Nuances in Interpreting the History of Beer

Until quite recently, the history of beer was terrible. Brewing has never been a source of much scholarly interest, so its history has been a collection of passed-along wisdom, often based on misunderstanding or invention. The work of Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell, non-professionals using academic methods to scrutinize this “history,” sparked a mini-industry of historical re-examination. Much of this has been incredibly valuable. Our knowledge of the past based on their careful examinations has improved enormously. I am given pause, however, but some recent work.

History is an interpretive art. Finding primary sources is great, and they can help us build a picture of what was happening. But interpreting what the source means requires having a nuanced sense of the time period and how that piece of data fits into things. I wrote my master’s thesis on the way British and German scholars misunderstood Indian religious thought. They both used data sets for their interpretations—corpuses of work spanning decades—but because they misunderstood some key facts about Indian philosophy, their interpretation of what that data meant was wildly inaccurate. Or to use a more familiar example: if you have a primary source from 1862 commenting on the civil war, it really helps to know if that person were a Confederate politician or escaped slave. Data alone won’t tell you how to interpret it.

This cropped up last month as I was revising the Beer Bible chapter on lambics. Since I finished the first edition, architect Raf Meert has devoted a website to revisiting the history of lambic, and has discovered some interesting material. Much of it is quite helpful. After what looks like a fairly comprehensive search, for example, he can find no reference to the word “lambic” before the early 19th century. Interesting! But many of the conclusions he draws seem unsupported by the data, emerging, like German and English understanding of Indian religion, from a misunderstanding of the nature of brewing and the way beer styles evolve.

There’s quite a bit of interesting material at Meert’s website, Lambik 1801, and I’m glad a Dutch-speaker has spent time in archives. He has helped refine my understanding of some of the history, particularly the development of the various lambic products after the 19th century. But some of his arguments seem faulty to me, and since I know his work has influenced people who care about these things, I’d like to point out where I think he erred.

The thrust of his argument goes like this: lambic is a fairly recent style, and older evidence actually points to different beer. He bases this on two findings: the use of the word “lambic,” and changes in the way the beer has been made over the centuries.

I don’t doubt he’s correct about the word. If he’s looked around and it’s not there, I’m satisfied people only started using it around 1800. But he also dismisses a famous document from 1559 that lambic-makers point to as an early recipe. Meert argues it describes a different beer. The proportion of wheat is wrong, he says, and it used oats, which isn’t a part of typical modern grists. (There’s a great summary of this argument at Lost Beers if you want a shorthand version.)

That’s all true. But is that convincing evidence it wasn’t an early version of the same beer? I don’t know a single type of beer that continues to use the same ingredients for hundreds of years. Styles evolve.

If I were to time-travel back to Halle (a village right next to Lembeek) and found brewers making a spontaneously-fermented wheat beer they aged in wooden barrels, it would never occur to me to think it wasn’t lambic just because it used a bit more wheat and included oats. No beer style has enough continuity to be made exactly the same for 450 years.

Evolution

When we talk about any beer style, we’re talking about an unfolding tradition, not an unchanging institution. The 5.5% porter we can buy down at the pub is entirely separated from its progenitor, which was a very strong beer acidified from long vat-aging, and made with now obsolete brown malt. Literally nothing about it save the name is the same. Witbier was a spontaneously-fermented wheat beer that went extinct only to be revived as a conventional, spiced wheat ale. Modern dunkel lagers routinely use pilsner malt in the grist, a practice that would have been unheard of in the 19th century. And on and on.

The naming issue is by no means dispositive, either. Americans didn’t really understand English naming conventions, and so when their pale ales reached a certain hue, they called them “amber ales.” Does this mean the beers they were making didn’t exist before they started brewing them? Hardly. Or what about pale ale itself, often called bitter when on draft but pale when bottled. Are they different beers? A beer style is a designation that has dimensions of language, ingredient, and technique, and any one may change over time. This is exactly why Ron Pattinson’s painstaking research is so valuable—by looking at log books and contemporaneous accounts, he begins to piece together the whole picture. It’s also why old beers that exist just as names without the supporting evidence are unknowable—a name tells you very little on its own.

Variation Across Category

A few styles have very narrow, prescriptive guidelines—but not many. Michael Jackson led us down a bit of a blind alley when he distinguished between what he called oud bruins and Flemish/Flanders red ales. But in fact, the barrel-aged dark ales of Flanders are idiosyncratic. Few breweries make them the same way. There aren’t two traditions—there are a half dozen. Or, perhaps, one. That’s why lately the makers of these beers are now opting to call them “roodbruin”—red-brown ales.

Or take IPA. Is it kosher to use wheat? Oats? Rye? All barley? Yes. Can they be strong? Weak? Yes. Light, dark, bitter, sweet? Yes, yes, yes, yes. They present a huge challenge even now among people trying to understand them. Imagine finding a recipe 450 years from now labeled IPA and trying to extrapolate about what the style was from a single example. Halle has one recipe. Did different breweries in the region make beer identically?

It seems a Belgian characteristic that breweries shun style. When Georges Lacambre was writing about Belgian beer around 1850, he acknowledged that town-by-town and brewery-by-brewery variations were the norm, not the exception. (That’s still basically true.) Would we expect every brewery making spontenously-fermented, aged wheat ales to make them the same way 150, 250, 500 years ago? I would be astounded if they were.

I have not spent a minute in any libraries in Brussels or Leuven studying regional beer-making in the 1500s. Were I able to (and learning Dutch well enough to do so seems unlikely at this point), I’m sure I’d make fascinating discoveries that changed the way I understood that history. It’s possible that Meert has other information that would make me think very differently about the age and continuity of the lambic tradition and hasn’t mentioned it for some reason. But I found nothing in his research to dissuade me from thinking that the Brussels tradition of making spontaneous, aged wheat ales was very old. Like every other old tradition, it has changed over time—apparently even picking up its current name centuries later. But when he argues that lambics are a more recent style and that the beers made centuries prior weren’t earlier versions of the same tradition, he’s offering an opinion based on almost no information. We don’t know how the scores of breweries in the region were making their spontaneous ales, nor do we have a historical record that completes the picture throughout these centuries.

Finally, Meert has a slashing approach and writes with exasperation at the motives of lambic-promoters whom he sees as corrupt, and the gullibility of the writers and drinkers who are taken in by them. Sometimes people with whom we disagree have good motives and arrive at different conclusions for entirely appropriate reasons. Meert didn’t talk to them or discover their reasoning or evidence. It would be illuminating to hear a dialogue between them.

To wrap this up. Beer styles are both complex and also somewhat vaporous. Look very closely and you may wonder if any “style” actually exists given the amount of change they go through. I’m quite open to the argument that “beer style,” as we currently use it, is a pretty flawed concept. The problem is that even amid change, there is a kind of continuity. We couldn’t have those modern 5.5% black-malt, unvatted porters if we didn’t first have the 9% brown-malt, vatted ones. Modern porters are entirely different beers; they are also clear descendants. I would be astounded if a spontaneously-brewed beer made in small batches by artisanal breweries hadn’t changed in centuries. It would literally be unbelievable. That doesn’t mean their lineage doesn’t go back centuries. That’s potentially a larger historical mistake than Meert asserts.