Liquid Bread and Solid Beer

Hello again, denizens of Beertopia,

It’s often amusing to consider the childhood hints that I’d become somewhat curious about the world of alcohol production - a deep and immediate love for Baskin Robbins’ Daiquiri Ice sorbet, a fascination with “potions” - but one such episode strikes me as a bizarrely adult-sanctioned foray. When I was in, oh, second grade, our class’s bookshelf held a book on Egypt with which I was particularly smitten, but which had a very curious little throwaway page: loose instructions on making “beer” that seemed far too simple to possibly be true.

The recipe went as such: add some whole grain bread and water to a jug or clay pot, add some bread yeast, and wait a few days. Done. And while my dad seemed...resistant to the idea (none the least since he was, and is, a Mexican Lager guy), in retrospect it strikes me as incredible that this existed for a number of reasons, but not least because: a) that would actually work to some degree, and; b) that’s not all that far from the beer brewing technique of the time. Shockingly on the money, actually.

Which brings up a fair question: since Red Star wasn’t a thing in ancient Egypt, where in the heck did they get their yeast? In fact, before the 40s (thanks, Fleischmann), where did anybody get their yeast?

In a World

Yeast is pretty hardy - people have brewed 10 gallon batches with the old yeast scavenged from single bottles, and DogFish Head famously brewed Egyptian beer with wild yeast captured in the air in Egypt - and this hardiness is quite handy, because these traits would certainly have been of use to early brewers, who seem to have employed a technique quite similar to modern Kveik brewers.

A brief interlude, though: yeast go through several stages during fermentation, but somewhat early on they’re quite active, and create a doughy froth on top of the fermenting beer (kräusen, pronounced “croy-zin”) which is rich in yeast. Some British brewers will scoop this yeast off (a process called top-cropping) a practice which, while perhaps bizarre to those familiar with conical fermenters, is weirdly enough still perhaps the best way to collect yeast, since it’s at the peak of health, and since you’re not selecting for low-flocculation cells, and...etc.

Anyway, those Kveik brewers - yes, so while the details of their yeast collectors vary somewhat regionally, Kveik brewers use wooden rings generally, like this gorgeous example, dipping them into the fermenting beer at high kräusen (i.e. the peak of fermentation) in order to scoop some of that maximally healthy yeast off of the top, but here they deviate - instead of then immediately repitching that yeast, they let these rings dry, to be used months later. And insanely, samples of this yeast have survived, like, well over a decade (see this video for the story - it’s perhaps the most informative hour of brewing information I’m aware of).

If that sounds so rudimentary that they could have been doing that for thousands of years, well, you’d be right. We talked in the last post about the “magic sticks” (and in fact, that article has a much more elegant explanation for this brief aside), which were used in Mesopotamia to not just collect the yeast from fermenting batches, but to then inocculate successive batches, assuming the previous batch tasted good (and it’s Mesopotamia, right? Pretty sure it was there...Sumeria? It’s unclear)

But perhaps just as interesting from the perspective of this blog is the interplay, even then, between beer and bread. This is because...well, let’s just start by saying that you can’t exactly plant barley, harvest it, and then make beer. Or rather, technically you could, but some intermediary step that helps break down the starches in the kernel (the endosperm) into sugars is work that will be amply rewarded down the road. 

I suspect that this is the reason that not just the Mesopotamians, but later the Egyptians used barley bread as a part of the fermentables (read: sugar sources) for their beers. Not only this, but as you might imagine, since brewing and bread-baking both require the use of milled grains, in Egypt at least the baking of bread as well as the brewing of beer fell to women (at first - it was evidently later man-ified during industrialization. Classic.)

Was this bread dosed with stick-yeast? Was it even leavened? After some light googling, I...have no idea. Yeast appears to have been involved, but it just as easily could have become established in that particular bakery through use rather than being brought to or from a brewing operation. 

As an anecdote of the power of yeast’s ability to cling to stuff and of pre-isolation superstition (well founded as it may have been), this fun book has a story about a distillery that, what, I think they wanted to bring over like the ceiling beams from their first distillery when they moved to a second, out of fear of messing with the yeast balance in the room? Something like that. The idea of losing your magic yeast has been terrifying humans for thousands of years.

In any case, and more related to that anecdote than I assumed when typing it out, the answer to our posed question as it pertains to ancient brewing is that yeast was selected from good brews and propagated using Kveik ring-like “magic” sticks, a technique which, as mentioned last time, is so powerfully timeless that even today you can start a brewery with it.

(That’s in Yonkers? Holy smokes, I’ll have to check that out)

Please sir, can I have some...more?

Hey, 1786 time! We made it!!!

So, while the old “magic stick” trick would obviously have worked as the arrow of time swept humanity forward, it seems like they altered the technique a bit, into something of a hybrid between the top cropping that I’m...pretty sure would have been happening at the time, and the Kveik method.

I’ll postulate here: as Lars points out in that hour video linked above, one hypothesis for the “Kveik yeasts love being dried” phenomenon is that weaker barley harvests in places like the Netherlands meant farmers could brew less, and thus needed their yeast to just keep in dried form, hence the yeast evolving in order to appease them and up their chances at reproduction.

Well, what happens when you have a large populace, with fairly easy access to flour and fermentables like barley and, now, cheap(ish) sugar, and thus a need to ferment things often, but perhaps not every day? Evidently, you get barm.

Barm? Nothing different than that kräusen from before, just dried out. As this lady, who I hope to employ as my short tempered and sharp worded chef, explains in this clip, making Barm is bizarre to a 21st century homebrewer but perfectly straightforward - you skim the kräusen off of your beer, or switchel or ginger beer or what have you, using wooden spoons, and then you simply dry those in the sun and collect the flakes that form. Simple.

And again, yeast is hardy so this seems to have just worked. This barm would have been the closest thing to Fleischmann’s for a few hundred years, and was, indeed, apparently the name of the game - I would not have put together that its the root of the term “barmy,” but there you go.

Back to the Future

Thanks to the work of some nerds in the late 1800s (largely), we now have clean isolates of a pretty endless range of yeasts, for both baking and alcoholic fermentation. And while there are a very few places (sourdough bakeries, a few UK and German breweries) that still use something akin to those ancient methods, this is the way of the world fermenting world now. But there is still an interesting crossover between the baking and brewing worlds.

First, we go back to Norway, where either breweries or just individual brewers regularly use commercial baking yeast for their farmhouse beers. Referenced in that link is a brief discussion of some genetic work that this Lars bro did concerning the various families of yeast, and indeed, perhaps of some relevance to this post (I kid) is that baker’s yeast may not exist as its own thing, it may just be brewers yeast (and, arguably, kind of vice versa) all the way back.

Further, and I’d totally forgotten about this until it popped up, you have a new anti-waste movement, particularly in the UK, that’s crystallized in one form as the very cool Toast Ale, in which stale bread is used as a percentage of fermentables. Wild.

Beyond that, technically all open-fermentations are glorified sourdough starters, so bonus points for that Quarantine pastime

Conclusion

Yeesh! I thought this would be an easy post, and here I am nigh on two in the morning, with a post that I feel I held back on, significantly! If I’ve learned anything, it’s that, no duh, humanity didn’t waste its time splitting fermentation of cereal grains neatly into different categories - the two have been intertwined more or less the entire time. So if you’d like to make kräusen bread, go for it and let me know how that goes, and if you’re thinking of running a bread yeast beer-xperiment, here’s your framework

Cheers,

Adrian “I have Linear Algebra in six hours”  Febre