Today in 1930, US Patent 1760071 A was issued, an invention of Henry George Koepke, for his “Centrifugal Separator.” There’s no Abstract, though it’s described this way in the application:
My invention relates to centrifugal separators of the discharge nozzle conical type, primarily constructed for the separation of yeast from most of the associated liquids in which it has been’ propagated.
Thursday’s ad is entitled Picnic at the New Homesite, and the illustration was done in 1951 by John Gannam. It’s #54 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, two couples are having a picnic in an unlikely spot. At a construction site, where presumably one of their homes is being built, they’re having beer and food while other people are working. It’s the weirdest spectator sport ever.
Today in 1908, US Patent 889140 A was issued, an invention of Joseph Lehnbeuter and Charles R Brunnacker, for their “Bar Counter Box.” There’s no Abstract, though it’s described this way in the application:
Our invention has relation to improvements in bar-counter boxes; and it consists in the novel construction of box more fully set forth in the specification and pointed out in the claims.
The invention relates to a class of cabinets or refrigerators which are employed in conjunction with a bar counter over which draft beverages are dispensed, the cabinet being known commercially as a novelty-box; and the invention has for its special object to so mount the drip-pan below the dispensing faucet that it may readily be shoved out of the way in making room for the insertion of the cask or barrel inserted into the space or compartment beneath the pan.
Wednesday’s ad is entitled Dad Tries Out The Ukelele, and the illustration was done in 1951 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #53 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, Dad is playing a ukelele while the family looks on. No wonder they’re all drinking beer.
In addition to being “Geek Pride Day” today, it’s also “Towel Day,” which is a tribute to Douglas Adams that was started in 2001. If you haven’t read or are otherwise familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — I’m disappointed in you — but here’s why a towel is relevant to that story, as explained in Chapter 3:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
The idea is that on May 25, fans should openly carry a towel with them, in fact they want you to make “sure that the towel is conspicuous — use it as a talking point to encourage those who have never read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to go pick up a copy. Wrap it around your head, use it as a weapon, soak it in nutrients — whatever you want!”
But since this is beer-focused place, and I don’t want to shortchange you, here are some beer towels that are educational as well as useful as any towel would be. So hopefully, you carried your towel with you today. If not, there’s always next year.
This beer towel is available from the Baltic Shop.
This one on beer and food pairing is likewise from the Baltic Shop.
And so is this one on beers of the world.
Today in 2004, US Patent 6739087 B2 was issued, an invention of Isaac Weiser and Margaret Weiser, assigned to Exhart Environmental Systems, Inc., for their “Garden Pest Trap.” Here’s the Abstract:
A pest trap for trapping snails, slugs, and the like comprising a base structure and a decorative cover. The base structure comprises a planar surface, a sloping surface surrounding at least part of the planar surface, two or more recesses formed in the planar surface for retaining a liquid for luring the pests, and a containment surface that is inclined and surrounds each recess. The cover rests over the base structure, preferably mounted on one or more side walls that partially enclose the planar surface and optionally have flanged ends for partially enclosing the recesses. Use and maintenance of the trap of the present invention is thereby greatly simplified and may be environmentally friendly utilizing common beer or other non-liquid luring means.
Today in 1999, US Patent 5906151 A was issued, an invention of Adam Firestone, Jeffers Richardson, Donald E. Othman, and Michel A. Blom, assigned to Firestone Walker, LLC, for their “Apparatus And Method For Brewing An Alcoholic Beverage and Beverage Brewed by Same.” Here’s the Abstract:
An apparatus for brewing an alcoholic beverage includes a plurality of wooden barrels including at least one first wooden barrel, at least one second wooden barrel, and at least one third wooden barrel; an enclosed trough; a plurality of first conduits providing flow communication between each of the plurality of wooden barrels and the enclosed trough; an enclosed catch pot in flow communication with the enclosed trough; a plurality of second conduits providing flow communication between the enclosed catch pot and each of the plurality of wooden barrels; and devices, such as valves, for controlling flow between each of the plurality of wooden barrels and the second conduit. The at least one first wooden barrel is a new barrel that has been filled with an alcoholic beverage up to 5 times, the at least one second wooden barrel is a middle aged barrel that has been filled with an alcoholic beverage from 6 to 12 times, and the at least one third wooden barrel is an old barrel that has been filled with an alcoholic beverage from 13 to 30 times.
This is essentially a patent for Firestone Walker’s modified Burton Union System that they pioneered when they first started, and then scaled-up when they bought the old SLO Brewery in Paso Robles and increased the size of their beer production. Jeffers, of course, is still there is the Barrelmeister, or Director of the Firestone Walker Barrelworks. That system is one of only two such brewing systems left in the world, the other being at Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent in England.
Here’s a few photos of the system at the Paso Robles brewery in 2012.
Tuesday’s ad is entitled Men’s Night In The Kitchen, and the illustration was done in 1951 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #52 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, the women — for once — are spectators, while the menfolk temporarily take over the kitchen to cook dinner. How subversive.
There was exciting news yesterday about a find in China by a research team from Stanford University. According to one source, “Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the earliest direct evidence of beer brewing in China, a trove of beer-making equipment dating from between 3400 and 2900 BCE, discovered at the Mijiaya site in Shaanxi province. Along with this archaeological find, scientists conducted an analysis of residue on the ancient pottery, jars, and funnels found, revealing a surprising recipe for the beer.” Their findings will be published in the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).
Here’s the abstract:
The pottery vessels from the Mijiaya site reveal, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence of in situ beer making in China, based on the analyses of starch, phytolith, and chemical residues. Our data reveal a surprising beer recipe in which broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), and tubers were fermented together. The results indicate that people in China established advanced beer-brewing technology by using specialized tools and creating favorable fermentation conditions around 5,000 y ago. Our findings imply that early beer making may have motivated the initial translocation of barley from the Western Eurasia into the Central Plain of China before the crop became a part of agricultural subsistence in the region 3,000 y later.
Significance
This research reveals a 5,000-y-old beer recipe in which broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears, and tubers were fermented together. To our knowledge, our data provide the earliest direct evidence of in situ beer production in China, showing that an advanced beer-brewing technique was established around 5,000 y ago. For the first time, to our knowledge, we are able to identify the presence of barley in archaeological materials from China by applying a recently developed method based on phytolith morphometrics, predating macrobotanical remains of barley by 1,000 y. Our method successfully distinguishes the phytoliths of barley from those of its relative species in China.
I’m not sure how that squares with Chateau Jiahu, the beer made by Dogfish Head based on a 9,000-year-old find in China, from Northern China. They also found preserved pottery jars “in the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan province.” The difference, as far as I can tell is the ingredients themselves, although in both they do use barley. This beer recipe calls for broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), and tubers to be fermented, whereas the earlier one from Jiahu used “pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers.” So their claim that this is older seems suspect unless there’s some qualifier I’m missing. As is typical, academic papers are only available online if you’re already an academic or are willing to pay to look at it for a short period of time, so I’ve not been able to look at their full claims or at the recipe itself, except what’s been written about it by more mainstream news outlets.
According to Gizmodo’s coverage:
Step aside with your claims to long legacies, craft breweries! This reconstructed beer recipe is over 5,000 years old. It’s the earliest beer recipe—and the earliest known use of barley—in China.
Archaeologists at Stanford University, while digging along China’s Wei River, made an intriguing discovery: A marvelously complete set of brewing equipment. And at the bottom of that equipment was something even more wonderful: Residue from the drink it once brewed.
After scrapping that gunk from the pots, researchers analyzed it and confirmed that it was, indeed, leftover froth from a 5,000-year-old beer. They were also able to pin down the recipe of that beer to an unlikely, but delicious-sounding, combination of broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears, and tubers.
So they claim, or rather Stanford claims, this is “the earliest known use of barley in China.” I didn’t think that the Chateau Jiahu added the barley to the original recipe, which was developed with the Patrick McGovern from the University of Pennsylvania, and I have a call into Dogfish Head to find out. But failing that, there’s a 4,000-year difference in the two claims that it seems hard for me to believe the Sanford team wouldn’t have uncovered.
The report from CBS News calls the barley a “secret ingredient,” which seems really odd, but seems to reflect the surprise of the researchers on this project. But McGovern’s find in the Jiahu area of China is more than ten years old, and got considerable media attention when the modern version of the beer was first released in 2007, so again I’m not sure a) how they could have missed it or b) what makes this find different, and if it is why none of the news reports are addressing that difference. Some news outlets, such as IFL Science, do mention that beer is older than 5,000 years, which is fairly well-known. Whether it was known in China at the very beginning, as it was in the fertile crescent seems to be gaining ground as a theory.
Although most of the paper is unavailable, there is supplemental information that is available, and that does give some information about the brewing process:
Monday’s ad is entitled Winter Evening at Home, and the illustration was done in 1951 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #51 in a series entitled “Home Life in America,” also known as the Beer Belongs series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation ran from 1945 to 1956. In this ad, a group of people dressed up (I’d be in more comfortable clothes for an evening of staying in) and are making popcorn on the fire and drinking beer rather than going outside on a presumably cold winter night. I guess that’s one way to kill an evening. But I love the tagline in the inset below the art: “Beer and ale — mealtime favorites.”
