Thursday’s ad is for Guinness, from 1951. While the best known Guinness ads were undoubtedly the ones created by John Gilroy, Guinness had other creative ads throughout the same period and afterward, too, which are often overlooked. In this ad, the “Guinness Guide to Oysters,” nine different types of oysters are illustrated, each with a short description of how they taste, although I take the overriding assumption to be that they should be enjoyed with a Guinness.
Saturday’s ad is for Heineken, from 1981. In the later 1970s, Heineken embarked on a series of ads with the tagline “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach.” Many of the ads were in a sequential panel, or comic strip, format and they were intended to be humorous.
In this ad, a single-panel format, a man is riding his bicycle down a tree-lined road with three packages of Heineken tied down to the back. I can’t tell if they’re giant oil-can size cans of beer or some sort of six-pack or other size of bottles. Also on the back of the bike, though, is a ginormously long loaf of bread that stretches the width of the road and then some. Hopefully, he won’t have to travel on any narrow roads to get where he’s going, otherwise he’s screwed.
Today in 1918, US Patent 1391561 A was issued, an invention of John C. Miller, for his “Food Product Obtained From Brewers’ Yeast.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes these claims:
Brewers waste yeast when dried has for some years been utilized for a force feed for animals. When analyzed, the dried brewers yeast contains, on an average, about fifty-four per cent crude protein, twenty-five per cent nitrogen free extract, two per cent crude fat and ten per cent ash and fiber.
I have discovered that when properly prepared, a flour can be obtained from the brewers waste yeast which can be effectively and properly used when mixed with wheat flour, or when used by itself, as a food product for human consumption.
In the processes heretofore employed in drying brewers yeast, the material has been dried on steam heated rollers and scraped therefrom from by scraping knives, which renders the material coarse and gritty. The older dried products have never been suitable for either as a substitute for or when mixed with wheat flour for human consumption.
In preparing my product, the wet material in the preferred apparatus is delivered into the rapidly rotation cylinder from which it is discharged by centrifugal force at the delivery end of the cylinder in the form of a very fine annular spray and is there subjected to a current of heated air, which is blown annularly across the centrifugally discharged material, so that the moisture is very rapidly taken up and the material can be readily collected in the form of a dry powder free from grit and in the condition of a flour.
Today in 1986, US Patent 4590085 A was issued, an invention of Daniel R. Sidoti, John H. Dokos, Edward Katz, and Charles M. Moscowitz, assigned to Anheuser-Busch Incorporated, for their “Flavor Enhancement And Potentiation With Beer Concentrate.” Here’s the Abstract:
A new method for intensifying the inherent flavors of foods and for imparting other desirable organoleptic properties is disclosed. The method consists of adding to foodstuffs a flavor enhancing amount of a heat denatured concentrate of beer. There is also provided a process for producing the above described concentrate.
While the abstract doesn’t tell us too much, the background from the application is very interesting, as it talks quite a bit about beer in cooking, which appears to be the primary goal of the patent’s use, although the patent has lapsed, so I don’t know if it was ever used in a commercial product. I know there have been, and even currently are, powdered beer products on the market, this one seems aimed at adding beer flavoring to cooking, rather than being able to make instant beer by adding water.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Foodstuffs of all varieties whether precooked, served hot or cold, or whether prepared without cooking have flavors, aroma, and other organoleptic properties that influence the sensory perceptions of human taste. The manufacturers of such foods as sauces, spreads, dips, soups, dressings, stuffings, garnishes, meats, fish, vegetables, salads, breads, etc. whether dry, frozen, refrigerated or canned, desire to produce products organoleptic properties closely profiling the natural flavors, aromas and textures that appeal broadly to the sensory perceptions of the consuming public. A food whose natural flavors are unduly masked may be too bland, or if overly modified with added flavor components, it may be perceived as too spicy. The availability of spices, condiments, etc., permits the individual consumer to adjust the flavor of food purchased from the shelf to suit his or her particular taste preference.
Nevertheless, food manufactures because of the nature of precooking processes, the addition of preservatives, the packaging and keeping techniques of retorting, pasturization, etc. will often times find that the desired natural flavor of the foodstuff has been suppressed below the threshold taste perceptions of the average consumer. Accordingly, techniques for addressing this deficiency have become customary to the industry.
One such technique involves the use of chemical compounds which intensify the flavors inherently present in food without adding any flavor from the chemical itself. These compounds are known as Flavor Enhancers and include, for example, linalool, 2-nonenal which is used to enhance the flavor of coffee, and certain sulfur containing amino acids which are used to enhance meaty flavors. Other chemicals serve as flavor enhancers through reacting with endogenous flavor components of food itself to synergistically promote the combined flavor effect of those components.
Another technique which is commercially employed to address the problem of suppressed natural flavors is that of using chemical compounds which when added to foods in very low concentrations to catalytically create desirable organoleptic properties of the foodstuff otherwise undetectable. These compounds are known as Flavor Potentiators, and like Flavor Enhancers, their taste is not itself detectable to the sensory perceptions of the ordinary consuming public.
There are drawbacks, however, to the previously known Flavor Enhancers and Potentiators. One foremost disadvantage is that these compounds are selective in their functional contribution to flavor development. The same compound which enhances coffee flavor may have a deleterious effect, if any effect at all, on, for example, cheese flavor. Accordingly, some food products such as soups, dressings and some pastries which have a combined variety of natural flavors are extremely difficult to potentiate or enhance from previously known chemicals.
Another serious drawback to previous flavor enhancement and potentiation techniques is that they require the addition of chemical compounds which have no nutritional value themselves nor are they derived from natural food or beverage constituents.
It has now been found and this finding forms the basis of this invention, that Flavor Enhancement and/or Potentiation can be achieved by the addition of denatured beer concentrate to foodstuffs of all types and varieties, whether cooked or prepared fresh, without the need to employ non-nutritional, chemical compounds.
It should be appreciated that cooking with beer is not new. The book Cooking With Beer by Carole Fahy, first published in 1972 by Elm Tree Books, indicates that the brewing of beer is known to have been practiced in Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians passed on their knowledge of brewing to the Greeks who in turn handed it down to the Romans who refined the Anglo-Saxon form which was already in place at the time of the Roman conquest. English ale became the basis for many religious and social festivals and is said to have accompanied bread as the sole breakfast menu of Queen Elizabeth I.
Ales and beers are all manufactured beginning with mashing barley malt and possibly grain adjuncts such as barley, corn and rice. This is filtered, brought to boil, pitched with hops and result in a wort which consists of water, dextrine and fermentable sugars. The wort is then fermented with yeast.
English ales have been traditionally distinguished from American brews or lagers primarily on the basis of the type of yeast employed to ferment fermentable sugars of the precursor wort into alcohol. Secondarily, there is a distinction between the ratio of malt and grain adjuncts in the mash in that ales customarily have far less, if any, grain adjuncts. Also there are distinctions in the level of hop addition. These factors contribute significantly to the variations in taste of American brews or lagers and ales.
Beers have gained some limited acceptance in cooking as a consequence of their richness, delightful taste, their ability to improve the texture and lightness of cakes, pies and batters; their tenderizing effect on tough meats; their contribution to preserving foods; their ability to make breads rise; their adding piquancy to dull vegetables and attractively glazing roasted meats and a few other culinary virtues. However, each of these benefits is owed to the full compliment of the beer flavor and texture attributes present naturally and, in the case of assisting cakes to rise, its fermentable state with its residual yeast in active form and its carbonation being readily apparent.
It has been determined however, that the use of beer in cooking does have its limitations. For example, if you are making a soup which requires dried vegetables according to Carole Fahy in Cooking With Beer, you must make certain that you soak them thoroughly, overnight, before use because the hard pellets will otherwise sink to the bottom of a rich vegetable beer soup apparently due to slow diffusion of beer molecules through the surface membrane and interior of the dried vegetables. Additionally, when sieving foods as for example, soups, the richer the beer is, the more difficult to push entirely through the strainer without losing some of the desired flavor. Still further, it is found necessary to cook foods longer with beer to fully develop the flavor. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, cooking with beer imparts of a clear beer flavor to the foodstuffs tending to mask the inherent natural flavors of the other foodstuffs. Accordingly, beers, although employed previously in cooking, have not been used nor thought to have any Flavor Enhancing or Potentiation functionality. Likewise, previous beer extracts or concentrates have had no utility in flavor enhancement but rather have been prepared in undenatured form in order to be reconstituted into either alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages.
British Patent No. 2127 describes the prepration of a nonalcoholic beer extract or concentrate. Although the concentration can be effected in any efficient vacuum evaporation apparatus, the first end to be attained is the separation of the alcohol produced by fermentation at as low a temperature as possible. After separation, as disclosed in this patent, the temperature may be raised, but the subsequent evaporation must be carefully conducted otherwise aromatic compounds present may be expelled or destroyed and the color of the product materially increased. The product is said to be pleasant to the taste and to possess all the nutritive and feeding properties of original beer before removal of the alcohol and subsequent concentration. The product is employed as an ale concentrate designed to be reconstituted into a non-alcohlic beverage by the addition of water.
British Patent No. 1,228,917 discloses a dry extract of a fermented beverage. However, it is compounded with dry yeast in live active form, together with dry fermentable carbohydrates or dry unfermented wort containing fermentable carbohydrates in order to permit fermentation when diluted. The boiling evaporation utilized to produce the extract is under a vacuum high enough to take place at the predetermined low temperature of 100° F. The original fermented beverages and their respective solids or residues and the yeast are protected during evaporation by the low temperatures. The evaporation at yeast-preserving temperatures with minimum of exposure to the heat also preserves the solubility of the enzymes of yeast and, therefore, the yeast remains in active condition so it will act vigorously when the extract is diluted with water for the preparation of a beverage.
In British Patent No. 1,290,192, a beer extract is produced from evaporating a partly fermented beverage at temperatures below 80° F. or any other suitably low temperature that will preserve the constituents of the reduced wort in a soluble state. The extract contains fermentable substances with the same characteristics of the beverage from which the extract was made. It possesses the characteristic flavor and taste of the original beverage that can be produced and imparted by yeast fermentation and is naturally alcoholic; and when suitable diluted with water, provides a beverage having the flavor and taste of the original beverage. The yeast, however, is used in large quantity for example, twice as much in respect to the amount of fermentable carbohydrates as is usually employed to pitch ordinary fermented beverages.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new and useful technique for flavor enhancement and potentiation intensifying the inherent natural flavors of food and creating desirable organoleptic properties to a broad range of foodstuffs with a derivative of a nutritious foodstuff natural concentrate despite having substantially denatured the components of flavor and color, consistency, solubility and fermentability from the concentrate.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a new and useful concentrate of beer and its method of manufacture.
These objects and others are fulfilled by heat treating a fermented malt beverage or beer at sufficiently high temperatures to substantially denature the product and adding it at very low levels to foodstuffs. The denatured beer concentrate is added in amounts below which the concentrate is detectable in taste or mouth feel, but sufficient to achieve flavor enhancement and potentiation.
Today in 1796, American Cookery was published. It was the first cookbook published in America and written by an American, Amelia Simmons. Not much is known about her. She’s referred to as an “American Orphan” on the title page, which isn’t terribly helpful. The first edition was published in Hartford, Connecticut, so some speculate that Simmons may have been from the area. And it appears the very first edition may have been self-published. Feeding America explores many of the questions about Simmons, but has few answers.
It was printed and reprinted for 35 years, with several people stealing her work and putting their own name to it, with some adding additional material. If you read through her biography, it appears that was happening from the very beginning and over the course of its thirteen additions. It’s 220 years old today.
It’s divided into six sections. First, there’s a Preface, followed by “Directions for Catering, or the procuring the best Viands, Fish, &c.” The chapters that follow include “2. Roots and Vegetables — Beans — Fruits,” “3. Receipts — [Meats] — [Pies],” “4. Puddings — Custards — Tarts,” “5. Cake,” and “6. Preserves — [Boiling], with a short “Errata” at the end. It’s in the public domain and you can get a copy for your eReader at Project Gutenberg.
Near the very end of the book, in Chapter “6. Preserves,” there’s a short recipe for Spruce Beer.
And here it is reprinted in more modern English:
For brewing Spruce Beer.
Take four ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle.
Also, the very first recipe under Chapter “5. Cake” calls for a quart of “new ale yeast.”
Plumb Cake.
Mix one pound currants, one drachm nutmeg, mace and cinnamon each, a little salt, one pound of citron, orange peal candied, and almonds bleach’d, 6 pound of flour, (well dry’d) beat 21 eggs, and add with 1 quart new ale yeast, half pint of wine, 3 half pints of cream and raisins, q: s:
Tuesday’s ad is entitled Thanksgiving Dinner, and the illustration was done in 1947 by Douglass Crockwell. It’s #10 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 picture perfect Thanksgiving turkey is on the dinner table, but the it’s not complete. People wait in the wings to be seated until the most important job is done. The matriarch of the family is putting beer glasses down at each place setting, the final touch, before the holiday meal can begin. Just like at my house.
The 2016 semifinalist nominations for the James Beard Awards were announced Wednesday, and the good news is there are quite a few beer professionals among the nominees for “Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional.” If you’re not familiar with the prestigious food awards, here’s how the James Beard Foundation describe their annual awards. “Covering all aspects of the industry — from chefs and restaurateurs to cookbook authors and food journalists to restaurant designers and architects and more — the Beard Awards are the highest honor for food and beverage professionals working in North America.” Until very recently, the awards were almost exclusively food and wine-centric, but more recently “beverage professionals” has slowly been expanding to include craft beer and spirits, too. It’s been nice to see the prejudice against beer in the food, cooking and restaurant world finally beginning to slide away. Too slowly, perhaps, but still … it’s about time and nice to see.
The list released Wednesday is the semifinalists. On March 15, a smaller list of finalists will be announced from among the semifinalists and the award winners will be announced May 2. In the category “Outstanding Wine, Spirits, or Beer Professional,” six of the twenty semifinalists work in the beer world. Last year it was five and the year before there were seven beer professionals nominated. Hopefully, many of them will make the cut next month. Here’s the beer people for this year:
Congratulations to all the semifinalists. It’s a great list, all deserving, though I’m especially pleased to see Vinnie Cilurzo, who’s a friend and neighbor.
Last month, The Street reported that the Pizza Hut chain has remodeled several of their 6,000+ restaurants, and “plans to remodel roughly 700 of its U.S. stores a year through 2022 in the new format.” The newly refurbished Pizza Huts will continue to have the company’s ” trademark red and black colors, albeit with deeper hues” and will also “feature wraparound windows, outdoor seating and yes, a drive-thru.”
All well and good, so far, but so what, you may be asking. Pizza Hut has also added beer and wine service at the remodeled locations, and plans to add alcohol to each refurbished restaurant. Frankly, I didn’t realize they didn’t serve beer already. Pizza and beer are pretty much a perfect pairing, as iconic as peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese and tomato soup. The more I think about it, almost every pizza place I can name also serves beer, both chains and the small mom and pop pizza joints. How many brewpubs serve pizza? Lots of them, with many even specializing in it.
Why I bring this up is because the wackos at Alcohol Justice tweeted their displeasure at this idea, with this. “Now Pizza Hut wants to sell booze too bit.ly/1PkIwe1 What’s next…wine tastings at Toys-R-Us?” That’s what’s known as a false equivalence, one does not follow from the other. It is, in effect, a bullshit argument. One is a restaurant, and a type of restaurant that typically does carry beer and wine. The other is a toy store. There’s no link whatsoever, nothing that would make this in any way logical. It’s AJ making a mountain out a molehill, as they so often try to do. It’s just absurd.
They idea that a pizza restaurant serving beer and wine is cause for alarm is absolutely laughable. It’s harder to think of one that doesn’t already serve beer then come up with all of those who do. Several times I’ve gone with Porter’s basketball team and his little league baseball team to a Mountain Mike’s or Straw Hat Pizza after a game with the whole team and their parents. Many pizzas are ordered for everyone, with pitchers of beer for the parents. That’s the very definition of family-friendly, with something for everyone. Not once has there been a problem. But in AJ’s worldview, beer at a pizza joint with beer is the same as booze being served at a toy store. But now I’m feeling hungry. I’ve got plenty of beer. I wonder if it’s too late to order from Pizza Hut? They just opened one in our town, and I definitely want to support their decision to upset Alcohol Justice.
I’ve made pancakes substituting beer for the water, I’ve enjoyed Kentucky Breakfast Stout, once with beer pancakes. And I’ve had beer that tasted rather sweet, like maple syrup, too. But it never occurred to me you could make the pancake syrup with beer. And it looks fairly easy. I recently ran across an article about The Art of Making Beer Syrup in Outside magazine, and apparently bartenders have been making them for years to use in special cocktails. Given that the only cocktail I almost ever order is a gin & tonic, hopefully you’ll forgive my cocktail ignorance. Apparently it’s just water (or any liquid) reduced, sugar added.
Outside’s recipe is so simple, even I could probably make it:
For best results, pour your favorite beer into a pan and slowly simmer over low heat until it reduces to two-thirds of its initial volume. Then add in an equal proportion of raw brown sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves completely. Pour liberally over your favorite breakfast food and wait for your insulin levels to spike.
The Good Booze blog suggests adding “a few whole cardamom pods” and “one small vanilla bean, split” to give it a little more flavor. It looks like any beer could work, although malt-forward beers seem better suited than hoppier ones, but certainly some experimentation is in order.
Allrecipes also has their own recipe, and a bar in San Francisco, The Fifth Floor (which is closed now, and reborn as Dirty Habit) used to make a drink they called Hops & Dreams, using a syrup made from Anchor Steam Beer.
And one entrepreneurial soul is trying to start the Beer Syrup Company to make commercial beer syrups.
Today in 2003, US 6622510 B2 was issued, an invention of Mark S. Giroux, Joseph M. Trewhella, and Darryl Alan Goodson, assigned to Grindmaster Crathco Systems, Inc., for their “Frozen Beer Product, Method and Apparatus.” Here’s the Abstract:
A method of freezing and dispensing a beer product comprises providing beer in a sealed, refrigerated storage container under pressure; feeding beer from the storage container to a sealed freezing chamber through a sealed delivery system; freezing the beer in the chamber; and dispensing frozen beer from the chamber.
The frozen beer product preferably has a slush consistency and a density of about 50% to about 90% of the density of unfrozen beer, a temperature of between about 23° and 27° F. and a volume reduction in a filled 14 fluid ounce plastic cup sitting in 70° F. room for 30 minutes or less than 10%.
A refrigerated cabinet for supplying beer comprises an insulated beer storage compartment; a refrigeration system comprising a compressor, a condenser, a thermal expansion device and an evaporator; a pressurized carbon dioxide tank in a separate, non-refrigerated compartment; and a fan for circulating air within the insulated beer storage compartment.
A beer freezing and dispensing apparatus comprises a freezing chamber; a refrigeration system for cooling the beer in the freezing chamber to a frozen state; a dispensing system for dispensing frozen beer from the freezing chamber when it reaches a slush consistency, and a beer delivery system for delivering beer to the freezing chamber, the beer delivery system comprising; a valve for controlling the introduction of beer into the delivery system; a check valve to prevent beer from flowing backwards out of the delivery system; an accumulator for holding beer that expands when beer freezes in the chamber; and a pressure sensor for sensing the pressure of the beer between the accumulator and the freezing chamber.
The method and apparatus may also be used to freeze and dispense other single-strength beverages.
