Jonny Garrett
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
It's a great question. And to be honest, no, we don't. What we know is the oldest record we have of that happening, which is about 13,000 years ago in a cave called Rakafet Cave near Nazareth in Israel, where we found evidence of the Natufian people who were a sort of semi-sedentary nation.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
semi-nomadic kind of tribe who we know they were brewing with barley and wheat in divots that they created purpose-built in the cave. And we know this through sort of digging right down and looking at these divots very carefully under microscopes and working out the processes and the ingredients.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But we're fairly certain, given how, I guess, complicated the process was, how technologically advanced it was, that it must have been happening earlier. We're too far down the chain to think that this was the first example of brewing. They must have learned it earlier.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
I think in the Western world, you'd absolutely not recognize it. Beer has come an incredible distance since that first brew that we know of. But there are still lots of, I guess the word would probably be like indigenous style still made in certain parts of Africa, certain parts of South America, where the technology hasn't been introduced. And so the methods are still very, very traditional.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
It must be a fermented cereal-based alcoholic drink. So it must use something like barley or wheat or phonio, which is sort of a new grain that we're getting very excited about now because of its sustainability properties, or even things like sorghum, spelt.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
All of these grains would have been used in different parts of the world and indeed exported and imported to different parts of the world because of the unique flavors and characteristics that they had.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Well, when it was first invented, as far as we know, in 11,000 B.C. and probably for the next 10,000 years, it had a dual purpose or even a three pronged purpose. So the first one, the most important one was actually that it was full of nutrition. It was full of calories and it was a relatively safe thing to consume. You didn't always have access to clean water, our ancestors.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So we somehow knew that beer was much less likely to poison us. And the reason behind that is that alcohol is an antiseptic. So it kills many of the bacterias and viruses that might make us ill from drinking water that we didn't really know the source of. So it became very important for nutrition and as a safe source of liquid. And as a result of those two things, it then became a form of worship.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So we've seen it in the ancient Egyptians. We've seen it in the ancient Sumerians and countless, countless different civilizations all over the world. We're using beer as part of funeral traditions, part of worshipping of gods.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
We don't necessarily associate beer with the ancient Egyptians, but actually it was a daily inevitability in their lives in terms of the people that built the pyramids were paid in beer, in cloth, and in bread. Those were the three things that you needed to survive in ancient Egypt as a worker.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And so it was inevitable to them, but equally it's painted onto their sarcophagi, it's carved into the stones as a gift to God because it was a life-giving drink. And that's only really faded in the last... you know, maybe 1,000 years, but really in the last 200 with sort of the industrial and technical revolutions and, of course, the spread of safe drinking water throughout the Western world.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
I mean, it's a super complicated question and would really vary depending on where you are. And I would say in the UK, where we're very sensitive to how much our beer costs because it's so important to us, but equally, we have some of the highest taxation on alcohol in the world. The strength of the drink can make a big difference because that's what the duty is levied against in many countries.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
You know, the important thing to point out, and I think the thing that a lot of people worry about when they're getting expensive beer is that the beers that maybe we grew up drinking, the beers that are the best-selling in the world, you know, the Budweiser's, the Coors, the Stella Artois, say, in the U.K., These are mass produced commercialized products. So they have huge economies of scale.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
They have used the absolute pinnacle of human endeavor and technology to make these beers as quickly and as cheaply and as uniformly as possible. And that has resulted in beer become very cheap.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But also, I think its place in society, its place in the world being diminished as well, because it just sort of sits there next to the washing up liquid on your shopping list instead of being something that was celebrated the way that our ancestors did.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And so there are a lot of people that are very cynical about the craft beer movement, about the bringing back of traditional methods of small batch brewing, of experimentation with different ingredients and different techniques. as sort of, you know, hipster fuel and this kind of stuff.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But actually, I think that it's an incredibly important thing that's happened in the last sort of 30 or 40 years. And of course, that's going to come with additional costs because of the smaller batches that it's being made in because of the increased ingredients.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
If you want to make a very strong beer, that takes significantly more malt because you need more sugar to ferment to get that higher ABV. But then also you might need more hops to balance it, or you might want more hops to get more aroma and flavor and to really push the boundaries of what a beer can taste and smell like.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Or you might, you know, a Budweiser's made in a week, 10 days, a really great artisanal lager like the way they've made in Germany for centuries would typically take at least six weeks. In the Czech Republic, they'll lager beers for three months, six months, 12 months.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've made a career of writing about beer for about a decade now, and I've constantly come up against either people online sort of saying, come on, man, it's just beer, or friends sort of worrying about me and worrying about my career. And that's sort of what spurred me onto this journey and just sort of going, well, is it just beer?
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Is the significance of beer purely, you know, a drink at the end of the day or at the end of the week or meeting up with friends or... in my brain something so fundamental to the daily life of most people in the world there has to be more significance to it. And so I started to think about all the possible ways that beer might have changed the world.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And it started with the discovery in my previous book, A Year in Beer, that the fridge was actually invented in a brewery in Bavaria. Like the first commercial compressed gas refrigeration unit was for a brewery so that they could chill their cellars and get fewer infections and be able to brew year round, most importantly, because it was too warm for the lager yeasts of Bavaria.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
to brew in summer, and it was literally outlawed by the government. So I started to think, what else could there be? And I started to discover all kinds of incredible things, such as the pH meter, the Keldahl test, which is what we use to test for protein in food.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So if you've ever read the back of a cereal packet with the protein listed, that would have probably used a process that was invented actually in the first case for beer. And then I started to go across some sort of the incredible industrial stuff and look at medicine and medical ties that the brewing industry had.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So we only discovered the full role of bacteria and infections in humans as a result of us trying to work out why beers and wines were turning sour. And that was the work of Pasteur and a couple of other incredible scientists in the mid-1800s.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And in fact, I managed to dig out a century-old biography of Louis Pasteur in which there's a letter that's sent by Joseph Lister, the surgeon who created the very notion of antiseptics and to save millions of lives as a result of basically saying to surgeons, wash your hands, please.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
That comes from him studying Etude Sula Beer and Etude Sula Van, which were the two sort of huge pieces of research that Pasteur did in wine and beer. So like many of the things, our journey to the moon, lots of people might say that was a huge waste of money, particularly given the way that the world is right now.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But if you look at the technology we had to develop to get to the moon and the implications that has had, it's kind of the same with beer. There's very few, I think, industrial, commercial, or indeed cultural developments that have happened in the last 200 years that haven't had beer either inspiring it or directly influencing it. And this book was trying to make that case.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And I'm sure there'll be critics out there that will say I've overplayed it in some ways, but beer literally and metaphorically has had an influence on our lives, whether we drink or not.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
I've had this argument many times online, and I think my point always comes down to a couple of simple facts. The first thing is that beer was the first alcoholic beverage produced by humans. We know that for a fact. Wine was four or 5,000 years later. We didn't distill anything for seven or 8,000 years after that. and things like cider were also discovered thousands of years later.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So we know that beer was the very first one, and we know that beer had a huge influence on why we settled, where we settled, arable farming in its early days, the shape of pottery, our religions and how they were constructed and how they were enacted. So beer had 5,000, 6,000 years of influence over humanity before any other form of alcohol was manufactured by humans.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
The other thing I would say is that we are yet, anthropologists are yet to find a civilization, ancient or modern, that didn't brew beer. And that's not the case, say, for vodka or for sake or these very regional forms of beautiful and influential alcohols within their spaces. But beer is fundamental to every human that's ever existed and ever will.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
We'll know what beer is and we'll probably have consumed it at some point. And so beer has the time and it has the spread that no other alcohol does. The only one where I'd entertain the idea that it might be as influential is wine. Pasteurization was an idea that Louis Pasteur first suggested to the wine industry before he did to beer.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And there's a couple of other instances there because wine is so central to Europe where a lot of these certainly 19th century discoveries were being made. Obviously, there's so many more happening around the world now. But wine could come close, but it doesn't have that head start and it doesn't have that ubiquity.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
There was a time after prohibition where many of the breweries had to close due to the lack of business, the fact they weren't allowed to brew. The surviving breweries, five of them became known as the shipping breweries. So these were breweries, Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Pabst.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And these were the breweries, they were called shipping breweries because they were the quickest out of the gate to recognize that railroads were the best way to grow their business, to get their beers out there. And so they were helping, they were funding railway projects. They were funding technologies such as ice-packed railway cars so their beer could stay cold on the way.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Budweiser invested in ice houses all over the country next to railroads where they could store their beer to keep it cold, but also then sell the ice to local people. So they had a huge impact on where the railways went, why they went and when they were built and indeed invested in many of them because that's how they knew their breweries could grow quicker than, say, their competitors.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Yeah, I mean, when I first got into beer, I was in the same position and didn't understand a lot of these phrases. And if I could have sort of craft beers time again, I would say, look, everybody, let's try and keep this a bit simpler.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But we didn't really have names for styles or families of beer until a great beer writer called Michael Jackson came along and he still venerated as sort of the original beer writer. And he came up with, you know, essentially he made sort of the animal kingdom, these taxonomies of beer. by traveling the world and discovering all these styles that haven't been made.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So it all sort of comes from his work. And really what we have at the top is beer. Beer, as I said earlier, refers to anything that is a, any drink that is a fermented cereal-based alcoholic drink. Down from beer, you have ale and you have lager. And lager is often seen as sort of the poor man's version of ale.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But really the only difference between those two things is the yeast strain that's being used. And lagers, lager yeast specifically, a slightly different breed of yeast, like to ferment cold. And ale yeasts like to ferment at room temperature. And that's literally the only difference.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
As a result of, you know, the laws of thermodynamics, lagers ferment slower and produce fewer flavors, which is why they're used in all these clean, crisp lagers. But that's the only difference.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And then from that point onwards, between ale and lager, you break down into hundreds and hundreds of different styles of beer that all have their individual histories, their individual stories, and in particular, until quite recently, their own regionality. So it used to be that...
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
you know, particularly in places like Belgium and the UK and Germany and the Czech Republic, these sort of old world brewing nations, every town would have its own style, its own breweries, its own customs when it came to consuming beer.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But obviously that's now blurred as we've started to learn more about other people's cultures, been able to brew with different yeast, different ingredients and export them around the world.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So I guess sort of the most famous styles would be the Pilsner, which was invented in 1842 in Pilsen in the Czech Republic, which is a beautiful, like quite hoppy, quite bitter, full-bodied lager beer, Pilsner Raquel being the most famous and the original.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And then you have the IPA, which in the UK used to be a slightly funky, really hoppy, very bitter, quite strong beer that got its name from being sent over to India when the UK occupied that. But now the Americans have sort of co-opted that beer and turned it into the American IPA, which I think... Most people will know, some will love, some will hate.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And those are sort of the two biggest styles in the world, IPA being sort of the flagship of craft beer. Don't ask me what craft beer means because that meaning is lost to the wind, I think, at this point.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Absolutely. Yeah. So beer has a couple of enemies. Light is absolutely one of them. Heat is the other one. And oxygen is the final one. So when it comes to brewing beer and when it comes to caring for the beers that you have, those are the three things you want to avoid. So light, UV light creates this process called light striking.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
which is essentially UV light breaking down some aroma compounds in the beer. And it makes the beer smell and taste a little bit kind of weedy, a little bit skunky. It's sometimes called skunking, but just kind of musty.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And if you want to know what that tastes like, what I'd advise is getting a bottle of Corona, putting it in the window for an hour and then drinking it or well, crack it open and smell it. And it will smell a little bit illicit. Um, So that's why bottles are almost always in brown glass because that blocks the most amount of UV light that you can.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
But in terms of protecting beers best, they're actually better off in the can. And there's a lot of cliches around cans not being as good for beer. And that was definitely true 40, 50 years ago. But technology, you know, we line these with certain plastics that are entirely inert. And now cans are absolutely the best preservative for beer because it blocks out the light.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
It also means they're quicker to chill down. And as I said, heat is the enemy as well. That also breaks down aromatic compounds. So you want to keep your beer cold. Don't sort of keep it in a cupboard and then put it in the fridge. So it's cold when you want to consume it. Always, always keep it in the fridge. Think of it as butter. It should always, always be in the fridge.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And then the final one is oxygen, which we can't do a lot about other than drinking quickly. But breweries spend millions and millions of pounds on perfect canning and bottling lines to minimize how much oxygen ends up in the bottles and the cans because that's called staling of the beer.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
And again, oxygen breaks down these delicious aroma and flavor compounds in the beer to make it no longer the beer that the brewer sort of had in their heads. Yeah.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Absolutely. Beer is, they called it liquid bread for thousands of years, our ancestors. And it is like that, you know, it's not going to poison you if you drink it out of date or you haven't cared for it because it's got alcohol in it. It's a pretty safe form of liquid, but it is at its absolute best straight from the brewery. And from the moment it leaves, it's only getting worse.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So that's why, you know, craft breweries, they'll always be saying, you know, drink it fresh. And why a lot of the cans will also say keep cold. and store in a dark place because it really, you know, 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
So you'll even see at beer festivals, and this is slightly ridiculous, sort of beer geeks putting paper over their beers to try and protect it from the light. That doesn't do much, but that's sort of the extent that it can affect the flavour of beer. So we need to treat beer, even mass-produced, you know, macro lagers, we need to treat it like it's almost a fresh food.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure being on the show.
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Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
At its absolute best, straight from the brewery. And from the moment it leaves, it's only getting worse. You know, 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer. So we need to treat beer like it's almost a fresh food.