All posts by Lacy

Lacy is a native Minnesotan and an attorney. When she isn't hard at work providing legal analysis, she enjoys homebrewing, baking, and attending the Twin Cities' many beer festivals. You can find her on caskconditioned.blogspot.com and on twitter at @conditionedcask.
Newsfeed

Review: MIA’s CrossTalk Tudor Keg Party

What do museum aficionados and beer geeks have in common? Last Thursday’s CrossTalk Tudor Keg Party at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The MIA’s Crosstalk series brings together two experts to present different viewpoints on an aspect of history and modern culture. For the Tudor Keg Party, experts Jeffrey Pilcher, a food historian and professor at the University of Minnesota, and Eric Harper, a brewer for Summit Brewing Company, discussed their expertise and views on beer of the past, present, and future.

Summit Brewing Co Oak BarrelDr. Pilcher presented his lecture first. He discussed the brewing process in the Tudor period and how it was not so different from today. (The Tudor period runs from roughly the end of the 1400s through the beginning of the 1600s—think King Henry VII, the Church of England breaking from Rome, William Shakespeare, the Black Death, Christopher Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth I). The brewing process hasn’t changed much, though the knowledge behind it has. There were both home brewers and commercial brewers in the Tudor period. In fact, most brewing was done at home by women until the Black Death and other sicknesses caused beer to become more widely available at public houses, or pubs.

Dr. Pilcher also talked about the perception of beer and brewers in the Tudor period. The women who brewed beer, ale wives, were seen as frugal shrew-like beings who watered down beer to make more money on less product. The same perception doesn’t seem to have existed for male brewers.

Mr. Harper’s part of the lecture focused more on the history of Summit Brewing. He talked about Summit’s current grasp on the beer market compared to larger players, the development of the Unchained series, and how he came to brew for Summit. Of particular interest, however, was his discussion of the beer that he brought to the Tudor Keg Party, Summit’s Tudor Ale, a recipe adapted from English recipes out of the period.

In order to craft the Tudor Ale, Mr. Harper worked with Dr. Pilcher and other historians to find actual recipes from the time. The recipes that he showed us didn’t shed a lot of light on the brewing process or what a beer from the period might taste like. One recipe called for brewing the ingredients “according to the art.” Another recipe suggested that the ingredients should be boiled a “reasonable while.” More baffling was the variety in the lists of ingredients: A bushel of oatmeal, a rind of fir, sassafras, a “good quantity” of sage, five new-laid eggs.

Fortunately for us, Mr. Harper did not follow those recipes exactly, and instead cobbled together a recipe that incorporated his wide knowledge of beer and the style of the Tudor period. In the Tudor period, malt was made by soaking barley in water in a hole in the ground and roasting it in a fire. To get a similar effect, Mr. Harper used floor-roasted organic malt in conjunction with a couple of other malts for flavor and color.

Two other things that stood out in this recipe were the use of oak barrels and sage. Brewers in the Tudor period used oak barrels for storing their beer, so to get the right effect, Mr. Harper brought oak barrels over from England for the Tudor Ale. Many of the recipes that Mr. Harper showed us during the lecture featured sage, so he incorporated that as well.

Summit Brewing Tudor AleA final note of interest was Mr. Harper’s use of Isinglass to clarify the ale. Of course, Tudor period brewers did not have fancy equipment to pull sediment from beer, so Isinglass, or dried sturgeon bladder, was added while the beer was in the cask. Isinglass allows the brewer to leave the yeast in the beer when it goes into the cask so that it ferments further, but the yeast will eventually solidify and drop out of the beer, leaving a clear product. Using it in this beer allowed Mr. Harper to incorporate the oak barrels, and still have a clear pint of beer at the end.

The result was Summit’s Tudor Ale, which tasted watery, sagey, and…not a lot like the beer to which we have become accustomed, from Summit or any other brewer. Hops were not introduced to England until later in beer history, so there was none of the hoppy flavor that has become so popular with the IPA movement.

In the Question and Answer period after Mr. Harper’s speech, a woman asked if Summit would be taking the Tudor Ale to commercial production. With a laugh, Mr. Harper asked how many audience members would buy the Tudor Ale in store. With the small number of hands that went up, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the sage-based Tudor Ale on tap at any restaurants. Although the beer would not be popular now, the CrossTalk lecture showed that, aside from style, the brewing world has not changed much between the 16th century and today.

Newsfeed

Sunday Sales and the Constitution

By Lacy

Although the law is written without mention of religion today, Sunday closing laws in the United States have a religious background. Most courts and legislatures currently maintain that the purpose of Sunday closing laws is not to encourage worship, but to provide a community day of rest and tranquility, free of the comings and goings associated with bars and liquor stores being open.

But given that Sundays are hardly reserved explicitly for rest and tranquility, is there a constitutional case to be made against the religious background of Sunday closing laws?

As with everything in the law, it depends.
America BeerThe First Amendment provides, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part of that phrase is referred to as the Establishment Clause. Under the Establishment Clause, government—whether state or federal—may not become so intertwined with a religion that a government action is perceived as an endorsement of religion.

Establishment Clause challenges are analyzed under a test found in a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman. The three prongs of the test require the court to decide whether there is a secular purpose for the statute, whether the statute’s primary effect is to advance religion, and whether the statute requires excessive and impermissible entanglement between the government and religion.

One case that successfully challenged a statewide liquor sales ban was Griswold Inn v. Connecticut. In that case, the state had prohibited all alcohol sales on Good Friday. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the ban violated all three prongs of the Lemon test.[1]

The state’s asserted secular purpose of prohibiting liquor sales on a day reserved for statewide celebration was dismissed by the court, since no prohibition existed for any other secular holiday.[2] Instead, the court said that “Given the traditional Christian significance of Good Friday and Christian exhortation to fast and abstain on that day in mourning for the death of Christ, the singling out of Good Friday reveals that there is no clear secular purpose which justifies the prohibition of liquor sales on this day.”[3]

As to the second prong of the Lemon test, regarding advancing or inhibiting religion, the court found that not only did the statewide ban advance religion in general, it also advanced Protestant and Catholic Christianity in particular over other forms of the religion.[4] As the majority said, “…the very existence of that …holiday gives the state’s clear stamp of approval both to the Christian rites…and to Christianity in general. It indicates a bias in favor of Protestant and Catholic forms of Christianity over Eastern Orthodox, non[-]Christian and nonreligious practices and beliefs.”[5]

The statewide ban failed the third prong because it required the state to monitor what calendar day Good Friday fell on, and required it to monitor whether its liquor license holders were complying with the ban.[6] Further, because the ban had pitted some Christians against others, and religious citizens against non-religious ones, the court found that the statute created political fragmentation and debate along religious lines.[7]

This holding on the third prong is important because it recognizes that requiring the state to monitor liquor store and restaurant closure as a burden on the state that impermissibly entangles it with a religion. This broad reading of the third prong of Lemon could serve to change the way courts analyze not only Good Friday closures, but Sunday closures as well. (Presumably, it takes the same, if not more, monitoring to make sure that the right restaurants, brewpubs, and liquor stores are not selling on Sundays as it would for Good Friday.)

Although Griswold Inn is a Connecticut Supreme Court case, it provides a persuasive authority with a framework for failing statewide bans on activities due to a religious day of rest. This is, however, an optimistic view of an Establishment Clause challenge to Sunday closings. The reality is that courts generally defer to the legislature’s intent in passing the statute, and all that is required is that the prohibition of Sunday sales be rationally related to the State’s goal of providing a day of tranquility for its citizens. Though Griswold Inn gives a map to future challenges, the likelihood of a success on these grounds in the near future is not good.

1 441 A.2d 16 (Conn. 1981).

2 Id. at 20.

3 Id.

4 Id. at 21.

5 Id.

6 Id. at 22.

7 441 A.2d 16, 22.