By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
“I drink beer whenever I can lay my hands on any. I love beer, and, by that very fact, the world.” (Thomas Merton, “Is The World a Problem? Ambiguities in the Secular,” Commonweal, June 3, 1966, found at: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/world-problem)
I call this blog “The Boy Monk.” For a long time, however, that title was almost self-mocking because an important aspect of my self-proclaimed “monkhood” was sorely lacking…I did not know how to make beer. I recently tried to fix that glaring deficiency.
Beer is one of the oldest drinks in the world (see http://www.heartlandbrewery.com/history-of-beer/ for a more detailed history). Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs were some of the first known brew masters. They used beer in religious ceremonies. Beer came to Europe from the Middle East and became a significant part of daily life in places like Germany and Belgium where there was an abundance of barley, the key ingredient. Drinking beer often was more safe than drinking water, which could be easily contaminated by human waste.
European monks of the Middle Ages played significant roles in the history of beer. They developed varieties we know and drink today. Almost every medieval monastery had an on-site brewery. They added “modern beer” ingredients like hops and flavoring agents to the malted barley they used as fermentable sugar. Hops added not just a pleasant bitterness, but also were a preservative that extended the shelf life of many beers. Monks also invented the lagering, or cold storing, of beer to improve its flavor.
For Trappist monks, like those who used to live in Huntsville, Utah, the governing Rule of St. Benedict required “ora et labora” (“prayer and work”). Brewing beer was a perfect way to pursue manual labor and support the monastery (see: https://www.thegrowlerguys.com/brews-and-benedict-the-history-of-trappist-ales/). Today, the American Trappists still brew beer in Spencer, Massachusetts. Some Belgian monasteries rank among the greatest breweries in the world.
I was never much of a beer drinker nor a beer connoisseur. As a boy, I sipped samples from my mother’s glass, often heavily-flavored with salt. Equally memorable were her stories of her father’s severe alcoholism, which always was a sobering influence. As I got older, “Mickey Big Mouth” (see https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/mickeys-fine-malt-liquor/2465/) was the popular peer beer among underage drinkers. My own first (and rare) youthful experimentations with alcohol involved not beer, but wine and then rum and tequila (which should never, ever be mixed).
In college, Notre Dame’s campus Senior/Alumni Club “quarter beer night” taught me the merits of Christian generosity. No one ever returned from the bar with less than four cups of frothy brew and they always shared. I still shudder today thinking about the bad things that could have occurred, but didn’t, when we foolishly passed red solo cups filled with beer to cute coeds in other cars while driving to away college football games. The combination of beer and mistaken youthful perceptions of immortality can lead to some poor decision making.
For most of my adulthood, I maintained my rather distant and immature relationship with beer, instead favoring sips of whiskies like Jack Daniels and Old Bushmills. My rather small experience with beer was consistent with my rather large ignorance about it. I never knew the difference between an ale and a stout. I was unable to distinguish a pilsner from a porter. And I was at a complete loss for words, very uncommon for me, if asked to describe how beers were made.
To fix this glaring omission in my monk education, I recently joined some friends for a “Bulldog Brew School” beer brewing class taught by two Judge Memorial Catholic High School faculty members (Dasch Houdeshel and my fellow Ogden St. Joseph High alum Bryan Jeffreys). Dasch is an engineer who makes his own beer at home and is always happy to discuss the applied science behind the brewing process. Bryan is an English teacher and self-proclaimed beer drinker who actually understands the different kinds of beer and thus helps Dasch educate brew dullards like me.
Their class, held on a quiet Sunday evening, appropriately started with some sampling, and a brief description of the various types of beers. Afterwards, our class decided to make a porter and a pale ale. A porter, I now know, is a dark brew developed in London using lots of hops and brown malt. It was popular with street and river porters, i.e. persons who carried objects for others. In 1759, a man named Arthur Guinness opened a Dublin brewery and started making porter. He used roasted unsalted barley for a dark ruby color, burnt flavor, and rich aroma, and called it Guinness stout. The rest is history.
A pale ale is a type of beer using some different types of ingredients (e.g. pale barley malt) and a warm fermentation process (in contrast to lagers, which the old Belgian monks fermented in ice caves). This results in a sweet, full-bodied, and fruity taste. Ales are the oldest types of beers, and their name comes from the Old English word “ealu” which conveniently means “beer.”
Guided by the skillful hands of our brew school instructors, we set up two brew pots, heated water, added specialty malts contained in a mesh bag, and then let it all steep to form a sort of pre-beer tea (called a “wort”). Next, we brought the worts to a boil and slowly added different malts while constantly stirring the pots. After a countdown, we added hops and yeast, in different amounts depending on the desired brew.
We then had to cool the resulting watery mash mixes in ice baths and siphon off the liquid into sanitized air-locked buckets for fermentation. This all took about three hours of time. After two weeks of fermentation in a secret storage area known only to Dasch, he put the beer into individual bottles for another week or two of processing, and then they were ready to enjoy. We called them “Puppy Pale Ale” and “Peaceful Porter,” and yes, trust me, they were enjoyable!
Given many of my many distinctly un-monk-like attributes, including my longstanding ignorance about how monks made beer, one might have been tempted to call this blog “FauxMonk” or “PseudoMonk” or “WannabeMonk.” With my new training from the Judge Memorial Brew School, however, I now may be as monk-like as I ever will become.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
