No Farms No Beer: Part 1, The Origin

This is me stirring a pot of mash at the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam. 

So, funny story...
As a recent Cornell graduate, I feel it necessary to relive some of my glory days of college. One of the best times of the year was Slope Day. This was the last day of spring semester, and it was typically a very lively day. Fraternities would host parties and barbecues starting at 11am. A large theme of that day was beer, I mean, it's college right? I was never a heavy drinker, but, I enjoy a good beer as much as the next guy. My fraternity, Alpha Zeta, like many other fraternities, had shirts made to celebrate the event. The shirts read: No Farms No Beer, which is a play on the American Farmland Trust's sticker, "No Farms No Food". We were an ag fraternity, and it just made sense to have shirts that reflected the venues, and what the fraternity stood for...agriculture that is.

Well, one large part of Slope Day was a concert on Libe Slope (hence the name, Slope Day), there was a big name band that would headline, I think that year it was Nelly. While waiting in line to enter the concert grounds, I'm next to a brother of another fraternity. For those of you who aren't familiar with the greek system, a brother is simply a member. He was staring at my shirt, and unprovoked proclaimed, "that's so true! without all the wheat fields, we wouldn't have beer!". I had to chuckle, as he wasn't quite correct, but he had the general idea. Below is the story of beer.

The origin: Ingredients in Beer
Beer is traditionally made from barley, though there are some beers that are made from wheat, or even oats In cheaper beers, fillers, such as corn and rice are added to cut costs. For the scope of this post, I will focus on barley. The reasons barley is often used include less processing and a hardier flavor. Barley is believed to be domesticated around 8000 BC. Additionally, there are records in multiple cultures with the production of beer, including the ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks.

More information on barley can be found at the following links: Barley Introduction.

Next, we need a mechanism to change the starches within the barley seed to change into sugars. In this instance, it was discovered that water works well. The process of changing these starches to sugars is called malting. Malting is used in many other applications such as malted milk. In nature, malting is known as seed germination. Malting is a chemical reaction, so once this reaction is complete, we need to stop it. This is done by drying the grain in a kiln. The dried grain, which in now packed with sugar, instead of starches is ground (or milled) and added to hot water. This is known as mash. The mash is then separated from the actual grain, which at that point is considered wort, which tastes almost like sugary water.

Now, we have a vat of wort. From here, we need a mechanism to convert the sugars into alcohol. In ancient times, it was unknown what this mechanism was. Some thought it was a divine act, that this mash (or later on, wort) was magically brewed. It was eventually discovered that the divine organism was actually a yeast. You can thank Louis Pasteur for that discovery. This yeast is extremely common, and natural inoculations were common. I am a big fan of fungi, and found this site very informative on yeast. Yeast transforms this sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is why beer is traditionally carbonated. After fermentation is complete, the brew is usually filtered to get rid of impurities, and is bottled accordingly.

Above is a graphic recounting the basic steps to making beer. 

The final major ingredient is added as a preservative. Hops is a vine crop that has antibiotic properties, which was useful in preventing other microbes moving into the young brew. This was before the invention of pasteurization, perhaps Louis was still discovering what made beer instead of how to cleanse it. In fact, 98% of hops produced in the world is consumed in beer production. Nowadays, with pasteurization, adding hops isn't so much a necessity from a preservation standpoint as it is for flavor balance. Non-hopped beers tend to be very sweet.

That's the basic rundown of the ingredients, each brewery adds their own twist on beer. And spices are another post for another day, more like a book.

If you think about it, not only do we cultivate the cereal that goes into the mash, but then we cultivate the yeast to do our bidding and ferment the cereal. This cultivation of yeast is what made it possible to mass-produce beer, and other products, such as leavened bread. The result is a change in taste, a beverage that is resistant to spoilage, and a beverage that is actually more nutritious. Unfiltered beer is very high in B vitamins.

While clean drinking water is something taken for granted, before sound sanitation, and water purification, it was actually safer to drink beer or wine. The alcohol within the brew would kill any microbes. In fact, there are ancient accounts of school-children in Egypt being sent to school with beer to be consumed during the day, in addition to an after-school snack of bread and more beer. Many of the laborers were even paid in beer, a tradition the was carried up until the industrial revolution in the United States. Could you imagine if the most important part of your wages was a safe form of water to drink? It goes to show how far we really have come as a society. In today's day and age, we would never see a union picketing over unfair wages and demanding more beer.