The recirculation process was so slow and tedious, I felt like I was watching Buddhist monks creating a mandala. Finally, all the wort went back into the kettle, which Emilien had kindly cleaned while the rest of us did nonessential tasks. After the wort came to a boil, Bertrand carefully added sacks filled with Northern Brewer and fuggle hops. I remembered that I’d bought two packages of Oregon-grown aroma hops to give to these homebrewers, but the hops were still in my freezer in Portland. Oh well. At least I had showed up with beer.
Ronoy poured a portion of the wort into a smaller kettle, which he placed on the kitchen stove. He’d take that portion, his personal portion, to an outdoor role-playing fair in July, where he’d play a monk who sells beer. He showed me pictures of previous role-playing beers, which had hand-drawn labels of a head in profile that looked like Ronoy, with a long braid of hair that circled the name of each beer. One was called Du Viking; the other, Otik Qui Troll.
Whether it was because I was a guest or an aspiring beer expert, Ronoy started asking me to make decisions.
“Lucy, should I add all of the hops in this packet or just a portion?”
“All.”
“Lucy, should we add the maple syrup?”
“Let’s taste it first.”
We each dipped a finger in the can. The syrup was lighter and less sweet than I thought it would be.
“Add it all,” I said.
Finally, we were done. Only we weren’t. A hydrometer revealed an original gravity of 1.040, which would probably produce a beer with less than 6 percent ABV. Ronoy frowned dramatically. He’d been hoping for 8 percent ABV. Bertrand mumbled something in French.
“He says the wort might be too hot and it’s affecting the reading of the hydrometer,” Ronoy translated.
Suddenly, I noticed the darkness through the doors to the back patio, which made sense when I looked at a clock. Ronoy and Lionel had started brewing at ten in the morning, before Emilien and I had arrived, which meant things were right on schedule. It was 7:30 P.M. Instead of pouring the wort into a sterilized carboy, Ronoy and Bertrand secured the kettle’s lid with rubber bands, a risky move that made the wort susceptible to bacterial infection because it wasn’t enclosed in a sterilized environment. But it was late, and everyone was tired. Plus ou moins.
When I said goodbye to the DIY brewers, I felt nostalgic for all my friends who brewed in their homes in Portland. I’d never brewed with any of them, yet here I was five thousand miles away, brewing with strangers. In the future, I vowed, I’d find the time to brew with friends, old and new.
A few days later, Lionel sent those of us who brewed an e-mail. “Je me suis bien amusé samedi à brasser, apprendre plein de trucs et voir Ronoy et Bert se chamailler …” (“I had fun brewing Saturday, learning stuff and seeing Ronoy and Bert bickering”). So that’s what all the French had been about.
In the following months, I would receive a few updates from the brew crew. “Bertrand is confident about a sweet, not so light beer,” Emilien wrote. “That sounds good!”
After they sampled the beer we had brewed, Bertrand told me, “The beer is pretty good, sincerely we can have something with homebrewing near like the best commercial beer!” He compared it to a Westvleteren 8, a classic dubbel of 8 percent ABV, which he and Ronoy had shared three days earlier: “Verdict is that it’s near it, with same color (CaraRed malt + 900 EBC malt), a fortuity mix! The Westvleteren 8 is very oriented with malt taste. Our dry-hopping has oriented on hop, but it’s a good balance between malt and hop, and finally near Westvleteren 8.” He would enter the beer in a homebrew contest in September. “I think we have chance to go far with it!” he said.
What the guys told me would be a maple stout turned out to be a Belgian dubbel, an amusing reminder that Belgians do not like conforming to beer styles. I was also thrilled to discover that plus ou moins is a methodology that produces great beer. I longed to transport myself to Ronoy’s kitchen for a side-by-side tasting of the Westvleteren 8 and the homebrew. Instead, from my living room in Portland, I would congratulate myself on playing a small but supportive role in brewing a Westvleteren simulacrum, aka a “Westy clone.”
A LITTLE ROCK ’N’ ROLL
It takes beer to make thirst worthwhile.
—GERMAN PROVERB
WHEN I LEFT my rolling suitcase full of bottles of beer in Brussels, I felt like I should attach a note about proper care, as though I were leaving a house sitter with a puppy or a bonsai tree. But I trusted Emilien and Hélène, who had not only let me stay with them in their high-ceilinged one-bedroom apartment, but had taken me out for an Italian dinner and cooked me pancakes in the morning. I was touched that people I’d just met were so generous, and, on the ninth day of my trip, it felt great to have someone taking care of me. “It’s a lot of pressure to cook pancakes for an American,” Emilien said, as he carefully flipped them with a spatula.
The couple lent me a small backpack, which I filled with two days of clothes, then Emilien walked me to the proper bus stop for getting to the train station. Later that day, I entered Germany without a passport (I had accidentally left it with my beer), without changing any money—a step I still expected—and without feeling the train slow at the border. I wasn’t accustomed to Europe as the European Union, a place that was more streamlined than I’d imagined. But I knew economic unification wouldn’t have destroyed the beer border built up between Germany and Belgium, differences embedded over the course of centuries.
When I’d first dreamed about doing beer research in Europe, I’d wanted to divide my time between Belgium and Germany. But once I started looking into the logistics of traveling in Germany, which was hulking in size compared to Belgium, I didn’t know how I’d make it work. So I came up with a compromise. Because Germany shares a border with Belgium, at least I could cross briefly into Deutschland and learn something, anything, about Germanic beer culture.
Aside from airport layovers, the last time I’d been in Germany was during college. I was twenty years old and a student in an art history program that took me to Munich, Rottenburg am Neckar, and Nuremberg, before we moved on to other European countries. In Germany, I drank legally, with gravel crunching under my feet, in romantically lit beer gardens where hours slipped away. The beers were a revelation: smooth, frothy, and golden in a way that made me feel like I was discovering the drink for the first time. Two decades later, I was headed to Germany with a focus that would have surprised my college-aged self. I wanted to understand what made German beers German, something that would help me place all beers, especially Belgian beers, in a broader context. So many styles were invented in Germany, from the wheat beers of Bavaria to dark lagers and bocks.
Before I left on my trip, I had decided to track down an expert on German beers. Alan Taylor is a brewmaster who owns two breweries in Portland and one in Albuquerque. He has a master’s degree in Germanic studies, and he studied brewing science in Germany after doing a brewing internship at Luisen-Bräu in Berlin. He’s also married to a German woman. He told me the key to understanding the country’s brewing is Weisswurstlinie, the “veal–sausage line” that serves as a cultural delineation between northern and southern Germany. Northern pilsners have a drier malt profile and bracing hop bitterness, while southern German beers include Czech and Bohemian lagers, which are more about malt, with their round sweetness and touch of spicy hops. As one might expect, beers of central Germany mediate the two extremes, with more balanced expressions of malt and hops.
Alan had said that, while beer styles tend to develop from the availability of ingredients, they also represent the tastes of the people who live in the region, preferences influenced by local food. In far-northern Germany, people have a preference for tea, Scandinavian herbal liquors, and anise-flavored drinks, beverages with bracing, astringent notes, he said. Then there’s southern Germany. “Combine a soft baked pretzel with sweet mustard and a weissbier (the German category of wheat beers), and it’s just heaven,” Alan said. He was talkin
g about weisswurst, a traditional Bavarian breakfast. “That same weissbier up north with freshly caught eel isn’t going to be quite the same.” Instead of a beer with a sweet, round malty flavor, he said, the oiliness of the fish would pair well with a dry, bracing pilsner.
Alan suggested I stop thinking about “German” beers and start thinking instead about “Germanic” beers. Since the country of Germany was formed in 1871, talking about German beers excludes many influential beer styles of the region—namely pilsner—which originated in the Kingdom of Bohemia and the modern-day Czech Republic. Pilsner spawned many styles, including Munich helles, Dortmunder export, pilsners brewed by German immigrants in the United States before Prohibition, and all manner of lagers brewed around the world.
Traditionally, German states and towns claimed a single style of beer, the one locals drank without question. That idea made me think of my namesake, my great-grandmother Lucy, the daughter of German immigrants to the United States. Lucy worked as a seamstress, and ever since I was a little girl, my mom told me that my great-grandmother drank half a beer a day, during evening card games, up until the day she died in her nineties. I liked to think about my great-grandmother popping open a can of some East Coast beer—she drank local, like her German parents did before they crossed the Atlantic—pouring half into a glass and the other half down the sink, especially because I’d become proficient at pouring beer I didn’t want down sinks and into dump buckets. There were simply more beers I needed to taste than to drink.
I wondered what kind of beer my great-grandmother would have liked. My mom guessed some kind of bock, a family of strong German lagers that originated in Einbeck, a central German city, during the fourteenth century. Einbeck brewers were some of the first to replace the spices of gruit—the herbs that preceded hops in beer—with hops, which made sense, because the city was located in an early hop-growing region. It’s said that brewers in Munich adopted the style during the nineteenth century, but my beer professor Bill Schneller theorized that the bocks of Munich used different malts and had much lower alcohol contents than the bocks of Einbeck, and were therefore less related than beer historians like to think. In fact, Einbeck beers were probably ales and lighter in color, while the Munich versions are dark lagers.
The link between the two cities can be traced to one man, Einbeck brewmaster Elias Pichler. During the late Middle Ages, Einbeck became known as a brewing capital unlike any other. Many burghers liked to brew beer at home, but none of them were allowed to own a brewery. Instead, the city-owned brewing equipment was transported through wide city gates to the houses of homebrewers, where the malting and brewing process was overseen by a city-hired brewmaster, who ensured consistency and quality. As a member of the Hanseatic League, a powerful merchant trading empire, Einbeck exported its beers through member port cities as far as Scandinavia and even Jerusalem. But the beer really caught hold in Munich, and when exports from Einbeck stopped arriving in the city thanks to the Thirty Years’ War, the beer drinkers of the city had a problem. Under Bavarian Duke Maximilian I, Elias Pichler came to Munich’s Hofbräuhaus in 1617 to recreate Einbeck bocks. What he created was a maibock, or helles bock, a beer that was traditionally served during the month of May. Maybe my great-grandmother had been drinking an American version.
Or maybe she preferred one of my favorites: the complex and rich doppelbock, a term that refers to the strength of the beer. Doppelbocks were originally brewed in Munich by the monks of Saint Francis of Paola to sustain themselves during fasts, most notably during Lent, when no solid food could enter their bodies. During the fast they became “purified” by liquids, especially the sweet, malty, rich beer, which contained not only enough nutrients to keep them alive during the forty-day fast but also, one can imagine, just enough alcohol for a pleasant beer buzz. The Paulaner monks named their liquid bread “Salvator,” for the Savior, and in 1780 their version became a secular brew, which we now know as doppelbock. Three hundred and seventy-five years later, Paulaner Salvator doppelbock is still a dark and chocolately bottom-fermented, unfiltered beer, something I look forward to drinking every holiday season.
Until the past three or four years, German brewing was “traditional, nonexperimental, and rigid,” Alan had said. Those attributes are embodied by the Reinheitsgebot, the famous Germany Purity Law that states that brewers can only make beer using four ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. (The law still remains in effect, despite the shift in attitude Alan mentioned.) Nearly every beer brewed in Germany and sold commercially meets these requirements. That means brewers can’t make beers with pumpkins, apples, passion-fruit, cinnamon, habanero peppers, thyme, donuts, oysters, rice, corn, or jasmine flowers. But there’s one ingredient I was surprised to learn they can use: sugar. It can be pure cane, beet, invert sugars, or, as Ben Edmunds probably knows, dextrose. These sugars can be used only in top-fermented beers, which mean the beers are ales, not lagers, but Germans prefer to use the term “top-fermented.” Under the Purity Law, in top-fermented beers brewers can use any type of grain that can be “caused to germinate,” which makes rye and wheat fair game. It turns out the current law has stricter rules for lagers and more lenient rules for ales.
The Purity Law originated in the southeast region of Bavaria in 1516. Michelangelo had recently painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Martin Luther was launching the Protestant Reformation. Created under the Bavarian duke Wilhelm IV, the law was designed both to put a stop to brewers making beers (mostly lagers) with wheat, which was needed to make bread, and to set pricing for beer. “In all cities, markets, and in the country, the only ingredients used for the brewing of beer must be Barley, Hops and Water. Whosoever knowingly disregards or transgresses upon this ordinance, shall be punished by the Court authorities’ confiscating such barrels of beer, without fail.” (Centuries later, yeast was added as an acceptable ingredient, after scientists discovered its role in fermentation, as were the distinctions about top-fermented beers.)
In 1777 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, which made up much of today’s northern Germany, who was dismayed by the amount of money being spent on his subjects’ emerging coffee habit, declared: “It is disgusting to note the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. Everybody is using coffee. If possible this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer; and the King does not believe the coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended upon to endure hardship or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war.”
Germany adopted the law in 1906, and in 1918, Bavaria joined the German Weimar Republic under the condition that the country uphold the Purity Law, which was named Reinheitsgebot. The law was enforced countrywide until 1987, when the European Court ruled that non-German brewers could sell beers in Germany that did not adhere to the law, while German brewers still had to conform to the strictures for beers sold domestically. The Reinheitsgebot represents more than a German tendency for order, but also for purity. While Americans tend to view the law as limiting, most Germans see it as necessary protection of quality, tradition, and ingenuity. In effect, the law became one of the first pieces of consumer protection. It shielded German beer drinkers from subpar beer.
I was heading to the city of Köln, known as Cologne to the English-speaking world, to attempt to understand the rigor and tradition of Germanic beers. Köln is the home of Kölsch, the name of both the dialect spoken in the city and a blonde-colored, effervescent style of beer that was invented to compete with pilsners. Even though by most standards kölsch seems like a pilsner, it’s fermented at warmer temperatures, which makes it a top-fermenting beer and, therefore, a rarity in German brewing. Kölsch is an ale. The beer has a low alcohol content and a soft roundness, something you might want to drink on a summer day. The style isn’t for everyone. My travel-writer friend Ryan,
who’d recently been in Köln researching a Lonely Planet guidebook, told me the city’s famous beer tasted “like water.” American craft brewers have made many iterations of the style. A Portland-brewed kölsch was one of two beers Tony and I served at our wedding, because we wanted a lighter beer that would appeal to anyone who didn’t like the IPA.
In 1986 the twenty-four breweries in the city signed the Kölsch Konvention, which mandated that, within Germany, anything called a kölsch must be brewed in Köln; have a pale color; be top-fermented, brewed with hops, and filtered; and qualify as a “voll-bier,” one of four German beer tax categories that states a “full beer” must have an original gravity of 11 to 14 percent. That decree followed earlier mandates, like one in 1603 that stated all beers brewed in Köln must be top-fermented, and then the one that created the Kölsch Konvention, a group formed to protect the style. Today, a majority of the breweries in Köln brews kölsch. Even though a city with a signature beer style seems like a rarity, Köln isn’t the only one. Upriver on the Rhine, Dusseldorf is the city of altbier, or “old beer.” Altbier is also a top-fermenting beer, one made with darker Munich malts instead of the light pilsner malt in kölsch. Dusseldorf and Köln are notoriously competitive about their respective beers.
To get my first glass of kölsch on the ground, I decided to skirt Köln’s most famous attraction, the Kölner Dom, or Cologne Cathedral, which was built starting in 1248 and was finished 632 years later. Today, six million people a year visit the hulking mass of Gothic architecture, which is hard to squeeze into the boundaries of a single photo. On the far edge of the cathedral’s plaza is Früh, one of the city’s largest breweries, which was founded in 1904 by Peter Josef Früh. When he died eleven years after hanging his shingle, his widow and two daughters took over the company, a rare gender reversal. Früh brews just three kinds of drinks—kölsch, radler, and Früh Sport, a nonalcoholic sport drink—all of which are made at a large facility on the outskirts of the city. I had an appointment to visit the brewery the following day, and I wanted to arrive having already tasted a Früh Kölsch.
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