Still popular 19 years after its release, Mr Eames’ Secret Life of Beer: Legends, Lore & Little-Known Facts continues to sell. He autographed a number of copies Sunday afternoon.

Royalty From The Beer World—

A Visit From Researcher Alan Eames Meant

New Knowledge For A Few Dozen Local Beer Hounds

By Shannon Hicks

The King of Beer is not some guy named Bud.

It is a man named Alan Eames, the self-professed Beer King, and last weekend Mr Eames made a visit from his home in Vermont to Newtown. He spent Sunday afternoon at My Place Restaurant as the special guest of “An English Beer Tasting with Alan Eames.”

Mark Tambascio, one of the owners of the popular restaurant in the center of Newtown, has been hosting beer tasting events occasionally for a few years. Mr Tambascio has quite an interest in the culture of beer — he is a certified judge and also brews his own small batches. His bar area is one of the finest in town thanks to a continually rotating selection of ales and stouts; there are no taps of Budweiser or Miller at Mr Tambascio’s bar (those brands are available, but they are never the featured selections).

Thanks to the growing popularity of the events — which reflects a continued growth in the brewing and tasting of small beers around the country — which usually feature a specific brewery and a meal to complement to beers being tasted, these affairs have moved from the smaller party room of the restaurant right out into My Place’s main dining room.

When Mr Eames walked into the restaurant Sunday afternoon he was welcomed by 60 fellow enthusiasts. There were folks who were, at varying degrees, into brewing their own beer and/or those who enjoyed tasting and learning about beer.

Mr Eames offered a presentation that deftly combined the results of decades of research and personal anecdotes and opinions with samplings of 11 different beers — ales, porters and stouts — that had been selected by Mr Tambascio. All of this was complemented by hors d’oeuvres coordinated by Mr Tambascio’s mother, Louise, who is also one of his business partners (the restaurant’s third owner is Mrs Tambascio’s other son, John, whose affinity is for wine selections).

The program was very similar to one of Mr Eames’ popular books, Secret Life of Beer: Legends, Lore & Little-Known Facts. The book has sold pretty steadily since its release in 1995 (sales are helped each time Mr Eames offers one of his programs). Countless visitors to Mr Tambascio’s bar within his restaurant have long familiarized themselves with a well-read bar copy of Secret Life of Beer.

“I’ve read about him and read his works for years but this is the first time I’m seeing him and he’s just fantastic,” said Sean O’Brien. “This is a great program. I really like the way he puts everything together.”

Mr Eames offered participants an abbreviated history of beer. Thirty years of research are hard to condense into a 3½-hour time slot that is also sharing time with people eating, conversing, and tasting beer. But he presented information about beer in the Viking age, medieval times, and even pre-Civil War versus the 1960s in the United States. There were more than 4,000 breweries in the country during the former era, but that number had dropped to a paltry 36 by the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

“In ancient societies beer drinking was celebrated,” Mr Eames pointed out. “Beer was enjoyed in great drinking halls among many generations. Beer is a vehicle that translates knowledge from one generation to the next.”

It is also, he said in paraphrasing Thornton Wilder, “a bridge between the living and the dead.”

Fairly current history was also touched upon, with Mr Eames reminding attendees of “the great beer scandal of ’72,” where headlines proclaimed beer was a cancer-causing agent.

During the course of the afternoon while Mr Eames was speaking, guests were quietly sampling the English beers Mr Tambascio had picked for the occasion. The selections ranged from St Peter’s Golden Ale, St Peter’s English Ale, St Peter’s Old-Style Porter, and St Peter’s Cream Stout, all from St Peter’s Brewery; and Black Sheep Ale and Riggwelter, from Paul Theakstom’s Black Sheep Brewery; to Hobgoblin, Scarecrow, Goliath, and Fiddler’s Elbow, all ales from Wychwood Brewery.

The final beer of the afternoon was Xingu (“SHIN-goo”), a black lager named after a tributary of the Amazon. The beer is brewed by the Vermont-based Amazon, Inc, which hired Mr Eames in 1986 when its founders were looking for a true black beer and needed help with its definition and in locating “native prototypes” of these silky dark beers that until then were generally found anywhere but the United States.

Silk is the perfect adjective for this beer, too. While most dark beers are heavy and bitter, Xingu is very smooth and indeed silky in appearance and taste.

“Black beer is relatively new to the mainstream,” Mr Eames pointed out. “Ten years ago this stuff was unheard of. Now it has its own category in competition.”

Halloween Will

Never Be The Same

Women play a huge role in the history of beer.

“If you look at all ancient societies, beer always came into the world as a gift from a goddess, never a god,” Mr Eames told The Bee last week. “I find that fascinating.”

On Sunday he elaborated on the idea of women and their involvement in the legend and lore of this liquid. One point that stuck with a few attendees was the comparison of women in medieval times to their representation in Halloween illustrations of today.

“In medieval times, women brewsters wore tall conical hats,” he said. “There women were not involved in the church, and they made beer that men loved. They were probably a little strange, and certainly were not part of the mainstream of village life.”

These were the women who were eventually persecuted during so-called witch trials.

“These women were not only making beer in their homes but they were working with herbs and natural remedies,” Mr Eames said. “They had antidotes for ailments, which was fine, but they had these drinks that made men — when they weren’t sick to begin with — feel very good.”

To advertise their beer, these women would put a broom in the ground, bristle side up, or hang a broom over their doorway.

“These were the first advertising signs ever,” Mr Eames said. “When people saw these brooms it meant beer was available to purchase inside a house.”

Mr Eames has been looking into “this witchcraft business” in particular for the past five years. “I find it fascinating, and so unfortunate, that these women who were primarily healers were really in the right place at the wrong time,” he said.

“The stylized imagery that we see today — the pointed hats, the cauldrons, the brooms — all of these symbols have lost their meaning,” he continued. “Today’s Halloween image of a witch is a female brewster, from her tall pointed hat and broomstick to the shape of her cauldron.

“The symbols have been seen through time, around the world, but today have lost any semblance to their original meaning.”

Sean O’Brien and his wife will be happy to resurrect a broom’s original meaning.

“Oh yeah,” Mr O’Brien laughed during one of Mr Eames’ breaks, “my wife has already said she’s going to go home and put a broomstick over our front door.”