The Brewer's Tale by William Bostwick

Author:William Bostwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Ninkasi and the gods of grain have been dethroned. In today’s beer world, all hail the hop. Craft brewers outbitter one another with double, triple, imperial IPAs and fight pun for pun with their names: Hoptimator. Tricerahops. Hoptimus Prime. These beers can be as pricey as they are potent, but drinkers still lap them up. Their popularity is not a new phenomenon, though. IPA’s hype, quality, and expense have been central to its story since the beginning.

Most beers have humble origins. Take saisons, a chore of running a farm, brewed with whatever was at hand. Or porter, the result of a working-class trick that eked a little extra life out of a stale keg. Not IPA. IPA was royal born, a drink of the effete, designed for princely palates. While porter lived in dank, dark cellars, IPA matured in the holds of India-bound clippers, jostling mahogany tables and pungent sacks of tea and saffron. Porter filled chipped tankards and IPA glittering glassware. Porter comforted with sweetness; IPA braced with astringent vigor. Bitter, all of a sudden, was better.

Today’s bitterest beers confer badges of toughness on those who brave them, named Palate Wrecker or Arrogant Bastard (its motto, imprinted under a snarling gargoyle: “you’re not worthy”). But the first IPAs were marketed as healthy, temperate alternatives to the rich, thick stouts and porters most drinkers were used to.

After the soot and sour beer of the factory age came an era of coffee and tea, bitter and bright. When a prosperous dawn punctured London’s fog and Samuel Johnson’s cutting wit sliced through the Romantic poets’ misty-eyed histrionics, drinkers turned to kicks instead of comfort. Coffee shops buzzed, tea cups rattled nervously on their China dishes. “Coffee,” wrote the historian Mark Pendergrast in his history of the drink, was “the sole, bitter companion of the lost soul,” a symbol of—and balm for—the modern condition. Not all were pleased. “That newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee,” one critic noted at the time, has caused “a very sensible decay of that true old English vigor, our gallants being every way so Frenchified that they are become mere cock-sparrows.” As tastes evolved to appreciate the bitter and bracing, drinking itself changed from necessity to choice. By the late 1800s British drinkers had more free time and more money to spend. They had options. Beer could be more than sustenance. As midday refreshment, or an after-dinner celebration, beer became a status symbol.

Porters, thick with “heavy mucilaginous matter,” were “better for hardy and healthy constitutions, such as workers in metal, soil, or mortar,” suggested doctors. “Fast young gents” were too delicate, too Frenchified. They allayed their “embittered existence,” Punch magazine joked in the 1850s, with something lighter. Something new that sparkled in their glasses. Bitter, hoppy pales.

Pales, “carefully fermented, so as to be devoid of all sweetness, or, in other words, to be dry,” were best for the delicate middle class, wrote Jonathan Pereira in his 1843 Treatise on Food and Diet. Physicians touted their favorite brands to medical journals.

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