More books showed up this week. See, as Craig has recently described, Beverwijck - or what is now Albany - was founded in the 1620s. In emails back and forth, we've been discussing and testing ideas around the meaning of brewing and the community in the 1600s and the 1800s. We have sorta skipped the bit in the middle for now. Which has led me to do a bunch of reading about the state of affairs affecting life where the Hudson and Mohawk rivers meet at the founding of the New Netherlands, just right of the buck on the map.
♦ In the early 1600s, Spain controls the Mississippi and France the St.Lawrence. The Dutch needed their own route into the interior of North America and there are not a lot out there. The English are not at this point nearly as successful in North American compared to the other European powers, challenged by the establishment and Puritan factions leading up to the Civil War. They were reaching down from Hudson Bay and making beachhead in places like Boston and Virginia. But English colonies were expressions of religious dissent as much as anything.
♦ The Netherlands had recently broke with its Spanish overlords and is entering a century of power based on global trade, naval power and liberty - relatively speaking. They sit on the north-south border of the beer-wine line as well as the Catholic-Protestant divide. They control the Baltic shipping trade and are extending their reach from Indonesia to the Caribbean. Their empire will last until the mid-1900s.
♦ The purpose of the Dutch colony on the upper Hudson River was not initially clear or, at least, singular as there was a tension between being a pelts and fur based enterprise or a self-sustaining agricultural colony. There was also the exploration of what was out there to explore and what there was out there to sell others. The opportunities around farming the Albany area may not have initially been obvious to the colonizers who were looking for furs to offset the dwindling Russian one.
The question in my mind now is whether all this trade got triangular. Have a look at this handy interactive map to see how the later pre-Revolutionary British colonial trade worked. People shipped stuff - including people - to other people to make a massive enterprise of the whole of the ocean shoreline. What is interesting is both how those triangular trade routes had a long history and also how that trade always seems to relate to booze. Clearly Caribbean sugar leads to British navy rum. Beer is sailed to Maryland in the 1630s. And in the 1670s, the English were bringing in malt for brewing into the Arctic as part of Hudson Bay Company operations. And earlier than that - definitely in the early 1600s and maybe even in the late 1500s - the masterless men of Newfoundland and their Bristol backers were shipping salt cod to Iberia, picking up wine and other goods and taking them back to England to be loaded again with supplies for Newfoundland including beer as well as malt.
So, if Albany has, as Craig establishes, a brewing capacity in the mid-1600s that is greater than local needs just as it did in the 1800s when they even sent beer to Newfoundland, is there any chance that those brewers were also part of a triangular trade in which the beer was sent to wherever Dutchmen with their beer based culture were imposing economic imperialism. If they are shipping everything else everywhere, why wouldn't their ship beer to where they lived but could not brew?
Comments
Gary Gillman - November 11, 2012 9:36 AM
Albany was in my mind too Alan, back in the 1980's when Bill and Marie Newman ran a pioneer craft ale brewery, William S. Newman Brewing Company. Bill had worked for the State government, I think as a budgetary analyst, before going into this venture, and made a number of tasty ales in an old industrial district not far from downtown.
Later in the 80's when I first went to England, my first taste of real ale there brought back, not the filtered, chilled west coast micro beers, but Bill's beers, he really nailed the style.
He used to hold brewing seminars on weekends to earn extra money and I attended one, which assisted my later extensive reading on the subject.
There was a bar next to the brewery which sold the beers, not owned by the brewery. It must have been an old working man's resort, a survival of the time when the area was replete with factories and employment.
The brewery later closed but Albany Amber, a bottled version, was sold for some years, made under contract in Utica I believe.
Bill and Marie were pioneers in U.S. craft brewing and as Michael Jackson wrote, ahead of their time. They may still live in the area, I don't know.
There were a couple of beverage discount stores (maybe still are) in the city, and the range of imports even then was very good. I used to buy Murphy stout in bottles which had a marked roasty/burned wood-taste, beers from Alsace (La Belle Strasbourgeoise), Germany (Dinkelacker - drink the Dink went the slogan), the spritzy Wurzburger, and many still available today. I remember that Merchant du Vin, the pioneering U.S. beer import specialists, had a display at one of them and so you could get gueuze, kriek, Trappist, oatmeal stout, porter, and other styles now mainstays of the international beer scene.
Jack's Oyster House was a favoured dinner place downtown, it is still there, and cherrystone clams and a Michelob were a pretty good combo let me tell you.
Finally, there was a corner bar and restaurant further uptown we liked, I think it was MacGregor's. The name in any case was the name of a nearby street - probably it had moved years earlier - so we always had a problem finding it the next time, which was part of the fun. It had a mix of regional lagers, national ones and the emerging micros. They made bloody marys with horseradish floating in it, first time I had seen that. It was in a leafy residential area.
There was a quietude around the downtown and river which suggested a much more active place generations earlier. The Egg was there, which gave it a hopeful modernity, but overall I had the sense of an old place which had seen a lot of changes.
I always liked it there and would like to go back some day.
Gary
Alan - November 11, 2012 10:30 AM
Here is more on Newman from a 2007 Beerjanglin' blog post.
Alan - November 11, 2012 10:41 AM
And that post links back to my cut and paste archive of the 1987 article "A Glass of Handmade" which contains this reference:
"...an authentic traditional brew was available in Albany, New York, a city once notable for its ales..."
Neato.
Gary Gillman - November 11, 2012 11:06 AM
That's very interesting Alan, thanks. I remember the cubes well. It's true that they had to be consumed quickly, there was relatively little CO2 in them to start with. I didn't know about Saratoga Lager, it sounds like a good idea.
I didn't know Jim Koch had worked there either.
Bill Newman did know by the way about Albany's former renown as an ale brewing city. He was well aware of it and wanted in his own way to revive the tradition. But it was not an easy thing to promote at the time..
Thanks much again for finding this.
Gary
ethan - November 14, 2012 1:28 AM
Well! You have outdone yourself yet again...