By the summer of 1867, Sweden knew hard times were coming. It had rained every day that year and the summer was cold – worse even than the awful summer before. The harvests failed. Food prices rose. People rioted. Priests advised their parishioners to eke out what little they had by mixing bark into their bread and eating heather and roots. But if food was scarce, so too was another staple: vodka. In the 19th century, Swedes were notoriously heavy drinkers. They liked their alcohol strong and in large measures. They made their vodka from grain or potatoes, but now there was neither. Keen to ease the nation’s suffering, Sten Stenberg began to experiment with something Sweden had in plenty: lichens.
IF NECESSITY is the mother of invention then there’s no one more inventive than a drinker deprived of drink. In the 19th century, Sweden’s alcohol consumption was huge and the country was dotted with distilleries. Small or large, legal or not, they fed barley, rye or potatoes in one end and piped vodka out of the other. Then in 1867, disaster struck. The entire country’s crops failed and there was nothing to distil. Well, not quite nothing – there were always lichens.
On the face of it, lichens are an unpromising source of alcohol. Some are little more than crusty scabs on rocks or roof tiles, while others form crunchy carpets across the northern tundra. Yet they have always had their uses, in traditional medicine, for instance, or as a source of colourful dyes. And many are edible. In the far north, reindeer thrive on a diet of renlav or reindeer “moss”, a luxuriant lichen with slender, branching stalks. Taking their cue from the reindeer, farmers collected the stuff as feed for their cattle in winter. And when times were really bad, they ate lichens themselves. Some bulked out their bread with it, others made a sort of porridge. The more ingenious even made what passed for cheese by boiling one sort of lichen with milk. And with a little practice, a lot of the right lichen and some suitable apparatus, you could even make alcohol.
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When the harvest failed in 1867, Sten Stenberg’s thoughts turned to lichens. Stenberg was not a botanist, but a professor of chemistry at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He had heard rumours that a few resourceful countryfolk were running their stills on lichens. Maybe this was the answer to a distiller’s prayers, he thought. Lichens were abundant, they flourished in the wet weather, and they were free.
In parts of the far north, lichens had long been used to make beer. During his travels in Siberia in the 1730s, the German naturalist Johann Gmelin discovered that monks at the monastery of Ussolka used lichens in place of hops. “It tasted exactly like that made with hops,” wrote Gmelin, “but it was more intoxicating.” It took a Frenchman, however, to turn lichens into brandy, an innovation attributed to Roy de Tonnerre at the start of the 19th century. By the 1860s, a few Swedes had adapted the French technique to make vodka from local lichens. But Stenberg was thinking bigger. Could lichen vodka be made on a scale that would satisfy the nation’s needs?
“Lichens were abundant, they flourished in the wet and they were free”
Stenberg wrote to churchwardens and country doctors around Sweden asking what they knew about the local lichens and their uses. He spent the autumn travelling around the countryside to see where the best lichens grew and how plentiful they were. One of the most abundant was reindeer moss (Cladina rangiferina), which seemed to thrive even where little else would grow. On the granite hills around Stockholm it grew on bare rock. In thick woodland it grew in small clumps. It did well among the sphagnum mosses of bogs, and positively flourished where forests had been felled or burnt, places “where no other plant life could find nourishment and be happy”. In parts of Lapland, it formed deep carpets across the landscape. “You could cover 2 to 3 miles over the fields and see only this lichen, as if the fields were covered in snow,” wrote Stenberg.
Convinced there was enough lichen to feed a considerable number of stills, Stenberg began to experiment. The key ingredient in making any liquor is sugar, which is fermented by adding yeast. The resulting alcoholic broth is then distilled one or more times to extract as much pure alcohol as possible. First, however, you need a source of sugar. Grains and potatoes are packed with starch, which can be broken down into fermentable sugars by crushing, heating and malting. Lichens, not plants but an association between a fungus and an alga, are chemically quite different. But as Stenberg discovered, they are a surprisingly good source of sugar.
The bulk of lichen is fungus, the walls of which are made of polysaccharides and hemicelluloses that can be broken down into glucose. Unfortunately, it takes something more than grinding and heating to release the glucose: acid. Stenberg found that if he boiled up clean, dry lichen with sulphuric or nitric acid for four or five hours, as much as 67 per cent of the weight of the lichen was turned into glucose, an astonishingly high rate of conversion. All he had to do then was neutralise the acid broth with chalk and add a large helping of baker’s yeast.
The new year brought no relief to the people of Sweden. The year of rain was followed by a year of drought. In some regions there was nothing to eat, and tens of thousands left for America. Stenberg laboured on. In May he installed himself at a friend’s distillery at nearby Roslagstull and began to fine-tune his methods. Almost every day for three months, Stenberg began a new batch of lichen vodka. He varied the proportions of the lichen, water, acid and lime. He tried boiling the broth for different lengths of time and he played about with the fermentation time, monitoring and measuring at every stage until he found the best combination. Eventually he had a 22-step process that gave him half a litre of 50 per cent vodka for every kilogram of lichen.
It was alcohol. But was it drinkable? Most lichen vodka “has a taste that reminds me of genever [Dutch gin]”, wrote Stenberg. “But that’s mainly because of the twigs and pine cones that are almost always found with the lichen.” Lichens from bogs were better because there were no pines. “Then it doesn’t taste like gin but has a mild almond flavour.”
Later that year, when Stenberg published a manual for distillers prepared to give lichens a try, he suggested that the best way to ensure their product had the taste Swedes liked – that is, as little taste as possible – was to employ someone to pick over each batch of lichen and remove every offending twig, cone and needle. It was tedious and time-consuming, but at least the vodka wouldn’t taste like gin.
Stenberg was not only concerned about the taste. He knew that if every distiller rushed off to gather lichens, they might destroy this new source of alcohol. Reindeer, he pointed out, grazed only the upper parts of renlav, and what they left behind soon grew back. When farmers raked lichens into heaps for their cattle, however, they ripped them off at ground level, and they did not recover. “Harvesting should always be done by hand,” he warned. Collectors should tread carefully to avoid crushing the lichens underfoot, and they should always leave some untouched, perhaps a quarter or more. Then, within a few years, the whole area would be covered once more.
In the event, he needn’t have worried. Like lichen bread or lichen porridge, lichen vodka was only for the desperate. “This was a really bad time. The need for alcohol was so strong, people simply had to find another source,” says Kenneth M. Persson of the University of Lund. But lichens were awkward to collect and harder to process than grain or potatoes. “When the harvests improved again,” says Persson, “distillers lost interest.”