Hey, folks, this is Chuck and welcome to this week's s Y s K Selects edition, How Beer Works. Uh not a long intro for this one. It's how Beer Works. So that was my pick. Why not rerun this one? Right? Enjoy? Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast Bottoms Up, etcetera. Take off your shirt? Is that what beer equates to in your book? Take off your shirt? Uh? Well, I take off my shirt when I drink too much beer. You, Lucy neal Belt, take off the shirt. Close the blinds. Neighbors don't want to see that, I want to point out, No, they don't, uh that? Um. Guest producer Maddy today just a little seren dip. He is brewing his fur batch of beer right now. And he was like, man, it's not like just preparing food, he said, is this? You know? It's like serious chemistry going on, because I think he's he's shooting for the stars here. He's not starting out with an easy brew. I think. No. You know, as you know Maddie, he's not one to just dive into something lightly. He goes full bore. Yeah, so you should see how how he got into the zeitgeist something I think he's thinks bring a porter? Is that right, Matt Stout? But stouts and porters, as we I learned, have been very much mixed throughout the years. I believe porters and they were named after river porters because that's what they like to drink in London, the River Porters, Allen River Reporters, dark darker beers. Yeah, yeah, although the kind of take what they can get. Yeah, that is one fact about a thousand that you're about to hear. So also, I want to mention aumis in my friends. Stewart is in a band called Superhuman Happiness and one of his bandmates is making his first beer right now. It's his first and they're calling it Superhuman Happiness. Nice where they out in New York, out of Brooklyn support, of course they are. Yeah, so Stewart has promised to save a six pack. Great, I'm pretty psyched about it. Is there music good? Oh yeah, they're really good. He's he's very good. He's in UM. He's one of the founding members of Anti Ballis. Have you heard of them? No? Do you know that UM show faila No, the Failer that was on Broadway. It's a musical about Fayla Coutie, the Nigerian afro beat, the one that you went to. Yes, yeah, a new about it. Okay, that guy he arranged that he's good man. Okay, he when we saw him with um uh not buying princip Billy the other guy. Yeah, you hate Bonnie principally, I don't hate him. What's the other guy? The other guy? Oh yeah, Sam Beam, Yeah, he played with him. Cool when they came through last those guys too. So do you want to talk about beer ever? Yeah? Seriously, we got a lot to cover. We shouldn't have wasted that minute of your lives. Sorry everyone. So, um, what Stewart and Matt are engaged in isn't millennia long tradition of brewing beer? Yeah, c o a first, really quickly, you must be twenty one to drink alcohol. Oh yeah, and don't don't really take off your shirt and drink responsibly. So we're certainly not encouraging anyone to go out and uh that's underage to get the delicious, delicious beer and drink it all right, So as old ass. Since people could walk around, it seems like they wanted to start brewing beer. Well it's as old as civilization, is what they think. So not you know, some they could walk around. But since they discovered that moldy bread did funny things. Yeah, and they think that it's possible that it was um an accident at some piece of bread got wet and um inadvertently fermented. Like all the everything was there just right, and I guess back then they didn't waste anything, so they probably were like, let me drink this nasty thing or everything was new and they're like, what does this taste like? Well, this dude, to me, they had tried um magic mushrooms before and we're like, I will eat anything now. You never know what you're going. They were still figuring things out. They're in the figuring things out phase. Um. So yeah, it's possible it was a piece of bread. It could have just been a piece of grain or something. Because there's a school of thought that we have bread as because we have beer. Yeah. I love that theory. Because they figured out that you could bake bread and easily mash make a mash out of bread and water um to produce beer, and that this was all very portable and anybody could kind of keep some bread in their homes, so it's possible we have we have bread because of beer. I love that theory. Um. But the point is is that, yeah, bread, beer is as old as civilization because one of the first grains. One of the first things we did was domesticate grain, and you need grain to make year and we figured it out pretty quickly. But the oldest record of brewing is I think six thousand years old and sumer Yeah, ancient Sumerians have a seal um that was had a hymn on it, the hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing and him. Not only was it him, but it was him about making beer. It was a recipe for beer. And it wasn't like use one chord of but it was it was very broad. Um the recipe. Have you read it? There's I think dog fish Head Brewery remade it using that recipe. Yeah, I've got one of theirs. They remade this ancient Chinese thing too. Um. I don't think it's the same thing. No, it's very much. It's more in the tradition of wine or brandy than beer. Um. But yeah, this this one, this hymn to Nankazi is definitely beer for sure. Um, and that just kind of kicked everything off, just right out of the gate. Yeah, the earliest reports where the beer would make you feel exhilarated, wonderful and blissful, and so people are like, how do I get my hands on this stuff? Yeah, and they figured out very quickly how you got your hands on this stuff? Choke. Because beer came about at a period of transition to um a grarian societies from nomadic hunter gatherer societies to graian societies. And there is another school of thought that not only do we have um bread beer to thank for bread, but civilization itself. That civilization, that beer attracted nomadic groups to civilization because that's who had the beer, right, That's how you got the beer. You domesticated grain and you made it. Yeah, and this hut over here, they're really good at making beer. So let's live near them. And then in circle that hut, and then that circle grows and all of a sudden, everyone's just sitting around getting drunk exactly. And then somebody's guests are plus grain, so they're in charge, and um, people end up doing work and religious groups start up. But that's this is kind of Um, immortalized in the epic of Gilgamesh inky Do, the wild man who represents the hunter gatherer tribes the nomads. Um is given beer because it is the custom of the city, yeah, the civilized people. And he drinks like eight glasses of it, and while he's drunk, he washes himself and became a human being just like that. So he moves from the wild into civilization via beer fastward a little bit to Babylonia or Babylon. Yeah, and I gotta get out of Babylon, man. Yeah, they had They had twenty different types of beer, and I believe they even invented the can that turns blue when it's cold. I'm not mistaken. It was priceless. Is that Babylon? I think it was. Okay. Um, there's also a question I could not find a definitive answer for. But supposedly the Babylonians took brewing so seriously that if you made a bad batch or tried to sell a bad batch, your punishment was to be drowned in it. Yeah. I wonder if that's true. I found it all over the place, but it was everybody. Nobody had a good definitive source. Sell I present it as a rumor. Early beer Josh was unfiltered, cloudy had chunks of junk in it and residue, so they would actually drink it through a straw sort of as a filter. Um, so they wouldn't get the stuff in their mouth. It was really bitter. Um. Hammerabi very important lawmaker back in the day. Yeah, why do we just talk about him in the eye for an eye? Code don't remember it was? Was it Noah's Ark? Maybe I don't remember, but yeah, he was the guy who came up with the eye for an eye, was like one of the earliest set of laws. And a beer for a priest, well, it turns out actually five beers for a priest. Well five leaders. Yeah, that's right a day. Yeah, that was his beer, rah, And that was one of the first laws that established Um, a normal worker got two leaders, civil servants three, and then administrators and the high priest five leaders a day. Now, that is what I call a social contract. That's that's worth sticking around for. Um. So yeah, Hammurabi's wasted. Um, then we're gonna fast forward a little more. The Egyptians keep it going. Um. They had their own hieroglyph. They did for brewer. And then everything comes very very close to being disrupted, disrupted forever um with the arrival of the Greece of the Romans, because they drove alvos and listen to NPR, and all they cared about was wine. To to the Romans especially uh, beer was barbarian drink, Like you only drank beer in the most the remotest outposts of the Roman Empire. U to make it wine to a certain degree, don't you think? Sure? Yeah, I mean wine is very big around Greece, but so is Greek beer. No, but I'm talking about period all over the world. Like you know, you generally think of wine as being high society. And the construction worker kicks back with the corpse light. Can't we all just drink both? Yes, maybe even mixed together. No, Okay, that's um. But yes, I agree with that that point of view. I think it does kind of carry on to day and I guess that's where it finds its roots. Yea, the snobby Greeks interesting in romans Um. Luckily there was a remote outpost of the Roman Empire that was like, I don't care what you say, man, we're making beer. We're going to dedicate our society making beer, of course. And today we call those people the Germans. Yes, God bless them and their efforts. Back then they were called Twotons. Yeah and uh. Tacitus wrote about the ancient Germans and said, to drink the Teutons have a horrible brew for a minute, from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a very far removed similarity to wine. The only thing that had in common was that you drink it and it messes you up. Yeah, you know, yeah. Aside from that, it was couldn't be any more different, right, And the Germans have been making uh beer since at least eight hundred b C. That's the earliest record we have of beer drinking in Germany. UM. And I don't know if it it probably spread from the Tutons to the rest of northern Europe um. But you see beer pop up in very ancient um Northern European texts like the Finnish saga the calla Walla, Yeah, CALLI walla. There there are four hundred verses dedicated to beer, two verses dedicated to the creation of the earth. That's that's that's a society that takes it to beer. Seriously. Yeah, and the Nordic Uh, I kind of thought it was called the Nordic epic eda. Wine was for the gods, beer was for mortals, and mead for the inhabitants of the realm of the dead. You ever had mead? Uh? No, I never have. It's like honey based right for minute honey. Yeah, it's like honey water for minute honeywater. It's doesn't sound like good. I had some hippie in uh in Virginia, give me some mead one time that he had made. You took mead from a hippie, stayed with him one night. It was one of those deals. Yeah, going through town. Okay, Now you just a friend hooked us up for a place to stay. Did you have a bindle? Now he did, though, and he even had a house. He had homemade mead. It was gross, was it? It wasn't very good. I didn't care for it. I'm sure it's an acquired taste. Um. So yeah, mead kind of falls off here, right yeah, um, except for hippies in Virginia exactly. Uh. Wine kind of stuck into the Mediterranean, but beer just continued to spread and take hold. Yeah, like barley, I mean of course wine spread itself as well, and we have it in France and californ on you and everything. But but around this time it was fairly localized to the Mediterranean area. UM. And as as we enter the medieval age, UM, the Dark Ages first and then medieval times, UM, the monks, Christian monks got really really good at brewing UM. And the reason they took it up is because this was a place of like science and agriculture and abbey was and UM could also support their abbey exactly, which is now what Trappist monks are. If you if you drink Traffis Dale and it says brewed by Trappis monks. This is a tradition that's well over a thousand years old. It's pretty cool monks supporting themselves by doing something for the community. And some of them threw beer. Another tradition, which is rampant sexism, took place when women, uh were the ones that brewed beer in the medieval times. And not only that, but they said we want only hot women brewing our beer. Well, it was so important that only beautiful women could brew beer. But can you believe that way back then they were like no, no, no, I don't want know ugly chicks making my beer. I can you believe that's yeah, the earliest form of sexism I can think of. I'll bet it goes back further than that. Well, but there's a feminist twist it later on. Well, because I got really good at making it. Yeah, people who were women who were um, you know, well known, like as if you were a medieval wife, Um, one of the things you did was brew right, um. And if you were good at it, eventually your family may come to bear the name Brewer or brewce Stir. That's where your name comes from, exactly. It means that you haven't a female ancestor who landed your family a surname through her brewing skills. That is feminism, asked me. It might have been the st poly girl herself. Maybe, So do you think she's a feminist icon? I don't think so. So where are we took? We are in the fifteenth century and something pretty cool happened in uh Germany. Um. And to me this is the fact of the show. Just because I did not know this. The Rheine heitzkbault A fifteen sixteen was a beer purity law basically said you can only make beer out of four things. Water, malted barley, malted wheat, and hops. So that is wrong, that's not right. It's three things. I don't know where this source got the fourth the four ingredients, but there's water, barley, and hops are the only three things you can put in beer. Okay, wheat wasn't included, Okay, regardless, that's still the fact of the show. The Rheine Heights boat is the oldest non religious legal standard of food production and the oldest consumer protection law on the planet was beer because beer. It's fifteen sixteen. That is crazy, and it's still around. It is, it's still enforced today, Like, don't try to make a beer in Bavaria using anything but at those three ingredients. You make beer in Bavaria with corn and rice, you got a one way ticket on the bullet train out of town, right, or you'll get caned publicly. That's right. Um. And there are a couple of reasons why this law was passed. One, people used to put crazy, crazy stuff in beer, like um, hallucinogenic roots or poisonous roots that could make you do crazy stuff like hemlock and things like that. Um, So it was for it was a purity law. It was also to control prices. If you read the purity law, it's like you can't sell a beer for more than this. And then thirdly, also is to make sure that um important grains like wheat got diverted to important things like food. They didn't want people going crazy like using wheat, which is why you why that wheat was wrong. It's barley water. But wheat beer obviously came along in rye beer later on. Right, So let's go to America, Man, Usa, Virginia again. Yeah, beer's been around in the US since before the US was around. Maybe it was that hippie. Maybe he was a descendant of the original brewers a beer in the US. Maybe so in fifties seven. By this time, colonists already making beer flagrantly ignoring the Ryan Heights Kabbat by using corn. They realized very quickly that this makes a terrible beer and uh. In sixteen o nine, the first ads appear in London newspapers asking for brewers to move to the Virginia colony. They needs some beer over there in the New World, and uh. In sixwelve, the first brewery set up in New Amsterdam by Adrian Block and Hans Christian Anderson now Hans Christensen and uh. I thought this was interesting too, same place where the first well, it says the first non native American, but I guess it's the first American because America wasn't there yet. This is new answer. That was Dutch colony. So it's the first the first non native American born in North America that wasn't who wasn't like of an indigenous group, which was gen vision vision e viny And he became a brewery. Yeah, he was born in the first brewery. Crazy, Yeah, I mean he kind of had to become a brewer under those circumstances, didn't he Well in America just had to become a nation of beer lovers because of this, I think, yeah, And boy did we love it so like researching this and other researchers I've done, America used to be a ten times more in an awesome place. I can't remember what what episode it was. It may have been prohibition where we were talking about like if you look at lists of things served at like colonial funerals or weddings or whatever, it'd be like five five kigs of rome, and it's fifty kigs of beer and all that, but there's only like sixty people there. And then the fact that the word cocktail referred to a drink that you drink in the morning, and that the old whiskey old fashion was the original cocktail. Um. Yeah, we used to drink a lot more in this country. So like in eighteen what is it, seventy three, Yes, we we hit our peak number of breweries four thousand, one d and thirty one breweries supplying uh population of just fifty million people. Yeah, our peak back then, of course. Yeah, because now there's a renaissance, there is craft brewing, and now there are more breweries than since the eighteen hundreds. That's awesome. Um. I did a little research on craft brewing and in the in the nineteen seventies, there were only forty consolidated breweries in the US, and experts thought that that number would fall to as little as five And it was all this homogenous light lagger that Americans grew to love. In World War Two, Yeah, because prohibition hit and there's like a beer evolutionary bottleneck. You couldn't survive unless you were one of the big big ones, right, and you had to do you had to make other things, including non alcoholic beer. But so you come out and there's just a few breweries operating, right, and um. Then World War Two hits and that caused the other reason that beer became homogeneous in the United States. Men went off the war, women became the market for brewers for beer, and they um preferred a lighter style beer. So in America almost for decades after World War Two, the only beer you can find pretty much was that um American style pills near Logger. Yeah, it was like this through the nineteen seventies. Uh, and then nineteen eighty I'm sorry, nineteen seventy six, the first craft brewery, the new I'll Be i'll be On Brewery in Sonoma, California, open and they were like, we want to start making some good old beer again, like some ales and some ambers and some stouts. Uh. They were only open about six years, but they inspired hundreds of others to take it up, and that's generally looked back as the New Renaissance started in seventy six. So in nineteen eighty there were eight craft breweries, in nineteen ninety four there were five hundred and thirty seven, and in two thousand and ten there were sixteen hundred's beautiful, and I think over nineteen hundred in two thousand eleven, so they went from literally almost being extinct like twenty something years ago or thirty years ago, to like booming, big time booming. But that's still half of that eighteen seventies number nineteen hundred, So yeah, you're right, half, but that's the highest level since that time. But consider that. Think about how much beers in this country right now. You've got nineteen hundred breweries get yet plus supplying three hundred million people. Back then we had forty one hundred breweries supplying fifty million. Yeah. Crazy, well, and let's not kid ourselves. I think the craft brewers are supplying about four by volume and about six percent by by dollars. And the three, you know, Miller, Anheuser, Bush, and Course are the three big daddies. I prefer to fool myself in this circumstance. But you are right. I mean, there's a renaissance going on. Um, so let's talk about what these people are doing during this renaissance. You want to talk about how beer is made? Yeah, and I've never done it, surprisingly, I never have either, but I'm going to oh yeah, yeah, we'll bring me somewhere. This has inspired me. I just need to collect friends who brew their own beer so I don't have to do it any exactly. Uh. Barley, water, hops, and east are the basic four ingredients and the UM I like how you put this The whole idea just to extract sugars from the grains. Usually barley yeast eats it up and it poops out alcohol and CEO two and that's beer. It's that simple. And you've just described two steps. There's two big categories of this process. There's brewing and then there's fermenting. And the brewing part is pretty simple. It's taking um malted barley or malted grain, which is like dried and cracked and um heated so that the sugars start to come out a little more. Um. I guess caramelized is another way to put it. And then you take that and you steep it in a basically a T and the t that you've just made is called worked and that's called mashing. Right, Yeah, so mashing, yes, taking them taking the malted grain and steeping it, that's mashing's right. But it produces a sticky, um sweet substance pre beer as it were called word imagined wort in Germany. Probably uh and you uh, you take that word and your brewing process is done. When you put it in a tank with yeast. You've just started the fermentation process. Yes, and that's where things get groovy. Uh that you boil the vert for about an hour. You add the hops and depending on what kind of beer you're gonna make, is uh really going to depend on what kind of hops or how how much hops? Yeah, we haven't started fermenting yet. I jumped the gun. You have to add the hops with to the worked Oh, oh, yeah, we did jump the gun. But Budweiser, let's say, has about eight to twin I b U s, which are international bitterness units. That's how you measure hops. Are you like happy beer? I am a big I p A and pale ale? Yeah, I'd like beer that's so happy it makes me sneeze. Well that's pretty happy. Um. A thirty uh stout has about thirty to fifty I b U s, and a double I p A or an I p A could have up to a hundred dog fish head D and twenty minute has a hundred and twenty IBus. Well, I like the sixty and the ninety. The one twenty is actually kind of hard to find a lot of times because they don't make a ton of it. Um. But interestingly, pale ale. You know where Indian palel comes from, the I p a India, Well it does. Uh. British soldiers were stationed over there, and when they started setting up trade with India back in the day, were colonizing it. It's just one, that's one way to put it. And they were like, boy, were really thirsty and we kind of miss our old beer back in England. So they would send over their pale ales and they wouldn't um really make the voyage very well, the sea voyage. It would show up flat and kind of gnarly. So they added a lot more hops because hot sex is a preservative. Thus India pale ale. Nice. Yeah, nice, that's the story I got. I'm gonna be really embarrassed, No, I think if it's not by that one, that's what's the kind of story here in a bar? Yeah you know yeah, um yeah, that's the story you see in a bar gets you free beer. We should try that. Um. So you've got you've got the worked that's boiled. Um, it's all sugary and um, you add east to it and put in a tank and now it's fermenting and like like we said, the yeast just eats all the sugars and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products. And depending on the kind of beer you make, um, well it really depends on the kind of yeast you use. Um you're either going to be waiting around for a few weeks to a couple of months. So um, if you were making um something called a an ale, you're going to be doing all this. You're gonna ferment um using tough fermenting yeast at room temperature, and then after a few weeks your beer is gonna be ready to drink. If you are making a logger which in Germany, which in German is a verb meaning to store, Um, you're going to it's gonna take a few months, um, and you're going to store this stuff. You're gonna let it ferment um at near freezing temperatures and it's gonna ferment at the bottom the yeast is Yeah, they would put it in caves. It's called lager ing. Yeah. It was the stort and cave cold caves because for those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years that they were making beer. They kept they kept being like, this beer is messed up, and it happens to be summertime. What's wrong with this beer? Oh, it's it's all the summertime. And then finally somebody figured out, wait a minute, we're making the best beer in the winter time. And they didn't quite know why, but they figured out a process to replicate it. But of course now we understand that UM, the wild yeast and bacteria in the area that was prevalent in the summers of Germany, UM was messing up the fermentation process, souring the beer. It's the stuff using yeasts that survived in winter months in the cold. UM produces really clean, crisp, very awesome beer. Taste of the Rockies. Yeah, exactly. That's now called the Lagger. That's right. We actually forgot something too. And I know there's homebrewers right now going you can't forget carbonation. Uh, skipping back a bit after you. After you do have the bottle beer, it's not carbonated yet, very flat, so you need to carbonate it. And I imagine the big breweries UM forced carbonate like sodas do and uh, if you're a traditionalist though, and I wonder about craft breweries that I need to know more about this if they do that or not. Well, I think it usually I'll say, like bottle conditioned. So bottle condition means it just waits and you wait it out for the yeast to do its thing naturally. And that's where you're gonna get your your phone and your good bubbly goodness because it produces carbon dioxide. Is a waste product, takes a while. Waste product. You say, waste product, I say bubbly goodness. Okay, Um, So you want to talk about gravity? Uh? Yeah, gravity is um. Gravity is how much alcohol is in your beer. And the brewers measure the gravity before and after the fermentation process, and they calculate the difference uh in the out of alcohol by volume and represented by a percentage. So like the higher the percentage, the higher the gravity of the beer. Yeah. And you know nowadays with the craft beers, you're gonna get all kinds of percentages, like you know, six to nine to right, that's a pretty heavy duty beer. Oh definitely. What is like get your average Budweiser? What is that? Five? Five? Is it? There's a law in Georgia for a while that was you couldn't sell beer over five point five. Do you remember when they repealed that law that beautiful time in the nineties. Do you remember that? Actually? That was Wow. They had a lot to do with crapper reis in Georgia too, Definitely. UM say the stuff about the lambic so, I thought that was really interesting, okay, um. So lambics are um a type of spontaneously fermented brew. I've had it. I didn't know this though, the same problem that the um old Germans had um with you know, local stuff getting in there the UM. I guess the French when they're producing this, these Lambics or the Belgians um French, and they're they're basically just leaving their stuff out to be exposed to wild yeast that grows in the area. It's crazy spontaneous fermentation. And I've had, Like I said, I'd tried lambic in the past, and I didn't know what made it so special that that was it. I don't care for it a whole lot. It's kind of has a sour aftertaste, its fruity sort of cider almost. Yeah, not enough hops. Oh, no, I like, what's your favorite beer? Actually? I mean to asking that. So I'm a pretty big fan of um anything New Amsterdam puts out. Yeah, they're great, um fat tires point of the all time best. Yeah, our friends that we have friends fans at Brooklyn Brewery. Yeah and New AMSTU. Remember they sent us like a bunch of beer. They were the first ones they did. Thanks again, guys. Um, Yeah, we have fans at Brooklyn Brewery. They sent beach towels and other swag they did. Uh. We had a fan who sent us some Shiner Bach once, but I don't think he was related to them in any way. He was just from Texas. Yeah, that's a Texas beer, right, Um, my all time favorite. It's just it's never been toppled. Like I've had plenty of beer. I'm like, this is really good, like innocent gun. Have you ever had that? Oh my god, it's like ambrosia. It's the most amazing thing ever. But you you can't just drink like one after the other if you're in such a mood. It's just it's just a lot. It's very rich. But my so my favorite beer, that's just no one's ever topped all day is Sierra Nevada pale Ale. I'm right there with you. It's just the best beer. I think that's anyone anyone's ever made. It's delicious and nutritious, it's refreshing. Yeah, I want to go to their brewery. Um. I like the dog Fish had stuff. Um, but I'm I'm in to try. And you know, we have these stores here in Atlanta now and Indicator where I live with, you know, all the myriad craft beers, and I'll try any kind of any kind of pale ale or I p a. Have you been to Ale? Yeah? I have, that's yeah. And they have the growlers there, which is always kind of fun. Yeah. You just get something on tappen, drink it out of a jug like an old pirate. And I also have to say our local boys at Sweetwater are killing it too. Like there's like as far as pale ales go, Sierra Nevadas and the four twenty very very close four twenties good. I will always go for that if it's um, if they don't have the seer on them. And I remember my first beer very distinctly, do you Yeah, Because I, as everyone listens to the show NOWS, I was a very good, good Baptist boy growing up, So I didn't um, I didn't drink or anything like that until I was older. And I remember the first time I tasted beer. I had only had soda as far as a carbonated beverage, and that's the only thing I could like expect, And I just remember thinking, this is so weird tasting. It's like it's fizzy like a soda, but it wouldn't taste anything like a soda. And I'm like, oh, how do people drink this stuff? And then like thirty seconds later, you're trying it again, like, oh, why can't I stop? I want to stop? Yeah? Um, first beer, huh, I don't remember mine? Remember there was a long gone. I think you're probably younger than I was. I don't remember. I mean my dad drank like old Milwaukee tall boys, and I'm sure like I tried like a sip of his when I was a kid. Or see, we didn't have beer in the house, so that it was just winn't around. Um alright, so where are we chuckers? We could talk about some of the older beers in existence. Yeah, so there's like actual old beer. It's like over a hundred years old. Like that that particular bottle of beer was manufactured like a hundred seventy eight years ago. And there's two shipwrecks that had beer on them that ironically are competing for the oldest beer in the world. Um, and they both went down in. I know, it's maddening. Um. There's one in the Baltic Sea. There was a shipment of beer and champagne from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg that went down in. And then there's a shipwreck in the English Channel UM in eighteen and a guy in named Um Keith Thomas. He was a microbiologist, I believe. Um. He got his hands on some of the bottles of this beer that is still around and Um tried it and was like he vomited, and he's like, maybe I can figure out some other way to do this. So he got the yeast from this beer, and UM got a colony going of the living yeast, same same yeast. It's not like a descendant of it, like this is the yeast. And Um he got it going again and found like an old porter recipe and now he makes flag Porter, which in and of itself is one of the better beers around. Oh I also want to say, I like just about anything Sam Smith does too. I don't know that Sam Smith like oatmeal, stout and winter welcome. Yeah, Sammy Smith. Sorry, sure they're Uh they had the Shakespeare stout yea when that Sammy Smith, that's rogue. Yeah, that's rogue. But I've had that. Guy Ale is awesome. Man, I'm getting thirsty. Uh. Dogfish Head has revived a recipe that they claim is the and that's what we're talking about earlier. Is he the guy from dog fish had claims it's the oldest known ferminted recipe in the history of man. And uh it was from a Neolithic burial site in China, and it is called they brew it now. It's called Chateau uh jiaho uh j i h h j i a h u from seven thousand b C. And they decoded it, uh molecularly from Clay Potts founded a Neolithic burial site and have brewed this stuff. And um, they're also the ones they get a little crazy. You know, they did the Midas touch brew that was supposedly King Midas's um recipe or from his tomb. And we have people right in But I love what they're doing over there at dog Fish Head. They also did the one based on the hymn to Nick Cancy the what the hymn? Didn't cantye that to marry in one right? Um? So there's also some brewers that have been around for a while, like Stella Artois. If you look on the label, you'll see that, um, it has some mention of thirteen sixty six. Man, that's when it was. That's when they started brewing that supposedly. Oh yeah, I like a nice summertime beer for me, agreed. Um. August Steiner was um began in probably the oldest beer in the world as far as like brewing. The recipe um is uh winehan Staffen. Did I get it? Yeah? Vahan v han Stefan. Oh nice. So those are brewed by Ben Benedictine monks. That beer has been brewed since the seven hundreds. But the weinhan Staffen Uh the guys brewing that also operate the oldest um continuously functioning brewery in the world, which opened its doors in ten party and it's been going ever since. That's awesome. It's about to celebrate its thousandth anniversary. That's so cool. Um, what else a man named Arthur Guinness and seventeen fifty six did a very smart thing by signing a nine thousand year lease on a building in Dublin and they have been making the old delicious Guinness beer there since then. And I enjoyed at our south By Southwest event at Fedoe Irish Pub. I enjoyed myself some Guinness at that a bit love me some Guinness. It's Gonnas sponsoring you, now, No, none of these people are. But why are you wearing that leather eight bulb jack with Guinness patches all over it? The Schlitz story I thought was kind of interesting. Yeah. I searched the story up because I had remembered hearing it you back, and I was like, we gotta mention now. So what was the deal? They were making good beer for a long time, We're one of the top three, and then they changed their recipe in the late seventies and just screwed it all up. They wanted to be number one and they were, they were number two. Wanted to be number one, so they decided that they were going to um just change it, and they changed it in a really lazy, cost efficient way. Instead of malt, they used corn, syrup, high fruit toast corn syrup. Such a bad idea. And then they didn't filter it as much either, So you had this really weird tasting chunky style beer. And this is in the seventies. What by Schlitz's market share was one It went from the number two selling beer in America to within just a couple of years, one percent of the market. I think more than one person lost their job on that that move. Oh yeah, they may have like killed those people. Um. So they discontinued the brand altogether at one point, didn't they. Yeah, it went under and then Strows, which I also remember from my childhood, Um was, uh, what said, well, you know what we're gonna buy you guys. So they bought Schlitz and then, um, they just bought the label. They're like, we don't want that. Keep your keep all this leftover chunky beer. Um, but they bought the label and apparently rolled out the classic sixties formula, which I have not tried. I have not either. We do want to shout out to Yengling as well. Um. In nine David Yengling opened a brewery in Pennsylvania in Potts Bell and it is still open today. The oldest operating brewery in the United States, still in the Yngling family, And uh, they're black and tan is very delicious to me, and it's a very popular beer. People seek it out. I think one of the reasons why is because it's tradition and it's delicious, and it has cute puppies in their labels and marketing materials. Yeah. And I want to ask Budweiser, if you are the makers of Budweiser and you're listening, bring back the bullet bottles and you'll thank me later. Do you know who makes um Budweiser? Anheuser Bush? Right? Uh? You know who owns Anheuser Busch um in BEV. They're a European company, really, as something as American as Budweiser is owned by the Europeans. Now, well, and Heisa isn't exactly American, you know what I'm saying. Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that, neither as Bush. But yeah, the bullet bottles, do you remember those? They were short, little stubby No, those are the barrels that these were bullets. They were short and kind of went up and then just graduated up and they were guarantee you people would buy those the classic Budweiser Fallus bottle, Well Miller High Life came back with their old school bottle. I haven't said, oh, yes, yes, I know exactly what you're talking. Remember the old bullets. Yeah, they were cute and uh, I think if Budweiser brought those back, people would really jump on that because if you know, everyone likes that old school stuff, you can look like you're in the seventies again or eighties seventies. Yeah, you can send your thanks by check to Chuck Annheuser Busch money starts rolling, or just a case of the bullets. So, um, this is kind of unusual. We don't usually throw out cool random facts at the end, but there's some cool ones. You go ahead, Okay, I'm going to start with the London Brewery of eighteen fourteen. Yeah, so there was a hundred thousand gallon tank fermenting tank of ale uh in London at a brewery and it exploded and when it did it killed eight people and destroyed a pub nearby. It actually killed nine people. The ninth guy died the next day. Because when these hundred thousand gallons of ale flooded the streets, people started drinking it. One guy drank so much that he died of alcohol poisoning. Wow, isn't that crazy, Josh. According to statistics, the Czech Republic leads the world and beer consumption per capita. I have been there, and I can tell you they love their beer. It's cheaper than their water. I have been there too, and it is delicious. Over a hundred and fifty six liters per year per person. That's for everyone that they don't just say like twenty one year old, uh, you know citizens. So that is four and thirty nine beers a year. Twelve ounces, right, they're probably sixteen ounces over there, or are they twelve? I don't know. I don't know how they broke that downs. So that is eighteen cases of beer per person, about a case and a half five s a leader a half leader. I think it's like a tall boy can a big can. Well. I think most of Europe it's like that, because I remember being in London for the first time in thinking, man, you guys have his tall boys and they're like, what's a tall boy? Oh wait that was Australian that was neither actually pretty close Matt's and they're laughing at my hackneed attempts uh best symbol. Yeah, the red triangle famous. It was registered as a trademark in eighteen seventy six. It's the world's oldest trademark. Pretty cool. And the beer Stein. You have been to Germany, Yeah, the beer gardens there, it's exactly what you think you're gonna get. You're to get a four and a half foot tall German woman with four arms as big as your waist, carrying like five of those big, huge mugs of beer in each hand. And it was exactly what you want if you're going over to your beer grou And I was like, Wow, I'm so glad it's like this. And my buddy Brett and I actually had a very fun night in Germany drinking with this ah old fat German dude that didn't speak any English and I spoke a little bit of German, but we all love the Beatles, and we drank with this dude for like three hours, singing Beatles songs in both English and German. And Carl and I have a picture with this guy still. It was one of my great great memories of traveling abroad. Well tell him where the beer stein came from? Oh, the beer stein comes from the bubonic plague. They're like, we need to put lids on these things so we don't get any disease in there. Until they came up with the beer stein. Yeah, and what was it to the pottery? Was they were there were advancements in ceramics, right. I think the money fact is the bubonic plague created beer steins, so that's it. But I didn't get steins in Germany. You know, it was just a big mug. It's like is you know, it looks like a half gallon of beer. I'm not sure how much it is, but it was good doomkalee stuff. Nice man, Matt, do we get anything wrong? He said, We're pretty good. That's good enough. I'm sure that there's some homebrewers that will take us to task. But we did our best. Man. We want to hear about it. Um, do you have anything else right now? I'm done? Okay, So that's it for beer. You can type beer into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. Remember, as Chuck said at the beginning, don't go out and drink beer if you're not twenty one. UM in the United States and drink responsibly. Yes, don't be a goin. Don't ever drink and dry it. It's just dumb, agreed chuck a little older and you realize that the commercials are all right, that's just a stupid thing to do. Um and uh so that's it for beer right now? Um, I said, search for how stuff works dot com. I think so it's time for listening. That's right, Josh. And you know the other reason why you get a little older and you say drink responsibly is because you do a lot of stupid stuff. If you don't, oh man, and you will be the butt of many many jokes. Even if no one gets hurt, you will. You will act a fool and end up with like toothpaste up your nose because you've passed out at a party. If that's what happens in your world when you drink too much, you know, you've seen a pass out at a party, and people like draw stuff on your face and take pictures of you and put it all over the internet. Plus you feel crutty the next morning. Yeah, exactly, see our hangovers podcast for that. All right, um, I'm gonna call this a pretty cool interesting email from an attorney about doing guys. I just got done listening to your podcast on duels. I thought you might like to know that I and I am sure many of your fans enjoyed the podcast with a twinge of sad This because alas I cannot duel. Why you ask, I am an attorney, and one of the states in which I am licensed is Kentucky. And when an attorney in Kentucky is sworn in, he or she swears an oath. And when I was sworn in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it contained this additional tidbit. In order to practice in the Commonwealth, I had to swear that I would not participate in any duels. She still has to say. This isn't that crazy, It's pretty cool. What's more, as I listened to the podcast, I realized that I had been preparing to duel my whole life. During college, I worked as a serving wench at Medieval Times, watching jousts each night and twice on Saturday's. My senior year of college, in order to fulfill my pe requirement, I took fencing, which was actually really interesting and more athletic than I expected. So sadly, no matter how much experience we may have, neither I nor my fellow members of the Kentucky bar come stuff. You should know. Fans can use the information we clean you from your podcast. Uh. There was talk in the last few years of uh years, of removing that particular clause from the oath, but as far as I know, newly minted Kentucky attorneys are still required to abstain from dueling nuts. It just seems logical. I think we should add that to just about anything, like when you go get your driver's license you have to check a box that says I won't do or in your marriage vowels. Yeah, there's there's just a lot of places where we could insert that. And that is from Rebecca right in Sincentucky, Ohio. Really that's what she signed. It is No, she signed it Cincinnati, but I like to say Sanantucky. Uh. Well, let's see. Oh, if you're a homebrewer, we want to hear from you. Um. And by hear from you, we mean it's into some of your weares. Chuck said that, not me, um, but he's right. So, uh, we want to hear from you via Twitter at s y ESK podcast. We wanted to hear from you on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash of you Should Know, and We want to get emails from you, and you can send those Two Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.