The Rise of Lagers: 19th Century American Beer

Gary Arndt: 00:00:04

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:07

My name is Gary Arndt.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:09

With us again, is the professor, Allison McCoy.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:12

And the sage of suds the chancellor of beer school, Mr.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:17

Joel Hermansen.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:17

We're here to talk some more about beer in American history.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:21

In this episode we're going to be talking about lagers in the 19th century and how beer really changed in the United States from what we were talking about in the last episode.

Gary Arndt: 00:00:32

We were talking about early American beers the role that it played in the fermentation of the American Revolution and what then changed?

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:42

First of all, thank you for Sage of Suds.

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:44

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh my God.

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:45

I'm writing this down.

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:47

That, that is maybe the greatest nickname that's ever been bestowed upon me.

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:51

Yeah.

Joel Hermensen: 00:00:52

And, and just as a quick refresher, if you hadn't listened to the previous episode, the last five minutes, don't Please stop what you're doing and go back and listen to just that where we talked about kind of the profiles and flavors that you would have found at an early 19th century public house.

Joel Hermensen: 00:01:12

Particularly pay attention to the the comments on patriarchy.

Joel Hermensen: 00:01:15

Those were excellent but I think in the early 19th century, there's four enormous changes in brewing that emerge and we'll just kind of run through these and, and we'll kind of get some questions about those, but the first one is in the 1820s, there is a massive migration of German people to the Americas, and German people are going to bring a beer culture wherever they go, and they brought it to the United States, so that's going to be change number one.

Gary Arndt: 00:01:49

And what's the difference between what they brought versus what was here beforehand that the English had?

Joel Hermensen: 00:01:54

Yeah, there's gonna be a greater emphasis on lagering and the second big change just to you know kind of get a little bit ahead of myself is going to be the arrival of lager yeasts in the 1830s lagering and for those just a quick recap super fast, quick brewing explanation.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:16

there's two types of, of yeast.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:18

There's ale yeast and lager yeast.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:21

Ale yeast ferment from the top down.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:24

And they function at much warmer temperatures.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:27

Which is why most, you know, homebrewers, that don't have the capacity to chill beer while it's fermenting.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:36

They're going to use ale yeast because ale yeast can thrive at 70 degrees or room temperature.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:42

So almost all of the beer in, in, well, all of the beer before the 19th century that was brewed here was, was brewed with ale yeast.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:51

In the 1830s, shortly after the arrival of the German population.

Joel Hermensen: 00:02:57

And then, you know, The Germans came to the coastal cities and then gradually migrated to the middle west, which is why Places like st.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:06

Louis and Milwaukee and Cincinnati have such a strong German You know connection at the same time that they're arriving in those places We are seeing the arrival of loggering yeast Loggering yeast ferments from the bottom of the vessel to the top It's a bottom fermenting yeast, and it has to be chilled.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:30

And this is one of the reasons when you look at the early brewing cities in the United States, St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:36

Louis is one.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:38

Obviously being, you know, from Wisconsin, we're partial to Milwaukee.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:41

Milwaukee, no offense to St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:44

Louis, is probably the more important brewing city in American history.

Joel Hermensen: 00:03:50

And one of the fundamental reasons behind that is the German population that arrived in Milwaukee in the 1820s, 30s, and the arrival of lager and yeast.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:02

So a lager is going to be a beer that, you know, as we were talking about at the end of our previous episode, you know, those early American ales were probably I'm going to borrow Dr.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:17

McCoy Fleshman's words.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:18

They were accurate.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:19

There was a lot of off flavors.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:23

It didn't have probably a very pleasant mouth feel to it.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:26

If you've ever had a really good lager, like McFleshman's Pirate's Cove is outstanding.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:32

You're going to find a beer that is incredibly crisp.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:35

And the yeasts have great flavor.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:38

very, very active.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:40

They have had the temperature to, to function at, and the beer is incredibly clear.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:46

So beer becomes clarified, it becomes refrigerated, particularly in the Midwest.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:53

Not using, you know, refrigeration, that's a concept that happens, you know, much later after the Civil War.

Joel Hermensen: 00:04:59

But they're using just the cold temperatures of this region.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:03

So people were brewing in large quantities, particularly after, you know, October because they had the climate to do so.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:12

With what you were saying with respect to St.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:14

Louis and Milwaukee, I think you're right.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:16

St.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:16

Louis had one very successful brewery that came out of there.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:20

Whereas in Milwaukee, you had so many different ones.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:22

You had Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, Miller.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:25

All of these are German last names that came out.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:28

A lot of them eventually disappeared, but you just had this ecosystem of brewing and, and Milwaukee, even when I was growing up was known as beer city.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:38

That's what truckers called it.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:40

Right, and, and, you know, I mean no offense to St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:43

Louis, St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:44

Louis has a terrific beer history as well, but St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:48

Louis isn't as cold.

Gary Arndt: 00:05:51

Yeah.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:51

St.

Joel Hermensen: 00:05:51

Louis didn't have a proximal geography to the city of Chicago, where after the Chicago Fire, in the 1870s, they needed Because Chicago was also a great brewing town, but after the fire occurred, Milwaukee kind of stepped into that void and completely took over the region's brewing prowess.

Joel Hermensen: 00:06:16

And that's where you started to see kind of this migration from You know, large breweries, I would, I would say that, you know, the early breweries in Milwaukee, Schlitz and Blatts and stuff, they were very large.

Joel Hermensen: 00:06:31

But they weren't what they were after that Chicago fire.

Joel Hermensen: 00:06:34

Like, they become these monolithic brewing, you know, companies that are producing, in the case of Pabst, I think they hit a million barrels a year in the 1890s.

Joel Hermensen: 00:06:45

That's an incredible amount of brewing.

Joel Hermensen: 00:06:50

and you don't have that particularly in an age before refrigeration, and if you don't like Wisconsin winter, you're not going to like this comment, but we're blessed with phenomenal lagering weather.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:00

there's nothing better than doing a homebrew in Wisconsin.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:04

And you know, you have to try to do your best to bring that temperature down to 68 as quickly as you can You brew in your kitchen on a day.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:13

That's 10 below zero.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:14

You put your brew kettle outside for 10 minutes and you're there You know, we have this this remarkable Opportunity to do that

Gary Arndt: 00:07:23

All of these cities you mentioned that were heavily settled by germans are in what was called at the time the west We call it the midwest today.

Gary Arndt: 00:07:30

Yep What role did the Erie canal play in I suppose beer and also the settlement of that region?

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:37

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up because that was number three.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:41

The Erie Canal, for those who don't know, connects the Atlantic Ocean through the Hudson River to the Great Lakes.

Joel Hermensen: 00:07:48

And all of a sudden, what the Erie Canal really does is It takes the coastal region of the United States, which had developed, obviously, more urban and cosmopolitan culture, and all of a sudden it connects it to other parts of the country.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:06

And ideas flow.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:10

Technology flows, goods and services, people flow, and all of a sudden the Midwest starts to grow and experience some of the same things that were happening on the East Coast.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:21

It becomes easier to get ingredients.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:24

For example, New York was the largest producer of hops in the early 19th century.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:30

Hops are then finding their way to cities like Milwaukee where they're using lagering yeast and they're producing these remarkably crisp beers that, particularly when you're serving it in February in Wisconsin, they're ice cold.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:45

And I think the entire, you know, notion of beer changed.

Joel Hermensen: 00:08:49

Philadelphia was another place that it changed quite a bit because they had a climate That was closer to Milwaukee than it was to, you know, for example, Richmond, Virginia.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:00

So they started to use lager.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:02

And a lot of this was kind of fueled by that Erie Canal.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:07

Which also, and this is innovation number four, brought Irish people.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:12

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Yay!

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:13

To the midwest.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:15

Obviously the potato blight in the 1845-1846.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:20

The migration of Irish, people was Occurring at astonishing numbers in many cases they were Kind of forced to leave europe.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:30

So they came here And they settled on the eastern seaboard.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:34

They moved to the midwest through the erie canal and the and the Communication networks and they brought a completely different style of beer like the Germans brought lager Mm hmm, and the Irish are going to bring stouts.

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:49

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Yes

Joel Hermensen: 00:09:51

But you can't make a stout unless you have the appropriate malt So the other thing that happens is you start to see new developments in malting like the rotary malting convection oven Or the rotating drum that you can, you can really darken malts.

Joel Hermensen: 00:10:09

And, and you can't,

Joel Hermensen: 00:10:10

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: It's a glorious black perfection.

Joel Hermensen: 00:10:12

Oh, it tastes so good, right?

Joel Hermensen: 00:10:14

And

Joel Hermensen: 00:10:14

you can't you can't do that with the malting that they were doing in the late 1700s early 1800s You can't just to go back briefly what you said about the erie

Gary Arndt: 00:10:23

canal Most people don't realize If you were to look at one of the things reasons why the united states was so successful and grew so fast in the 19th century The united states has the largest inland waterway system in the world If you use the entire mississippi river basin You The great lakes and the intercoastal waterway system along the East coast.

Gary Arndt: 00:10:43

It's larger than all the other inland waterway systems in the world combined, which meant that you had this enormous area where goods could go travel easily and allowed for something that was in the Midwest to service things that were otherwise on the East coast.

Gary Arndt: 00:10:57

I think it was James Monroe that initially talked about one of the, the initial problems in the United States was the tyranny of space.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:06

That you had these enormous distances and it was cheaper to ship, say, a piece of furniture from London to Philadelphia than it was to take that same piece of furniture 40 miles inland.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:18

Because it was so expensive to do it by land.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:20

But that inland system revolutionized the entire economy and obviously it completely helped in this particular part of it in terms of beer.

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:29

This is why Gary Arndt is a national treasure.

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:31

That little interlude right there, connecting James Monroe, the freight rates along the Erie Canal.

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:38

I, I, I'm, I'm just speechless.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:40

Water makes transport, or made transportation at the time, cheap.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:45

And that is what made, you know, so much of the country up until you get to the Rocky Mountains accessible.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:51

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: There is even an inland, or a, a seaport, if you will, in Oklahoma.

Gary Arndt: 00:11:56

It reaches that far in.

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:58

Really?

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:59

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Mm hmm.

Joel Hermensen: 00:11:59

The port of Catoosa is what it's called.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:01

It's out, you know, kind of near Tulsa.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:03

Huh.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:04

About a mile from where we're sitting, you can get in a canoe, and you can go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:10

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Rock on.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:12

Go down the Fox River to Lake Michigan, down the little St.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:16

Lawrence Seaway.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:17

And get there from there.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:19

And a lot of people don't realize that, that you can, or if you wanted to, you'd go down Lake Michigan, go to Chicago and go to St.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:25

Louis or to, to new Orleans via the Mississippi river.

Gary Arndt: 00:12:28

It's that connected.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:30

So speaking of connections and trade networks and communication networks, the Erie canal is the first big one.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:38

The second big one.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:40

Which you mentioned getting to the Rockies, well, all of a sudden in the period after the Civil War as people are migrating west, you know, even in the pre Civil War period as part of that Manifest Destiny, that is largely fueled by railroads.

Joel Hermensen: 00:12:56

So, on the one hand, you're able to easily get to the Middle West.

Joel Hermensen: 00:13:01

Through the Erie Canal, but then after that period you're you're finding it far easier particularly by 1870 to get all the way to the the Rockies and then even beyond to the Pacific Which is also going to change the beer culture Because one of the things we're going to come back to the quote again Charlie Bamforth you know beer is Is kind of this constant and things change around it And when the Irish came to the Midwest, they brought stout styles.

Joel Hermensen: 00:13:34

When the Germans came, they brought lagering styles.

Joel Hermensen: 00:13:37

When you start to move to the Rockies and beyond, you're starting to see, again, additional changes, you know, to brewing.

Joel Hermensen: 00:13:47

So all of these things kind of connect.

Joel Hermensen: 00:13:50

And not to simplify it, but beer really is the basis of static civilization.

Gary Arndt: 00:13:59

I mean, in our previous episodes, we had Nicola Twilley on and she, she talked a lot about the role of refrigeration and the role that beer played in it.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:07

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: You can get her book Frostbite on some place that you can get books on the interwebs.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:11

But yeah, that was, enormous.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:13

It wasn't just that refrigeration played a role in beer, but beer was a driving force behind refrigeration.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:20

Yes.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:22

And also, I, I think was really responsible for the the popularity of lagers was I mean the Germans brought loggers here But what allowed it to really expand and for everyone to drink it was the fact you could drink a cold beer and up until That point the idea of a cold one Didn't really exist

Joel Hermensen: 00:14:40

unless you were in Milwaukee in February, right?

Joel Hermensen: 00:14:43

Which

Joel Hermensen: 00:14:44

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: but then you would also be the cold one because you're surrounded by the you know Frozen depths of the tundra because it's so damn cold.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:50

Yes It really isn't that cold here.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:53

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh my god, dude, I'm from the South.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:54

It's so cold.

Gary Arndt: 00:14:54

No, it

Joel Hermensen: 00:14:56

Coming back to refrigeration, refrigeration starts to appear in the 1880s, which is also really the time in which America has multiple industrial revolutions.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:07

The first one is in, you know, the 1820s and 30s where we're starting to see, the beginnings of steel production and iron and, and that's ultimately going to fuel railroad technology.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:19

But the second one occurs after, really after Thomas Edison enters the equation with incandescent lights and electricity and Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:32

Refrigeration is a part of that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:35

And refrigeration changes kind of the entire calculus of how beer is brewed as does pasteurization.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:42

Can you give us a quick scientific overview of pasteurization?

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:46

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Hot stuff kills bugs.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:49

There you go.

Gary Arndt: 00:15:50

Thank you, Dr.

Gary Arndt: 00:15:51

McCoy.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:52

That, that was

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:54

fabulous.

Joel Hermensen: 00:15:54

But again, when you add that to refrigeration to lagering, you're going to have beer that has a longer shelf life.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:00

You're going to ultimately, start to move into a place, and I think this really happens during that prohibition period, which is part of our next episode, is you start to see drinking at home.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:15

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh, that's a lovely thing.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:17

Yes.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:17

Because that was never possible unless you were extremely wealthy and had your own casket.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:22

Well, you could have a bottle of whiskey.

Joel Hermensen: 00:16:24

Not drinking beer at home.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:27

And to go back to pasteurization, where this has been a common theme on my podcast, in many episodes that I would say, like, if we were to lose all the knowledge and of our civilization, what's the one sentence that, that we would probably want to take forward.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:40

It's that the germ theory of disease.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:42

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh, absolutely.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:43

That this was something that people had kind of figured, you know, they knew that there was something.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:48

Ignace Semmelweis was the Hungarian who figured out at a maternity hospital that if doctors washed their hands, it lowered the fatality rate.

Gary Arndt: 00:16:57

John Snow was the epidemiologist in London who figured out the cholera epidemic, but they didn't know what it was that was causing it.

Gary Arndt: 00:17:03

And it was Louis Pasteur, who probably did the biggest part of it, that figured out that there were germs.

Gary Arndt: 00:17:09

That these microscopic things that they had seen before through microscopes was the cause of this stuff.

Gary Arndt: 00:17:14

And that not just in terms of health but also in terms like in brewing and food science and food preservation was enormous and a huge chunk of the increase in life expectancy that we've seen over the last hundred years i'd say the majority of it is that one thing

Gary Arndt: 00:17:29

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Probably so.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:30

Louis Pasteur was working at a brewery.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:33

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Yeah rock star discovery.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:34

I think part of that too Creating stainless steel or just steel in general is also kind of this side story of how the brewing industry really was revolutionized.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:44

So like under pasteurization, you need to get it really, really hot, but you can also do it under really high pressure.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:50

You have to have these vessels that you can put under really high pressure and like autoclaves and such.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:54

And so anything under high pressure is going to break or bust.

Joel Hermensen: 00:17:58

And so that's where the steel comes in.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:00

This is one of the reasons that In the late 1600s folks were doing, well folks, the thermodynamicists in France were doing all these studies on pressure and volume of gases and then the balloonists came from that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:11

But it's really hard to get things under pressure without things exploding.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:14

So most stuff was done at constant pressure just because it was safer and you could, you know, didn't get glass in your eye or something like that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:20

And so I think that with the materials, they were able to then push the technology forward.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:25

And this goes back to what you were saying with the malting.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:28

One of the problems of getting that really roasty, crisp grain malted or roasted, I should say, is that most of the places would catch on fire before they could actually, like, slow and slow toast the grain.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:41

Right,

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:41

And, and that goes into another thing, too.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:43

All beers, you know, we have, there's a special type of beer, and I for those who are new to the podcast, I'm a very fussy beer drinker.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:50

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: One of the fussiest, actually.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:52

You're kind of a diva beer person who's very much, Oh, I'm sorry.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:55

This is recording.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:56

I

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:56

think that was a compliment.

Joel Hermensen: 00:18:57

I'm not sure, but like a smoky beer,

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:00

I hate smoky beers.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:03

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: That's,

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:03

but that would, that would be all you would be able to,

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:06

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: that's actually what they would have tasted like back in the day,

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:08

Because when you were doing this kind of.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:11

Primordial roasting, you are undoubtedly getting smoky flavors.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:16

But as beer becomes, and I love your mention of stainless steel.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:21

Or just

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:22

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: steel in general.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:22

Right.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:24

But it, beer becomes industrialized and it becomes an industrial process.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:30

And being that it's an industrial process, they sought efficiency.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:36

They sought redundancy.

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:37

They sought the ability, you know, and Bobby has said this on a number of occasions And I think people that don't know what he's talking about were probably like really because you're a craft brewer But he will tell you that the best brewers in the world are the ones that work you know, at the domestic...

Joel Hermensen: 00:19:56

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Technically, they're really now computer programmers are the best brewers in the world because the big industrial systems are so automated, but they have it to the like eighth decimal place of accuracy or actually should say precision on that part.

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:09

And do they produce the best beer?

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:11

Do they produce the widest variety?

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:13

No.

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:14

But they're able to redundantly make the same product over and over.

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:18

So it became industrialized.

Joel Hermensen: 00:20:20

It became efficient.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:21

To add to what you said about steel, steel wasn't widely manufactured until the development of the Bessemer Steel Process in 1856, which is happening at the same time, you're seeing refrigeration start to come and all these other things are happening that all lead up to this, that, that allow for these industrial processes to happen.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:41

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: I also have to throw in because this is just way too interesting.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:44

It was in mid 1700s.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:45

So, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was the German physicist who invented the alcohol thermometer in 1709.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:51

So the thermometer had at least a hundred years of development from that to then know what the temperatures were with all this extra industrial part.

Gary Arndt: 00:20:59

Fun fact, you know Why Fahrenheit picked the scale he did where he, where 32 degrees is freezing and two 12 is boiling.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:09

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: I sadly know the answer because I just read it on the screen, but tell me, Gary.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:13

Oh, because, well, first of all, we use degree for temperature, but we use degree to also measure the angles of a circle.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:20

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh mmhmm.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:21

And 32 and 212 are 180 degrees from each other, which is as far apart as two things could be on a circle, which is why he picked degree as the unit of measure.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:33

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Oh, interesting.

Joel Hermensen: 00:21:34

A Gary Arndt moment for those who are listening in at home.

Joel Hermensen: 00:21:38

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: That blows my mind because that's not what I just read.

Joel Hermensen: 00:21:40

So this little thing says he chose 100 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale because that was the human body temperature.

Joel Hermensen: 00:21:45

But then it was adjusted to 98.

Joel Hermensen: 00:21:47

6 because he was, you know, not that accurate in his value.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:50

I had heard that he used a salt ice combination to pick the zero,

Gary Arndt: 00:21:54

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: yeah, totally.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:55

That's so fascinating now, but no, I never knew.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:57

But it was

Gary Arndt: 00:21:58

180.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:58

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: That's crazy.

Gary Arndt: 00:21:59

Between boiling and freezing.

Gary Arndt: 00:22:00

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Because Fahrenheit's the F word around here.

Gary Arndt: 00:22:02

We use Celsius.

Gary Arndt: 00:22:04

Because Fahrenheit's a dumb scale.

Gary Arndt: 00:22:06

It kinda is.

Gary Arndt: 00:22:07

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: It's such a dumb scale.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:08

We'd like to apologize to any partitioners of the Fahrenheit scale.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:12

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Nope, nope, not taking that back.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:14

Nope, you own it.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:15

It's Celsius.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:16

Please do Celsius.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:17

nothing to say after that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:20

I don't either.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:22

Where does one go after this?

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:24

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Not to Fahrenheit.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:25

Can we, can I go from temperature to temperance?

Gary Arndt: 00:22:29

Sure.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:29

So, we would also be making a mistake as we sit here in the, in the Prohibition Room not to kind of talk a little bit about the trajectory of the 18th Amendment.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:38

Which was probably in part driven by the rise of kind of these, these industrial brewers like Pabst and Schlitz, and later on Miller, and all of the tidehouses.

Joel Hermensen: 00:22:52

That were springing up, supporting their brewing, which was leading to people all over the country, you know, being able to go to a tide house and to drink Schlitz or Blatts or Pabst products or whatever.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:07

And they were spending too much of their income at these tide houses, which, facilitated the rise of women leading, you know, much of the charge behind that temperance movement.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:19

And beer was actually really the primary target.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:23

Because beer was so readily available at that point.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:27

Whiskey distillers and things like that, they didn't really have like a tidehouse.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:31

You know, that you would just buy whiskey and oftentimes drink it at home or whatever.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:35

But beer, this is in that period before, beer is consumable at home, so people were going to these tide houses, which is taking them out of the home, you know, kind of leading to this perception that there was a, kind of this degeneration of the family and family values.

Joel Hermensen: 00:23:52

So that's why beer was really kind of the primary target of the Prohibition Movement, which, as we know from looking at the economics of the situation was an absolute disaster for the United States.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:07

I think we tend to overlook the power of the temperance movement, which was actually a very big social movement at the time.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:14

It kind of grew steadily throughout the 19th century.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:17

And there was if you were to make a venn diagram of the temperance movement the women's suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement there would be a lot of overlap there would between those movements and I think two of those we kind of look at as oh, you know progression of society and then the temperance movement we kind of think of as sort of this historical joke.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:37

It's something that happened and whatever.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:39

But those three things were actually kind of really connected.

Gary Arndt: 00:24:41

That you had religious people that were involved in all three.

Joel Hermensen: 00:24:46

Well, this is again how beer tends to impact all elements of civilization.

Joel Hermensen: 00:24:52

As you get industrial, efficient, scientific brewing, which is producing more, which is leading to the cultivation of tide houses.

Joel Hermensen: 00:24:59

There's a cultural movement that responds to that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:03

There's a social movement.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:04

That responds to that.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:06

So all of these things, , they're, they're always kind of inexorably tied together.

Gary Arndt: 00:25:10

in fairness, I think it also has to be pointed out that early Americans drank a lot.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:15

They did.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:15

Like gallons.

Gary Arndt: 00:25:17

Like, I mean, from what I, what I can figure, and I've also done an episode on this, Americans, maybe the early 19th century may have been the biggest drinkers in world history.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:27

Yes, I would completely agree.

Gary Arndt: 00:25:31

And and so the rise of the temperance movement out of that is almost kind of understandable how it would have happened.

Gary Arndt: 00:25:38

And because you know people have been drinking ales for a long time And you never saw this movement arise really until it was an American phenomenon at this period, you know of time

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:48

And I think drinking it the ale that we talked about, you know at the late 19th century public house That would have been hard to drink a lot of.

Joel Hermensen: 00:25:57

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Well, I, I'm wondering now, because as the technology improved for beer, you wouldn't have had those lower ABV beers.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:04

You would have actually started to be able to consistently control and get the ABV to be higher.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:09

And so now, the quantity of beer that you're drinking is becoming closer to, well, not closer to the ABV of whiskey, but if you continue to drink the small beer 2.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:22

8%, but now it's 6% alcohol you're now not really staying on your feet,

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:27

Right.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:28

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: And that's why pissing off women who aren't allowed to drink during that time because you know what F the patriarchy

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:34

We're gonna end almost in there on the same note, even before the Volstead Act, which ended prohibition and led to the 21st Amendment, there was actually an act before that, the Cullen Harrison Act, which mandated that beer could not exceed 3.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:50

2 percent.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:51

Which goes to what you were just talking about, which, you know, if, if a 200 pound male is drinking.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:58

3.

Joel Hermensen: 00:26:59

2 percent alcohol.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:01

I mean, it is going to take, I don't know what the number is, but it's going to take a significant amount of beer to incorporate intoxication.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:08

For those people like myself, but like higher ABV beers, 3.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:13

2 seems like a really sad number.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:14

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: Yeah.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:15

Whereas tiny people like me love the 3.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:18

2.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:18

Cause I can have two of them and still be okay.

Joel Hermensen: 00:27:20

Right.

Gary Arndt: 00:27:20

That being said, I don't think there were a lot of 200 pound people back then.

Gary Arndt: 00:27:23

Allison McCoy-Fleshman: True.

Gary Arndt: 00:27:24

Anyways, that concludes this episode.

Gary Arndt: 00:27:26

So please remember to join our Facebook group, support us over on Patreon links to both of which are in the show notes.

Gary Arndt: 00:27:31

And until next time, please remember to respect the beer.