The Vaporousness of Style
This has been one of those strange weeks of harmonizing themes. On email, I’ve been discussing pilsners with Parker Rush at Narrows Brewing. He’s experimenting with a beer that conforms to the style, but is fermented with kviek yeast. Over at Good Beer Hunting, David Jesudason discusses the colonial history of IPAs and the dark legacy that name carries with it, centuries on. Finally, Martyn Cornell has a lovely post on the long, important history of Irish red ale, which dates to 1974 and … Lille, France.
Beer styles are so weird. They’re a little like movie-set facades, which may stand in front of whole buildings, partial sets, or nothing at all. But that’s not a perfect analogy, because a style can start with a romantic fact and a marketing campaign and evolve into a real style. In other cases, like IPA, a name persists even when the style wanders so far away from its origins that it bears no resemblance to the original. These three examples form a case study for how beer styles conceal as often as they reveal.
Let’s start with “Irish red ale,” a style invented as a marketing gimmick, which drinkers and brewers eventually retconned into a historical tradition. Do yourself a favor and read Martyn’s whole post—it’s really entertaining. Very briefly, the French brewery Pelforth was casting around for a something new and approached an Irish brewery about licencing one of their beers. They released it as George Killian’s Bière Rousse. Several years later, Coors famously extended the line in America with George Killian’s Irish Red. Marketers then invented a load of blarney about the long history and tradition behind these beers. I think that kind of thing was pretty typical back then. Create a product based on romantic ideas about a place, and then invent a story about it. Maybe you even find an actor to play the part, as Coors absurdly did with Canadian Christopher Plummer.
What happened next was the fascinating bit: that history stirred to life. In the absence of a proud local tradition, a fake will do, and sometimes the fake is mistaken as the real thing. Martyn tracks this process, all the way to Michael Jackson. Amazingly, they have come to be. Irish red ale is very much an extant style—you can find hundreds of examples. True, a big part of their “history” is as fake as that movie-set facade. But never mind how they were born—they’re here now. This isn’t the only recent such case, either. “Scotch” ales, made with peated distillers malt, never existed until Americans, confusing two traditions (beer and whisky), invented it. It’s like money—red ales have no intrinsic value except that which we place in them.
David’s IPA post glances on this subject from a different direction, one rooted in very real, I’d often misunderstood, history. His family comes from Malaysia and India (via Singapore), and he approaches the style’s colonial history from the perspective of his own life. His post is a rich examination of the meaning of colonialism and I don’t want to try to summarize it. In thinking about what to do with the style now, he concludes this way:
“I want to see a beer that is sold as an ‘India Pale Ale,’ but which is advertised and marketed in a way that explains the legacy of Britain’s empire, and the blood that was shed in the process. Instead of brewed ‘nowhere near India,’ how about a bottle or can label that tells the drinker about the [East India Company’s] misdeeds and explains why these beers were shipped out to India in the first place?”
David is discussing IPA’s meaning in Britain, principally. Matters get trickier in other countries. Most drinkers in the US, for example, only have the dimmest sense that the “I” in IPA stands for “India,” and even fewer have any idea why. Trying to trace the origins back to the East India Company gets ever harder in light of IPA’s second life—the American revival of the style. Breweries all over the world now make American-style beer in American-style craft breweries, and most also make American-style IPAs. Now we’re three countries removed from the “I,” and the beers a modern brewery makes with four pounds per barrel of Citra hops in Guadalajara could hardly be much different from those that traveled in wooden casks in the bellies of ships from London to Bombay two hundred years ago. The only thinking connecting them is a name.
Last we have pilsner, a beer that seems to have some consistency of method and a clean, unambiguous history. Yet look closely and almost everything about the Czech originals is up for grabs. Once the style migrated to Germany, it shook off Saaz hops. Decoction fell away decades ago, as did open fermentation, still common in Czechia. The connection to malt that goes all the way back to Josef Groll is still incredibly important in Czechia—Urquell still maintains their own maltings—yet we have modern “pilsners” made with very different base malts, often not pilsner malts, and often including other fermentables. Big breweries use mash filters and hop extracts. First wort hopping is practiced rarely outside Czechia. I mean, you may strongly disagree, but Miller Lite has long styled itself “a fine pilsner beer.” In terms of style coherence, it’s hard to find the essence of a pilsner that hasn’t encountered compromise somewhere along the line.
Where does the soul of pilsner reside? If you made a double-decocted beer with floor-malted Czech malt and Saaz hops, conducted first-wort hopping and fermented it in an open tank but used kviek yeast instead of a lager yeast, is it less of a pilsner than a beer made on a mash filter with hop extract and lager yeast? Is it more or less authentic than Irish red ale? Or IPA?
Beer styles are an agreement, shorthand to describe something we think we all understand. But scratch the surface even a little bit, and you fall into an epistemological void. What I love most about beer is the way culture and history shape the styles brewers make, but that dynamic process also leads into quite a few blind alleys.
Perhaps it’s better not to think about it too deeply. Just pass me a Smithwick’s, will you?