A Hobbled History of Beer: The 19th Century (1800AD - 1899AD) by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

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

Bottom fermenting had been all but perfected by 1500, but the brewing of lagers was a specialized trade reserved for districts with chilly climates and caves which could be used for cold fermentation and storage. That changed dramatically as steam power transformed Europe and North America into industrial powers, and whatever else may have been happening in the brewing world, it was overshadowed by this single development.

Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, was then and is now world-renowned for the unique quality of its Saaz hops. Jozef Groll and Johann Eisner, two brewers from the small Bohemian town of Pilzn, combined this unique hops with the soft, mineral-depleted water of the region and a specially-bred bottom-fermenting Bavarian yeast to produce the world's first Pilsner in 1842. The maintenance of year-round cold temperatures was finally made possible on a large scale with the aid of steam power, which was used to transport ice and snow from the mountains in the early days of steam, not to power cooling pumps. The Pilsner recipe and the new ability to brew it cheaply in large quantities assisted in rapidly elevating this clean, golden lager style to prominence in Europe, and eventually to market dominance in North America. Beer had always been popular, but the introduction of lager on a large scale literally exploded the industry. Over 4,000 breweries were registered in the US by 1873, most of their product the cool, pale lager we know as commercial beer today, and the age of ales was at an end.
CAUTION: Readers are warned never to repeat these facts in a British pub at the risk personal injury. Britain is one of very few nations where ales still dominate the market and cooling is considered an insult to good beer.

Steam power's explosive effect on the American lager industry was so dramatic that it set a tone for the entire industry which still resonates today. Among the wave of Germans who emigrated to the US in this period and whose names eventually became synonymous with American beer included Adophus Busch, Adolph Coors, Joseph Schlitz, Bernard Stroh, Frederick Pabst, Theodore Hamm and Eberhard Anheuser. Every one of these names enjoyed at least a century of national popularity in the American market.

A few of these folk also made their way to central Canada, let us not forget, paving the way for generations of beloved Canadian lagers, from Keith's and Moosehead in the Maritimes to Labatt's "Blue" Pilsner and the lagers of the Molson family in Ontario and Quebec, but immigrant brewers to Canada typically wound up as brewmasters for these and a few other established brewers rather than owners of successful independents. The predominance of German surnames in beer brands was primarily an American phenomenon.

So why exactly did lager become so popular? It's believed by many that the general social climate of the age played the pivotal role. Ales offer a richer, more flavorful refreshment, more suited to a lazy sit-down than a quick guzzle. Lagers, lacking any trace of a sweet or fruity character, tend to be perceived as more "macho". Their crisp clarity presents the drinker with an ever-present reminder of what really rules the world: gold...not at all the earthy tone of a good ale. They also tend to be slightly less alcoholic than ales, no small consideration when you've got another ten acres of field to plow before it's Miller time and those ever-present temperance folks from the next concession breathing down your neck.

And let's not forget that America was providing plenty of its own stimulation at the time, what with all this railroad building, warring between the states, inventions up the proverbial wazoo and rampaging industrial expansion. Heavy ales just weren't compatible with all this action...not in the Americas and not in Europe.

If the nature of lager gave it an advantage over ales and steam power made its production viable, rail transit made it mass-marketable. Prior to rail, a brewery's service area was severely limited by the distance horses could travel with fresh beer, which is why lager was largely a regional phenomenon prior to the late 1800s. Beer brewed for export by land or ship had to use special recipes, typically with substantially higher-than-normal hopping, to insure that the beer wouldn't go off before it reached its destination. Ales are far more tolerant to this type of reformulation than lagers, and better able to withstand long periods of storage at ambient temperatures.

Rail transit allowed brewers to serve much wider areas with a much wider range of beers, and this opportunity was exploited by brewers on both sides of the Atlantic. While brewers had gotten rich from their trade for centuries, this new opportunity opened the door to vastly greater wealth for the likes of Adolphus Busch, cofounder of Anheuser-Busch Breweries; Adolph Coors of you-know-who; and the legendary Ruppert family, whose names became synonymous with the New York Yankees of the early 1900s.

Advances in scientific discovery in the second half of the century proved to be every bit as crucial to the industry as advances in technology had been in the first half. Rail transit and telegraph communication insured that these new discoveries were put to practical uses in record time, too.

So when Louis Pasteur finally ripped the lid off of the greatest remaining brewing mystery - the role of yeast - in his landmark Études Sur La Biere (Explorations of Beer) in 1876, it was years, not decades, before his discoveries were integrated into the brewing practices of brewers around the world. In this historic work, Pasteur finally laid bare the nature of yeast as a single-celled living organism, and offered empirical proof of its role in producing alcohol. (Pasteur had actually identified the role of yeast in brewing as early as 1859, but his studies weren't published for a wider audience until a few years later. Then as now, transportation and communication speed hadn't impacted on the pace of the business end of the book publishing industry.)

This wasn't the limit of Pasteur's contributions to brewing, either. One of the stickiest problems faced by many brewers was the phenomenon of secondary fermentation, or fermentation which takes place after the beer has been bottled or kegged. If this fermentation is produced by airborne yeasts, it can spoil the beer. Even if it's produced by brewer's yeast, it can have unwanted side effects if the conditions for that yeast aren't quite right. By experimenting with temperature, Pasteur discovered that judicious heating would kill microbes in a fluid and stabilize the growth of all micro-organisms known at the time. (The discovery of viruses would have to wait for the improved magnification technology of the 20th century.)

His development of what we know today as pasteurization is probably much more widely known for its impact on product safety in the dairy industry, but it was also a godsend for mass-market commercial brewers. Heat-killing of yeasts plays a major role in preserving the clarity and extending the shelf life of lager.

In 1881, the Danish scientist Emil Christiän Hansen would revolutionize brewing by isolating and cultivating a single yeast cell in the Carlsberg brewery's laboratories in Copenhagen. While his family may have preferred that he simply raise hounds or goldfish, this monumental achievement demonstrated that yeasts could be bred, and paved the way for the identification and cultivation of specific strains of yeast. This was to have profound implications in quality control, since it was now possible to identify and insure a specific yeast strain for a particular beer. Prior to this time, it was virtually impossible to insure that only a single strain of yeast could or would be used in fermentation.

Brewers soon discovered how crucial a role yeast selection plays in determining the flavor and quality of particular beer styles, and today literally hundreds of strains of commercial brewer's yeasts are available, each capable of imparting its own unique character to a beer.

Brewers had long been aware that careful preservation of small amounts of each batch for use as "primer" in the next batch was absolutely critical to the ongoing viability of the brewery. Less craftsmanlike brewers would use any available yeast. After all, for thousands of years, the yeast used to brew beer was the same yeast used to bake bread. Many of today's most popular strains owe their heritage to carefully-preserved yeasts which evolved their unique characteristics through hundreds of generations of reproduction in kettles of the same recipe and meticulous preservation between batches. Many popular beer styles of today owe their reputations to the care and craftsmanship of early brewers who contributed to the development of unique yeast strains without ever knowing what they were doing.

The same period that saw the demystification of zymurgy (the science of fermentation) was marked by the appearance of commercial refrigeration in the manufacture of beer. Carl von Linde, a noted German scientist who also discovered means of creating transportable liquid versions of gases such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, was largely responsible for inventing and refining techniques of modern refrigeration. One of the first applications of this revolutionary technology was the development of refrigerated fermentation and conditioning tanks, and these were implemented at the Anheuser-Busch breweries in the United States as early as the 1860s.

As production and energy costs fell, von Linde's technology would eventually be applied to the manufacture of refrigerated containers such as rail cars, meat lockers, and within a few more decades, affordable refrigeration for the home. But beer was where the money was at this time. Artificial refrigeration made it possible to produce lagers so consistently throughout the year that the lagermeisters buried the once-dominant alehouse competition in just a few decades. By 1900, America could count fewer than half of the 4,000 breweries that existed just 25 years before.

Even with all this innovation, beer was still largely a keg product, and bottled beer was relatively scarce. The crown cap wasn't introduced to bottling until 1892 when a Baltimore firm finally figured out how to match bottle design and crown design to withstand the pressures of highly carbonated bottled lagers. Bottling very likely existed in brewing for as long as it has existed in winemaking, but until this time it was necessary to use cork or porcelain stoppers on beer bottles. Cork was especially problematic. While this soft wood seems to be ideally suited to wine, allowing it to breathe slightly and age in the bottle, it can impart some rather unpleasant flavors to beer, especially if the cork itself is not sufficiently cured.