Book of Lists: 4) Most Interesting Historic Figures With Whom to Enjoy a Beer

A publishing phenomenon arrived in the 1970s: The Book of Lists. It was a series of apparently wildly popular books first published in 1977 that functioned as pre-internet topic-surfing. Which got me thinking: blogs were basically invented for this kind of thing! Thus was born a modern-day version of the Book of Lists here, on the subject of beer. (Previous entries: 1, 2, and 3.

The beer world is filled with many great characters, from the regular at the end of the bar to August Busch III. And thus has it ever been. Our crack team of researchers here at Beervana Amalgamated Sentences were at a bar late one night, and the conversation led to dorm-room hypothesizing. “If you could have a beer with any figure in beer history,” one said, “who would it be?”

Once the day’s light had dawned and coffee had helped clear away the previous night’s fogginess, the researchers found the question every bit as interesting. In their usual industrious fashion, they set about investigating, compiling, and refining. They began with the important historical figures on whose work an industry hinged: the yeasties, for example, Pasteur, Hansen, and Claussen. They probed the lives of these researchers. Sure, isolating a pure strain of yeast changed beer forever, but did that make Hansen interesting? Our researchers ultimately concluded no, it did not. Pasteur, on the other hand…

And so they went, poring through the historical record. What emerged was a blend of people with world-historical significance and/or that beery je ne sais quoi that would make them interesting bar companions. As always, the list is offered as an invitation and a provocation. Add your two cents.

In the end, our researchers decided to place a hard limit of ten on this list, lest it get too far out of hand. In some cases we know very little about these figures, but their lives are such that we intuit an unusual mind and therefore a compelling personality. In one case, we select a figure not for their own accomplishments, but their proximity to history. A session with this person would lead to one of the most interesting discussions imaginable—or possibly one of the most disturbing.

So with that, here’s the list.

10. Georg Schneider (1817-1890).
By the mid-19th century, Bavarian wheat beer was nearly kaput. It had been so popular for hundreds of years that the dukes of Bavaria had restricted who could make it, doling out licenses as political favors and a source of revenue. In 1855, brewer Georg Schneider began fighting to have this system dismantled, and it took almost twenty years. In 1872—in an age the whole world was digging out cellars for their shiny new lager breweries—he managed to pull it off and founded his all-wheat ale brewery, the one now called Schneider and Sohn. It’s a pretty good bet that had this champion not come along and launched his quixotic effort to free the weizens, we wouldn’t have them today. We owe him a lot for this act of cultural preservation, but even more, his work raises the question: why?

I would love to sit down over a weissbier (and weisswurst, naturally) and ask him: what the hell, man? Why did you do that? It’s is incredibly cool that he put that much effort into this beer style, but I want to hear what he was thinking.

9. Georges Lacambre (1811-1884).
We don’t know a lot about the life of French-born brewer Georges Lacambre, but his writing has been indispensable in understanding Belgian beer. Lacambre moved to Leuven in 1936 to run a new brewery, and would spend the rest of his life in Belgium. Over the next fifteen years, he traveled broadly, left his job at the brewery, married a wealthy Belgian, and eventually, in 1851, published what amounts to an ethnography of Belgian beer called Traité complet de la fabrication de bières et de la distillation des grains. So much of what we understand about 19th century Belgian beer comes from Lacambre and his work documenting the various beer types made in the villages and cities of Belgium (and France, too—they were of a piece, brewing-wise).

I would love to speak to Lacambre to interrogate these travels. He alluded to tons of other beers he didn’t write about. Why? His book is delightful not just for its breadth, but its voice. Lacambre was a highly opinionated man, and praised or dismissed beer styles with prejudice. His big opinions of these beers is obviously not reliable—though his descriptions of what he saw were clear and objective—because some of the styles he criticized were beloved for decades. But that only makes me want to meet him all the more.

8. Hans Parzer (Hofbrauhaus innkeeper, 1919-1930).
I couldn’t find anything about Mr. Parzer save his name. Nevertheless, he was the innkeeper during the rise of the Nazis, who used the Hofbrauhaus as their unofficial HQ. He must have been the man who booked the hall where Hitler spoke on February 24, 1920. That’s the day the future Fuhrer launched the Nazi party in front of a crowd of 2,000 (hundreds of communists were on hand to protest as well). Hitler continued to speak and organize there, including almost two years later, in November 1921, when Marxists attacked him during a speech. Historian David Ian Hall describes this event, which started an hour into a Hitler speech. “All appeared to be calm until someone shouted ‘,Freiheit’ the Marxist battle cry. A large 1-litre beer stein flew over Hitler’s head followed by several more. The next instant Hitler’s small group of SA-men surged forward into the crowd of beer-mug-throwing-Reds.”

Since we know nothing about Parzer, we can’t guess if he sympathized with the Nazis, or was just booking whichever group offered the full fee. Germany was boiling with rage following WWI, and leftists also used the pub. In any case, I would love to spend an evening or three with Parzer and hear his fly-on-the-wall observations of this incredible moment in history. The Nazis continued to meet at the Hofbrauhaus through the war, but I would be most curious about those early years.

7. John Vanhuele and Martin Pappenheimer (dates unknown).
Pappenheimer and Vanhuele were the founding brewers at Orval during its restoration in the 1930s. The former was German, which was an odd choice for a Belgian monastery. Vanhuele was Belgian, though he had brewed for years in the UK. It seems likely that Pappenheimer would have been more on the engineer/QA side, coming from Germany in a period when it was displacing the UK as the world’s standard-bearer. The recipe, however, seems much more likely to have come from Vanhuele, incorporating as it did British and Belgian influences. Orval looks a whole lot like a British pale ale when you step back and examine the grist and the dry-hopping it employs. But even more than that, the addition of Brettanomyces after primary fermentation was decidedly not a German technique.

I would love to sit down with the two men and shoot the breeze about how this beer came together. It is one of the most lauded and enduring beers on the planet, and had more than a little to do with the way Americans would come to make beer. Everything I mentioned above is pure speculation, and I would appreciate the full story. How did this beer come about?

6. Josef Groll (1813-1887).
It’s unsurprising that the inventor of the world’s most famous and durable style would appear on this list. In 1842, Groll brewed up the first batch of pale Czech lager in Pilsen, of course. But that’s not why I would want to have a beer with him. He was, accomplishments aside, a famously unpleasant human being. Pete Brown summarizes it succinctly in The Oxford Companion: “He is described by historians as ‘a simple man without any manners,’ and ‘coarse even by Bavarian standards.’ His own father declared Groll to be ‘the rudest man in Bavaria.’” Despite launching the first pilsner—a successful beer from inception—the new brewery sent him packing within five years. That was all right by Groll. A talented brewer, he went home to Vilshofen, taking over his father’s Bavarian brewery, which he ran the rest of his life.

The real reason to have a seidla with Groll is to find out how unpleasant he really was. By the end of his life, his creation was on its way to conquering the world. How did he feel about that? What did he think of his first beer, and why did he choose to make it so pale? What did he think of Czechia? And really, did he ever mellow out or was he unpleasant to the end?

5. Regina Wauters (1795-1874)
Numbers five and six here are something of a pair—two iron-willed entrepreneurs who managed to overcome circumstances and found landmark breweries. Wauters was born into a brewing family in Mechelen, a town famous for beer. She married a man named Pedro Rodenbach, and so of course we don’t immediately associate her with the founding of Roeselare’s finest. Yet the Rodenbach Brewery was, despite the name, a Regina Wauters joint. Her husband was more interested in fighting wars than brewing beer, so it was Wauters who built out Rodenbach after she and Pedro took full control of it in 1835 (she also ran a distillery in Roeselare). They bought it with her money, in fact, and designated her the owner. In a fascinating twist, her largest cross-town rival was also a woman. (Roeselare must have been quite a town.) Under her management, Wauters expanded the brewery and installed the first steam powered engine in the city. She ran it nearly the rest of her life, sellimg it to her son Edward at the age of 69. (Her grandson Eugène is another fascinating character—he was the one who brought the techniques of vat-aging porter back from a stint in London and used it to transform the brewery.)

It is hard to imagine what it was like for a woman to become such a success in the Victorian era. My writer’s instinct kicks in with Wauters—hers seems like a story that deserves a fuller treatment. What kind of woman was she? How did she manage Rodenbach? What kind of boss was she? History has overlooked these heroines, whose stories are often more heroic than the men around them, and it would be great to hear how she navigated those times.

Adolphous could afford to build brewhouses with hop-shaped chandeliers

4. Adolphus Busch (1839-1913).
We couldn’t go through our list without inviting at least one of the great beer barons to join the party. Many might turn to Arthur Guinness or Gerard Heineken or JC Jacobsen or any of the great Midwest brewers of the 19th century. But let’s go with Adolphus Busch, whose ambition, intelligence, and will personify the billionaire beer class. The 21st of 22 children, Busch was used to making his own way in life. He left his home in Germany and made his way to St Louis where he married the daughter of a man named Anheuser. His father-in-law owned a small St Louis brewery, and invited Busch to join him. Following the Civil War, the younger man would turn it into an empire. His story isn’t unique, but even among his peers, he was special. He did a number of things to change beer, including moving into bottles early—pasteurizing them as early as 1872 for quality—becoming one of the first breweries to use refrigerated rail, and harnessing early branding in the form of the Budweiser label almost as effectively as Guinness later would. The business about it being a Czech beer was nonsense, but the name sounded good. Along the way he became immensely rich and powerful, and created a culture and company that would outlast its rivals.

Even in his lifetime, Busch became something like royalty. He called presidents and emperors friends, who in turned called him “the Prince.” Beer was very good to Busch, as it was to scores of industrialists of his era. He had great estates in Missouri, California, New York, and Germany; today we call them “mansions,” but they were really more like castles. I suspect having a beer with Adolphus would mean settling in for a lot of listening, especially in the latter years after the baron had built his vast empire. That would be totally cool with me. I would love to hear him talk.

3. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895).
If you were one of those kids who grew up poor and would rather have been out wandering around the woods than sitting at a tiny desk in school, Pasteur is a kindred spirit. The son of a poor tanner, he was dyslexic and wasn’t a great student. As a kid he was more interested in painting than school. He struggled to get through higher studies, but he was quite gifted intellectually and got on track as he advanced into higher studies. He began research on fermentation in his early 30s, and here is where he made a huge mark, transforming the way we understood microbiology. He didn’t discover that yeast was a microorganism—that had already been done—but he described how brewers could avoid spoilage (“diseased ferments”) by adopting lager-making techniques and fermenting at a lower temperature. He published his findings less than two decades after Groll introduced the world to the pilsner, which accelerated the transition to lager-brewing. He also figured out that raising the temperature of food and beverages killed spoilage microorgansims, and we’re still busy pasteurizing things today.

He was also just an interesting guy. He was a pretty accomplished artist even as a child and was a supporter of the arts throughout his life. His artist’s knack in visualizing the world almost certainly helped him in his scientific work as well. His marriage was a big part of his life: his wife Marie Laurent was his assistant throughout his work. Given the era, she may well have been his collaborator and partner. Unfortunately, they lost three of their five kids in childhood, common at the time, but no doubt shaping their lives. As one of the most acclaimed scientists in the world, it’s surprising to learn he remained deeply committed to the Catholic Church. In other words, he wasn’t a scientist with no interior life. I suspect it would be quite entertaining to sit with Louis and Marie later in their lives and talk about their fascinating lives.

Gabriel Sedlmayr (r) Anton Dreher (m) and Georg Lederer (l) in Scotland, 1839.
Source: Munich City Archives

2. Anton Dreher (1810-1863) and Gabriel Sedlmayr II (1811-1891).
These scamps. A couple of friends who conducted a bit of international industrial espionage and went on to create two of the most important malt varieties (Vienna and Munich, named for the cities of their breweries), two watershed types of beer, and two of the most powerful and important breweries in the world. I mean, nothing big. As young men in the 1830s, they went to Britain to figure out how the brewers there were doing what they were doing—and how they could take that knowledge back to their family breweries. (I tell their stories at length in The Beer Bible.)

Unlike most of the figures from history, I would prefer to talk to these two early in life, preferably in their 20s at a British pub on their 1930s adventure, when they were cocky, naive, bold, and full of dreams. Knowing how it all turned out, it would be wonderful to hear what they saw for their lives and whether even they could imagine a future as bright as the ones they would go on to live.

1. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1178).
We conclude with one of the most remarkable humans who ever lived, a woman who seemed to have packed at least nine full careers into her 80 years. She was a foremost a nun and abbess, and the founder of two hermitages. But along the way she was also a: composer, mystic, artist, writer, natural historian, theologian, philologist (she invented not just a language but a script), and medical writer. Music people know her through the corpus of compositions she left behind—one of the largest from the middle ages. I learned about her in my academic life studying religion; a woman of visions, she is the author of the radical (and still much studied) work of mysticism, The Book of Divine Works. Given her incredible curiosity and accomplishment, no subject is more than a degree or two removed from Hildegarde, and so it is with beer.

In her great treatise on the natural world, Physica Sacra (an English translation is still in print), she mentions hops in one of the important early writing on the subject. She was neither the first to describe hops nor did her description cause her monastic brothers and sisters to start brewing—they’d been doing that for centuries—but it was an important and accurate early description of their benefit (tr: Priscilla Throop): “Hops (hoppho) [are] a hot and dry herb with a bit of moisture. It is not much use for a human being, since it causes his melancholy to increase, gives him a sad mind, and makes his intestines heavy. Nevertheless, its bitterness inhibits some spoilage in beverages to which it is added, making them last longer.”

Would she want to sit down over a beer and shoot the breeze? Looking at her life’s work, one can infer that she didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out in the bars. But if you were able to corral her for a few minutes, imagine the discussion!