Drink? Good idea.
See you at the pub!

Singin' the Brews
A powerful liquid to lift all known steins
© Dave Preston

Okay, I know lederhosen becomes you and slapping those ample red thighs keeps the accordion player in synch, but pull up a barrel and take a breather. It's October and we're going to talk about beer.

And since you're turning the fall clock back we'll begin by domesticating grain, so we can make bread, 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Now, when stored grain gets wet it begins to germinate, then if it dries again it becomes malt. Simply add rain then airborne yeast and before you can say "Dammit the grain store's leaking" you've got a fermented malt beverage. So if the good lord had meant us to drink pure spring water, He wouldn't have given us beer. (In His infinite wisdom He performed the same trick with fruit, but called it wine.)

If you turn to your 18th century BC centrefold of Ninkasi, the Asian goddess of brewing, you'll see her school song which describes how she made beer by mixing Sumerian bread with "aromatics" and letting it ferment in a big vat. Her beer was no doubt an acquired taste and was best drunk quickly, for two reasons. First, it probably tasted like the oil that later came out of her ground, which came to be known as Iraq, and secondly, she didn't know about hops.

Hops are green things that grow in temperate climates on tall bines, having flowers that contain resins and oils which smell and taste wonderful (okay, I'm biased) and act as a natural preservative. They first made an appearance in beer, we think, around 820 AD.

From there it seems that beer went from strength to strength, quenching thirsts and refreshing parts no other beverage had hitherto reached. The Mayflower docked early, and far north of its planned destination, because it ran out of beer. A passenger wrote, in December 1620: "We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer." I'll remind you that Puritans of this era strictly regulated the drinking of beer, allowing only two quarts of it for breakfast.

In 1777 Joseph Priestly "discovered" carbon dioxide because of it and James Watt based his first commercial steam engine on a brewer's kettle he'd seen.

The middle of last century saw immigrants such as Eberhard Anheuser, Adolph Coors, Theodore Hamm, Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, Bernard Stroh, and Henry Weinhard, coming to North America, bringing with them brewing skills and lager recipes. Unfortunately, their once-proud names and reputations in the brewing industry have been spoiled by corporate successors who fell prey to the economies of scale, and cut corners on ingredients. Most of them now sell image instead of beer.

However, in 1850 a lad of their ilk, William Steinberger, established the Victoria Brewery on the east side of Swan Lake, in Saanich. This was the first commercial brewery west of the Great Lakes and survived, in one form or another, until 1981.

So, we here on Vancouver Island have a beer history envied by the likes of cities with bigger breweries and stadiums. We also had a major hop-growing industry on Saanich Peninsula which supplied breweries up and down the west coast during thirsty days of goldrush fever. Apart from archival photos and the odd wild hop bine, alas, little remains. But we are, once again, a proud, coaster-sized mark on the national beer map; The Great Canadian Beer Festival is based in Victoria, and is about as likely to move as a Yorkshireman living next door to a brewery.

Each November the Victoria Conference Centre rings to the happy sound of several thousand glasses clinking a collective toast to the brewer's art. This year over 35 craft breweries from four provinces and four states will be represented, offering around 105 beers including raspberry ales, Mudshark Porter, Honey Pilsner, Rattlesnake ESB and Espresso Ale (yes, it's got real coffee in it, and no, it's not franchised). Although the two-day event is strictly non-smoking, the sipping of rauchbier is allowed. This is a strong-flavoured beer made from smoked peat malt, the same used for making whisky.

If you're looking for a cold pitcher of Kokanee, move along. This is real beer made by real people who care about quality, and they stand right behind the counter ready to tell you just how much they care, where they got the hops from and why they named the stout after a family pet. Samples are sold in four-ounce servings for $1 each and comparative gossip is encouraged. Imagine a wine tasting without the snobbery, price tag, or spitting, and you'll get the idea.

There'll even be a seminar there on how to judge beer, but if you slip behind this bracket I'll spare you the wait. (Hold up your glass and enjoy the colour, watch the tiny bubbles spiral their way to the top - the slower they rise the more body the beer has. Look at the head on top of the beer, which some prefer to be deep and uneven, made up of tiny bubbles. Next, take a good sniff and appreciate the blend of hops and malt in the aroma. Take a good mouthful and move it all around your mouth to experience the flavour and feel the body with your tongue. Then, swallow and wait for the finish or aftertaste. Finally, talk to someone about what you have just seen, smelled, tasted, and felt. If you like it, it's a good beer - congratulate the brewer. If you don't, move on and look for one that suits you.) There, wasn't that easy, and just think how much fun it could be with 6,000 friends.

All this, just because 10,000 years ago someone let the grain get wet. Okay, see you at the festival. Wear the lederhosen if you must, but leave the accordion.


The Mustache of Human Kindness
© Dave Preston

It's that time of year, folks. Underwear's nearly as long as the dark night stretching before us and there's time to sing about that white stuff we love so much. Milk.

When I was a young farming lad we had a friendly Ayreshire cow named Daisy, whose breath was as sweet as creme caramel and who gave rich, thick milk that stuck to my cornflakes and coated my glass. I could milk Daisy by hand, any time, any place, and I'd often impress urban cousins by drawing a fresh drink from her udder as she grazed quietly in the back meadow. Those who weren't impressed were shot in the eye by a warm stream of milk as her teat doubled as a farm boy's water pistol.

Milk was a valuable commodity and the lifeblood of the farm kitchen. The government gave us each a seven-ounce bottle to drink in school every day as we listened to a teacher talk about essential food groups without ever mentioning fat or cholesterol.

It took us a while to figure out just how good, or bad, milk can be for us. Infant formula was first tried 3000 years ago and became fashionable with European royalty during the past 500 years. But by 1700, someone noticed that feeding babies animal milk, rather than human breastmilk, brought nearly a 90% mortality rate. By 1950, scientists thought they could duplicate and even improve on breast milk. Unfortunately, they didn't know about the special fatty acids EPA and GLA required for brain development, the amino acid taurine for brain and sight, acquired immunity factors, nutrients that nurture the intestinal lining and pancreatic cells and much more. Fortunately, mom knew.

Times change and so does the white stuff. It's still loaded with healthy goodies like calcium, vitamin D, protein, phosphorus, potassium, riboflavin, vitamin B-12, niacin, vitamin A... and it's highly recommended for most bods. But it's not everyone's cup of tea, milk in first.

The protein casein can thicken mucus and make breathing difficult for cold or asthma victims, and lots of people have "milk allergies." This is often lactose intolerance which means they don't have enough lactase enzyme to digest lactose, a disaccharide composed of glucose and galactose.

Of course, it's no longer just plain milk. Pull into the milk bar today and the range of super, natural, lead-free pumps and their various octanes will mystify you.

See, Canada's 1,279,000 cows produce milk that's aggressively sold through a very complicated system involving two layers of government and several marketing boards. There are two markets: the fluid market of table milk and fresh cream, and the industrial market for manufactured dairy products. There are four major types of fluid milk: homogenized (3.25% butterfat), partly skimmed (2%), 1%, and skim milk (which has less than 0.5% butterfat). Butterfat contents range from 10 percent for coffee cream, to an artery-stopping 35 percent for whipping cream. And sales of all but skim milk have dropped over the last ten years, because we don't like what butterfat can do to us.

Our neighbours to the south just past federal law two weeks ago to remove the 23-year old label "low-fat" from 2% milk. Only 1% can sport that sexy tag now, while skim milk can boast itself to be "fat-free" even though we just read above that it may contain .5% fat.

Although the number of cows has dropped over the years, milk production has risen. Daisy's been down on the health farm, developing buns, and an udder, of steel. Bruce Cockburn once lyrically called her a "methane dispenser" but if you had to chew through almost 50 pounds of dry food during 14 meals every day, you might have a gas problem, too. The raw materials for milk production are transported via the bloodstream to secretory cells in Daisy's udder. It takes 400-800 litres of blood to deliver the goods for 1 litre of milk. And you thought she just stood there all day, staring.

Then there's BST, not the Breast & Services Tax but bovine somatotropin. This is something clever people with too much time and not enough cows came up with to increase milk production. When Daisy gets an injection of BST she thinks it's her own somatropin, a hormone that stimulates her internal milk factory. Next thing she knows there's a 10-15% liquid bonus in the milk pail. About 90% of BST is destroyed during pasteurization and scientists say they're unable to detect a difference between milk from BST-treated cows and from untreated cows. Of course, these same detectives took 10,000 years to spot the real difference between mom's milk and Daisy's.

Milk's getting the hard sell these days. Celebrities wear white mustaches on glossy pages and there's a fancy website, whymilk.com, which has an incredibly stupid "Milk Mystic" to answer all your questions about milk. Hah! Sadly, it knows more about the stars who parade with white lips than it does about the source and composition of milk. Like a dumb, ill-briefed politician it avoids giving a straight answer. Try it if you want the cold, white taste of frustration. It's a campaign they've spent millions on, with about .50 of it going towards research.

And if you want to know where milk comes from, ask my dictionary. The word's from the Latin mulgere to milk a cow and the Sanskrit mrij, to wipe, rub, or stroke. When Daisy gets her udder licked by the calf, or washed with a warm, wet cloth by the dairy farmer, she releases a hormone called oxytoxin. This stimulates muscles which to create a pressure in the udder known as letdown reflex, and stored milk components are released into the duct system. Certain sounds can also trigger lactation, as any new mother, (who hears someone else's baby crying while hers is at home), will tell you.

But look, there's more white stuff, falling down in tiny flakes. I've got dandruff! Wonder if a milk shampoo would help...