SUSAN: Good evening, everyone. That was a
great quiet down.
Thank you for that. Welcome to the National
Museum of American History
and to our inaugural American History
(After Hours) event.
This is a new program series at the
museum where we are looking at
intriguing historical topics through
modern day approaches
all while enjoying some delicious food and
drink which you will be doing shortly.
I'm Susan Evans, I'm the Program Director
of the American Food History Project
here at the museum
and tonight we are Brewing Up History. So,
sales of craft beer in the United States
have been on a steady increase since the 1990s,
and in fact the Brewers' Association
reported last year that
currently the United States has over
3,000 operational breweries
which means that we currently have more
breweries right now
than any other time since the 1870s. So
how are today's brewers looking to the past of brewing
some of that 1870s and earlier brewing history
and what
has really changed or stayed the same in
the world of brewing
throughout that time period. So with me
to discuss
this tonight are Greg Engert to my
left and Mike Stein --
yes that's his real name. Greg is the
beer director and managing partner for
Neighborhood Restaurant Group
which includes Bluejacket, Birch and Barley,
Churchkey, and many other restaurants
around the DC region
Mike is the brewery historian at DC
Brau, he's a staff writer at DCBeer.com,
and the President of Lost Lagers.  So we'll
be talking for about 30 minutes
up here that will turn it over to you
for some questions and
while we are doing that, please feel
free to take out your cell phones and
tell
all of your friends what a great time
you're having using the hashtag #DCbeer1812. 
So after we've wrapped up in here,
we'll move on to the part you've all been
waiting for and we'll go taste some beers
and enjoy some food made by
chef Kyle Bailey at the Arsenal at Bluejacket and drink some beers that we're
talking about.
There'll be objects out-of-storage,
we'll have some exhibitions open, and we can
continue the conversation.  So with that
introduction I want to start off by
asking both of you
about a really interesting project you put
together in the past year or so
and one that has a really strong
historical connection.
So last year marked the two hundredth
anniversary of the Battle of Baltimore
during the war of 1812.
In fact, we have the very flag that
inspired the Star Spangled Banner
in this museum and that happened
during the Battle of Baltimore.
So in the spirit of that story and our
little historical warm-up
can you tell me a bit about your
1812 beers project?
GREG: Sure, so this is, I promise it's going to be convoluted and complicated.
Really. SUSAN: That's history!
GREG: So, Mike Stein and I have talked about doing historic collaborations
for quite a while now, and I think we probably both thought we do some kind of pre-Prohibition lager or something like that,
until Mike brought me some research that our friend Garrett Peck had done
about Navy Yard and Navy Yard
brewing, specifically the Washington Brewery
which, though established in 1796
in what is now Foggy Bottom area
moved down to a stone's throw away from where Bluejacket is today
in 1806? 5?
MIKE: 4. GREG: 4. That's why he's here.
And then operated there until about 1836 
So this was intriguing, and even more intriguing was the fact that we only
have two advertisements, both from the National Intelligencer
that give us any indication about the types of beer
that would have been brewed at this place 
and there's no recipes which I found
freeing
We weren't just going in and trying to replicate
some kind of recipe, but so we
set upon utilizing, I think, a lot of our
previous
research on historic beers. I know I
personally drew on my
research into English brewing history 
and, and started to kind of attack these
two advertisements and come up with a
project that ultimately
we'll all get to taste after this.
MIKE:  So, like Greg was saying we had planned to make
sort of a historic beer for some time. The question
of style was never really a question. We always
knew we were going to collaborate,
but with these beers that we choose to
do, we went
sorta back in time, but not just in time,
in place
to a very significant place to both of us, you know, Navy Yard.
And we had some clues, obviously we
didn't have a recipe
but we knew the size of the brewery, the Washington
brewery in Navy Yard, which was actually bigger -- their
copper was 1100 gallons, which is bigger than any
boiler in DC today, which is kinda
humorous.
And then we had some other context
clues
like Greg mentioned, we're both huge fans of history
so we've read a lot of writings on historical beer. You know, 
Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson and we're familiar with their work, but of course their work
is primarily based in Britain or England
or Scotland
I and we wanted to do something that was
relevant to DC where we
live and play and work, so we decided on
the Washington Brewery at Navy Yard
and then, again, the two ads we had. One was from 1811, one was from 1813
SUSAN:  And these were newspaper ads that you found, right?
MIKE: Yes, absolutely, from the National Intelligencer like Greg said. So there were three
The first ad from 1811, which was
advertised
for beer orders to be sold at Daniel Rapine's bookstore
was the second mayor of DC, who was decided mayor
before we even really had title for mayor -- he was a councilman -- by a coin toss.
At his bookstore you could place an order
for table ale
for three dollars a keg,  GREG: Literally a half barrel.
MIKE: Literally a half barrel. GREG: 15.5 gallons.
MIKE: It was four dollars for strong ale and
then five dollars for
X ale. And then the-
there are lots of historical arguments about
what that entailed.  Is that a style?
Is that was something a brewery made and
it's more a definition of a processes?  You know
X ale might have very well been strong ale that just sat longer, there's all this talk
stock ales and mild ale, and then the
convoluted
nature of style starts. GREG: And that was the fun thing for us.
Ok, it's like, if we start with those
three, it could literally mean
just about anything.  I mean, so we have
these, these names and there's
a rough reference point as to what it is--but--and then
cost, which should indicate strength, or at least original gravity, how much sugar existed
beforehand.
But, just to give you an idea of the
different permutations that these terms
could mean
way back when,
in 1811, 1812, 1813,
styles were not really existant, there was no such thing as style,
but even the terms we use today
meant something different back then. So
you had two major families:  ale and beer, right, so ale -
been around for, for a very long time
and beer basically is just very
well-hopped, or hopped ale, so ale
originally was not, was not hopped, until around the 1500s
when it comes to British brewing and things like that.
But then, from those two you can go
colors. So you can have, let's say, pale
ale, amber ale, brown ale.
No black ale, and we'll talk about why in a second.  But you can do the same on the beer side
so the same but just different hopping
rates, all right?
But then you can go to strengths so for
every one of those
pale, amber, brown ale, or beer, you can have
table, which is the lightest, right, the lowest ABV.
You can have common, which is stronger, so "strong"
then the table, and then you can have stout, which would be the strongest.
So stout back then just meant, uh, "strong."
SUSAN:  And ABV meaning alcohol content, alcohol by volume
GREG: Yes, alcohol by volume, or by weight at that time.
So now you have that, OK, and then the
last layer
is mild, which in those days meant
fresh, young, and then
a whole host of terms: keeping; stale,
which is a positive term, believe it or not. MIKE:  It's a good thing.
GREG: Stock, and eventually maybe old
meant the same beer aged, and they would do all these things to
everything.  So when we look at this and see "table,"
"strong," and "X," it's like
X could be a fresh version
of probably the strongest of the three, but what color is it?
You know, what ABV is it? Strong
doesn't mean stronger, but is it X? Is it
fresh, or is it K? Keeping? So this
was kind of like
a dead end here for us in many ways, 
so
you know, we started thinking, "OK, they're all probably,
probably related and I think that was
based on
the second advertisement, which we'll talk more about later,
wherein it states --
Well, there's a guy John Collett who buys this brewery
in 1811. He's a very enterprising
man, so buys the brewery, immediately puts an ad out
saying these three beers are for sale, okay? And then
by 1813 he's advertising the sale of
the brewery.  He wants to get rid of it.
And then he lists everything that's in the brewery's MIKE: inventory. GREG: stocks and inventory.
SUSAN: And now, was that supplies or types of beer that he was -- GREG: Just supplies.
So this is where we get new
information 
and also we find out more about the
brewhouse itself and things like that. In the interim, though,
when he first bought the brewery, we know
that
he bought the lot next door 'cause he intended to expand the brewery
and there was a malthouse as well, but
lo and behold people of the Navy Yard, the workers of the Navy Yard were actually more
interested in spirits than beer
and so it didn't seem like a profitable
business.  And so then he tries to turn around and sell it
in 1813. So, when we look at that information, that's where we find out that not only do they
have an
1100 gallon kettle, they have a second
500 gallon kettle, so they have to two kettles
which I don't think any of us in DC have today.
And one of the reasons why - the reason
why you'd have two kettles way back when
is to do something called parti-gyle
brewing,
and parti-gyle brewing
is basically -- I'll let Mike explain a little bit
more about that -- but is basically a way
by which you can make many different
strengths
of beer or ale from
one original grain base,
grist, and so then you can have, kind of,
the same beer
two ways, three ways, four ways, five ways, the lightest one being the lowest
in alcohol, and that's like the last one to be made, and the first one, the first runnings
being the strongest so that kinda
got us thinking in a whole different direction.
MIKE:  Yeah, and the interesting thing about, you know, this,
this type of brewing process that Greg is
talking about is even at,
even in this point in time in 1811, it's
done differently in England
than it's done in Scotland. In Scotland,
the boil time is much shorter so they may
have produced two beers from the same
mash
but they're boiling for sometimes is as
little as 60 minutes
but in English breweries, in the London breweries, they're mashing for
an incredibly long amount of
time and their boiling for an incredibly
long
amount of time I mean it's the same concept when you make soup or a stock on your stove -- if
you let it go
half an hour it might be very, you know,
liquid-y, not very viscous.  If you let it go an hour, more viscous,
an hour and a half well you have less
broth then you started with and it's the
same concept in beer.
So, this just, this method just opens a
whole 'nother rabbit hole to jump down
which we dipped a toe in but we didn't
want to
go full board.  GREG: Yeah, we didn't parti-gyle this.
MIKE: Right, right, exactly. SUSAN: What prevented you from doing that? Why didn't you 
wanna
do the whole process? GREG: Uh, we didn't have two kettles, I mean-
MIKE: Also, the brewers would have killed us. SUSAN: That was all that was holding you back?
MIKE: So, the last gyle, the last batch was boiled
for four hours before the eight-hour day
so have we spent 12 hours down at Navy
Yard
Bobby and Josh and Owen would have quit, they just would have been
so pissed off, they would have left. No, but in all seriousness,
um, there's no way to accurately recreate
this brewery from
1811, and knowing that at the outset of
the project
we made some concessions to history. SUSAN: And that's an
important point,
it sounds like there's no real way to
recreate it, so can you guys talk a little more
about that,what that --
recreating versus inspiration you got. GREG: Well, I think this strikes at the heart
of what we end up doing. Basically, you know,
creating historic beers is a conundrum.
Well, first off, it's, you're never actually
recreating
historic beer, right. We're not using copper in our brewhouse. We're not using --
I mean, grains are completely different today than they were back then, I mean, there's a whole host of reasons we don't need to go into, obviously, I think it's 
pretty clear. SUSAN:  That's it's not 1813 anymore.  GREG:  Right. So then,
on the other side, though, is you do try
to make
some concessions to get at the flavors
of the time, you know, it's
as simple as -- I don't think anybody's saying like, "Well,
you know, it's inspired by this." All
beers are inspired by
some kind of historic, stylistic, you know,
precursors. So you start to think about
what are the ways,
what are the few ways, that we can actually create flavors that are not of this era.
And then the problem with that, of course,
is that
those flavors are not of this era, so we might not like the way that
they taste, maybe progress has led us to come up with new
techniques and new types malt, and
so this is the conundrum. It's like how do we make it historically
interesting but not only historically interesting
SUSAN: And what are some of those tastes that you're talking about, when you say it might not be up to our taste,
what would it be like? GREG: So anyway, the big one, I think, for me anyway, in the beers you're 
gonna taste -- and just so everyone knows, too, you're not gonna hate all the
beers.  MIKE: We brewed bad beer, but on purpose!
GREG: But I think is the most interesting thing
is what we ended up doing to have it both
ways, so
this parti-gyle system basically ends up meaning that you create
one beer, right, and you'd have two kettles going.
So you mash in your grains
and you send that grain sugar
called wort over to one kettle and you're leaving your,
your grains behind in the latter tun. Meanwhile, in the
other kettle you're already cooking up
boiling up your new water that you're gonna
bring -- not boiling it, but heating it up pretty hot --
you're moving that over immediately
into the mash tun whereby
you can heat the mash up again and now send
more wort over to that
kettle from which that hot water just came, so now you've got two kettles going,
two boils going with wort. One, the first
one,
has way more sugar in it than the second one, right?
And so that if you do that a third time
now you've got the same beer
but each with decreasing amounts of fermentable sugar.
And then, if you,
so then if you apply the same hopping rate, same yeast, you create
three beers that just are different strengths, different flavors and intensities but all
related
on the same so that's kinda where we
went and decided
to say that table strong and X
were just three tiers, you know, X
being
the first runnings, 'cause it's the most expensive, table being the last.
But then we said, "Okay, how are we going to be historic about this?"  So
Mike found a maltster from England, Thomas Fawcett, right? >>MIKE: Right.
GREG: A 200-year-old maltster right, and they've got this malt
that nobody would use today, but it's called --
amber malt SUSAN: Perfect. GREG: and it gives you, literally, hardly any sugar, it's very
under-modified, so there's not a lot of sugar to ferment, and it's
got a pretty big roasted, kind of,
almost acrid character to it, and but we like
this is gonna be
our historic, you know, take on this
and so we decided to use it. MIKE: Yeah, I think it should be said, no
200-year-old barley kernel exists
today and if it does, not in the
quantities in which
modern brewers would use it. Bear in mind,
all the modern brewers in DC, whom I love,
all of them,
you know, just don't have the capacity,
even at the Washington Brewery at Navy Yard, so this
is on a massive scale
and they're malting their own grain,
something which is done by
very few breweries in the world today
because we've become more efficient
doing it elsewhere and just
buying our malt but this maltster, Thomas
Fawcett,
has been around for two hundred years,
and I went as far as
to email Mr. Fawcett and say, "Hey, do you have any records from
1810 to 1814, of course he didn't, but,
you know, I checked all bases. GREG: We tried. MIKE: Yeah we
tried.
SUSAN: Which is an important historical story, that that's how
you find out about history, is a lot of
dead ends.  GREG: So I guess,
so of course we didn't do the
parti-gyle method.  What we did instead
was create three recipes with the exact
same malt bill,
hot bill, which we can  talk about
later if we have time, or afterwards, and then the same
primary yeast, or yeast for primary
fermentation. I think the
plato gravities ended up being like, 23, 15, and 10.
So 23 was, just, the most sugar, 15 and then 10.
The finals ABVs ended up around 8.5%
for the first beer,
what we'll call X ale. 6.5% for
strong ale, and then 2.6% for the table ale.
MIKE: I think the original grav of the table even under ten,
it like nine. GREG: Eight or nine. MIKE: Yeah, round to nine. But very,
you know, I mean, our definition,
American craft brewers today, our definition of strong is really strong
I mean we're talking beers over 10%
whereas a premium strong ale in England
today might be 6%
which is a lot of the flagship beers
around here in DC
we like 6% pale ale, we like 6% whatever,
but that's the American palate. SUSAN: And do you have records historically of
what a strong ale, percentage-wise, would
have been comparable?
How do you find that out? MIKE: Yes, but the hydrometer has only existed
SUSAN: There you go, good point.  MIKE: Right, has only been around since-- GREG: The hydrometer is how you measure 
the sugars in the water, in the wort, 
so that's how you know, like, we started with this much sugar and ended up with this much,
now we can calculate alcohol amounts.
So, that's from the early 19th century. We didn't really knows strengths before that.
But we can guess at strengths based
on the gravities, you know,
that we had, and I think straight is-is relative. It goes up and down and up and down, and when you
go in and out of wars, for instance, it changes dramatically
MIKE: Absolutely. GREG: So when you start taxing or
restricting how much malt somebody can use, all the sudden, you know, your
definition of strength can go from 8% to 4%. MIKE: Of course.
SUSAN: So are you suggesting there's some sort of War of 1812 link here that you we just don't know.
GREG: There is. SUSAN: There was, you know, there was limits on what you could get.
MIKE: I'll say this, taxes were very important to what
was America in 1811 as
as they were in England and there's a
beer tax. England is just coming out of
the Napoleonic Wars they're still
involved in them
and the point is that we always talk
about the Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law.
Well, England had a purity law, too. France had, Paris--there was a Paris purity law,
but we know about the German
one because it's been intact for so long
SUSAN: And can you just explain what that, if people are not familiar with it? 
MIKE: Sure, so, the Reinheitsgebot 
determined that all German beer should
only be made with three ingredients:
water, hops, and barley. They didn't know about yeast, 
pure yeast culture at the time so yeast wasn't listed as one of the
ingredients. But, the Brits had a law
as well,
in, I think it was 1811, saying that all
British Beer must be made from the same
ingredients,
the fourth with yeast, and they couldn't use
sugar
or molasses or treacle or honey or any
of those ingredients that
the Brits, the British brewers could have used, as well as the Scottish brewers, and thats really interesting because
the Washington Brewery at Navy Yard is
housed
in the old sugar mill, in the old sugar
factory
where, of course, they would have had, there would have been a history of making sugar
and molasses and the other byproducts so
it's very interesting in terms of local
history,
how that varied from the Anglo
British-Scottish world. >>GREG: And also we know
from other recipes of the time that
molasses were used in a lot of
America brewing. Part of the reason for that is just the fact that the Mid-Atlantic
at that time was not and still is not a hotbed of grain-growing,
so you had to find your sugar source from some place.
And so, to that end, not only do we use, you know, Maris Otter Pale Malt, which is an English malt,
that's modern, amber malt, we use
some molasses, we use a little bit of chocolate malt, some
special W, which is also pretty intense, slightly acrid and roasty malt.
It's, uh, Belgian, but just trying to go to the
flavors. But
what I think is very important is that at some point
we decided to maybe go more historic, if I
can say that, on these
three in some ways, i.e., like, let's
let's stop worrying about necessarily, like, how its gonna taste to the modern palate
and let's go a little bit more historic
on these
because we started referencing that second advertisment
more and in that advertisement, you know, so John Collett decides he wants to 
sell the brewery, and so now this is where we find out that he's got
two kettles, and a malt house. This is where we find out he's got
five hundred bushels of barley
and malt. That's roughly, like, 24,000
pounds or so. That's where we find out he's got 2000 lbs of hops on hand
which would have been whole corn hops, so, a lot more than
you might expect. I mean, that's a
lot of hops on hand, actually, for the time. But its also where we find out
that he's got ale and porter, so those are the two
general categories mentioned, and a huge
stock
of barrels, oak barrels, in all sizes, too, so like, half-barrels
MIKE: Hogsheads... I mean these are just
GREG: Pipes and tuns. SUSAN: Words to describe shapes of barrels. MIKE:Wonderful early 19th-century words
for different size of barrels. Yeah, exactly.  GREG: And we knew, there wasn't any stainless steel in the
brewing industry
until the fifties. Keg beer is 1960s, so back
then you're filling
oak barrels, half-barrels, or barrels, and sending it out
and pouring from them but he also had pipes
and tuns, which are like 125-250 gallon
giant oak, kind of, >>MIKE: Vats. >>GREG: Vats.
So we start thinking about porter, we
start thinking about
vats, we start thinking about aging beer
and then, depending on who you believe,
there's kind of a little debate going on
about what porter once was.
MIKE: It's very hot in story in the historic beer nerd circle right now. GREG: It is.
MIKE: A raging debate. GREG: So on one side you have - so we chose to go with Ron Pattinson, who
is on the side of sour, because now we're starting to think,
"Well, wait a minute - we're gonna make these three beers. We'll make that table beer,
we'll make that X ale, and we'll make that strong ale,
and we'll make them pretty historically accurate, malt-wise.
But at the end of the day, let's create
one interpretation of what porter would have been in the early nineteenth century,
and that's a blend of ale,
typically a blend of ale, part of which is
aged, and therefore soured
and likely funky from the fermentation,
secondary fermentation of any number
of Brettanomyces strains, which is a
cousin to ale yeast, lager yeast,
Saccharomyces
that creates, kind of, funky flavors and it dries beer out.
And let's say that, you know, maybe
what we'll do
is we'll brew all three of these threads, and then we'll create a master porter blend,
but knowing that we didn't necessarily have enough time to let this
part of the blend age naturally and sour
naturally and get funky from Brettanomyces naturally
just from spontaneity of fermentation, we said let's dress up
those threads a little bit, too. So we, we took the
X ale, which is the strongest, it came out 8.5%, we said
we're not gonna manipulate that, we'll leave it as a sort of barleywine of sorts, right?
Then we took the 6.5% percent middle road one and
we spike that with Brettanomyces lambicus, which is typically found in, 
it's the funkier-producing flavor strain that
we find in lambic from Brussels and Pajottenland and we spike that in the middle one
so that got really dry and really funky and wild
and then with that 2.6% table beer we said, you know what,
let's hit that with some lactobacillus which
is
the deposited bacteria that gives us really
great tartness, and then we'll have three
strains of beer that are interesting and weird and
wild on their own, maybe even historically
evocative. But at the end of the day, we know
we can create a final blend, our homage to the early
19th century porter that is going to be much more to
our modern palates. SUSAN: So, can you talk a bit about that blending process
and what-- how blending would have worked in that time period and why,
you know, you're saying why you chose to do it now but how is it different now.
MIKE: So, as Greg was mentioning, there's this debate
about whether or not stock ale was sour
tart, funky... SUSAN: So,stock ale, porter, same thing or are those two different things?
MIKE: Right. A porter could very well be a stock ale.
That depends on the brewery, specifically in history.
GREG: Stocks are just aged, yeah, aged in the barrel. MIKE: It just means, it sat. But, just to fast forward, to go
 from 1811 to 1911, stock ale is probably a
lager
that's been sitting in these German
lager beer breweries but they might
still call it stock ale.
Confusing, I know.  GREG: And it wouldn't be sour at all. MIKE: And wouldn't be tart at all, it would be very clean, made with a pure
pastorianus, you know, a lager yeast culture.
What we found in that 1813 ad
is that beyond all the visers,
leagues, hogshead and in these massive vats and small little
kegs, all wooden, there were casks
of vinegar. So why would a brewery
be holding casks of vinegar? I mean, it's as random an ingredient as
sugar or molasses. Why didn't they put that in the ad as well? Well, I suspect that some of
those casks, serving casks, kegs,
had turned to vinegar because they've been stock
ale, stock porter, perhaps, for too long. So
did we want to recreate vinegar? No. I
mean, we could have done that
but the point is when we drink sour
ale, we like it to have an incredible
complexity and a depth, and what a better
way to do that than by creating
three unique ales and blending them together
to create a porter. And that's kinda
where the notion
came about. GREG: And also, so, for the blend,
we had, you know, 
So, at Bluejacket we have three incredible brewers
who are the heart and soul of that brewery
Their names are Josh Chapman,
Owen Miller, and Bobby Bump, so they
you know, well Mike actually sat in on a couple of the brew
days, I think, but the five of us got
together and then
Mike Tonsmeire, who's here as well, he'll be outside selling his book on sours.
We invited him in because he knows quite a bit about sour. MIKE: We invited
the man who literally wrote the book
"American
Sour Beer", I mean that's the title of the
book, and he'll be here tonight signing
books. But we invited him because we knew his palate is kinda
bar none.  He's traveled all over the world,
all over the country,
you know, to California and
to Texas, all over to these, sort of, renowned American sour beer breweries.
And these sour breweries are convening
with history in a sense that
they're making beer that was as tart as
turn of
the 19th century stock ale but, of course,
their ingredients are very 21st century
and their methods are very 21st century
and they don't have to let a beer sit for
six months to get it
nice and tart. GREG: So we did, I think
we ended up, like, 8 or 10
12 different blends? MIKE: I think it was eight blends. GREG: Tasted them out, and then
we ended up doing the final blend, which we loved,
with 25% of that table beer, and then the other
the rest of it splitevenly between the other
two threads,
right?  MIKE: And so we kinda got there by doing
okay we're just gonna start with two
strands and see what that's like. We blended the two, okay, well, we definitely want to add the
table beer because we know that's tart and funky,
and we did 1/3-1/3-1/3. Well this is
too earthy,too terra firma,
let's bring in some tartness. So it was like,
you know, 1/6-1/6-2/3, or whatever it was,
and eventually just got the ratio right. But it took
eight separate concoctions of just taking, you know, 
I don't know, 12 ounces of beer, a small amount, and blending them, you know,
3oz-3oz-3oz or whatever. GREG: Right.
MIKE: Yeah, I mean, it was a process
but that's something when you when you
buy
you know, the beer we love a Russian River beer, a Jester King beer
a Cantillon beer, that's all behind the scenes. They don't
I mean, sometimes they'll put in marketing what the bland is
GREG: Yeah, trust that it's blended.
MIKE: Right right exactly. GREG: It doesn't come out perfect from barrel anytime, necessarily.
I think, so, I mean, so we ended up with
this
more modern sour but still it's gonna
a lot of malt character
it's very funky, it's about 6% alcohol,
really tasty
a cool homage, like I said, to that kind of original early 19th century porter style.
SUSAN: So, as we're thinking about 
wrapping up the conversation, how do you
think that your dive
deep into history here will be impacting
what you do you as
brewers moving forward? GREG: I will never use amber malt again.
SUSAN: Learning from the past. GREG: Yeah, no, I think it's
it's really fun, it's, I don't know, I think it's
the stuff that we think about every day so I'd love to do more this stuff
keep learning about the way that the flavors can
be manipulated and get manipulated and things like that. 
It's just great, you know, honestly like
creativity
need some bounds for me, like, otherwise, it's just like chaos, like what do you make tomorrow,
you know? So this was a great thing to
focus on,
focus us on this project to create beers that we never would have made
had we not seen these two
advertisements and spoken together
about them, and then sat down with the brewers and created these recipes, and I think that's the most rewarding part. >>MIKE: For me, I think it's just
convincing as many brewers
as I can to keep using amber malt. No I'm just kidding. GREG: Or to let Mike in their brewhouse.
MIKE: No, which I'll say, you know, Jeff from DC Brau is here and
we did a great beer just with amber and
brown and
Maris Otter malt this summer, so, I think the way we learn
is we take what's good about the past
and we leave what's bad
behind and then we funnel that creativity into
a brewing project. So, you know, what's next, or what's for the 21st century, is looking back
through the centuries,
taking the best and maybe offering a flavor
experience that is very palatable
to the modern palette but is also evocative of what the palate was like
in the 19th. GREG: And I'd say the last thing is, we're not 
trying to be definitive here, obviously, we're not saying, "This is what beer tasted like back then!" Nobody should
ever say that
but you know we're starting a conversation.
We should all, I think, be interested in, 
was porter
tart? Was it not? Was it funky and breaded, you know?
I think these conversations are fun to have, and I think these beers make you think about them
And it's a another way to drink beer, rather
than just being, you know,
you know 100 points, or you know, this one's better than that one. It's to
create experience not just visceral but maybe a little bit more
intellectual, and
a great jumping-off point into other
ideas that are beyond the glass. SUSAN: Well i really appreciate from
the
historic perspective of how you guys really
dove deep into what was happening in the
past
and made it something that makes us
think about how history really
influences
the experiences that we're having today so
with that I wanna leave time for some
questions.
If you do you have questions there
are two microphones at either side of
the seats there, it's a packed house so make friends with your neighbors and kinda
scootch on
out to the microphone and we'll just take a
few questions before we turn
everybody out to try some of the things
that we just talked about.
So our first question is right over here.
I think they should be on.
Yeah, I can hear you so I'll repeat it.
GUEST: So, drinking sour beer
and avoiding problems with somebody that's diabetic. SUSAN: So I think the question --
GUEST: Is there a lower glucose or glycegin index? SUSAN: So I think the question is about
sugar levels, probably, in a beer?
so what and how -- if the sour beer maybe
have a lower sugar level than a different beer.
MIKE: I'm happy to handle that. So, I'm actually a type 1 diabetic
I have been since I was 7, so I've had it for a few decades now
and I'll say that generally speaking the
better
attenuated beer is better for the blood
sugar. SUSAN: Attenuated, can you say, what does that mean?
MIKE: So attenuation, right when a beer is really dry
it's well attenuated and that means
there isn't a lot of residual sugar.
The yeast has eaten that alcohol-- eaten that sugar and converted it into alcohol.
With these big rich styles like Russian
Imperial stout and barley wine
and old ale you can taste the sweetness
and that will jack your blood sugar up, no doubt about it.
The better attenuated beers: pilsners,
berliner vice that's been sitting for
years that's very attenuated with
Lactobacillus,
perhaps with Brettanomyces, that is, in
theory, better for a diabetic
'cause you can have 12 ounces of it and it's only, you know, ten carbs.
Comparatively, you know, 12 ounces of barleywine, that's going to be like 20 or 30 cards,
depending on which maltose, dextrins,
are inside of it.
GREG: But at the same time -- glucose -- I mean, you can have a beer that's
lowly attenuated that's really sour too. So, it's not, lactobacillus 
just convert sugar out into, you know, i mean when we make our sours, we use a particular kind of
lacto strain called Brevus
most the time, because we find it's able
to drop the pH
and acidify the wort without converting too
much of the sugar
we wanna leave that sugar to be fermented out by
Brettanomyces or other kinds of yeast, later on, so,
that's why you can have really sweet
and sour beers, you know, I think like
Rodenbach Classic or Duchesse de Bourgogne
kinda taste like sweet and sour, and it's for that reason.
Then you can have bone-dry heavily acidic beers, like Cantillon Lambic,
that's going to be bone dry and super
sour, too, so, it can go either way.
SUSAN: And if no one's ever experience what a dry beer tastes like, I think
you will have that experience, probably, when you taste them, 'cause it's
GREG: Among those and other beers that we brought, too. SUSAN: All right, another question over here.
GUEST: Sure, well, we know that hops barley, and malt are grown
in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, a number of other European countries but also in
the States.
Can you say something about where the
ingredients
came from for the historic beers and
where did they come from now
and what affect does that have on the
quality
and the taste of the beer?  SUSAN: So where the ingredients were being grown
historically where the ingredients you
guys are using in your brews today.
MIKE: So, that's a great question
how does ingredients -- how do ingredients affect taste in the end product.
The answer is very much so. You know, we didn't use any,
really, Czech or German, Eastern European
ingredient, and it's also a great mystery, too.
They had a ton of malt and a ton of hops, where did they get all those
from. Obviously if you go back to historical
record, you learn
you know, George Washington at some point, is against the English
porter and is in favor of porter from Philadelphia, and then it's made at home on his estate.
So, there's this shift in
ingredients and how ingredients might
even reflect patriotism or nationalism.
SUSAN: Ooh, a whole other lecture! MIKE: Yeah, sorry. SUSAN: Love that topic.
MIKE: Getting back to that question, ingredients do 
drastically affect flavor. GREG: I think, so,
of course, it's hard to say exactly what
we know obviously English
exportation stilll existed at the time so we're so importing. So we used some English malts
that's why we can use German or Czech malts or things like that.
We did use some locally grown wheat, unmalted wheat
not because necessarily it was going to be a part of that recipe
in the old days but to try to show that there
probably would have been some
influence of locall-grown grain in the beer, and then
one of the amazing chefs I get to work with
all the time, his name is Nathan Anda he's a butcher, too.
Red Apron, the Partisan, B Side,
he's incredible. He smoked some malt for us on his smoker.
So, just showing that how, like the malthouse would have
dried some malt and probably smoked it all
right next door
but probably wouldn't be doing it
with hickory, cherry, and applewood. MIKE: Right.
GREG: So we incorporate that, but in a
very modern way as well.  MIKE: And that wheat malt, that malted wheat,
came from Virginia, from the northern neck
Virginia. Now, of course,
in the malthouse they wouldn't have said, yeah, like, cherrywood
you know I want some oak, I want-- they
wouldn't have said let me take three
words because this will make a beautiuflly
delicate smoke I mean it was what was
available right and so that's where the
21st century said, 'We'll you some local malt,
but will use you know a gentleman who's known for being an excellent butcher and a
great smoker
and therefore he'll smoke our malt and this
unique product. SUSAN: Great question. So, we're going to
take two more questions before we head out, so you,
right over here I think you were up there next. GREG: We'll keep our answers short.
GUEST:  Hi, my name's Jake Grover, I'm a DC homebrewer. First I want to thank
Greg and Mike for your valuable
contributions to the DC beer community
it's truly appreciated.
Second, I would
highly encourage everyone to buy a copy
of Mike Tonsmeire's book.
It is truly an encyclopedia of knowledge
on sour beers in America. Finally, I'm
really interested
im the choice of wild yeast that you guys
utilized.
Given that Bluejacket is one of the
few American breweries
with the coolship, I'm a bit surprised
that you guys did not utilize
local microflora that would have
presumably mimicked
what got into the beer back in the
1810 period. Can you guys explain that choice a little bit more?
GREG: I can.  So, the coolship -- we did a lot this brewing in the
summertime. MIKE: July. GREG: So we would never be pulling,
or attempting to pull, airborn yeast and
bacteria out of the air at that time just because when it gets hot
the possibility for really nasty
infections to occur
are high. That's why seasonal brewing existed before everybody stopped using
coolships. So, until the 1860s you brewed from
October to March, largely because in you brew in the summertime
the beer would be unpalatable or worse, so
its kinda a timing thing. Were we brewing these now we absolutely would do that,
because we've we've actually pulled wild
yeast bacteria, ale yeast, out of the air, we've
separated it out, and
we're growing cultures of it now so in the future that'll definitely be something that
probably we'd incorporate into our historic beers.
SUSAN: And I think that coolship story and what Bluejacket is doing with that
is also very interesting and maybe you can
talk about when we're,
afterwards, got it. One last question over
there, thank you. GUEST: could you say something
about how the beers
you're trying to recreate were originally consumed?  Were they consumed at home or in
the pub?
On special occasions, or daily, with meals,
not with meals, men, women
one at a time, eight at a time? SUSAN: No, I think that's a great
question
that we didn't really get but is an important one: who is drinking these beers,
and how are were they drinking them? MIKE: All right, ten seconds on the clock.
Men, women, children. SUSAN: I'm timing. GREG: We can talk more later. MIKE: Yeah, but I think that's a really good point, because when we
think about scale, these beers were
massive size but the interesting thing is
that
these beers are being sold at a bookstore. To read the ad, you have to be literate,
and america is nowhere near as literate
 in 1811 as it is
today. It's not as populated
and so I think this connection is notion
we have with
year as a sort you know the common
everyman spirit might,
this might be a sort of twist in that narrative, because--  GREG: Right,
maybe the spirits were the common thing. MIKE: Right, whiskey was huge.
You know, I mean Garrett Peck, our friend,
makes the argument in his book that the
reason that John Colette is selling his brewery in 1813 is because whiskey,
is king, beer is out. Nobody wants to drink
beer anymore. Whiskey's
cheaper, you can consume it, you know, you get more
bang for your buck. All of those things --
but it's interesting, too, if you talk about
like where it's being consumed, you know,
in taverns, of course, in pubs
but also beer at this point in time in
America is
also very much a women's domain and
that's important to note because this
this, the Washington Brewery was really
following
the Scottish-English model of sort of
industrial-scale
brewing but there very
very very well may have been more
brewers bring it home at that time,
right, because one of the other breweries, uh,
the two others in 1811 that are
allowed, Hereford and Bassars,
are selling malt
and yeast to the public when they're
advertising their beer for sale they're also
advertising their malt.
Yeah, Washington Brewery did not advertise malt and yeast
that we know in those National Intelligencer articles,
but it's important to know that it really took a long time for the
industrialization of beer to get going
I mean, America was very much a home brew country at that point in time.
SUSAN: There seems like there are so many
topics around this beer history idea that
we could have an entire series
at the American History Museum about
beer history and you can all
come back for that. See? 
Yeah, thank you all for coming.  I'm gonna turn it over to Greg
who will explain what is going to happen
in terms of beer and I do wanna remind
everyone that we are doing an event
every month this year, except for taking
the summer off, so almost every month,
looking at different topics in history
so next month we'll be looking at at the
craft distilling revolution and what's
happening
in distilling so maybe even touching on
that whiskey popularity story
and we invite you to come back and
thank you very much for your enthusiasm
for the topic
and Greg will let you know how this is gonna work. GREG: OK, so, real quick
when we go outside Kyle's got a bunch of great food. You'll see that when you first 
go through, so if there's a huge line for
me and you want a drink
first, you can just skirt the line. SUSAN: Around the food. GREG: Right. On one side
we're gonna be pouring the blend, the
porter blend, into your, you're gonna pick up a glass
first
when you go out, and you'll see the food then the beer, pouring the porter blend into your glass,
but then also we have pre-poured little
samples of the three threads
after and then on the other side, I couldn't help myself, I brought
three other beers from Bluejacket, a barleywine
called High Society that we aged in James E. Pepper bourbon barrels to showcase
a different kind of "X ale" for today,
and then a new sour we have called Mothra that tastes really great 
to show you a kind of more contemporary sour and then just
to pound afterwards Forbidden Planet which is a good kolsch that we make.
MIKE: If you want to try a very dry highly attenuated beer with mixed culture, Brettanomyces
and a Lactobacillus, Mothra is a beautifully dry, sort of
farmhouse saison that beer is dry, beautifully dry.
SUSAN: And as we mentioned, Michael
Tonsmeire's
signing his book, we have objects from
the collections out of storage on display
and our
exhibition Food: Exploring the American Table 1950 to 2000
is also open. So, with that, thank you all
very much.
We really appreciate being part of the conversation.
