As Christians captured the Roman world with their ideals and then took their gospel to non-Roman lands, beer was very much a part of the story. For example, around the turn of the fifth century, the revered St. Patrick introduced the Christian gospel to the wild and pagan land of Ireland. Always at his side was Mescan, the great saint’s personal brewmaster. It seems that Patrick understood godly hospitality and captured many an Irish tribal chieftain with his tasty beer before he won the man for God. In other words, yes, beer played a role in the winning of Ireland for Christ. Beer also played a role in the miracles the great saint performed. According to legend, Patrick was once dining with the King of Tara when “The wizard Lucatmael put a drop of poison into Patrick’s cruse (an old English word for pitcher), and gave it into Patrick’s hand: But Patrick blessed the cruse and inverted the vessel, and the poison fell thereout, and not even a little of the ale fell. And Patrick afterward drank the ale.”
Some sense of the importance of beer to medieval Christians is indicated by the many patron saints of beer celebrated by the Catholic church. Chief of these is St. Arnou, or Arnold, who once said, “From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world.” Yet the miracle that led to his canonization happened after his death. When he passed from this life in AD 640, the people of his hometown went to retrieve his body from the monastery where he had retired. As his friends carried Arnou’s body the weary distance home, they stopped in the village of Champigneulles, where they hoped to have a glass of beer. However, in the entire village only one mugful of beer could be found. They decided to pass the mug around for every man to at least have a sip. Amazingly, each man was able to drink his fill and the beer never ran out. The people came to believe that Arnou had performed this wonder from beyond the grave and thus the church made him the patron saint of beer.
There were other saints associated with beer, of course. St. Bartholomew was the patron saint of mead drinkers, or those who drank beer fermented from honey. St. Brigid was the famous Irish saint who labored in a leper colony and once asked God to turn bathwater into beer so that her lepers could also enjoy the taste of brew. According to the Catholic church, God did and so Brigid was made a saint. And then there was St. Columbanus. He once came upon a gathering of pagans who were about to sacrifice a keg of beer to the idol of their god. Their plan was to offer the keg on a sacred fire, but Columbanus began to preach and it wasn’t long before the idol was burned instead. Afterward, Columbanus told the pagans that beer must always be received with thanksgiving to the true God before it can be rightly consumed. All of these became saints and all of their stories became part of the medieval worldview.
Beer was also in attendance at the birth of the Holy Roman Empire and this was largely because the emperor Charlemagne loved beer and insisted on raising its quality throughout his domains. While conquering most of Europe and revitalizing art, religion, and culture as he went, he elevated the position of brewers in the empire, supported innovations in brewing science, and even formed a kind of brewing think tank to give him advice. His chief brewer was a man known to history as St. Gall, who came to Charlemagne fresh from his ministry among beer-loving Celts. St. Gall brought many Celtic ideas to his brewing endeavors and ended up enhancing nearly every stage of the brewing process. Charlemagne’s reforms—and the eager work of monasteries throughout the Christian world—gradually made the church the primary brewer and wholesaler of beer in society. Men quickly learned that being in right relationship with the local religious leaders guaranteed access to beer. Soon the beer served at religious functions became known as “church ale,” and this gave rise to a number of new terms, including bridal, originally the term “bride ale,” the beer new brides served to those who gave them wedding gifts.
Charlemagne’s support for brewing enhanced an already vibrant Christian beer culture in the medieval church, one that is difficult to exaggerate. An example comes to us from a letter that Pope Gregory wrote to Archbishop Nidrosiensi of Iceland. In it, Gregory describes how some children in the medieval period were baptized not with holy water but with beer. This was likely because beer was cleaner than water and for the baptizing priest it was also in more convenient supply. Still, the reference has become a symbol of how much the church of the time was almost literally immersed in beer.
The rise of monastic orders only strengthened this religious attachment to beer. Monasteries brewed beer as a social service—because it was a healthier drink than water and with less alcohol than the harder liquors a man might choose—but also to raise the funds that a monastic enterprise required. Naturally, the beer drinking of the monks themselves often became the subject of a laugh or two, as one ditty from the period reveals.
To drink like a Capuchin is to drink poorly;
To drink like a Benedictine is to drink deeply;
To drink like a Dominican is pot after pot;
But to drink like a Franciscan is to drink the cellar dry.
Though the church certainly maintained a monopoly in the beer trade, other sources soon emerged. Peasant wives had long brewed beer at home for their families and the servants in castle kitchens brewed for their masters in much the same way. This was nothing new. Yet by the end of the twelfth century, other masters of the brewing trade were slowly emerging. Taverns and inns began springing up in towns and along major roads, and many of these also brewed their own beer. These early brewpubs sometimes transformed into commercial breweries, some of which survive to this day—and more than a few of which were managed by female brewers, called brewsters, who were quickly becoming common throughout Northern Europe.
An explosion of such brewpubs and taverns came on the heels of one of the worst disasters to befall the western world. In 1347, a nearly invisible creature—Yersinia pestis—likely embedded itself in a rat, which in turn boarded a banana boat bound for Northern Europe from the Crimea. The result was the Black Plague, which led to four years of terror and more than forty million agonized deaths. It was an age of suffering, and though it may seem heartless to discuss it, the impact on beer and brewing in the years afterward was nothing less than astonishing. In the years following the plague, a dramatically smaller population shared the wealth of Europe, which still thrived much as it had prior to the years of death. By 1400, the average worker made twice the wages he might have made for the same work only one hundred years before. This meant more disposable income and time to travel, all of which fed the already thriving trade of brewing beer.
With wealth on the rise and travel the fashion, markets and fairs sprang up throughout Europe. In their wake came taverns and inns, brewpubs and breweries. In lower England alone, the number of drinking establishments grew from nearly none in 1300 to more than seventeen thousand by the year 1577. This meant a rate of increase of one new tavern a week. During this same period, London boasted a population of some thirty-five thousand residents within its city limits, yet it also contained more than 354 taverns and another 1,330 brewshops—one alehouse or tavern for every twenty-one people. And in Dublin, the city that would one day be home to Arthur Guinness, a survey published in 1610 estimated that there were more than 1,100 alehouses and nearly one hundred breweries and brewpubs—and this in a town of only four thousand families!
This dramatic increase in the number of sources for beer began raising concerns about standards of quality in brewing. These concerns were so widespread that when the English barons met King John at Runnymede to insist on the Magna Carta, one of their demands was for uniform brewing standards. It is no wonder. The beer of the day was a far cry from what we think of as beer now. Because yeast was unknown, the fermentation process occurred naturally through airborne yeast and was often incomplete. Beer was flat and very low in alcohol as a result. To compensate, brewers flavored it with spices. Sometimes even peppers were used. The description that comes to us from the 1200s portraying English beer as “muddy, foddy, fulsome, puddle, stinking” seems apt. A famous rhyme cited by Andrew Boorde in 1540 expresses the same
sentiment.
Ich am a Cornishmann, ale I can brew
It will make one to cacke, also to spew
It is thick and smokey and also it is thin
It is like wash as pigs had wrestled there in.
As the number of breweries in Europe continued to rise, Germany took the lead in regulating brewing to improve quality. In 1487, Duke Albert IV issued a set of regulations that became the basis for the Reinheitsgebot of 1516. Best translated as “purity order,” the Reinheitsgebot was called the German Beer Purity Law in English and was famous for defining the ingredients of beer as water, barley, and hops. The inclusion of yeast would have to wait until the 1800s, when Louis Pasteur explained to the world the role of microorganisms in fermentation. The Reinheitsgebot did indeed improve the quality of German beer; so much so that many brewers in Germany claim to abide by the standards to this day. These German innovations had no effect in England, though, which so reacted to the idea of using hops in beer that it banned the practice as a contamination. It was a view that prevailed well past 1524, when widespread English complaint took the form of this popular rhyme.
Hops, Reformation, Bays, and Beer
Came to England in one bad year.
The Reinheitsgebot helped make German beer among the best in the world. Unfortunately, it did so just prior to the Reformation, which had the twin effect of both celebrating beer more than any movement in church history and serving to close the very monasteries that brewed most of the world’s beer at the time. Martin Luther could not have anticipated this result when he nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the Wittenberg Church door in 1517. His goal was to reform the Roman Catholic Church, not break from it. Yet when the church authorities stood firm and tried to destroy the fledgling Protestant movement, they only succeeded in fanning the flames of the revolt. As Reformation ideas captured hearts and minds throughout Europe, priests and nuns renounced their vows, Roman Catholic cathedrals became Protestant churches, and monasteries closed, thus decreasing the production of beer. While this decline in brewing would not have deterred Martin Luther from his reforming work, he certainly would have grieved the loss of any fine brew, for he was among the great beer lovers of Christian history.
Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.
It is important to know that Luther’s hometown of Wittenberg was a brewing center, that his wife, Katie, was a skilled brewer at her convent before she left it to marry him, and that in his day every occasion of life from weddings to banking was graced by the presence of beer. This was only good news to Luther. Inviting a friend to his wedding, he once wrote, “I am to be married on Thursday . . . Katie and I invite you to send a barrel of the best Torgau beer, and if it is not good, you will have to drink it all yourself!” This is typical of his playfulness, his boldness, and his passion for good German beer.
Having wrestled his soul out of its harsh theological constraints, Luther tried to understand the world afresh in a consistently biblical light. He reexamined, reapplied, and, where necessary, reformed according to a fiery biblical worldview. And he spared no one, from the pope to nuns and priests, from extremist Protestants to those who wouldn’t live life fully in the love and grandeur of God. He did not suffer fools lightly and could barely stand those who feared moral excess and so retreated from everything that might tempt them in the world. “Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused,” he once wrote. “Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?”
Luther spent much of his life in the taverns of Wittenberg and not just because he loved to drink beer. He often mentored his students there, studied there, met important visitors there, and, upon occasion, even taught classes there. The time he spent in taverns and inns gave him a chance to look out onto the world as it was in his day, to experience and to observe. He surely chatted with prostitutes, helped carry drunks out the fair door, and may have mediated more than his fair share of spats between tipsy husbands and wives. The tavern was where Luther learned of the world he was called to reform with the gospel of Christ.
These hours of learning from life around beer must have led him to his famous definition of intoxication. “Drunkenness,” he wrote, is “when the tongue walks on stilts and reason goes forward under half a sail.” This definition posed no challenge to Luther, though, for he is never described as drinking to excess. Instead, he viewed drink as good for the body, an aid to social life, and a gift of God. “If God can forgive me for having crucified Him with Masses twenty years running,” Luther once boomed, “He can also bear with me for occasionally taking a good drink to honor Him.”
Martin Luther
John Calvin, Luther’s fellow reformer, felt very much the same way, though this is contrary to the image of him that has come to us through time. Perhaps we should have known better. In his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin wrote, “We are nowhere forbidden to laugh, or to be satisfied with food . . . or to be delighted with music, or to drink wine.” The great Genevan reformer also wrote, “It is permissible to use wine not only for necessity, but also to make us merry.”
Like Luther, Calvin worked hard to hammer out a consistently biblical worldview. He wanted all of his life to be submitted to the rulership of Jesus Christ and yet he did not want to miss some grace or provision of God because of flawed theology or religious excess. He and Luther had seen too much of that in their pre-Protestant lives. “The use of gifts of God cannot be wrong, if they are directed to the same purpose for which the Creator himself has created and destined them,” he insisted. In his little classic, The Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, Calvin developed the case that God has “made the earthly blessings for our benefit, and not for our harm”:
If we study . . . why he has created the various kinds of food, we shall find that it was his intention not only to provide for our needs, but likewise for our pleasure and for our delight . . . . For, if this were not true, the Psalmist would not enumerate among the divine blessings “the wine that makes glad the heart of man, and the oil that makes his face to shine.”
This robust Reformation theology, which taught enjoying God’s creation and doing all that is not sinful to the glory of God, filtered into the centuries that followed the reformer’s work. This likely comes as a surprise to those who confuse biblical Christianity with the antisaloon leagues and prohibitionism of later history. The truth is that most post-Reformation Christians believed as their first-century fathers did—that drunkenness is sin but that alcohol in moderation is one of the great gifts of God.
Thus, John Wesley drank wine, was something of an ale expert, and often made sure that his Methodist preachers were paid in one of the vital currencies of the day—rum. His brother, Charles Wesley, was known for the fine port, Madeira, and sherry he often served in his home; the journals of George Whitefield are filled with references to his enjoyment of alcohol. At the end of one of his letters, he wrote, “Give my thanks to that friendly brewer for the keg of rum he sent us,” and in another, “I believe God will take Georgia into his own hands. Its affairs have lately been before the House of Commons,” where, thankfully, “the use of rum was granted.” The revered colonial American pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards viewed alcohol in much the same way. According to biographer Elizabeth D. Dodds, Edwards grew up in the home of a father who “turned out a locally famed hard cider in the orchard behind his house.” Though he was not known to dri
nk much at a time, Edwards was famous among his friends for nursing a glass of punch throughout an evening with family or while preparing his sermons at night.
Clearly, then, though the Reformation diminished the production of beer temporarily by closing many of the European monasteries where beer was brewed, it also served the cause of beer and alcohol well by declaring them gifts of God and calling for their use in moderation. This, in time, led to a restoration of beer brewing and even gave it a noble purpose—offering beer to the world as an alternative to the hard liquor that so often meant destruction in human lives.
Now I confess that when I started the research for this book, I knew very little of what you have read in this chapter. None of my academic courses or reading prepared me for the significant role that beer has played in world history and I might never have guessed that Christians would have loved beer as they did through the centuries or that they would have mastered the brewer’s art with such conviction.
I was armed, then, as I approached the life of Arthur Guinness, with some important truths. I understood for the first time that beer had a noble history and that it had been intricately interwoven with the Christian faith for nearly seventeen hundred years by the time Arthur was born. I understood also that brewing had long been a respected profession and this was due in part to the positive contribution it made to society. Men drank beer rather than harder liquors, improved their health as they did—the B vitamins of beer being particularly important in times of meager diets—and in the post-Reformation centuries did so with a specific sense of offering their joys to God, as Calvin and Luther had taught them to do.
The Search for God and Guinness Page 4