Tag: beer

Yeast, as Understood in 1736

gordsellar2 Comments

  I’m really glad I was able to get a second opinion on one little detail that has become of great importance to my ongoing novel project. That is: how well did brewers understand the function of yeast in brewing back in 1736? It might sound strange, but that detail is incredibly important in terms of a lot of things going on in the book! During my visit to Korea, I got a chance to read a fair bit of Jamil Zainasheff and Chris White’s book Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation. I wasn’t particularly blown away by the book: …

Continue Reading

A Brief Word About Historical Terminology

gordsellar2 Comments

Just read a wonderful piece over at the excellent beer history blog Zythophile on the historical changes undergone by the terms “ale” and “beer”: I used to think that their merger into synonymity was pretty much complete in Georgian England at the latest, agreeing with the historian WH Chaloner, who wrote in 1960, reviewing Peter Mathias’s great book The brewing industry in England, 1700-1830: “By the end of the seventeenth century the terms ‘ale’ (originally a sweetish, unhopped malt liquor) and the newer ‘beer’ (a bitter, hopped malt liquor) had come to describe more or less identical products following the victory …

Continue Reading

Beer and the Habsburgs, Plus Lager Confusion

gordsellar0 Comments

In my recent post about the economics of brewing and the consolidation of breweries in London in the wake of the Gin Craze, I mentioned that I’m searching for sources on beer under the Habsburgs. I haven’t found all that much, but maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise: after all, wine was preferred in Habsburg Vienna, and the kind of taxation that marginalized wines in England only affected wine consumption in the Habsburg Empire more slowly… though the eventual stratification we see in England does eventually appear in the Habsburg domains as well, and for the same reasons: ‘Modest’ is …

Continue Reading

Steam Injection Brewing? (and some Belgian brewing links)

gordsellar0 Comments

Good grief, this sounds cool. (There are more posts on the subject, too, of course, like this one, or these ones, over here, if you search around.) Like I said, it sounds cool, but a little hard to set up. Sometimes I wish I had a little stronger background with hardware and building stuff. I think I really would like to have a small steam-powered mash/boil setup. Also, here are some links connected to Belgian beer, which I’m posting here so I can find them again, but which others might appreciate too: I always forget to go and check out …

Continue Reading

Fusion Brewday: TriplIPA Riff — Wonmisan Tripel IPA

gordsellar0 Comments

On the weekend, a few of the brewers in Seoul gathered for a goodbye party for a brewer many of us have known and learned from over the last few years, Kevin. I brought a bottle of the OpperBacco brewery’s TriplIPA Speciale, a beer that I’d picked up in Rome on recommendation from the proprietor of the excellent Johnny’s Off-License. We sampled it at the end of the night, which was probably not optimal, but the beer seemed to be well-received. Fitting with what I noticed about Italian craft brew — that there’s a marked Belgian influence — this seemed …

Continue Reading