of the founding members of Anti Ballis. Have
you heard of them? No? Do you know that UM
show faila No, the Failer that was on Broadway. It's
a musical about Fayla Coutie, the Nigerian afro beat, the
(02:37):
one that you went to. Yes, yeah, a new about it. Okay,
that guy he arranged that he's good man. Okay, he
when we saw him with um uh not buying princip
Billy the other guy. Yeah, you hate Bonnie principally, I
don't hate him. What's the other guy? The other guy?
Oh yeah, Sam Beam, Yeah, he played with him. Cool
(02:58):
when they came through last those guys too. So do
you want to talk about beer ever? Yeah? Seriously, we
got a lot to cover. We shouldn't have wasted that
minute of your lives. Sorry everyone. So, um, what Stewart
and Matt are engaged in isn't millennia long tradition of
brewing beer? Yeah, c o a first, really quickly, you
must be twenty one to drink alcohol. Oh yeah, and
(03:20):
don't don't really take off your shirt and drink responsibly.
So we're certainly not encouraging anyone to go out and
uh that's underage to get the delicious, delicious beer and
drink it all right, So as old ass. Since people
could walk around, it seems like they wanted to start
brewing beer. Well it's as old as civilization, is what
(03:41):
they think. So not you know, some they could walk around.
But since they discovered that moldy bread did funny things. Yeah,
and they think that it's possible that it was um
an accident at some piece of bread got wet and
um inadvertently fermented. Like all the everything was there just right,
and I guess back then they didn't waste anything, so
they probably were like, let me drink this nasty thing
(04:04):
or everything was new and they're like, what does this
taste like? Well, this dude, to me, they had tried
um magic mushrooms before and we're like, I will eat
anything now. You never know what you're going. They were
still figuring things out. They're in the figuring things out phase. Um.
So yeah, it's possible it was a piece of bread.
It could have just been a piece of grain or something.
Because there's a school of thought that we have bread
(04:28):
as because we have beer. Yeah. I love that theory.
Because they figured out that you could bake bread and
easily mash make a mash out of bread and water
um to produce beer, and that this was all very
portable and anybody could kind of keep some bread in
their homes, so it's possible we have we have bread
because of beer. I love that theory. Um. But the
(04:50):
point is is that, yeah, bread, beer is as old
as civilization because one of the first grains. One of
the first things we did was domesticate grain, and you
need grain to make year and we figured it out
pretty quickly. But the oldest record of brewing is I
think six thousand years old and sumer Yeah, ancient Sumerians
have a seal um that was had a hymn on it,
(05:15):
the hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing and him.
Not only was it him, but it was him about
making beer. It was a recipe for beer. And it
wasn't like use one chord of but it was it
was very broad. Um the recipe. Have you read it?
There's I think dog fish Head Brewery remade it using
(05:39):
that recipe. Yeah, I've got one of theirs. They remade
this ancient Chinese thing too. Um. I don't think it's
the same thing. No, it's very much. It's more in
the tradition of wine or brandy than beer. Um. But yeah,
this this one, this hymn to Nankazi is definitely beer
for sure. Um, and that just kind of kicked everything off,
(06:00):
just right out of the gate. Yeah, the earliest reports
where the beer would make you feel exhilarated, wonderful and blissful,
and so people are like, how do I get my
hands on this stuff? Yeah, and they figured out very
quickly how you got your hands on this stuff? Choke.
Because beer came about at a period of transition to
(06:21):
um a grarian societies from nomadic hunter gatherer societies to
graian societies. And there is another school of thought that
not only do we have um bread beer to thank
for bread, but civilization itself. That civilization, that beer attracted
nomadic groups to civilization because that's who had the beer, right,
(06:44):
That's how you got the beer. You domesticated grain and
you made it. Yeah, and this hut over here, they're
really good at making beer. So let's live near them.
And then in circle that hut, and then that circle
grows and all of a sudden, everyone's just sitting around
getting drunk exactly. And then somebody's guests are plus grain,
so they're in charge, and um, people end up doing
(07:04):
work and religious groups start up. But that's this is
kind of Um, immortalized in the epic of Gilgamesh inky Do,
the wild man who represents the hunter gatherer tribes the nomads.
Um is given beer because it is the custom of
the city, yeah, the civilized people. And he drinks like
(07:25):
eight glasses of it, and while he's drunk, he washes
himself and became a human being just like that. So
he moves from the wild into civilization via beer fastward
a little bit to Babylonia or Babylon. Yeah, and I
gotta get out of Babylon, man. Yeah, they had They
had twenty different types of beer, and I believe they
(07:48):
even invented the can that turns blue when it's cold.
I'm not mistaken. It was priceless. Is that Babylon? I
think it was. Okay. Um, there's also a question I
could not find a definitive answer for. But supposedly the
Babylonians took brewing so seriously that if you made a
bad batch or tried to sell a bad batch, your
(08:10):
punishment was to be drowned in it. Yeah. I wonder
if that's true. I found it all over the place,
but it was everybody. Nobody had a good definitive source.
Sell I present it as a rumor. Early beer Josh
was unfiltered, cloudy had chunks of junk in it and residue,
so they would actually drink it through a straw sort
(08:30):
of as a filter. Um, so they wouldn't get the
stuff in their mouth. It was really bitter. Um. Hammerabi
very important lawmaker back in the day. Yeah, why do
we just talk about him in the eye for an eye?
Code don't remember it was? Was it Noah's Ark? Maybe
I don't remember, but yeah, he was the guy who
came up with the eye for an eye, was like
one of the earliest set of laws. And a beer
(08:52):
for a priest, well, it turns out actually five beers
for a priest. Well five leaders. Yeah, that's right a day. Yeah,
that was his beer, rah, And that was one of
the first laws that established Um, a normal worker got
two leaders, civil servants three, and then administrators and the
high priest five leaders a day. Now, that is what
(09:12):
I call a social contract. That's that's worth sticking around for. Um.
So yeah, Hammurabi's wasted. Um, then we're gonna fast forward
a little more. The Egyptians keep it going. Um. They
had their own hieroglyph. They did for brewer. And then
everything comes very very close to being disrupted, disrupted forever
(09:34):
um with the arrival of the Greece of the Romans,
because they drove alvos and listen to NPR, and all
they cared about was wine. To to the Romans especially uh,
beer was barbarian drink, Like you only drank beer in
(09:55):
the most the remotest outposts of the Roman Empire. U
to make it wine to a certain degree, don't you think? Sure? Yeah,
I mean wine is very big around Greece, but so
is Greek beer. No, but I'm talking about period all
over the world. Like you know, you generally think of
wine as being high society. And the construction worker kicks
back with the corpse light. Can't we all just drink both? Yes,
(10:19):
maybe even mixed together. No, Okay, that's um. But yes,
I agree with that that point of view. I think
it does kind of carry on to day and I
guess that's where it finds its roots. Yea, the snobby
Greeks interesting in romans Um. Luckily there was a remote
outpost of the Roman Empire that was like, I don't
care what you say, man, we're making beer. We're going
(10:42):
to dedicate our society making beer, of course. And today
we call those people the Germans. Yes, God bless them
and their efforts. Back then they were called Twotons. Yeah
and uh. Tacitus wrote about the ancient Germans and said,
to drink the Teutons have a horrible brew for a minute,
(11:04):
from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a
very far removed similarity to wine. The only thing that
had in common was that you drink it and it
messes you up. Yeah, you know, yeah. Aside from that,
it was couldn't be any more different, right, And the
Germans have been making uh beer since at least eight
hundred b C. That's the earliest record we have of
(11:25):
beer drinking in Germany. UM. And I don't know if
it it probably spread from the Tutons to the rest
of northern Europe um. But you see beer pop up
in very ancient um Northern European texts like the Finnish
saga the calla Walla, Yeah, CALLI walla. There there are
(11:46):
four hundred verses dedicated to beer, two verses dedicated to
the creation of the earth. That's that's that's a society
that takes it to beer. Seriously. Yeah, and the Nordic Uh,
I kind of thought it was called the Nordic epic eda.
Wine was for the gods, beer was for mortals, and
mead for the inhabitants of the realm of the dead.
(12:07):
You ever had mead? Uh? No, I never have. It's
like honey based right for minute honey. Yeah, it's like
honey water for minute honeywater. It's doesn't sound like good.
I had some hippie in uh in Virginia, give me
some mead one time that he had made. You took
mead from a hippie, stayed with him one night. It
was one of those deals. Yeah, going through town. Okay,
(12:29):
Now you just a friend hooked us up for a
place to stay. Did you have a bindle? Now he did, though,
and he even had a house. He had homemade mead.
It was gross, was it? It wasn't very good. I
didn't care for it. I'm sure it's an acquired taste. Um.
So yeah, mead kind of falls off here, right yeah, um,
except for hippies in Virginia exactly. Uh. Wine kind of
(12:52):
stuck into the Mediterranean, but beer just continued to spread
and take hold. Yeah, like barley, I mean of course
wine spread itself as well, and we have it in
France and californ on you and everything. But but around
this time it was fairly localized to the Mediterranean area. UM.
And as as we enter the medieval age, UM, the
(13:12):
Dark Ages first and then medieval times, UM, the monks,
Christian monks got really really good at brewing UM. And
the reason they took it up is because this was
a place of like science and agriculture and abbey was
and UM could also support their abbey exactly, which is
(13:32):
now what Trappist monks are. If you if you drink
Traffis Dale and it says brewed by Trappis monks. This
is a tradition that's well over a thousand years old.
It's pretty cool monks supporting themselves by doing something for
the community. And some of them threw beer. Another tradition,
which is rampant sexism, took place when women, uh were
(13:56):
the ones that brewed beer in the medieval times. And
not only that, but they said we want only hot
women brewing our beer. Well, it was so important that
only beautiful women could brew beer. But can you believe
that way back then they were like no, no, no,
I don't want know ugly chicks making my beer. I
can you believe that's yeah, the earliest form of sexism
(14:17):
I can think of. I'll bet it goes back further
than that. Well, but there's a feminist twist it later on. Well,
because I got really good at making it. Yeah, people
who were women who were um, you know, well known,
like as if you were a medieval wife, Um, one
of the things you did was brew right, um. And
(14:38):
if you were good at it, eventually your family may
come to bear the name Brewer or brewce Stir. That's
where your name comes from, exactly. It means that you
haven't a female ancestor who landed your family a surname
through her brewing skills. That is feminism, asked me. It
might have been the st poly girl herself. Maybe, So
(14:58):
do you think she's a feminist icon? I don't think so.
So where are we took? We are in the fifteenth
century and something pretty cool happened in uh Germany. Um.
And to me this is the fact of the show.
Just because I did not know this. The Rheine heitzkbault
A fifteen sixteen was a beer purity law basically said
(15:20):
you can only make beer out of four things. Water,
malted barley, malted wheat, and hops. So that is wrong,
that's not right. It's three things. I don't know where
this source got the fourth the four ingredients, but there's water, barley,
and hops are the only three things you can put
in beer. Okay, wheat wasn't included, Okay, regardless, that's still
the fact of the show. The Rheine Heights boat is
(15:42):
the oldest non religious legal standard of food production and
the oldest consumer protection law on the planet was beer
because beer. It's fifteen sixteen. That is crazy, and it's
still around. It is, it's still enforced today, Like, don't
try to make a beer in Bavaria using anything but
at those three ingredients. You make beer in Bavaria with
corn and rice, you got a one way ticket on
(16:05):
the bullet train out of town, right, or you'll get
caned publicly. That's right. Um. And there are a couple
of reasons why this law was passed. One, people used
to put crazy, crazy stuff in beer, like um, hallucinogenic
roots or poisonous roots that could make you do crazy
stuff like hemlock and things like that. Um, So it
(16:28):
was for it was a purity law. It was also
to control prices. If you read the purity law, it's
like you can't sell a beer for more than this.
And then thirdly, also is to make sure that um
important grains like wheat got diverted to important things like food.
They didn't want people going crazy like using wheat, which
is why you why that wheat was wrong. It's barley water.
(16:50):
But wheat beer obviously came along in rye beer later on. Right,
So let's go to America, Man, Usa, Virginia again. Yeah,
beer's been around in the US since before the US
was around. Maybe it was that hippie. Maybe he was
a descendant of the original brewers a beer in the US.
Maybe so in fifties seven. By this time, colonists already
(17:12):
making beer flagrantly ignoring the Ryan Heights Kabbat by using corn.
They realized very quickly that this makes a terrible beer
and uh. In sixteen o nine, the first ads appear
in London newspapers asking for brewers to move to the
Virginia colony. They needs some beer over there in the
New World, and uh. In sixwelve, the first brewery set
(17:34):
up in New Amsterdam by Adrian Block and Hans Christian
Anderson now Hans Christensen and uh. I thought this was
interesting too, same place where the first well, it says
the first non native American, but I guess it's the
first American because America wasn't there yet. This is new answer.
(17:55):
That was Dutch colony. So it's the first the first
non native American born in North America that wasn't who
wasn't like of an indigenous group, which was gen vision
vision e viny And he became a brewery. Yeah, he
was born in the first brewery. Crazy, Yeah, I mean
(18:18):
he kind of had to become a brewer under those circumstances,
didn't he Well in America just had to become a
nation of beer lovers because of this, I think, yeah,
And boy did we love it so like researching this
and other researchers I've done, America used to be a
ten times more in an awesome place. I can't remember
what what episode it was. It may have been prohibition
(18:40):
where we were talking about like if you look at
lists of things served at like colonial funerals or weddings
or whatever, it'd be like five five kigs of rome,
and it's fifty kigs of beer and all that, but
there's only like sixty people there. And then the fact
that the word cocktail referred to a drink that you
(19:02):
drink in the morning, and that the old whiskey old
fashion was the original cocktail. Um. Yeah, we used to
drink a lot more in this country. So like in
eighteen what is it, seventy three, Yes, we we hit
our peak number of breweries four thousand, one d and
thirty one breweries supplying uh population of just fifty million people. Yeah,
(19:26):
our peak back then, of course. Yeah, because now there's
a renaissance, there is craft brewing, and now there are
more breweries than since the eighteen hundreds. That's awesome. Um.
I did a little research on craft brewing and in
the in the nineteen seventies, there were only forty consolidated
breweries in the US, and experts thought that that number
(19:47):
would fall to as little as five And it was
all this homogenous light lagger that Americans grew to love.
In World War Two, Yeah, because prohibition hit and there's
like a beer evolutionary bottleneck. You couldn't survive unless you
were one of the big big ones, right, and you
had to do you had to make other things, including
(20:08):
non alcoholic beer. But so you come out and there's
just a few breweries operating, right, and um. Then World
War Two hits and that caused the other reason that
beer became homogeneous in the United States. Men went off
the war, women became the market for brewers for beer,
and they um preferred a lighter style beer. So in
(20:31):
America almost for decades after World War Two, the only
beer you can find pretty much was that um American
style pills near Logger. Yeah, it was like this through
the nineteen seventies. Uh, and then nineteen eighty I'm sorry,
nineteen seventy six, the first craft brewery, the new I'll
(20:52):
Be i'll be On Brewery in Sonoma, California, open and
they were like, we want to start making some good
old beer again, like some ales and some ambers and
some stouts. Uh. They were only open about six years,
but they inspired hundreds of others to take it up,
and that's generally looked back as the New Renaissance started
in seventy six. So in nineteen eighty there were eight
(21:16):
craft breweries, in nineteen ninety four there were five hundred
and thirty seven, and in two thousand and ten there
were sixteen hundred's beautiful, and I think over nineteen hundred
in two thousand eleven, so they went from literally almost
being extinct like twenty something years ago or thirty years ago,
to like booming, big time booming. But that's still half
(21:39):
of that eighteen seventies number nineteen hundred, So yeah, you're right, half,
but that's the highest level since that time. But consider that.
Think about how much beers in this country right now.
You've got nineteen hundred breweries get yet plus supplying three
hundred million people. Back then we had forty one hundred
breweries supplying fifty million. Yeah. Crazy, well, and let's not
(22:01):
kid ourselves. I think the craft brewers are supplying about
four by volume and about six percent by by dollars.
And the three, you know, Miller, Anheuser, Bush, and Course
are the three big daddies. I prefer to fool myself
in this circumstance. But you are right. I mean, there's
(22:21):
a renaissance going on. Um, so let's talk about what
these people are doing during this renaissance. You want to
talk about how beer is made? Yeah, and I've never
done it, surprisingly, I never have either, but I'm going
to oh yeah, yeah, we'll bring me somewhere. This has
inspired me. I just need to collect friends who brew
their own beer so I don't have to do it
any exactly. Uh. Barley, water, hops, and east are the
(22:45):
basic four ingredients and the UM I like how you
put this The whole idea just to extract sugars from
the grains. Usually barley yeast eats it up and it
poops out alcohol and CEO two and that's beer. It's
that simple. And you've just described two steps. There's two
big categories of this process. There's brewing and then there's fermenting.
(23:07):
And the brewing part is pretty simple. It's taking um
malted barley or malted grain, which is like dried and
cracked and um heated so that the sugars start to
come out a little more. Um. I guess caramelized is
another way to put it. And then you take that
and you steep it in a basically a T and
the t that you've just made is called worked and
(23:30):
that's called mashing. Right, Yeah, so mashing, yes, taking them
taking the malted grain and steeping it, that's mashing's right.
But it produces a sticky, um sweet substance pre beer
as it were called word imagined wort in Germany. Probably
uh and you uh, you take that word and your
(23:51):
brewing process is done. When you put it in a
tank with yeast. You've just started the fermentation process. Yes,
and that's where things get groovy. Uh that you boil
the vert for about an hour. You add the hops
and depending on what kind of beer you're gonna make,
is uh really going to depend on what kind of
hops or how how much hops? Yeah, we haven't started
(24:13):
fermenting yet. I jumped the gun. You have to add
the hops with to the worked Oh, oh, yeah, we
did jump the gun. But Budweiser, let's say, has about
eight to twin I b U s, which are international
bitterness units. That's how you measure hops. Are you like
happy beer? I am a big I p A and
pale ale? Yeah, I'd like beer that's so happy it
makes me sneeze. Well that's pretty happy. Um. A thirty
(24:37):
uh stout has about thirty to fifty I b U s,
and a double I p A or an I p
A could have up to a hundred dog fish head
D and twenty minute has a hundred and twenty IBus. Well,
I like the sixty and the ninety. The one twenty
is actually kind of hard to find a lot of
times because they don't make a ton of it. Um.
(24:57):
But interestingly, pale ale. You know where Indian palel comes from,
the I p a India, Well it does. Uh. British
soldiers were stationed over there, and when they started setting
up trade with India back in the day, were colonizing it.
It's just one, that's one way to put it. And
they were like, boy, were really thirsty and we kind
of miss our old beer back in England. So they
(25:18):
would send over their pale ales and they wouldn't um
really make the voyage very well, the sea voyage. It
would show up flat and kind of gnarly. So they
added a lot more hops because hot sex is a preservative.
Thus India pale ale. Nice. Yeah, nice, that's the story
I got. I'm gonna be really embarrassed, No, I think
(25:39):
if it's not by that one, that's what's the kind
of story here in a bar? Yeah you know yeah,
um yeah, that's the story you see in a bar
gets you free beer. We should try that. Um. So
you've got you've got the worked that's boiled. Um, it's
all sugary and um, you add east to it and
(26:00):
put in a tank and now it's fermenting and like
like we said, the yeast just eats all the sugars
and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products. And
depending on the kind of beer you make, um, well
it really depends on the kind of yeast you use.
Um you're either going to be waiting around for a
(26:20):
few weeks to a couple of months. So um, if
you were making um something called a an ale, you're
going to be doing all this. You're gonna ferment um
using tough fermenting yeast at room temperature, and then after
a few weeks your beer is gonna be ready to drink.
(26:40):
If you are making a logger which in Germany, which
in German is a verb meaning to store, Um, you're
going to it's gonna take a few months, um, and
you're going to store this stuff. You're gonna let it
ferment um at near freezing temperatures and it's gonna ferment
at the bottom the yeast is Yeah, they would put
(27:00):
it in caves. It's called lager ing. Yeah. It was
the stort and cave cold caves because for those hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of years that they were making beer.
They kept they kept being like, this beer is messed up,
and it happens to be summertime. What's wrong with this beer? Oh,
it's it's all the summertime. And then finally somebody figured out,
wait a minute, we're making the best beer in the
(27:21):
winter time. And they didn't quite know why, but they
figured out a process to replicate it. But of course
now we understand that UM, the wild yeast and bacteria
in the area that was prevalent in the summers of Germany,
UM was messing up the fermentation process, souring the beer.
(27:44):
It's the stuff using yeasts that survived in winter months
in the cold. UM produces really clean, crisp, very awesome beer.
Taste of the Rockies. Yeah, exactly. That's now called the Lagger.
That's right. We actually forgot something too. And I know
there's homebrewers right now going you can't forget carbonation. Uh,
(28:04):
skipping back a bit after you. After you do have
the bottle beer, it's not carbonated yet, very flat, so
you need to carbonate it. And I imagine the big
breweries UM forced carbonate like sodas do and uh, if
you're a traditionalist though, and I wonder about craft breweries
that I need to know more about this if they
do that or not. Well, I think it usually I'll say,
like bottle conditioned. So bottle condition means it just waits
(28:28):
and you wait it out for the yeast to do
its thing naturally. And that's where you're gonna get your
your phone and your good bubbly goodness because it produces
carbon dioxide. Is a waste product, takes a while. Waste product.
You say, waste product, I say bubbly goodness. Okay, Um,
So you want to talk about gravity? Uh? Yeah, gravity
(28:48):
is um. Gravity is how much alcohol is in your beer.
And the brewers measure the gravity before and after the
fermentation process, and they calculate the difference uh in the
out of alcohol by volume and represented by a percentage.
So like the higher the percentage, the higher the gravity
of the beer. Yeah. And you know nowadays with the
(29:09):
craft beers, you're gonna get all kinds of percentages, like
you know, six to nine to right, that's a pretty
heavy duty beer. Oh definitely. What is like get your
average Budweiser? What is that? Five? Five? Is it? There's
a law in Georgia for a while that was you
couldn't sell beer over five point five. Do you remember
when they repealed that law that beautiful time in the nineties.
Do you remember that? Actually? That was Wow. They had
(29:32):
a lot to do with crapper reis in Georgia too, Definitely.
UM say the stuff about the lambic so, I thought
that was really interesting, okay, um. So lambics are um
a type of spontaneously fermented brew. I've had it. I
didn't know this though, the same problem that the um
old Germans had um with you know, local stuff getting
(29:53):
in there the UM. I guess the French when they're
producing this, these Lambics or the Belgians um French, and
they're they're basically just leaving their stuff out to be
exposed to wild yeast that grows in the area. It's
crazy spontaneous fermentation. And I've had, Like I said, I'd
tried lambic in the past, and I didn't know what
made it so special that that was it. I don't
(30:15):
care for it a whole lot. It's kind of has
a sour aftertaste, its fruity sort of cider almost. Yeah,
not enough hops. Oh, no, I like, what's your favorite beer? Actually?
I mean to asking that. So I'm a pretty big
fan of um anything New Amsterdam puts out. Yeah, they're great,
um fat tires point of the all time best. Yeah,
(30:36):
our friends that we have friends fans at Brooklyn Brewery.
Yeah and New AMSTU. Remember they sent us like a
bunch of beer. They were the first ones they did.
Thanks again, guys. Um, Yeah, we have fans at Brooklyn Brewery.
They sent beach towels and other swag they did. Uh.
We had a fan who sent us some Shiner Bach once,
but I don't think he was related to them in
any way. He was just from Texas. Yeah, that's a
(30:58):
Texas beer, right, Um, my all time favorite. It's just
it's never been toppled. Like I've had plenty of beer.
I'm like, this is really good, like innocent gun. Have
you ever had that? Oh my god, it's like ambrosia.
It's the most amazing thing ever. But you you can't
just drink like one after the other if you're in
such a mood. It's just it's just a lot. It's
(31:19):
very rich. But my so my favorite beer, that's just
no one's ever topped all day is Sierra Nevada pale Ale.
I'm right there with you. It's just the best beer.
I think that's anyone anyone's ever made. It's delicious and nutritious,
it's refreshing. Yeah, I want to go to their brewery. Um.
I like the dog Fish had stuff. Um, but I'm
I'm in to try. And you know, we have these
(31:40):
stores here in Atlanta now and Indicator where I live with,
you know, all the myriad craft beers, and I'll try
any kind of any kind of pale ale or I
p a. Have you been to Ale? Yeah? I have,
that's yeah. And they have the growlers there, which is
always kind of fun. Yeah. You just get something on tappen,
drink it out of a jug like an old pirate.
And I also have to say our local boys at
(32:02):
Sweetwater are killing it too. Like there's like as far
as pale ales go, Sierra Nevadas and the four twenty
very very close four twenties good. I will always go
for that if it's um, if they don't have the
seer on them. And I remember my first beer very distinctly,
do you Yeah, Because I, as everyone listens to the
(32:23):
show NOWS, I was a very good, good Baptist boy
growing up, So I didn't um, I didn't drink or
anything like that until I was older. And I remember
the first time I tasted beer. I had only had
soda as far as a carbonated beverage, and that's the
only thing I could like expect, And I just remember thinking,
this is so weird tasting. It's like it's fizzy like
(32:44):
a soda, but it wouldn't taste anything like a soda.
And I'm like, oh, how do people drink this stuff?
And then like thirty seconds later, you're trying it again, like, oh,
why can't I stop? I want to stop? Yeah? Um,
first beer, huh, I don't remember mine? Remember there was
a long gone. I think you're probably younger than I was.
(33:06):
I don't remember. I mean my dad drank like old
Milwaukee tall boys, and I'm sure like I tried like
a sip of his when I was a kid. Or see,
we didn't have beer in the house, so that it
was just winn't around. Um alright, so where are we chuckers?
We could talk about some of the older beers in existence. Yeah,
so there's like actual old beer. It's like over a
(33:27):
hundred years old. Like that that particular bottle of beer
was manufactured like a hundred seventy eight years ago. And
there's two shipwrecks that had beer on them that ironically
are competing for the oldest beer in the world. Um,
and they both went down in. I know, it's maddening. Um.
There's one in the Baltic Sea. There was a shipment
(33:49):
of beer and champagne from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg that
went down in. And then there's a shipwreck in the
English Channel UM in eighteen and a guy in named
Um Keith Thomas. He was a microbiologist, I believe. Um.
He got his hands on some of the bottles of
this beer that is still around and Um tried it
(34:10):
and was like he vomited, and he's like, maybe I
can figure out some other way to do this. So
he got the yeast from this beer, and UM got
a colony going of the living yeast, same same yeast.
It's not like a descendant of it, like this is
the yeast. And Um he got it going again and
found like an old porter recipe and now he makes
flag Porter, which in and of itself is one of
(34:33):
the better beers around. Oh I also want to say,
I like just about anything Sam Smith does too. I
don't know that Sam Smith like oatmeal, stout and winter welcome. Yeah,
Sammy Smith. Sorry, sure they're Uh they had the Shakespeare
stout yea when that Sammy Smith, that's rogue. Yeah, that's rogue.
But I've had that. Guy Ale is awesome. Man, I'm
(34:55):
getting thirsty. Uh. Dogfish Head has revived a recipe that
they claim is the and that's what we're talking about earlier.
Is he the guy from dog fish had claims it's
the oldest known ferminted recipe in the history of man.
And uh it was from a Neolithic burial site in China,
and it is called they brew it now. It's called
(35:17):
Chateau uh jiaho uh j i h h j i
a h u from seven thousand b C. And they
decoded it, uh molecularly from Clay Potts founded a Neolithic
burial site and have brewed this stuff. And um, they're
also the ones they get a little crazy. You know,
they did the Midas touch brew that was supposedly King
(35:39):
Midas's um recipe or from his tomb. And we have
people right in But I love what they're doing over
there at dog Fish Head. They also did the one
based on the hymn to Nick Cancy the what the hymn?
Didn't cantye that to marry in one right? Um? So
there's also some brewers that have been around for a while,
(36:01):
like Stella Artois. If you look on the label, you'll
see that, um, it has some mention of thirteen sixty six. Man,
that's when it was. That's when they started brewing that supposedly.
Oh yeah, I like a nice summertime beer for me, agreed. Um.
August Steiner was um began in probably the oldest beer
(36:24):
in the world as far as like brewing. The recipe
um is uh winehan Staffen. Did I get it? Yeah?
Vahan v han Stefan. Oh nice. So those are brewed
by Ben Benedictine monks. That beer has been brewed since
(36:45):
the seven hundreds. But the weinhan Staffen Uh the guys
brewing that also operate the oldest um continuously functioning brewery
in the world, which opened its doors in ten party
and it's been going ever since. That's awesome. It's about
to celebrate its thousandth anniversary. That's so cool. Um, what
(37:08):
else a man named Arthur Guinness and seventeen fifty six
did a very smart thing by signing a nine thousand
year lease on a building in Dublin and they have
been making the old delicious Guinness beer there since then.
And I enjoyed at our south By Southwest event at
Fedoe Irish Pub. I enjoyed myself some Guinness at that
(37:29):
a bit love me some Guinness. It's Gonnas sponsoring you, now, No,
none of these people are. But why are you wearing
that leather eight bulb jack with Guinness patches all over it?
The Schlitz story I thought was kind of interesting. Yeah.
I searched the story up because I had remembered hearing
it you back, and I was like, we gotta mention now.
So what was the deal? They were making good beer
(37:51):
for a long time, We're one of the top three,
and then they changed their recipe in the late seventies
and just screwed it all up. They wanted to be
number one and they were, they were number two. Wanted
to be number one, so they decided that they were
going to um just change it, and they changed it
in a really lazy, cost efficient way. Instead of malt,
(38:11):
they used corn, syrup, high fruit toast corn syrup. Such
a bad idea. And then they didn't filter it as
much either, So you had this really weird tasting chunky
style beer. And this is in the seventies. What by
Schlitz's market share was one It went from the number
(38:32):
two selling beer in America to within just a couple
of years, one percent of the market. I think more
than one person lost their job on that that move.
Oh yeah, they may have like killed those people. Um.
So they discontinued the brand altogether at one point, didn't they. Yeah,
it went under and then Strows, which I also remember
from my childhood, Um was, uh, what said, well, you
(38:54):
know what we're gonna buy you guys. So they bought
Schlitz and then, um, they just bought the label. They're like,
we don't want that. Keep your keep all this leftover
chunky beer. Um, but they bought the label and apparently
rolled out the classic sixties formula, which I have not tried.
I have not either. We do want to shout out
to Yengling as well. Um. In nine David Yengling opened
(39:16):
a brewery in Pennsylvania in Potts Bell and it is
still open today. The oldest operating brewery in the United States,
still in the Yngling family, And uh, they're black and
tan is very delicious to me, and it's a very
popular beer. People seek it out. I think one of
the reasons why is because it's tradition and it's delicious,
(39:37):
and it has cute puppies in their labels and marketing materials. Yeah.
And I want to ask Budweiser, if you are the
makers of Budweiser and you're listening, bring back the bullet
bottles and you'll thank me later. Do you know who
makes um Budweiser? Anheuser Bush? Right? Uh? You know who
owns Anheuser Busch um in BEV. They're a European company, really,
(40:00):
as something as American as Budweiser is owned by the Europeans. Now, well,
and Heisa isn't exactly American, you know what I'm saying.
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that, neither as Bush.
But yeah, the bullet bottles, do you remember those? They
were short, little stubby No, those are the barrels that
these were bullets. They were short and kind of went
(40:22):
up and then just graduated up and they were guarantee
you people would buy those the classic Budweiser Fallus bottle,
Well Miller High Life came back with their old school bottle.
I haven't said, oh, yes, yes, I know exactly what
you're talking. Remember the old bullets. Yeah, they were cute
and uh, I think if Budweiser brought those back, people
(40:43):
would really jump on that because if you know, everyone
likes that old school stuff, you can look like you're
in the seventies again or eighties seventies. Yeah, you can
send your thanks by check to Chuck Annheuser Busch money
starts rolling, or just a case of the bullets. So, um,
this is kind of unusual. We don't usually throw out
(41:03):
cool random facts at the end, but there's some cool ones.
You go ahead, Okay, I'm going to start with the
London Brewery of eighteen fourteen. Yeah, so there was a
hundred thousand gallon tank fermenting tank of ale uh in
London at a brewery and it exploded and when it
did it killed eight people and destroyed a pub nearby.
(41:25):
It actually killed nine people. The ninth guy died the
next day. Because when these hundred thousand gallons of ale
flooded the streets, people started drinking it. One guy drank
so much that he died of alcohol poisoning. Wow, isn't
that crazy, Josh. According to statistics, the Czech Republic leads
the world and beer consumption per capita. I have been there,
(41:48):
and I can tell you they love their beer. It's
cheaper than their water. I have been there too, and
it is delicious. Over a hundred and fifty six liters
per year per person. That's for everyone that they don't
just say like twenty one year old, uh, you know citizens.
So that is four and thirty nine beers a year.
Twelve ounces, right, they're probably sixteen ounces over there, or
(42:10):
are they twelve? I don't know. I don't know how
they broke that downs. So that is eighteen cases of
beer per person, about a case and a half five
s a leader a half leader. I think it's like
a tall boy can a big can. Well. I think
most of Europe it's like that, because I remember being
in London for the first time in thinking, man, you
(42:32):
guys have his tall boys and they're like, what's a
tall boy? Oh wait that was Australian that was neither
actually pretty close Matt's and they're laughing at my hackneed
attempts uh best symbol. Yeah, the red triangle famous. It
was registered as a trademark in eighteen seventy six. It's
the world's oldest trademark. Pretty cool. And the beer Stein.
(42:53):
You have been to Germany, Yeah, the beer gardens there,
it's exactly what you think you're gonna get. You're to
get a four and a half foot tall German woman
with four arms as big as your waist, carrying like
five of those big, huge mugs of beer in each hand.
And it was exactly what you want if you're going
(43:15):
over to your beer grou And I was like, Wow,
I'm so glad it's like this. And my buddy Brett
and I actually had a very fun night in Germany
drinking with this ah old fat German dude that didn't
speak any English and I spoke a little bit of German,
but we all love the Beatles, and we drank with
this dude for like three hours, singing Beatles songs in
(43:38):
both English and German. And Carl and I have a
picture with this guy still. It was one of my
great great memories of traveling abroad. Well tell him where
the beer stein came from? Oh, the beer stein comes
from the bubonic plague. They're like, we need to put
lids on these things so we don't get any disease
in there. Until they came up with the beer stein. Yeah,
(43:59):
and what was it to the pottery? Was they were
there were advancements in ceramics, right. I think the money
fact is the bubonic plague created beer steins, so that's it.
But I didn't get steins in Germany. You know, it
was just a big mug. It's like is you know,
it looks like a half gallon of beer. I'm not
(44:19):
sure how much it is, but it was good doomkalee stuff.
Nice man, Matt, do we get anything wrong? He said,
We're pretty good. That's good enough. I'm sure that there's
some homebrewers that will take us to task. But we
did our best. Man. We want to hear about it. Um,
do you have anything else right now? I'm done? Okay,
So that's it for beer. You can type beer into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com. Remember,
(44:41):
as Chuck said at the beginning, don't go out and
drink beer if you're not twenty one. UM in the
United States and drink responsibly. Yes, don't be a goin.
Don't ever drink and dry it. It's just dumb, agreed
chuck a little older and you realize that the commercials
are all right, that's just a stupid thing to do.
Um and uh so that's it for beer right now? Um,
(45:02):
I said, search for how stuff works dot com. I
think so it's time for listening. That's right, Josh. And
you know the other reason why you get a little
older and you say drink responsibly is because you do
a lot of stupid stuff. If you don't, oh man,
and you will be the butt of many many jokes.
Even if no one gets hurt, you will. You will
act a fool and end up with like toothpaste up
(45:26):
your nose because you've passed out at a party. If
that's what happens in your world when you drink too much,
you know, you've seen a pass out at a party,
and people like draw stuff on your face and take
pictures of you and put it all over the internet.
Plus you feel crutty the next morning. Yeah, exactly, see
our hangovers podcast for that. All right, um, I'm gonna
(45:46):
call this a pretty cool interesting email from an attorney
about doing guys. I just got done listening to your
podcast on duels. I thought you might like to know
that I and I am sure many of your fans
enjoyed the podcast with a twinge of sad This because
alas I cannot duel. Why you ask, I am an attorney,
and one of the states in which I am licensed
(46:07):
is Kentucky. And when an attorney in Kentucky is sworn in,
he or she swears an oath. And when I was
sworn in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it contained this additional tidbit.
In order to practice in the Commonwealth, I had to
swear that I would not participate in any duels. She
still has to say. This isn't that crazy, It's pretty cool.
(46:28):
What's more, as I listened to the podcast, I realized
that I had been preparing to duel my whole life.
During college, I worked as a serving wench at Medieval Times,
watching jousts each night and twice on Saturday's. My senior
year of college, in order to fulfill my pe requirement,
I took fencing, which was actually really interesting and more
athletic than I expected. So sadly, no matter how much
(46:48):
experience we may have, neither I nor my fellow members
of the Kentucky bar come stuff. You should know. Fans
can use the information we clean you from your podcast. Uh.
There was talk in the last few years of uh years,
of removing that particular clause from the oath, but as
far as I know, newly minted Kentucky attorneys are still
required to abstain from dueling nuts. It just seems logical.
(47:13):
I think we should add that to just about anything,
like when you go get your driver's license you have
to check a box that says I won't do or
in your marriage vowels. Yeah, there's there's just a lot
of places where we could insert that. And that is
from Rebecca right in Sincentucky, Ohio. Really that's what she signed.
It is No, she signed it Cincinnati, but I like
to say Sanantucky. Uh. Well, let's see. Oh, if you're
(47:37):
a homebrewer, we want to hear from you. Um. And
by hear from you, we mean it's into some of
your weares. Chuck said that, not me, um, but he's right. So, uh,
we want to hear from you via Twitter at s
y ESK podcast. We wanted to hear from you on
Facebook at facebook dot com, slash of you Should Know,
(47:58):
and We want to get emails from you, and you
can send those Two Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff Works dot com.
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