General Beer and Brewing Trivia by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

General Trivia | Taste-Related Trivia

Not to trivialize beer in any way, but there just seems to be something about obscure, meaningless factoids that adds a unique richness to any experience. My cardiologist has ordered me to cut down on all that richness, so kind folk that I am, I'm passing this richness along to you.

While I've done everything I can to verify the authenticity of the information on this page, I can't guarantee that this page contains 100% factual information. Hey, this isn't rocket science. (And for what it's worth, I can tell you from experience that rocket scientists don't make very good beer, either.)

Barley, the most commonly used grain for beer malt (but see below), was very likely the first grain ever cultivated by man. In fact, there appears to be some evidence that the cultivation of grains, which many believe led to the development of civilization, was undertaken not because some savvy Middle Easterners figured it was a good idea for insuring food supplies, but because it was a good idea for insuring beer supplies. Try that line the next time someone hangs the "uncivilized" tag on you or your beer-loving crew.

Contrary to popular belief, wine wasn't completely illegal in the US during prohibition. It was legally determined that fermentation couldn't be outlawed because it was the natural tendency of fruits to ferment, and one can't outlaw a natural process. (Similar arguments about the natural tendency of cannabis seeds to take root in almost any available soil don't seem to have found the same favor in the courts.) Grains didn't get the same consideration as grapes, however. Home winemaking flourished during the 1920s, but home brewing wasn't looked upon quite so kindly by the authorities.

Only 15 of the 127 commercial breweries in Canada operating in the early 1900s were still alive following the end of prohibition. But at least the surviving breweries could compete. Yeesh.

The origins of the English word "beer" are unclear. Some speculate that it stems from "bere" or "beere", an old English term for a plant used as an element of gruit seasoning before hops gained favor. Others say it comes from the Latin bibere, which means to drink. It almost certainly has nothing to do with "bier", which is a coffin and the stand or altar on which the coffin rests during a funeral or wake. Although, considering what we know about what went into gruit, it's easy to imagine how it could.

Beer was considered so vital a nutritional staple for British soldiers that when the British army and navy couldn't supply their own beer, they provided their troops with cash allowances to purchase it. The high concentration of B vitamins from the grain and yeast were vital to good health on long overseas missions. British soldiers in Upper Canada were given a daily beer allowance of a penny, sufficient to purchase six pints of ale from a local pub.

We said that barley is the most commonly used grain for beer malt, but that may not be the case for much longer. Rice malt is gaining ground fast and could overtake barley in volume in just a few years. Lighter, cheaper, less flavorful rice malt is preferred for brewing light beer, and is used in a wide range of American-style lagers because of the high alcohol-to-flavor ratio it produces. American-style lager is not just popular in America, either...it's the most popular beer style in a lot of non-traditional brewing countries as well. (That wasn't thunder...it was the sound of thousands of European brewmasters spinning in their graves.)

The oldest written document in recorded history is an 8,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet which apparently describes the ritual process of brewing a type of beer designed solely for the purpose of sacrifice in the temples. We used to wonder about what happened to those Sumerians, but honestly...a society so decadent it sacrifices beer to the gods? Poor sods...not even the fact that their temple brewers were women saved them from defeat at the hands of the Babylonians.

The first beers were actually produced not from fermented grain, but from fermented, leavened barley bread. There are many legends, but historians believe that the fermentation of bread into alcohol was discovered by happy accident. Bread beers were far easier to brew than mash beers, since the brewer could acquire their needed supplies from almost any merchant. It took centuries for brewers to refine the art of zymurgy and figure out how to isolate strains of yeast that produced unique flavors and effects. Prior to that, brewer's yeast and baker's yeast were pretty much one and the same.

Beer isn't nature's most perfect food...but it may be the byproduct of it. Dried, heat-killed brewer's yeast is one of the most potent and nutritious foodstuffs known to humanity. It is exceedingly rich in trace minerals and B vitamins and absolutely jam-packed with protein, and it includes a wide range of enzymes and cofactors that actually make these nutrients work better in your body.

But don't get the wrong idea...you get very little of that nutrition in a glass of beer. Virtually all North American beer is filtered to remove yeast prior to bottling or kegging. The brewer's yeast you typically find on health food store shelves isn't grown on barley malt, either. It's usually grown on beet juice, which gives the dried yeast a more palatable, almost beef-like flavor. "True" brewer's yeast, grown on grain mash and acquired directly from the brewery, is exceedingly bitter-tasting. In fact, it's so bitter that most producers actually remove the bitterness before packaging it for sale as "debittered brewer's yeast". According to some experts in the area of performance nutrition, brewer's yeast is so vastly superior to our typical daily diet that eating large amounts of it in one sitting can actually shock your digestive system from a mass killing of non-essential bacteria in the gut. The result can be bloating and gas beyond your worst pickled-egg nightmares, at least until healthy bacteria take over.

British pub patrons used to favor ceramic mugs with whistles molded into the rim or the handle. The whistle was blown to get service when a refill was needed. Thus was born the expression "wet your whistle". No word on how they signaled the barkeep when the john ran out of toilet paper....

Before Louis Pasteur uncovered the exact nature of single-celled organisms in the second half of the 19th century, the role of yeast in brewing was largely a mystery. Brewers knew something produced the fermentation, and that it had to be cultured and preserved from batch to batch. But that was just about all they knew. Until yeast cells were seen reproducing under a microscope, the actual mechanism was unknown. Pasteur's foundation research on single-celled organism was not done on milk, as is commonly believed, or even on wine, as one might expect from a French scientist. It was done on beer, an historical fact that the French wine and dairy establishments would probably prefer to keep secret.

We can probably thank ancient Egyptian brewers for the invention of the drinking straw. They used the hollow stems of reeds to slurp up beer from a still-fermenting vessel as a way of testing the brew without getting a mouthful of yeast from the top of the ferment. It was a practice almost anyone could perform, since early brewing could be accomplished with anything from the smallest nomad's goatskin to the largest clay tanks in the temples, and all the average Egyptian needed to make beer was some leavened (yeast-risen) bread and water.

The expression "rule of thumb" originated with brewing. Before the invention of thermometers, brewers would dip their thumb or forefinger into the wort to test the temperature prior to fermentation. (We don't even want to think about how early doctors must have taken your body temperature.) The temperature had to be just right before yeast was added or there could be dire consequences to the resulting flavor...or to the brewer. Too hot, and aggressive fermentation could produce a vile-tasting beer. Too cold, and fermentation might be incomplete, leaving undigested sugars in the beer that could actually cost the brewer his life if a conner (beer inspector) should discover the error.

The tale of the near-disaster suffered by the Jacques Cartier expedition of the early 16th century is learned by nearly every Canadian schoolchild. Typically we're told that the French sailors were saved from scurvy by the local Indians who taught them how to brew spruce needle tea, which is relatively rich in vitamin C. Modern historians now believe that it wasn't tea at all that Cartier's crew brewed up, but spruce beer, and you can actually find a number of recipes on the Internet for this "treat".

The English are very likely responsible for the expression "mind your Ps and Qs". When pub customers got rowdy, bartenders would remind them to "mind your pints and quarts", not wishing to have to clean up the mess of their patrons' spilt beverages. Some linguists dispute this, claiming it stems from the French pieds et queues (roughly translated "mind your feet and the line that they walk") but we don't buy it. These same linguists are likely the same ones who claim that the tennis expression "love", which means zero points, comes from l'oeuf (egg, or "goose-egg" if you prefer), rather than the Scottish luff.

It was long believed that the availability of good beer discouraged alcoholism. Not only did good ales have recognized nutritional qualities, but they were far weaker than spirits. There were also strong social and medical pressures to drink alcoholic beverages as a safer alternative to drinking water right up until the 1900s, and this even occurred in North America, where you'd assume good fresh water would be plentiful, as well as in Europe, where water quality had been a concern for centuries. You'll find an armload of documents in historical archives suggesting that those who preferred water to beer, or were forced to drink it for health or religious reasons, were to be pitied or scorned as weak or ill-informed souls.

Four thousand years ago, the father of a Babylonian bride would supply his new son-in-law with all the honey beer (mead) he could drink for a full month as part of the wedding dowry. Mead isn't exactly topping the charts for beer popularity these days, but the tradition of the honey month, or "honeymoon", is still going strong. Apparently the new wife was expected to participate in the brewing but wasn't allowed to share in the bounty, which is quite possibly how the tradition of the nagging wife began. Admit it, that would make you cranky too.

The metal "gold crown" beer cap wasn't patented until 1891. Prior to its introduction, cork and porcelain stoppers were used to top beer bottles. When cork was used, it had to be cured and cut carefully, because improperly dried cork could impart a nasty flavor to the beer. When porcelain was used, more macho types would smack the bottle's neck on a bar rail to break the seal, which often resulted in bits of porcelain falling into the bottle. Bottled beer was considered a luxury well beyond this date because of the cost of creating bottles and shipping this perishable potable, and typically only the most remote outposts served bottled beer at the bar. Keg beer outsold bottles or cans by an overwhelming margin up to the middle of the 20th century.

If it hadn't been for beer, the Pilgrims might have landed in Virginia or the Carolinas rather than Plymouth Rock. According to the Mayflower's ship's log, the ships' stores were low on beer at the time, and the sailors weren't about to go farther south on the US coast than their supplies would permit. Beer was considered essential food on board British vessels in the 1600s. Lucky for the Pilgrims, they found fertile soils, reasonably hospitable natives and good fresh water at their Massachusetts landing site...although they were quite homesick for the good beer they'd left behind in England, so homesick in fact that hops were one of the very first supplies they requisitioned from the next supply ship.

St. John's, Newfoundland can lay claim to being North America's oldest city. But it wasn't the first North American city with its own commercial brewery. That honor goes to New York...or, rather, New Amsterdam as it was known in those days, where the first commercial brewery was established in 1633. The Dutch settlers advertised for brewers in London, and the son of the successful applicant carried on the family tradition as New York's first native-born non-Indian brewer.

Beer may have had its birth in the Middle East, but it was in Northern Europe, where grapes gave way to grain, that beer found its most widespread and longest-lasting acceptance. Before the rise in popularity of lagers and pale ales, beer was almost always brewed up dark and rich, and seen as the "meal replacement drink" of its time. It was actually fed to children and expectant mothers as a safe, nutritious substitute for what were typically inconsistent and often poor-quality food supplies. In the Bavarian province of Germany, beer is still officially recognized in Bavaria as a food, not a drink.

Brewing was shrouded in mysticism through most of its history. After all, the process by which grains became alcohol was a complete mystery prior to the microscope. The relationship of the ingredients in beer even correspond to the four elements, with malt being earth, hops or other seasonings being air, water playing a starring role as itself, and, at least until the microbe was discovered, the fire that transformed sugar into alcohol was widely referred to as the fire of the gods.

The mystical traditions in any civilized culture are almost always guarded by the church, and from Sumerian days, thousands of years BC, through to end of the Middle Ages, the church controlled the art of brewing, and this appears to have been the case from Sumeria through ancient Egypt right up through the Christian monasteries under the auspices of the Holy Roman Church. Even across the Atlantic, the brewing of beer among civilized Indian nations was the domain of the church. It appears that only the Christian church encouraged men to become brewers. In virtually all other societies, brewing was considered part of cooking, and was the domain of the witch, the female devotee, the concubine or the priestess. But it wasn't all chauvinism...at least in Christian breweries, the men also had to do the cleaning up.

Prior to the 20th century, rich and robust dark beers were overwhelmingly more common than the pasty-faced golden brew we typically call beer today. The popularity of dark beers was due primarily to refrigeration...or, rather, the lack thereof. Rich, heavily-hopped ales keep better than light, mild lagers, and not everyone had a temperature-controlled alpine cave in which to store their beer. On the other hand, the popularity of lagers since the rise of refrigeration isn't strictly a result of big brewery brainwashing or low production costs, but rather good market research. However tragic it may sound, most beer drinkers apparently prefer a relatively bland taste. Just give us thirty seconds alone in the same room with them...we'll change their minds.

Pilsner, the light lager which is arguably Canada's single most popular beer style, was first brewed in Pilsen in the Czech Republic (or Pilzn, if you prefer). By powering their drying kilns with steam instead of coal, the Pilseners discovered that they could create a light-colored malt with all the flavor of the darker malts typically created by coal-fired kilns. Most commercial "pils" use substantial amounts of less costly corn and rice malt; typically only craft breweries use 100% barley malts in their Pilsners. Saaz hops, which at their best have a slightly earthy flavor and aroma, are considered de rigueur for "real" Pilsners. While Saaz can be grown pretty much anywhere, it's widely accepted that the best Saaz come directly from the heavily-depleted red clay soils around Pilsen, and that's exactly where our Saaz come from. Don't say we never did you any favors.

The rise in popularity of micro-breweries has produced an enormous increase in the number of beer styles available to the average consumer, and even resulted in brand-new styles never conceived when the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) first began lobbying for laws to enable microbreweries in the 1980s. We doubt the many members of the House of Lords who were registered CAMRA members would be thrilled about the notion of brewers of hemp and ginseng beers describing themselves as "brewers in the craft tradition", and at least a few are downright disgusted at what's happened to some of the most venerable styles of ages past. Still, times and taste evolve and change, and today craft-tradition brewers find it necessary to distinguish between traditional brews, made with recipes and techniques true to times past, from contemporary renditions of those brews, which remain true to the style but offer new features and flavors.

The collecting of coasters, or "beer mats" as aficionados refer to them, is known as tegestology. If you have more than three of these coasters in your personal possession, you should probably learn to pronounce it: teh-guss-TAW-luh-gee. For what it's worth, a savvy collector can easily outperform the hottest sectors of the stock market. Try a web search on "beer mat collect auction" and you might be amazed at the popularity of this hobby.