In keeping with my apparent trend in pointing to historical beer items, I thought this anecdotal bit of history about the Fesenmeier Brewing Comany was interesting. (Though it died as a result of Prohibition.)

Sons of the German Fesenmeier family, which had started a brewing beer in the Cumberland, Md., area shortly after the Civil War, came here in 1899 and bought the 6-year-old American Brewing Co.

The new owners overcame all sorts of obstacles to sell their product, including unpaved streets and swamps that stood between the brewery in Central City — later West Huntington — and its retail markets in Huntington, a devastating fire in 1905 and the 1913 flood. But Prohibition was the last straw, and longtime employees were laid off and scattered in all directions.

Interesting article: Ancient Egyptian Alcohol, with a large section on the beer of Ancient Egypt.

Beer was depicted on the walls of the tombs, as were scenes of the ancient Egyptian brewery. It was probably very similar to the way beer is still produced in Sudan today. Traditionally, beer was regarded as a female activity as it was an off-shoot of bread making - the basis of the beer were loaves of specially made bread.

Most likely, the beer was not very intoxicating, nutritious, sweet, without bubbles, and thick (the beer had to be strained with wooden syphons, used as a straw, because it was filled with impurities). Though the later Greek accounts suggest that the beer, instead, was as intoxicating as the strongest wine, and it is clear that the worshipers of Bast, Sekhmet and Hathor got drunk on beer as part of their worship of these goddesses, because of their aspect of the Eye of Ra. Tenenit was another ancient Egyptian goddess of beer.

Via On Tap.

A little post-holiday-yet-Thanksgiving-related beer history: American History Shaped by Colonial Beer Run. The Pilgrims landed where they did (Plymouth Rock), which by the whims of history gave us the tradition and holiday of Thanksgiving, because they needed beer.

Slashfood beat me to the punch and points to a BeerAdvocate article on Thanksgiving beer pairings.

Hors d'oeuvre Hour
Kick things up a notch with a moderate level of hops. The hoppy characters in Pale Ales will pair nicely with salads, a slew of cheese varieties, fruits, and many hors d'oeuvres, without overwhelming any flavors. But don't go too bitter.

* Anchor Liberty Ale
* Harpoon IPA
* Smuttynose's Shoal's Pale Ale
* Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Dinner
Eating poultry, gravy, stuffing, etc? You could kick the day up a notch by pairing your meal with some strong Belgian-style ales. Their higher alcohol percentages cut through fats and starches, provide an edge of sweetness, and boast very diverse and complex flavors that lend themselves very well to this pairing.

* Allagash Grand Cru
* Avery's Salvation
* North Coast's Pranqster
* Ommegang's Rare Vos

Yes, I know I'm too little, too late for the big day, but maybe this could apply to leftovers this weekend. :)

Pfiff! has a fun post on one of the strongest of beers, Samichlaus.

Unlike most beers that strive for this level of strength, Hürlimann's crown jewel is not highly hopped, resulting in a brew that (when drank young) is seriously sweet, rich, and chewy, to the point where you wouldn't be surprised to see it poured over an ice cream sundae.

That reminds me, I still have a bottle of Samichlaus in the pantry...

This is very cool: this site is being used as a news source for Topix.net, a news aggregator site that pulls news from sources all over the web—and just added blogs recently as a source. I saw my Stone Age Beer article show up on the Topix.net Beer News page (screen grabbed below).

I don't know why, but this seems to add a feeling of legitimacy to this whole blogging thing. :)

The last several posts have taken an historical theme, so I thought I'd throw in another: Binge-drinking an age-old problem (via A Good Beer Blog).

Experts have uncovered evidence that 12th century Londoners drank ale by the gallon, starting at breakfast time, due to poor quality drinking water....

Looking back only 700 years, London had over 1,300 alehouses - one for every 50 people living in the city.

John Clark, curator of the Medieval London gallery, said: "Most people, including children, drank ale made from malted barley without hops.

"The even drank ale for breakfast, and got through up to a gallon, or four-and-a-half litres, a day each.

"At a price of a penny per gallon, only the poorest had to make do with water." However, he pointed out that this ale was much weaker than the beers people drink today.

By the gallon? Wow... considering you only need a half gallon or so of water a day, the "binge drinking" label isn't far off.

Not a whole lot more to say about the article; I just thought it was an interesting snapshot of beer in the life of medieval England.

November's issue of Discover Magazine has an article titled "Stone Age Beer" (unfortunately, the full article is only available to subscribers) about Dogfish Head Brewery's attempt at brewing a 9,000 year-old beer from China. (Other articles are here and here.) It's a pretty interesting story, beer brewed with rice, grapes, hawthorn berries, honey, and such, emulating as closely as possible the conditions they guess the beer was brewed under. But I found myself wondering about how authentic such a beer could be, especially when (by federal law) they were required to use 25% barley malt, so I was delighted when the author chronicled his own experience attempting to brew the beer in a more authentic fashion.

McGovern, Calagione, and Gerhart seemed satisified with the day's brew. I was not... Château Jiahu, it seemd to me, was still too burdened by the present....

Two technological hurdles stood between me and quality. One was starch conversion; starches are long chains of sugars and can't be consumed by humans until first broken down. The second challenge was attracting enough wild yeast to ferment those sugars quickly, before marauding hordes of bacteria and fungi turned the brew into a frightful and possibly hazardous libation....

I was down to my last option: chewing the grain and spitting it out. Horrifying, perhaps, to our fussy 21st-century sensibilities, this Neolithic technology is still very much alive today. In Africa they do it with manioc roots; in the South Pacific they do it with kava. The idea is simple: Digestion begins in the mouth. Saliva contains, among other things, ptyalin, a form of amylase. By chewing the grain, I myself would initiate the starch conversion.

So, to remain authentic, he chewed the rice to produce the mash, added raw honey and crushed grapes (for the wild yeast), and added hawthorn berries. Some of you are cringing, no doubt, and his first attempt tanked, but the second was drinkable... or at least drinkable enough.

Lacking an oenophile's nomenclature and nuance, I can only describe it as a sort of Flintstones wine cooler: sweet and sour, with a honey funk and blurry sight lines. With a second glass I proved to myself that it was drinkable and caught enough of a buzz to trip over the border in my garden.

In the end, I was more entertained by the homebrewing portion of the article than the rest. Someday I might try brewing an historical beer like this... without the chewing, though. I'm not that authentic.

One of the things on my list to do someday with homebrew is kegging. Several years ago, I picked up a cornelius keg, CO₂ tank and the necessary hoses and regulator from a garage sale, and as near as I can tell it's all in usable condition. I'd simply have to clean the equipment and recharge the CO₂ tank, and then learn how to use it all, of course.

There's a decent primer here: Introduction to the Cornelius Keg System. I need to remember this: "Bleach should never be used to clean stainless steel because it is corrosive and will cause it to rust with continual use." Another good page is here.

Kegging sure would make things simpler, as far as bottling is concerned. The problem is, I only have the one setup—I'm not brewing enough beer these days to make a difference, but it would be nice to have several kegs on-hand to have a "rotating" tap. Unfortunately, these setups can get rather spendy. This page, for instance, offers a new complete keg setup for $280. Used kegs by themselves generally look to run in the $30+ range.

Whew... sometimes this ain't a cheap hobby.

Picked this article up off the wire: Brewery offers glimpse at pre-Columbian civilizations along Andes. Pretty interesting stuff, concerning an early American brewery circa 600 BC.

The brewery serviced the earliest known diplomatic embassy in the Americas, a palace complex atop a steep-sided mesa in southern Peru built by the Wari empire around 600 B.C. When the empire collapsed 400 years later, residents of the mountaintop abandoned the place - but not before holding a final, blowout feast and burning down the brewery, smashing ceremonial cups in the flames....

The beer was fermented from corn mash - making a potent concoction called chicha that is still brewed in the Andes today - and spiced with peppercorn tree berries.

"This was no mini-brewery operation," said Williams. "It was the biggest early brewery anyone has so far seen. The brewing facility had three main areas: a grinding room for corn, a boiling room with at least 20 huge vats that allowed them to brew 1,000 to 2,000 liters of beer at a time and a storage area with huge, 4-foot-high clay storage vessels."

That meant every five or six days the brewery could turn out at least 500 gallons.

Now that would be an interesting beer to try to brew...

Follow-up from my earlier post about Bad Elf Beer: the state of Connecticut approved the Bad Elf.

The department determined that although state regulations bar alcohol advertising with images that might entice kids, including images associated with Santa Claus, the regulations do not apply to beer labels....

At a compliance hearing before a state liquor commissioner last month, a lawyer for the distributor argued the state would be violating the distributor's free speech rights by banning the labels. Protecting Santa Claus also violates the Constitution's establishment clause, which prohibits government endorsement or disapproval of religion, she argued.

The state Department of Consumer Protection ordered a formal hearing for Nov. 22 before the state Liquor Control Commission.

The hearing was canceled on Tuesday and a ruling was issued in favor of Shelton Brothers.

Interesting how they turned it into a Constitutional issue on the separation of church and state... I didn't know Santa Claus was that overt a religious force. That would have set some interesting precedents had it gone to court.

But after all that, the best part is the punchline: "Shelton said he is not sure when Seriously Bad Elf might make it to Connecticut store shelves."

Sorry I hadn't posted much for the first week of this month—my in-laws were in town and we were celebrating a birthday, so we had a busy week in the real world. Anyway, I still have a bunch of pumpkin in the freezer that I'm going to brew with, and since I mentioned it the other day, I haven't been able to stop thinking about using cranberries in one of the batches of pumpkin ale I'm going to make.

The plan would be to add 5 to 10 pounds of cranberries to the secondary, rather than at the end of the boil. Why? Well, if I added during the boil, there's a good chance the heat would set the pectin in the fruit and create a haze in the beer. And if I added during primary fermentation, the vigorous fermentation process would scrub away a lot of the character and aroma of the fruit.

Of course, I'd have to find fresh cranberries. Or frozen, I suppose, but fresh sounds so much more appealing. I haven't really decided if I'd make this an "Imperial" beer, though... do I really need to get that carried away?

I've got enough pumpkin this year for two nice batches of my pumpkin ale. I'm thinking I'll make my regular recipe for the first batch, and then maybe experiment with an Imperial Pumpkin style recipe for a Christmas/winter ale. Or maybe start with the heftier beer since it'll take longer to mature.

Of course, the "Imperial" concept is something I've talked about before; I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone (Weyerbacher Brewing, in this case) came up with a pumpkin version. 8% ABV, not bad.

Maybe I'll have to take it up a notch and add cranberries or something to my version...

Well, it's pretty debatable (to me, at least) whether this "fermented coffee beverage" can be truly called beer, but that's apparently how it's being marketed. Or something. New Scientist has the article.

Nestec, part of the Nestlé empire in Switzerland, has filed patents in every major market round the world on a "fermented coffee beverage" that pours and foams like beer, but smells of strong coffee and packs a concentrated caffeine kick.

The beverage is made in a similar way to beer, but fine-tuned temperature control stops the formation of ethyl alcohol. So the new drink could go down well with people who want a long tall pick-me-up while driving.

I just don't see the point. Wouldn't you just drink coffee directly? Or better yet... a coffee-flavored beer, with alcohol and everything?

Slashfood also has a post about it.