Historic Homebrew: Perry's 1934 X Ale - A Satisfactory Unsatisfactory Brew...

Back at the start of this year - which seems a lifetime ago given recent and ongoing events - I took a trip a few kilometres north to view a rare batch of brewing records from a defunct Irish brewery - Robert Perry & Son of Rathdowney in Laois. The records are held in the local studies department of the Portlaoise library and are viewable by appointment only, so after a couple of exchanged emails I presented myself at their door and was ushered in to a book-packed room and a table full of cardboard boxes. The total of what I've found there must wait for another longer piece of writing and will entail some return visits, as I only rifled through some of the boxes held there and each contains a wealth of information. Although some of it relates to the non-brewing part of the business such as financial correspondence, leases and other topics, it will require time and dedication to sort through it all in detail - and it may require a wiser and more patient mind than mine!

The idea of brewing a Perry's beer has always appealed to me, indeed a couple of years back I brewed a double stout from these records thanks to a recipe published in Ron Pattinson's 'Let's Brew!' book. So, as my information-greedy eyes scanned over the recipes in the brewing books in the collection I decided it might be time to brew a little more from their records. Perry's are relatively well known in brewing history circles in Ireland but they deserve even more attention, especially for the range of beers they produced. Their line-up over the years included Special Stout, XX Stout, X Ale, XX Ale, Porter, 'ND' Pale Ale, Pale Ale, Pale Dinner Ale, XXXX Strong Ale, Vintage Ale, IPA and probably more, including brewing the famous Phoenix ale at one stage towards the end of the brewery's life in the sixties when it was part of a bigger conglomerate.

At this point it is well worth mentioning that I am not a great brewer and currently brew on an old Brew-in-a-Bag system, which is just about adequate as a kit. Regardless, I decided to plough on with my attempts to recreate a historical brew, so after copying various recipes from the books into PDFs I sent some off to Edd Mather and Ron Pattinson who both specialise in this sort of thing. I was particularly interested in an early X ale or Mild, as this is a style I like and one that was a little rare in Ireland - although more common than many had thought, which you will be aware of if you have read some of my other posts.

One from 1934 caught my eye...

Edd put a recipe up on his blog and Ron duly obliged me by sending back a relatively simple homebrew version that I could adapt for my kit.

And so, off I went and brewed an Irish Mild which ended up an amalgam of both recipes...

It should be noted that if you look closely at the entry for the beer in the image from the brewery book above you will see that it says 'Unsatisfactory brew. Ale very dull when racked.' but undeterred I pressed on with the experiment. I took a few liberties with the recipe, such as using Crisp's Chevallier Malt, which was probably not what Perry's would have used, and also by fermenting with a dried English ale yeast, but I tried as much as possible to stick to the recipe as far as percentages and timings were concerned. The alcohol content wasn't quite right but ended up at an acceptable - to me - 3.5% with 30 IBUs according to the software I used. I racked it into proper pint bottles, which it wasn't put into at the time I'd imagine(?), and left it to condition.

So how did it taste? Well very pleasant if I do say so myself! The above photo in a 1939 pint glass (the closest I had to the brewing year) was taken when it wasn't completely conditioned but it has since dropped clear in the bottles and is a wonderful golden colour. It's mostly biscuit - Rich Tea with Malted Milk and a dash of Ginger Nut with a pleasantly odd, light floral bitterness. At the time of writing the carbonation is nearly there, I think it needs another week or two, although the head retention is quite poor.

Certainly far from 'Unsatisfactory'!

Is it the same as the original brew? I'm pretty sure it isn't but that's not the point, the point is that I rebrewed it, drank it, and posted here and elsewhere about it.

As I've said before, we need to remember that once upon a time, and not too long ago, Ireland brewed more than just stouts and red ales...

Liam

With thanks to Edd, Ron and the nice people in the local studies department of Portlaoise library.

(I might add that any errors and mistakes are mine and nothing to do with the recipes.)

[All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and can not be reproduced elsewhere without full credit to its source and a link back to this post.]

'Operation Frothy' - The Beer That Wouldn't Die...

The village of Gambell sits right on the northern most tip of the St. Lawrence Island in the remote north west of the American continent, closer to Siberia at just 70 km away than to the Alaskan mainland coast. Gambell is officially classed as a city but a quick glance at any online mapping site shows a small town of low wooden house arranged in a grid like formation, with a few municipal building and a hotel on its fringes. Its population in 2010 was just 681 practically all of which are the indigenous Yupik Eskimo people¹.

On the face of it this would not seem to be a place where one might find anything remotely interesting beer-wise, but back in 1959 it had a problem that even made it into an Irish national papers, as the story crossed over a continent and across to this side of the Atlantic.

During World War II the U.S. Air Force operated an Aircraft Control and Warning Station in Gambell, which meant providing for the considerable number of personnel that were stationed around the area. Even after the that war ended the US military maintained a presence in Gambell as The Cold War started to escalate, given its geographical closeness to the perceived enemy no doubt - a cold place to monitor an equally frosty war from indeed. When the army eventually left that area of the island in 1956 or 1957 the literally covered up any sign of their presence (including plenty of ecological nightmares) and moved to the other side of the island², and this is where my interest was prodded...

As amongst the other things they buried were 7,000 cases of canned beer.

If this strikes you as odd on a number of levels I'm not surprised, as it certainly peaked my interest when I read the following article in a newspaper from August early 1959³.

 Beer that would not lose it's "head" 

US. troops were being flown into a tiny island 50 miles off Russia's eastern coastline this week-end for their third assault on the beer that would not lose its "head." In official terms the mission to St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea is to destroy the remains of 7,000 cases of canned beer abandoned there when American forces moved out in 1957 

For the beer - condemned by medical officers as unfit and stacked in earth-covered pits - proved too great a temptation for local "inebriates," according to Senator E. L. Bartlett (Democrat. Alaska). 

The islanders went to work on the "beer pits" with picks and shovels. and "much vandalism" occurred, the Senator said. 

Now the local Council of Gambell village has mounted a 24-hour watch over the beer until the soldiers arrive. Nothing short of an all-out operation will destroy the beer the islanders say. 

And if army experience is anything to go by they are right. When the beer was dumped in 1957 it was covered in oil and petrol and burned and finally buried. 

It survived and a battalion the National Guard landed on the island and mangled the cans with a bulldozer for 24 hours and set them on fire once more.

This time a secret method is to be used to rid the island of the beer. and an officer of field rank will certify complete destruction the Senator said.

Ignoring the obvious typo in the headline - as I'm not one to talk - this was an intriguing article which raised a number of questions, not least of which were; Why so much beer? What was wrong with it? What exact beer was it? And what Happened next?

I decided that some research was required and although I haven't got to the bottom of all those questions I  did manage to find a little bit more about the story, including an interesting twist at the end so stick with me.

First I found an article from an American newspaper published the day before the one I referenced above that filled in a little more information⁴. Under the headline 'Trouble Brewed - Platoon is Ordered to go on a Beer Bust' we get a different amount of 7,000 cans quoted, which although a considerable amount is a lot less than 7,000 cases regardless of the case quantity - 24? This article also expands on the vandalism cause by the 'natives' [sic] and states that 'village council' send a letter to the local senator reaffirming that the beer mining has...

"...constituted a growing and serious menace to the health, peace and welfare of our community"

Fair enough.

Going back a little farther I found a mention on the 27th of July in a South Carolina newspaper⁵. under the headline 'Eskimos Have Beer Problem', stating as per my first article that it was 7,000 cases not the above 7,000 cans. The writer goes on to quote a junior senator named Gruening from Alaska who says that such a huge amount of beer would...

"... have constituted a lifetime supply and it would have required a very hearty group of men, indeed, to cope with it even over the period of the next 25 years."

He also states that the 'better element among the local Gambell Eskimos' had tried to destroy the beer themselves but lacked the manpower and equipment and then goes on to ascertain that there were probably about 70 personnel stationed on the island and it must have 'been a wrench' to leave behind 100 cases or 2,400 cans of beer each.

The writer signs off with the line:

'...Senator Gruening refuses to get me passage to Gambell Island [sic]. It seems like an interesting place to spend the summer.' 

Thankfully someone snapped off at least one picture of the operation and it appeared in Life magazine in August 1959⁶. Here again it mentions 7,000 cases not cans so I think we are getting closer to the true figure - perhaps - and this time the stash was destroyed with TNT and the task took 2 weeks to complete, or so it reports. Interesting that one of the cans here has been clearly opened for consumption. I wonder did one of those pictured here feel the need to try one? Just to be sure that it was undrinkable of course...

Then, on September the 17th a Liverpool paper⁷ ran this story under the headline 'Troops Go Into Action With Tin Openers' 

A detachment of U.S. Army engineers armed with tin openers has just completed a melancholy mission on remote St. Lawrence Island off Alaska. 

The mission dubbed "Operation Frothy"—was to destroy a cache of beer burled by the U.S. Army when it left the island two years ago. 

Village elders complained that thirsty residents were digging up the beer in large enough quantities to constitute a menace to the community. They asked the army to come back to destroy the brew. 

The Alaskan Army Command reported that 19 enlisted men and two officers were flown the Island. They bulldozed a hole "one and a half times larger than an ordinary football field" to uncover the cache, which contained soft drinks and chocolate milk In addition to 2,000 tins of beer. 

"All of these were destroyed by opening the cans and pouring the contents upon the ground," the army reported. 

The army dispatch said: "It is impossible to say that 100 per cent. of this beer has been destroyed" but it added that any remaining would be "of such small quantity that It no longer represents a threat to the health or discipline of the community."

So 'Operation Frothy" involved 21 soldiers and now the opened beer cans in the picture possibly make sense, and given the size of the hole they excavated to get at the cache I think they might be underestimating the the number of beers - 2,000 - that they mention here, but when we read another version of the story in an Indianapolis newspaper⁸ it has two additional remarks, which throws more light on the numbers, plus it gives the exact dates of the operation.

[The] company which conducted the operation from Aug. 3 to Aug. 22 failed to locate the 7,000 cases of beer. All they could find were 1,500 to 2,000 cans of beer...

and most importantly

"Questioning of the members of the village failed to disclose the location of any other burial sites within the area."

So it appears that most of the cases of cans had 'disappeared' in the couple of years since the army had last tried to destroy them, and the huge hole they dug was a way of trying to find the rest of the cache. But it certainly sounds like some of those in the village didn't want to give up on their stash...


But what beer was it?

In Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist(1993)⁹ the author D. B. S. Maxwell states that during WWII at least 18,000,000 cans were produced for overseas consumption, so although our stash is later than that period it does show us just how much beer the US army bought and goes some way to explaining our stockpile of 7,000 cases. He also states that 40 different breweries produces these beers during the war and even if we reduce that dramatically post war it still probably leaves a good few possible contenders, perhaps the stash was from multiple breweries given the volume, which would make sense. Interestingly he confirms what we would imagine, that these cans were camouflaged or plain, 'olive-drab' or grey in colour and had a matt finish so as to be non reflective, with the actual brand name in black, and although I'm not sure if it's safe to assume the same packaging was used in the late fifties one would think it would be the case. The cans were flat topped and opened using a punch called a church key, which left the two holes we can see in the photograph of the operation.

If I was to hazard a guess - and that is all it is - I'd suggest it may have been Schlitz lager or maybe Blatz, as both seem to have had a connection with supply for the Korean War, it's just a pity the above photo from Life isn't a little clearer...

As to what exactly was wrong with the beer, I haven't found any other comments other than the earlier mention that it was 'condemned by medical officers as unfit' to drink, perhaps the cans had started to rust and disintegrate due to poor storage originally, or other similar issues...



But that's not the end of the story...

Just when I was beginning to think that I had exhausted my search I came across a Blog post by Bruce Bond¹⁰, and it seems that some of this tale has been partially told before and he relates in that post a discussion he had with a person called Dennis Corrington in Skagway, Alaska. Bruce told him the story of the destruction of the beer and then Dennis in turn tells him a story...

In the 1960s Dennis had been hunting on St. Lawrence with a friend, one of the indigenous people, and was asked if he'd like a beer. Dennis acquiesced and was then led down a tunnel into a beer mine, where they both enjoyed on of those long buried beers!


So, that's just about as much as I can find out, but I can't help think there is a movie that could be written around the story. Are there any screen writers out there?

I also wonder if perhaps those beers are still there now, kept safe and sound by the cold of the tundra landscape...

It is of course highly unlikely but who knows? Perhaps finding these beer mines are a right of passage, in tales passed on through the generations of local people?

After all, it seems like Operation Frosty was an abject failure...

Liam

(All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and can not be reproduced elsewhere without full credit to its source and a link back to this post.)

¹ Wikipedia - Gambell

² North East Cape and Gambell, Formerly Used Defence Sites

³  The Sunday Independent - 2nd August 1959 via The BNA

⁴  The Spokane Daily Chronicle - 1st August 1959 via Google Newspapers

⁵  The Greenville News - 27th July 1959 via Newspapers

⁶  Life Magazine - 31st August 1959 via Google Books

⁷  Liverpool Echo - Thursday 17 September 1959 via The BNA

⁸  The Indianapolis Star - 13th September 1959 via Newpapers

⁹  Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist(1993) D. B. S. Maxwell

¹⁰  Bruce Bond via Wordpress Blog