Lars Marius Garshol

I’ve tasted a few and really liked them, so I’d be all in favor of that.

She was very positive and interested. Nothing specific just yet, although she’s trying to get the prime minister into a brewhouse in Hornindal.

Yes, that's basically the story the book tells (Kanpai - The History of Sake). How important beer taxes have been to various gov'ts at different times is quite remarkable.

In 1882 two thirds of the farmers in Tohoku (northern Japan) bought home brewing licenses. In 1895 there were 1 million home brewing licenses in total. So Japan definitely had farmhouse brewing of sake.

Then in 1886 the gov't banned home brewing entirely. Probably killed the farmhouse brewing.

Exactly. :-)

Never heard of acid hydrolysis, to be honest. Is it theoretically possible they used that in the Stone Age?

I'm embarrassed to admit I still haven't bought the book. It's bothered me for a while now. I think the time has come to do something about that.

Cooper (profession) - Wikipedia

I've tried looking into this, too, without getting very far. The wikipedia page for cooperage gives roughly the same history as you (with footnotes), but I never really got any further.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_...

Definitely unusual to see it happen it all three domains of eukaryota.

I guess that reflects the success of grasses and other starchy plants, causing a huge energy potential for anyone who could figure out how to tap into starch as a food source.

I wonder what readers would have made of it if you had. Pretty sure it's not what they would have expected to find in the book.

Malt, Mould, or Saliva | Larsblog Personal blog of Lars Marius Garshol.

I tried to look at the past 13,000 years of beer brewing from a bird's eye perspective. That leads to some reflections I certainly didn't expect.

A simple way to put it: there are three kinds of beer, but not the ones you expect.

www.garshol.priv.no/blog/439.html

Four farmhouse dudes with a very well-dressed woman in a red suit jacket.

We did get an hour with the secretary of agriculture, who was very interested. Several different things might come out of this. Huge cred to Vidar Skeie for setting this up.

Next step: getting into parliament

Okay, got it stashed in the car.

Har jeg først fått jævelskapen inn i en bil er det egentlig andre steder jeg har mer lyst til å kjøre med den. Det er nok det som blir løsningen.

A hotel room full of stuff, including a cornykeg, a cardboard box of beer bottles, a mason jar probably full of kveik, and a 10-liter plastic canister with the text "For Lars Marius".

The chair of the @kornolfest.bsky.social board has set up a meeting with politicians at parliament to discuss legalizing sale of farmhouse ale directly from the farms. On the train from Voss they also brought a lot of beer, including one 10-l canister for me. But how to get it home?

I don’t know enough about US-AUS relationship to comment, but I’m pretty sure Reagan would have fought for Europe. That’s all over now, though.

We’re definitely on our own. I’ve been saying this would happen since before Trump was elected. The difficulty is getting people to see it.

Diagram showing gov't support for Ukraine by quarter, starting Jan 2022. Big gap in US support Oct 2023-Mar 2024, when Trump made Reps in congress block support. Huge spike just before Biden left office, as they rushed out as much as they could, knowing Trump wouldn't send anything. Then basically no support at all after Trump took office.

What the Trump administration really thinks about Ukraine is painfully clear from simple statistics about support to Ukraine. They don't give a shit about Ukraine. Never have, never will.

Their attitude to Europe is unlikely to be very different.

We've found yet another new kveik in the Voss area, so I called the owner to get some background info. He normally ferments 36 hours, he says.

You can get huge energy savings by boiling the hops in a small volume of water, then pouring that in, instead of boiling the entire wort. So there's many ways around this.

Yes. If you boil 3-4 hours you really see and taste the difference. But this doesn’t mean you have to boil — it just means unboiled beer tastes different.

You don’t *have* to boil. People think it’s necessary, but it’s not.

It does taste different when you don’t boil. I like it, though. And if you filter and use lots of hops nobody will notice. Nøgne Ø used this trick to make a 4.5% pale ale. Never heard anyone complain.

Use less water in the mash -- same result. Use more caramelized malt. Hop bittering is the same in water.

Yes. That’s super inefficient, though. Heating the wort to 90C for a minute or two or so is more than enough. Isomerisation you can do by boiling the hops in a small volume of water, maybe 1% of the wort volume. Huge energy savings.

Japanese sake brewers figured out pasteurization in the 17th century. If you want to disinfect the beer there's no need to boil it for an hour.

It's becoming increasingly clear that none of this was designed. People just repeat what others did before them because that's how you're supposed to do it

Yes.

Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone, but this, happily, is one of his lesser-known inventions: "he designed the "Saxotonnerre", a massive, locomotive-powered organ which was supposed to be so loud as to be heard across all of Paris at once"

Beginning to look to me like the only type of boiled beer is European commercial beer. I don't think any of the other continents boiled, and European farmhouse brewers largely didn't, either.

So of course everyone concluded all beer must be boiled.