Upper Hudson Valley Beer

Project.

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 2010, Kingston, Ontario–based beer blogger Alan McLeod stumbled across an advertisement in Newfoundland’s Public Ledger of October 12, 1847. The ad listed a number of products for sale by Clift, Wood & Co.—coffee, tobacco, candles and Albany ale. What exactly was Albany ale? Shortly thereafter, Craig Gravina, a native of Albany and beer blogger in his own right, had joined Alan in a beery quest for the answer to that question.

The question took them on a journey through the history of New York spanning over four hundred years, from the arrival of the first Dutch explorers to the twenty-first century, and it developed into an international research endeavor dubbed the Albany Ale Project. Nearly five years later, the duo has begun piecing together the history of brewing, not just in Albany, but also the Upper Hudson Valley, laying the foundation to explore the entirety of brewing in New York State and, eventually, the country.

It became clear to the duo, quite early on, that beer does not exist in a bubble, and therefore, an account of its history in the Upper Hudson Valley can’t simply be a story of beer. It has to be a larger narrative than that. It has to be an overall history—a cultural, social and economic history of Albany and the Upper Hudson seen through amber-colored glasses. The success and failure of the brewing industry was directly affected by the world it occupied and still occupies. War, climate, law, ethnicity and a myriad of—what might be considered unrelated—factors in fact give context to the story of Upper Hudson Valley beer.

Although this book delves rather deep into the brewing heritage of the Upper Hudson Valley, it would be impossible to include every brew house and brewery in the nearly seven hundred square miles this book covers. Every hamlet and village between Canajoharie and Hoosick and Saratoga Springs to Kingston most likely had some sort of brewing establishment. But there are simply not enough pages to include them all.

1

THE DUTCH AND NEW NETHERLAND IN THE 1600S

The European newcomers who came from across the Atlantic in the early 1600s had a taste for beer. It should not come as any surprise as all European communities, and especially oceangoing crews, depended on a regular supply of grain-based drinks as a safe and nutritious supply of fluid. Water was simply too unhealthy to rely on. As soon as land was reached, personal or communal ale brewing would have been one of the first activities to be undertaken. With the stabilization of the settlement, personal brewing turned to commercial as small taverns were established, which were in turn followed by larger stand-alone breweries.

Brewing became a cornerstone of society. Some of the families who founded the first commercial breweries in the region passed the skill and wealth created on for generations, turning local indigenous hops and surplus wheat sown for export into small empires and, eventually, political power. Striking an alliance with the Mohawk Nation, the Dutch in the Upper Hudson built themselves security for over four decades until conflict between global empires saw the community pass from Dutch to English control. Rather than be overrun by settlers with other tongues and other customs as might have been expected, the Dutch community was left largely to itself, protected by treaties and accords as well as its relative isolation. As the seventeenth century came to a close, despite dangers from New France to the north, the wheat-brewing culture of the Dutch was expanding in geography and population.

DUTCH DRINKING HABITS IN THE EARLY 1600S

The Dutch who settled the Upper Hudson were drinkers and had been for centuries. The role of beer was central to the culture with brewing processes in the early 1600s not being that different from those of the mid-1400s. The historian Richard Unger describes the years 1450 to 1650 as the golden age of Dutch brewing. In 1600, the citizens of Amsterdam drank an average of over 250 liters of beer annually. Skilled workers and laborers drank more. Sailors in the late 1500s were allotted 4 liters of beer per day. The Dutch brewed with wheat, barley, oats and rye, with wheat being the most prized and therefore most expensive. The taxation of beer was a major source of revenue for the state. Dutch control of northern European shipping trade routes was necessary to protect its need to feed its demand for imported grain brought in from as near as France and as far as the Baltic. Much of that grain was destined for the brewing trade.

THE VOYAGE OF THE HALF MOON

In 1609, when the Half Moon, commanded by Henry Hudson, entered the mouth of the river that would one day bear his name, it found itself in a busy, populated valley. The river valley and the shores and islands around the mouth were the home to many communities and a number of peoples who spoke a number of related Algonquian languages. They were known as the Lenapes to the south and the Mahicans to the north. The Mahicans named the great river on which they traveled Mahicanituck and what would later become Albany was a stronghold.

The diary of Robert Jeut, one of Hudson’s crewmen, describes interactions with these local communities that ranged from the murderous to the convivial. On September 20, 1609, Jeut states that Hudson wanted to determine whether the chiefs of the area of Albany had any treachery in them. He gave them so much wine and aqua vitae that they were all merry, even though the alcohol was strange to his guests. Two days later, the Mahicans returned with gifts of wampum belts as well as a platter of venison. Things appeared to be going well. On the Half Moon’s way south, however, a battle with a community south of the Catskills broke out on October 2, during which the Dutch and English crew killed a number of men with muskets, swords and even a small cannon called a falcon. By the fifth, the Half Moon was on the Atlantic Ocean returning to Europe.

The two episodes encapsulated the nature of the cultural clash between the European intruders and the local communities. For almost two centuries to come, conflict as well as alliance marked the relationship between them, as did alcohol. This first meeting introduced the people of the Upper Hudson to strong drink, an aspect of their lives that would be lived there for centuries to come. For better or worse, the session of September 20 was also somewhat ironic for Hudson, who, in 1611, was left to die by his own treacherous men on a desolate Arctic sea. His mutinous crew celebrated their liberation from Hudson by drinking his private store of casked strong ale before dashing back home to England.

Cultural and political clash would follow Hudson’s return to Europe as others retraced his route to find the rare woods, minerals and, most importantly, lands fit for the growing of grain. Hudson’s voyage was under Dutch patronage and his discoveries bestowed a claim that the Netherlands acted on as part of their throwing off of Spanish rule in the first quarter of the 1600s. At its height, this colony, named Nieuw-Nederland, would stretch from southern Delaware to eastern New York. The newly independent Netherlands had recently thrown off the yoke of their Spanish imperial overlords and was entering a century of power based on global trade, naval power and personal as well as commercial liberty. Culturally, the Dutch sat on the north–south border of the beer-wine line as well as on the Catholic-Protestant divide. Their adventures in the western hemisphere built on their control of the Baltic shipping trade and their reach from Indonesia to the Caribbean. They were building an empire that would last until the mid-1900s.

1620S AND 1630S

Development of the Hudson by the Dutch did not happen all at once. The short-lived New Netherland Company sought to create a foothold by the establishment of Fort Nassau near Albany on an island a few leagues south of the place where the Mohawk River joined the Hudson. Its more successful rival, the West India Company, gained a charter for trade and colonization of the region in 1621. Conflicting interests between two goals—the promotion of the fur trade with existing nations native to the valley or repopulation with European farmers—would impact the efforts of the West India Company. In addition to provisioning the fur traders, however, the opportunity to replace the nation’s dependency on foreign imports of staples, including wheat, was too great to ignore. In 1624–25, ships loaded with livestock, tools, settlers and seed left the Netherlands to cross the ocean for the new lands.

From their initial settlement in New Amsterdam (now Manhattan) in 1613, the Dutch laid claim to most of what is modern Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, parts of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, as well as all of New York. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts & Special Collections.

Success did not come immediately. In the fall of 1626, the Wapen van Amsterdam returned to the Netherlands with a cargo of unusual plants, rare woods and valuable furs. In 1627, returning ships conveyed many colonists abandoning the project. The plan for settlement was too restrictive, too focused on the fur trade. Colonists were at first barred from competing with trades established in the Netherlands, like weaving. A group of the directors of the West India Company led by Kiliaen van Rensselaer advocated that the success of the colony depended on private investment as well as allowing the colonists the freedom to maximize their own fortunes through the pursuit of individual production. The two sides of the dispute would affect development of New Netherland at Albany for decades.

The merchant mark of Kilean van Rensselaer. Public domain image.

Van Rensselaer also faced the reality that the colony was not becoming populated with his own countrymen. Many languages, nationalities and races were represented in the settlers. What they had in common was the desire for adventure and advantage. One study has suggested that only 50 percent of colonists were originally from the Netherlands. The rest were a mix of northwestern Europeans. The mixed population brought with it a northern European taste for beer that was fed by trade and familiar with both imported beers as well as local variants. It is also reasonable to expect that they would have been used to the upper end of consumption levels that have been explored by the historian Richard Unger.

The most successful of the settlements in the young colony developed roughly 150 miles north of the mouth of the Hudson River. It sat near the farthest point of Henry Hudson’s explorations, just south of where it is joined by its tributary the Mohawk River at what is now Albany, New York. Fort Orange was built where the rivers met as a small outpost and trading site in 1624. The fort—and all its initial thirty inhabitants—fell under the control of the West India Company–appointed director general of the New Netherland colony. They were not alone, as surrounding the fort on all sides for twenty-four square miles was the patroonship of Rensselaerwijck. Its inhabitants, materials and businesses fell under the separate authority of one single man, the patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer. Within that zone, certain free colonists were able to exploit resources and trade more as they saw fit compared to those in the fort.

In response to attacks from Algonquian nations, the Dutch formed an alliance with a more northwestern people, the Mohawk Nation, which had defeated its neighbors the Mahicans in 1628. They formed an alliance with the colonial Dutch that provided relative peace locally as well as secure access to the hinterland of the continent that would rival other routes controlled by France and Spain. As this alliance grew in strength and trust, by the early 1630s, Kiliaen van Rensselaer acted on his own belief, and the large groups of Dutch settlers began traveling up the Hudson. With their arrival, tensions between the West India Company director general and the patroon grew, due in large part to different goals and uncertain limits of authority.

Despite the clear generosity of life afforded the local inhabitants, the grain-growing, malting and brewing capacity of the Dutch in the Upper Hudson appears to have been greater than simply what was needed to supply local demand. The Albany area was a huge supplier of grain—primarily wheat—and was being developed as a breadbasket supplying New Netherland as well as Dutch interests elsewhere. The colony exported wheat back to the homeland as early as 1626.

From the 1630s, breweries were built to take advantage of this supply. These were not settlers simply making beer for personal consumption, either. This more formal brewing was in addition to household brewing, and all were both regulated and taxed. The first individual to brew in Rensselaerwijck under the authority of the patroon Van Rensselaer was Jacob Albertsen Planck, who was authorized in 1632 at his own expense and risk and full charge…[to] brew beer to be sold to the men of the Company or to the savages, or do otherwise therewith as he shall think fit.

With the establishment of licensed formal commercial breweries, the colony both founded a commercial industry and provided itself with another level of self-sufficiency and security.

1640S AND 1650S

Within a few years, a greater number of details related to brewing are recorded. In 1643,