Alcohol in the Early Modern World

A Cultural History

B. Ann Tlusty, B. Ann Tlusty

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350199620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna temprana

This book examines how the profound religious, political, and intellectual shifts that characterize the early modern period in Europe are inextricably linked to cultural uses of alcohol in Europe and the Atlantic world. Combining recent work on the history of drink with innovative new research, the eight contributing scholars explore themes such as identity, consumerism, gender, politics, colonialism, religion, state-building, and more through the revealing lens of the pervasive drinking cultures of early modern peoples. Alcohol had a place at nearly every European table and a role in much of early modern experience, from building personal bonds via social and ritual drinking to fueling economies at both micro and macro levels. At the same time, drinking was also at the root of a host of personal tragedies, including domestic violence in the home and human trafficking across the Atlantic. Alcohol in the Early Modern World provides a fascinating re-examination of pre-modern beliefs about and experiences with intoxicating beverages.

Chapter 1

Production

Thomas Brennan

The production of alcohol is actually quite easy. Nature produces alcohol with no human intervention. When yeast meets sugar dissolved in a liquid it normally produces alcohol in a matter of hours. Consequently, every human society has had access to alcohol and nearly everyone has taken advantage of this fact. Alcohol has been easily available, relatively cheap, and, as a consequence, central to the diets and culture of most societies. It is also worth pointing out that a large fraction of most human societies has also been involved on a regular basis in producing alcohol until quite recently. Within that framework, however, there are certain challenges that will shape much of this discussion. In the first place, the source of this sugar has profound implications for the process and history of alcohol production. Second, the alcohol produced by fermentation is inherently unstable if left on its own. Efforts to stabilize alcohol also drove much of the early modern history of production.

The sources of sugar for fermentation divided the world into several sugar regimes, each with its own challenges and modes of production. The classic source of sugar for alcohol production is grapes, which are little more than dissolved sugars surrounded by yeasts. Once the skin is broken, fermentation follows. Unfortunately, not everyone has grapes, though they became remarkably prevalent on the Eurasian continent by the Middle Ages and can also be found in coastal North America. In the absence of grapes, the most common source of sugar is starch that has been saccharified. Since all grains have starch, the trick is saccharification, which is done through enzymes. Barley has lots of the right enzymes, and other grains have less. Saccharification begins with malting, when grains are allowed to begin the initial stages of germination. Bathing these malted grains in hot water stimulates enzymes even more; this is called mashing and results in a sugary liquid called a wort. Barley was fortunately prevalent in Europe, especially in the areas that lacked grapes, but less so elsewhere. Alternatives included sorghum and millet in Africa, and quinoa, manioc, and maize in the Americas. These grains and roots were often mashed but also sometimes saccharified by humans adding enzymes by chewing them and spitting them out. Rice is saccharified in much of Asia with the addition of a fungus. Getting the yeast into the wort created by mashing is less easy than with grapes, although nature still obliges with a wealth of airborne yeasts and bacteria, some helpful, others much less so.

The relatively greater challenge of adding yeast to beer than to wine may explain why early modern brewers were more conscious of their yeasts than winemakers. Other fruits have sugar, but usually less than grapes, and harder to extract. Still, apples and pears have long served as an alternative in places without grapes. Sap from trees, such as the palm tree in Africa, or from the agave plant in Central America, or from sugarcane—which would continue its westward migration from one side of the Atlantic to the other—is also sweet and can be fermented.¹

The differences in the source of sugar affected the kinds of alcohol produced, at least in its taste if not so much in its strength. More importantly, these differences in sugar regimes shaped the different experiences of the early modern alcohol producers in several ways. Most obviously, the fact that the sugars in grape juice were already dissolved in a liquid made this source of sugar much heavier than the sugar inherent in dry grain. As a result, grapes were fermented close to their source and had to be fermented as soon as they were picked. Typically the grape grower was also the winemaker, which meant, among other things, that wine making was and mostly remains a small-scale activity, largely dominated by the male vine owner, even if women helped with certain stages of grape production. It also meant that winemakers were left, once a year, with a new batch of alcohol that needed special care to avoid deteriorating quickly. Problems of stability shaped much of the early modern history of wine production.

In contrast, grain, being dry, was easier to transport and to store. Thus the raw materials for beer could be more easily disseminated among people who wished to produce it and could be fermented throughout most of the year. Indeed, grain was routinely present in communities and households for other cooking purposes anyway, and fermenting was really another cooking alternative. Fermenting grain was long a female task associated with other domestic duties. Such domestic, small-scale production was less troubled by the need to stabilize the alcohol since it could be made in small batches when needed. But because the principal narrative of premodern beer production involves the gradual switch from domestic to large-scale commercial production, the problem of stabilization remained. Here again, the relative ease of transporting grain allowed for the concentration of production in larger and larger facilities, but only if the beer could be stabilized and subsequently transported. The process of commercialization, specialization, and masculinization that had begun in the Middle Ages would develop through the early modern period to the extent that much, and sometimes most, of the beer would be produced by commercial brewers.

In addition to these fundamental distinctions in sugar regimes, the early modern period also inherited a way to concentrate alcohol through distillation. From being largely a pharmaceutical activity at the beginning of the early modern period, distillation became big business by the end. In a more concentrated form, the alcohol in spirits was stable but, initially, unpalatable. Producers slowly learned how to improve the flavor of spirits, but they also quickly learned that combining spirits with wine could improve the wine’s stability and the spirit’s flavor. As distillation became commercially significant, it would begin to change the techniques for stabilizing wines and influence much of the wine industry as well.

Beer

Beginning with the simplest, humblest, yet possibly most pervasive producers of alcohol takes us to the kitchen of the peasant’s cottage, where the woman made a batch of ale as part of her domestic duties. And, although “ale” may be the best term for what was produced in Europe, something similar was happening around the globe, as women fermented local grains into other kinds of mildly alcoholic drinks. Using grains like barley, oats, spelt, and wheat that formed part of the household’s regular diet, they created or purchased a “malt” of germinating seeds, which was dried, ground, and then “mashed” in warm water. After drawing the “wort” off the grains, the domestic producer might add herbs, including hops, or a mixture of herbs, like “gruit,” which required boiling, and then, when cool, she let it ferment.² Since hops were not always available and were expensive, it is not clear how much domestic brewing made use of it. English women in 1500 were not using hops in their domestic brewing, but England was behind the Continent in that regard. German brewers had been using hops in their beer since at least the thirteenth century and had exported this new drink throughout much of Northern Europe; cultivation of the hop plant spread slowly behind. Initially, the English had to import hops from the Netherlands and, even after Flemish immigrants started growing hops in England in the sixteenth century, the bitter taste of the beer took longer to gain popularity.³ Unhopped, this domestic brew was probably weak and quickly turned sour, but it contributed important calories and nutrition to the household diet.⁴ In larger country houses the household staff often included someone with a specialization in brewing, along with more elaborate equipment and ingredients.

By 1600, hops had become a widely accepted taste and were a standard part of country house brewing, even in England where unhopped “ale” had been slow to cede its primacy. Resins in the hops, released by boiling or steeping, helped preserve the beer, even if the alcohol levels were relatively low. Indeed, hopped beer tended to be brewed with much less malt than was ale, because it needed less alcohol for preservation. Histories of brewing often reserve the term “beer” for the hopped variety that became increasingly pervasive in the fifteenth century, but there is evidence that the colloquial use of these terms was not very exact, and that common speech in early modern England more often used these terms to distinguish the strength of the brew. Thus large households would make a range of drinks by remashing the same malt two or three times with diminishing sweetness and strength, resulting in variations of “small beer” versus “strong ale” regardless of the hops.⁵ Whether made in a peasant’s house, a larger country house, or some institution, beer made for private consumption rather than sale accounted for the majority of malt made into beer through the eighteenth century in England, and probably a significant minority on the Continent as well.⁶

A short shelf life and economies of scale were reasons why the medieval domestic brewer easily slipped into commercial brewing by offering her excess for sale, at least on an intermittent basis. As a source of supplemental income, this small-scale, unprofessional activity probably never died out during the centuries under consideration here, but it had stopped being the primary source of commercial ale, even in the countryside, already at their beginning.⁷ Commercial brewing might not have been much more elaborate, however, and tended to be widely scattered around the countryside, since beer was a very heavy and relatively cheap commodity that did not repay long-distance trade by land, and ale was too fragile to be transported far. Thus medieval breweries in the inland Low Countries produced “exclusively” for a local market.⁸ The growing popularity of alehouses, both in town and countryside, also contributed to more professional commercial brew...