Some few of the breweries make ale, or porter, but the greater number make nothing but the favorite drink of the Germans, the lager beer which, notwithstanding the inroads of prohibition, must still be considered as one of the great commercial factors in the United States. Moreover, while the American brewers formerly catered exclusively to a restricted local market, within the past 40 years the art of beermaking has attained such a point of perfection that this product can now be shipped, both in barrels and in bottles, from one end of the country to the other, while a further idea of the immense importance of this trade may be gathered from the facts that while the capital invested in this country in the beer in dustry is not less than $671,158,000, according to the figures reported by the 1913 United States Statistical Abstracts census, the annual output of the country shows an aggregate value of more than $350,000,000. More than 66,000 men were directly engaged in the interests of brewing, and its contributions to the support of the United States, in internal revenue taxes alone, amounted in 1913 to more than $65,000, 000 per annum, while $95,596,000 represents the cost of materials used in that year. That the bottling branch of the industry has also as sumed proportions which entitle it to serious consideration is shown by the fact that the product of one brewery alone now amounts to more than 150,000,000 bottles per annum.
While such figures are valuable in the sense that they are reliable manifestations of the growth of the brewing industry, there is a deeper and broader side to the question of its development that is a matter of far greater importance, for the modern brewer, while he is proud of the fact that his craft has grown to be one of the great industries of this great nation, still takes even greater pride in the knowledge that the science of brewing has made more marked scientific advancement dur ing the past 50 years of its history than it had made in all the years that had previously elapsed since those days of emerrie England" when Falstaff and his coterie of jolly fellows joked together over their generous tankards of some foaming brew.
For example, we may say that it has been only within the past 50 years that anything approaching scientific principles have ever been applied to the art of brewing. Since 1870, however, the establishment of brewers' schools to teach the higher knowledge of the craft have brought theory and practice into such close association that a field of competition has been opened that had never existed prior to that time. Thus, during the sixties the prin ciples governing the production of beer were practically the same as those which had been followed by our forefathers in their breweries in 1805, for while every branch of applicable science, including chemistry, botany and me chanics had experienced marvelous develop ment, these changes meant nothing to the art of brewing, except in the general sense that they were preparing the foundation upon which the more scientific art might be constructed.
The first great improvement in the art of brewing, and especially that portion of it to which the physiology of fermentation may be applied, was the result of the labors of Pas teur in Paris and Hansen at Copenhagen. Pas teur discovered that spoiling of wine, beer and vinegar were due to similar causes, that is, to infection by bacteria or bacilli, and found proper remedies, not only saving those industries in France alone millions of francs annually, but he became the founder of medical science by realizing through his studies on fermenta tion that contagious diseases in animals and man were due to microbial infection likewise, and thus Pasteur was led to his discoveries of antitoxin treatment. From the earliest days beer has been known to be a perishable product, but the character of the causes which made it spoil was a problem that nobody had been able to solve. By his discoveries of the physiology of the organisms of fermentation Pasteur not only proved that these diseases of beer might rationally be traced to a sort of bacteria but indicated the manner in which such diseases might be avoided through the application of a process of wort cooling and fermentation, while Hansen went a step farther by not only finding another cause for such diseases in the brewers' yeast, which might easily become, by contact, under certain circumstances, with sim ilar organisms closely resembling it, far more injurious than any bacteria, but brought its labors to a most logical conclusion by devel oping a process of cultivating yeast in large quantities and in such absolute purity from a single germ that he prevented the introduction of wild yeast into the brew. The immediate adoption of these innovations by the leading brewers of the United States resulted in some very material changes in the practical opera tions of the breweries. Thus the discovery of the principle of preventing infection brought about the substitution of suitably closed ap paratus in place of the old-fashioned open cooler, but this improvement was simply one step in the efforts of the manufacturers to meet the requirements of the new scientific methods of brewing. It was followed by more ingeniously constructed machinery, all tending toward a cleaner and better product. There were processes for the production of filtered air; there were other processes for the steril ization of water, for everything that now entered into the product must be germ-proof, absolute protection against infection being the keynote of the new science. Under the present methods, therefore, from the very moment that the beer leaves the brew-kettle to pass over the coolers, and through the process of fermenting and lagering, and even up to the very moment that it is served as a refreshing and reviving beverage, no effort is spared to protect it from infection. See BREWING and MALTING.