This week, my parents and I have been brewing the traditional Christmas ale. It is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season, because it is the continuation of old, traditional knowledge passed down and adapted through the generations, and because the end result tastes great. In Norway, brewing ale for Christmas goes back to at least the twelfth century, and might have its origin in pre-Christian practices. The ale that we brew nowadays, however, has little in common with the medieval product, and although the practice itself is old, the methods, the equipment, and the ingredients that we use now are very different from what we should expect to find in medieval ale. In other words, although I appreciate that this annual tradition maintains a link with previous generations, I cherish our ale for what it is now, not as a replica of a medieval product.
The brewing of beer takes place over several days. This year, we started on a Tuesday when I went gathering juniper twigs higher up in the valley where my ancestral farm is located. The juniper is the main flavouring agent, and this year I was fortunate to find green and fresh twigs with a lot of berries on them. These berries enhance the flavour, and are always sought-after when brewing. That same evening, my father began to boil the fifteen litres of water that we needed for this year's batch. The next day, I went to the farm and helped my parents mix the various ingredients together, making sure to add the yeast at exactly 32 degrees centigrade, and to pour the liquid of boiled juniper twigs through a sufficiently thick cloth that we might filter out the needles and other debris.
Each year, we do things slightly differently than the year before - usually not by design, but because there are enough variables that we might change things up without being aware of it. For instance, I do not remember whether we poured the sugar in before the malt extract last year, like we did this year. These differences do not impact the ale in any noticeable manner, so we do not keep too strict a watch over the minor movements of the process.
However, this year we did one thing differently, and that was my father starting the boiling of the water the day before the mixed the ingredients, so that it would cool down in time. Normally, the water would be boiled earlier the same day. The reason why he did things differently this year, was a stark reminder of how such minor occurrences as brewing a batch of Christmas ale can reflect much larger historical contexts. When I first started learning how to brew ale, we would place the keg of boiled water in a snowdrift outside and wait for the temperatures to get sufficiently low. As my father noted, "now we don't have snow anymore". This was in the sense that we now no longer have reliable, long-term, steady supplies of snow in December, due to the climate change and global warming. Decembers are rainy and wet, with infrequent bouts of snow that is typically washed away by subsequent squalls. The climate affects how we do things, and the traditional practice came to stand in sharp relief with the new realities in which that practice was maintained. We have to adapt and prepare things differently, because the climactic reality in which we live has changed dramatically from what previous generations were used to. In this way, climate history can also be understood through such common, minor things like brewing ale.
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