Читать книгу Self-Sufficiency: Home Brewing - John Parkes - Страница 14

Prior to Prohibition in the 1920s and early 30s, there were thousands of breweries in the United States, mostly brewing heavier beers than modern US beer drinkers are used to. Most of these breweries went out of business, although some converted to producing soft drinks.

Bootlegged beer was often watered down to increase profits, beginning a trend, still ongoing today, of the American palate’s preference for weaker beers. Consolidation of breweries and the application of industrial quality control standards have led to the mass-production and mass-marketing of light lagers.

The decades after World War II saw a huge consolidation of the American brewing industry: brewing companies would buy out their rivals solely for their customers and distribution systems, shutting down their brewing operations. Smaller breweries, including microbreweries or craft brewers and imports, have become more abundant since the mid 1980s. By 1997 there were more breweries operating in the United States than in all of Germany, historically the most established brewing nation.

Many European nations have unbroken brewing traditions dating back to the earliest historical records. Beer is an especially important drink in countries such as Belgium, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom, with nations such as France, the Scandinavian countries, the Czech Republic and many others having their own methods, history, characteristics and styles.

There is a significant market in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, for ‘live’ beers. These unfiltered, unpasteurized brews contain live yeast, and are awkward to look after because not only do they continue to ferment in the cask but there is also a risk of air getting into the cask, turning the beer sour. ‘Dead’ beers, on the other hand, are easier to look after. These are beers that have had all traces of yeast removed before being pasteurized and transferred into airtight metal casks. Live beer quality can suffer with poor care, but many people prefer the taste of a live beer to a dead one. While beer is usually matured for relatively short periods of times compared to wine – a few weeks to a few months – some of the stronger so-called real ales have been found to develop character and flavour over the course of as much as several decades.

In 1953, New Zealand brewing pioneer, Morton Coutts, successfully developed the technique of continuous fermentation, a process which involves beer flowing through sealed tanks, fermenting under pressure and never coming into contact with the atmosphere, even when bottled, thus eliminating the possibility of the alcohol oxidizing into acetic acid (vinegar) and spoiling the beer. Coutts went on to patent this process which is still in use today by many commercial brewers.

In comparison, Marston’s Brewery in Burton-on-Trent, England, still uses open wooden Burton Union sets for fermentation in order to maintain the quality and flavour of its beers. Belgium’s lambic brewers go so far as to expose their brews to outside air in order to pick up the natural wild yeasts which ferment the wort. Traditional brewing techniques protect the beer from oxidation by maintaining a carbon dioxide blanket over the wort as it ferments into beer.

Traditional brewing techniques are still widely used for the sake of maintaining the quality and uniqueness of the final product, which suffers if brewed using the more efficient industrial processes developed in modern times. Today, the brewing industry is a huge global business, consisting of several multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers, ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.

Advances in refrigeration, international and transcontinental shipping, marketing and commerce have resulted in an international marketplace, where the consumer is presented with hundreds of choices between various styles of local, regional, national and foreign beers.