Everything Old is Brew Again

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You definitely get some kind of gaminess in the nose in a good way, in a good, well-cooked game type of way.

And then, you know, you drink it and you're kind of waiting for it.

There's a little bit of a sort of,

I don't know, kind of bacon-y finish, I guess, but it's pretty mellow.

Most of the beers that we've done with meat, if you didn't tell people it was in there, they wouldn't know.

Beers made with meat.

It's actually a thing.

Not only is it a thing today, but people made beer brewed with, say, chicken or wild boar hundreds of years ago.

But this is not the Gastropod Extreme Beer Edition.

It is Gastropod, though.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And as usual, we're looking at food through the lens of science and history.

And this week, the focus is one of our favorite food groups, beer.

Beer is a huge topic, and trust us, we'll come back to it in the future.

This week, we're going to explore one particular aspect of the beer world.

Inspired by a listener's suggestion.

So, my name's Jason, and I live in Salem, Massachusetts, right now.

And I know that you guys, the podcast is kind of mixing history and science and food.

And I thought, you know, if you did do a podcast exclusively on beers, Earth Eagle would be an awesome place to kind of visit.

We called Jason and asked him why he wanted us to head up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to visit Earth Eagle.

Because their whole thing is doing grutes or these like historical historical pre-hot beer recipes and they sound it sounds literally like a witch brewing a pot of like some like you'd expect there to be like eye of newt in there or something but they always taste pretty good at first we were like groot newt what

and then we started digging into what earth eagle is doing and we got intrigued so thanks to jason we'll be tasting some of the hottest new directions in brewing today inspired by the past

So, trend spotting is kind of a fool's game, but you know, that makes it perfect for me.

So, here goes.

The new thing in beers is old.

What I mean by that is, it seems like the cutting edge of craft brewing right now is finding inspiration in the past.

And as it happens, the folks over at Draft Magazine agree.

In an article a few weeks ago, they list a few signs that more and more people are curious about what beer used to taste like.

There was a whole roundtable at the Craft Brewers Conference this year focused on historical beer styles.

And another conference at Colonial Williamsburg in March on Ales Through the Ages.

And one in London on recreating old beer styles.

And the Smithsonian just announced a program in which they'll be documenting American brewing history.

One brewer thinks there's a good reason for all this interest.

Well, it's also how can we like reach back and kind of get inspiration for new beer, new things that people haven't been drinking, which people drank for 8,000 years.

For me at least, there's sort of an attraction.

Like, well, people drank this for 8,000 years.

Is really like the best thing we can do?

What came out of the Industrial Revolution?

Probably not.

That's Brian Greenhagen.

He's the founder of Mystic Brewery in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

And he's one of this new wave of brewers who are finding inspiration for new beers from the lost flavors of beers past.

As Brian points out, we humans have been drinking beer for thousands and thousands of years.

In fact, just this month, archaeologists found evidence of brewing beer in China from 5,000 years ago.

The recipe seems to have included millet, barley, a grain called Job's Tears, and tubers such as yams.

It's the earliest physical example of brewing in China, and there are traces of these types of fermented drinks on pottery in China that date back even further.

China, the Near East, South America, all over the ancient world, our ancestors were fermenting their local grains to get buzzed.

Some of you might have tasted recreations of these first beers produced by the brewery Dogfish Head in collaboration with molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern.

But those

have been polished a little to suit modern tastes.

The originals were probably a bit more of a mixed bag.

Will Glenn and Trish Perry are actors who are currently touring a show all about the history of beer.

As part of their research, they talked to an Australian chemist who recreated a version of what's likely the very earliest ancient Sumerian beer.

And it was essentially, you know, he germinated this grain and, you know, let it hang out, sort of wet mash of, you know, if you imagine grain that got left out in the rain and then it kind of sat around for a few days and the sort of natural sugars fermented kind of on their own with wild yeasts.

I remember it sort of tasting a bit like how I imagine sort of wet dog might taste.

Obviously, that's not the best advertisement for historical beer recipes.

If you go back, I mean, beers were all over the place, from horrendous to fantastic.

That's Brian again.

And the reason beer was all over the map is because it was basically anything goes.

It was any grain fermented with any other combination of ingredients you fancied.

That's it.

Especially in Europe, people threw in mixtures of herbs into their beer, and each brewer would have his or her own blend.

They had a mixture, a secret mixture that they called gruet, spelled G-R-U-I-T, as a means of kind of offsetting the sweetness of the malt.

Every brewer had her own recipe for gruet, and

that was, in a sense, that was her signature as a brewster, was what she would use to kind of flavor her ale with.

Yes, her ale.

Will is not just being politically correct here.

Since the dawn of time, really, women have pretty much, they were pretty much the brewers of beer for thousands of years.

That's Will's beer history performing partner, Trish.

So at this point, beer is water, grain, secret blends of herbs, and of course yeast, but no one really knew what that was until later on.

They just knew something made their brew bubble.

Some of you listening are probably yelling at us right now.

That's not beer.

Beer has hops.

Settle down.

No need to yell.

There's a reason we haven't mentioned hops yet.

Because hops weren't in everyone's beer.

Throughout thousands of years of history, beer did not have to have hops in it to be considered beer.

Hops basically are another herb.

So it's not like they never used them, but that was just one of the bazillion things that you could put into a beer.

And

like everything, it came down to politics and money and power.

This is the brewer Jason suggested we should talk to, Butch Heilshorn of Earth Eagle Brewings.

Now we're in medieval Europe.

Everyone's making their own beer with their own blend of herbs.

Then a whole bunch of things happen kind of around the same time.

And like Butch says, a lot of it is about money and power.

Kings and bishops wanted to control what folks were drinking.

And obviously, they wanted to tax the ingredients for beer.

Brewing was becoming professionalized.

If you wanted to sell beer increasingly, there were rules.

One of those rules had to do with the grain, because in Germany, the rulers wanted to protect wheat and rye for bread, so only cheaper barley could be used for beer.

And then there's another thing.

Maybe people were getting a little high off these herb mixes.

I mean, some of these herbs have a long history of being used medicinally, but also for their mind-altering effects.

It's theorized that people drinking beer with gruit in it that had those ingredients actually were having not only the alcoholic effects of the beer, but were also having psychedelic effects.

Another thing that I think is interesting about the history there is that hops are kind of a downer.

They decrease the libido.

People make little pillows out of them so they fall asleep.

It definitely can, you know, make you drowsy and whatnot.

And the groots, those herbs, completely the opposite.

You know, you're ready to rock.

You're excited.

You're stimulated.

Hops were seen as a good, safe alternative to those crazy brews.

Keep the the people sleepy.

Hops were also potent preservatives, though some of those other herbs helped preserve beer, too.

And so in Germany, the use of hops to make beer, that became the law.

Yes, you're talking about the Reinheitsgebot, Cynthia.

I'm glad you had to say that and not me.

Yes, forgive me, German-speaking listeners, but I'm going to do it again.

The Reinheitsgebot.

I'm not even going to try.

Shut up.

I'm trying to say that this German law was enacted 500 years ago last month.

Happy birthday, German beer purity law.

It's famous as the oldest food purity law still in existence.

It was introduced in April 1516 by a couple of German dukes in Bavaria, and it stipulated that only barley, hops, and water could be used in making beer.

Like Nikki already said, they didn't really know what yeast was until later.

The motivation behind the law was to guarantee good quality beer, sure.

And some unscrupulous brewers were throwing all kinds of crazy things in their beers to cut corners.

But there's also all those other forces we've been talking about, making sure that wheat and rye went to bakers, taxing the industry, controlling what kind of pies were legal.

And what this meant is that all those crazy herb mixes that had been used to bitter and preserve and flavor the beer, they were now illegal.

This all started in Bavaria, but the hop dogma spread.

The thing about the Reinheitskeba purity laws is that these days, you know, breweries love to use it as like, oh, we are abiding by the Reinheitsgeba purity laws.

Like, we're amazing.

When basically, in a lot of cases, these laws, you know, made it impossible to create other forms of beer.

Not, you know, maybe it preserved something, like the purity, maybe, but it actually inhibited, you know, creativity within the trade.

I'd like to point out here that back in my corner of the world, England, we held out against this foreign hop BS.

We liked our traditional ales.

And then in the UK, when they were calling it beer, it was almost a pejorative, actually, because they thought beer was for waste rolls and it made you fat.

Wait, so you British thought hops made you fat?

Not just fat, but impotent.

There was a thing called brewers droop, which...

Well, you get the picture.

I do, yes.

There's obviously a grain of truth to it, but also all of this was anti-hopped beer propaganda put out by English ale brewers.

Is the other brewers that didn't want hops to come into fashion in the UK when it was coming into fashion all over Europe and they wanted to keep their own traditions?

So it took longer for beer with hops come into play.

And now we come to America, which at the time was really just an extension of England.

If you realize that England in America, when you're drinking beer in the 17th century, actually technically ale then, right?

You don't have hops in it.

And one of my favorite books on this is Gravais Markham's English Housewife.

It goes through numerous editions from like the 1580s to the early 17th century.

And in there are instructions to how to brew ale.

And he very specifically says, here's how you brew ale, and because every housewife is expected to do this.

And then at the end, he says, now, you could add hops in it, but why would you want to ruin a perfectly good English ale by adding hops to it?

You know, only the French do that, and that would make, you know, and that's like it's a wussy French thing to do to make beer because stouth-hearted Englishmen drink ale.

Du Sachon Schmerson Baker.

He goes by Tad, so that's what we'll call him from now on.

He's a historian at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

And he's been researching early pre-hop ales.

We wanted to know what these early brews would have tasted like.

And that brings us back to Earth Eagle and Butch Hilshorn.

I was a high school guidance counselor.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, he turned to booze.

First as a hobby and then professionally.

My partner is also my brother-in-law Alex.

And we started home brewing together in like 09.

Really enjoyed it.

Once we started, we were brewing at least once a week.

You know, as homebrewers do, you give out beer to your family and your friends, and you're dying to know what people think.

And people are like, this is great, and you should sell it.

So they did.

And in 2012, they started Earth Eagle, which Alex told Butch was a term used by Native Americans for turkey.

I've never been able to verify that.

I don't know if he just pulled that out of his ear or what, but you know, it stuck.

From the very beginning, they were inspired by the past.

We just weren't interested in brewing, you know, the new IPA or the new brown ale or whatever.

It was much more exciting to be looking at, looking back in history for inspiration.

and really nobody was doing it or not regularly anyway so since we started in 2012 we've been brewing a new group every week just about since then that was kind of it it was like wow there's this whole other world of beer out there that no one is really getting to or doing anything about one of the challenges of brewing a gruit is how do you know if you're doing it right if no one else is doing it when butch and his brother-in-law alex got started it really was a big experiment.

They knew that the classic gruet, remember, gruit just refers to the herbs that were used in beer, the classic gruet is based on three herbs, sweetgale, wild rosemary, and yarrow.

Rosemary I'm familiar with, but this is not the kind that I know and love.

It's a flowering rhododendron-type shrub that grows wild all over northern Europe and the U.S.

kind of smells like antiseptic cops, and it was used as a moth repellent for clothes in Scandinavia.

Sweetgale supposedly has a kind of resinous scent to it.

It's been used as a traditional insect repellent.

Yarrow is a flowering plant that apparently grows everywhere.

Yes, it's what we'd call a weed.

It's kind of sweet with a bitter note, and it was traditionally used to stop wounds from bleeding.

So Bush gets a hold of these three herbs, and he takes a regular beer recipe, a recipe for a dark, stout beer, and he just switches out the hops for herbs.

We're at my house, we're in the backyard on the picnic table.

We've got a big turkey fryer, you know, this big five-gallon pot and a propane tank and all that.

and i'm telling you when we when it came out of the fermenter it was just wonderful i'm getting goosebumps telling you about it because it was just like oh my god this tastes really really good and then we bottled it and then a few weeks later when it came out of the bottle it tasted like ass it was horrible it was horrible

and what it was is that we didn't have our cleaning regimen down with these bottles you know we had a bunch of you know empties and we thought we had cleaned them very nice and well and no no no no no

So that's how it started.

And thank God we tasted the beer before we bottled it.

Otherwise, who knows, we might have just said, forget this, you know?

Lucky for us, they were too excited to wait until they finished bottling it.

Here's how Butch describes the taste of that very first gruet before the little problem with the bottling.

It's hard to, it's, you know,

these are all kind of cheesy adjectives, but you know, earthy, herbal, slightly medicinal maybe.

You know, a little bit more residual sweetness, because that beer is such a big beer and there's so much malt in it.

But just really,

really drinkable.

Back in his homebrew days, Butch had met Tad, the historian we heard from earlier.

Tad actually specializes in studying witchcraft in colonial New England.

But it turns out there's a surprising amount of overlap between beer and witches.

In the 17th century, making beer was a household activity.

Everybody did it.

In fact, probably every woman who was accused of witchcraft in Salem in the 17th century probably also knew how to make beer because, you know, witchcraft is a gendered crime.

About three-quarters of the people accused are witches.

And as women, they would have been responsible for their household for doing not just the cooking, but also the brewing.

Like Trish and Will said, it was mostly women making these gruits.

And, you know, there they are with these bubbling pots of mysterious herbal concoctions that might have made you imagine things.

So in a weird way, Tad's research on witchcraft is sort of connected back to Gruitz.

What Tad is really good at is looking back through all sorts of historical documents and finding any mention of beer or ale.

These aren't just cookbooks, he finds recipes hidden in all sorts of weird documents from the time: diaries, travelogues, newspapers.

And so, I'm able to go back and look at historic cookbooks and accounts of natural history and things like this that provide just a range of different activities from the standard sort of,

okay, English housewife, here's how you make beer, to sort of travel accounts of, well, here's, you know, we didn't have the ingredients we needed to hear what we made.

Tad and Butch's first collaboration for Earth Eagle was called Jocelyn 1666.

And Tad found the recipe for that in a book called New England's Rarities Discovered.

The book was actually published in 1672, but we thought 1666 had a better rate.

He actually would have been making it here.

So it was a fellow who was an English settler who came over and lived here in Scarborough, Maine, for 20 or 30 years.

And in 1672, he published, we'd gone back to England, and he published a book on his experiences.

And he just, it's a throw-off line in the book almost, and he's talking about how they make beer or ale.

And the ingredients are just, it's a really short, strange list of ingredients.

It's essentially, he says, bran, which was essentially malt.

Molasses, sassafras,

and wormwood.

So this, as far as we know, is the first written down recipe used in New England.

Again, notice it doesn't include hops.

They're using the wormwood as a bittering agent.

So Tad and Butch follow the recipe, they make the gruet, and they taste it.

And of course, it's an opportunity to really go back into time

and to really experience something that is not anywhere near the norm now.

So it is a little time travel in a sense.

Time travel sounds awesome.

I've always been kind of obsessed with the idea personally, but it doesn't necessarily taste fantastic.

When Butch and I first tried it, frankly, we were a little disappointed.

Everyone else really liked it, though.

That was the good news.

And my initial reaction was, wow, I bet we made it.

I bet the problem is it's too authentic.

Because I think, and this is the thing, and this is where I think, you know, it takes someone like Butch to really, I say, you know, I kind of provide the historic recipe, and then that's his inspiration.

Tad's point is, yeah, he is a historian, and both he and Butch love finding inspiration in these old recipes.

But Earth Eagle is not in the business of historic reconstruction.

This is not some colonial Williamsburg project.

And so they don't worry too much about making the exact beer you'd have tasted if you wandered into a New England tavern in the late 1600s.

Right.

First off, pretty much everyone, every beer here in the 17th century would have been a Rausch beer.

Because by definition, you know, they're using wood to cook with.

And so you're going to have, by definition, all of them are going to be smoked beers.

So if we're making a beer nowadays, not everybody loves a Rausch beer.

And so in that sense, are we being genuinely authentic?

Do we take out the cauldron and heat it

with the charcoal in the wood?

Well, not exactly, because

modern day tastes are a little bit different than that.

You know, these historical recipes are kind of jumping off points for us.

It's only

once or twice a year that we grab one of these recipes and really try and faithfully reproduce it.

But in the process of brewing those, you start to get familiar with these herbs and familiar with these other processes that they used.

used back in the day.

And we've gone off, way off the book, if you want to say that, and have got all sorts of recipes that are completely and 100% ours.

In fact, one of the things that has sort of happened is that as they've tried to source all these crazy herbs and plants, you know, many of which we think of as weeds today, they've ended up building a really intimate connection to the landscape all around them.

And from April to roughly October, we try and source those ingredients around here.

We have a forager.

who goes out for us each week and whatever's in season and in bloom or whatever, she brings back to us and we brew with.

This is one of the things that sets Earth Eagle apart and it means they have flavors from all over New England to play with.

And the idea of representing your local terroir through your beer I think is another big thing.

Like we just went through brewing three batches of beer that have no water in it.

All maple sap.

So that's a pretty unique, you know, thing that we've got going in in New England, I think.

We each bought a bottle of this maple sap beer to take home.

We kind of had to.

It's made with maple sap and a weird tree fungus called chaga.

And we just did episodes all about the maple boom and the weird world of mushrooms.

But I haven't tasted it yet.

I haven't either.

It's in my fridge chilling.

I'm a tiny bit scared, to be honest.

The way Butch described the fungus.

It looks like this tumor.

It looks like a big, a burnt tumor, is what it looks like.

I don't know.

But Butch, we trust you, really.

We did taste a number of their beers when we visited Portsmouth.

and just like they're not being super orthodox about the original historical recipes, they're also not limiting themselves to New England foraged plants.

These are all launching points for their creativity.

When we were there, they had a gruet called Sweepy McGee on tap.

It's made with scotch broom.

Which, unfortunately, is not a local herb.

That's something that's like, it's an invasive that's just wreaking havoc on the West Coast.

It's a Class B noxious weed in Washington state, apparently.

But in its native home, which is Western Europe, scotch broom was traditionally used in place of hops for its bittering effect.

It was supposed to induce amorousness as well, according to medieval herbalists.

We might not have had quite enough of it to find out.

But there are some local herbs in Sweeping McGee as well.

Butch used poplar buds from New England trees and sweet fern.

Sweet fern has a waxy leaf that Butch says looks a little like pot.

It grows everywhere and was used by Native Americans in a tea for all sorts of aches and pains.

Okay.

Oh,

I wasn't expecting this.

It's more refreshing than I thought.

Well, so I'm not a big hops person,

but I feel like I love kind of the

sour notes in it that are like the herbal and the kind of floral and almost fruity that comes through.

Exactly.

And the poplar at the end is like the last taste for me.

You start getting that resiny under taste.

Yeah.

I really like it.

Awesome.

That's good.

I love to hear that.

Sweet fern, poplar buds, even wormwood.

All these herbs sound maybe a little crazy, but not nearly crazy enough for a butch, apparently.

His ingredient palate goes well beyond herbs.

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The beans, I'm still not clear on.

The eggs, initially, we were like, this sounds like, what is it, septis or whatever.

Like, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen if we're going to pour this beer.

That's Earth Eagle's most recent historical experiment.

It's an English knockoff of a German beer.

I found this in a book published in 1695 called Every Man His Own Gauger, which is actually a book on how to make barrels and judge what size they are.

You know, what is a hog's head versus a double hog's head and so on, all these antiquated terms for sizes of different barrels and different uses.

So in addition to writing this book about how to gauge the size of your barrels, oh by the way, here's a couple of recipes you might want to try.

And one of them was a recipe for something called mum.

So what's interesting about this is that the original German version is the first official beer style that was never brewed with herbs.

German mum always used hops.

It's really the first post-gruet beer.

It was invented in Brunswick in 1492 and it became really popular, even internationally, almost immediately.

But the English knockoff didn't have hops, and it was weird.

The German recipe is super tight.

Barley, water, hops.

Over in England, we basically threw the kitchen sink at it.

Tad read us a list of the ingredients.

Those eggs, they think the calcium in the shells altered the pH of the brew to help preserve it.

But it had beans, they have no idea why, and it had about 20 ingredients total.

One was penny royal, which has a kind of minty flavor.

Butch and Tad weren't crazy about the result.

You know, we followed the proportions and whatever very,

you know, fastidiously, but to our taste, that penny royal just dominated the whole thing.

So people were like, well, you know, this would be a great beer if I like drinking, you know, Vic's vapor rub.

But some people were like, this is, this is awesome.

I love this.

Hmm.

That sounds horrendous.

In my humble opinion, based on a very unpleasant encounter with a limited edition holiday peppermint flavored stout, beer and mint should never go together.

I'm not sad there wasn't any around for us to try.

But beans and eggs in a minty-flavored beer, that's far from the craziest thing Earth Eagle have brewed.

Of the ones that we made together, though, I have a particular fondness for the cock ale, which, again, is one of those ones that people don't normally think about.

But this was like the favorite beverage of William III King William of Orange in the late 17th century and it essentially is like when you take a beer and basically add fortified wine to it and fermented pieces of chicken we warned you meat in beer I gotta tell you that was a really frightening beer to make mainly because the recipe called for the meat to be added post fermentation So you'd think, oh, that's lovely.

Like, what kind of funk are we going to throw in there?

But the other part of it is is that those chicken carcasses are being soaked in sack.

Was that sort of a brandy or

sherry?

So, of course, the booze kills off anything.

So, that was like we had to keep reminding ourselves.

Are you sure we want to put it in now?

Yeah, no, it's going to be good.

I mean, it was super popular in the 17th century, and those guys can't all have been wrong, right?

Even in the 17th century, they couldn't keep it in stock because the name Cockale has a double entendre then as now.

And all the women in London would grab it off the shelves and take it home and give it to their husbands to, here, drink some of this, honey, because it would have the sort of the desired effect, supposedly, on male fortitude, right?

No word on whether Butch's version had that particular effect, but apparently it didn't taste half bad.

And you know what?

That beer was marvelous.

It was really wonderful, and it didn't taste like chicken soup at all.

But as with the gruets, so with the meat ales.

Give Butch a little bit of historical inspiration, and he goes nuts.

Before you know it, he's making beers with bear and wild boar.

And even moose.

They'd skin the head of an animal and smoke it and then toss it into the brew.

We like to say placed.

None of these meat ales were on tap when we visited, but Butch promised they tasted great.

You think you're gonna have a roast beef sandwich in a glass?

It's not like that at all.

We weren't sure that we wanted to just take Butch's word for it when it came to his own beer, so we asked Jason Newton.

That's the listener who suggested we visit Earth Eagle in the first place.

And I specifically drove from Portland down there to try the one with the moose head in it.

I mean, this is like with a lot of beers at Earth Eagle, it's not like, oh my god, this is my favorite beer of all time, but it's always like, wow, this is really interesting and it's not like anything I've ever tried before.

All of this sounds a little like, woo, look how crazy I am brewing all these extreme beers.

But Butch isn't doing it for the shock value.

He wants to make beers that taste good.

And we tried a bunch of them.

All research.

And they are good.

I mean, if what you're used to is industrial lager or even the heavily hopped crap brews that are super popular.

They do make those too, actually.

They have an equal number of hopped beers on top and even, you know, the typical IPA.

But obviously, these historically inspired gruets and meat yells, they do taste a little weird and different if that's your baseline.

Some of these beers are a challenge, you know?

We always say it's a three-sip rule.

At first sip, you don't think you like it, hang in there for two more.

And generally speaking, people are like, you know what?

I really like that, you know?

Or that's beer?

I hate beer.

I love this.

What's going on here?

You know?

I really enjoyed his gruits.

As I said, I'm not a huge fan of the super hoppy beers, so I am a fan of this kind of experimentation.

And I like hops, but I like variety too.

It's fun to see what herbs bring to the party.

Yeah, I mean, I think the palate that the brewery is using is expanded like geometrically.

One thing that's going to disappoint some of you beer lovers out there, Earth Eagle doesn't ship.

Sometimes there's one on draft available at Boston bars, and they occasionally show up at festivals, but basically, you have to go to their brewery in Portsmouth to taste their beer.

But now you know, if you see a gruet on a menu, give it a try and see what you think.

And there's actually something called International Gruit Day.

It's every February 1st, and lots of breweries participate in that, so you can probably find a gruet to taste close to home, at least once a year.

We have links on our website at gastropod.com.

So, one of the things that's interesting about gruits is that they can actually be local.

You can really create a sense of place by using local herbs instead of hops, but that's not the only way to make a beer taste like it's home.

Wait, is it time to talk about microbes again?

I can only hope so.

Does that mean everyone takes a shot?

Oh yeah, that's right.

A beer in this case, or whatever is handy.

But yeah, this is another way that the historical way of making beers, the way everyone made beers until a couple hundred years ago, ends up creating really unique local flavors because you had to use your local yeast.

Of course, they didn't know that's what they were doing.

That's why the German purity laws from 500 years ago didn't refer to yeast.

Nobody knew what yeast was until Louis Pasteur came along in the 1860s.

Archaeologists and beer historians think that ancient, ancient beers got their yeast from the air.

People let the grains sprout to make their sugars available to airborne yeast, and then that sugary mash would get all yeasty.

Over time, people realized that reusing barrels of particularly good batches of beer was a good idea, because the yeast stayed in the wood and helped make the next batch taste good too.

By the 1300s, monastic records show that Flemish monks had figured out that they should save the remains of one beer to inoculate the new brew.

In other words, even though they didn't know what a yeast was and had never seen a microbe, they had cultured a house yeast, a subspecies that lived in their barrels and gave their beer a different flavor from the one brewed next door.

That house yeast was one of the things that gave each beer its characteristic flavor.

But some people's yeasts, they just worked better.

They worked faster, they had a more pleasing taste, and they were basically more reliable.

And so people started sharing them.

And then, once people understood what yeast was, it sort of became standardized and industrialized.

I mean, most of where people get yeast for craft beer is from cattle, like, you know, yeast banks basically that do culturing for you and then send it to you.

That's Brian Greenhagen again from Mystic Brewery in Chelsea.

And his point is, ever since people figured out what yeast was and how to culture it, the diversity of yeast used in brewing has tanked.

Most commercial yeast houses today offer about 50 different varieties, and that's how 99.9% of beer gets brewed with the same varieties of yeast as everyone else is using.

Brian originally studied the science of how flavors are generated in plants.

Well that ended up playing around with flavors and fragrances and yeast and I did that for a career for a while and that's what my wife still does.

And it was kind of like those jobs are few and far between and I wanted to live in the Boston area and settle down.

But there are not many flavor and fragrance jobs in Boston so Brian turned to beer.

He's already a yeast guy so why not focus on the yeast?

When Brian got started back in 2009 beer people were getting all excited about new varieties of hops and pretty much no one was paying attention to the microbes.

So for one thing, focusing on yeast seemed like it could be the thing that would help set his new brewery apart.

And the question was like what, you know, how does America have like their own beer?

We can come up with styles.

Obviously there's been a big contribution from new types of hops from Oregon, to some extent Washington.

So

the question was like what are the things can you get that are sort of like sort of like terroir?

Like how can you make beer that's like very regional?

As we said, nearly all beer is made from the same yeasts.

These are strains you can buy online and they're all European yeasts originally.

There aren't any commercial commercial strains of truly indigenous American yeasts.

So Brian went prospecting at a local farmer's market.

There was an organic farmer and they had fruit and it was a plum and I was looking at the plum and I was like

all the dark fruit you can see the yeast because it has that gray thing, the blueberries and plums.

I was looking at the plum and I was like, here it is.

This is like local yeast.

This is where it is right here.

Brian called the beer brewed with this truly indigenous Massachusetts yeast Vinland, because when the Vikings are supposed to have come over and explored North America back around one thousand AD, that's the name they gave to this land that was filled with wild berries and grapes that they used to make wine.

Brian didn't stop at that first Vinland beer, which he called Vinland One.

That's the one made from the plum yeast.

And then two, we got blueberries from Maine from our first brewer's back yard where he had grown up, that were growing just wild in the backyard.

So that got even more interesting.

And that one, that strain actually was the the beer that we won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Fest which to our knowledge is the first one that was used in American yeast at all.

So you might be thinking awesome I'm gonna go out and pick some local raspberries and use that yeast to make beer.

But it's not quite that easy.

This is where Brian's training working with yeast in the lab comes in handy.

He brings the fruit home and grows the yeast up in what beer makers called wort.

It's the sprouted sweet sugary liquid made from wet grain.

With the ones that we isolated, what we would do is take a few of the samples from that and then isolate many, many, many, many yeast off a petri plate and then make little beers and we would make like a hundred and then try to find like a single strain that tasted good and we would get about two out of a hundred.

A lot of bad beer went down the drain.

And this is even after Brian has looked at the yeast under the microscope and picked out the ones that look most like regular brewing yeast.

It takes about six months, so.

As opposed to just buying the yeast from a list in a catalog.

It's not surprising that most breweries don't bother.

But to Brian, it seemed reasonable.

We thought we could commit to that because like the timeline of getting a product out in the world we used to work in, research science and

biotech companies and whatnot, were, you know, it's 12 years.

So we're like, six months is not a big deal.

We can wait that long to put out products.

Brian's taken these yeasts he's found in the wild and stabilized them in a petri dish.

Now he can grow the ones he wants whenever he wants them.

It's like his own version of that commercial yeast catalog, except all the yeasts are native New England varieties.

He's got one from Massachusetts, one from Maine, and one from Vermont, isolated from some raspberries.

As he said, Brian won an award with one of these local yeasts, but he's not setting himself up to sell the yeast commercially for a living.

Partly because I don't want them to call me up and go, like,

I just lost $5,000

with this culture you gave me.

So you might think the fourth one in Brian's Finland series would use a yeast from Connecticut or New Hampshire.

But no, instead, Brian let go of a little control and tried something called spontaneous fermentation.

Before we taste that beer, yes, we do actually get to taste it.

We have to explain something about sour beers.

Back in the day, almost all beer would have been at least somewhat sour because wild yeast would have started growing in the brew during the fermentation process.

Brewers didn't have the refrigeration and modern sanitation to keep those yeasts out.

Once people figured out how to control fermentation and keep those wild yeasts and other bacteria out, they did.

And sour beers almost disappeared, at least in America.

Now, if you're into craft beer, you'll know that sour beers are getting popular again today, but they're made a little differently than they used to be.

Most breweries actually buy the same yeasts that would have randomly infected the beer hundreds of years ago.

They're strains that can give beer funky, puckery flavors.

So whereas in the past those funky strains would have been floating around in the air and infected the beer that way, today brewers mostly keep their brewing setup super clean and they carefully inoculate beers that they want to taste sour with specially ordered quote-unquote wild yeast.

Before all you beer lovers cry out examples of breweries that are going all wild, we do know they're out there.

A small, a really small handful of breweries in the U.S.

are experimenting with going totally wild and native.

They're just letting letting their beer brew with whatever's out there, but there aren't many of them.

At all, because it's really risky and it can get expensive if you have to dump a bunch of beer.

But Brian was up for the challenge, so Vinland 4 was made without inoculating any yeast at all.

It was a spontaneous fermentation.

We actually started this by using our local maltster's grain, and we figured, well, they malted it, so anything on it that can make a beer has to be from Massachusetts.

So we just used that itself to start a spontaneous culture and then kept developing that culture to make this beer.

So it's literally had no microbes added to it.

Yeah, okay.

Oh.

What are you thinking?

I'm thinking it's crazy.

It is crazy.

That's nuts.

I think that's just our general reaction.

It's totally nuts.

Binlin has been in the bottle for about six months at this point, and it was still changing as the microbes continued to referment it.

There's just different, there's a big pineapple note like early on that's gone now, and different things are coming around.

It's definitely more tart.

Tart and funky.

Just like at Earth Eagle, Brian and Mystic Brewery, they're not trying to recreate the past, but it is a sort of time travel.

It's almost like a time warp back hundreds of years when brewers were kind of playing the yeast lottery, experimenting with with their local microbes without even realizing it.

Just in this case, Brian's a scientist.

He knows what he's doing.

Right, it's not about reconstruction, like using historic yeast from shipwrecks or whatever.

Instead, it's about reclaiming some of that creative freedom that early brewers had before the rules got laid down and the yeast got optimized.

Like we said at the beginning of the show, historic beers are hot right now.

But even so, brewers experimenting the way Butch and Brian are, they're in the minority.

It's a tiny, tiny sliver of the whole beer market.

But who knows, maybe it will take off.

Craft beer lovers are an adventurous group, and this is a way to get new flavors into our pint glasses.

There are lots of interesting new hops being bred and lots of new local grains being malted.

But looking outside the box for yeasts and bittering agents is an amazing way to get the crazy back into brewing.

And of course, we are not done with beer forever.

We'll come back to hops and grains and who knows what else in the future.

It's just too tasty to cover in just one episode.

First of all, huge thanks to listener Jason Newton.

We've been wanting to do a story on beer and he sent us a delicious and intriguing tip.

If you have ideas for future shows or questions you'd like us to address, let us know.

Send us an email to contact at gastropod.com.

And here's another way to help us out.

You can donate one-time or monthly donations at gastropod.com, or you can support us per episode at our Patreon page.

If you donate at least $5 per episode or $9 a month, you can get our special supporters-only newsletter filled with goodies we couldn't squeeze into the show.

And actually, we need your help for a forthcoming episode all about packaging.

If you want to get involved, check out our Twitter feed or Facebook page at Gastropodcast, or email us for all the details.

Special thanks for this episode go to Butch Hileshorn of Earth Eagle Brewings and Emerson Baker at Salem State and Brian Greenhagen at Mystic Brewery.

And of course, Trish Perry and Will Glenn of Wish Experience.

Their show, A Brief History of Beer, is touring the east coast of the U.S.

right now.

Links on our website, gastropod.com.

We're back in two weeks with a mystery involving tomatoes.

All will be revealed.

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