Travels with Barley (11 page)

Clay then stopped to drain his beer, a stout of some kind, and then called Tracy over and ordered a porter. I didn't have a beer yet and he asked what I wanted to drink.

I'd already figured Clay for a Malt Man (recall Daniel Bradford's explanation that stouts tend to be malt-accented styles). I confessed I was a Hophead, but that I would defer a choice to him as the knowledgeable regular. He puzzled over this for a second and then said, “Well, you need a stout on the bitter side.” He told Tracy to bring me a Mackeson's, a British ale. Tracy delivered the drinks and I told Clay it was his lucky night—as a beer scribe on expenses, I'd pay.

Clay thanked me and then told me something about himself—well, actually, a lot in just the first two sentences.

“Basically,” he said, “I'm a slacker and I'm struggling and I'm stuck in this town. I'm a cartoonist but this town isn't my market.”

I'm hardly a student of cartooning but I asked about his genre. He reached into a sheaf of papers he'd laid on the bar and came up with a thin, glossy book that looked, from the cover, to be a downsized comic-book. The title said,
Grumpy Dog: The True Story of a Living Legend
. A smug, impudent-looking mutt adorned the cover; he was wearing a blue suit and tie over a white shirt, and smoking a filtered cigarette.

Clay handed it to me and I studied it for a few minutes. The guy clearly could draw, though I didn't quite know what to make of the story line, about a dog named Rufus who had been a TV personality brought low by fame and feral dereliction. I could at least appreciate the back of the book, where he'd included a “Phony Letters Page” of readers who had sent in their reactions to
Grumpy Dog
.

One, from a bag-of-wind art snob, praised its “readable style of story-telling,” not to mention that Holman's “sense of line weight and chiaroscuro are appealing.” But a counterletter stated:

Holman later told me he had self-published the book with his parents' help after getting turned down by a number of publishers. He was selling copies in bars, and to his friends, for $2, which I couldn't imagine came close to covering the printing cost. So it was hard for me to know whether this phony parental letter was self-deprecating humor or something deeper. Thinking about it, Holman's work reminded me of stuff you'd see in the
Village Voice
or some big city alternative newspaper back in the 1960s.

Of course, this wasn't the 1960s and La Crosse wasn't a big city.

“That's the problem,” he said. “I just don't like the odds. I don't want to go to some mom-and-pop publisher with this. I'd like to do something that would get me into Barnes & Noble.”

I could tell we were skating toward one of those moments when you order another beer and curse the trenchant unfairness of life and punch up “Crazy” on the jukebox. To avoid that, I was thinking about diverting the conversation back to the purported Amish crack epidemic when the Marine Corps anthem and Abigail and Leah saved the day.

For just about the time that the “Halls of Montezuma” came blaring out of the jukebox (an antidefeatist number if ever there was one), Abigail and Leah, young, bubbly friends of Tracy's who had come in moments before, started kissing.

“Hey, no making out at the bar, lesbians!” Tracy shouted with obvious glee.

Even the author of
Grumpy Dog
was snapped from his torpor over this turn of events.

The cute couple broke off and Abigail came over to us. She apparently knew Clay.

“Oh, is that the new comic book?” she asked Clay, noticing the copy of
Grumpy Dog
.

Clay nodded.

Then she said, “Did you hear we got married recently?”

Clay didn't know what to say to that.

I didn't, either, though I did wonder if I should offer a toast. Instead, I snapped into journalist mode and angled for safe territory.

I said, “So, what is it you do, Abigail?”

She threw her head back and laughed. She said, “
This!
This is what I do!”

She then went back to Leah. The Marine Corps anthem ended and I heard Abigail and Leah ordering drinks called Jolly Ranchers. Tracy made them up and set them on the bar. Then, a Diana Krall song came on and Abigail and Leah went off to slow-dance.

“Hhm,” said Clay, “I don't know about that marriage stuff. Is it an exaggeration? I've known Leah for a long time and it's news to me.”

We then sat silently for a while, watching the lasses dance and frolic, and contemplating their happy “marriage,” and I just knew after this there was no way we were going back to the depressing stuff. So Clay filled me in on more La Crosse lore, notably the mysterious question of whether all of downtown was connected by a series of secret tunnels that had been built during Prohibition, allowing people to move easily among the speakeasies and brothels that proliferated back then.

This question seemed to go round and round, the way questions do when it gets late in a bar and the beers keep piling up. A semidefinitive answer arrived around 1:45
A.M.
from a guy who claimed to have intricate knowledge of La Crosse history. He said that though the tunnels once existed, they had been closed up during a construction project some time ago designed to make the streets tourist-friendly. Until then, “this place had been prostitute heaven,” he said. (This same guy then told me the story of the murderous priest up the road in Winona.)

On that note of resolution, and clutching the copy of
Grumpy Dog
I'd bought from Clay, I bid the happy Casino crowd good night and headed back to my hotel, only sorry that those mysterious tunnels no longer existed and that I hadn't met the mysterious Don. This was my kind of joint, and beer joints down the river would have their work cut out for them.

I headed out of La Crosse the next morning (not particularly early) and made a beeline for the City Brewery and the World's Largest Six-Pack. I thought I might even try to get a tour of the Smirnoff Ice brewing operation but found the brewery closed up like a church on Tuesday, though a placard did tell me that it was once the seventh largest brewery in America by volume.

But there loomed the six-pack, mighty even in its bland coat of white paint. I parked the car, got out, and walked up to see the behemoth. A sign in front of the middle tank told me all I needed to know. The six-pack was capable of holding 22,000 barrels of beer or 688,200 gallons. That's enough beer to fill 7,340,796 cans, which, if placed end to end, would run for 565 miles and would keep a person in a six-pack a day for 3,351 years.

If you doubt that the River of Beer runs deep into America's past, consider the following:

It's November 9, 1620, and there are the Pilgrims aboard the
Mayflower
, 101 in all, bobbing around off the gray, wintry Massachusetts coast, many of them seasick. They have finally spotted land after more than 2,500 miles and sixty-four miserable days at sea. But, alas, this isn't Virginia, their intended destination. It's Cape Cod, which will be a swell place to visit—in about 300 years. It holds no suitable landing spot and the
Mayflower
's crew must push on down the coast.

Two days later, though, the crew has had it and so have the passengers, who, though they've fled the Old World seeking freedom to practice their austere, separatist religion, are beer-drinking Christians. They've arrived at Plymouth Bay, which does afford a safe place to come ashore, and decide to call it home. That's because, as the group's leader William Bradford writes in his diary, “We could not now take much time for further search … our victuals being much spent—especially our beere.”

It isn't recorded whether any of the ship's beer got left on the shores for the Pilgrims, who, with the help of friendly Native Americans, went on to organize that famous party known as the First Thanksgiving. But it is recorded that the beer-short crew sailed back to England in a speedy thirty days—perhaps pushed on by the fear of no beer at all.

I digress from my narrative long enough to explain how the River of Beer came to be and what forces and events have shaped and transformed it as it flows through America today. Though you probably didn't learn of the
Mayflower
beer connection in seventh-grade history, it's clear that beer was present at the very beginning of the American experience. One lament of the poor Pilgrims in their first years in their new world was that they had no barley seed, thus could not make malt to brew proper beer. No matter: ingenious Native Americans graciously supplied tips on how to make beer from corn, pumpkin, and walnut chips. This was hardly surprising: Christopher Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the New World more than a century earlier, reported that the indigenous people of Central America brewed a corn elixir that reminded him of British ale. And such innovation, together with beer's chronic reinvention, either in substance or by marketing, along with waves of expansion and consolidation among commercial brewers, has been a remarkably resilient feature of the American beer scene.

But first a bit of background on the very beginnings of beer history. In 1952, a debate, prompted by a scholarly response to a scholarly article by anthropologist Robert Braidwood in
Scientific American
magazine, began that continues unabated today. It is over a rather startling question: Which came first—bread or beer?

Anthropologists speculate that both were discovered by happenstance. Somebody ground up or chewed up a primitive grain; it somehow got wet, by design or accident, and turned into a pasty glob, then was abandoned on a rock in the hot sun. It baked, in an early demonstration of solar power, into bread.

Or: Wild barley harvested by ancient hunter-gatherers got damp and sprouted, then got rained on and sat forgotten for a while in water. Wild, airborne yeast strains, which exist in every climate on earth, invaded the broth and induced the then unseen alchemy of fermentation. There you have it: beer.

Braidwood argued for bread.

I personally and with obvious self-interest vote for beer as the forerunner, buying the arguments of Jonathan D. Sauer, a University of Wisconsin botanist, who took the beer side of the
Scientific American
debate. For one thing, barley was among the first domesticated grains and eventually came to be used by bakers and brewers alike. (One widely known modern-day food use of barley is Grape Nuts cereal.) But the work required to gather wild barley, and later domesticate it for food purposes, Sauer pointed out, would've been daunting for the ancients, who had only the most primitive tools and knowledge. Thus, the initial food payoff—a few lumps of hard, dry, unappealing bread—would have been scant inducement to abandon hunting for barley growing.

Accidental beer, on the flavor front, might not have seemed much better. It no doubt looked and tasted pretty foul—cloudy, sour, skunky to the smell, unrecognizable to any modern beer drinker. But, ah, the buzz it imparted, to use a modern term. This certainly would've gotten the attention of the experimentally inclined tribesperson brave enough to take a few sips. So taste be damned: the seemingly magical mind-altering attributes of accidental beer could well have provided a huge incentive for the first beer sippers to try to re-create the accident. They could've even hastened it by pouring a splash of the accidental beer into the hoped-for new batch, a lucky guess that would've introduced surviving live yeast to start fermentation all over again (a practice, in fact, that later brewers intuitively used, even before they had connected those invisible yeast organisms to fermentation). Historians and archaeologists believe that barley has probably been cultivated for at least 10,000 years, making brewing at least that old but probably much older.

History tells us (and so does the Beer Institute's informative Web site) that the first written record of beer anyplace is a 4,000-year-old Sumerian recipe carved into a clay tablet dug up from ancient Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers long considered the “cradle of civilization” and a known site of early mass barley cultivation. (Mesopotamia today is known by a different name and for a different reason: it's called Iraq. And the beer, including Miller Genuine Draft, found near the end of Gulf War II in the fridge in Odai Hussein's abandoned sybaritic pleasure pad, bore no resemblance to ancient Sumerian brew.)

The 4,000-year-old recipe wasn't just the musings of some scribe noodling in cuneiform, the pictograph form of writing the Sumerians invented. It was, according to the translation, given to the Sumerians by their chief god, Enki, in the form of an epic poem called the Hymn to Ninkasi (who, until some more ancient tablet is unearthed, can lay claim to being the original Beer Goddess). And there is good evidence that this beer, made from unleavened bread called bappir, was leaps ahead of the accidental swill of prehistoric times because, well, two Americans re-created it in 1989. Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing Co. and Solomon Katz, a respected bioanthropologist and beer historian at the University of Pennsylvania, working with a University of Chicago translator, decoded the Hymn to Ninkasi and figured out that it was essentially a primer on Sumerian beer making. Using Sumerian techniques and what they believed was a reasonably accurate rendition of the recipe (a mixture of dried barley-dough bread to form the mash, plus dates, honey, and a mystery fermenter known as gestin), they brewed up a ceremonial batch, substituting brewer's yeast for gestin. The taste, Maytag now recalls, was “better than you might have expected—not much like beer but pleasant, and similar to homemade apple cider.”

In fact, archaeologists would be hard pressed to name many ancient civilizations, including wine-loving Greece and Rome, in which they haven't found, in the ruins and rubble of tumbled-down cities, images of people making, delivering, or drinking beer. Plato even said, “He was a wise man who invented beer,” though Herodotus didn't think much of it, preferring wine while conceding beer was extremely popular in the “barbarian states” such as the Roman colonies of the British Isles.

Hammurabi, whose Amontes conquered Mesopotamia around 1800
B.C.
and set up the kingdom of Babylon, was known as a great reformer and early codifier of laws known as Hammurabi's Code. But here's something else you probably didn't learn in seventh-grade history: beer was so important in Babylonian culture that a portion of the code was given over to the intricate regulation of beer parlors. It certainly put drama into beer drinking: tavern keepers who overcharged customers were put to death by drowning, while any high priestesses caught frequenting beer parlors were condemned to death by fire.

The ancient Egyptians likewise brewed beer, and the barley-and-wheat-based beverage was so treasured that the Egyptians believed it had been delivered unto the people by the god Osiris himself. Hek, as it was originally called, was the Egyptian national drink and the pharaohs strictly enforced beer quality with official beer inspectors. British archaeologists found an entire kitchen/brewery while sifting through the tomb of boy king Tutankhamen; beer scholars in 1996, with the help of U.K. brewer Scottish & Newcastle, deduced the recipe from writings and wall paintings and produced 1,000 bottles of Tutankhamen Ale. The first bottle sold for $7,200 at auction at Harrod's of London—a record price for any bottle of beer.

University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists, on a dig in central Turkey in 1957, unearthed a gold-laden royal tomb that scholars believe belonged to a ruler who was likely the inspiration for the legendary King Midas. (In legend, at least, the king nearly starved when everything he touched, including his food, turned to gold.) Among the relics found in the 2,700-year-old tomb was the largest set of Iron Age drinking vessels ever discovered. Some forty years later, Patrick McGovern, a University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeological chemist, ran biochemical analyses on the vessels' residue and determined it was the dry dregs of an ancient elixir whose components included barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead. (This beer, too, is being made commercially, but more about that later in a chapter on Extreme Beer. Suffice it to say that replicating ancient beers has become a niche in commercial brewing, and is also big among U.S. homebrewers.)

Beer was a central fact of life in much of Europe by the eighth century
A.D.
treasured not only as food and a mild intoxicant but because it didn't kill you like the water of the time did. The Vikings were great beer swillers, brewing on ships as they sailed up and down rivers and oceans looking for places to plunder. Beer-induced hallucinogenic stupors were part of a quasi-spiritual exercise that worked the Vikings into a trance on the nights before they sent out raiding parties.

An epic poem of Finland, known as the Kalevala, devotes an entire rune to brewing, not to mention a passage in which a heroic protagonist, served a tankard of beer brimming with toxic serpents, first dispatches the snakes by catching them with fish hooks, then drinks the beer (yuck!) and kills his inhospitable host in a sword fight.

By the eleventh century, the Germans, Dutch, and brewers in the Czech lands, known then as Bohemia, had introduced hops into beer—until that time beer had been flavored with herbs such as rosemary, bog myrtle, thyme, and yarrow. These early brewers first noted the preservative qualities of hops, important because before this discovery, beer spoiled quickly. Brewing, until the Middle Ages, was largely an enterprise carried out at home, mostly by women.

By the thirteenth century, that began to change as beer making became a thriving commercial trade in Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and the British Isles. About that time monasteries, where literate monks started writing down recipes and techniques and turning their energies toward scientific brewing, began playing a significant role in beer production, as they still do in modern-day Belgium and a handful of other countries. Meanwhile, a beer-friendly thirteenth-century German duke and brewer named Jan Primus was apparently so beloved by the beer-drinking hordes that after death he was made the patron saint of beer and idealized with a new name, King Gambrinus. (At least, that's one of the theories of the origin.) Flash forward to the 2003 Oregon Brewers Festival in Portland, where a brewer dressed up like King Gambrinus wended his way through admiring crowds. Indeed, breweries and beer festivals all over the world honor this king who was never a king at all.

By the mid-150Os, Bavarian monks, looking for a way to defeat the summer heat that spoiled beer all too quickly, began storing beer in cool cellars and even caves in a process they would call lagering. The connection of yeast to fermentation, not to mention development of a pure strain of lager yeast, was still at least three hundred years away, but never mind. This was the beginning of the beer style that would one day change the beer world.

In Britain by the middle 150Os, beer was such a staple of life that Queen Elizabeth was said to enjoy a pint of strong ale a day—for breakfast. By this time, the British alehouse, a forerunner to the modern British pub and our beer joint, was already 600 years old. British literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, is rife with references to beer, the inns and taverns that served it, and ale-induced mischief. By Shakespeare's peak, in the late 1500s, beer still meant strictly warm, dark, and usually cloudy ale but it was commonly categorized by strength—strong beer, table beer, ship's beer, and small beer in descending order. Small beer referred to a weak ale made by taking once-brewed mash, rinsing it with hot water to extract a diluted wort, and brewing a second batch of beer from it; many people drank it at every meal. (As an aside, Maytag's Anchor Brewing Co. makes a contemporary small beer.) The Bard was perhaps venting his personal beer tastes when, in
King Henry VI, Part II
, he has a character declare “I will make it a felony to drink small beer.” Over time, the term became synonymous for a trifling thing (or person).