INSIDE By Jack Kenny - Brewing News

10 Yankee Brew News December 2012/January 2013
Winter Ales continued from p. 1
Wassail
In medieval Europe’s northern climes,
where many a holiday drinking tradition
was born and throve, the wassail bowl was
often filled with ale, unless one’s wealth
and status enabled him to procure and store
wines from regions south. In the barley and
hop belt, ale was the everyday drink of the
common folk, adults and children alike. On
special occasions, such as weddings and
other feasts, the ale was likely to be brewed
with more care and more ingredients,
thereby giving celebrants another reason for
cheer.
In their zeal to turn pagans away from
the wrong gods to the right god, Christian
priests co-opted the local holidays and
assigned new religious meanings to the
events, thus allowing the unwashed to keep
their silly celebrations and at the same
time pay homage to Yahweh and his son
and a legion of saints. That’s how we got
Christmas. Nobody knows when Jesus was
born, but the winter solstice is as good a
time as any, they decided, and put the stamp
of the Roman Church on the whole thing.
(The church did not, however, give us the
Christmas tree, mistletoe and Santa Claus.)
It’s a good bet that the holiday drinking
traditions came from the Old Norse.
Households in Scandinavia today observe
ancient post-prandial holiday drinking rituals
involving the repeated consumption of
øl and akvavit, each round accompanied by
a specific song. These people come from
the cold and they know what winter is. Hell,
they gave us the Vikings, those mad men
who, in the words of the late Alan Eames,
“remained deeply and profoundly drunk for
two hundred years.”
Sjur Soleng, co-owner with Rich Dunn
of Ninety9 Bottles in Norwalk, Conn., was
born in Norway and knows well the stories
told by his father of holiday traditions in the
old country. Local people brewed their own
ales, and paid visits to their neighbors at
Christmas time, passing the bowl, laughing
and singing, warming the northern nights
with the gift of the jul øl. Soleng shared
some history:
“After the Norwegian people became
Christians, laws were passed that regulated
the brewing of beer at Christmas. The ale
was brewed with the farm’s best barley to
be strong and could be seasoned with tobacco,
syrup, sugar, juniper and herbs. One
report stated that the beer had to be brewed
with as many kilos of grain as the master
and mistress of the farm weighed
together. I would like to have
tasted that.”
The brew vessel was consecrated
with fire. The first
beer was thrown outside to
appease the trolls (old beliefs
die hard.). The strength of the e
beer said something about the e
honor one offered to Jesus
and Mary. Weak beer brought t
shame upon the farmer.
One source claims that
the wassail bowl was first
mentioned in writing in the
13th Century and defined as a vessel in
which revelers dipped cakes and fine bread.
The practice of floating crisped bread in
the bowl might have given rise to our use
in English of the word “toast” to mean a
drinking salutation. In The Sketch-Book
of Geoffrey Crayon, written in 1820 by
American author Washington Irving, toast
is included as an ingredient in the holiday
drink bowl, along with the afore-mentioned
crabs.
The Wassail Bowl was sometimes composed
of ale instead of wine; with nutmeg,
sugar, toast, ginger, and roasted crabs; in
this way the nut-brown beverage is still prepared
in some old families, and round the
hearths of substantial farmers at Christmas.
It is also called Lambs’ Wool, and is celebrated
by Herrick in his poem Twelfth
Night:
“Next crowne the bowle full
With gentle Lambs’ Wool,
Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And thus ye must doe
To make the Wassaile a swinger.”
Lambs’ L Wool was prepared by
whipping whippin w pp dark ale to form a
surface su froth in which
floated fl the roasted crab
apples. ap Sometimes nutmeg
m was involved. The
hissing hi h pulp bursting
from fr them resembled
wool. w Samuel Pepys,
the th famous English
diarist, di clearly enjoyed
the th beverage. His entry
from fr November 9, 1666,
includes the following:
“We got well home … Being come home,
we to cards, till two in the morning, and
drinking lamb’s-wool. So to bed.”
Today’s Winter Beers
“I have heard a variety of stories
as to the origins and history of winter/
Christmas beers, including that monasteries
brewed the first holiday beers to celebrate
Christmas, or that special beers were created
during the winter solstice for festivities
associated with worshiping and celebration
of the gods,” said Jim Koch, founder
and chairman of Boston Beer Co. “For us,
brewing seasonal beers has always been
inspired by the seasonality of ingredients
and the weather. During the winter months
beers such as old ales, barleywines, strong
ales and lagers were made at higher levels
of alcohol to warm against the cold winter
nights.”
Boston Beer has once again released
its Winter Lager and Old Fezziwig Ale,
both spiced with cinnamon, ginger and
orange peel. Two new seasonals are White
Christmas, an unfiltered white ale that contains
cinnamon, nutmeg and orange peel,
and Merry Mischief, a gingerbread stout
flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and
ginger.
“The U.S. has a history of brewing
spiced beers dating back to the colonial
times as colonists made the traditional wassail,”
Koch added. “Over the years there
have been spiced beers for the holidays, but
it really wasn’t until the craft beer revolution
that you started to see so many wonderful
winter beers available in the market.”
Koch said that the company experiments
with new ingredients all the time. “We have
actually experimented with brewing a traditional
Wassail at Boston Brewery using traditional
spices of nutmeg, ginger, allspice,
orange peel and some apple purée. It was a
really interesting brew, as the fruity estery
notes were balanced by the roasted malts
and the apples. Separately, it took us five
years to figure out how to integrate chilies