OnTap Magazine

24 | Winter 2025 | ontapmag.co.za ed into the final beer, making it smell your clothes after a night around the campfire. In the UK, however, brewers were doing it differently. As early as 1642 we know that some were using coke as fuel, which pro- duced far less smoke and offered a more even heat. Around the same time a series of patents were applied for by inventors of ‘in- direct heat kilns’, in which the air was heat- ed separately to the grain and then blown over it. The first was in 1635 by a Cornish lord called Sir Nicholas Halse, whose patent was ‘for the dryinge of mault and hops with seacole, turffe, or any other fewell, without touching of smoake’. Sir Halse seems a little eccentric, writing numerous letters to King James I and then Charles I advising them on their tax regime and foreign policy, despite having abso- lutely no experience in either field. He was, however, rather prescient about the impact of his invention. He claimed that his new kilning method would revolutionise sever- al other industries and processes: ‘baking, boyling, roasting, starchinge, and dryinge of lynnen, all at one and the same tyme and with one fyre’. Later versions of such indi- rect fire kilns did indeed go on to take over kitchens around the world – it’s the principle behind the fan oven. Now, these paler and less smoky malts were expensive to produce, so most brew- eries were still making (and selling millions of barrels of) Porter using cheaper grains when Sedlmeyer and Dreher came to the UK. But some of the breweries they visit- ed were making a name for themselves by making pale and remarkably clear beers with these new malts – breweries like Bur- ton-on-Trent’s Bass and Allsopp. These were the original India Pale Ales, a style we’ll dig into later, and they opened Sedl- mayr and Drehers eyes to the possibility of a paler, brighter and lighter style of beer on the continent. On the return to their respective brewer- ies, they began building what they called ‘British kilns’ to produce their own pale malt. Both succeeded in creating a lighter, more consistent malt, which they put into use immediately. In Vienna, Dreher called his the er…Vienna lager, but in Munich Spaten simply changed up the recipe for its Märzen, a style brewed in spring in huge quantities to ensure there was plenty of beer in the cellars over summer. The beer was such a hit at the 1841 Oktoberfest that it became a signature style mimicked by countless breweries around Bohemia. Gabriel Senior sadly never saw the re- lease of this beer. He died suddenly in 1839, leaving the brewery to his two sons. Gabri- el Junior bought his brother Josef out and took the incredible modernisation of his brewery to new heights – as he put it him- self, he didn’t want to leave any part of the brewing process to ‘chance’. In 1844 Spaten became the first non-UK brewery to install a steam engine, and just under 30 years later he made his greatest contribution to the world by commissioning the world’s first (viable compressed gas) fridge. You read that right. The first ever fridge was invented to keep beer cold – so next time someone asks why your food fridge is full of beer, ask them why their beer fridge is full of food. IT’S GETTING COLD IN HERE The story is, inevitably, a little more compli- cated. Bavaria gets pretty warm in summer, but in a bizarre twist of nature, the local yeasts that fermented the region’s beers were ‘lager yeasts’, a specific species that prefers to work at no more than 12C. This meant brewing stopped between April and September, because infections in the beer were too common. New beers still needed to be lagered, however, so those made in autumn, winter and spring were matured in cool, natural caves or man- made cellars beneath the breweries. Even this wasn’t enough in summer though: la- bourers had to harvest ice from lakes, rivers and mountains during the winter and lug themdown into the caves ready tomaintain the cool temperatures. This was laborious and expensive work, with ever-growing de- mand and the hanging threat that if there was a warm winter, there might be no ice at all. Brewers had long looked for a solution, but while nature makes ice production look pretty easy, it was beyond human ingenui- ty. The idea of doing it on the scale that a commercial brewery might need was even more far fetched. That changed in the early 19th century, when scientists discovered how to liquify gases, and found that doing so cooled the air around them. Pretty quickly, entrepre- neurial men began to play around with the idea. The problem was that these amateur fridges were incredibly dangerous, because they pressurised highly volatile gases: that is to say, gases that boil and turn to gas at low temperatures. A clue to why you need to be careful with a volatile gas is in the name. Leaks were common in these ma- chines, and if you breathed in some of the early gases used, ones like Chloromethyl, it might be the last thing you do. Imagine that, but in a machine cooling miles of cel- lars beneath a European capital, and you have the makings of an Age of Enlighten- ment Jerry Bruckheimer movie. So the principle of refrigeration was established before Gabriel Junior came along, but no one had quite worked out how to make one not destined to kill some- one. Gabriel Junior liked to think of himself as an engineer, but he needed a real one to solve this problem, and that’s what he found in Professor Carl Von Linde of the Munich Polytechnic. Linde had been pub- lishing papers on refrigeration for a few years, and was looking to solve the two key issues: the dangerous gas involved, and the fact that gases under pressure love to leak. He landed on methyl ether, which while flammable wasn’t as deadly, and designed unique seals to keep the gas where it was supposed to be. The next hurdle was to prove it worked in practice, which is where Gabriel Junior came in. In the early 1870s he approached Linde and offered to pay for the construc- tion of Linde’s system in the caves under Spaten. Linde agreed, and along with sev- eral of his students started experimenting on-site with systems capable of cooling the brewery cellar. By 1873 Linde had received a patent for a methyl ether refrigeration system, which he showed off at the Vien- nese Brewers Conferences that year. In the meantime, a company in Augsburg started construction on the four-tonne machine. It was installed that year…and leaked. Back at the drawing board, Linde re- placed his mercury sealant with glycerine and the methyl ether with ammonia. He received a new patent in 1876 and installed a machine that year at Dreher’s brewery. Amazingly, the drawings handed in with the application show that Sedlmayr him- self had a hand in the design. This time the machine worked perfectly, and it was used at the Dreher brewery right up until 1908. Despite this success, Linde kept refining his machine and installed a third version back at Spaten, where it produced 480 tonnes of ice a day for the cellar, while also providing cold water to cool the wort to the chilly 12C that the yeast liked. Linde’s system was a game changer, for Spaten, for brewing and for his own busi- ness endeavours. He gave up teaching in 1879 to focus on running a company that built them, and a decade later he’d sold 747 machines. Some of the names on his early customer list will be familiar – includ- ing Guinness, Heineken and Carlsberg. Not only did refrigeration remove the reliance on foraged ice, it allowed any brewery with a Linde system – or one of the many imita- tions – to brew year round safely for the first time in history. It effectively meant the end of seasonal brewing, a doctrine brewers had followed for centuries. It wasn’t just brewers that adopted this new technology, either. Slaughter houses, ice suppliers, dairies and chocolate facto- ries all lined up for Lindemachines. He even made bespoke designs for ice rinks and an air cooling system for a hotel in Kolkata, In- dia. Linde continued to create new designs too, applying his technology to smaller fridges for ships and railroad cars, which went on to inspire the very fridges you use at home. The impact of those is, of course, inestimable. It changed the way we stored, cooked and consumed food at home, and it’s hard to envisage a modern home with- out this incredible invention that can be traced directly back to Spaten.