The Speares

The Original City

Today we're off to the first incorporated city in Canada, Saint John. Always spelled out in full; never abbreviated. Variously called The Original City, Loyalist City, The Port City or even Canada's Most Irish City. But for today, we're going to call it Beer City. And any discussion of beer would naturally begin with Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk in Sumeria a long, long time ago. And he was something of a bastard.

He didn't treat his subjects all that well, and this is back in the days when that really meant something. So when the people complained to the goddess Aruru, she created a hairy wildman name Enkidu to do battle with him. Smarten him up. But Gilgamesh was tipped off, and sent Enkidu a hooker and some beer. The two (Enkidu and

Gilgamesh, not the hooker) became inseparable buddies after this and had some epic adventures together. Beer and hookers can make that happen. But we'll do hookers another day; this story is about beer.

As far back as 13,000 years ago, based on some archeological residue found, it seems that the Natufian people near what is currently Haifa made a kind of beer, likely by accident. It had the consistency of gruel, and while the evidence is somewhat gone at this point it is easy to imagine that a neolithic culture which was just starting to experiment with crops would grow some grain and dry it out for storage. Later they would likely intend to mix it with water and make a nutritious gruel. But neolithic technology being what it was some of the dried grain got wet in storage and started to sprout. Then I can imagine the neolithic Natufians seeing their grain going to waste so they would dry it out again. Problem solved.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, a whole lot of stuff was happening to their grain. The process they just discovered by accident is called malting, and has the result that several enzymes are created within the growing grain. A-amylase and B-amylase would

have helped the growing grain shoot convert the starches in its seed into sugar for energy. Proteases help to break down protein, and the shoot was relying on these to help it break free from its seed prison. Sadly, the young shoot was killed in the second drying. But the sugars, and easy access to them through the compromised seed husk remained. Later, when the Natufians made their nutritious gruel they would discover it to be equally nutritious for the yeasts and stuff floating around in the air, and the result would be a kind of beer. In gruel form.

The Natufians would notice a few things about this new gruel. One is that it made you stronger. When grains sprout they develop lots of vitamins that weren't there before, and the ones that were are suddenly much easier to digest. The yeast, being somewhere between a plant and an animal, has a lot of B vitamins in it. The end result is the nutritional potency of your gruel is much improved.

They also would have noticed that the new gruel tended to remain edible longer. The longer you left it, the stronger it likely tasted, but it was still edible, and didn't tend to make you sick. And speaking of, sickness in general, and diarrhea in particular, an often fatal affliction, seemed to be on the decline.

And lastly, they would have noticed that eating the new gruel made you happier. There would have been a modest amount of alcohol in it, to be sure, but there would have been far more probiotics. Natural fermentation is as much about "good" bacteria as it is about yeasts, and probiotics enhance the production of serotonin in one's guts, which one's brain interprets as "happy".

Over the years this accidental beer making process was refined somewhat. Certainly by 3500 BC something pretty close to what we would consider beer was being produced - the people in the Zagros mountains of present-day Iran were making their beer concoction out of barley, which has a lot of starch in it.

By that time, bouza, a beer-like drink made out of barley and bread, was being given in large quantities to the labourers building the pyramids in ancient Egypt. It tended to keep them on their feet more so than untreated Nile water. They say that whoever drinks from the Nile will return to Egypt. It's more likely they'll never leave, because they will surely develop amoebic dysentery and die.

Beer-like fermented drinks spread all around the known world, although calling some of them "beer" might be a bit of a stretch. The early Germanic and Celtic people had a form of beer that might today be considered mead. It would contain lots of things such as fruit, honey, spices and the odd narcotic herb. But at the end of the dark ages, more or less, in Europe, beer production was in full swing.

The making of beer - technically ale - was typically left to the women along with the making of bread, the

same thing really. If they sold a little on the side they were considered an Alewife, a noble profession. It was these alewives and just regular wives making ale that likely brought Europe out of any number of plagues, as boiling was a part of the process of making Ale, which would then go off quickly, much like bread. So every week people had freshly baked bread to eat and freshly boiled ale to drink, which they preferred to the open-sewer-and-dead-animal taste of regular water. I mean, people still drank water if they had to, but in the words of Aelfric of Eynsham in his Colloquy to the novice monks, "Ale if I have any, or water, if I have no ale.". Only in Latin.

The home production of Ale in England in the 1300s would be something like this, for two and a half gallons of weak ale. At that time it was not uncommon for an adult man to drink one or two gallons of ale per day:

1) Get 13 quarts water boiling.
2) Crush 4 2/3 pounds malt and mix with 1 1/2 pounds rolled oats.
3) Pour two quarts of boiled water into brewing vessel from a height, in order to cool it off.
4) Add all of the dry grain.
5) Slowly pour in three more quarts boiled water. Cover and let stand 10 minutes.
6) Add one more quart boiled water. Cover and let stand 20 minutes.
7) Take off the lid and stir. It will be a gooey mess. Replace the lid and let stand for some hours.
8) Add three more quarts boiled water and stir. Replace the lid and wait 25 minutes.
9) Add remaining boiled water and stir well.
10) Strain liquid into a fermentation vessel. Cover and leave overnight.
11) Give your spent grain to the chickens or the pigs.
12) You can't afford either chickens or pigs.
13) So you'll end up eating it yourself.
14) Pitch the wort - that means add some of the mystery goo from the last batch that makes everything bubble. Then stir like crazy to get some air into the mixture.
15) Let the ale ferment for a day, and then add any flavourings. Oak chip tea perhaps; maybe some gruit, a mixture of herbs that had some preserving effect.
16) A couple of days later and you're good to go with some fresh ale.

And don't forget to save some of the mystery goo from this batch for the next batch. But only if you are happy with this batch. This will make the yeasts you are using adapt to making you happy. Over the years they will lose their ability to reproduce naturally and will rely upon being added to the next batch of beer in order to survive, much like a sourdough starter. Oh, and don't forget to drink the ale in a timely manner. I mean, you're not likely to forget this step, but the fact is, home-made ale in the 1300s would go off fairly quickly. It was basically liquid porridge.

By the 1500s the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Flanders and/or Belgica) introduced hopped beer. It kept longer and was easier to transport, so was therefore suited to larger scale production. That meant men had to make it because women weren't supposed to have real jobs. So making beer became a male thing. The introduction of hops into the recipe, and therefore removing gruit, had the extra advantage of pissing off the Catholic church, who had a monopoly on gruit.

Meanwhile, Bavaria was getting skin in the game. The famous Reinheitsgebot, or Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, stated that only barley, hops and water could be used in the making of beer (yeast was poorly understood). In an effort to protect Bavarians from

spoiled beer, Duke Wilhelm IV also passed a law forbidding the brewing of beer in the summer. So beer makers started brewing their beer in deep underground caverns, where they could store the beer together with winter-cut ice to keep it fresh throughout the summer months. This had the effect of mutating the yeast into lager yeast, after lagern, to store. Lager yeast is heavy and settles out on the bottom of whatever you're brewing it in, and it outcompetes spoilage organisms in the colder environment. The end result is that lager keeps even longer than hopped ale and lends itself even more to being brewed for large crowds. So much so that the term beer came to apply exclusively to lager, and not ale. The age of large-scale commercial breweries had begun. Which brings us to Susannah Woodhouse Culverwell, Alewife.

Susannah was born in Somerset, England, in 1818. At the respectable Victorian age of 24 1/2 she married John James Dunn Oland, a younger man and a bit of a wet noodle. He studied to be a minister but didn't hear the call; he worked as a tobacconist, also selling tea and beer, but ran that business into the ground. Then he took up accounting and went to work for the railway, which worked for a while until he took up farming. When farming didn't seem to be his thing he took off for the wilds of Nova Scotia, leaving Susannah, the farm, nine children and the shed out back to fend for themselves. Now as fate would have it, the shed out back was where Susannah had been making ends meet all along by brewing her secret recipe Brown October Ale.

When the family moved to Dartmouth a few years later to reunite with John, recently released from his employment obligations, the recipe made the journey as well. A family friend encouraged Susannah to market her brew commercially, and even put up some funds. So the Turtle Grove Brewery started operations in 1867, with general manager John Oland, middle managers consisting of three of the sons of John and Susannah, five employees (male), and, officially at least, not Susannah. But if you were to visit the brewery you would find Susannah doing all of the work, from running the business to being the chief brewer. And she took the company that she could not own nor work at to the number three spot in Dartmouth. And then John died.

With the paper owner of the company gone, and the two remaining "official" partners selling their interests, Susannah was left with no control over her own brewery. But she persevered, continuing to work at least unofficially for eight years at the brewery she had started. It was now called the Army and Navy Brewery, after their two largest customers. Things continued this way for eight years, even though the brewery burnt to the ground and had to be rebuilt. Twice. Eventually,

with the aid of an inheritance from England, Susannah was able to purchase the rights to her brewery back and she started anew as "S. Oland, Sons & Company". No one would buy beer from a company owned by a Susannah, but an S was okay.

In due time, Susannah was the matriarch of a vast brewing empire and then died. In complete disregard for the mores of the time she left majority control to her youngest son George and minority control to her daughter Hulda. They led the brewery, under the name of the Maritime Brewing & Malting Co., to Halifax just in time for the Halifax Explosion. That explosion took the life of brother Conrad and destroyed the Halifax brewery. So they bought another brewery in Halifax, and, just to be safe, another, larger brewery in Saint John New Brunswick.

Over time, the Halifax and Saint John breweries became different entities. The Halifax version went on to make Schooner Beer and have replica racing schooners built and get gobbled up by big beer. The Saint John version went on to make Moosehead Pale Ale, which was so successful that they changed their name in 1947 to Moosehead Breweries Ltd. Today, they're known as the makers of Moosehead Ale and Moosehead Lager. And as the oldest independent brewery in Canada. And it was all started by a humble Victorian alewife.

So anyhow, here we are in Saint John. If you're not into beer then check out the reversing falls.

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