It’s snowing gently in the gray morning light as Kyle Spears steps out the front door of Carillon Brewing Company. There’s an axe slung over his shoulder, because no beer is brewed at Carillon without fire, and there’s no fire unless Spears or fellow brewer Dan Lauro splits the wood for it. Their brew days begin around dawn with the thunk of the blade meeting the chopping block and the clatter of local ash, walnut, or osage wood falling asunder.
“Dan and I have come to the realization over the years that we’re actually fire-builders, and we just happen to brew beer in between tending fires,” jokes Spears, Carillon’s head brewer, as he piles wood onto the embers beneath the hot liquor tank to heat the day’s strike water. “We’re the only brewers I know who carry axes to work.”
Carillon Brewing is housed on the grounds of Carillon Historical Park, a living history museum near downtown Dayton, Ohio, that is home to one of the Wright brothers’ first planes and the tallest carillon bell tower in the state. The brewery opened in 2014 to recreate the brewing techniques of the area in 1850. Using an entirely gravity-fed, wood-fired, oak-fermented brewing system, Spears and Lauro are breathing life into methods of producing beer that fell out of use a century and a half ago. And perhaps more importantly, they’re making good beer in the process.
There’s no stainless steel inside Carillon Brewing. The period-correct building is full of warm wood and brick surfaces, and even at midday the light through the windows gets lost in the large space, something I’m reminded of every time I try to take action shots of the brewing process. There’s a constant clamor of activity—sourdough from a 40-year-old culture being folded and then baked in a wood-fired oven; fragrant, non-alcoholic ginger ale being boiled in a hearth; period-dressed staff waiting on tables—which serves as a reminder that the past wasn’t a sepia-toned photograph, but a vibrant moving picture.
Carillon’s large brick brewhouse contains multiple fireboxes that heat the embedded, open copper brewing vessels, while a complex internal flue system vents smoke to the chimney. At the top of the stair-step structure sits the hot liquor tank, and it’s here where the first fire of the morning gets lit. The fires at Carillon never truly go out, though. Even at night, embers survive deep in the ash bed of the main fireboxes, and Spears and Lauro coax these back to life each morning. A roaring wood fire will bring the roughly 100-gallon vat to strike temperature quickly, but presents a challenge when trying to hold that temperature.
“Most modern breweries have steam jackets or electric and you push a button and walk away,” says Lauro, while ladling hot water from the hot liquor tank to the open mash tun on the next tier down. “People ask how we do this [without modern controls], and there’s really no way to teach it. It’s a learned skill. You learn how to look at the fire and know whether or not it needs adjusting, or if you have too much fire in the box. As we’re pulling water out, there’s less water to heat, so the temperature goes up. It’s all about paying attention.”
As the strike water mixes with malt in the one-and-a-half-barrel mash tun, Spears stirs it in with a wooden mash rake. Eventually, the wort will be drained down to the boil kettle on the lowest tier and another fire will be lit beneath it.
Every step of the process is drenched in sensory input. The heat of the fires, the steam lifting aromas from the open vessels, and the resistance of the mash against the worn wooden paddle all give information to the brewers—information they might not be able to quantify—and influence how they approach each ensuing step.
That tactile interface is about more than just a publicity stunt or an old-fashioned gimmick for its own sake. After thousands of fires built and batches brewed, Spears and Lauro are brewing truly distinctive beer on this antiquated system. In 2020, their Porter won a silver medal at the Ohio Craft Brewers Cup. The judges had no idea it was “historical.”
“The fact that our Porter beat out other modern beers is finally some vindication that what we’re doing isn’t just cool because it’s unique or historic, but it’s also actually good beer. It makes me start to think we know what we’re doing,” Spears reflects. He pauses a moment, then smiles. “But I won’t let myself get too comfortable with that idea.”
Spears and Lauro didn’t start their careers as brewers. Both are trained historians who earned degrees in that field, and they never dreamed they would end up using those degrees to brew beer. Spears began working in the education department at Carillon Historical Park shortly before the brewery project started, and he asked to be a part of it because of his casual interest in craft beer. He became Carillon’s head brewer after founding brewer Tanya Brock departed for Fifth Street Brewpub across town in 2015. Spears and Brock had spent a couple years researching and establishing a brewery that was as historically accurate as they could make it.
“It has taken about eight years for me to finally start to admit that I can perhaps think of myself as both a legitimate working ‘living’ historian and a professional brewer,” says the quiet but clear-spoken Spears, who goes on to confess he’s dealt with imposter syndrome around both titles. He started college as an environmental science major, and switched to history late. Experiences like giving talks alongside Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver and Theresa McCulla (curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.) at Chicago’s Beer Culture Summit have been surreal for him.
“People ask how we do this [without modern controls], and there’s really no way to teach it. It’s a learned skill. You learn how to look at the fire and know whether or not it needs adjusting, or if you have too much fire in the box.”
“It still amazes me that people want my opinion about this stuff,” he admits.
Carillon’s staff and volunteers wear period-correct clothing while working, which sees Spears and Lauro in button-fly pants, loose plaid shirts, and suspenders. With his full beard and ponytail, axe in hand, Lauro looks every bit the part of a lumberjack or renaissance-fair reenactor. In reality, he’s more modern scholar than medieval squire. He defended his master’s thesis on the state of Japanese military intelligence at the outset of World War II while working at the brewery.
Because of their backgrounds, the Carillon brewers are able to approach the process as historians who brew beer rather than as brewers who enjoy history, ensuring they view the project with researchers’ commitment to veracity. They want Carillon to be more than just a tip of the hat to 19th-century Ale brewing, or as a side project to a modern production operation. They want to be as close to the real thing as possible.
“What does it mean to brew a historical beer?” asks Lauro, manually recirculating cloudy wort back into the mash tun with a copper ladle. “How many bottles have you seen on the shelf that say it’s a historical beer, or a Pre-Prohibition beer, but they’re brewing it on a modern system with modern methods? It takes people being in here and seeing this to understand that when we say ‘historically made,’ we mean ‘historically made.’”
There are several museum projects around the country that are seeking to preserve America’s brewing history by collecting breweriana artifacts and showcasing them in static displays. The purpose of a living history museum like Carillon, however, is to draw visitors into the tangible experience of another era. McCulla sees Carillon’s efforts to revive the past as a fascinating counterpoint to her own preservation work.
“What’s very interesting to me as a historian looking at Carillon is everything that surrounds the glass of beer,” says McCulla. “The physical work that is required, what it’s like to move around the brewing equipment, what it smells like and looks like, how hot it feels in there. It’s a kind of tactile experience of beer that surrounds the glass.”
This kind of historical immersion is starkly different from the work of carefully cataloging and maintaining objects from the past within the Smithsonian’s archives. McCulla offers a story about the long-handled homebrewing spoon former Brewers Association president and craft beer icon Charlie Papazian donated to the museum’s collection upon his retirement.
“It’s a wonderful object. You look at it and can see the use in it. The wood has been discolored from so many batches of beer, and you can sense this connection to the past, to Charlie, to his students,” recounts McCulla. As soon as it was placed into her care, however, it ceased to be an object of use; it instantly became a historical artifact. She recalls with a laugh when Papazian came to visit the collection months later and had to put on purple nitrile gloves in order to pick up his own spoon. It rests now behind glass.
“What’s very interesting to me as a historian looking at Carillon is everything that surrounds the glass of beer. The physical work that is required, what it’s like to move around the brewing equipment, what it smells like and looks like, how hot it feels in there. It’s a kind of tactile experience of beer that surrounds the glass.”
Carillon presents another way to experience beer history, even if total accuracy is not always possible. The brewery makes some minor concessions to modern technology (the use of an electric water pump to fill the hot liquor tank, for example). Still, McCulla downplays the potential tension between maintaining historical accuracy and brewing beer modern consumers will want to drink.
“I think any kind of idea of authenticity and perfect accuracy is fairly elusive,” she says. While there is value in trying to establish historical fact, she explains, it’s impossible to perfectly replicate in a living environment. More than the beer has changed: We have.
“The historian’s practice is to try to thoughtfully understand what kinds of contexts existed at a particular time,” McCulla says. “It’s not just the beer itself and how it tasted, but also the experience of the brewer coming from his home to the brewery and brewing there, and where the beer like that was enjoyed, and whom he was with. You can approach the idea of authenticity with a critical eye and find so much value in how hard Carillon is working to try to understand what beer was like in a particular time period.”
Mike Stein, beer historian and president of beer history consultancy Lost Lagers, is more succinct in his summary of the value of Carillon’s efforts: “Theory ain’t shit without practice.”
That practice is about more than just reviving historical brewing techniques. As Stein sees it, Carillon has the opportunity to shed light on America’s broken Ale brewing legacy, including recognizing the minority groups who contributed to that legacy before it was buried under the tide of Lager brewing in the late 19th century.
Dayton sits at the edge of the so-called German Triangle, a tract of the Midwest stretching from Cincinnati to Milwaukee to St. Louis, in which a large number of German immigrants settled during the mid 19th century. They brought with them a love of Lager and, often, the gumption to brew it on a large scale. By 1852, Lager was being brewed commercially in Dayton, and quickly overshadowed English Ale traditions here and elsewhere across the country. Lager would go on to dominate American brewing for a century, until the craft beer movement began to reverse that, beginning around 1980.
While Carillon originally planned to brew Lager and condition it in underground cellars, the brewery’s proximity to the Great Miami River cutting through Dayton prevented this. When they started to dig, they hit groundwater just a few feet down. From there, it was clear they would be brewing Ale.
“We’re replicating 1850, not 1852,” says Spears. “We’re not set up for telling the story of Lager.”
As Stein says, Lager changed the social-historical narrative of brewing on this continent. “Our Ale legacy is so much greater than this,” he explains. “Writers have sorely neglected the strong nuance of West African brewing traditions which were in America when the United States was still a colony. The shot in the arm for American beer history hopefully now comes with the understanding that America’s first Ale brewers—women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, enslaved West Africans in the Virginia Colony, and so many others—are so often left in the footnotes of American history, if they’re even on the page at all. The erasure of many early Ale brewers, even at the hands of Lager brewers’ marketing, is atrocious and almost always upholds the narrative of white supremacy.”
Carillon’s revival of that broken Ale legacy runs the spectrum from Porter, the first industrialized beer style, to more obscure recreations that point to the role of female homebrewers in early America. The recipe for its Coriander Ale was found in a book on household management called Receipts for the Husbandman and Housewife published in Cincinnati in 1831. The recipe was just listed as “Another Way to Brew Ale” and called for pale malt, cane sugar, and hops, with vague instructions like “boil it to a color.” The recipe also called for coriander seeds and, curiously, “capsica” (chili pepper). Carillon’s rendition carries some noticeable earthy heat.
“The shot in the arm for American beer history hopefully now comes with the understanding that America’s first Ale brewers—women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, enslaved West Africans in the Virginia colony, and so many others—are so often left in the footnotes of American history, if they’re even on the page at all.”
“People think about history as food or beer being bland, but they were brewing with fun ingredients just like brewers are today,” says Spears. “A few years ago I was reading a manual from London from 1830 listing almost the same recipe [as our Coriander Ale]. It must have been a popular beer for homebrewing at that time.”
Similarly, Carillon’s Squash Ale, Beet Ale, and Ginger Pale Ale pay homage to beers brewed by female homebrewers in early America. Its Spruce Ale allows us to look at early indigenous brewing traditions. When French explorer Jacques Cartier wintered with his men near modern-day Quebec City in the winter of 1535–36, a number of them came down with scurvy, due to a lack of vitamin C in their diet, and several died. Dom Agaya, son of an Iroquois chief, instructed them to make a tea by boiling conifer tips such as spruce, which provided the needed nutrient. The French turned this into an alcoholic beer shortly after. By the 19th century, the British navy was producing a Spruce Beer for this purpose for its North American troops.
At over 9% ABV, Carillon’s Spruce Ale is more a comfort to the soul than a cure for the body, but it does allow for conversations around the plant knowledge possessed by indigenous North Americans, and the early influence of that knowledge on at least one brewing tradition.
Reaching the entrance of Carillon Brewing involves passing the sheltered stack of firewood and the scarred chopping block, and stepping through the heavy door means entering a more sensory-rich world than what exists in most modern taprooms. The monolithic brick brewhouse is the first sight that greets you, as well as a labyrinth of oak barrels. Wood surfaces are everywhere, from pale to burnished, rough to worn. Comforting smoke permeates the air, and there’s a room-filling warmth from the multiple fires, a warmth you feel in your spirit as much as your skin. After a few moments to take it all in, other details emerge depending on the time of day or day of the week—fresh ginger being chopped for the popular Ginger Pale Ale, hops hitting the boiling wort in the open kettle, spent-grain sourdough being pulled from the oven.
Spears and Lauro feel it’s critical their beers are enjoyed here, in this building. Carillon doesn’t package its beers at all, and it doesn’t distribute kegs to draft accounts. Part of this policy is meant to maintain the educational intent of the museum, but part is because these beers are best understood in context. While Carillon’s beers are delicious, they don’t always taste the way modern palates would expect, and many bear the unmistakable rusticity of their creation.
“We are a museum. The entire purpose of creating this was to experience these historically brewed beers within this environment we’ve created for it, and get a sense of the time period and place,” explains Spears from the brew deck, 15 feet above the dining-room floor. “That gets totally lost if our beers are being served at a modern bar where the bartenders might not be well versed in how our beers are made. We can try to explain this place all we want, but unless you see it, you don’t really understand what we’re doing.”
Lauro sees the visceral experience of both brewing beer at Carillon and appreciating it within the building as satisfying the same need that has driven the modern popularity of vinyl records. You can hear the warm crackle of the needle in Carillon’s beers, and it awakens us to something we might otherwise miss in modern brewing.
Drinking in Carillon’s restaurant or in its expansive beer garden shaded by massive sycamores provides the best way to appreciate its beer, but also gives the brewers the chance to interact with customers and explain what’s happening around them.
“Even people coming in here and seeing it and drinking our beers sometimes have a hard time believing we actually make it on the equipment they can see,” says Spears. “I didn’t realize how much I would fall in love with the informal education side of museum work until I started doing this.”
Recreating the past would be of only academic interest if the past didn’t taste good. Carillon has proven that it did—but it has taken a lot of trial and error to convey the deliciousness of the 19th century in the 21st.
With fermentation taking place entirely in wood at ambient temperatures, the risk of infection in Carillon’s beers is always present. It’s something the brewers monitor constantly.
“We are a museum. The entire purpose of creating this was to experience these historically brewed beers within this environment we’ve created for it, and get a sense of the time period and place. That gets totally lost if our beers are being served at a modern bar where the bartenders might not be well versed in how our beers are made. We can try to explain this place all we want, but unless you see it, you don’t really understand what we’re doing.”
“There isn’t a day of the week we don’t have our noses in the fermenters, paranoid about what smells are in there,” says Lauro. “The fermenters are living environments. It’s not stainless steel, and we already know we have several forms of Brettanomyces in here. Of course it’s going to get into what we do. We’ll get a little bit of that Brett character coming through in some beers, especially depending on the time of year.”
Carillon brews about 300 barrels of beer per year, and it turns that beer over before the slow-acting Brett can impact the flavor much. In the case of its Berliner Weisse, however, some sourness from Lactobacillus bacteria and some subtle Brett funk are desirable. Aside from Ale yeast for primary fermentation, Spears and Lauro don’t pitch either into the beer. They have a dedicated barrel for fermenting this beer with its own spontaneous resident culture, serving as a 19th-century “funk tank” of sorts. Through careful management, they’ve been able to keep the fermentations of the other beers relatively clean.
Lauro made use of much of the slow-down period during the early days of the pandemic by analyzing brewhouse procedures to fine-tune Carillon’s recipes. Relatively simple processes—like determining exact liquid volumes of vessels and utensils, perfecting malt milling, and improving lautering procedures—yielded significant efficiency and quality improvements. Carillon is now hitting 75–80% mash efficiency, up from about 50%, which has reduced malt usage by close to 30%. More importantly, the beer is more consistent.
Carillon gets most of its malt from Riverbend Malt House in Asheville, North Carolina, which works largely with heritage and heirloom grains. The brewers use its Southern Select pale blend as their primary base malt, but turn another Riverbend malt into their own roasted crystal malt in-house. They soak Riverbend’s 6-row Pilsner malt overnight in their kettle, then bring it up to mash temperature the next day to convert its starches into sugar within the grain, then load it onto sheet trays and put it into the wood-fired baking oven to dry it out and crystalize those sugars. Attempts to make darker roasted malts have not gone quite as well, as the temperatures required have led to accidental combustion of the malt and required hand-cranking a jury-rigged drum roaster for hours.
“I accidentally smoked everyone out of our beer garden a year ago when I walked away from a tray of malt I thought was cooling down,” says Lauro with a laugh.
While the experiment led to some successes, Spears explains that if doing something themselves doesn’t produce quality beer, they’ll abandon a process in favor of quality. The best example of this isn’t an ingredient that goes into the beer, but the fuel to brew it.
Carillon Historical Park sits on 165 acres on a partially wooded glacial moraine from the last ice age, and the brewery originally planned to process all its firewood from fallen timber on the property.
“Wood that hasn’t been properly seasoned [dried] is very difficult to brew with, it turns out,” says Spears. “We would end up with 15-hour brew days because it took so long to get the fires hot enough. Now we get it from a local arborist, and our brew days are down to seven or eight hours.”
That’s seven-to-eight hours of brewing beer the hard way, so to speak—chopping wood, transferring hot coals from one firebox to another with a shovel, carrying baskets of milled grain up the stairs to the mash tun, and sparging by hand. When that sparging is done, every bit of wet grain is scooped back out by hand, then carried back down the stairs in buckets. Brewing 1850 beer in 2021 isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
“These beers tell different stories,” reflects Lauro as the copper boil kettle begins to roil above a blazing fire. “I think the connecting story is that beer wasn’t just for fun in the past. It had a place in our lives as a food source and it was culturally significant. Beer and the culture surrounding it is part of human existence.”
If the story Carillon’s beer is telling ties into the broader story of human history, it’s appropriate that Spears and Lauro are fire-builders, echoing a distant time when flame first allowed humanity to envision a new future full of possibilities. As the snow falls outside and gusts of chill air enter each time the front door is opened, the fires of Carillon Brewing Company offer a bolstering warmth, and a light to illuminate a hidden past that’s worth preserving.
Words + PhotosDavid Nilsen
