Hi,
Sorry it's been a while. Safe to say the ony reason I haven't been updating on here is that I've been working full time writing the book.
Thought I'd take time out today to share the news that I've just submitted the first three of six sections to my editor at Unbound!
The book is looking like this:
1. The Nature of Beer
2. Barley
3. Water
4. Hops
5. Yeast
6. Reinheitsgebot
The first three sections come to just over 40,000 words - about 130 pages - and I think that represents about 45% of the finshed book, as water is a relatively short section compared to yeast and hops.
The sequence follows the brewing process, but the book isn't about that process at all, and talks about it as little as possible. It's just that you need to get you head around barley and malting before you can fully appreciate the deep joy of water chemistry, and you need to get the interaction between those two to do full justice to yeast, and so on.
I'm having an absolute blast writing the book, but it's vital that I get the details right, and the details of brewing history create sinkholes of time.
Here's an example.
Enzymes are absolutely fundamental to the brewing process, and a key part of the story of barley. We've been malting barley for around 10,000 years because malting is what gets the enzymes to work, and without enzymes you won't get fermentable sugar, which means you won't get alcohol, and that would be a disaster. Given that we've been doing this for so long, I wanted to find out when we first figured out the reason we were doing it, and found out no one really knew what enzymes were until 1833, when a French chemist called Anselme Payen identified them in a solution of malt. Pretty cool, right? We've been doing a thing to get beer brewing to work for 10,000 years, but we've only really known what we're doing and why for less than 200. Just one of the many fascinating facts in this book.
Then, when I get to water, there's a great scandal in 1851 when a French chemist gives a lecture in which he claims the famous IPAs of Burton on Trent get their characteristic bitterness from the addition of colossal amounts of strychnine - a pretty nasty poison. This wasn't true of course - Burton beers got their character from the naturally dissolved sulphates in the town's well water, but this guy didn't know that, and was utterly humiliated when Burton brewers (a) threw open their doors to the world's press and demonstrated that no chemicals were added to their beers, and (b) produced some simple calculations that showed there wasn't actually enough strychnine on Planet Earth to adulterate the vast quantities of beer being brewed in Burton in the manner suggested by the French scientist.
Another great story, right?
But here's the thing: the name of the French chemist who made this accusation is given in accounts of the episode as M Payen. Was that an initial, or was it English language texts adopting the French abbreviation for 'Monsieur?' And if it was the latter, could this really be the same Monsieur Payen who had identified enzymes two decades earlier?
For the book, I had to know. There can't have been many French chemists called Monsieur Payen looking at beer in the mid-nineteenth century, but there's an 18-year gap between the two incidents. And could the genius who discovered enzymes - a discovery that's affected our lives in more ways than you can imagine - really have been the same dumb-ass who hadn't even worked out that his accusaiton was volumetrically impossible before he made it?
It's a tiny point in the whole scope of the book, but get something like that wrong and it will haunt you forever, and there'll be a beer blogger somewhere who knows the whole story in great detail, who will ridicule your mistake and denounce the entire book.
I could have found the answer quite easily by going to the British Library and consulting their newspaper archive to see if any report of a scandal that gripped the country surrendered M Payen's first name, but that would be half a day out of my schedule, so I turned to Google. It took me half an hour of different searches. Unsurprisingly, every biography of Anselme Payen cites the enzyme thing as his main achievement. Not one mentions the Burton thing. Does that mean it wasn't him? Or was it a case of "Well he made himself look like a complete dick, they wouldnlt mention it would they?" Eventually I found ONE HIT from an academic journal that named the M Payen from 1851 as the same Anselme 'Enzymes' Payen. Of course it was. It's obvious. But I had to be sure.
One page later, I've got a quote from one of the most famous brewing scientists of his day, but two different sources attribute it to different publications in different years...
And so it goes on. I've broken the back of hops now, and I've almost finished my meditation on Germany's beer purity law, and how writing about the four ingredients it stipulates has been affected by the debate and activities around its 500-year anniversary. At the very end, a shocking tragedy, on which I'm merely at the very fringes, completely changes the ending of this book, and the message I finish with. So that just leaves me with yeast. Now yeast, that just blows my mind...