THE BREWERY
From Babylon and Egypt to St. Columban
Beer is a malted beverage that was brewed in Babylon and
Egypt from primordial times[572]
but it was held in low esteem
by the wine-loving Greeks and Romans, and because of
this deeply rooted cultural aversion made no imprint whatsoever
on early monastic life, from the literature of which
the terms cerevisa or celia are wholly absent. The drink
acquired significance, however, as monachism spread into
the north and west of Europe where beer has been a
traditional beverage since the remotest times and where wine
was as yet not made in sufficient quantities to take care of
all of the needs of the monks.
Pliny describes caelia, cerea and cerevisia as words of
Celtic origin denoting beverages drunk in his days in
Spain and in Gaul and remarks that its froth was used by
the women of these countries as a cosmetic for the face.[573]
The terms do not occur at any place in the Rule of St.
Benedict. The earliest evidence of the consumption of beer
in a monastic context, to the best of my knowledge, is a
passage in the Life of St. Columban, (543-615) written by
the monk Jonas of Bobbio (ca. 665) which relates that in the
days of Columban, beer was served in the refectory of the
monastery of Luxeuil (founded by St. Columban ca. 590).
In this account cervisia is referred to as a beverage "which
is boiled down from the juice of corn or barley, and which
is used in preference to other beverages by all the nations
in the world—except the Scottish and barbarian nations who
inhabit the ocean—that is in Gaul, Britain, Ireland, Germany
and the other nations, who do not deviate from the
custom of the above."[574]
Basic procedures in the making of beer
Beer is brewed in a number of different ways, resulting
in a variety of different brews. The manufacture of all of
them has certain basic steps in common:
1. First, grain, usually barley, is "malted," i.e., allowed
to steep in water until it begins to germinate, and starches
in the grain undergo chemical changes that produce
sugars.
2. Then the malted grain is mashed and infused in
gradually heated water, the temperatures of which are
raised in stages to 165° or 175°F. This heating arrests the
germination of the malted grain and results in a liquid
known as wort (sweet wort) which retains the natural
sugars and enzymes generated by infusion.
3. After completion of the infusion process the wort is
transferred to a kettle and to it is added the blossoms of
hops that give beer its characteristic aroma and flavor. This
mixture of wort and hops (hopped wort) is boiled for about
two hours.
4. After this operation is completed the liquid is
cleansed by straining out the hops and sediments, and
filtered into a cask or trough for cooling. At this point
the yeast is added to the wort and fermentation begins.
Beer may be fermented in a variety of ways, but until
relatively recently, the process favored on the Continent
was that of top fermentation, in which the yeast rises to
the top of the fermentation vat and is there skimmed off
when fermentation is complete. Some beers can be drunk
immediately after fermentation is complete. Others, particularly
those made by top fermentation are stored in
casks from two or three weeks to six months. During the
storage period the beer brightens and becomes charged
with carbon dioxide. Beer fermented in this way is stored
in an ambient of 58°-70°F, a condition entirely consonant
with temperatures that could be maintained both in the
Monks' Brew House where fermentation of the beer was
instigated, and in the great cellar used for wine and beer
storage (see I, 292-307).
Layout and equipment
On the Plan of St. Gall, the monks' brewery lies in the
western half of the Monks' Bake and Brew House (fig.
462). It covers the same area as the bakery, but has no
lean-to on the narrow end of the building. The space in
which it is accommodated is marked by the title "Here let
the beer for the brothers be brewed" (hic fr̄ībus conficiat
ceruisa). It is reached from the monks' bakery and has no
separate access from the outside. The monks' brewery is
furnished with all the equipment needed in brewing: a
stove with four ranges for heating water and boiling wort
with hops. The stove is identical in design with the large
stove in the Monks' Kitchen.[575]
Around that stove four
round objects are shown—vats or cauldrons, no doubt,
wherein the grain was steeped for malting, and infusion
was done. These could have consisted either of simple
wooden tubs, or of heatable cauldrons or of a combination
of both, and may have been in shape or construction like
any of those shown in figure 387 and 390. The south
aisle of the brew house serves as a cooler. It is furnished
with two troughs and a vat, explained by the inscription
"Here let beer be cooled" (hic col&ur celia). Here the
yeast was added to the worted liquid and fermentation
began. From the cooling troughs unquestionably the beer
was moved to casks in the cellar, and allowed to finish
fermenting and clearing, before it was brought to the table.
Replacement of wine by beer in ratio of 1:2
We have already drawn attention to the fact that wine was
the traditional monastic beverage, beer only a substitute,
and that a ruling of the Synod of 816 directed that if
shortages in wine had to be made up for by beer, this should
be done in the ratio of 1:2.[576]
Therefore, if such an emergency
arose, beer would have had to be available in considerable
quantities. Abbot Adalhard of Corbie allows each
visiting pauper a ration of 1.4 liters of beer per day.[577]
If
this same amount were issued to the monks and the serfs
of the monastery, this would mean that the monastery
shown on the Plan of St. Gall issued 350 to 400 liters a
day. Over a period of time, this practice would have required
storing a considerable volume of beer. Unlike wine,
beer is not a seasonal product, but can be manufactured
continuously, and in the monastery it probably was manufactured
continuously, like the bread in the nearby bakery.
Today the brewing of beer is almost exclusively in the
hands of commercial firms. Throughout the major part of
the Middle Ages it was a small-scale domestic operation.
Before the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when brewing
first emerged as a commercial venture, the monastery was
probably the only institution where beer was manufactured
on anything like a commercial scale.
Use of hops as a flavoring agent
The explanatory titles of the various bake and brew
houses of the Plan of St. Gall contain no direct reference to
the use of hops as a flavoring agent in the production of
beer, but it is quite possible that a tacit allusion to this
plant is hidden in the second half of the title which defines
the Brewers' Granary as the place "where the cleansed
grain is kept and where what goes to make beer is prepared"
(granarium ubi mandatū frumentum seru&ur & qd ad
ceruisā praeparatur).[578]
This granary is ideally located, in
the middle between the Monk's Brewhouse and their
Drying Kiln—which in addition to serving as a facility for
parching fruit and grapes, could also have performed the
function of a monastic oast house.[579]
There is sufficient evidence to make it clear that the
hopping of beer was in the early Middle Ages a widespread
monastic practice north of the Alps. In his Administrative
Directives of A.D. 822 Abbot Adalhard of Corbie addresses
himself in detail to the procedures that should control the
tithing of hops and their distribution among the various
monastic officials placed in charge of brewing.[580]
He makes
it a point to exempt the miller from making malt or from
growing hops (nec braces faciendo nec humulonem) because
of the weight of his other duties.[581]
Ural-Altaic origins
The origins of the use of hops as a constituent ingredient
in brewing is an intriguing literary and linguistic subject.
E. L. Davis, and others before him, have drawn attention
to the importance given to hops in the folklore of Finland
and the Caucasus region and believed to reflect a cultural
heritage of great antiquity. They thus inferred that hops
were used as an ingredient for beer in the northeast and
east of Europe long before this practice was introduced in
western Europe.[582]
In a more recent study, Arnald Steiger
traced the origin of the custom even further eastward.
The earliest word forms for hops (best reflected in Old
Turkish qumlaq), Steiger contends are found in a variety of
Ural-Altaic languages of great antiquity. From there the
term migrated west into the orbit of the Slavic languages
(Old Slavic chǔmelǐ and through the latter into the North
Germanic language groups (Old West Nordic humili) which
transmitted it to the Salian and Ripuarian Franks (Middle
Latin humelo . . . leading to Modern French houblon). This
evidence, Steiger argues, suggests that the practice of
hopping beer originated in Central Asia and was transmitted
from there to Northern and Western Europe by the
Slavs along the linguistic channels indicated by the
migration of the word for hops.[583]
The Greeks knew the plant only in its uncultivated state
(and under a different name), but the Romans grew it in
their vegetable gardens and used it as a flavoring agent for
salads.[584]
Earliest medieval mention of hops
Probably the earliest medieval mention of the plant is a
charter of A.D. 768 in which King Pepin the Short deeded
some hop gardens (homularia) to the monastery of St.Denis.[585]
During the reign of Charlemagne and Louis the
Pious the evidence multiplies. Abbot Ansegis (823-833)
lists amongst the annual deliveries to be made to the Abbey
of St.-Wandrille (Fontanella): "beer made from hops, as
much as is needed" (sicera homulone quantum necessitas
exposcit).[586]
Hops were part of the revenues paid to the
Abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés from several outlying
possessions (The fiscs of Combs-la-Ville, of Marenil and of
Boissy),[587]
and the plant is mentioned in various places in
deeds of the abbey of Freisingen, dating from the reign of
Louis and Pious as well as from later periods.[588]
All of these references to the plant, in conjunction with
the detailed directives issued by Abbot Adalhard on the
tithing and internal distribution of hops leave no doubt
that, at the time of Louis the Pious, hops had become a
customary ingredient of beer produced in the transalpine
monasteries of the Empire.[589]
One of the beneficial effects of its admixture, besides the
distinctive flavor it imparted to the brew, was that owing
to its antibiotic properties it prolonged the life of beer
considerably over that of the older and more perishable
ale.[590]
This was of great importance when storage in bulk
was required and where transportation was involved—as
they inevitably were in the beer economy of a monastic
settlement.
Contemporary sources make it quite clear that not
all the beer consumed by the monks and their serfs
was brewed inside the monastic enclosure. All the larger
outlying agricultural holdings, and many of the smaller
ones, had their own facilities for brewing. The delivery of
a tenth of their home-brewed beer was a standard procedure
in the tithing of tenants. Records of these tithes
appear in the deeds of the monastery of St. Gall from as
early as the middle of the eighth century. Some of the
tenants had licenses to set up taverns, and many of these
continued to pay for their tenancy through the delivery of
beer even later, when all other forms of tithing in naturalia
had been abolished.[591]
Work in the bake and brew house:
a privilege of the monks
Working in the Bake and Brew House was one of the
manual labors traditionally required of the brothers, and
so specifically stipulated both in the preliminary and the
final resolutions of the First Synod of Aachen (816).[592]
The
brothers apparently liked this work, since one of the protests
lodged before the emperor in the same year by the
monks of Fulda about the hardships brought upon them
by Abbot Ratger's excessive building program included the
complaint that it deprived them of their traditional right
to work in the Bake and Brew House (pistrinum and brati-
arium).[593]
It does not seem far-fetched to suppose that the
constant warmth of the bakery attracted the brothers to
the chore of breadmaking. During the long northern winters,
when all warmth was leached from the cloister, the
bakery was one of the few places in the community a monk
could work in comfort of body as well as of soul, and
surrounded by the incomparable fragrance of new bread.
