Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Beer Works

Episode Date: May 27, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, at long last, Josh and Chuck take on perhaps their most important topic ever. Learn about the history of beer, how it's made -- the whole shebang, basically -- in this watershed episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey folks, this is Chuck, and welcome to this week's S-Y-S-K Selects edition, How Beer Works. Not a long intro for this one, it's How Beer Works. So that was my pick. Why not rerun this one, right?

Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Bottoms up, et cetera. Take off your shirt. Is that what beer equates to in your book? Take off your shirt.

Well, I take off my shirt when I drink too much beer. Oh, do ya? Listen, you'll belt, take off the shirt. Close the blinds. The neighbors don't wanna see that. I wanna point out, no they don't, that guest producer Matty today, just a little serendip,

he is brewing his first batch of beer. Yeah. Right now. Yes. And he was like, man, it's not like just preparing food. He said, this is, you know, it's like serious chemistry going on. Yeah. Cause I think he's shooting for the stars here.

He's not starting out with an easy brew. I think, you know, as you know, Matty, he's not one to just dive into something lightly. Oh no. Full bore. Yeah. So you should see how he got into zeitgeist. There's something.

I think he's brewing a porter. Is that right, Mat? Stout. Stout. But Stout's and Porter's, as I learned, have been very much mixed throughout the years. Which came first? I believe Porter's and they were named after River Porter's.

Yeah. Because that's what they like to drink in London, the River Porter's. Allen River Porter's. His dark, darker beers. Yeah. Although, they'll kind of take what they can get. Yeah.

That is one fact of about a thousand that you're about to hear. So also I want to mention, Ayumi's and my friend Stuart is in a band called Superhuman Happiness. And one of his bandmates is making his first beer right now. I believe it's his first. And they're calling it Superhuman Hoppiness.

Nice. Where are they? Out in New York. Out of Brooklyn. Of course they are. Yeah. So Stuart has promised to save a six pack. Great. I'm pretty psyched about it.

Is their music good? Oh yeah, they're really good. He's very good. He's one of the founding members of Antibolus. Have you heard of them? No. Do you know that show Fala? No.

The Fala, it was on Broadway. It's a musical about Fala Kuti, the Nigerian Afro beat. The one that you went to? Yes. Yeah, I knew about it. Oh, okay, that guy. He arranged that. Gotcha, gotcha.

He's good, man. Okay. We saw him with not Bonnie Principally, the other guy. Yeah, you hate Bonnie Principally. I don't hate him. What's the other guy? The other guy that's not Bonnie. Sam Beam, Iron In One.

Oh yeah, Sam Beam. Yeah, he played with him. Oh cool. When they came through last time. I like those guys too. Yeah. So do you want to talk about beer ever? Yeah, seriously.

We got a lot to cover. We shouldn't have wasted that minute of your lives. Sorry, everyone. So what Stuart and Matt are engaged in is a millennia long tradition of brewing beer. Yeah, COA first really quickly. You must be 21 to drink alcohol. Oh yeah, and don't really take off your shirt.

And drink responsibly. So we're certainly not encouraging anyone to go out that's underage to get the delicious, delicious beer and drink it. All right, so since people could walk around, it seems like they wanted to start brewing beer. Well, it's as old as civilization is what they think. Yeah, so not, you know, since they could walk around.

But since they discovered that moldy bread did funny things. Yeah, and they think that it's possible that it was an accident that some piece of bread got wet and inadvertently fermented like all the, everything was there just right. And I guess back then they didn't waste anything. So they probably were like, oh, let me drink this nasty thing.

Or everything was new. And they're like, what does this taste like? What will this do to me? Exactly. They had tried magic mushrooms before and were like, I will eat anything now. Yeah, you never know what you're gonna get. They were still figuring things out.

They're in the figuring things out phase. Right. So yeah, it was possible it was a piece of bread. It could have just been a piece of grain or something because there's a school of thought that we have bread because we had beer. Yeah, I love that theory. Because they figured out that you could bake bread

and easily make a mash out of bread and water to produce beer and that this was all very portable and anybody could kind of keep some bread in their home. So it's possible we have bread because of beer. I love that theory. But the point is that yeah, beer is as old as civilization because one of the first grains,

one of the first things we did was domesticate grain. And you need grain to make beer. And we figured it out pretty quickly. But the oldest record of brewing is I think 6,000 years old and Sumer. Yeah, ancient Sumerians have a seal that had a hem on it. The hem to Nincasi, the goddess of brewing. And the hem not only was a hem,

but it was a hem about making beer. It was a recipe for beer. Yeah, and it wasn't like use one cord. But it was very broad, the recipe, have you read it? I know. I think dogfish had brewery remade it using that recipe. Yeah, I've got one of theirs. They remade this ancient Chinese thing too.

Yeah, I don't think it's the same thing. No, it's very much, it's more in the tradition of wine or brandy than beer. Yeah. But yeah, this one, this hem to Nincasi is definitely beer for sure. And that just kind of kicked everything off just right out of the gate.

Yeah, the earliest reports were that beer would make you feel exhilarated, wonderful, and blissful. Right. And so people were like, how do I get my hands on this stuff? Yeah, and they figured out very quickly how you got your hands on this stuff, Chuck, because beer came about at a period of transition

to agrarian societies, from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies. And there is another school of thought that not only do we have bread, beer to thank for bread, but civilization itself. That civilization, that beer attracted nomadic groups to civilization, because that's who had the beer.

That's how you got the beer. You domesticated grain and you made it. Yeah, and this hut over here, they're really good at making beer, so let's live near them. And then encircle that hut and then that circle grows and all of a sudden, everyone's just sitting around getting drunk.

Exactly, and then somebody's got to serve plus grain, so they're in charge and people end up doing work and religious groups start up, but this is kind of immortalized in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Inkidu, the wild man who represents the hunter-gatherer tribes, the nomads, is given beer because it is the custom of the city. Yeah, the civilized people.

And he drinks like eight glasses of it and while he's drunk, he washes himself and became a human being. Just like that. So he moves from the wild into civilization via beer. Fast forward a little bit to Babylonia or Babylon. Yeah, I gotta get out of Babylon, man. Yeah, they had 20 different types of beer

and I believe they even invented the can that turns blue when it's gold. I'm not mistaken. That was priceless. Is that Babylon? I think it was. Okay. There's also a question I could not find

a definitive answer for, but supposedly the Babylonians took brewing so seriously that if you made a bad batch or tried to sell a bad batch, your punishment was to be drowned in it. Yeah, I wonder if that's true. I found it all over the place, but it was everybody, nobody had a good definitive source. So I present it as a rumor.

Early beer, Josh was unfiltered, cloudy, had chunks of junk in it and residue. So they would actually drink it through a straw, sort of as a filter. So they wouldn't get the stuff in their mouth. It was really bitter. Hammurabi, very important lawmaker back in the day. Yeah, why did we just talk about him in the iPhone I code?

I can't remember it was, was it Noah's Ark? Maybe? I don't remember. But yeah, he's the guy who came up with the I for an I. It's like one of the earliest set of laws. And a beer for a priest, as it turns out. Actually, five beers for a priest. Right, well, five liters.

Yeah, that's right. A day. Yeah, that was his beer ration. That was one of the first laws that he established. A normal worker got two liters, civil servants three, and then administrators and the high priest, five liters a day. Now that is what I call a social contract.

Yeah. That's worth sticking around for. Seriously. So yeah, Hammurabi's wasted. Then we're going to fast forward a little more. The Egyptians keep it going. Yeah. They had their own hieroglyph.

They did, for Brewer. And then everything comes very, very close to being disrupted forever with the arrival of the Greeks and the Romans. Because they drove all those and listened to NPR. And all they cared about was wine. To the Romans, especially, beer was barbarian drink. Like, you only drank beer in the most, the remotest outposts

of the Roman Empire when you couldn't get wine. To a certain degree, don't you think? Sure, yeah. I mean, wine's very big around Greece. But so is Greek beer. No, but I'm talking about period all over the world. Like, you generally think of wine as being high society and the construction worker kicks back with a coarse light.

Can't we all just drink both? Yes. Maybe even mix together. No. OK. That'd be gross. But yes, I agree with that point of view. I think it does kind of carry on today.

And I guess that's where it finds its roots, the snobby Greeks. Interesting. In Romans. Luckily, there was a remote outpost of the Roman Empire that was like, I don't care what you say, man, we're making beer. We're going to dedicate our society to making beer. Of course. And today we call those people the Germans.

Yes, God bless them and their efforts. Back then, they were called Teutons. Yeah. And Tacitus wrote about the ancient Germans and said, to drink, the Teutons have a horrible brew permitted from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a very far removed, similar to wine. The only thing that had in common was that you drink it

and it messes you up. Yeah. Yeah, aside from that, it couldn't be any more different. Right. And the Germans have been making beer since at least 800 BC. That's the earliest record we have of beer drinking in Germany. And I don't know if it probably spread from the Teutons to the rest of northern Europe.

Yeah. But you see beer pop up in very ancient northern European texts, like the Finnish saga, the Kaliwala. Yeah. Kaliwala. There are 400 verses dedicated to beer, 200 verses dedicated to the creation of the earth. Yeah, that's the society that takes beer seriously.

Yeah, and the Nordic, I kind of thought it was called the Nordic epic Eta, wine was for the gods, beer was for mortals, and mead for the inhabitants of the realm of the dead. Yeah. You ever had mead? No, I never have. It's like honey based, right?

For men at honey? Yeah, it's like honey water for men at honey water. It doesn't sound like it. I had some hippie in Virginia give me some mead one time that he had made. You took mead from a hippie? I did. Stayed with him one night, it was one of those deals.

Yeah. Going through town. Oh, OK. No, he just, a friend hooked us up for a place to stay. Did you have a bindle? No, he did though, and he even had a house. He had homemade mead, it was gross. It wasn't very good.

I didn't care for it, I'm sure it's an acquired taste. So yeah, mead kind of falls off here, right? Yeah, except for hippies in Virginia. Exactly, wine kind of stuck in the Mediterranean, but beer just continued to spread and take hold. Yeah, like barley. I mean, of course, wine spread itself as well, and we have it in France and California and everything.

But around this time, it was fairly localized to the Mediterranean area. And as we enter the medieval age, the Dark Ages first and then medieval times, the monks, Christian monks, got really, really good at brewing. And the reason they took it up is because this was a place of like science and agriculture, and abbey was. And could also support their abbey.

Exactly, which is now what trappist monks are. If you drink trappist ale, and it says brew by trappist monks, this is a tradition that's well over 1,000 years old. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Monks supporting themselves by doing something for the community, and some of them brew beer. God bless them.

Another tradition, which is rampant sexism, took place when women were the ones that brewed beer in the medieval times. And not only that, but they said, we want only hot women brewing our beer. Well, it was so important that only beautiful women could brew beer. But can you believe that?

Way back then, they were like, no, no, no. I don't want no ugly chicks making my beer. Like, can you believe that? That's like the earliest form of sexism I can think of. I'll bet it goes back further than that. Well, sure. But there's a feminist twist that later on. Well, because it got really good at making it.

People who were women who were well known. If you were a medieval wife, one of the things you did was brew. And if you were good at it, eventually, your family may come to bear the name brewer or brew stirrer. That's where your name comes from. Exactly. It means that you have a female ancestor who landed your family a surname through her brewing skills.

That is feminism, to ask me. It might have been the St. Pauli girl herself. Maybe so. Do you think she's a feminist icon? I don't think so. So where are we, Chuck? We are in the 15th century. And something pretty cool happened in Germany.

And to me, this is the fact of the show, just because I did not know this. The Rheinheitsgebot of 1516 was a beer purity law. Basically said, you can only make beer out of four things. Water, malted barley, malted wheat, and hops. So that is wrong. That is not right? It's three things.

I don't know where the source got the four ingredients. But there's water, barley, and hops are the only three things you can put in beer. OK, wheat wasn't included at first. Yeah. OK. Regardless, this is still the fact of the show, the Rheinheitsgebot is the oldest non-religious legal standard

of food production. And the oldest consumer protection law on the planet was beer, because of beer. It's 1516. That is crazy. And it's still around. It is. It's still enforced today.

Like, don't try to make a beer in Bavaria using anything but those three ingredients. Yeah, you make beer in Bavaria with corn and rice. You got a one-way ticket on the bullet train out of town. Right. Or you'll get caned publicly. That's right. And there are a couple of reasons why this law was passed.

One, people used to put crazy, crazy stuff in beer, like hallucinogenic roots or poisonous roots that could make you do crazy stuff like hemlock and things like that. So it was a purity law. It was also to control prices. If you read the purity law, it's like, you can't sell a beer for more than this.

And then thirdly also is to make sure that important grains like wheat got diverted to important things like food. Yeah. They didn't want people going crazy like using wheat, which is why that wheat was wrong. It's barley, water, and pop. But wheat beer obviously came along and rye beer later on.

Right. So let's go to America, man. USA. Virginia again. Yeah, beer's been around the US since before the US was around. Maybe it was at Hippie. Maybe he was a descendant of the original brewers of beer in the US. Maybe.

Who knows? So in 1587, by this time, colonists are already making beer, flagrantly ignoring the Reinhardt's gabbard by using corn. They realized very quickly that this makes a terrible beer. I bet it was gross. And in 1609, the first ads appear in London newspapers asking for brewers to move to the Virginia colony.

Right, they need some beer over there in the New World. Bad. And in 1612, the first brewery set up in New Amsterdam by Adrian Block and Hans Christian Andersen. No, Hans Christensen. And I thought this was interesting, too. Same place where the first, well, it says the first non-native American,

but I guess it's the first American was born there. No, because America wasn't there yet. This is New Amsterdam. It's a Dutch colony. So it's the first non-native American born in North America. Right. There wasn't, yeah, who wasn't like of an indigenous group. Which was Jean Vigene Vigny.

And he became a brewer. Yeah, he was born in the first brewery. Crazy. Yeah. I mean, he kind of had to become a brewer under those circumstances, didn't he? Well, in America, just had to become a nation of beer lovers because of this, I think.

Yeah, and boy, did we love it. So researching this and other researches I've done, America used to be 10 times more an awesome place. I can't remember what episode it was. It may have been Prohibition, where we were talking about like, if you look at lists of things served at colonial funerals or weddings or whatever, it'd be like five kegs of rum and 50 kegs of beer and all that.

But there was only like 60 people there. Yeah. And then the fact that the word cocktail referred to a drink that you drink in the morning and that the whiskey old-fashioned was the original cocktail. Right. Yeah, we used to drink a lot more in this country.

So like in 18, what is it, 73? Yes. We hit our peak number of breweries, 4,131 breweries, supplying a population of just 50 million people. Yeah, our peak back then, of course. Yeah. Because now there's a renaissance. There is.

Of a craft brewing. And now there are more breweries than since the 1800s. That's awesome. I did a little research on craft brewing. And in the 1970s, there were only 40 consolidated breweries in the US. And experts thought that that number would fall to as little as five.

Wow. And it was all this homogenous light lager that Americans grew to love in World War II. Yeah, because prohibition hit and there's like a beer evolutionary bottleneck. Yeah, you couldn't survive unless you were one of the big, big ones. Right.

And you had to make other things, including non-alcoholic beer. But so you come out and there's just a few breweries operating, right? Yes. And then World War II hits. And that caused the other reason that beer became homogenous in the United States.

Men went off the war. Women became the market for brewers, for beer. And they preferred a lighter style beer. So in America, almost for decades after World War II, the only beer you could find pretty much was that American-style Pilsner Lager. Yeah, it was like this through the 1970s. And then 1980, I'm sorry, 1976, the first craft brewery,

the new Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California, open. And they were like, we want to start making some good old beer again, like some ales and some ambers and some stouts. They were only open about six years, but they inspired hundreds of others to take it up. That's awesome. And that's generally looked back as the new Renaissance

started in 76. That's great. So in 1980, there were eight craft breweries. In 1994, there were 537. And in 2010, there were 1,600. That's beautiful. And I think over 1,900 in 2011. So they went from literally almost being extinct,

like 20-something years ago, or 30 years ago, to like booming, big-time booming. But that's still half of that 1870s number. 1,900. So yeah, you're right. Half. But that's the highest level since that time. But consider that.

Think about how much beer is in this country right now. You've got 1,900 breweries. Yeah, plus. Supplying 300 million people. Back then, we had 4,100 breweries supplying 50 million. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, unless not kid ourselves, I

think the craft brewers are supplying about 4% by volume and about 6% by dollars. And the three Miller and Heiser Bush and of course are the three big daddies. I prefer to fool myself in this circumstance. Yeah. But you are right. I mean, there's a Renaissance going on.

Sure. In the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy band are each week

to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So let's talk about what these people are doing during this round of stunts. Do you want to talk about how beer is made? Yeah, and I've never done it, surprisingly. I never have either.

But I'm going to. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well, bring me some way. This has inspired me. I just need to collect friends who brew their own beer, so I don't have to do it. Exactly.

Barley, water, hops and yeast are the basic four ingredients. And I like how you put this. The whole idea is to extract sugars from the grains, usually barley. Yeast eats it up, and it poops out alcohol and CO2. Yeah. And that's beer. Yeah.

It's that simple. And you've just described two steps. There's two big categories of this process. There's brewing and there's fermenting. And the brewing part is pretty simple. It's taking a malted barley or a malted grain, which is like dried and cracked and heated so that the sugars start to come out a little more.

Yeah. I guess caramelized is another way to put it. And then you take that and you steep it in basically a tea. And the tea that you've just made is called wort. Yeah, and that's called mashing, right? Yeah. So mashing, yes, taking the malted grain and steeping it. That's mashing.

That's right. But it produces a sticky, sweet substance, pre-beer, as it were, called wort. Yeah, I imagine wort in Germany. Probably, yeah. And you take that wort and your brewing process is done. When you put it in a tank with yeast, you've just started the fermentation process.

Yes, and that's where things get groovy. Yeah. You boil the wort for about an hour. You add the hops. And depending on what kind of beer you're going to make is really going to depend on what kind of hops or how much hops. Yeah, we haven't started fermenting yet.

I jumped the gun. You have to add the hops to the wort. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We did jump the gun. But Budweiser, let's say, has about eight to twin IBUs, which are international bitterness units. Yeah.

That's how you measure hops. Yeah. Are you like hoppy beer? I am a big IPA in paleo. Yeah, I like beer that's so hoppy it makes me sneeze. Well, that's pretty hoppy. Yeah. A 30, a stout has about 30 to 50 IBUs.

And a double IPA or an IPA could have up to 100. Dogfish head, 120 minute, has 120 IBUs. Wow. And they make. I'm going to try that stuff. Well, I like the 60 and the 90. The 120 is actually kind of hard to find a lot of times because they don't make a ton of it.

But interestingly, paleo, you know where India paleo comes from, the IPA? India? Well, it does. The British soldiers were stationed over there. And when they started setting up trade with India back in the day. Or colonizing it.

That's one way to put it. And they were like, boy, we're really thirsty. And we kind of miss our old beer back in England. So they would send over their pale ales. And they wouldn't really make the voyage very well, the sea voyage. It would show up flat and kind of gnarly. So they added a lot more hops because hops acts as a

preservative. Thus, India paleo. Nice. Yeah, nice. That's the story I got. If I'm wrong, I'm going to be really embarrassed. No, I think that's a good story. And if it's not, I would buy that one.

That's the kind of story you hear in a bar, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's the story you say in a bar that gets you free beer. We should try that. So you've got the wort that's boiled. It's all sugary. And you add yeast to it and put it in a tank.

And now it's fermenting. And like we said, the yeast just eats all the sugars and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products. And depending on the kind of beer you make, well, it really depends on the kind of yeast you use, you're either going to be waiting around for a few weeks to a couple of months. That's right.

So if you are making something called an ale, you're going to be doing all this. You're going to ferment using top fermenting yeast at room temperature. And then after a few weeks, your beer is going to be ready to drink. If you are making a lager, which in German is a verb meaning to store, it's going to take a few months.

And you're going to store this stuff. You're going to let it ferment at near freezing temperatures. And it's going to ferment at the bottom, the yeast is. Yeah, they would put it in caves. It was called lagering. It was to store it in cold caves. Because for those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

years that they were making beer, they kept being like, this beer is messed up. And it happens to be summertime. What's wrong with this beer? Oh, it's also summertime. And then finally, somebody figured out, wait a minute, we're making the best beer in the winter time. And they didn't quite know why, but they figured out a

process to replicate it. But of course, now we understand that the wild yeast and bacteria in the area that was prevalent in the summers of Germany was messing up the fermentation process, souring the beer. The stuff using yeast that survived in winter months in the cold produces really clean, crisp, very awesome beer.

The taste of the Rockies. Yeah, exactly. That's now called the lager. That's right. We actually forgot something, too. And I know there's home brewers right now going, you can't forget carbonation. Skipping back a bit, after you do have the bottle beer, it's

not carbonated yet. It's very flat. So you need to carbonate it. And I imagine the big breweries force carbonate, like so does do. And if you were a traditionalist, though, and I wonder about craft breweries, I need to know more about this if they do that or not.

Well, I think it usually will say bottle conditioned. Oh, really? Yeah. So bottle conditioned means it just waits, and you wait it out for the yeast to do its thing naturally. Right. And that's where you're going to get your foam and your good bubbly goodness.

Because it produces carbon dioxide as a waste product. It takes a while. Waste product? You say waste product? I say bubbly goodness. OK. So you want to talk about gravity? Yeah, gravity is how much alcohol is in your beer.

And the brewers measure the gravity before and after the fermentation process, and they calculate the difference in the amount of alcohol by volume and represented by a percentage. Right. So like the higher the percentage, the higher the gravity of the beer? Yeah.

Nowadays, with the craft beers, you're going to get all kinds of percentages, like 6% to 9% to 10%. That's a pretty heavy duty beer. Oh, yeah, it definitely is. What is your average Budweiser? What is that like? 5.5. Is it?

There was a law in Georgia for a while that you couldn't sell beer over 5.5. Do you remember when they repealed that law, that beautiful time in the 90s? I do remember that, actually. That was wow. Yeah, that had a lot to do with craft breweries in Georgia, too.

Yeah, definitely. Say the stuff about the lambics, so I thought that was really interesting. Oh, OK. So lambics are a type of spontaneously fermented brew. I've had it. I didn't know this, though. They're the same problem that the old Germans had with

local stuff getting in there. I guess the French, when they're producing these lambics, the Belgians, they're basically just leaving their stuff out to be exposed to wild yeast that grows in the area. It's crazy. Spontaneous fermentation. And I've had, like I said, I'd tried lambic in the past, and I didn't know what made it so special.

That was it. I don't care for it a whole lot. It's kind of has a sour aftertaste. It's fruity. Sort of like cider, almost. Not enough hops. Oh, no, I like my hops. What's your favorite beer, actually?

I meant to ask you that. So I'm a pretty big fan of anything New Amsterdam puts out. They're great. Fat Tire is one of the all time best. Yeah, we have friends, fans at Brooklyn Brewery. Yeah, and New Amsterdam. Remember, they sent us a bunch of beer. They were the first ones.

They did. Thanks again, guys. Yeah, we have fans at Brooklyn Brewery. They sent us beach towels and other swag. They did. We had a fan who sent us some Schinerbach once, but I don't think he was related to them in any way. I think it was just from Texas.

Yeah, that's a Texas beer, right? My all time favorite, it's never been toppled. I've had plenty of beer where I'm like, this is really good, like, innocent gun. Have you ever had that? No. Oh, my god. It's like ambrosia.

It's the most amazing thing ever. But you can't just drink one after the other if you're in such a mood. It's just a lot. It's very rich. So my favorite beer that's just no one's ever toppled is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Yeah, I'm right there with you.

It's just the best beer I think that anyone's ever made. It's delicious and nutritious. It's refreshing. Yeah, I want to go to their brewery. I like the dogfish head stuff. But I'm into trying. We have these stores here in Atlanta now and Indicator where I live with all the myriad craft beers.

And I'll try any kind of Pale Ale or IPA. Have you been to Ale, yeah? I have. Is that place in again? Yeah, and they have the Growlers air, which is always kind of fun. You just get something on tap and drink it out of a jug like an old pirate. And I also have to say our local boys at Sweetwater

are killing it, too. Like, as far as Pale Ale's go, Sierra Nevada's and the 420 are very, very close. 420's good. I will always go for that if they don't have the Sierra on them. I agree. And I remember my first beer very distinctly. Do you?

Yeah, because as everyone listens to the show knows, I was a very good Baptist boy growing up. So I didn't drink or anything like that till I was older. And I remember the first time I tasted beer, I had only had soda as far as a carbonated beverage. And that's the only thing I could expect. And I just remember thinking, this is so weird tasting. It's like it's fizzy like a soda, but it doesn't taste

anything like a soda. And I was like, oh, how do people drink this stuff? Yeah. And then, like, 30 seconds later, you're trying it again. Like, oh, this is so bad. How do you drink this stuff? Why can't I stop? I want to stop.

Yeah. First beer, huh? I don't remember mine. Yeah, I remember it. There's a long gone. I think mine was, you were probably younger than I was. I don't remember. I mean, my dad drank, like, old Milwaukee tall boys.

And I'm sure, like, I tried, like, a sip of his when I was a kid or something. See, we didn't have beer in the house. So it was just running around. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so where are we, Chuckers? We could talk about some of the older beers in existence.

Yeah, so there's, like, actual old beer. It's, like, over 100 years old. Like, that particular bottle of beer was manufactured, like, 170, 80 years ago. Yeah. And there's two shipwrecks that had beer on them that, ironically, are competing for the oldest beer in the world.

And they both went down in 1825. Wow. I know, it's maddening. There's one in the Baltic Sea. There was a shipment of beer and champagne from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg that went down in 1825. And then there's a shipwreck in the English Channel in 1825. And a guy named Keith Thomas.

He was a microbiologist, I believe. He got his hands on some of the bottles of this beer that's still around and tried it. And he was like, he vomited. And he's like, maybe I can figure out some other way to do this. So he got the yeast from this beer and got a colony going of this yeast. Still living yeast.

Same yeast. It's not like a descendant of it. Like, this is the yeast. And he got it going again and found, like, an old porter recipe. And now he makes flag porter, which, in and of itself, is one of the better beers around. Oh, sure.

Oh, I also want to say, I like just about anything Sam Smith does, too. I don't know that. Sam Smith, like oatmeal stout and winter welcome. Yeah, yeah, Sammy Smith. Sorry, sure. They had the Shakespeare stout. Wasn't that Sammy Smith?

I don't know. That's rogue. Yeah, that's rogue. But I've had the oatmeal stout. That guy is awesome. I'm getting thirsty. Dogfish Head has revived a recipe that they claim is the, and that's what we were talking about earlier,

is the guy from Dogfish Head claims it's the oldest known fermented recipe in the history of man. And it was from a Neolithic burial site in China. And it is called, they brew it now. It's called Chateau Jiahou, J-I-H-U, from 7,000 BC. And they decoded it molecularly from clay pots, found at a Neolithic burial site. That's very cool.

And have brewed this stuff. And they're also the ones, they get a little crazy. You know, they did the Midas Touch Brew that was supposedly King Midas' recipe, or from his tomb. That's so cool. And we have people right in. But I love what they're doing over there at Dogfish Head. They also did the one based on the Himtina Kansi.

The what? The Himtina Kansi, the Spitamian one. Right. Sumerian one. Right. So there's also some brewers that have been around for a while. Like Stella Artois, if you look on the label, you'll see that it has some mention of 1366.

That's old, man. That's when it was, that's when they started brewing that. That's awesome. Delicious, too. Oh, yeah. I love a good Stella, like a nice summertime beer for me. Agreed. Augustiner began in 1328.

Probably the oldest beer in the world, as far as brewing the recipe, is winehenstaffen. Did I get it? Yeah, winehenstaffen. Oh, nice. So those are brewed by Benedictine monks. That beer has been brewed since the 700s. But the winehenstaffen, the guys brewing that

also operate the oldest continuously functioning brewery in the world, which opened its doors in 1040. Wow. And it's been going ever since. That's awesome. It's about to celebrate its 1,000th anniversary. That's so cool. What else?

A man named Arthur Guinness in 1756 did a very smart thing by signing a 9,000-year lease on a building in Dublin. And they have been making the old delicious Guinness beer there since then. And I enjoyed at our South by Southwest event at Fado Irish Pub. I enjoyed myself some Guinness at that event.

Love me some Guinness. Is Guinness sponsoring you now? No, none of these people are. But why are you wearing that leather A-ball jacket with Guinness patches all over it? The Schlitt story I thought was kind of interesting. Yeah, I searched the story up because I'd remembered hearing it years back.

And I was like, we got to mention that. So what was the deal? They were making good beer for a long time. We're one of the top three. And then they changed their recipe in the late 70s and just screwed it all up. They wanted to be number one. And they were number two, wanted to be number one.

So they decided that they were going to just change it. And they changed it in a really lazy, cost-efficient way. Instead of malt, they used corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup. That's such a bad idea. And then they didn't filter it as much either. So you had this really weird-tasting, chunky-style beer. And this was in the 70s.

By 1980, Schlitt's market share was 1%. It went from the number two selling beer in America to within just a couple years, 1% of the market. Yeah, I think more than one person lost their job on that move. Oh, yeah. They may have killed those people. So they discontinued the brand all together at one point,

didn't they? Yeah, it went under. And then Stroze, which I also remember from my childhood, was said, well, you know, we're going to buy you guys. So they bought Schlitt's, and then they just bought the label. They're like, we don't want that. You keep all this leftover chunky beer. But they bought the label and apparently rolled out

the classic 60s formula, which I have not tried. I have not either. We do want to shout out to Yingling as well. In 1829, David Yingling opened a brewery in Pennsylvania in Potsville. And it is still open today, the oldest operating brewery in the United States, still in the Yingling family. Boo-yah.

And their black and tan is very delicious to me. And it's a very popular beer. People seek it out. I think one of the reasons why is because it's tradition. Sure. And it's delicious. Yeah. And it has cute puppies in their labels

and marketing materials. Yeah, and I want to ask Budweiser. If you are the makers of Budweiser and you're listening, bring back the bullet bottles. And you'll thank me later. Do you know who makes Budweiser? Anheuser Bush, right? You know who owns Anheuser Bush?

Imbev, they're a European company. Oh, really? As something as American as Budweiser is owned by the Europeans now. Well, Anheuser isn't exactly American, you know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Neither was Bush. But yeah, the bullet bottles, do you remember those?

They were short, little stubby bottles. Oh, yeah, like Mickey's bottles. No, those were the barrels. Oh, OK. These were bullets. They were short and kind of went up and then just graduated up. And they were, I guarantee you, people would buy those. The classic Budweiser phallus bottle.

Well, Miller Highlife came back with their old school bottle. I haven't seen. Oh, yes, yes. I know exactly what you're talking about. You remember the old bullets? I totally do. Yeah. They were cute.

And I think if Budweiser brought those back, people would really jump on that because everyone likes that old school stuff. If you can look like you're in the 70s again. Yeah. Or 80s, 80s, 70s. Yeah. You can send your thanks by Chuck to Chuck, Anheuser-Busch,

when the money starts rolling in. Or just the case of the bullets. So this is kind of unusual. We don't usually throw out cool random facts at the end. But there's some cool ones. Yeah, go ahead. OK. I'm going to start with the London Brewery of 1814.

So there was a 100,000 gallon tank, fermenting tank, of ale in London at a brewery, and it exploded. And when it did, it killed eight people and destroyed a pub nearby. It actually killed nine people. The ninth guy died the next day because when these 100,000 gallons of ale flooded the streets, people started drinking it.

One guy drank so much that he died of alcohol poisoning. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Josh. Yes. According to statistics, the Czech Republic leads the world in beer consumption per capita. I have been there, and I can tell you, they love their beer.

It's cheaper than their water. I have been there, too, and it is delicious. Over 156 liters per year per person, that's for everyone. They don't say 21-year-old citizens. So that is 439 beers a year, 12 ounces. They're probably 16 ounces over there. Or are they 12? I don't know.

I don't know how they broke that down. So that is 18 cases of beer per person, about a case and a half a month. They do 500-centiliter, a half liter. I think it's like a tall boy can, a big can. Well, I think most of Europe is like that, because I remember being in London for the first time and thinking, man, all you guys have is tall boys,

and they're like, what's a tall boy? Right. Oh, wait, that was Australian. That wasn't either, actually. That was pretty close. Matt's in there laughing at my hackneyed attempts. Bass symbol? Yeah, the red triangle, famous.

It was registered as a trademark in 1876. It's the world's oldest trademark. Pretty cool. And the beer stein, have you been to Germany? Yeah. The beer gardens there, it's exactly what you think. You're going to get a 4 and 1 half foot tall German woman with forearms as big as your waist,

carrying like five of those big, huge mugs of beer in each hand. Yeah, that's crazy. And it was exactly what you want if you're going over to your beer garden. I was like, wow, I'm so glad it's like this. And my buddy, Brett, and I actually had a very fun night in Germany drinking with this old fat German dude that didn't speak any English.

And I spoke a little bit of German. But we all love the Beatles. And we drank with this dude for like three hours singing Beatles songs in both English and German. Very nice. And Carl, and I have a picture with this guy still. It was one of my great memories of traveling abroad. Well, tell him where the beer stein came from.

Oh, the beer stein comes from the bubonic plague. They're like, we need to put lids on these things so we don't get any disease in there. So they came up with the beer stein. Yeah, and what was it, too? The pottery was? They were advancements in ceramics at that time. I think the money fact is the bubonic plague

created beer steins. So that's it. But I didn't get steins in Germany. It was just a big mug. Gotcha. That's like, it looks like a half gallon of beer. I'm not sure how much it is. But it was good, dinkley stuff.

Nice, man. Matt, did we get anything wrong? He said we're pretty good. That's good enough. I'm sure there's some home brewers that will take us to task. But we did our best. Man, we want to hear about it. You have anything else right now?

I'm done. OK, so that's it for beer. You can type beer into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. Remember, as Chuck said at the beginning, don't go out and drink beer if you're not 21 in the United States. And drink responsibly. Yes.

Don't be a goon. Don't ever drink and drive. It's just dumb. Agreed, Chuck. Get a little older, and you realize that the commercials are all right. That's just a stupid thing to do. Yeah, agreed.

And so that's it for beer right now. I said search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, I think. So it's time for a listen and a minute. That's right, Josh. And you know the other reason why you get a little older and you say drink responsibly is because you do a lot of stupid stuff if you don't. Oh, man.

And you'll be the butt of many, many jokes. Even if no one gets hurt, you will act a fool and end up with toothpaste up your nose because you passed out at a party. That's what happens in your world when you drink too much? Yeah, you know. You've seen all the pictures. People put toothpaste up your nose.

You pass out at a party and people draw stuff on your face and take pictures of you and put it all over the internet. Plus you feel cruddy the next morning. Yeah, exactly. See our Hangover's podcast for that. All right, I'm going to call this a pretty cool, interesting email from an attorney about dueling.

Guys, I just got done listening to your podcast on duels. I thought you might like to know that I, and I am sure many of your fans, enjoy the podcast with a twinge of sadness because, alas, I cannot duel. Why? You ask. I'm an attorney, and one of the states in which I am

licensed is Kentucky. And when an attorney in Kentucky is sworn in, he or she swears an oath, when I was sworn in, the Commonwealth of Kentucky contained this additional tidbit. In order to practice in the Commonwealth, I had to swear that I would not participate in any duels. She still has to say this. Isn't that crazy?

That's pretty cool. What's more, as I listened to the podcast, I realized that I had been preparing to duel my whole life. During college, I worked as a serving wench at medieval times, watching jowst each night and twice on Saturdays. My senior year of college, in order to fulfill my P.E. requirement, I took fencing, which was actually really interesting and more athletic than I expected.

So sadly, no matter how much experience we may have, either I, nor my fellow members of the Kentucky Bar, come stuff you should know fans, can use the information we clean from your podcast. There was talk in the last few years of removing that particular clause from the oath. But as far as I know, newly minted Kentucky attorneys are still required to abstain from dueling.

Isn't that nuts? That just seems logical. I think we should add that to just about anything. When you go get your driver's license, you have to check a box that says I won't duel. Or in your marriage vows. Yeah. There's just a lot of places where we could insert that.

And that is from Rebecca Wright in Sinsitucky, Ohio. Really, that's what she signed it is? No. She signed it Cincinnati, but I like to say Sinsitucky. Yeah. Well, let's see. Oh, if you're a home brewer, we want to hear from you. And by hear from you, we mean send us some of your

wares. Chuck said that, not me. But he's right. So we want to hear from you via Twitter at Sysk podcast. We want to hear from you on Facebook at Facebook.com, and we want to get emails from you. And you can send those to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our

friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here

to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.