A Hobbled History of Beer: 1400-1599AD

A Hobbled History of Beer:
Out of the Dark Ages (1400AD - 1599AD)
by Cub Lea
Last updated 09/00

Intro | Prehistory | -200AD | 200-1000AD | 1000-1400AD | 1400-1599AD | 1600s | 1700s | 1800s | 1900s | Canada

Closing the book on the monastic tradition

As the Dark Ages drew to a close , more and more European states had begun to resent the dominance of the abbey brewers. Emperor Sigismund of Germany was apparently one of the first to withdraw the tax-free status of these breweries around 1400, paving the way for the rise of commercial breweries...and rise they did. In Hamburg alone there were 600 privately-owned breweries by 1500.

By the late 1300s, the British brewing tradition was well established, and British beers were highly respected throughout Europe even if the English themselves weren't. Scots had been world-class experts in the malting of grain for making usquebaugh (whiskey) at least since Roman times. British beer was said to be among the best anywhere, gifted to dignitaries and reputed on the mainland to be as clear and strong as good wine. By the 1500s even royalty was into the act; Queen Elizabeth I apparently gave up her morning orange juice for strong ale. (But then she also used cannabis for her menstrual cramps, so feel free to draw your own conclusions about her motives.)

1500: No Renaissance for you if you don't clean your room

The really interesting news in brewing in the 16th century revolved around a public health issue.

We need to remember that the fresh water available to most of the population in those days was not the tasty artesian spring water, pure glacial runoff or sterile reservoir siphonage that we enjoy today or associate with modern brewing. We have the relative luxury of virtually limitless fresh water almost anywhere in the world. All it takes is enough drill pipe to reach an aquafer. But drilling through more than a few dozen feet of bedrock wasn't an option prior to the steam age. Water quality throughout Europe, with a few exceptions around large lakes, watersheds and alpine glaciers, was generally marginal to horrible. Alcoholism was at least as much of a problem in those days as it is now, but even if you were susceptible to 'dipsomania', you had to balance the long-term risk of addiction against the short-term risks of abstention...and abstinence wasn't always advisable for good health. Alcohol is a very effective antimicrobial, and aspects of the brewing process eliminate toxins and impurities from the water. In many locales - perhaps even most - beer was actually far healthier as the sole source of day-to-day fluid than any available fresh water.

As for the food, well, if beer required gruit as a seasoning, it doesn't take much imagination to guess how far folks in those days had to go to preserve fresh meats for more than a few hours.

For perhaps as long as 20 centuries, practically every Northern European drank beer from the wetnurse to the wake. Farmers would take flagons and goatskins of it into the fields, where beer served both as liquid refreshment and midday meal. Bosses would fill buckets with it in the morning to replenish their work crews as the day wore on. Heavy ale was served to expectant mothers to bolster their strength. "Healthy" ales were available for children as a dietary supplement.

Given this level of reliance on beer as both food and water, brewers were both highly influential within the communities they served and required by law or community pressure to be religiously responsible in their craft. It's easy to imagine, given the level of power and influence at stake here, how many brewers would be tempted to adulterate their beer or cut corners in the brewing process to increase profits. The problem with beer is that it has its own schedule, and that schedule doesn't always mesh with the schedule of the brewer. The temptation to sell immature "green" beer must have been overwhelming in some regions.

Fortunately, most regions had designated inspectors, known in England as conners. These officials were either appointed by local or royal courts or selected arbitrarily by the community. Their duty was to help insure the quality of beer by continually monitoring new batches of brew as they came to market. The wrong judgement from a conner could literally cost a brewer his life...but then, better the death of a shady brewer than the illness or malnutrition of an entire village. For centuries the penalty in many parts of Europe for adulteration of beer was drowning in one's own brew kettles. This sentence dated back to the same Code of Hammurabi first used by the Babylonians. In locales where the church held sway over the law, punishment for adulteration was as severe as the church could mete out, which in many cases was doubtless even less pleasant than drowning.

Stick this in your lederhosen

One of the most famous beer legends of the era describes how a conner would test a new batch of beer by pouring a small quantity onto a wooden chair, and then sitting in that chair in leather breeches (lederhosen) until the beer had dried. If the leather stuck to the seat, it was a sign that unfermented sugars were left in the beer, indicating that the brewer had failed to allow the beer to ferment or mature for a sufficient length of time...the beer was "green" and unfit to drink or sell.

William Dufty's best-selling book of the mid-1970s, Sugar Blues, helped popularize the legend, but Dufty claimed that it was adulteration with sugar that caused this effect. Any brewer worth the title knows that the sugars created by malting and mashing are more than enough to cause this effect on their own. Sugars were very costly in Europe right through to the 1800s, so it wasn't common for brewers to use syrups or sugars in place of grains as an adjunct in fermentation until the 1800s. If sugar or syrup was available, it was more commonly used as seasoning than as a fermentation aid.

By the sixteenth century, Protestantism was a major force and hops had become so deeply entrenched in brewing tradition that it was actually mandated by law throughout Germany as the only herb permitted for use in beer. And barley had become so popular, and so widely trusted, as the sole source of malt, that it too was legislated into a prestigious position as the only malt permitted in beer.

1516: The Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Purity Law)

"Herewith shall beer brewers and others not use anything other than malt, hops and water. These same brewers also shall not add anything when serving or otherwise handling beer, upon penalty to body and chattels."
The Beer Purity Law
as set forth by Wilhelm IV, Duke of Bavaria in 1516

The establishment of these practices as standards, combined with the necessity of quality beer to the health of the general population, paved the way for what may be the most important single event in brewing of the last millennium. While brewers today might disagree on whether its primary benefit was quality of flavor or public safety, virtually every brewer agrees on one thing: its name is the one German word you must be able to pronounce if you expect to be taken seriously at a beer tasting.

The famed Reinheitsgebot, or Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, dictated that only barley, hops and water could be used in the brewing of beer. The Reinheitsgebot is such a potent part of brewing lore that it still exists today as the oldest still-active food law in the world. One wonders if Bavarian brewers lose sleep over the fact that technically they're breaking that law every time they pitch yeast into the wort. It's quite certain that brewers of old adhered most strictly to this law, but it must be remembered that while fermentation was reasonably well-understood, yeast's role in this process was unknown, so the addition of even dried yeast was outlawed. No one actually observed living yeast until Louis Pasteur first identified and studied single-celled organisms and pioneered the field of microbiology a full 350 years later.

By the way, it's pronounced ryne-HYTE-ska-boot (rhymes with "foot"). Commit it to memory and don't say I never did you any favors.)

And turning to international news...

In other news, Christopher Columbus returned from America with a tale of dark-skinned non-Chinese natives who offered his crew a brew of fermented maize similar to beer. Other tribes were soon after discovered to be proficient at brewing alcoholic beverages from persimmons. Finally Europe knew for certain what it had wondered for so long: it was not alone in its love of beer. Oh, and a bit of trivia Chris picked up along the way: turns out the world is round.

In sports, a promising new name showed up in this century's amateur draft: lager. Until the late 1400s, beer was beer, and beer was ale. The only known fermentation technique used top-fermenting yeast. Bottom fermenting typically leaves far less unfermented malt sugars in the resulting brew, theoretically producing a "cleaner" product. Scouts had been searching for ages for a young talent able to ferment on the bottom of the wort with consistency, but the big question was, could this amateur prodigy make the big leagues? Until the mid-1800s it was impractical to brew lagers in large quantities outside of regions with large cold storage areas such as the alpine caves of Austria and Bavaria, but lager was a star in Munich's minor leagues for a few hundred years before that.

Turning to the weather board, by the middle of the 16th century we see moderate social and political temperatures sweeping in with only occasional clouds from church and state. This pattern appears likely to continue well into tomorrow with possible pockets of rain from isolated temperance movements and pressure groups, as we can see from these 500-year-old traditions clustered together on our satellite map.

That's the news for now, but stay tuned. Coming up next, an all-new season of Survivor as we send a group of religious fanatics to the New World and follow their wacky adventures as they try to get along with the natives and figure out how to live without barley for a whole year.