Written In Stone?

by Dick Cantwell

The brewery I used to work in was a funny place, rife with prejudice. One Luddite-ish dictum that came from on high was that we were to use only whole hops, that pellets were plebeian, something commonly used by our fatter-fingered competitors which imparted coarse flavors. The preference was for English varieties, though occasionally a New World type might be introduced—as long as it wasn’t Cascade. The very speaking of that name was invariably attended by a wrinkling of the owner’s nose, a physical pronouncement on another aspect of brew-craft that separated our aristocratic brews from the zymurgic hoi polloi. Well, our rarified efforts often tasted musty and old, the function of prolonged and possibly inattentive storage in Britain, a bracing sea voyage, and then sitting in our hop cooler which, if the truth were told, wasn’t really all that cool. But that was our pedigree, the flaw which was really (or at least supposedly) a virtue, like the quack of a bagpipe’s drone, overlooked by the uninitiated but esteemed by the cogniscenti. We didn’t sell all that much beer, and wondered why.

A stern sense of ethics ran in the rank and file as well, much of it equally misplaced. I remember a conversation I had with the outgoing head brewer about my perverse appreciation for lagers (which of course with our adherence to some twisted English-derived version of Reinheitsgebot we would never brew), in which he seemed genuinely to pity my unschooled aesthetic sense. Lagers were all very well, he pretty much told me, but he preferred a beer that had more flavor, an ale, naturally.

I got into the act, too. We brewed a big sturdy stout from time to time, dependent on the alcohol and robustness of flavor of quite a high starting gravity. Every spring, when the weather began coming around, there would be an algae bloom in our water supply, counteracted by the authorities with an extra dose of chlorine which we eventually determined to hamper enzymatic activity in the mash. No, we didn’t filter the water—that wouldn’t have done. The stout was a multiple-mash brew, and when the first effort turned in a surprisingly anemic gravity, it was desperately proposed by the head brewer (a different guy, and a good friend of mine to this day), that we add dark malt extract to bump things up to a tolerable range. I was vocally against it, and we argued about until I went home, at which time he added the extract and told the others on hand not to tell me. Of course I found out about it the next morning, and we yelled at each other.

Was that unethical? The addition of the extract, I mean, not the yelling. For in our professional lives we make choices that harder-liners than ourselves might deem shabby and dishonest. Lately I’ve been brewing small batches of a Belgian-style pale ale flavored with Yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit. It’s a refreshing, summery offering, but so far I’ve gotten the best aromatic effect adding the juice post-fermentation. Is this unethical, to flavor a beer so? No!, according to the resounding response I got from a gang of home brewers from Eugene whom I let taste the beer off the fermenter the other day. There you have it, from purists of a tie-dyed stripe.

Of course no examination of brewers’ ethics is complete without taking a couple of swings at the Reinheitsgebot itself. This piece of protectionism has been with us for some time. It wasn’t sufficient grounds for keeping imported beer off the shelves in Germany twenty or so years ago, according to the European Court, but it does keep German brewers from doing an awful lot of the things that we take for granted. Like brewing with unmalted grains, or sugar, to say nothing of such assaults on sensibility as fruit or honey, spices or herbs. And not all brewers in Germany are happy with the restrictions imposed on them by Wilhelm’s twin tablets. I’ve had conversations with quite a few who are envious of what we are allowed to do as a matter of course. Now that we have to answer to the Department of Homeland Security for every additive we contemplate, however, all that may change. But the point is that the Reinheitsgebot represents one system of ethics, outside of which many of us, possibly decadents of the West, operate. I amused many on my last trip to the Fatherland by impishly sharing with them the fact that in the fall I brew a pumpkin ale. There was laughter, disbelief, and a little bit of apoplexy, a dumbshow of Teutonic emotion, but more than a few wanted to try it. I had a very interesting conversation with a charming large-scale broker of grains on the same trip. She wondered if the addition of healthful herbs to beer might be accomplished within Germany if the resulting product were called something other than beer. Now there’s a concept. Just the same, I don’t see that wall coming down anytime soon.

There’s plenty of long-standing precedent for bodies of ethics backed by systems of law. Take the Trappists. They have a highly-developed entity charged with protecting the exclusivity of various monk-made products, beer and cheese among them. No one outside of the approved orders, including us, can refer to anything they make as even adjectivally Trappist without the long arm of Abbey authority brandishing orders of cease and desist. And we might as well recall the machinations of Gruit, Inc., in other words, the Church, which controlled, and taxed, the production and sale of gruit prior to and overlapping the general use of hops in beer. So threatened were they by this new, unregulated and unethical additive that they rammed through some ecclesiastical legislation making it a sin to brew with hops.

What are the ethics of swapping yeast, as so many of us do? When you draw off a Cornelius keg of something interesting to share with your buddy at his or her brewery across town aren’t you kind of infringing on the right of sale held by whichever lab you got it from? I doubt that any of the concerned parties would object to thereby giving a new potential customer a trial of a product they might later be able to sell to them, but perhaps there are ethical limits on how long such free love might be pursued. Some holders of yeast are in fact extremely jealous about the use of their product. Think New England, and the spate of breweries there shackled for eternity to exclusive use of a particular strain. Many good beers are brewed with it, but not to be able to use anything else is to me simply unthinkable.

Speaking of brewers in far-flung places feeling the creative pinch of regulations which may or may not involve ethics, I know an Australian guy who wants to start a brewery producing American styles. Because of Australian quarantine laws governing agricultural products, any outland malt or hops he might want to use would, on importation, have to sit in repose for up to several months before he could get his hands on them. Is that a matter of ethics, protectionism, or just good sense? A mixture, I suspect. The thought of all those hops sitting there under official scrutiny, not getting any younger, takes me back to the little brewery and our stale Fuggles and Goldings. Perhaps the sensory effects of all those aged C-hops will simply have to be chalked up to house flavor.

Where ethics are concerned, I guess, we all have to draw our own lines, or have them drawn for us. One man’s meat product is another man’s poison, even if it makes the beer clear. It’s all just another subject to be taken up for discussion at the bar.