More lager letters to Scotland

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Andrew

More from J.C. Jacobsen and his letters to his son. The letters give a good idea of export developments to Great Britain but more tellingly give a cracking insight into Jacobsen’s worries about sending his prized beer so far away.

To understand  why requires a bit of background. Jacobsen was a disciple of the great Munich brewer Gabriel Sedlmayr and originally collected his first batch of lager yeast from Sedlmayr’s Spaten Brewery. His views on quality – especially with regard to limits on quality by scale of production – stem from Sedlmayr. He stated that there was a natural limit for any brewer, and that over this limit beer quality would begin to fall (I can’t find the reference) .

Reputation at home or abroad?

With growing demand at home, the last thing Jacobsen wanted to risk was his domestic reputation by expanding too quickly abroad. As revealed by the letters, Jacobsen was at turns amazed and flattered that his beer was in demand, and terrified that it wouldn’t survive the journey intact.

His awe of British brewers’ technical ability to brew beer that could stand the test of shipping to the other side of the world, led him to underestimate his own. It also lay behind his almost manic insistence that Carl should learn everything about British brewing methods.

The first mention of beer sent to Great Britain is in October 1868. His letters reveal that Theilmann, a Danish merchant Carl had met while at Younger’ s in Edinburgh had asked for “more of my beer”. Typically, Jacobsen apologised for not having any of the right quality despite the novelty of having beer for sale in Scotland.

Self-imposed lager limits

Interestingly, he has more faith in a test sending of cold fermented top-fermenting beer (presumably with ale yeast) that would better survive the journey and could be stored without problems. By the following month, however, he decides to limit himself to a crate (50 bottles) as a present. He adds that he has worried about putting Carl in a difficult position in Younger’s if his father began to compete (“no matter how unworthily”), but with Carl’s trip to London he will send some beer that will do him some honour “… and honour in this case is more important to me than any possible advantages”.

The fact that shipping from Denmark to Edinburgh (via Leith) was suspended over the winter months made Jacobsen’s task of exporting harder. Not enough beer was available of the right (stored) quality when Carl wrote asking for a further four half-barrels of beer. Jacobsen refused thinking that it was for sale not private use. After clearing up this misunderstanding he apologises and promises to send him more beer – but emphasises the less than brilliant quality should be for Carl and not for sale.

Warming up to sales

By January 1869, the weather and Jacobsen had thawed slightly and the brewer wrote saying that  four half barrels were on their way – but again with the proviso that they were only samples, with no guarantee they would be any good.  He asked Carl only to take payment if the beer was any good – but he wanted the empties back.

By March the beer circle had widened and he dispatched a further 6 half-barrels for “friends and acquaintances” of Theilmann. And this time he mentions the bill straight away and even inquires if the “friend” would like an invoice from the brewery. The tone becomes more businesslike as Jacobsen wins over his coyness on news that the lager beer he has sent would do better than any version of ale or porter he could produce.

By November 15, 1869, Jacobsen wrote that he was sending a few crates of Bavarian beer left over from a batch brewed for Theilmann to the English East Indian ports. True to form he was sceptical of the commercial value, “but it is always interesting to discover whether it can withstand the journey,” he noted.

Carl’s view at this time we can only guess at  as his letters in return haven’t been preserved in the same number as his father’s. But one letter from Carl in October 1868 could give a clue. In it he asked his father: “Is it possible or beneficial to allow German beer be replaced by English, will the public change its taste and its habits in favour of English beer?” He answers his own question in no uncertain terms: Never! Under no circumstances!”

Posted in Brands, Carlsberg, Lager | Comments Off

Letters from home to satisfy a brewer’s thirst

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Andrew

J.C. Jacobsen's letters to his son reveal a wealth of technical brewing details

I’ve been digging into Carlsberg history again – more specifically the letters from J.C. Jacobsen to his son Carl. As a young man Carl was packed off to travel the breweries of Europe for four years as part of his apprenticeship in brewing. The letters published in Danish as Din hengivne Jacobsen (Your devoted Jacobsen) are a fascinating insight into not only the characters of J.C. and Carl, but also into the techniques and practices of brewing at the time (1866-1870).

On his sojourn, Carl gained access to some of the greatest breweries of the time – both on the continent and Great Britain. Zum Spaten, Weihen Stephan, William Younger, Allsopp, Bass, Ushers, Evershed, Barclay Perkins, Lovibonds, Truman and Whitbread all figure in the letters of the father to the son. Carl actually worked for some time in Wm. Youngers and Eversheds  Allsopp’sand had several interviews while in Burton with the noted brewing chemist Horace Brown

The letters illustrate Jacobsen’s thirst for brewing knowledge as he fires off letter after letter with questions about malting, mashing temperature, the cost and construction of pumps and corrugated iron, bottling and especially how English ales were brewed – Porter and Pale Ale in particular. His goal was to open a brewery for English-style beers to get a slice of the lucrative export market.

Some of his last letters in 1870 are with a desperate need for detail before Carl leaves Great Britain to return home:

Have you in Burton received reliable information about the degree of attenuation for Export Ale and Pale Ale in the larger breweries during the main fermentation and at the filling of casks? It is not necessary for me to call attention to how important it is to know the measurements one should achieve during fermentation.

Despite this demand for information about the brewing techniques used in Great Britain he never really got over his dislike of the taste of the beer. He writes about Bass:

Most of the beer types from Bass have, to my taste, far too much dry hopping. In some of the casks there was an unreasonable amount of hops. Is this necessary for its keeping abilities or is it only a matter of taste?

When Carl returned to Denmark he did in fact open a brewery for English styles, but was never convinced that it would take off at home. He preferred to export lager beer, which he considered excellent, despite his father’s worries that it wouldn’t travel well and damage his hard-won reputation.

Posted in Beer, Brewing, Brewing history, Carlsberg | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Lager carries the can for loutish behaviour

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Andrew

On busy streets, in the subways below and amid the tight, after-work squeeze on commuter trains, a menacing, befuddled and reeling regiment is on the attack.

Its young members, emboldened by alcohol and loosely allied by behavior, are known as ”lager louts” and are being accused of sexual assault, harassment, disorderly conduct and other offenses. As they struggle to vanquish their morning-after haze, the British Government, police and local authorities are marshaling their forces to defeat them.

The Daily Mail even ran a campaign against rampaging rabits boozed up with lager. No, honest.

Bloody hell, sounds like the opening scene of ‘Dawn of the Dead’. But no, the above quote is from The New York Times, October 31 1988, the height of the ‘Lager lout’ panic of the late-eighties.

I’ve been looking at news stories from 1988 and 1989 and the birth of the lager lout phenomenon, and the bile and venom served up by newspapers – broadsheet and tabloid alike (when it used to make a difference) – is remarkable. Especially when several academic studies suggest that the link between crime and alcohol is not as clear cut as the tabloid journalists would have it.

Roger Birch, chairman of the Association of Chief Constables, is credited with adding fuel to the ‘Moral panic’ by announcing to the association’s annual conference that Britain’s police forces were now so undermanned that they were “losing control on the streets”.

The Tory government at the time were not slow to turn ‘Lager louts’ into the new scapegoats ahead of  that year’s Conservative conference with new laws on advertising that brought a (temporary) end to George the Hofmeister bear. The Labour Party were also vocal. It also marked the start of calls for video surveillance cameras in town centres and Coventry became the first UK city to ban drinking in public

The drinks industry made attempts to clear its name – a Gallup survey for Miller Lite revealed that the youth were not drinking as much as everyone assumed and bought on average a mere four cans of beer a week. Mind you if they were buying Miller Lite, perhaps the low number is understandable.

The real villains of course were the advertisers who were blamed for forcing the poor innocent drinkers to swap the good honest pint of real ale for lager “by the shameless creation of an in-crowd mentality which permeates almost all of the lager advertisements we see on television”, according to the Sunday Times.

Andrea Gillies, editor of the Camra’s Good Beer Guide at the time also weighed in, frothing slightly at the mouth. “Lager breweries and their advertising agents seem to be proving that sections of the British public will literally swallow anything. The most inferior, overpriced lager will sell well if it is marketed right – especially if it has got a foreign name.”

And added: “The reason for the image war is that most of them taste the same. But when it ends in violence in the streets, we need to look carefully at what the lager adverts are really trying to sell us. Who really cares what’s in the can, or who in the end will have to carry it?”

So as the UK politicians again turn their focus on beer in the form of binge drinking, you can look back nostalgically to the louts of the 1980s and fast forward to the future.

Posted in Beer, Lager | Tagged , , , | Comments Off