Kinda beer related.

Music and beer have long been willing bed mates so I think its fitting to
stray a little bit from the path and shine a light on some long
forgotten music. I speak of that wonderful Klesmer / Mambo hybrid, Bagels and Bongos.

Created by pianist Irving Fields in 1959, the music became an instant hit.
Fields was born in 1915 in New York and started playing piano
professionally from his teens onwards. He had to dress "old" to play at
bars and union gigs, and would sport a painted on mustache and a large
hat pulled down to hide his youth. His repertoire included hits of the day from Cole Porter and Gershwin to the classics.

At 17 he got a gig as a pianist for cruise ship on a run to Cuba and Puerto Rico (what a great job for a teenager!!) In Havana he fit right in with the local musicians. So much so he was often mistaken for a native Latin musician. Whilst sitting in with a local band one night he met Xavier Cugat, who, so the story goes, came up and just talked to him in Spanish, totally convinced he was the real deal. He had the genuine Latin feel in his playing.

Back in New York he played the Crest Room at the Waldorf Astoria and added the Latin sound to his New York roots. The place was packed every night and became the hip spot to be for celebs like Ava Gardner. RCA Vistor signed him and in 1946 he had his first big hit with Miami Beach Rhumba. The combination of well known, comfortable Jewish melodies set to swinging Latin beats was a recipe for success. Everyone wanted it.

He worked steadily for years playing the swankiest venues in the world. In 1959 he sealed his place in music history with the release of Bagels and Bongos. He said in an interview for the Montreal Mirror "Bagels and Bongos was Jewish music with Latin rhythms, and the wonderful thing about this music, this unique idea, was that it had no language barrier."

The concept was so succesful that RCA Victor had him do the same treatment to other ethnic sounds. Although commercially successful, I'm not sure about Pizza and Bongos or Bikinis and Bongos.

As with any trend, the pendulum swings both ways and as Vietnam and acid rock started to seep into muisc culture, the appetite fro Jewish/ Latin fusion wained. Fields kept working and returnd to the lounge circuit and has been playing ever since.

Laying down the law.

The popular notion of witches dancing around a kettle probably came from the "beer witches" who caused batches of beer to wrong in the 14th and 15th centuries. Of course none of the boneheads making poison beer took any responsibility for their wacked out recipes going wrong. That they might have something to do with it never crossed their minds. So blame it on some folksy tale thats hard to prove is better for business.

Beer making really had turned into witches brews by then and there must have been deaths, or at the very least some painful weekends passed grasping one's stomach. The Germans had had enough and got tough on the beer makers. In 1516 the German Beer Purity Law was passed outlawing anything but barley, malt, hops and water be used to make beer. Back then yeast was an unknown additive that was found in enough quantity naturally to produce the fermentation needed to make alcohol and carbon doixide. Not surprisingly, there were many "flat" batches.

And just to fool you a bit the picture up top is of Egyptian beer jars. They were made to hold the beer that were put in the tombs of the dead so they had beer in the afterlife. Practical.

How we made it this far I have no idea.

As an aside, the term "King of Beers" comes from the patron saint of beer, King Gambrinus, who pioneered the use of hops to flavour beer. As you'll see below, there is a good reason he is a saint. Because some of the crap that people used to flavour it until then was just awful, if it didn't kill you.

Brewers in Germany used what was called "grut", a mixture of flavourings to give their unique beer its taste. The brewers were so fond and protective of their blends that a law was enacted, the Flavourings License, that protected the recipes. Consequently they were not happy about the use of hops as a flavouring agent. It totally ruined any secret, cool special blend they had concocted to set their beer apart from the crowd. And to heap coal on the fire of their disgust, the beer drinkers preferred hops flavoured beer.

So what did some of these gruts contain? Some basic Internet research has turned up- Juniper berries (gin flavoured beer?)
Caraway seed
Anise seed
Thornapple (a poison) more of that coming up
Gentian (used to flavour one of the world's first soft drinks "Moxie", said to be able to cure softening of the brain and loss of manhood, whatever that means)
Spruce chips and pine roots (for those of you who like air freshener flavoured beer)
and my favourite- Helbane, aka, Stinking Nightshade. It is poisonous but was a common component in what were called witches brews because of it psychoactive properties. Consuming helbane flavoured beer induced hallucinations, elevated heart rate and induced a good old glorious buzz.

Helbane was the original flavour used to make the classic German Pilsner beer until it was outlawed in 1516 and as a poison in several noted Victorian murders.

Only in Germany, pity.

So the Romans continued the beer making thread only until they discovered wine making. After that they pretty much poo pooed it. Now we know where uppity wine drinkers come from. To be honest, most beer was still unfiltered and had no shelf life, refridgeration was thousands of years away AND, horror of horrors, it didn't have a head. No wonder the Romans preferred the drink of the gods.

In the outer reaches of the Roman empire, beer was still king. The Teutons were noted for their brewing prowess as early as 800 BC. Over the years beer making in what is now Germany became an art and then a trade. Beer had mainly been brewed by families for their own needs and bartered occasionally for other staples, but the Teutons saw it as a business. Bread making and beer making still went hand in hand.

Beer making made its way up to the Nordic tribes and figured prominently in many sagas. But it wasn't until the Christian era that beer enjoyed its first major popularity explosion. Odd. The monastaries were at the hub of early Christian beer making. Like beer makers before them they started out making beer for their own enjoyment. Rumour has it they preferred beer to almost anything else. The monastic life could be very frugal with little enjoyment. Beer fixed that. It was particularly handy during fasting when drinking liquids wasn't considered breaking the fast. We can thank the monks for this tradition of drinking beer for long periods without eating very much as a ritual shared worldwide to this day.

Why we celebrate November 8th.

November 8 is the feast day celebrated in honour of St. Godfrey of Amiens. Born in 1066 in the town of Molincourt, France. Seems he was a prickly priest and although had a knack for getting things done was mainly remembered for his fierce conservatism.

He banned people wearing rich clothes to his church, had a deep dislike of drinking and was crazy about celibacy and clean, simple living. He was known throughout his life though as someone who cared deeply and worked hard for the sick and infirm. Kind of balanced it out a bit. He also consistently turned down gigs because he felt he wasn't worthy. He relented and his first post found him at the abbey of Our Lady of Nogent, a broken down place with an equally sad looking staff. His talent for order got the shop in order and he bagan to earn his reputation. When a local drought threatened crops and soon the lives of his countryfolk, he recommended people fast, and for good measure the animals too. Well it worked. The clouds gathered and rain fell. He was on his way.

He was offered a bishopric and turned it down, again feeling unworthy. King Phillip and the Council of Troyes both got pissed off and forced him to take it. He longed for the monastic life and tried repeatedly to give up his title. No one would have it. He died in 1115.

Take 2 beers and call me in the morning.

The Egyptians carried on the beer making traditions started by the Sumerians and Babylonians. Like these cultures it was revered for the calming and invgorating effect it had on people. Nothing changed there. And interestingly it crossed all class boundaries, from lowly peasants to the highest priest.

The preferred brewing method still often used bread as the starchy component. I think this is partly, according to folklore, how beer was "accidently" discovered. That bread got wet somehow and was left in its container and voila! beer, and they just kept making it that way. But some folk think they kept doing it like this because the main ingredients (wheat, barley, sugar amd yeast) were easily transportable in the form of bread. To make beer then you broke the bread into pieces and soaked it in water and then let the chemical reaction take over. Pretty slick actually. Everyone knows how heavy those beer bottles are.

The Egyptians used beer for medicine too. Documents have been found with lists of prescriptions that included among other cures, beer. Why not? They took it seriously enough to bury their dead with it, buy favours and appease pissed off gods. But they took a lot more beer, about 30000 plus gallons. Those gods are thirsty. Isis is the patron "goddess" of beer.

Becoming human.

Its tough to spot the exact time beer was invented, but most sources point to about 6000 BC. As for the location, Mesopotamia seems like the spot. However, because of the the simple chemical process required to ACCIDENTALY make beer, chances are there were a few tailgate parties before the Mesopotamians hoisted a mug.

Historians agree that bread making and beer go hand in hand. In fact the main components of bread: wheat, sugar, yeast water, is pretty much beer. We're used to varieties that favour hops for flavouring. However the starchy part doesn't have to be barley or wheat. In fact it can be any starch. Some horrifying variations have sorghum, cassava, potato and the agave plant.

The Sumarians actually figured out how to do it on purpose lo those many years ago and passed it on to the conquering Babylonians around 2000 BC. Little writen records remain but my uneducated guess is that 4000 years is lots of time to make beer.

The Babylonians took beer making to its logical pinnacle for the times and produced no less than 20 different variations. They also placed the beverage pretty high up on the importance scale. I know a few people who positively cannot operate without beer, but the Babylonians insisted on daily consumption. A law was written outlining a daily beer ration that ran from 2 litres per day for ordinay folk, to 3 litres for civil servants (thats a good move, slightly less than the current modern equivalent in many cities) to a whopping 5 litres a day for high priests.

One invention to come out of these times was the drinking straw. Seems the brew was unfiltered, so to avoid drinking in the muck rolled reeds were used to suck up the beer. Now there's a plan: drink 5 litres of beer slowly through a straw.