If you want a sudsy taste of history, here's your chance: The McLean County Museum of History is partnering with microbrewer Casper Brewing Company in Bloomington to honor Bloomington-Normal's longest continuously operating (and now defunct) brewery.
Meyer Brewing Company shut down in 1920 because of Prohibition, after 58 years in business. The brewery was where Highland Park Golf Course in Bloomington is now. There's still one original building left.
The museum and Casper Brewing have modeled a lager after Meyer’s “Extra Select” beer which was advertised as being “brewed exclusively for family use” in 1904. Archival documents and newspaper records from the museum’s collections provided the context to recreate the beer.
Hey, if Illinois State University, the Illinois Farm Bureau, and Illinois Wesleyan University can all have specially branded beer, why not the Museum of History? They'll roll out the barrel for you to taste the brew at the museum Friday evening as part of the annual holiday open house, Christmas Under the Dome. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, that date is 92 years after the repeal of prohibition.
Brewmaster Dave Casper said Meyer's Extra Select made in the 19th and early 20th centuries was different than lagers from Germany. The beer reflects German immigration and the ingredients they found to substitute for what they had used to brew beer in the old country. For instance, two-row Barley was hard to find. Instead, they had six-row barley. Two-row has two kernels on the stock and six row has six kernels.
“The two rows are a cleaner, meltier, lower-protein type of malt, whereas six-row has a special grainy sweetness to it. A little bit less malt available to you, but it also has a lot of protein, and proteins is not really good for brewing beer, because it could leave the beer hazy, cloudy, and not as crystal and beautifully clear as one would hope when the beer is ready for serving,” said Casper.
What companies like Meyer Brewing did was dilute the protein with other ingredients not as readily available in Germany — things like rice, grits and corn. Corn was the most popular choice.
“They would dilute the grist or the malt bill down to about 20%-30% of corn to dilute that protein level down. When they got their finished beer, the proteins would settle out and make a nice, brilliant beer from that,” said Casper.
That is also different than today’s lagers even though mass-produced beers still use corn and rice as an adjunct and inexpensive way to add sugars to the beer. He said enzymes artificially added to a grist now break down the sugars and add inexpensive carbohydrates to a beer.
Filtration and centrifuges get rid of the protein now. He said what Meyer and other American brewers were doing gave birth to mass-produced beers, which are less robust and less bitter than maltier original recipes.
Casper said historical records did not yield a specific recipe Meyer used, so he had to approximate and tinker with corn levels to get a pre-Prohibition style lager.
“We made seven barrels of this, which doesn't seem like a lot, but that's 14 kegs,” said Casper. “It's a brewing judges' style.”
“We filtered it to get that crystal clear, beautiful clarity out of it,” said Casper. "It's well balanced. It has a great body to it. It has a bitterness that just sticks around for a little bit then clears. It doesn't stick around and hang on the tongue too long. It does have a nice, grainy sweetness to it that kind of makes you want to have another sip. It has a long-lasting, thick white head that creates lacing on the glass every time you take a sip.”
Alcohol content is “just a smidge over 5%,” he said. Lagers can go up to 6%, so it’s on the heavier end of the style.
You can try a sip at the museum holiday open house from 5-8 p.m. Friday during Christmas Under the Dome and at Casper Brewing Company all day.
Casper said it’s likely he will continue making that recipe for purchase for some time and it will be sold at select restaurants and bars in Bloomington-Normal.
“It's amazing. It might be my next most favorite beer,” said Casper.
A portion of every beer sold will be donated back to the museum.
