Friday’s ad is for Brands Bier, from the 1950s, I believe, though some sources say it’s 1950. From the late 1800s until the 1940s, poster art really came into its own, and in
Beer In Ads #2899: The Beer That Limburg Is Proud Of
Beer In Ads #2898: If Only I Had A Glass Of Cold Three Horseshoes Beer!!
Thursday’s ad is for Van Roy Wieze, from the 1940s, I believe, though some sources say it’s 1950. From the late 1800s until the 1940s, poster art really came into its own, and in
Beer In Ads #2895: 3 Hoefijzersbier
Monday’s ad is for 3 Hoefijzersbier, or three horseshoes, from around 1935. From the late 1800s until the 1940s, poster art really came into its own, and in
Potato Peel Beer
My good friend Luc De Raedemaeker, who among quite a bit more, publishes the Belgian beer magaine Biere Grand Cru that started in 2014. Knowing my love (some might say obsession) with frites, my universal name for fried potatoes or fries, he included me in a tweet about an article covering a new Dutch beer that uses potato peels from a frites business.
Beer in which old bread is processed during brewing, we already had, but also when making fries a lot of ‘waste’ is produced. To put it in the words of FrietHoes say “potatoes are round, french fries square”. Throwing away the leftovers would be a shame, especially because they are still trying to make their production process as sustainable as possible. In search of a solution they came into contact with Jopen as beer lovers and the solution was not far away.
Potatoes are full of starch and you can use some of them during the brewing process. Jopen therefore developed a beer in which the leftover potato (the ‘shells’) is added to the batter. Still nice fruity hopping and ‘Klaar is Kees’. The result is a dark blond beer with a hoppy aroma of citrus fruit and a nice bitterness so that it dries super smoothly. Ideal for a pack of salty fries …
I’m in.
I’ve had a few potato beers before. Widmer Brothers made one for OBF a number of years ago, I believe. And I certainly remember a couple more. But this is even more interesting because it’s recycling at its finest. Taking the leftover potato peels from making frites is just genius. The people behind it, Friethoes, grow their own organic potatoes, operate frites shops, food trucks, and have other potato-related businesses. But the peels were going to waste. So why not? Of course, now I’m dead keen to try a bottle. So they partnered with Brouwerij Troost to brew the beer.
Until I can get my own bottle, here’s a review of it from a Dutch blog called Lauriekoek:
Beer is usually made of malt, yeast and hops. Malt does not necessarily have to be malt, other sources of sugar and starch are also suitable for fermentation. You can also use potato starch, because that too can be converted into alcohol and bubbles by yeast. And that’s what FrietHoes did, together with brewery Troost. By working in a smart way on the potato residues as part of the ingredients in the beer, FrietHoes comes a step closer to the zero waste goal.
Peeling beer is described as a Weizen. Of course this is not a Weizen in the most German sense of the word, because it differs from the traditional ingredients. It is a bit between a Weizen and a Belgian wheat beer, partly because of the addition of coriander seeds and orange peel, to give it a fresher character. Peeling beer is sweet and a little weeïg, but a bit more acidic than other white beers and with the typical notes of banana and clove that you can also find in weizen beers. The acidity in this beer is easy to combine with fatty dishes such as everything that comes out of a frying pan.
All in all, FrietHoes has succeeded in developing a beer with potato that fits well with the deep-fried delicacies that they mainly sell. Whether it is a really accessible beer, I wonder. For a number of people, perhaps it is just a bit too sour.
And here’s another review from BierNet.nl:
Friethoes Schillenbier
New: Schillenbier from Friethoes . An unofficial Weizen beer made from hops, barley and pieces of potato from Friethoes fries factory. The fries bakers worked together with Brouwerij Troost to process the remains from the fries cutting plant and use them in a new and cool product. From now on: fries and beer from Friethoes.
Brewery Troost has often brewed with other ingredients with the aim to prevent waste. In the past they also brewed Pieper Bier and Bammetjes beer.
That’s how you make beer
Friethoes Schillenbier bottleYou already knew: beer is made from malt, hops and yeast. You mainly use malt to give color and flavor to your beer. The starch in malt also provides alcohol and bubbles with the help of a little yeast. You do not need malt starch per se, you can also use potato starch.
And that is exactly what Friethoes and Troost have done: the waste is converted into a main component. In the end, fewer raw materials are needed to make the same fries and the same beer. Hoera!
Es ist (k) ein Weizen
The new Schillenbier naturally had to taste good with fries, which is why the brewers chose Weizen beer . Weizen is sweet, mild and accessible and that fits well with a first-class salty burger.The new Schillenbier consists of 50% wheat malt, a little barley and little hops. Officially you can not call that Weizen. If you are a bit of a German, you know that according to the Reinheitsgebot you do not use beeper starch in Weizen, even if it tastes exactly the same. No Weizen.
A responsible company
Friethoes wants to make fries in a responsible and honest way. That’s why it uses as many local potatoes and local ingredients as possible, uses green electricity for their fries and 100% E-numberless sunflower oil to bake the fries.
The packaging is made of biodegradable plastic, recycled paper and cardboard and the forks in the recycled wood store. Schillenbier is an initiative and an experiment to determine the value of the waste stream. The goal is to be the first zero waste fries company in the Netherlands by 2019.
Beer In Ads #2863: Van Vollenhoven’s Stout
Thursday’s ad is for Van Vollenhoven’s Stout, from the 1940s, I think. From the late 1800s until the 1940s, poster art really came into its own, and in Europe a lot of really cool posters, many of them for breweries, were produced. This poster is for Van Vollenhoven’s Stout, brewed by De Gekroonde Valk (“The Crowned Falcon”) which was an Amsterdam brewery in the Netherlands that was founded by Jan van den Bosch. In 1792, the Rotterdam Van Vollenhoven family took over the company and gave its name to different beers, including the stout. The text at the bottom of the ad, “Geeft Kracht aan Jong en Oud,” translates as “Gives Strength to Young and Old.”
Historic Beer Birthday: Gerardus Johannes Mulder
Today is the birthday of Gerardus Johannes Mulder (December 26, 1802–April 18, 1880). He “was a Dutch organic and analytical chemist,” who wrote several technical chemical publications analyzing various substances, including one entitled “The Chemistry of Beer,” in 1856 or 57 (sources vary).
“He became a professor of chemistry at Rotterdam and later at Utrecht. While at the Utrecht University, Mulder described the chemical composition of protein. He claimed that albuminous substances are made up of a common radical, protein, and that protein had the same empirical formula except for some variation in amounts of sulfur and phosphorus, long before the polymer nature of proteins was recognized after work by Staudinger and Carrothers.
He was the first to use this name, protein, coined by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in a publication, his 1838 paper ‘On the composition of some animal substances’ (originally in French but translated in 1839 to German). In the same publication he also proposed that animals draw most of their protein from plants.”
Here’s a biography of Mulder from Encyclopedia.com:
Mulder studied medicine at the University of Utrecht (1819–1825), from which he graduated with a dissertation on the action of alkaloids of opium, De opio ejusque principiis, actione inter se comparatis (1825). He practiced medicine in Amsterdam and then in Rotterdam, where he also lectured at the Bataafsch Genootschap der Proefondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte and taught botany to student apothecaries. At the foundation of a medical school at Rotterdam (1828), Mulder became lecturer in botany, chemistry, mathematics, and pharmacy. His attention was directed primarily to the practical training of his students. In 1840 Mulder succeeded N. C. de Fremery as professor of chemistry at the University of Utrecht. He applied for his retirement in 1868 and spent the rest of his life in Bennekom. Besides publishing on scientific subjects, Mulder took an active part in education, politics and public health. The works of Faraday and Berzelius exerted a great influence on him; his Leerboek voor Scheikundige werktuigkunde (1832–1835) was written in the spirit of Faraday’s Chemical Manipulation. Mulder edited a Dutch translation by three of his students of Berzelius’ textbook of chemistry as Leerboek der Scheikunde (6 vols., 1834–1845). His difficult character caused problems with some of his pupils and with other chemists.
From 1826 to 1865 Mulder edited five Dutch chemical journals (see bibliography), in which most of his work was published. He worked in physics and in both general and physical chemistry, the latter in combination with medicine, physiology, agriculture, and technology. Most of his work had a polemic character. His most important contributions are in the field of physiological chemistry and soil chemistry, in which he published two extensive works that attracted much attention in translation despite their many mistakes and erroneous speculations.
Studies on proteins led Mulder to his protein theory (1838): he supposed that all albuminous substances consist of a radical compound (protein) of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, in combination with varying amounts of sulfur and phosphorus. The differences among proteins resulted from multiplication of the protein units in conjunction with the two other elements. Thus, casein was formulated as
10 protein units + S,
And serum albumin as
10 protein units + SP2.
In 1843 Mulder published the first volume of a treatise on physiological chemistry, which was translated into English as The Chemistry of Vegetable and Animal Physiology (1845–1849). At first both Liebig and Berzelius accepted Mulder’s analysis of proteins; but Liebig soon opposed the theory vigorously, and a deep conflict with Mulder ensued. In 1839–1840 Mulder investigated humic and ulmic acids and humus substances and determined the amounts of geic acid (acidum geïcum), apocrenic acid (acidum apocrenicum or Quellsatzsäure), crenic acid (acidum crenicum or Quellsäure), and humic acids in fertile soils (1844). The structure of these various brown or black substances is unknown. They are a group of aromatic acids of high molecular weight, which can be extracted from peat, turf, and decaying vegetable matter in the soil. The difference between these acids is the oxygen content. In the decay of vegetable matter ulmic acid is formed. According to Mulder, this has the formula C20H14O6(in modern equivalents). In contact with air and water more oxygen is absorbed, which results in the successive formation of humic acid (C20H12O6, geic acid (C20H12O7), apocrenic acid C24H12O12, and crenic acid (C12H12O8).
His studies on agricultural chemistry led to the treatise De scheikunde der bouwbare aarde (1860). Mulder confirmed Berzelius’ suggestion that theine and caffeine are identical (1838) and was the first to analyze phytol correctly in his researches on chlorophyll. Among his other works are technical chemical publications on indigo (1833), wine (1855), and beer (1856), detailed research on the assaying method for analyzing silver in relation to the volumetric silver determination of Gay-Lussac (1857), and a study on drying oils (1865).
While I can’t find the book itself, Julius E. Thausing mentions it in his “Theory and Practice of the Preparation of Malt and the Fabrication of Beer,”published in 1882.
Historic Beer Birthday: Alfred Heineken
Today is the birthday of Alfred “Freddy” Heineken (November 4, 1923-January 3, 2002). “He was the grandson of Gerard Adriaan Heineken, who was the founder of the brewery Heineken” in 1864. Under his management, it became a global company and today one of the largest breweries in the world.
He entered the service of the Heineken company – which by then was no longer owned by the family – on June 1, 1941 and bought back stock several years later, to ensure the family controlled the company again. He created the Heineken Holding that owned 50.005% of Heineken International; he personally held a majority stake in Heineken Holding. By the time of his resignation as chairman of the board in 1989 he had transformed Heineken from a brand that was known chiefly in the Netherlands to a brand that is currently famous worldwide.
Heineken married Lucille Cummins, an American from a Kentucky family of bourbon whiskey distillers. Heineken died unexpectedly from pneumonia on January 3, 2002 at the age of seventy-eight in his home in Noordwijk. The businessman died around 6pm in the presence of his immediate family, including his daughter Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken. Heineken struggled for some time with deteriorating health, in 1999 he suffered a mild stroke but recovered. Shortly before his death he broke his arm in a fall. Heineken was buried at the General Cemetery in Noordwijk. Heineken’s daughter, Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, inherited his fortune. Heineken was a member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).
One dark period of life occurred when he was kidnapped and held for ransom in 1983.
Freddy Heineken and his driver Ab Doderer were kidnapped in 1983 and released on a ransom of 35 million Dutch guilders (about 16 million Euros). The kidnappers Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Jan Boelaard, Frans Meijer, and Martin Erkamps, were eventually caught and served prison terms. Before being extradited, Van Hout and Holleeder stayed for more than three years in France, first on the run, then in prison, and then, awaiting a change of the extradition treaty, under house arrest, and finally in prison again. Meijer escaped and lived in Paraguay for years, until he was discovered by Peter R. de Vries and imprisoned there. In 2003, Meijer halted resisting his extradition to the Netherlands, and was transferred to a Dutch prison to serve the last part of his term.
There have been two films about the incident, one in the Netherlands starring Rutger Hauer, and a more recent one starring Anthony Hopkins, entitled “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken , released in 2015.
Here’s his obituary from the New York Times:
Alfred Henry Heineken, who built an Amsterdam brewer into one of the world’s biggest beer companies, died on Thursday at his home in the Dutch coastal town of Noordwijk. He was 78 and died of pneumonia.
Mr. Heineken, who was known as Freddy, created the green bottle that helped Heineken become synonymous with imported beer in the United States. Aided by the company’s marketing, Heineken was the best-selling import in the United States for many years before it was dethroned by Corona of Mexico in 1998.
Born in Amsterdam in 1923, Mr. Heineken began working for his family’s brewing company at the age of 18, during World War II. The company was started in 1863 by his grandfather Gerard Heineken, who persuaded his mother to back him financially by arguing that there would be fewer displays of drunken behavior on the streets if the Dutch were able to drink a good beer instead of gin.
His grandson Freddy would prove himself equally gifted in the art of persuasion, directing Heineken’s advertising and marketing efforts. ”Had I not been a beer brewer I would have become an advertising man,” he once said.
Shortly after the war, he went to New York and walked the streets of Manhattan presenting samples of Heineken to bartenders. His two years in New York changed Mr. Heineken’s life. Not only did he learn about the export market that would make the company one of the three global giants in beer — behind Anheuser-Busch of the United States and neck-to-neck with Interbrew of Belgium — he also found the partner of his life. In 1948, he married Lucille Cummins, the daughter of a whiskey-making family in Kentucky.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Heineken is survived by his daughter, Charlene, and five grandchildren. Family members continue to control Heineken Holding, which owns 50.1 percent of the brewing company, Heineken N.V.
Freddy Heineken began working at the company’s headquarters in Amsterdam in 1951, and set up its advertising department. He made Heineken’s brand color a bright green and oversaw the bottle’s distinctive design, with the red star logo and a black banner bearing the Heineken name. ”I don’t sell beer, I sell warmth” was his motto.
His talents were not limited to sales and marketing. In 1954, he succeeded in regaining the family’s controlling interest in the brewing company, which his father had sold in 1942.
From 1971 to 1989, Mr. Heineken served as chairman of Heineken, setting the company’s long-term strategy nearly single-handedly. Under his leadership, Heineken grew into a global powerhouse.
Heineken, which says it was the first brewer to export to the United States after Prohibition, had particularly strong growth in the American market. In 1960, the company sold a million cases of beer in the United States; 40 years later, the company sold more than 53 million cases, according to Impact, a beverage industry publication.
The company acquired a Dutch rival, Amstel, in 1968, and Murphy’s of Cork, Ireland, a brewer of stout, in 1970. Today, Heineken has 110 breweries in more than 50 countries. Its beer can be found in more than 170 countries.
Mr. Heineken became one of the wealthiest men in Europe and enjoyed near royalty status in the Netherlands.
But his life was turned upside down in November 1983, when he and his chauffeur were kidnapped. The two men were chained to neighboring concrete cells for three weeks before the Dutch police raided a warehouse in Amsterdam and freed them. The rescue came after a ransom, said to be more than $10 million, was paid.
Afterward, Mr. Heineken limited his public appearances and became very protective of his family’s private life. In 1989, he relinquished his control of the brewing company but he continued to play a role in its running right up to his death.
In November, he resigned as chairman of the holding company that owns a majority stake in Heineken N.V. His daughter, Charlene, was supposed to take over some of Mr. Heineken’s responsibilities at a shareholders meeting in April, but will now do so immediately, the company said. His family will retain its majority ownership of the company.
Outside of brewing, Mr. Heineken played an active role in promoting science and the arts. In 1964, in honor of his father, he founded the Dr. H. P. Heineken Foundation, which awards cash prizes for pioneering work in biochemistry and biophysics. In the 1980’s, Mr. Heineken started a second foundation in his own name that awards cash prizes to the sciences and the arts.
Historic Beer Birthday: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Today is the birthday of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (October 24, 1632–August 26, 1723). He “was a Dutch tradesman and scientist, and is commonly known as ‘the Father of Microbiology.'” Apropos of nothing, “his mother, Margaretha (Bel van den Berch), came from a well-to-do brewer’s family.” Despite hi family ties, van Leeuwenhoek didn’t discover anything specifically useful to the brewing industry, but he did find that there was life pretty much everywhere he looked, using his microscope, including the “microscope—tiny “animalcules,” including yeast cells, which he described for the first time” in 1674-80.” But he laid the groundwork for later scientists to figure how exactly yeast worked. As Brian Hunt wrote in the entry for “infection” in the “The Oxford Companion to Beer,” that “the existence of yeast as a microbe was only discovered in 1674 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the modern microscope.” Or as Sylvie Van Zandycke, PhD, put it. “The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was used for thousands of years in the fermentation of alcoholic beverages before anyone realized it! The Dutch scientist, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek observed the mighty cells for the first time under the microscope in 1680.”
Here’s a short biography, from the Science Museum Brought to Life:
Leeuwenhoek was born in Delft in the Netherlands, to a family of brewers. He is known for his highly accurate observations using microscopes.
Leeuwenhoek worked as a draper, or fabric merchant. In his work he used magnifying glasses to look at the quality of fabric. After reading natural scientist Robert Hooke’s highly popular study of the microscopic world, called Micrographia (1665), he decided to use magnifying lenses to examine the natural world. Leeuwenhoek began to make lenses and made observations with the microscopes he produced. In total he made over 500 such microscopes, some of which allowed him to see objects magnified up to 200 times.
These were not the first microscopes, but Leeuwenhoek became famous for his ability to observe and reproduce what was seen under the microscope. He hired an illustrator who reproduced the things Leeuwenhoek saw.
In 1673 he began corresponding with the Royal Society of London, which had just formed. Leeuwenhoek made some of the first observations of blood cells, many microscopic animals, and living bacteria, which he described as ‘many very little living animalcules’. In 1680 his work was recognised with membership of the Royal Society – although he never attended a meeting, remaining all his life in Delft.
Leeuwenhoek with His Microscope, by Ernest Board (1877–1934)
Here’s a story from Gizmodo, by Esther Inglis-Arkell, explaining Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s role and iviting readers to Meet The First Man To Put Beer Under A Microscope:
The man in the picture [the same one at the top of this post] is considered the “Father of Microbiology.” He helped to discover and sketch microorganisms. When he turned his microscope on beer, he saw some of the most useful microorganisms in the world — but he failed to recognize them.
This man above is Anton van Leeuwenhoek, and he’s wearing an absolutely bitchin’ coat because he was a draper by trade. In fact, he draped so successfully that he managed to indulge his hobbies as he got older, one of which was lens making. Anton spent his days making powerful microscopes and sketching the objects he put in front of them. He discovered many things, the most interesting of which were animalcules, things that looked like tiny little animals. His sketches and descriptions, as well as his microscopes, jumpstarted the field of microbiology.
It wasn’t long before he turned his lens on beer in the process of brewing. It was 1680 when he first trained his lens on a droplet of beer. At the time, no one knew what it was that made hops, barley, and water turn into beer. Although they knew of yeast as a cloudy substance that appeared in beer after it spent some time fermenting, they were entirely ignorant of what it did; to the point where there were laws against using anything except barley, hops, and water in the beer-making process. Naturally, as soon as Anton looked at brewing beer he saw little circular blobs. He saw the way they aggregated into larger groups. He saw the way that they produced bubbles of what he thought was “air,” and floated to the surface.
Despite his obsession with microorganisms, he utterly failed to recognize them as life. These blobs, he believed, had come loose from flour. They aggregated into groups of six as part of a chemical process. Anton was fascinated by these groups of flour globs. He modeled them in wax, because he wanted to figure out the ways six globs could stick together while all being visible from above. This is his sketch of his models.
It took another 150 years before Charles Canard-Latour figured out that the “air” was carbon dioxide and the sextets of blobs hadn’t aggregated together, they’d grown. Archaeologists believe that beer was probably first brewed around 3000 BC. That means that we used an organism for nearly 5,000 years before we realized it even existed.
Although van Leeuwenhoek did write about the wood used in beer barrels:
Beer Birthday: Ron Pattinson
Today is the 62nd birthday of Ron Pattinson, a brewing historian who writes online at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins. Ron lives in Amsterdam but is obsessed with the British brewery Barclay Perkins, which is what the title of his blog refers to. I have finally had the pleasure of meeting Ron in person, when we were both guests of Carlsberg for a press trip to Copenhagen earlier this year, and then again this year in Denmark, when he was there with his lovely wife. A few years ago, Lew Bryson had a chance to go drinking with Ron, too. Join me in wishing Ron a very happy birthday.
Me and Ron at a bar in Copenhagen.
In that same bar, with (clockwise from lower left) Martyn Cornell, Jeff Alworth, Evan Rail, me, Stephen Beaumont, Pete Brown, Stan Hieronymus and Ron.
Ron, talking with Jeff Bell and Mark Dredge.
Leaving Copenhagen; Pete Brown, Ron, Jeff Bell, Stephen Beaumont and Stan Hieronymus.
Ron while drinking with Lew Bryson.
At Pretty Things 1901: Jim Barnes, Dann Paquette (Pretty Things), Jay Sullivan (Cambridge Brewing) and Ron Pattinson.
Beer Birthday: Theo Flissebaalje
Today is the 69th birthday of Theo Flissebaalje. Theo’s from the Netherlands, and co-founded StiBON, and he’s also active in the beer consumer organization PINT. He’s also on the international judging circuit. I first met him judging in Tokyo, Japan, but have also judged with him in Europe and America, as well. Join me in wishing Theo a very happy birthday.
Theo judging in Tokyo in
Through a window in Antwerp during lunch for the Brussels Beer Challenge in 2015, that’s Theo on the far right.
Agostino Arioli, from Birrificio Italiano, with Theo, also in Japan in 2013.