Eat the City(55)
Josh uses a giant piece of cherrywood as a paddle to mix the mash—another leftover from some art project. “Kind of amazing it becomes beer,” he says, gazing into what looks and smells like a giant vat of breakfast porridge. He picks up the thermometer—144 degrees. They’re approaching the critical target temperature of 150, which they want to hold for ninety minutes.
“We gotta get all smart,” says Jon. “This is the moment.”
You have to hold the temperature as close to the target as possible, Josh tells me, to allow the enzymes to do their work. Temperature at this stage affects the body, flavor, and dryness of the later beer. A couple degrees Fahrenheit translates to a world of difference in taste. The thermometer edges to 147, 149. Jon and Josh move around their equipment, checking and rechecking it. They had wired up a computer-controlled temperature monitor to turn the burner on or off as the mash temperature drops below or above their target. Now Jon cuts the fire on the burner under the vat. “We might want to put on some insulation,” suggests Josh, and so Jon fashions a beer cozy, tying old moving blankets around the mash tun with bungee cords, leaving just the temperature dial sticking out. Jon turns on the new pump.
This new system keeps the temperature steady, and after the specified time, they pump the mash into the boil kettle. Josh gazes into the steaming twenty-gallon pot, where the foam of bubbling wort has made landmasses that crack and separate and recombine, like tectonic plates at high speed. “It’s ready,” Josh says. Jon drops in the hops pellets one by one. “The hops will help it to coagulate,” he explains, “so it looks like egg drop soup.” Great yellow bubbles turn over in the brew, and visible bits of protein twist and turn and attach to each other, forming something like floating congealed snowflakes. Josh adds the Irish moss, a plant-based gelatin that helps the proteins attach to each other and leaves the beer clear—an update on the isinglass, made from fish bladders, used in the past. The surface of the wort becomes foamy, with deep wrinkles, like the skin of a shar-pei dog, but greenish, like pond scum. And the characteristic aroma rises: fresh, green, bitter.
As the brewing finishes, the system is dismantled into its component parts. Hoses are detached from the vessels they had filled and they drip out their liquids, limply draped over the brew tank. Lids creep off pots and clatter to the floor. Vessels, pipes, pots, and burners return to closets and shelves, receding to join the rest of the tools on the periphery of the loft. It’s as though these dissociated pieces of equipment had not, for a few hours, formed a brewery.
And when it’s all done, Jon dumps the water that had been used to cool the wort into the washing machine, and fetches a basket of dirty laundry. No sense wasting hot water.
THE lager breweries in New York started as small operations, with a brewmaster and five to ten German Landsleute, or countrymen, sweating over a kettle on an open fire. But the new technology of the Industrial Revolution transformed their careers. Mechanization was polarizing, as the early adopters expanded and became rich, while brewers who could not afford the costly machines shut down.
Early on, Jacob Ruppert’s business included new malt house machines to clean the barley with forced air and mix it with other grains. Pumps moved the wort into giant brew kettles heated with coal or steam. More beer, less labor. Soon the operation became so large that Jacob Ruppert no longer worked as the brewmaster. Instead, he managed money, external relations, labor, technology, affiliated companies, and a growing portfolio of real estate acquisitions: instead, he became a capitalist. It wasn’t just brewers—in the middle 1800s, bankers, brokers, exporters, importers, manufacturers, and real estate and publishing men all amassed fortunes. “Wealth,” wrote New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, “is rushing in upon us like a freshet.”
The story of the Industrial Revolution is a story of the fall of the individual and the rise of the machine. “We brewery workers have already reached the lowest level of social existence,” read one letter to a German-language newspaper in New York. “We are told that work ennobles, but in the breweries it debases him and makes him dumb.” Unlike in Europe, where laws forbade summer brewing, American brewers worked year-round, from before dawn to as late as nine at night. Everyone was usually drunk, and often the brewmasters beat the workers. When finally the workers tried to form unions, Jacob Sr. and other New York brewers locked them out. Men who had thought of themselves as craftsmen in an ancient fraternity learned that to their bosses—the new beer barons—they were nothing more than replaceable factory workers.
Meanwhile, the well-groomed, modern Jacob Jr., with his hair slicked back in geometric layers, had joined his father’s brewery in the lowest position of bottle-washer. “Show this apprentice no favors,” his father reportedly told the brewmaster. “If he does good work, promote him. If he won’t go along and do the work we require, dismiss him.” Jacob Jr. soon advanced to carrying hundred-pound sacks of barley in from the delivery wagons, and a few moves later, he was manager. The system was changing: No bottle-washer could save up enough to buy the massive equipment and tracts of real estate necessary to operate a modern brewery; the owners just promoted their sons.
The saloon at the time was the smallest local political district, and the bartender was not only confessor and raconteur—but also a kind of community mayor for those who drank his beer. Surely Jacob Jr. knew that Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine, was fleecing the public—one 1892 denouncement had termed its leaders “polluted harpies that, under the pretense of governing this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals.” Yet he threw his lot in with the Democratic powerbrokers, hosting glamorous dinner parties at the brewery’s Tap Room for Tammany district men. He knew that his father kept the brewery lawyer Congressman Ashbel Fitch happy with such gifts as a five-hundred-dollar watch charm with a cat’s-eye gem. In the “silk stocking” brigade of the National Guard, Jacob Jr. served New York’s governor as an aide with the rank of colonel—a title he insisted others address him as for the rest of his life. He ran for U.S. Congress on the Tammany ticket, and he represented Yorkville for four terms.