By Kathleen Parrish Of The Morning Call
Germansville pair honors the Pilgrims by brewing their own suds every year.
Some
folks toast Thanksgiving with a juicy turkey, green bean casserole
and clouds of creamy mashed potatoes.
Roger
Latzgo and Rachel Roland pay homage to the Pilgrims a different way.
They
make beer.
''It's an American tradition,'' says Latzgo,
stirring a simmering pot of home-brew atop a wood stove in the
kitchen of the couple's Germansville home. ''We talk about a lot of
things, but not [the Pilgrims'] drinking habits.''
Beer, you
say? What's that have to do with the early settlers?
Plenty.
If not for beer, we might not be here. OK, we'd be here, but
cranberries, the flowerings of a hardy northern climate, surely
wouldn't be on the Thursday's menu. Boiled peanuts, perhaps.
The
Pilgrims dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock not because they thought it
was a good place to build a life — they were aiming for a more
southern locale — but because they ran out of suds.
Here's
what William Bradford had to say about the trip: ''We could not take
much time for further search, our victuals being much spent,
especially beer,'' he wrote in the ''History of Plimouth
Plantation.''
In the 1600s, they didn't quaff mugs of frothy
golden beer for fun. They drank it to stay alive.
''Nothing
else was safe,'' says Lew Bryson, author of ''Pennsylvania
Breweries.''
''Milk was good for four hours. No one drank
fruit juices, and the water they collected from rivers was green and
full of wiggly things.''
The Colonists didn't know about germs
or sterilization, but they knew that drinking water could be
deadly.
''No one dies from drinking beer,'' Bryson says. ''It
can make you nauseous if you drink too much, but it can't kill
you.''
That's because to make beer you have to boil the
ingredients, beer historian Richard Wagner of Hatboro, Montgomery
County, says.
''By leaching ingredients out of malt, you're
making a nutritious beverage'' full of vitamins and minerals, he
says. Women were usually the ones who made the beer, and they'd
ferment it in a keg or crock for a few days before deeming it ready
for consumption. It was considered a domestic craft, as important as
cooking, sewing and tending a garden.
Children imbibed, too,
but the alcoholic content of the brew was about 2 percent, compared
with 6 to 8 percent today. ''You'd have to drink gallons before you
got a buzz,'' Bryson says.
But a buzz was never the point. Not
at first, anyway.
''It was a staple,'' Wagner says. ''They
drank it for breakfast.''
Each Thanksgiving, Latzgo and Roland
fire up the wood stove early in preparation for the day's brewing.
Latzgo, who's been making beer since his college days at Rutgers
University, uses a stainless steel pot to boil the water before
adding powdered malt.
After 30 minutes or so, he crumbles
hops, a flower grown in the couple's garden, into the roiling tub.
'In
olden days, everyone grew hops in their garden, and they stuffed
pillows with them because they help you go to sleep,'' he says of the
slumber-inducing plant.
Hours later, the couple pours the
brew, a malted barley soup called wort, into a yellow bucket to
ferment, a process that involves yeast and sugar.
''We
don't even go to my mom's for dessert because when you're making
beer, you have to be vigilant,'' says Roland, who works in the
communications department at Air Products & Chemicals Inc.
The
product will be ready to drink in five to six weeks.
Latzgo, a
professional musician, comes from a long line of brewers. His
grandfather made beer and distilled hard cider in the 1920s during
Prohibition.
''The only time anyone ever saw my grandfather
cry was when he dropped a vat of apple jack,'' quips Latzgo, who got
his start making beer in college. ''It was a great freshman chemistry
project.''
He opens his brew log, a faded notebook containing
recipes and observations from every batch beginning in 1976.
''Cost
was lower for this particular batch because of a bargain price on
malt,'' his first entry read.
On Nov. 27, 2003, he wrote,
''Good, zingy bitter feel to this beer.'' Of a batch two years later,
he inked, ''Keep civilization alive,'' an adage in line with Benjamin
Franklin's own beliefs about the holistic properties of beer.
''Beer
is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,''
Franklin wrote in his famous almanac.
The Colonists would have
used spruce tips, pumpkin, persimmons or molasses to yield sugar for
beer making, Wagner says.
Later, the Indians, who were also
beer drinkers, showed the Pilgrims how to use corn in the brewing
process.
''This is part of our mystique about the Pilgrims,''
Wagner says. ''You have the image of these people huddled together
and starving. You forget that they were coming from an advanced
culture in Europe.''
Does that mean the Pilgrims washed down
their meal with beer at the first Thanksgiving?
Absolutely,
according to Wagner. ''If there were Indians, there was beer.''
Good
to know. On Thursday, lift your glass to the Pilgrims and toast our
country's affinity for a cold one.
Now, what could be more
American than that?
For Latzgo's beer recipe go to
www.rogerlatzgo.com
kathleen.parrish@mcall.com
610-820-6627