What The Schnitt?

Yesterday I introduced you to our friend Mr Bílek, shoemaker and fundraiser for Czech national causes extraordinaire, yet he was far from alone in his endeavours, as I discovered in the German language daily "Znaimer Tagblatt" from January 1900.

Znaim is the German name for the modern city of Znojmo in Moravia (minor aside, I always find typing "Moravia" rather than "Morava" weird) and if ethnic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century are accurate the city, and its attendant region, was predominantly German rather than Czech. The history of Bohemia and Moravia within the context of the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire is delightfully complex and multi-ethnic, and I don't want to get into that fun here. However, what is clear is that Czechs and Germans living in Bohemia and Moravia used each other to prod and cajole their fellow citizens into ever greater demonstrations of national fervour.

According to this story, the fund raising undertaken by the likes of Mr Bílek at U Fleků had raised a total of 26,614 Florins in the 20 years since 1880. One thing that I find fascinating is all the different names for the same basic currency throughout the Empire. If the 14,000 Złoty raised by our shoemaker friend was about $90,000 then over the course of 20 years, the proud Czechs of U Fleků raised about $170,000/£126,000/€146,000 for various Czech national associations, specifically the Czech School Association, Czech Association in North Moravia, and the Sokol, a gymnastics association.

And so this success makes the "Deutsche Blatt" ask the question "and what are we Germans doing?". Seemingly there were a pair of Moravian "Bunds", one in the North and one in the South, for whom an annual contribution of a mere 20 Kroner or even a single Krone respectively was, perhaps hyperbolically, considered "already too much".

The writer continues to berate their fellow German Austrians that a single "schnitt" fewer every day wouldn't be so bad and that the savings would build up to a sizeable fund for civic associations tied to the ethnically German population of the Empire. And here we have again an example of the cross pollination of cultures that was Bohemia and Moravia in the 19th century, evidenced today through the use of a transliteration of "schnitt" into Czech, "šnyt" as the name for effectively a half pour of beer and lots of foam. "Schnitt", if you know your German means "cut", because it is a cut down pour of beer, that is "better than nothing", at least according to Bohumil Hrabal, or was it Karel Čapek, when he wasn't inventing the word "robot"?

Anyway, clearly the writer in the Znaimer Tagblatt thinks Czechs are more effective as patriots, reminding his audience with his closing line "organising festivals and dancing for national purposes is far from fulfilling one's duty".

Collecting Coins in the Pub

I am always fascinated by the social and political aspects of the pub, perhaps more so even that the beery ones. Pubs, beer halls, biergartens, are all inherently social and political spaces, because they are places where humans get together and talk about the things that are important to them, or at least on their minds. Sure, folks can prattle on about not talking about politics or religion in polite society, but the pub, beer hall, or biergarten are not necessarily polite spaces, and so it is no surprise when you dig into the role such places have played in history that you learn interesting things...such as this story from the "Kuryer Lwowski" - that's Lemberger Courier for the non Polish speakers amongst us...

As you can probably tell from the highlighted sections, I was doing a search on the legendary Prague beer hall, U Fleků, but this story from May 4th 1893 has nothing to do with black beer, or any other shade of booze, rather it comes from a story titled "How Czechs Collect Donations". For historical reference, at this point in time, the Polish people were divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empire. There was no independent Polish state, Gdansk was in the German Empire, Krakow in Austro-Hungary, and Warsaw in the Russian Empire.

In the 45 years since the popular nationalist uprisings of 1848, many of the national minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire has asserted their identities as distinct from their German or Hungarian speaking overlords, and none more so arguably that the Czechs. This assertion of national identity often took the form of civic society projects, such as the building of a national theatre dedicated to performing only in the Czech language - which the Czech had to do twice because the original building suffered a catastrophic fire just a couple of months are first opening. If I remember rightly, the Imperial crown refused to provide funds for such an independent Czech cultural institution, and so the money was raised from the people themselves.

How did they manage to raise the kind of money needed to buy the saltworks upon which the theatre was built, and then to actually build the thing? One way was that people asked for donations in places like U Fleků. People like the shoemaker, Mr Bílek in the story above, would collect small amounts in popular places, and where is more popular in Central Europe than the beer hall? By collecting loose change, Mr Bílek raised 14,000 Złoty (as Poles in the Empire referred to the Austro-Hungarian Krone), or about $90,000/£65,000/€75,000. According to the story in the Kuryer Lwowski, having done his rounds Mr Bílek would put the donations in a box, the keys to which were held by two other people, and thus he collected such a sizeable sum for the "People's School Society".

The writer of the Kuryer Lwowski article finishes off their piece recommending that the people of the province of Galicia, which included much of modern western Ukraine, take lessons from the Czechs and likewise raise their own money for similar projects.

I wonder what else I will find about U Fleků in the archives...

Haus Lagerbier Update

In the very first post on Fuggled this year, I wrote about my main homebrew project for 2025, namely to take my many, many years of lager drinking, my fewer years of experience brewing my own beers, and come up with a beer that would be my "house" lager. I have named it, somewhat unimaginatively I am sure, Haus Lagerbier.

The aim is to have something I brew 4 times a year, on the first Saturday of each quarter, to compliment in many ways my house best bitter, a brewday that I could probably do in my sleep. For this year, I wanted to dial in my preferred yeast strain before messing with hops and malt, etc. As such, batch 1 was brewing using the near ubiquitous 34/70, while batch 2 switched to S-189, which is a strain from Switzerland.

Batch 1 went on tap in March, and looked like this in the late winter sun...

I was most remiss with Batch 1 in that I didn't take the time to sit down and really analyse it with my modified Cyclops set up. A fact likely due to the fact that it tasted good and between Mrs V, myself, and some of the neighbours, we cranked through the keg in double quick time.

Thank goodness for it being a year long project, and so a couple of weeks after kicking batch 1, I brewed batch 2, exactly the same beer but with the different yeast. One thing I noticed about S-189 as opposed to 34/70 was that it took an extra couple of weeks for the green appley thing of youth to fade out of the beer. Those early pints looked like this.

However, I got my shit together and sat down one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago to write some notes, with the beer pouring absolutely beautifully and looking like this.

On to the notes then:

• Sight - yellow to light gold, good couple of inches of white, rocky, foam, fantastic clarity (not fined with anything), and good head retention.
• Smell - Lightly toasted malt, some crackeriness, floral hops, kind of like walking through a mountain meadow on a breezy day.
• Taste - nicely bready, with slight toasted edges, nice hop spiciness, think cinnamon in particular
• Sweet - 2/5
• Bitter - 2.5/5

Damn it I am happy with that beer. The mouthfeel and body were just what I wanted, medium bodied and such easy drinking. The bitterness hits right at the back of the mouth, leaving me wanting more, and invariably more is what I had. I was genuinely sad when the keg kicked last weekend.

Now though, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma for batch 3 as I would happily stop and just make batch 2 the default for Haus Lagerbier. Yet, there are plenty of other bottom fermenting yeast strains out there that might be even better than S-189...what to do, what to do?

Stuck

I'm stuck in a rut.

It has been 49 days since my last post, I have several other writing projects stacked up, waiting to be completed, I am just not happy enough with them yet. I need something to break the log jam. 

So here is my crazy idea, I am just going to write whatever random boozy thoughts pop into my head each and every day for the rest of July, including when I am in Florida on vacation.

Maybe I will find something new in the Austrian newspaper archive that I love to trawl, maybe it will be a few lines of total tosh that just needs someone to comment that I am completely wrong, or right, or that you've been feeling the same but unable to say it. Maybe I won't stress myself out with long form essays, maybe I'll just post pictures of my homebrew, or other good beers I am enjoying, or more likely at the moment, something about the glories of cider in Virginia. Maybe a commenter (remember those?) will ask a question looking for my opinion on something? Who knows?

I need to break the log jam, and so I will post every day, at some point of the day, maybe more than once.

One down...

Lamentationes Desperatorum

I was wandering around the supermarket where I do the weekly shop recently, and as is my wont I bimbled over to the beer section to have a browse. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying anything, my beer fridges being pretty full of excellent lager after all, but it is a habit at the end of the shop to just take a peek. Now, while owning the fact that I do my weekly shop in a supermarket, and that I understand they have to offer what is more likely to sell, it was still a dispiriting experience.

Unless you have read a vanishing small number of my posts on here, or any other social media platforms, you will know that I am a very irregular drinker of the old India Pale Ale - side thought, it seems almost jarringly quaint to see it spelt out in full rather than just acronymed down to IPA. Yes, I am predominantly a lager drinker, especially of beers I am buying in the shop or at the pub/taproom. Most of the top fermented beers I drink are my own homebrew, stuff like bitter, mild, stout, and my lime infused witbier, which is currently on tap.

Of course, being a lager drinker gives me plenty of scope for diversity of style, and I love mixing things up with pilsners, Vienna lager, a dunkel or six, the occasional rauch doppelbock, you get the picture. Anyway, coming back to my wander around the beer aisles and their groaning under the weight of many a bottle and can of IPA with cartoonish labeling, it suddenly hit me that there are many beers I have enjoyed which seem no longer to be available, not just in my local store - there are some things that I pop into the northern Virginia branch when I have the chance specifically to buy - but as in gone, and invariably replaced by an IPA of some level of bastardisation.

As I bimbled those short aisles, and not counting here the import section, I noted a single brown ale, the excellent Tavern Brown from Alewerks Brewing in Williamsburg, just the one amber ale, Satan's Pony from Charlottesville's South Street Brewery, and precisely zero milds, hefeweizens, Scottish ales, Czech style dark lagers, and even an utter dearth of Extra Special Bitter - I have given up hope of ever finding a worthy bitter, ordinary or best, on the shelves of the supermarket. Thank goodness for Selvedge, who produce excellent examples of both, and have them on cask, from time to time, as well as my own best bitter than I brew at least 4 times a year.

It seems actually vaguely ironic then that at the recent Beer World Cup, there were 112 categories - and don't get me started on the iconic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the very archetype and poster child of the American Pale Ale being submitted as an ESB and winning gold. At last year's Great American Beer Festival there were 102 categories, and yet an alien visiting a supermarket in central Virginia would be forgiven for believing beer was called IPA, and that was pretty much all that was available. Yes, I appreciate that I am not talking about specialist craft retailers here, who tend to have a much better selection of beer in terms of stylistic variety. Even then, the prevalence of badly out of date beer, lagers stored at room temperature, and badly oxidised imports gives me pause when dropping full price money on a six pack of duff beer.

Maybe I am just entering my curmudgeonly dotage as I creep ever closer to my 50th birthday later this year, but I have found little joy of late browsing the aisles and shelves of the beer retailing world, whether supermarket or specialist. Of course there are beers, usually seasonally available lagers such as Tröeg's Little Nator, that I happily stock up on when they are available, but usually my little bimbles are more a ritual performed through a misplaced sense of duty, with a hint maybe of self-flagellating hope of something other than yet another "innovation" in the form of an IPA.

Hop to Murphy & Rude Mother

I don't really post all that often on here about my homebrew, or at least not as often as I actually brew beer in my garage. I am more likely to post pictures of grains, hops, and packets of yeast on my main Instagram account, I have a separate one for my book, "Virginia Cider: A Scrumptious History", if cider is more your thing...

Since the twins have reached an age where they don't need constant oversight, I have been able to find the necessary time to myself to brew. Kid related side, I popped into Selvedge last Friday and the bar staff made a point of thanking me for the fact that when my kids are in the taproom they are impeccably well behaved. We had been in for lunch and a pint the previous weekend and there were kids roaming the taproom unsupervised, which I know is a pet annoyance for many, and I fully understand that. In my world it is one thing to be a "family friendly pub/taproom/whatever you want to call it" but it is incumbent on families to likewise be pub/taproom/whatever you call it friendly as well. I like having the option to take my kids with me to the pub, and would be mortified if they abused that privilege so that fewer places would welcome families - after all, how else do you teach people to be good pub goers if not through teaching them when they are young?

Anyway, back to homebrew. I probably brew twice a month or so these days, having the chest freezer fermentation/lagering chamber means I can have a pretty regular supply of beer in my kegerator, and best yet I don't ever have to look at the menu and wonder if there will anything I want to drink. Currently carbonating, and hopefully ready to tap on Friday, is my first all grain version of LimeLight, my Belgian style witbier that uses lime peel in place of Curaçao orange, and batch 2 of my Haus Lagerbier project is in primary.

As with all my beers in the last couple of years, all of the grain has come from Murphy & Rude, our local craft malting company that I did a profile of a while back for Pellicle. I am not ashamed to admit it, and I realise here I am insanely privileged, but being able to support a local malting company, who in turn buy all their grain from local farmers, and also get involved in projects to make sure that historic Virginian corn varieties remain available to the like of Josh Chapman for making their gorgeous malted corn lagers, is deeply, deeply satisfying. It definitely helps that M&R malts are right up there in terms of quality and freshness. My house best bitter has been brewed for more than 2 years now with just Murphy & Rude malt, and it is the best it has ever been.

Speaking of my best bitter, a few recent batches have been brewed using Virginia grown Challenger hops from Mountain View Hops down the road in Floyd County, and now thanks to Murphy & Rude I will have more options for making near completely Virginia versions of that beer. Over the weekend, they announced that they are now stocking Virginia grown hops, in particular those of Greenmont Hopworks in Albemarle County. At present they have three varieties available, Cascade, Crystal, and their own unique hop called Mother, a wild hop that was discovered on their farm and has proven excellent for brewing - a recent version of Selvedge's landbier, Local Fabric, used them to great effect.

As a result of Murphy & Rude selling hops as well as grains now, my next batch of best will likely use Mother for the 40 odd IBUs that go into it. Now if only they sold Virginian yeast strains, such as that isolated by Jasper Yeast from an oyster plopped in some wort by Josh Chapman, my dream of a purely, and genuinely, local homebrew will become a reality.

Session 146 - What Value in Beer?

 

Yikes, where did the last couple of months go? The cynic side of me says "right down the shitter" whereas the more considered side says "life's just busy". Anyway, it's time for the Session again, and this month is being hosted by Ding and he has asked us to consider the "value" of beer, in the sense of:

"when I part with the cash, no matter how large or small the amount, does what I receive in return meet or exceed the value of said cash? Subjective? Sure, but we all have our own sense of value."

 Yeah, very subjective topic here, but one that I feel gets to the very heart of why we drink beer at all, or at least why we don't submit ourselves to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator brew that is ubiquitous with wherever we live. That's not to say that industrial brews like Budweiser, Carling Black Label, Stella Artois, or Gambrinus are inherently bad, just that they lack value for me.

So, yes, let's think about value, at least the word itself. Value is by its very nature relative, where I might balk at spending $5 on a pint of a given pale lager, I am more than happy to spend $7 on a pint of some alternative lager. For the sake of discussion, let's assume both beers are of the same style, similar ABV, and fairly equivalent IBUs derived from the same family of hops. What factors then make me willing to spend more money on the beer with the higher price point?

My first consideration is likely to be process. If said beers are of a Czech lager style, regardless of strength and colour, then I would be asking questions like "was the mash a decoction?", "how long did it lager for?", as well as expecting a voluminous foam head when poured. I will put this out there from the start, I don't give a flying monkeys if it is poured from a Lukr tap. For nearly the entire time I lived in Czechia, Lukr taps were not a thing, they really only started showing up in around 2008, oh and I don't recall ever seeing the choice for different pours. You asked for a beer, you got a beer, a well poured beer more often than not, with a voluminous foam head, from a flow control beer tap like the ones in this picture^*.

All of that is not to say I won't drink beers if poured from a Lukr tap, just that I don't buy the marketing that has built up around it - after all it's not as if Czechia was a beer desert in the half century or so between the original side pour taps being replaced by modern flow control taps and their making a re-tooled with filter screen re-introduction.

Anyway, got a bit off topic there. Yeah, process, why do I care if a Czech style lager has been made with a decoction mash and extensive lagering more so that how they are poured? Well for starters even when ripping our the original side pour taps, the breweries weren't ditching their process for actually making the beer. From my reading of history, there was no en-masse move to step mashing, there was no trimming of lagering times to get product out the door as soon as possible, there was a well established way of doing things that didn't need changing, so why bother? 

Part of the value then of a beer for me comes from the brewer's own sense of wanting to make an authentic product. Sure you can make a tasty pale lager with an infusion mash, a touch of melanoidin malt, and Saaz hops, but it will never be a truly Czech style lager, and I value that authenticity. Coming back to Lukr taps for a moment, I actually love them when the beer being served from them has been produced in a manner that a Czech brewer would recognise as the correct way to make it. Like this 12° pale lager from Selvedge here in Charlottesville.

Even then this brings up the question of "what is authenticity?". If a pastry stout, hazy IPA, or syruped up fruity gose is an genuine expression of the brewer's view of beer then fine, I am not going to drink it, but everyone has their own thing and will likely find a market for it. And that is another question in my mind that creates that additional value, does the brewer actually drink what they are putting out? If I am in a taproom and see the brewer drinking the only pilsner on the menu, for example, then I am more likely to try that than all the variants of IPA on offer - let's not deny it, we all know many a taproom with 25 taps of IPA, a lager, and Guinness as the guest stout. The beer that the brewer drinks most, is likely to be the only they pour the most of themselves into, and thus it becomes the one that is their "house beer", and that adds value.

Value is intangible, personal, difficult to really describe. What I value in a beer, or even entire breweries, others don't give a rat's arse for, and maybe that comes to the crux of why I am such a crap beer tourist, when I find a place that makes the kind of beers I like, in a way that feels authentic, whether to the brewer themselves or my own little collection of prejudices, then I am a happy, loyal, and potentially slightly tipsy customer.

* - the picture is by my good friend Mark Stewart, was taken at my old local in Prague, Pivovarský klub, on the occasion of my wedding reception.