musing

Brewing on the high seas – now and then

This kind of brings new meaning to the concept of a “brews cruise,” doesn’t it?

The 827-foot long cruise ship AIDAblu is outfitted with a complete brewery. The brewhouse on deck 10 (of 14 decks) is made of glass and can produce 5 hectoliters a day (132 gallons, about 4 U.S. beer barrels). Copper fermentation and lagering tanks have a capacity of 130 hectoliters (more than 100 U.S. barrels, 3,435 U.S. gallons).

This is not a gimmick. It’s a real brewery, and it’s fair to talk about how beer from this place (even if it is in motion) is different. Certainly German brewmaster Andreas Hegny faces unique challenges. A press release from Weyermann Specialty Malts in Bamberg, Germany which provides all the malts for the brewery, explains system designers configured the brewery vessels so that their contents would not be affected by the ship’s rolling and pitching.

And then there’s the water (how’s that go? “Water, water everywhere but not . . .”). The AIDAblu uses sea water, stripped of its salt content by an onboard desalinification plant. The water is then cleaned and enriched with minerals. “This water is just right for beer making,” Hegny said, “because it is very soft.” (That’s Hegny in the photo at the top.)

Hengy travels with seven Weyermann malts, milling them fresh on brew day. He brews a variety of specialties, pointing with particular pride to AIDA-Zwickel, but also including an Eisbock — a lager in which the alcohol content has been raised by freezing. (The process has been at the heart of the competitition between BrewDog in Scotland and Schorschbraeu in Germany to brew the world’s strongest beer.)

The press release refers to this as the world’s first floating brewery. That’s not quite true. During World War II the HMS Menestheus, a British mine-laying ship, was converted into a floating brewery to supply beer to British and Allied troops in the Asian theater. By the time they got everything in order the war was over, but it was a working brewery. I love this story from the Beer Drinkers Companion (1993, Edinburgh Publishing Co.):

Towards the end of the Second World War, the supply lines to the Far East were dangerously stretched. For the forces engaged in the fighting against the Japanese, certain supplies, such as beer were a rare luxury. In order to maintain morale, and at the instigation of Winston Churchill himself, in late 1944 the Board of the Admiralty decided to convert two mine-laying vessels into Amenity Ships, to include cinemas, dance-halls, shops, bars, and onboard breweries.

These ships — the HMS Menetheus and HMS Agamemnon — were sent to Vancouver in early 1945 to be refitted.

Distilled sea water was to be used for brewing purposes, and malt extract and hop concentrate would be shipped from the U.K. to bases in the Far East where the vessels would call. A 55-barrel capacity brewing copper was to be installed in the forward hold of the ships and heated by steam coils from the ships’ boilers. Six glass-lined fermenting vessels were also installed, and the capacity was an estimated 250 barrels per week. Only one beer was to be produced, a chilled and carbonate 1037 Mild Ale. Beside being sold in the ships’ bars, this was also be be made available in 5 gallon stainless steel kegs

Some of the brewing equipment was lost on the way to Canada so only the Menestheus ended up brewing, the first test batch made on the last day of 1945. Although the war in the Far East was over troops remained. The ship visited Yokohama, Kure, Shanghai and Hong Kong (“with the latter proving a conspicuous success”). Brewing took place at sea between ports of call.

 

Weekend drinks links

In case you missed these blog posts last week . . .

  • Can you make money blogging about drinks? That was one topic of discussion at the Wine Writers Symposium last week in northern California. (You could have taken many of the panel topics, plugged in “beer” instead of “wine” and it would have made sense, such as “What wine writers need to know about wine.”) As far as blog advertising goes, Steve Heimoff (who works of Wine Spectator) says we’re “not even close” to a tipping point.
  • Jeff Alworth ends up in the woodshed, getting into a whole lot more trouble than I did when commenting on Malcom Gladwell’s “Drinking Games.” You probably need to start here (read the comments), perhaps detour to what Alan McLeod has to say, and then return to lessons Jeff might have learned.
  • Mark Dredge has tasted BrewDog’s Sink The Bismarck: “Maybe the hoppiest beer I’ve ever had, earthy, citrus, floral, imperial. So thick and full bodied, like syrup, like honey. It smells like a hop sack, so fresh, uniquely fresh, like hop resin, hop oil on the finger tips. It’s sweet like candy but hot like bourbon, it’s smooth but jagged, it’s bitter, it’s intense, it’s astonishing. Five months in the making, this is insane US Extreme IPA meets Scottish whisky, an unimaginable blend.”
  • 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Natty Light. Including No. 11, that Anheuser-Busch owns the domain name NaturalLightSucks.com.

    • You may now return to your glass of beer.

     

     

    Orange tree terroir

    Lord knows how scientists may have manipulated orange genetics since John McPhee reported this in 1966, but here’s a little bit about the where involved with oranges.

    He writes that taste and aroma vary based on “the position of the individual orange in the framework of the tree on which it grew. Ground fruit — the orange that one can reach and pick from the ground — is not as sweet as fruit that grows high on the tree. Outside fruit is sweeter than inside fruit. Oranges grown on the south side of the tree are sweeter than oranges grown on the east or west sides, and oranges grown on the north side are the least sweet of the lot. The quantity of juice in an orange, and even the amount of vitamin C is contains, will follow the same pattern of variation. Beyond this, there are differentiations of quality inside a single orange. Individual segments vary from one another in their content of acid and sugar.”

    In “Oranges,” his book developed from New Yorker articles, the Catch-22 becomes obvious to McPhee when he checks to see if a restaurant offers fresh juice at breakfast.

    “There were never any request for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. ‘Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,’ she said. ‘Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.'”

    Then he strikes up a conversation with a couple at the next table. “. . . they had an orange grove on their property, with three kinds of oranges, so that ripe fruit was on their trees almost eight months of the year. All year long, they said, they drank concentrate at breakfast. They hadn’t made juice from the fruit on their trees for more than ten years.”

    People knew what they were getting.

    But what was the price?

    Somewhere down the Ghost River

    Wait, did you hear that
    Oh this is sure stirring up some ghosts for me
    She said “There’s one thing you’ve got to learn
    Is not to be afraid of it.”
    I said “No, I like it, I like it, it’s good.”
    She said “You like it now
    But you’ll learn to love it later.”

      – Robbie Robertson, Somewhere Down The Crazy River

    If you use Twitter and follow beer folks you’ve see a lot of pointers today to CraftBeer.com, one of three relatively new websites from the Brewers Association. The other two are a site for members of the American Homebrewers Association and one for Brewers Association members.

    A bit of necessary disclosure: I did a bit of work for the CraftBeer.com site and I also write for association publications, including two books.

    That’s not why I’m suggesting you take a look at this particular video about Ghost River Brewing. Hit the arrow and hang on until they get to the river. You’ll wish it was longer.

    Soundtrack Project: A Tangible Birthplace from Memphis Chamber on Vimeo.

    Anyway, nice music. Works well, don’t you think? Yet when they return to the Ghost River and Chuck Skypeck (he’s the guy talking) mentions the “sound of your canoe going through the water” Robbie Robertson’s music found its way into my head. Both the melody from “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” and one of those lyrics you never heard on the radio and will never forget.

    A canoe, a river, a beer, music. All things that stamp themselves into your soul.

     

     

    ‘Drinking games’ in The New Yorker

    The current (February 15 & 22) of The New Yorker magazine includes an article by Malcom Gladwell called “Drinking Games” that tackles a bit of drinking and culture. Unfortunately it’s not one the magazine chose to make free online, but you can read the abstract here.

    Hey, it’s The New Yorker and Gladwell, so ideas all over the place. Two to consider:

  • Gladwell writes : “When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”
  • He also writes: “Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.” This is called “alcohol myopia,” and you can read more about it here.

    • Reading Gladwell it is always good to remember something Steve Pinker wrote in reviewing What the Dog Saw, a collection of Gladwell pieces.

    The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.

    More than anything the article raises questions I wish more people thought about.