About a month ago, Carlsberg (or rather, their Russian division, Baltics) invited me to attend a closed presentation of a secret experimental grade of that time, which was boiled in microscopic quantities and would not go on sale. Since it sounded interesting, and my day was free, I agreed.
The event itself took place last week in Moscow and turned out to be even more interesting than I had originally predicted, based on fragmentary information such as "we brewed historic beer according to the old recipe." Well, many mass breweries (both large and medium, both in Russia and in all other countries, and Carlsberg himself is no exception) like to brag about supposedly historical recipes, presenting another standard light camp from the same raw materials as everyone else, and fermented with a modern strain of yeast. But here it turned out quite differently.
To begin with, the preamble, which you probably already know without me, but here it is important. For many centuries, all breweries, like today, used yeast, but the fermentation process itself was associated with unknown chemical elements contained in this substance added to the wort. I’m even afraid to imagine what kind of bacterial cocktail was in such a sourdough with basic yeast;) And only in 1861, Louis Pasteur proved that the fermentation process is microbiological, not chemical. Further progress in this area was not long in coming. In 1883, in the laboratory at the then small Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen, the microbiologist Emil Hansen managed to isolate a pure yeast culture, i.e. isolate the yeast cells of one particular strain (it was a bottom fermentation strain that came from Bavaria). A few years later, Hansen gave the name to this yeast culture - Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. The owner and founder of the brewery, Jacob Jacobsen, had every right to use the research results as a competitive advantage, but he decided to help his colleagues and allowed to transfer pure yeast culture to other brewers - mutual assistance right at the level of modern craft brewers (in the USA, of course, but not at all us, where almost everyone hates each other). The result, almost a century and a half later, we all see: the camp reliably conquered the entire planet, and today's Carlsberg multinational rivals - Heineken or San Inbev - also use S. carlsbergensis yeast, as well as smaller breweries brewing camps.
But what did the very first lager fermented with pure yeast culture taste like? If we take the old recipe, we still won’t succeed today: the yeast over the past one and a half hundred years has changed anyway due to the repeated change of “generations”, and barley is already completely different, so the enterprise is hopeless ... Or not?
It turned out that no, if very confused. A few years ago, 3 bottles of beer from the 1880s were procured somewhere on Carlsberg, and one of them managed to find live yeast cells! Yeast is quite a tenacious microorganism, and since they had nothing to eat in the bottle, they spent all these long years in suspended animation, i.e. it's the same yeast that Carlsberg used when he was a small, local Danish brewery.
Further, space begins: Carlsberg agreed with the Norwegian underground seed storage (this is the case for an unplanned exterminators) and got 10 barley grains of the corresponding period from there, because during the 20th century barley was greatly altered and more tenacious and productive species replaced all older, less competitive ones that were 100 years ago. They propagated these ancient grains and, for the purity of the experiment, planted two fields from them: in Denmark and New Zealand. Malt was made from the collected barley, caramel malt with a color corresponding to the recipe of the end of the 19th century was made from part of this malt. Then they made wort from this malt, which was fermented with yeast from the same bottle ...No, they are not going to brew this beer on a commercial basis, they brought a little less than 10 liters in a barrel and 3 gift bottles to Russia.
Presented beer: Danish Ambassador to Russia Thomas Winkler, Carlsberg Group Vice President of Research Birgitte Skadhauge and Carlsberg Foundation and Supervisory Board of the Carlsberg Group Fleming Besenbacher.
After a long story, which I freely retold above, everyone who was present at the presentation was poured a glass for a sample directly from a barrel in which beer was transported, as in those days when glass was a container for the rich:Well, let's go back 140 years and try the lager of that era.
Carlsberg The Father Of Quality Lager (5.8% ABV) - due to barrel bottling, beer is practically without carbonation, and therefore without foam. The color is copper red, saturated, slightly turbid. The aroma is fried shades from malts, tannins from the barrel and a small hop spice. The taste is dry and even slightly tart: the combination of bread crust from malt, tannins from a barrel and grassiness from hops, the bitterness is quite significant, significantly higher than in modern mass camps. Due to the lack of carbonation, the body seems to be excessively light and this also affects a somewhat “drying” sensation.
In general, beer is very interesting as an experience, as an opportunity to try what people drank more than a hundred years ago. But we must admit that development nevertheless does not stand still, and modern Viennese camps (namely, they are stylistically closest to this beer) today look much more harmonious than their ancestor. By the way, at the end of the event, the organizers had a buffet with a modern, familiar to us Carlsberg, so that everyone had the opportunity to compare.
I will say this - I, to put it mildly, not a fan of emasculated, refined drinking EuroLager, but even I understand why such beer began to prevail and won over 90% of supermarket shelves around the globe when I look at the whole picture in dynamics, taking into account how beer changed. The most important thing is not to stop and continue to develop, not to be afraid to experiment with commercial beer in particular. Of all the beer giants, I would like to wish this to Carlsberg, because in the rapidly changing global beer landscape they began to look lagging: yes, there is Jacobsen, there is the “Brewer Collection” (which, by the way, was turned down in Russia instead of being developed), but this is not enough! One cannot hope that a light, light lager is the pinnacle of perfection, and development will stop there. “Perhaps the best beer in the world”?
Perhaps at some point, it was like that, but development continues and will always continue. I sincerely hope that the brewery, once so radically transforming the beer world for the better, will continue to contribute to the development of the beer landscape.