© 2016, Randy Mosher for All About Beer Magazine
My brain is tearing itself apart as I try to write this. It seemed so simple. Just outline the benefits, drawbacks and general importance of tradition in the art of beer. Nothing controversial, at least until the sentences started rolling onto the page. It turns out to be a very complex and polarizing topic, and for me, at least, almost impossible to be entirely on one side of the debate or another.
Every artistic product goes far beyond what stands before you. A good work of art is a touchstone for much more, incorporating shared chunks of our experience to wiggle its way into our collective consciousness. This is what makes the artistic experience resonate so richly, especially for those who appreciate this context and can and understand the metadata behind the work.
As art, every beer is part of a larger story, and comes out of a specific context, whether it’s a traditional classic or an avant-garde experiment. These stories, technological guideposts and aesthetic characteristics shape not only the specifics of the drink itself, but our expectations, attitudes and ultimately the nature of our interaction with it. Tradition is a metaphoric bucket for certain ideas that get poured into beer along with the malt and hops.
It’s a loaded word. At its most basic, tradition is just a summation of general practices and their resulting products. Deployed thoughtfully, it can be a deep well of ideas that can inspire and inform any beer, no matter how iconoclastic. Tradition has the intoxicating odor of nostalgia about it, pinging peoples’ deep longing for things they see as grounded, legitimate and authentic. Taken too far it’s a monster that can be dogmatic and restrictive, hindering innovation, creativity and growth. Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione is fond of saying that the Bavarian beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, is nothing more than 500 years of art censorship. Many people share his view.
It’s a difficult question: Good, bad, ugly or indifferent, and when? Can one actually hold these two ideas in your head at the same time? Let’s dig a little deeper and see if we can make up our two minds on the subject.
On the plus side, tradition can be a powerful muse. Since there is very little new under the sun, art constantly recycles and gives new context for ideas from other times and places. Artists jokingly call it “stealing,” but it’s really a way of expanding our world of ideas, adding to the conversation and ensuring relevance with ideas that have stood the test of time. Saxophone players still learn Charlie Parker solos; classical musicians always have a grounding in the standard repertoire. Brewers work with traditional styles in one way or another.
Like plant breeders going back to the wild genome for desirable traits, traditions are repositories of the past, and often a window into ways of thinking that may differ from modern views. The US craft movement was built on this foundation. Inspired by the existing beer cultures of Europe, some of these new-school beers started as fairly accurate replicas of the styles that spawned them. But as brewers interacted with their audiences and embraced North American ingredients, craft beers here became something new and different from their inspirations.
This is still happening. The treasure trove of classic European beers has sporadically been plundered, but obscure examples are still resurfacing. Look at the overwhelming enthusiasm for gose, that quirky, salty-sour Germanic witbier variant that tickles today’s palates just right, and also makes a great base for everything from blood orange to cucumber.
Love them or hate them, styles and the specific set of ideas each represents, are a necessary form of communication with beer fans. Each style is a familiar stepping-stone for drinkers; the space between represents a strange wilderness. As my brewery partners and I have found out, there is only so much space on the tap list chalkboard, and faced with vague or non-existent style info, an enterprising bar manager will make something up rather than leave it blank. Communication is a mad tango, but one partner can’t venture where the other is unwilling or unable to go.
On the other hand, leather shorts can get a bit stiff. Tradition, if it’s too forcefully policed, leads to creative stagnation. Tradition can be simplified into empty pastiche, it becomes ossified, Disney-like and ceases to be living culture. This is when big business usually piles on, feigning the trappings of tradition but maybe just embracing a corpse. Some consumers are content with the bric-a-brac; the dirndls and lederhosen are enough. And the beer is tasty.
While a style discussion in a book or a competition guideline can seem precise and definitive, reality is often a lot messier. There may be quite a bit of variation from brewer to brewer and even some serious outliers and tangents. It is, after all, art.
But people don’t like messy. We have a tendency to pick out one thing or two and let the rest take care of itself. And there are times and places where people, decide to enforce tradition often for very good reasons. Starting in the early 1970s, England’s CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) started battling to preserve classic English cask ale. While it did prevent the extinction of real ale, it’s anti-innovation dogma spilled over into other aspects of beer. So while creative craft beer was blooming in the US, beer was pretty unimaginative in the UK until recently, where a new generation has gotten things moving again.
And even though styles appear to be fairly static, they often change continuously in their details. Brewers constantly make small changes to the product for reasons of economy, practicality and market pressure. They also depend on others for ingredients and technology, which puts the agriculture and processing of grain and hops beyond all but the very largest brewers’ control. European malt, for example, differs in genetics and manufacture compared to just a generation ago.
American mass-market beers show this incremental drifting. Modern versions are based on the same general idea from a century or more ago: pale beers incorporating about 25 percent neutral adjuncts like rice or corn. The labels, the Clydesdales and a lot of the other trappings are the same. The beer, however, is different in many ways. Malts have changed from 6-row to two-row. The beers themselves are paler in color, lighter in body, lower in hop bitterness and aroma. While many still say “lager” on the label, most show the telltale fruitiness that no true lager would ever display. One major brewer uses no actual hops in the process, just purified, re-blended hop components. Is the beer still traditional? Maybe, sorta, in some ways. Do their customers care?
So great is our desire for a great story, that we will latch onto the skimpiest wisp of a tradition and build a whole mythos around it. ”Farmhouse” beer pushes all of today’s significant buttons: artisanal, rustic, local, authentic. Wallonian hazy blonde ales in various guises are hot and drinkers really buy into the whole hazy agricultural summer vibe, and I admit to enjoying both the beers and the story myself. But as an actual matter of history, whatever farmhouse brewing there was in Belgium was at a bigger scale than you likely imagine.
For all its glories, history has already happened. It can only suggest what the future might bring. In practice, the future is dragged forward by the creative efforts of those who don’t simply want to repeat the past, but instead weave it in to a new tapestry that suits the moment and hopefully, stirs the soul.
Photo at top: Wolfgang Koedel, brewmaster of Capetown Brewing Company in South Africa, taps one of his exquisitely poised beers for guests.