How we have brewed beer for 8,000 years without really understanding it
Why did you decide to write this book?
While beer is the most popular drink in the world after water, tea and coffee, hardly anyone knows what it’s made from, which is weird.
What fascinates you most about the brewing process?
Many of the processes vital to making beer – understanding the mineral content of water, the nature of fermentation, the role of enzymes – have only been properly understood for fewer than 200 years. Yet we’ve been successfully brewing beer for at least 8,000 years. Humans are so clever we can make something work, even when we have no idea why it works.
What makes beer a “miracle brew”?
There are quite a few “miracles” covered in the book but probably the main one is fermentation, where a microscopic, single-cell organism eats sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide. The only other way alcohol is created in nature in by the birth of a new star, which is why there’s a cloud of alcohol billions of miles wide hanging in the centre of the Milky Way. No, I’m not drunk – this is true.
When and where did we start brewing beer?
It was likely somewhere in what we now think of as the Middle East, somewhere between 7,000 BC and 10,000 BC. It wasn’t that similar to a pint of lager, that’s for sure – most probably a kind of grainy porridge that would have tasted quite sour. Today, in some parts of Africa, sorghum brew is still similar.
How did early brewers explain the process?
Brewers hoped that evil spirits (what we now know as bacteria) wouldn’t infect the brew, and good spirits (yeast) would prevail. When commercial brewers started brewing regularly and pitched yeast from one brew into the next (around the 15th or 16th Century) ‘godisgoode’ was the name given to the foamy head of yeast that started a good and more consistent fermentation from brew to brew. To them, this substance appeared from nowhere and made better beer. A miracle!
Who unlocked the secrets of yeast?
It’s generally credited to Louis Pasteur. He finally confirmed beyond doubt that different micro-organisms were responsible for both the fermentation and spoilage of beer. His work, and that of Emil Hansen at Carlsberg, allowed brewers to create beers that taste identical from batch to batch for the first time ever, which is why so many of the major lager brewers date back to the 1870s and 1880s.
How important has beer been to our history and culture?
It’s incredible just how much beer seems to have been written out of our history and culture. I studied Victorian industry at school, and the textbooks completely avoided mentioning that brewing was the second-biggest contributor to GDP after cotton-making, or that brewers led innovations from steam power to microscopes.
How has the brewing process changed?
The basics are exactly the same: modify barley by tricking it into sprouting so its starches turn to sugars, mix it with water, add some flavourings and seasonings and let the yeast do its job. Scientific progress has helped us do that more efficiently. But recent innovations have been more about making beer more cheaply and quickly rather than making it better.
What sparked the recent craft beer revolution?
There were loads of different causes, all coming together: better legislation supporting small brewers, social media allowing beer fans and brewers to communicate, big beer becoming really boring, and a background of interest in locally produced, small-scale food and drink.
Miracle Brew: Adventures in the Nature of Beer is published by Unbound, out now