Pumpkins were a part of colonial beer making as a malt substitute. Only in the 1980s did pumpkin beers become the pumpkin spice flavored beers we know today.
Pumpkins have had two lives in beer making history – colonial and modern. Native to the Americas pumpkins are fairly easy to grow and a great food source. There is documented evidence of humans cultivating pumpkins since at least 5,500 BCE. When European colonists arrived in the 16th century they learned to use pumpkins as food, eventually hitting upon the idea of using them to make beer.
When you make beer, malt gives the process the sugars needed for fermentation to produce alcohol. Malt is grain that has been soaked, germinated, & dried. Early colonists had a difficult time staying alive let alone having the ability to produce reliable harvests of grains for beer. Necessity being the mother of invention they turned to the pumpkin and used the meat of the pumpkin to produce the sugars they needed for fermentation.
While they were initially used out of necessity, pumpkins continued to be used to make beer long after colonists were growing grain up through the 18th century. Pumpkins were cheap and grown everywhere which made them hard to resist. That said pumpkin beer was a drink of the colonies. Europe, which had affordable sources of grain, had no interest in making beer from pumpkins. After more than 200 years pumpkin-based beer began to decline in the early 19th century as grains in America became more affordable.
Pumpkins have been grown in the Americas as a food source for thousands of years. Eventually European colonists realized they could make beer with them.
Pumpkin Spice Pumpkin Beer
Our modern concept of pumpkin beer is more inline with the Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) and the pumpkin spice craze of the early 2000s – it’s about the flavor of pumpkin pie rather than using pumpkins as a malt substitute.
In 1986 the California brewpub Buffalo Bill’s Brewery (the first brewpub in America) was inspired to brew one of George Washington’s beer recipes that called for pumpkins instead of malt. After trying it however they found the taste less inspiring. So instead they created a syrup using traditional pumpkin pie spices and added it as flavoring. This was the first modern pumpkin beer.
Today pumpkin beers are an autumnal tradition with hundreds of options. Like other pumpkin flavored foods, some pumpkin beers contain real pumpkin while others do not, but one common characteristic is they all tend to taste like the spices of pumpkin pie.
In the 14th century the northern town of Einbeck, Germany was producing some great tasting beer with higher alcohol content than typical lagers. The beer was brewed by individual households (in citizen brew houses) but the town owned all of the beer making equipment and hired hundreds of master brewers. This helped maintain a consistently high-quality product throughout town. As Einbeck joined the Hanseatic League they exported their beer around Europe and the popularity of their beer grew. In 1521 Martin Luther said that“The best drink anyone knows is called Einbecker beer” and later served it at his wedding.
In the early 17th century the master brewer Elias Pichler was lured down from Einbeck to Munich by Duke Maximilian to help the Bavarians make the Einbeck beer, or “Ainpöckisch bier”. The Bavarians changed the name a bit and with their southern pronunciation Ainpöckisch bier became “Oanpock bier” which was eventually shortened to just “Bock bier”. Soon the Einbeck style of beer was known by the name created by the brewers in the south.
Goat imagery has been tied to bock beer for years.
The Goat
As the centuries progressed bock beer posters, signs, and bottle labels tended to have a common visual motif – the image of a goat. No other style of beer has had such a consistently universal visual element. Goats have been used as imagery for bock beer across breweries, across time, and across countries. The reason is that “bock” in German means “male goat” (among other things). So Einbeck could be “ein bock” or “a goat”. Goats selling bock beer is a visual pun. It’s a multi-century dad joke.
Added info: there are different styles of bock beer including Maibock which is a seasonal beer made for the month of May (hence the name, “May bock”). The Sly Fox Brewery in Pennsylvania hosts an annual goat race every Spring where each year’s Maibock is named for the winning goat.
Also Doppelbock (“double bock”) is an even stronger bock brewed for Lent and the strong beer season.
The idea that ancient Persians would make a decision drunk then make it sober to see if the two match.
Herodotus was a 5th century BCE Greek whose Histories changed how world history is recorded and earned him the title of the “Father of History”. Histories contains a record of the Greco-Persian Wars as well as other stories and information from around the ancient world. Some things he got right, some he got wrong. He did the best he could, but he also wasn’t an impartial recorder of events which meant some things became exaggerated or biased. One such example is his account of how Persians would make important decisions.
Drunk History
In HistoriesHerodotus reported that the Persians had a peculiar method of decision making. Supposedly they would get drunk on wine and come up with a solution to a problem. Then, the following day while sober they would think about the problem again and consider if the previous night’s decision was still a good idea. This process could also be done the other way around – sober first, then drunk. In either order, if the two decisions agreed then the decision was adopted. If they did not, the Persians would have to think on the matter some more.
At face value this a Persian version of the Latin phrase “In vino veritas” or “In wine, there is truth”. It’s also a bit like an ancient version of the misattributed Hemingway quote“Write drunk, edit sober” (which is actually by humorist Peter De Vries). The Persians would use wine to come to the truth of a dilemma and confirm the truth when sober. While a fun anecdote, it seems unlikely they did this in the way Herodotus describes.
To start, it’s improbable that the Persian empire was in the regular habit of making all important decisions twice. Further this story says more about Herodotus than it does about the Persians. The Greeks drank their wine diluted with water but the Persians drank their wine undiluted (as we do today). Drinking undiluted wine was seen by the Greeks as decadent and even barbaric, and Herodotus uses this story to depict the Persians as less civilized than the Greeks. There’s also a double standard in how he portrays Persia’s wine & wealth as a negative (again as decadent), even though a similar wealth amongst the Greeks would be seen as a positive. Further, while they may have drank wine differently, the Greeks enjoyed wine just the same as the Persians did. More than anything though, this is an account of Persian culture by a Greek. To get a more accurate portrayal of Persian culture we should look to the Persians themselves.
Persian Wine
Wine has been an important part of Persian culture for thousands of years (far longer than its recent prohibition). One of the world’s earliest known wine-making artifacts originates in Neolithic Persia (in modern day Hajji Firuz, Iran) from around 5,000 BCE. According to Persian folklore the legendary Shah Jamshid (who lived for 700 years) is said to have inadvertently discovered wine after one of his harem women found and drank from a jar of old fermented grapes.
At the time of Herodotus wine was a staple of Persian society. It was safer to drink than water (which was true around the ancient world), but more importantly people enjoyed it just like we do today. Wine was enjoyed at all levels of society from royalty to commoners, at social gatherings, meals, and political meetings. Given how common wine was in Persian society, perhaps the wine being drunk while making decisions was incidental to the decision making and not the focal point as Herodotus would lead us to believe.
Added info: the Persian region of Shiraz had a long history of wine production and was once Iran’s “wine capital”. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution however, alcohol was banned throughout the country and Shiraz no longer makes wine. Also the wine type of Shiraz is not named for the region, and Shiraz and Syrah wines are the same thing.
Drinking alcohol in cold weather only warms you temporarily and then you need to get inside.
Our bodies are designed to regulate heat in order to stay alive. When you’re too hot the blood vessels nearest the skin use vasodilation to open wide and allow heated blood to pass through and radiate heat away from the body, cooling you down.
When you’re cold you body does the opposite. In the cold your body uses vasoconstriction to close off the blood vessels closest to the skin to prevent heat loss. In order to keep your core warm your body limits the blood flow to your extremities, conserving heat. This is why your fingers, toes, skin, etc. get stiff & cold before your core. Fingers are expendable, your organs are not. When your body is using vasoconstriction to keep warm the last thing you want to do is dilate those blood vessels … which is exactly what alcohol does.
From old myths and advertisements, the idea that alcohol is a good way to warm up in the cold has been around for centuries.
Hot Shots
Part of why we think alcohol helps comes from St. Bernards rescuing avalanche victims in the snow wearing small barrels of brandy to warm them up. Unfortunately no St. Bernard dog has ever worn such a cask – it’s a myth popularized by the Edwin Landseer 1820 painting Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller.
Probably the main reason we think alcohol warms us up in the cold is because it sort of does. Alcohol is a vasodilator and so it isn’t the alcohol warming you but what alcohol does to the body that warms you. In the cold alcohol opens the blood vessels that the body has closed down to preserve warmth, the result of which is that the warm reserve of blood in your core is suddenly released out to your extremities. Unfortunately this sudden warmth comes at a cost. As the warm blood reaches your extremities there is a loss of heat and as it travels back to your core your overall body temperature drops. Further, alcohol reduces your body’s ability to shiver (which is another mechanism used to increase warmth) so you’re cold and only getting colder. Now you no longer have a reserve of warmth and need to get indoors.
In this bootlegged video from MythBusters, they explore the myth that alcohol helps warm you up in cold weather.
The design fad that had a practical application in prison.
In the late 1980s a trend for clear products took hold – clear electronics, clear drinks. Clear beverages and clear beauty products were pitched as more “pure” than their traditional counterparts because they were free of artificial colors. Health conscious consumers began to associate clear with clean. There is of course no correlation between clarity and health but the trend for clear beverages took off regardless.
Learning from the failure of New Coke, that you don’t mess with your best selling product, various brands created new clear products (leaving their bestsellers untouched) as an attempt to appeal to underserved demographics. In 1992 Pepsi released Crystal Pepsi which was a clear soda without preservatives or caffeine. In response to this Coca-Cola released Tab Clear which was created solely to sabotage Crystal Pepsi. Tab Clear was marketed as a diet soda which they hoped would confuse people into thinking Crystal Pepsi was a diet soda, which it did. Both clear sodas were retired by 1994 (although Crystal Pepsi has come back from time to time in limited releases).
The Clear Craze gave us a variety of clear drinks – some more popular than others.
In 1993 Gillette released a series of clear antiperspirants. In the same year Coors Brewing Company released the clear alcoholic beverage Zima. Building off of the 1980s popularity of wine coolers, Zima was a new alternative to beer. It was a lemon-lime drink that was produced for a surprisingly long time (until 2008 in the United States), but was more popular in Japan. Part of Zima’s popularity problem in the US had to do with the fact that it was more popular with women than men which (for some consumers) made it seem like a drink for women. This cut out a large part of the potential male customer base.
A 1993 Zima commercial, complete with a peppering of Z’s substituting for S’s.
In 1993 the Miller Brewing Company chose a few American cities for a limited release of Miller Clear. Through intense filtering they removed the color (and by some critics, the flavor) from a lager to make a clear beer that was less heavy than traditional beer and with greater “drinkability.” It never left the limited release stage.
A 1993 Miller Clear commercial demonstrating it’s radical style while proclaiming that it’s “The first regular beer without all the heaviness.” The Clear Craze was even more popular in electronics.
Electronics also became transparent, allowing you to see the internal workings of the device. The trend for transparent/translucent electronics lasted into the late 1990s, much longer than the craze for transparent beverages.
In 1983 Swatch released the celebrated Jelly Fish model of watch which had a transparent body allowing you to see the gears (a version of which you can still buy today). A variety of brands made clear telephones some of which would flash when a call was coming in. As part of the Play It Loud! series, in 1995 you could buy a clear Nintendo Game Boy (the clear model’s color was called “X-Ray”). The first iMac series, which ran from 1998 to 2003, all featured clear / colored translucent bodies. While clear products were a fun novelty that faded out around the late 1990s they are still very much alive in one particular market: prisons.
Clear Prison Electronics
Behind bars transparent goods allow prison security to easily inspect for contraband. Depending on the prison system there are different rules & requirements for goods in prison. Some rules are to aid in the search for contraband (such as clear plastic) while other requirements are to prevent objects from being turned into weapons (such as using silicon instead of hard plastic). Prison music players & TVs frequently have a lower maximum volume so as to not annoy one’s neighbors, forcing the listener to be very close to the speaker. An alternative is that some players have the speakers removed altogether and only provide a headphone jack (to be used with clear headphones).
Prison electronics has continued the Clear Craze, but for practical reasons rather than stylish ones.
While the cassette was a popular music format in the 1980s, and has seen a resurgence in recent years, it never completely went away. Cassettes have been in steady use in prisons because they’re harder to turn into weapons than CDs and clear cassettes in particular can be quickly inspected for contraband. Thanks to the US’s prison population (the largest and highest per-capita in the world, something America is definitely #1 at) they were able to keep the cassette industry alive long after it fell out of favor with the mainstream public. Even with the introduction of mp3 players into prisons, cassettes are still popular as they are easier to share/trade than digital files.
Bob Barker and Keefe Group are just two examples of companies who specialize in clear products intended for correctional facilities.
Today
You can still find transparent/translucent products today (in and out of prisons). Coca-Cola Clear is a clear version of Coke (but with additional lemon flavoring) introduced to Japan in 2018. You can still find different video game consoles and/or controllers with special clear/translucent editions. Swatch still makes several different clear watches. While clear beer never happened, and Zima hasn’t really come back strong, the hard seltzer craze of 2019 has introduced a plethora of profitable clear alternatives to beer.
In 2024 Zima is still available in Japan.
Added info: If you’re interested in owning second-hand clear prison electronics (for the novelty and certainly not for their quality), you can find various options on eBay. Here’s a selection of clear prison televisions. Urban Outfitters has also gotten in the game of selling clear electronics that were originally designed for prison, such as this cassette player.
Mat Taylor of Techmoan has a fantastic introduction to prison technology.
The SNL commercial for Crystal Gravy was a parody of the Crystal Pepsi commercial.
Sparkling wines range from dry to sweet based on how much sugar is added after the second fermentation.
What’s in a name?
Sparkling wine goes by many names. The most well known is of course Champagne (which not-so-coincidentally comes from the Champagne region of northern France). The word “Champagne” is a protected designation of origin (PDO) term which means only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France may be legally called “Champagne” (as per a a rule included in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919). That said Crémant is sparkling wine made from other areas of France that can be just as good (or better) and frequently for a lot less money.
The Spanish call their sparkling wine Cava, the Germans and Austrians have Sekt, the Italians have Spumante but their better known protected designation of origin variety of sparkling wine is Prosecco, etc. The United States however (who never ratified the Treaty of Versailles) does sometimes call their sparkling wine Champagne. That said in 2006 the issue was revisited and the US agreed to some limits on the name but established American companies calling their sparkling wine Champagne were allowed to continue doing so.
While there are a variety of methods to making sparkling wine, they all start with making wine. This is followed by adding a little sugar & yeast to each bottle to generate a second fermentation. This second fermentation, which takes place in the capped bottle, is what produces the CO2 bubbles sparkling wine is known for. Depending on the production method, wine makers then add a mixture known as “le dosage” at the end before the final corking. Dosage is a sweet mixture of still wine and sometimes sugar to balance out the flavor of the sparkling wine. How much dosage is added makes all the difference.
Sparkling Sweetness
The sweetness of a sparkling wine is determined by how much sugary dosage is added – the more sugar, the sweeter the sparkling wine (makes sense). To know how sweet a sparkling wine is, wine makers label their bottles with a variety of terms. Unfortunately, different countries use different words to convey the same general idea. The following is an explanation of sparkling wine sweetness terms.
Sparkling wines range from brut to doux. Brut comes from the French for “dry” or “unrefined”. There is some overlap in Brut categories depending on the wine maker but they are all fairly unsweet sparkling wines. Doux comes from the French for “soft” or “sweet”. These bottles are the candy aisle of sparking wines.
Added info: the most famous early sparkling wine was by the 17th century monk Dom Pérignon, however sparkling wine originated in England. In typical wine bottles, sparkling wine has the tricky problem where the second fermentation inside the bottle builds up enough pressure that the bottle can explode. Because 17th century English glassmakers used coal in their glass production they could produce a stronger bottle which allowed them to reliably produce sparkling wine before the French.
Munich’s strong beer season began as a work-around to Lenten fasting.
During the Lenten season leading up to Easter, the German monks of the Neudeck ob der Au Monastery would fast. While they were forbidden from eating solid food they were allowed to drink beer. “Liquid bread wouldn’t break the fast” was the idea – but they didn’t drink just any beer. The monks created the nutritionally-rich, and high in alcohol, doppelbock Salvator beer for the Lenten season. First brewed in 1629, the beer’s name of Salvator comes from “Sankt Vater”, or “Saint Father”, essentially meaning “Holy Father beer.” This beer was not only the start of the Paulaner Brewery but it was also the origin of Starkbierzeit, or “strong beer season.”
Strong Beer Season
Not as big or as well known as Oktoberfest, Starkbierzeit is the multi-week strong beer festival of Munich. While Oktoberfest beers have an alcohol content around 6%, all of the Starkbierzeit beers have a minimum alcohol volume of 7.5%. In the lead up to Easter, breweries around Munich release special high-alcohol beers for the season and host parties in beer halls. There’s music, dancing, people dressed in traditional tracht – it’s like a Lenten smaller-scale decentralized Oktoberfest … fueled by high-alcohol beer.
As part of a Guinness marketing effort in the early 1990s, thousands of Irish pubs around the world have been built using standardized design templates.
Recognized around the world, the Irish pub is one of the most well-known Irish cultural exports – and where there’s an Irish pub there’s usually Guinness. In the 1980s Guinness began to track the causal relationship between new Irish pubs and regional increases in Guinness beer sales. As new pubs opened, Guinness sales went up. If Guinness could help create more Irish pubs then they could also increase their own revenue.
Ahead of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Guinness sales representatives traveled around Italy meeting with potential Italian business partners with the goal of opening Irish pubs. Their pitch was built around revenue generation and how Irish pubs have a more profitable beverage-to-food ratio than most other bars. From January to June of 1990 Italy opened 58 Irish pubs, welcoming Irish soccer fans and drinkers of all kinds. However, the critical factor to revenue generation was that these pubs needed to appear authentic – enter the “pub in a box”.
Pub in a Box
Successful Irish pubs outside of Ireland have the look & feel of the real thing. As part of their expansion effort Guinness assembled a team to analyze, quantify, & document the seemingly ineffable essence of the Irish pub. The Irish Pub Concept helped determine the critical success factors to operating an Irish pub. Chief among these factors is visual authenticity.
Founded in 1990, the Irish Pub Company of Dublin was one of the first companies to offer “authentic” Irish pubs for export. Instead of doing all of the work yourself they’ll take your dimensions and design, manufacture, and ship all of the necessary materials to you. Do you want the rural Irish pub style or the Victorian? Maybe you want the general “Celtic” style. They offer a variety of prepackaged pub types that come complete with all the knickknacks for the walls. To date they have designed & shipped over 2,000 pubs to more than 50 countries.
Fadó in Chicago, designed by the Irish Pub Company in their “Celtic” style.Mandy’s Apothecary in Moscow, designed by the Irish Pub Company in their “Shop” style.
The Irish Pub Co. isn’t alone. Ól Irish Pubs and GGD Global also offer to design & ship you a “pub in a box”. This Disney-ized packaging of Irish culture is not without criticism. For one it raises questions of authenticity. It’s true these are pubs that have been designed & manufactured in Ireland. However, it’s difficult to claim authenticity when your pub has a fake Irish country store as part of the decor. Instead of organically collecting meaningful mementos for your bar, these superficial design packages ship all the rusty farm equipment, dusty old bottles, and framed photos of strangers you need to give the illusion of authenticity. Why take years cultivating a unique local flavor when you can just throw up a portrait of Michael Collins or the Molly Maguires?
An additional criticism is of Guinness for helping to bring these “pub in a box” bars into existence. Established Irish bars were expected to keep serving Guinness beer while the Guinness company was busy creating additional local competition. Beginning in the early ‘90s some bars boycotted and stopped serving Guinness. McGillin’s Olde Ale House of Philadelphia still does not serve Guinness as a result of the “pub in a box” fallout with Guinness.
The Wild Rover in Barcelona features framed photos of random Irish people, used purely as decoration.
Better than nothing
To many customers the ambiance that these cookie-cutter bars generate is all that matters – the question of authenticity never crosses their minds. The theatrical set dressing used by these bars creates a fun environment. Even for those who recognize the dubious credibility of these establishments, some feel to have a “pub in a box” Irish bar is better than having none at all.
As America has helped transform St. Patrick’s Day into an all-out extravaganza, Irish pubs (authentic or otherwise) are increasingly patronized not only by the diaspora but by people of all backgrounds. The pub offers people of all stripes an environment that is hard to find anywhere else. The long tradition of the pub serving as a gathering place for the local community can still be carried out by these “pub in a box” bars … just don’t scrutinize the bric-à-brac too closely.
Added info: If you’re interested in standardized / templated restaurant experiences, you may also be interested in learning about how the Thai government’s culinary diplomacy has successfully spread Thai restaurants around the world.
Starting in France and making its way to Australia, Syrah and Shiraz are the same thing.
When the French dark grape varietal Syrah arrived in Australia from France, the local Australians began to change its name through their accent calling it “Shi – RAZ” and eventually through actually spelling it Shiraz. Syrah and Shiraz are the same grape. Today which name a winemaker uses is based on where in the world they are making their wine.
