Toast the history of beer

Ed Herrmann is a German-trained brewmaster who worked as brewer at Upland Brewing Co. for six and a half years.

Thursday evening, he gave a lecture at The Bishop Bar about the history of beer.
He found his Bell’s Brewery Two Hearted Ale and explained beer’s backbone. All you need, he said, is crushed grain, yeast and water.

Additives like hops, fruits, spices, berries, herbs and more flavor the beer and give different, complex profiles.

One of his favorite additives, Herrmann said, was a medieval tradition that made beer clearer as glass drinking vessels became more popular. Bird feathers, early brewers found, helped collect particulate to clarify beer.

“They thought a great way was to throw in some feathers,” he said. “It kind of worked and they got to the point where they’d throw in a whole chicken.”

The most popular additive in today’s beer is hops. Hops, Herrmann explained, are flowers with glands full of acids that have bittering properties that manipulate flavor to balance the natural grains’ natural sweetnesses.

The earliest known fermented beverage was a rice-based beer product from the Henan Province in China, as old as 8500 B.C. In Sumer, “consuming beer was the custom of the land.”

That early influence on the importance of fermented beverage has continued through human history.

In 1516, the Bavarian Purity Law, or Reinheitsgebot, stated that beer can only contain hops, grain and water.

When the pilgrims of Plymouth came to the New World, they stopped in what is now Massachusetts because they ran out of ale, an important purifying agent for their water.

And today, beer drinkers celebrate the craft in a growing market that extols the old styles while still exploring new ways to create new brews. It all goes back to the rise of early civilizations and their development of fermented beverage.

“This took place right as people were settling down from mobile hunter gatherers,” Herrmann said. “They were living pretty good.”

­— cscudder@indiana.edu