Beer and Holiness

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Entrepreneur
A Profile of Luis Gordon

Somewhere in the furthest branches of the family tree there might have been gin but the fashionable homes of England awakened to a taste for sherry and by the middle of the 18^th Century Arthur Gordon had moved to Spain to satisfy this thirst.  A prosperous business was handed from Gordon to Gordon but the talent wore off in the 19^th Century and the business collapsed leaving Juan Gordon, Luis’ father, to start over with very little.

Luis was born, the tenth of fifteen children, in Cadiz in August, 1898 but his father’s import business failed, perhaps due to some chicanery of a competitor. The family moved around Spain during Luis’ formative years, definitively settling in Madrid in 1915 when Luis was 17.

Nothing is known of his university education which, most likely, took place in Madrid and concentrated on Industrial Engineering. In September, 1922, Luis enrolled in a graduate program at Ecole de Brasserie, Nancy, France.  The most prestigious brew school outside of Germany, it had been founded in 1893 as a department of the University of Nancy and specialized in the low temperature fermentation of beer popular in Germany (in comparison to high temperature fermentation in Great Britain).

Ecole de Brasserie, Class of 1923. Luis is in the front standing row, third from the left

His decision to study at Ecole de Brasserie was a perspicacious move on Luis’s part. He was the only foreigner in the program at a time when Spaniards were taking a new interest in beer. Although Germans drank 50 times more beer than Spaniards (in Liters/person) the demand in Spain was growing relentlessly. By 1920, the consumption of beer in Spain had already tripled, to 30 million liters, since the beginning of the century and was to increase by 30 million liters over the next 5 years and by another 30 million liters in the 5 years after that!

Consumption of Beer in Spain (Hl)

This demand was met by 46 Spanish breweries of which Mahou and Aguila were the top producers.

The basic ingredients of beer are water; a malted grain, such as barley, able to be fermented (i.e., converted into alcohol), a brewer’s yeast to produce the fermentation; and a flavoring, such as hops to offset the sweetness of the malt.

The first phase of beer brewing is malting the grain. The grains are made to germinate by soaking them in water, and are then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air. Malting grains develop the enzymes required to modify the grain's starches into sugars.

Luis had long known that malted grain was an indispensable ingredient in beer. At Ecole de Brasserie he learned its science; how the sugars – monosaccharide glucose, disaccharide maltose, trisaccharide maltotriose, maltodextrines and other enzymes, such asproteases, act together to break down the proteins in the grain into forms that can be used by yeast in the next phase of brewing. He studied the cultivation, selection and harvesting of grains, particularly barley. He learned the different methods of germination and drying, each resulting in variations in the taste of the beer. Most importantly, he learned how to produce a malt of consistently high quality.

Though based on science, malting was more of an art, an art at which Luis excelled, perhaps more than any other Spaniard of his time. Malting was practically unknown in Spain where there were two malting companies producing small amounts of malt of unpredictable quality. Most of the Spanish brewers imported their malt from Eastern Europe and the high cost of transportation cut into their margins.

Luis returned to Spain in the summer of 1923 with his Brew Master certificate and the new art of malt production. He had no difficulty convincing his father and his uncle to back him in a new venture supplying Spanish brewers with a local source of malt with a consistently high quality. In September, 1925 they formed Gordon y Ca. and began operating a malt processing factory in Ciempozuelos, an agricultural area to the south of Madrid. Luis was the heart and soul of the new company.  He worked assiduously with local farmers, demonstrating to them the best practices for growing barley (the preferred grain). The local population knew nothing of the malting process, so Luis had to explain to each employee what was expected of him. He designed the factory, supervised the production and traveled throughout the country to find customers.

Since the Gordon malt was locally produced, it cost significantly less than the Eastern European malts. Within a few years the factory at Ciempozuelos was producing 7,000 Kg per day working three shifts and, by 1930, almost all the Spanish breweries were purchasing their malt from Luis Gordon and his biggest problem was increasing production to meet the demand.

So where's the holiness?  Click here for the second part of this post.

This blog post is adapted from an article which can be found here.