The Art of Making Beer in 1971
A friend of mine was pruning her library and sent out a list of books that were going away. One title caught my eye: The Art of Making Beer (1971), by Stanley Anderson and Raymond Hull. It was a proper book, though small, published by Dutton in New York, and I was curious to see the state of the art for homebrewing—and beer itself—in the US during the Nixon administration. I knew the answer would be “poor,” but even I was surprised by how poor.
Bear in mind that this isn’t a dusty 19th-century book with comical old-timey folk wisdom—it was published within the lifetimes of at least 115 million Americans still wandering the streets (including me). Humans had traveled to the moon; computers, though crude, crunched numbers. Some Americans, presumably, had traveled to places like Munich and London and Brussels. In six years, Michael Jackson would make the first extensive catalogue of these styles (though he would not yet call them “styles”). So how bad could things have been?
Hull and Anderson drain away my confidence by starting off with an overview of “better-known” types of beer, which I reproduce in toto:
Lager. Apparently refers to American beer, though the authors describe it as 3-4% ABV, which was well below actual levels at the time.
Vienna. “Amber in color and has a mild, smooth flavor since it is brewed with less hops that most other beers.”
Munich. This apparently refers to dunkel lager (“dark brown”), though maybe not: “has a strong hop flavor” “and may range up to 5%—noticeably stronger than lager.”
Bock. A “heavy beer.” No mention of strength.
Weiss. On the plus side, they know it’s a wheat beer, and even that wheat was colloquially called “white,” thus the name. On the minus side, they think weissbier is only made from wheat, “not from barley,” and then mention that it contains less carbon dioxide than lager. Obviously, the authors had never been to Germany.
Ale. “Heavier and darker in color than beer.” (?) They appear to be trying to describe British beers, but confusingly add that ale is stronger than lager at 6% and “requires extra aging in a bottle.”
Porter. This one they get basically right, though note that the style is made from “charred or chemically-colored malts,” which must not have encouraged many to track down a bottle.
Stout. A strong, dark ale, sometimes made with licorice. (Guinness was one of the most popular beers in the world at the time, yet they miss that gimme in their description.)
When you encounter an older beer drinker who cites nonsense beer facts to you, forgive them. They may have read this book.
That was just a warm-up though. This is a beermaking guide, and most of the book is devoted to making your own. Homebrewing was technically illegal in the US when the book was written, and homebrew stores were famously ill-equipped. Pick up a copy of The Widmer Way to hear amusing descriptions of how Rob and Kurt got started. It’s therefore not surprising that all the recipes are based on extracts. Even acknowledging that, the recipes in this book are something.
The first three beers are lagers, and differ only in that the use increasing amounts of corn syrup. The light uses 50% corn syrup (2.5 lbs), the medium 58%, and the heavy 62%. Later, an “ale” recipe uses two-thirds corn syrup. After boiling this concoction with some hops, the authors instruct brewers to add the corn syrup to the carboy and pour the hot wort into it. Since the wort goes in at boiling temps without chilling, the authors note it will take at least 12 hours to cool down. They also instruct brewers to add the “finishing hops” at this point—in the carboy—where they will stew overnight. (Stewing overnight is my description.)
Fermentation happens between 55-65 degrees F and the beer will finish at at an elegantly even gravity of zero Plato (1.000). I was a little surprised to read that, since they did actually instruct brewers to source liquid lager yeast. A pure lager strain wouldn’t ferment that fully, so whatever yeast the authors were using was clearly diastatic. (Pity the poor homebrewer with decent yeast whose beer kept “crapping out” at 3 Plato.) Given everything else they advise, I don’t even consider the primary fermentation temperature a horrible mistake.
Finally, add brewing salts to the carboy after primary fermentation.
For advanced brewers, they do have a technique they call “brew-art,” which means adding a pound of caramel malt (always a pound, no matter the recipe) to the boil. Going in the other direction, they offer a handy “modern” technique for anyone who finds the regular process too onerous: source hop extract and then just dump everything into the carboy cold, stir, and pitch the yeast. Honestly, this would have made better beer.
In 1971, the US was still very much in thrall to science-experiment foodstuffs—instant coffee, shelf-stable cheese, Tang, etc.—and this is very much a document of its time. Buy a can of malt extract, a can of corn syrup, and you’re off to the races. But this would have made bad beer, even if everything went right. And given the overnight-cooling, things mostly wouldn’t have gone right.
Other people were writing about beer at the time, and Fred Eckhardt’s first homebrew book came out a year earlier. (He apparently knew Anderson.) This was the decade everything started to change. Yet it was also a decade in which someone could publish a book by a national publisher containing information like this. It was a very bleak time for the taste buds in America.