The debate continues
The leading brewer’s chemists in both England and Scotland may have been convinced that pure yeast was a dead letter in their countries, but the subject refused to lie down. In a paper given in Manchester in December 1900 to the North of England Institute of Brewing, entitled ‘The Development of Scientific Ideas, as Applied to Fermentation Industries’two academic scientists, Drs William A. Bore and H.C. Harold Carpenter, in applauding Hansen’s work and the transformation it had brought about in continental brewing practice noted how: the inherent conservatism of the English character has prevented the majority of brewing firms from following the good example of their more enlightened and progressive competitors.
This prompted a brewer from Chester’s Brewery in Manchester, Charles Frederick Hyde, to respond that his brewery had been using pure yeast successfully for seven years in which time they had introduced ‘147 new growths ... from the same stock’ and had sent over 700,000 barrels of ale and porter to trade. Hyde went on to criticize Morris’s recent paper and stated: ‘Had Dr. Morris taken the trouble to send him a postcard asking if he was using pure yeast, he should have at once replied in the affirmative’. Ouch!
Meanwhile, Jörgensen remained active in promulgating the doctrine of pure yeast. In October 1901 an English 32 Journal of the Brewery History Society brewer, Ralph Grey, fresh from a trip to Jörgensen’s laboratory in Copenhagen read a paper in Manchester in praise of the technique. In May 1903 Jörgensen himself, in a paper coupled with, and presented by, Walter Alfred Riley Jnr. of Morgan’s Brewery Company in Norwich, again claimed success in British breweries, blaming the failures of others on poor yeast selection techniques.19 By now George Harris Morris was unable to fight his corner having died of pneumonia at the age of 43 on New Years' Eve 1901 at a time when his career was at a low ebb. But other prominent English brewing scientists and brewers took up the cudgels pointing out that things were not so straightforward as Jorgensen tried to tell them; that failures to give condition and flavor in stock ales, in particular, were too widespread to be discounted so easily. Julian Levett Baker, newly appointed chemist to Watney, Combe, Reid, also spoke from experience of the problems of maintaining a pure culture in the typical English brewery of the time. Alfred Chaston Chapman, a rising consulting chemist, spoke particularly forcefully of the ‘unfavorable results which were obtained’ in several English breweries he had attended in the course of his work. Chapman went on to question the apparent success of Jörgensen and Riley, raising a valid practical point which has resonance today when he asked how the authors were so sure that they were still using a single strain of yeast after repeated repitching rather than a mixture of several ‘closely allied’ culture yeasts:
He certainly would be extremely sorry to be asked to detect the presence of 10 to 20% of a variety of one yeast in another ... He could not help thinking that the results brought forward to-night did not carry them much further.
Indeed the two sides in the by now stale argument whereas far apart as ever, but even as they debated that May evening in 1903 in Brewers’ Hall, London, fresh discoveries were being made in Copenhagen which would lend decisive support to the doubting English brewers and show that in some cases two yeasts really were better than one.
To be continued...
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