Alas, no one ever devised a palatable milk beer, possibly because brewers found it a lot easier to turn a tap than yank an udder. But they came pretty close with milk stout.
Creamy, wholesome and chocolaty as that glass of Nesquik you used to dunk your Oreos into, milk stout - aka cream stout or sweet stout - seemingly comes straight from the dairy. Yet it contains not an ounce of moo-juice.
The story behind its name goes back even earlier than those grand days of 19th-century milk-and-beer experimentation.
It stems from the age-old practice of adding sugar to beer to create a festive punch or to take the edge off overly tart or sour beer. Yellowed texts speak of sweetening beer with honey or nectar.
In an 1869 treatise, "Cups and their Customs" (Roberts and Porter), there is a description of the "Freemasons Cup," which consisted of a pint of Scotch ale, a pint of mild, a half-pint of brandy, a pint of sherry and a half-pound of sugar. The practice lives even today, in the small children who stir teaspoons of sugar into their low-alcohol faro at Brussels' famed café À La Mort Subite.
Sugar, however, had another benefit: added calories. Medical literature of the 19th century is filled with advice to feed sweetened beer - especially dark, rich stout - to the pale and sickly. Whether the patient had tuberculosis or was simply pregnant, those extra pounds couldn't hurt; if nothing else, the booze certainly dulled the pain.
From that standpoint, Chevallier hardly sounds like a crackpot. Indeed, it was only a matter of time till someone wondered: If brewing beer with milk is out of the question, what if you simply added the essence of milk?
The essence, these deep thinkers suggested, is lactose, or milk sugar.
