Brewing for Kings (and Commoners, I guess)
The concept for Beer for Kings and Beer for Commoners began in late 2018 with a meeting with William Parkinson, Field Museum Curator of Anthropology and co-curator of the First Kings exhibition. Bill laid out his vision and message for the exhibition, which has themes rooted a 2017 study that concluded that 8 men held more wealth than the poorest 3.6 billion humans. “That study just blew my mind,” Bill told me at the time. He further explained extreme income inequity did not happen in a vacuum but has been evolving since the beginning of society. First Kings of Europe was going to illustrate how far back into our history hierarchy and wealth inequity ran. “(W)e hope that the exhibition will facilitate visitors’ understanding of how our own world of concentrated wealth and disparate inequalities began, along with the emergence of leadership, in a remote past.”*
The initial conversation got the wheels turning on how to pair a beer with the exhibition. Bill had provided a list of domesticates found at a 6,500-year-old Copper Age site in Hungary. Ultimately, einkorn wheat (Triticum momococcum), a wheat variety believed to be one of the earliest domesticate grains, was added to our Beer for Kings and Commoners mash. But including ancient grain in a modern beer style seemed more like an easter egg than a main attraction.
All concepts for a beer pairing kept coming back to the theme of hierarchy. The rich siphoning wealth from the poor got me thinking about an archaic technique called parti-gyle brewing. And not the ‘modern’ version, but rather the system that was “abandoned as soon as brewing became industrialized, starting about 1700.”**
To understand this method, it’s important to understand how modern brewers extract sugar from grain into a liquid solution called wort. This is done in two phases: The first phase is mashing which simply means hot water is mixed with grain. The initial wort pulled out of the mash is called first runnings and contains the highest concentration of sugar in the process. The second phase is sparging, when additional hot water is added to the grain while progressively weaker wort is collected. This weaker wort is called second runnings, and ultimately called last runnings.
Modern brewing takes first runnings, second runnings, and last runnings and collects them together to make a single homogenous wort and a single beer. Whereas historical parti-gyle brewing makes two (or more) beers: A strong beer out of the first runnings, a low alcohol beer from the second runnings, and often a third table strength beer from the last runnings somewhere around 1% ABV… but we skipped making a third beer primarily because we ran out of tanks to collect the different runnings.
Our first runnings are reserved for our wheat wine, Beer for Kings which starts at over 20% sugar by weight and ends at 9% ABV; while our second runnings go to Beer for Commoners, which starts a little over 10% sugar by weight and ends at 4.3% ABV.
As the First Kings of Europe exhibit highlights, humans have been economically sorting themselves in a parallel way since the beginning of society and to an extreme level today. But parti-gyle beers are not a good metaphor for modern income inequity, as the first third of the wort contains half of the extract** which is not at all parallel to income inequity. So I started doing some math.
If we were to divide the fermentable sugar out of a mash the way the worldwide wealth is currently divided, then out of every 100 cases:
· 90 cases would be about 1% alcohol, each can would be about 25 calories;
· 9 cases would be 21% alcohol, and each can would be about 700 calories;
· the final case would be 450% alcohol, each can would be about 8,000 calories.
So there are some obvious flaws as a metaphor to modern wealth inequities.
“Beer may not seem like it would be a big deal, but it was traditional in some societies for the upper-class elites to consume beer and wine with higher alcohol content, while commoners only had access to drinks with lower alcohol levels,” says Bill Parkinson.. “This partnership offers a creative — and tasty — way to help us literally illustrate those practices and prompt further discussion about the history of social inequalities.” If the First Kings of Europe exhibition featuring over 25 collaborating institutions and 750 objects (ranging from 6,900 to 2,300 years old) can’t prompt further discussion about the ruling class’s pull throughout history to modern day, perhaps these two stupid beers can.
Beer for Kings and Beer for Commoners will be available at Binny’s Beverage Depot locations, the museum’s Field Bistro, and Off Color Brewing’s Taproom mid-March 2023. First Kings of Europe will open to the public on March 31.
*Gyucha, Attila and Parkinson, William, First Kings of Europe Exhibition Catalog, UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2023, pg. 1
** Mosher, Randy, Radical Brewing, Brewers Publication, 2004, pg 200–201
