EXPANDING YOUR BEERCABULARY

Well hey there,

Our return to proper, technical posts covering serious and interesting topics is imminent, I promise, but in the meantime, I figured I’d squeeze in one last post on the light side. 

There are plenty of fun english phrases whose original meanings are so obscure to us as to be effectively dead in and of themselves, like those in this awe-worthy list (“vim” by itself being a particular favorite of yours truly), but among those words lies a set of particular interest to us, namely those whose origins can be traced to beer, like “barmy.” So today, we’ll be going through a very short list of such terms, and dissecting their origins.

Barmy

While not often heard in US English, barmy’s kind of a big deal across the pond, meaning something along the lines of mad, crazy, or foolish.The term is a very slight modification of the old brewing term “barm,” for which there’s actually a nice OG MacLeod story - yeast is often pitched (added to beer) as a slurry or in granule form from a lab, but if you brew often enough, you can “top crop” your yeast, which is to say, literally scoop the frothy, yeast-laden foam from actively fermenting beer, and that’s exactly what our first brewer would do (and I approve! It’s mad, but the beer is theoretically a bit better, though you need to use obscure fermenters, which kinda sucks). 

Why do this, given the slightly higher risk of infection? There are two simple reasons: first, you’re not actively selecting for yeast that drop out of suspension more easily, like you would if you were to harvest your yeast from the bottom of a conical fermenter, the standard practice (and generally, it seems that using yeast with a broader set of biological properties increases the number of generations you can use it for? Maybe? My copy of this book is in storage, I defer to that); and second, you’re pulling yeast at the peak of viability (read: yeast happiness), which should also buy you more brews with that yeast.

The reason for the de facto death of this practice is obvious: the gains are marginal, it’s work intensive and a bit finicky, it doesn’t work in most conicals, and it’s risky.

But to get back to the term, barm can mean both that actively fermenting frothing head on beer (these days, the German “Kräusen,” pronounced “croy-zin,” has taken over), or dried flakes of yeast scooped from this froth (as is absolutely still done in the Kveik-brewing world), and in this case it seems as if that frothy mass is responsible for the term, having once been associated with being “flighty or excited,” which transformed over time into the term we know and love today.

Bung Hole

This one’s a classic, an absolute treasure of a word, and a gem immortalized by that incorrigible 90s fever dream of a character, Bungholio. God bless Mike Judge.

So what is a Bung Hole? Stainless Steel kegs are used today for beer storage and service, and these kegs have two key features: they’re made out of stainless steel (duh, and for the sake of this discussion, irrelevant), and they use a single port for both gas input and beer output (very much relevant). Not only is this is only really accomplishable with modern precision engineering, but the idea of adding gas is in and of itself a modern concept, since traditionally (and as is...well, largely still the case with our cask beers at MacLeod), you don’t really add any gas; the yeast produces it.

So how did they get beer out of wooden casks without the resulting vacuum rapidly decarbonating the beer, and/or throttling flow? With two holes, of course! As you can see in this link, there are two holes in a cask: the keyhole (which is where the keystone and tap go, and what Shrek hits in the fight scene), and the bunghole (DING DING DING), which is where the shive and spile go.

We’ve already landed at the term, but for the sake of talking beer, we at MacLeod fill the casks by the keyhole (since it’s easier to fill them when they’re on a flat end as opposed to their “bellies,” my term not the industry’s), and while we used to actually rack casks into a proper stillage (it’s shocking that even a single of these terms is still used), we currently just park them on their ends, slide a slick, clever little combination spile/tap into the keystone, and skip the spiling altogether. Which is to say, our bungholes are permanently shut.

Oh, and the term evidently dates back to the 17th century - no surprise there.

Conclusion

Just two words, kinda nuts, right? Yet I couldn’t find a single other technical brewing term that exists in common English, beyond stuff like “pint” and “ale.” But hey, the detours we took in discussing the terms just about balances out the brevity of the topic, right? Right?

Cheers,

Adrian “right?” Febre