Story in a Glass

Took a little stab the other night at being a French field hand.

No, I wasn’t shoveling manure. I was drinking beer.

As told by Greg Engert, beer director for Washington, D.C.’s new Birch & Barley, the water in pre-industrial France was so bad that farmers began brewing to give their workers a healthful drink. I’m guessing it also made pushing a plow a lot more fun.

The workers were often quaffing something like Saison d’Epeautre, a musty, effervescent seasonal of spelt and barley mash that opens the door to the restaurant’s 500 bottles, 50 taps and five cask ales. Engert was a master’s candidate in English before he became a beer expert and for him, beer is not just a drink, it’s an expression of culture as surely as a novel.

“The novel doesn’t exist in a void,” Engert says. “It’s related to social, political, cultural histories. I try to attend to all the different stories beers can tell, and all the different ways they relate to everything else that’s going on around them, historically and contemporaneously.”

Take the malty, toffee-tinted Bonator, a creation of Italy’s Paulist monks that pays perfect complement to the restaurant’s sausage flatbread. As Engert tells it, the monks called their brew “Salvator” – savior or salvation – because the nutrient-rich double-bock formula kept them alive during fasts (my kinda Lent!) The “-ator” suffix traveled with the brew as it headed north, and today, anytime you see “-ator” in a beer’s name you know it’s a double-bock. So next time don’t just drink your foam. Read it.

Birch & Barley, 1337 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005; 202-567-2576; birchandbarley.com