Author, speaker, and researcher of farmhouse ale. Norwegian posts: @larsga-no.bsky.social https://www.garshol.priv.no
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Hello friends! I'm doing a *free* online talk about Filthy Queens and the history of Beer in Ireland for the Dublin Festival of History on Sept 30th from 5pm IST. All welcome. Hope to see some of you there! Link to register: dublinfestivalofhistory.ie/event/filthy...
Uh, Guardian, this will only provide spice for the beer. To actually make beer you need grain, and that's a lot of work to grow, and to process after growing. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
His son still brews, but he makes craft beer with a Speidel brewing machine. As far as I know Oppdal is now down to a single family of brewers. The good news is the younger generation has learned to brew, so they might last a while yet.
Another traditional brewer has left us. Harald Storli died earlier this week. I visited the family in 2014 and it was an unforgettable experience. Harald is a great loss not just for family and friends, but also for Norwegian brewing culture. www.garshol.priv.no/blog/297.html
Thank you! I feel pretty confident this time, but we'll see.
I have not. I don't actually know anyone in the field, which makes this a good bit harder. I have looked at other papers in the field, without really gaining much from those that I could use.
I'll be happy to send it to you now, if you want. Comments welcome.
Context: bsky.app/profile/lars...
After about a day's effort jumping through various strange hoops the paper has been submitted to the next journal. I also did another couple of rounds of editing, which admittedly improved the paper. And one more data point sneaked in. Now for some weeks of waiting before I know how this went.
Definitivt! Veldig glad jeg fikk møtt ham igjen i år på Gotland.
At the very end of Saturday night, a little treat for microbiologist Richard Preiss, who got more kveik samples plus some extra kornøl from Stig Seljeset (owner of kveik #22) and festival general Ståle Raftevold.
The first ever female winner of the brewing competition (long story why) was very happy indeed to get to second place. She even cried a little during her acceptance speech.
The oldest participant received the William Holden memorial prize, and got to have his say for a while when receiving his prize.
Also very Kornølfest: Göran Winarve demonstrating brewing of gotlandsdricke while a fiddler plays Norwegian folk music in the background. And of course Göran is being filmed by somebody.
What could be more @kornolfest.bsky.social than a guy dressed as a viking serving stjørdalsøl from a miniature washing machine? (Going through photos from last year's festival because reasons.)
As if recipes from 1129 exist...
Thank you, Tim! I appreciate it. I convinced myself that having spent 11 years on the paper I should make the effort to get it into the highest-impact journal I could. Not least because I feel it's important that archaeologists become aware of these findings.
Error handling and error reporting are both arts, and both sadly ignored by many programmers.
My guess is that if I had been more experienced in ethnobiology I could have added 6-7 paragraphs of text and gotten this into the journal. I am not going to try, however.
I honestly don't know what to contribute beyond the descriptive in this field. Half of me feels that's because I don't understand the field well enough, and the other half feels that's because there isn't really much theorizing of value to be done in this field. I'm not sure who's right.
To be fair, I'm involved in a microbiology paper right now that the scientists involved don't want to submit to top-level journals because it is "purely descriptive." Einstein's theory of relativity is objectively a far more valuable work than Eddington's purely descriptive data confirming it.
This is the paper in question bsky.app/profile/lars...
I got the editor's decision on my spice in farmhouse ale paper. Although they don't say it explicitly, they reject it as being out of scope. Note that it was not rejected by reviewers -- they never sent it for review, as they see it as not being right for their journal. Ah well. Next journal, then.
My god, what a poet. One can only imagine what he would have written had he lived.
Another letter from the J.C. Jacobsen archive, this time a letter to Gabriel Sedlmayr in which J.C. informed him about the new pure yeast they managed to isolate and propagate at the Carlsberg Laboratories, with some interesting insights. dafteejit.com/2025/09/j-c-... #beerhistory
Absolutely gorgeous day in the mountains.
I link to it in the post. Martyn wanted us to each do a paper for Brewery History journal arguing opposite sides of this issue. Great idea, but obviously that’s not going to happen now.
At the cabin this weekend. Hiked to a little waterfall we’d not seen before. Up here it’s already fall, with the leaves going yellow.
Obligatory link when this comes up www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html
Yes. Frameworks may be the right thing in some cases, but generally libraries are much to be preferred, where possible. The current obsession with frameworks in the Java world is IMHO very harmful.
We only dropped by Lars Gjelland for a short stop, but did get a little tour, and of course the kveik, and a glass of his beer. The beer was excellent, and the farm itself beyond gorgeous. Lars was super nice, too. One of those places you're reluctant to leave.
The second is #72 Gjelland, collected from Lars Gjelland in Voss. Very good kveik, used in a commercial stjørdalsøl coming on the market in a few days. www.ncyc.co.uk/catalogue/sa...
Two new kveik cultures have been added to the NCYC collection, preserved for posterity. First up is #70 Straumgjerde, collected a few years ago in ... you guessed it ... Straumgjerde. www.ncyc.co.uk/catalogue/sa...
Turns out it's 11 years. I got the first set of data some time late summer of 2014. www.garshol.priv.no/blog/300.html
Thank you! I guess the achievement comes once it's actually published, but I'm confident that will eventually happen.
On the other hand ... if they don't know what other factors are in there (hop extracts, alginate etc) then how do they know the results are from the factors they observed? I think maybe I agree with you after all.
I agree that all the conclusions they draw about the beers themselves are deeply flawed, but the basic physics results seem independent of that, since they seem to have based those on analysis of stresses and flows, as well as proteomics. Guess it tells you what to aim for, but not how to get there
As far as I know nothing comparable has ever been published in the scientific literature. Map below shows the area covered. Will be interesting to see what reactions I get.
On top of that comes 370 accounts (part of the 1052) that I collected myself, from local history books and journals, Youtube videos, articles, and fieldwork.
10 years after I started collecting data my paper on the use of spice in farmhouse brewing is finally submitted to a journal. It's based on 1052 individual accounts of farmhouse brewing. Material collected from 15 different archives in 8 different countries. 7191 pages of documentation in total.
Social media is what you make of it, I guess. For me it's a fantastic way to get information I would find it very hard to get by other means. First time I had that "wow" feeling was when I asked a US journalist to clarify something from a press conference in Japan, and he replied immediately.
I have seen it, but I haven't had time to read it yet. Yes, this theme (beer+political power) is something that runs through the entire history of beer. I'm actually working on something on that, hence my interest.
It's not a perfect measure, but the British Empire and the Ottomans both definitely had more administrative levels than Sparta and Athens. Similarly, the Roman Empire had more than the Kingdom of Hawaii, etc. I think it has the benefit of being both decently correlated and decently objective.
I can understand that concern. I share it myself, although I'm perhaps less skeptical than you. The variable they were predicting is "number of administrative levels", which is less vague and subjective. The general issue of untangling all these factors remains, of course. Anyway, fair enough.
The paper is estimating what factors lead to high political complexity and use a rating system to investigate that. What you wrote seemed to imply that you doubted this could be meaningfully done.
I'm not a foam scientist, either, of course, and maybe I'm wrong about the effect of blowing air. To me the research itself seems pretty decent, it's just the interpretation of which properties of the beer cause foam stability that seems unmoored from reality.
It's absolutely true that there's been abuse of research in the past (and some research that in itself was abuse), but that doesn't mean measuring aspects of cultures with metrics is necessarily wrong.
The people I've seen be critical of this research here on Bsky are all pro-alcohol to one degree or another, so I really don't think that's the issue.
Of course, I do agree that this is an extremely complex question, and this analysis is much too simple to settle it definitively, even had the dataset been larger. But it is an indication that there's something there. An indication supported by other evidence (not in this paper).
You're dismissing their result because of quibbles over text that's basically just explanatory background. It's a very different thing from finding fault with their actual analysis, and it's the analysis that matters.
On the first point they've basically overlooked a single paper (Liu et al 2018). Would you disagree that, say, the Inca Empire, was more politically complex in a meaningful way than that of the NW Pacific natives?
Well, this study is not restricted to any specific time, but most large-scale societies have had some of those tendencies. I agree it's quite possible you could make that argument.
As for morally wrong ... they make a table of cultures and put in the number of levels of political hierarchy, and whether they had access to alcohol. I don't really see the morality of that.
To be honest, this criticism is too vague and broad to really be meaningful to me. They explicitly discuss and address bias/misunderstanding. I don't see how prejudice is relevant. If you see anything factually wrong you should point it out. Seems a bit of a stretch to just assume there are errors.
Well, it has to be expressed as a number, so it’s hard to see how they could avoid being reductionist. Personally, I think reductionism isn’t necessarily bad. It’s being wrong that’s bad.
I wouldn't say that this paper definitively settles the question, but it certainly lends weight to the theory that alcohol helped humans build complex societies. A lot of interesting references in here, too. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
What they found was that in all models there was a positive correlation between alcohol and political complexity. It was 0.77 when the only factor was alcohol, and 0.19 in the weakest (model 4). Average 0.27 across all five models. In other words, the result appears pretty robust.
They tried different models to see what weight was given to alcohol in each model. The simplest one was just "does alcohol lead to greater political complexity?" The other models add other factors as well. Agriculture has a big effect, but the effect of alcohol remains even with agriculture.
They chose political complexity of a society as the variable to predict, and considered many different factors which might influence that.
The dataset did not contain information about whether the society had access to alcohol, so the researchers added that information themselves
The researchers used an existing database describing 186 societies, containing 2000 different variables on the culture and environment for each society.
Many researchers have suggested that alcohol may have been an important factor in developing early states. Basically, it's supposed to have helped social cohesion, improved cooperation, and reduced friction among people living cramped together. Well, did it? New research on the subject out now.
September's newsletter is out, so if you're subscribed and don't see it, let me know. This time: how to tell yeast strains apart, the history of lager, book news, research progress etc. buymeacoffee.com/larsblog
Yes, in the bottle I agree, but here they were creating foam by blowing air through the beer. I'm not sure they need nucleation sites then.
If you’re in IT I recommend reading this. bsky.app/profile/lars...
I don’t think bottle conditioning matters in this study, though, as they degassed the beers, then forced air into them to create the foam for testing.
Here's Michael Jackson's article from when he visited Svein Rivenes in 1993 www.independent.co.uk/life-style/f...
When I visited him in 2018 he showed us his brewhouse, but he was old and frail and hadn't brewed in a while. There were spider webs in his cauldron. "We had a lot of fun in here. A lot of fun," he said, making it sound like it was all over now. Pause. "And sometimes we got drunk, too," he laughed.
We've lost another carrier of the brewing tradition: Svein Rivenes from Voss died yesterday, at the age of 85. He's best known for being the owner of kveik #2. Martin Thibault and I had his vossaøl back in 2014 and were absolutely blown away. It was really fantastic.
Great that you managed to write to them. Unfortunately, the response contains a lot that is either not true or at best misleading. Someone clearly does not want to admit they just didn't understand what a triple was.
Well, no. The ingredients can and do make a difference. Wheat beer, for example, has notably better foam retention because of the protein from the wheat. Process differences matter, too.
That's a very good point. I checked, and they're using a setup where the beer is first degassed, and then air is pushed through it. So they've eliminated carbonation as a variable.
The malt is definitely a factor (protein content and types), as is mashing regime. Yeast type could well be a factor, too
I don't know that that's true, but one of the variables in their experiment (number of fermentations) is entirely imaginary
The researchers don't imply it. They say it explicitly: "One unique aspect of our approach is a controlled series of experiments on beers brewed from the same ingredients but subjected to single, double, and triple fermentations" It's an old misunderstanding that the style names derive from this
They don't say very much about brewing, but I'd have to agree. They suggest fermentation is the main likely cause of foam difference between lager/Belgian ale, but differences in mashing affecting the proteins seems far more likely. So, yes.
No. They’re saying it’s been fermented three times. No explanation of what that’s supposed to mean.
The same nonsense in Ars Technica No doubt you'll see many more outlets publish the same junk soon. arstechnica.com/science/2025...
Looks like another beer myth is about to be born. Scientists analyze stability of beer foam, and mistakenly conclude tripels have better foam because they're fermented three times. (They're not.) Here's the bullshit conclusions presented in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/food/2025/au...
We're happy to announce that @braciatrix.bsky.social will be speaking at this year's festival on "Drinking with the Dead: Women, Ale, and Ritual in Viking-Age Ireland." www.norskkornolfestival.no/2025/08/27/s...
The article is not about US intelligence, but private individuals with close ties to Trump.
Sad #beerhistory news from Dogfish Head - Dr Pat McGovern has died; a true pioneer of brewing archaeology.
Beer for people who don’t like beer.
Tizard in 1846 complains that many brewers spoil their porter by using weird, unnecessary ingredients. 180 years later that’s still a problem.
I bet many Swedes are, too. The island is remote, thinly populated, and has no obvious power sources, though. It is very vulnerable, though, so perhaps this will cause changes.
The entire island of Gotland is without power, because of a problem with the single power cable from the mainland. Sabotage or accident? Not known.
Unfortunately, I don't. I use plastic bottles with screwcaps for my homebrew.
There was about 1cm of beer left in the bottle once the foam subsided. It was really nice. I wish I'd left the bottle in the fridge for a day before trying this. That would have worked better.
A wine producer gave me a bottle of beer they made, but warned me that it was way overcarbonated. They told me to open it in a bucket of water. I did, and got my daughter to film it. The result, well...
I shouldn't have written "biologists". I'm baffled at how the NYT article presents this, but of course that need not correspond with how the biologists see it.
True. But I think it’s useful to understand how it fails.
The biological species concept makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms, but it amazes me that biologists cannot see the hole in it. In mathematical terms they’re proposing an equivalence relation where the transitive does not hold. That’s exactly how you get all these problems. Like ring species.
The vessel they're drinking from in the video is known as a "kjenge", the traditional drinking vessel in Voss and Hardanger, mentioned in the lyrics. Here's me drinking from one, outside the same brewhouse.
The lyrics to the song are actually from a poem about oppskåke from 1946, by Olav H. Hauge, a poet from nearby Hardanger. I don't think it's too much to say that Hauge was one of Scandinavia's greatest poets, translated to English many times. Though never, as far as I know, this particular poem.
The brewhouse belongs to Kjetil Dale, and he offers both visitors training in brewing and the more straightforward experience of drinking in the eldhus. I've been to a party there and can attest that it's a fantastic venue for a party. eldhuset-dale.no/en/
Music video from Voss. The song is about oppskåke (the traditional party in the brewhouse when the beer has finished fermenting). There's more to this video than might be immediately apparent, though. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBoM...
Maybe I have. Not sure. I think I need to talk to someone up there to see what they say.
Photo rights should be no problem. You know where to find me.
There are some that have done decoction like you describe, although it was quite rare in farmhouse brewing. Your suggestions for changing the process are interesting and might work, but what I'm trying to figure out is why this works for people in Stjørdal, but not for me.
I've many times seen people do infusion mashing alone with 50kg of malt. I've never seen it be a problem.