by Paul Graham
Guy hit up Blimpy Burger in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we’d lived about a decade ago. I could still picture the obese polar bear slouched against the porch of that tumbledown diner on the corner of Packard Street, where the undergraduate dwellings clustered. There were couches on the roofs of rental houses, debris fields in the front yards, and more gluten per square mile than I will ever be around again. Guy ate a quadruple Blimpy. With crispy onion rings.
“Fuck you, Guy.”
He found an Italian place in Syracuse that we could have driven to, if all this shit hadn’t gone down, and then a seafood joint in Maryland. I believe Guy might have hit up Burlington, one of our favorite food-haunts. And Montreal: Joe Beef. I wrote the name of the place down, it looked so promising.
Of all the strange, counterintuitive things I did at this time, my extended voyeurism of Guy’s eating habits might be the most extreme, given my loathing for television. And most of the dishes I watched him eat, since they were not from places that used local or regional ingredients (though some did), I wouldn’t have allowed myself to consider eating in the first place.
What the hell was I doing? Well, for one thing, my brain cells were starved for oxygen. I had the numbers to prove that. I think, though, that I was bidding farewell to a part of my future as an adventurous eater, a lover of food. I was making celiac disease real through a form of particularly irritating and punishing desensitization. And I was preparing myself for what was to come: the awkward social situations; the sight, in person, of the restaurants I would not be able to enter no matter how much I might want to; the dishes on the menus that I would order and eat only if I wanted to lose a week of my life; and the cravings that would come over me without hope of satiating them. I was inoculating myself, or attempting to, through a medium that has been described as “food porn.”
I’m not sure that the gluten-voyeurism worked, though. Guy couldn’t really help me with the longing. I had only hoped he could.
* * *
* In the same helpless, drifting way, I also watched a lot of Chopped, and dreamed of taking revenge on the gluten-eating (and cooking) world by designing dastardly mystery baskets out of nothing but the worst GF substitutions on the market.
Shortly after my first foray into the GF offerings at the grocery store, I worked up the courage to have a GF beer tasting. I drove to the beer store in town and received a shock.
The place I’d been frequenting for all of the brews David and I purchased to supplement our cottage operation featured, at the time, three—yes, three—gluten-free beers. I had learned on the internet that there were more GF beers out in the world someplace, but I would never be able to find any of them within a hundred miles. The three offerings—Bard’s, New Planet, and Redbridge—were tucked into another sad corner, way at the end of the shelves past the six-packs of Great Lakes, Middle Ages, Lake Placid, Saranac, Lagunitas, and all the others I used to drink. A pattern was emerging between taste and the location of GF items on the shelf or in the store; it did not augur good things. Still, I bought all three beers.
Later that night, I opened a bottle of each when David and Mere came over for dinner. Get it over with all at once, I thought. One of them had to be decent.
I sniffed the glass of Redbridge. There were no hops to speak of, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; many of the better light lagers do not have discernible hops, either. But the Redbridge tasted like a brew I could not have been prevailed upon to drink in college. On the bright side, that might not be as damning as it sounds; I had come of age at the turn of the century, in the late dawn of microbrews and craft beers, and I transitioned almost immediately from iced tea at home to beer snobbery in my dorm. My favorites were strong and hoppy ales and brooding, dark stouts. The first beer I ever tasted was Labatt Blue. Not a craft beer, to be sure, but not too shabby, either—especially when my roommate and I paired the twelve-pack with an entire box of grocery-store doughnuts. I shudder to recall all of the gluten I consumed in those days.
The problem was the finish, which tasted of vegetal funk, like old lettuce. Malted sorghum, when not countered with a contrasting element like hops or other aromatics, has a tendency to get chewy. This is a painful discovery for someone who loves the burnished, even tarnished, bittersweet taste of malted barley, the basis of beer since long before the Beer Purity Laws. Enacted in Germany in 1487, this series of regulations declared that beer could only be made from barley, water, and hops; other countries have similar notions of beer purity, mostly because you can’t make a good dark beer or even a mediocre light-bodied beer out of wheat or rye alone. The starches in wheat and rye do not convert to sugar as readily as the starches in barley do—a process known as saccharization—although wheat and rye can be, and are, used as flavoring ingredients. Sorghum does malt agreeably, but the taste is thicker, greener, and sweeter. And somehow also flatter, in my book.
“I don’t know what this is, but it’s not beer,” I said to David.
He didn’t want to agree with me, but I could see the pained look in his eyes. Bec, for her part, said she could imagine drinking Redbridge in the hot, hazy stillness of the summer, on the tailgate of someone’s pickup. That might have been true, but I knew from experience that quality pale ales and IPAs went just as well with pickups, Johnny Cash, and that particular strain of Americana.
Next we tried the Bard’s. The beer smelled, again, of funk, not toasted malt and hops. The body tasted a little fuller than the Redbridge, but there was a cloying saccharine taste on the back end that Bec accurately likened to Diet Coke, possibly owing to a heavier proportion of sorghum malt.
David screwed up his face. “It tastes like that Wee Heavy we drank back in October,” he said, referring to a Scottish ale he brought back from Rochester that we drank around noon, if memory serves, while brewing up a double-IPA. This was not a compliment.
New Planet, another stalwart of the GF industry, makes a pale ale that tasted better to me because the sorghum was cut with brown rice and molasses. I finally found some hops in this bottle, though Bec pointed out that the beer was overcarbonated. She was right, but I ranked New Planet as the least of the three evils sitting on the table before me.
“You know what the solution is,” David said, trying to be optimistic. “We get a Bard’s clone from the brewing supply and we bomb it with hops.”
It was an interesting idea. But I wasn’t in a place to think about brewing right now. When dinner was ready, Dave asked me which of the beers I was going with. I told him I’d finish them later. I needed to raise my spirits with some wine first.
—
My next-door neighbor, Matt, also a professor at the college where I teach, must have predicted the paucity in the local offerings. We had brewed together several years back, too, and we shared a love for IPAs. One afternoon he showed up at my door with a box of assorted GF beers that he had picked up from a beer emporium in Rochester as a consolation. Here you go, buddy, he seemed to be saying. Better you than me. Drink up and try not to lose your mind.
Some of them I’d already tried, but a few were new: Estrella Daura Damm, a lager from Spain; Brewery Brunehaut’s ale from Belgium; Green’s Dubbel Dark Ale; and Dogfish Head’s Strawberry Tweason’ale. Since a dark beer in the winter is as good as hearty bread, I opened the Green’s first (and saved what I anticipated to be a strawberry fiasco and a raspberry beer from New Planet for last, preferably for never). Green’s is brewed in Belgium, from a mixture of sorghum, buckwheat, brown rice, and millet. The best-tasting GF beers, I would eventually learn, utilized a mix of malted grains as well as interesting flavorings, instead of expecting sorghum to be able to replace barley on its own, and the best of them did not use any sorghum at all. I thought that surely the Belgians couldn’t screw up a GF beer, though it would have been telling, had I noted it at the time, that Germans, Czechs, and Irish did not appear to be attempting GF beers (yet the British were).
I poured the Green’s that night in front of a hockey game. I li
ked the darkness of it in the glass immediately; it was reminiscent of a beer like Lake Placid’s Ubu. Before I even tasted it, I proclaimed to my wife, “This is a beer I can drink and still feel like a man!”
But I was wrong.
I was only momentarily buoyed up by the novelty of the color. This beer disappointed too, precisely because of its promising color. Through the familiar sorghum sweetness I tasted the compost heap once again. The head looked like the brown, scummy foam that appears on the banks of the nearby Grasse River during the spring thaws.
The Brunehaut and Damm, when I tried them, I liked better, but I couldn’t find them in our town, so there was no point in getting too excited about them. (No matter how hard I tried, every beer supplier would tell me they couldn’t get the good GF beers from their distributors.) And like the bread, and the other GF products we tested, every beer I sampled that month was more expensive. Since no one is buying GF beer unless absolutely necessary,*1 the production volume is lower and the cost of ingredients is higher. This meant that I got four GF beers for the price of six real ones. It was like being kicked when I was down.
So I renounced beer for a time. I turned to cider, which I enjoyed, though not as much. At first, all I could find was Woodchuck (fail) and Angry Orchard, which I drank until I got so sick of its one-note cloying sweetness that I took to calling it Bitchy Tree. I found Stella Artois Cidre to be significantly drier, more in keeping with the long history of hard ciders in America, and able to pull me through. Later on, I discovered craft and artisanal ciders, including a dry-hopped cider made in Vermont that was so wonderful I considered filling a carboy with local cider and dry-hopping my own version. But I was still more than a year away from those discoveries.
So I just started drinking straight whiskey when I went out with friends, which is safe for celiacs because the distillation process breaks down the glutenin and gliadin proteins. I have always enjoyed Scotches and bourbons, but drinking whiskey while my friends all drank beer meant that I was one cheap date, especially in the early days, when I was still anemic. It was like getting an ethanol IV. Not good.
Trying to bolster my spirits, a friend of mine who had literally filled his basement with wine through an internet wine retailer remarked that I was fortunate to love wine as much as I loved beer. And this was true; I did love wine, all varieties from all over the world. I loved learning about where they came from and enjoyed pairing dishes with them. Selecting a really good bottle, like a Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Barolo, and cooking up to it is one of my favorite things to do. But loving wine did not make losing beer any easier. There are different seasons, moods, meals, and social situations that are better matched to beer. And, as with bread, I sometimes wondered if the sharpness of the longing I felt for real beer, a strong ale or a porter like I used to drink, was not simply gluten-withdrawal but something deeper, the gravitational pull of history and tradition.
Humans, after all, have been enjoying beer for as long as bread, and by some counts for even longer. Even the wine drinkers among us who object, as the Greeks did, to the taste of beer (Aristophanes, being a true Greek and partial to wine, called beer a “dark purgative”), have beer running through their veins. The ancient beers made by the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Sumerians, all of whom were ambitious and skilled brewers, would be unrecognizable to us today; they were unfiltered, uncarbonated, and unhopped. Many of them, with an alcohol content between 1 and 2 percent, served as potable drinking water more than a festive libation, though the ancients also made stronger brews for hedonistic purposes. Beer spread just as rapidly throughout the ancient world as bread, and it, too, constituted a form of payment. Some views hold that writing and accounting were invented in response to bread and also beer, as a necessity for keeping track of their high-volume exchange. Beer supported workers in the fields, builders of houses and temples, and slaves. Our light, effervescent “lawnmower” beer is probably the closest brew in our time to what people drank to refresh themselves thousands of years ago.
Like bread, beer might have reached Europe around 5,000 BC (in Barcelona), and its reach extended to central Europe and north to the Hebrides between 4,000 and 2,000 BC. Consumption was not low, either. By the late Middle Ages (circa 1300), a normal allowance for a monk was a gallon each of strong and weak ale per day. In 1593, the British Crown purchased 600,000 gallons of ale and beer—about 3.2 million of today’s twelve-ounce bottles. These were my people. And so I railed—to Bec, to David, to anyone who would listen—against losing this history along with bread. None of the replacements I found that winter seemed like anything those cheerful monks would have recognized as beer.
Technically speaking, though, “beer” is any alcoholic drink derived from “fermenting sugar-rich extracts of starchy plants.” I still want to dismiss this definition as excessively forgiving, as would become immediately clear if one were to walk into any licensed seller in America, whether a gas station or grocery store, and ask where to find the beer made with fermented bananas or manioc. But these drinks (which do in fact exist) are beer, chemically speaking, and they’re seen as beer by the people who drink them. That’s apparently the key, if you can get your head around it: beer is whatever the drinker believes it to be. To begin drinking beers made of barley substitutes like sorghum, or millet, simply means you fall out of one brewing tradition and land in another that is just as long.
It can be comforting, to a tiny degree, to know that a gluten-free beer like the UK’s Hambleton Ales’ Toleration,*2 which my friend Cory brought back for me from Buffalo that winter and contains no malted grain at all (it’s made only from fermented sugars), does in fact have a precedent somewhere: in east Africa, where palm sugar and dates were fermented and consumed by the lower classes throughout antiquity, and still are in some communities to this day. All over the world, people have chosen to ferment something, usually whatever was growing plentifully in their backyards. The Chinese may have brewed the world’s first beer, known as li, from fermented rice and millet as early as 10,000 BC. The Amazonians brew a fermented drink from manioc root, called chichi. South Americans have long made beers from corn, which, like millet, sorghum, and rice, is becoming a common base for contemporary gluten-free beers, like Glutenberg’s Blonde Ale.
Africa, though, is the ancestral homeland of most gluten-free beers sold in America—at least in spirit, if not in an actual recipe. Sorghum is the essential African grain, supplying the bulk of calories consumed by rural eaters on most of the continent, often in the form of beer. I did not know until I was forced to leave barley and wheat behind that Africans were such huge beer drinkers. There are men in Cameroon and Burkina Faso, if the anthropological studies are to be believed, whose beer consumption of several liters a day would far surpass that of anyone I know. Like brews from the ancient Near East, sorghum beers from Africa would not look like “beer” to American drinkers; they’re thick to the degree that one is said to “eat” beer instead of drink it, usually through a long straw.*3 The alcohol content of these African sorghum beers is often high, and there are special social traditions around the brewing and the drinking of them.
And even Europeans, who were the most dependent on barley beer, brewed with other ingredients as a last resort. In times of shortage, beer lovers in northern Europe, where grapes for wine did not grow, had a simple choice: make a beer out of whatever was available, or go without fermented drink. Not much thought was required, here; they threw whatever they had on hand into the beer pot. They fermented it. And then they drank the brew until they enjoyed themselves, which sounds like it could take quite a while sometimes.
An example of such a brew is Mumm, which was an unhopped “ale”—kind of—dating formally to at least 1492, though descriptions of it appear as early as 1350 to 1390. Mumm did not arise exclusively out of a shortage of barley, though it would have been attractive when the barley crops failed, because of its flexible recipe. According to one document, Mumm was
a wholesome drink, brewed from w
heat malt, boiled down to a third of its original quantity, to which were added oatmeal and ground beans, and after working, quite a number of herbs and other vegetable products, including the tops of fir and birch, a handful of burnet, betony, marjoram, avens, pennyroyal, wild thyme, and elderflowers, and a few ounces of cardamom seeds, and barberry.
Other vegetable products? The crowns of resinous trees? Seriously? I’ve never seen so many brewing adjuncts in one recipe. Talk about a drink that requires a straw: it sounds more like fermented compost. However, Mumm does show how “beer” has long been viewed as a malleable product—if the drinker can only be convinced to imbibe it. And, in fact, Mumm was widely drunk into the 1600s in England, until its popularity finally waned in the eighteenth century. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it, would appear to be the lesson here.
For as much as I felt alone with my sorghum brews, some of which were laced with the strange, unappealing taste (in beer, at least) of raspberries, strawberries, and honey, in time I would come to appreciate Dogfish Head’s Strawberry Tweason’ale—brewed from sorghum, buckwheat, honey, strawberries, and hops—as a distant relative of other cultures’ beer. Understanding this intellectually and accepting it at the table, however, are two different things. History and culture are powerful forces that we respond to without much awareness until something jolts us loose from their hold; they make us adept at pointing out the real thing, whether a glass of ale or piece of cake, from the impostor. But the truth, as any historian could tell me, is that for most of human culinary history, a distinction between “real” and “fake” has been irrelevant. Shortage and famine have been the norm, not the exception, and they have always led people through a combination of ingenuity and willpower to find ways to satisfy themselves. With one part of my mind, I knew the only reason I was crying foul was that I had taken for granted that foods like barley beer and wheat bread would always be on my table, simply because I live in an age, and a place, where I had never before even contemplated going without them.