Brewing

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BREWING

BREWING. Like wine making, brewing has existed for millennia as an art; only in the twentieth century have its practitioners attempted to transform it into an applied science. The earliest settlers brought beer from England with them to America. At that time, brewing was a household industry, carried on primarily by farmers and tavern keepers, but commercial breweries soon emerged, selling to local areas they could reach by horse and wagon. William Penn established such a business in Pennsbury in 1683, not only to make a profit but also to encourage the drinking of beer rather than hard liquor, in the interest of temperance.

The early process of brewing began by heating and soaking barley to force germination. Producers then mixed the end product, called malt, with water and boiled it to form what brewers called the wort. They then added hops to the boiling liquid to give it a pleasantly bitter taste and a distinctive aroma. After straining the liquid, brewers added yeast and allowed the wort to ferment for a few days. Until the twentieth century, brewers governed the proportions of the ingredients and the exact timing of the process by age-old recipes or simply by rule of thumb. The reputation of a commercial brewery depended greatly on the skill of its brewmaster rather than on any particular technology or equipment.

Early American beer was similar to English beer, which was fermented with yeast that floated on top of the wort. Near the middle of the nineteenth century, the many German immigrants to the United States brought a different type of beer. Following German brewing traditions, they used a yeast that stayed at the bottom of the wort during fermentation. Then, after its removal, they

allowed the fermented wort to age at low temperatures for some weeks. The milder and more aromatic German lager soon captured most of the beer market, and the English type of fermentation became confined to ale.

From about 1875, technological and scientific changes took place in brewing that made it very difficult for the amateur or small-scale operator to compete with the up-to-date, large brewery. The railroad made it possible for breweries with limited local markets, such as those in Milwaukee, Wis., to seek nationwide distribution—which, in turn, required beer able to withstand temperature changes, bumping, and the lapse of time. From the 1880s, pasteurization checked bacterial growth, chemical additives were eliminated (this was enforced by law in 1907), bottling became mechanized, and brewers devised new methods to artificially control carbonation levels. In addition to changing their product, commercial brewers infiltrated the territory of local brewers by devising new business tactics to influence local sellers, ranging from discounts and credits to purchases of saloon properties.

The brewing industry that revived after the years of Prohibition (1919–1933) had most of the same large producers but operated in a quite different environment from the old one. Because Prohibition had accustomed people to drinking hard liquor, it took a dozen years to build the market for beer back to its pre–World War I size. As late as 1970, domestic consumption of beer still remained slightly less per capita than it had been in 1914. Meanwhile, the motor truck, cans, and a more exact understanding of the chemistry of brewing aided the competitive position of the larger breweries relative to would-be small-scale producers. There were only 150 brewers in 1970, compared to 1,400 in 1914, and fewer than a dozen sold their product throughout the nation. Since all these companies could make reliable beer with many desirable qualities and were forbidden by federal law from controlling outlets, competition was chiefly in marketing and rapid adjustment to changes in public taste.

In 1976, however, the federal government legalized home brewing, and in the late 1970s and 1980s a number of small-scale "craft" brewers emerged to capture loyal local, regional, and eventually national followings. Craft beer sales began to grow exponentially in the 1990s, as sales from larger commercial brewers flattened out, causing some to declare a "Beer Rennaissance" in the United States and leading many larger brewers to begin marketing their own versions of the stronger, darker beers that regional breweries and microbreweries had so successfully popularized.