The Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives are diving into the history of hop farming in Benton County, Portland.

"I​’m currently in the midst of a quest to learn more about the history of hops in Benton County, more specifically the land in south Corvallis owned by the Lilly and Seavey families. That’s a post for another day, but in talking to folks about hops in Corvallis and digging into some research on labor for a food history guide, I got distracted by the story of German POWs who picked hops during WWII. Again, a story for another post. Looking for info about POWs in Salem didn’t lead in a straight line to my field trip to Independence, but it did FINALLY get me to the Heritage Museum."
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Great piece on exploring Mesopotamian cuneiform text.

"Which leads to another thought. Is that pattern a constant? Four grades of beer naturally created solely by the relationship between the sparge fluid and mash?  Following these rules you will have a 11%-ish beer, a 4%-ish one and a 1.25%-ish one. As well as whatever the heck double double was to create all that toil and trouble. A constant pattern. Could be. Could be."

"Back in the early 1950’s Edinburgh city council had rather grand plans for redeveloping the Holyrood Palace end of the Royal Mile. Which was home to several breweries, including the Abbey and Holyrood breweries of William Younger."
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Boak & Bailey just scored some photos of pubs in the 1960's.
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Some tasting notes for the lentil beer brewed by the Brewing Classical crew.
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A look into the definition and history of the symposium.
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I feared this would come up eventually. Hope it doesn't happen!

"Traditional South African beer, brewed for centuries by peoples such as the Xhosa, is in danger of disappearing, according to Slow Food International, an organization trying to revive local food cultures."

Investigating brewing terms found in a letter dated on 1720. 

"Just bask in that passage for a moment. It’s (i) a contemporary that British beer was prepared for transport to warmer climates and (ii) among a few other techniques, the intentional deadening a beer followed by bottling was a technique used for export. Burton was, after all, brewed for export. As was Taunton for Jamaica’s plantations. The British simply shipped beer everywhere. IPA was not unique. Was there a beer brewed for Hong Kong that we’ve also forgotten about?"
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An old technique used to quickly sour ales.

"​First, he distinguishes true vatting from the later method, which was to ferment beers at high temperature and rouse them (to permit air to enter the fermenting wort). These practices had the result of producing acidic beers in a relatively short time, perfect for blending, but they lacked the “ethereal” taste of beers stored a year or two as ales and stouts used to be stored. "
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Weekly translation from the good folks at Brewing Classical.
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Brewing up a sweet stout from the 1960's.

"Associated with old codgers sat in the corner of the pub with a half, Mackeson became as fashionable as the Bay City Rollers. Along with Brown Ale and Light Ale, Sweet Stout was a bottled beer that suddenly fell from favour. So much so that it’s hard to imagine now the enormous quantities of it that were sold."
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A brief review of the history of the brewing industry at Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Brian Alberts (of Brewed Culture fame) thoughts on the recent Budweiser super bowl ad.

"Beer also holds another legacy that the advertisement overlooks—how modern American beer, the kind that millions of Americans will consume on Sunday, is a product of immigrant activism and entrepreneurship. In the 1850s, beer became a cultural battleground for German immigrants to defend not only their right to participate in American political and economic life, but also their very presence in the U.S."

Be sure to catch his interview with Michael Smerconish!
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Getting past the clever marketing and revealing the real life of Adolphus Busch.

"​As always, reality, even in a brewing context, is sobering: he came from a well-off family; he received a “patrimony”, or inheritance, which permitted his start in business; and he retained significant links to the country of his origin, where he passed away at a castle he owned after years of a debilitating illness."
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Boak & Bailey try to answer the question as to why some cask ends were painted red.
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Your weekly translation from the good folks at Brewing Classical, following their millet theme. 
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A look into farmhouse ales in Austria, and why it seemed to not catch on.

"So, for centuries, brewing in parts of Austria has been absolutely dominated by cities and market towns, which had exclusive brewing rights. Already towards the end of the middle ages there were efforts to stop farmers from brewing beer, and since no farmhouse brewing is recorded since then, it seems like it was quite successful."
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Archaeology students brew some beer in accordance to available technology and recent residue analysis from Chinese ceramics.
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A new book detailing the history of brewing in Portsmouth, Ohio.

A look at yeast genomics and how it relates to the history of beer.
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To show the importance bread and beer played in past societies, PhD student Lara Gonzalez Carretero put together an exhibit at the Petrie Museum at University College London.

"​We chose a loaf of bread from Hatshepsut’s tomb in Deir el Bahri (ca. 1458 BC), beer residue from inside a ceramic vessel and emmer wheat spikelets. Emmer, an ancient crop originated in the Near East, was domesticated 12,000 years ago in Syria as new archaeobotanical research has recently shown (Arranz-Oteagui et al. 2016); and it was also, together with barley, the staple crop in ancient Egypt used by the community on a daily basis."

This one accidentally slipped through, but interesting nonetheless! Recent excavations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn found a few brewing caverns belonging to a Sebastian Schnaderbeck.

I wasn’t supposed to go to Krakow, and out of all our options, Poland was last on my list. I left for Poland with mild curiosity and didn't expected much. 
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Like with most things in life I have preconceptions about, Poland proved me wrong. Dead wrong. I feel completely stupid for even thinking it’s a crappy place to travel to.

My girlfriend and I were getting a little bored with the Berlin life and were looking for a nice weekend getaway. Given she’s been everywhere and I nowhere, I drafted a list of the three places I wanted to visit. Czech Republic (aka Pilzn), Belgium (anywhere), or Poland. Poland only because it was a place she hadn’t been before. So, after a bit of discussion, we head down to the Deutsche Bahn to buy our tickets to Warsaw. About 20 min later, I realized we purchased tickets to Krakow by mistake. Following our embarrassment and a stint of laughing, freak-out from hotel cancellations, and only a day of planning, we set out for our first trip to Poland.

​We now go any chance we get.

To put it into perspective, I am at odds with the German beer scene. It isn’t the same here as it is elsewhere. While I do appreciate and like traditional German beers (at least more than my European counterparts), there is something unique about German drinking culture. From what I can tell, they don’t let their beers get in the way of conversation. It is this tradition which seems to put craft beer in an awkward position, leaving the microbreweries here with a major uphill battle. Although my thoughts on German beer is outside the scope of this piece, suffice it to say that it's noticeably different than anything I’ve encountered before.

Poland is completely different. There is a vibrant drinking culture that takes pleasure in things besides cheap Pilsner; Polish brewers are nailing Brett-only ales, experimenting with styles (like a smoked Berliner Weiss), and promoting craft beer classics like a west coast IPA. So, for me, traveling to Poland is like standing on familiar ground.  

But like most things foreign, I am limited by language. A look into how craft beer developed in Poland would prove fascinating. Post-WWII, most breweries were nationalized. Following the collapse of the communist government, the brewing industry went through consolidations, and now 80% of the breweries are owned by only three companies.

​Yet underneath this seemingly challenging market, craft beer seems to be thriving. From what I can tell, the ‘craft beer’ movement started roughly in the early 2000s and started gaining momentum in 2012. Now, there are plenty of beer fests like the Targi Piwne or the Festiwal Dobrego Piwa, and 2016 alone saw around 65 breweries opening their doors.  
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​On a (fairly) recent trip to a beer festival in Poznan, I learned about a historic beer called Schöps. According to the marketing pamphlet as provided by Browar Stu Mostow (the brewery which recreated the style), Schöps was the highest consumed beer in Breslau (Wroclaw) during the sixteenth century. Apparently, beer had been made in the area since 1255, and around the 1700s, barley beers fell out of favor to wheat based beers. Now, that alone is worthy of a research project. What was import / export relationship with the rest of Europe? Were these beers influenced by what was going on abroad, or were they born from Poland? Unfortunately, the marketing pamphlet is all I have on the matter.

The taste was a bit unexpected. The beer had a nice golden color with a nice lasting head. Aroma was rather subtle, with only a hint of malt and slight sourness. The taste was just a typical wheat-cereal flavor, with not too much yeast characteristics. I would say it was an enjoyable beer, but that might be due to my bias towards historical recipes.

The Brewers Association added it to its list of beer styles (here, pg 19 - 20). Yet they don’t cite where they found the information, and I can only find Stu Mostow's work online. So I have no idea where they came up with the “Breslau Style - Dark Schöps,” which is all I will say about that.

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Good news though is that it appears there has been some work done on the brewing history of Poland, as I found these two publications:

Historia piwowarstwa w Opolu i okolicach

and

Alkoholowe dzieje Polski. Czasy Piastów i Rzeczypospolitej Szlacheckiej

Now all that’s left to do is learn Polish and I’ll be set.

A great analysis over the use of juniper in beer brewing throughout Europe.

"Juniper has definitely been widely used in farmhouse brewing in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. It's also definitely been used, probably widely, in Germany, Russia, and Austria. There are signs it may also include France and Poland, but we'll see. This is what I mean about the beer community somehow having missed a huge story.

What's more, it's possible that juniper was the main brewing herb from the Stone Age onwards, and that hops only eclipsed it at some point after the end of the Middle Ages. That, however, is going to be substantially harder to prove."
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A brewing experiment inspired by the Greek Historian Strabo, utilizing both millet and barley for the malt bill.
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To honor Michael Jackson as the 10th anniversary of his death approaches, Boak & Bailey are starting a list of all his publications from 1977 to 1986, in hopes to show how influential Michael was to beer writing. 

"The harder job, now, is tracking down the material he wrote for the national press in the same period. We have searched The Times and Guardian archives but if you have clippings, or perhaps have access to the Sunday Times archive online through your local library service, we’d welcome any tips."
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This one came my way thanks to Brian Alberts over at Brewed Culture, and covers the role German immigrants played in the rise of the American Brewing Industry.

"In April, 1946, a Brigadier Brimblecombe wrote a letter to The News in Adelaide complaining that soldiers during the war drank too much beer and risked becoming enslaved to alcohol."
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An odd note in an old brewer's notes, stating that flour adds clarity to their pale ale.
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A look into wine cellars that were built underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

​Theresa McCulla has been announced as the new Beer Historian for the Smithsonian!