I’ll forgive myself for never having heard of 961 Beer, because its products are apparently not yet on sale in the UK. But they ARE available in Hong Kong – and 961 Lager has just been declared the best lager in the city, after the blind tasting by me and 11 other judges I blogged about last month.

Those of you with an encyclopediac knowledge of international dialling codes will recognise 961 as Lebanon: the brewery, based in the village of Mazraat Yachoua, six miles or so north-east of Beirut, is now six years old and claims (I’m sure it’s true) to be the only microbrewery in the entire Arab world. It triumphed over 38 competitors in the lager category at the 2012 Hong Kong International Beer Awards, suggesting strongly that founder Mazen Hajjar, who started the operation in his kitchen, knows what he is doing.

British winners were BrewDog, which came top in the Amber Ale category with 5am Saint; Saltaire, which took the Stout first prize, with Triple Chocoholic; Little Valley, from Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, in the Organic category with Python IPA; and in the “British Style Ale” category, Strong Suffolk from Greene King. That wouldn’t be my personal first choice for a “British Style Ale”: I’ve always had a problem with Strong Suffolk, it’s a beer I really want to like, because of the almost unique way it’s made, by blending an aged 5X old ale with a younger Burton Ale, and yet every time I try it I go away underimpressed. However, I’m glad it won, simply because I hope it encourages Greene King to carry on brewing 5X.

Pacific Coast American craft brewers also swept up four of the prizes, a sign of the boom in imports of microbrewed beers from the West Coast US to Hong Kong in the past 12 to 18 months. The Californian North Coast Brewing’s Scrimshaw took the Pilsner prize, Rogue of Oregon won both the Pale Ale category, for its Chatoe OREgasmic Ale, and the Brown Ale category, with its Hazelnut Brown Nectar, and another Californian operator, Mendocino Brewing, had the top Bock with Eye of the Hawk.

Despite strong competition from American craft brewers, the “Belgian Style Ale” winner was a proper Belgian brewer, Brouwerij Huyghe (best known for Delirium Tremens) of Ghent, with Artevelde Grande Cru, and Huyghe also walked off with the prize for best Fruit Beer with Floris Fraise. The Wheat Beer prize went to a German entry, Hopf White, from Weissbierbrauerei Hopf in Miesbach, in the far south of Bavaria.

The big surprise, however, was the winner in the IPA category – not an American, but Feral Brewing, from Baskerville, Western Australia, with its Hop Hog. Indeed, the judges loved this beer so much, they gave it the highest number of points of any of the more than 250 entries in the competition, meaning Hop Hog also carried off the palm for Champion Beer of the 2012 Awards.

Reports say the microbrewing scene in Western Australia is booming: hopefully Feral’s success will encourage more brewers from there to look north to the market in Hong Kong.

(Addendum: apparently Feral was extremely surprised to win, because it didn’t even know the competition was on, let alone that it was entered.)

In the history of brewing in Britain, the Graveney Boat is an archaeological anomaly almost as great as finding the skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon warrior with a hole in his skull that could only have been made by a 17th-century musket ball.

The boat – actually a clinker-built cross-channel cargo vessel, reconstructed as some 44 feet (13.6 metres) long, 11 feet (3.4 metres) wide and just three feet  (one metre) in draught – was abandoned more than a thousand years ago. It was discovered in 1970 under six feet of soil, during the widening of the Hammond Drain, a silted-up ancient natural water course linking Graveney village, a small settlement near the coast between Faversham and Whitstable in Kent, with the Thames estuary.

Dendrochronology suggests the Graveney Boat was about 55 years old when it was abandoned, since it was built from oak timbers cut in the mid-890s, and it had apparently been left to settle into the mud some time close to 950AD. When archaeologists analysed the boat and its immediate area, searching in particular for plant remains, they found evidence that pointed strongly towards it having carried a cargo of hops.

The Graveney Boat being excavated in 1970

Yet at the time the boat was stuck up a Kentish creek, (at a period when there was still a separate Viking King of Northumbria, contending with the King of England), English brewers were not using hops to flavour their ale – or at least, there is no good evidence at all that they were doing so. Hops stay unmentioned in the history of English brewing (apart from one brief and almost equally mysterious pop-up in the 12th century, to which we will return) until the 1500s, almost 400 years later, when immigrant brewers from the Low Countries started making the upstart Continental hopped drink bere, a rival to unhopped traditional English ale. So why were there hops on board the Graveney cargo boat?

Some have insisted that the Graveney Boat’s cargo is clear evidence that Anglo-Saxon brewers did, in fact, hops their ales. One vigorous supporter of this position is Francis Pryor, the archaeologist and Iron and Bronze Age historian (and Time Team TV star), who declared in his book Britain in the Middle Ages, published in 2007, that the Graveney Boat

“was carrying a cargo that included (presumably Kentish) hops – comprehensively destroying the myth that all medieval ale was unhopped.”

But this is totally wrong: the hops found in association with the Graveney Boat do no such thing. They prove nothing, except what they are – hops associated with a cargo ship abandoned in Kent about 950AD. There is no hard evidence whatsoever to link them with brewing (and nothing, either, that could let us presume the hops were from Kent. Indeed, since the remains found with the Graveney Boat also included fragments of quern-stones made from Mayen lava, in the Rhineland, then Germany seems a reasonable bet for the origin of the Graveney Boat hops, as it was the origin for the Graveney Boat quern-stones).

Pryor’s mistake, and the same goes for other writers who insist the Graveney Boat proves Anglo-Saxon ales were hopped, or were hopped at least sometimes, is to assume that hops were only ever associated with brewing, and that therefore the presence of hops on the ship MUST mean the presence of hopped beer nearby in space and time. But hops have had a wide range of uses in the past. In “Hopped Beer: The Case for Cultivation” (Economic Botany 48(2): 166-70, 1994), two American academics, DY DeLyser of Syracuse University and WJ Kasper of Pennsylvania State University, list almost a dozen uses for hops in the past, including as a salad vegetable; to make a fabric resembling linen; to make a hair rinse for brunettes; for dye-making (the hops themselves and the leaves yield a yellow dye, the hop sap a reddish-brown one); as bedding (for humans and animals) and insulation, and also as packing; to make twine; for fodder; and as a basis for manure. Hops can also be used to make sacking and paper, to fill hop pillows for those who have difficulty sleeping, and as a substitute for oak bark in tanning, and hop ash was used in the manufacture of Bohemian glass.

The fullest article on the subject is “Plant Remains from the Graveney Boat and the Early History of Humulus lupulus L. in W. Europe”, by D Gay Wilson of the Botany School at the University of Cambridge, from New Phytologist (1975) 75, pp 627-648. (This is also, still, after 37 years, one of the best accounts of early mentions of hops anywhere, and the source of one of my favourite quotes: “Beer is a popular subject, and the literature abounds in unsupported statements, misleading or inaccurate quotations and inaccurate references.” Indeed.)

The Graveney Boat being excavated: the stern is at the right

Wilson discusses the large number of hop “inflorescences” (cones) found on the brushwood next to the Boat, and the absence of hop pollen found in and around the Boat, although the hop “nuts” (seeds) that were found were fertilised, meaning they had to come from somewhere that hop pollen could be found. It is, she says,

“difficult to avoid the conclusion that hops were deliberately brought to the boat from a distance, or were actually unloaded from it when it was finally abandoned. The use and cultivation of hop in Britain are, however, of relatively recent and disputed date. Such an abundance of tenth-century hops in Britain, especially in salt-marsh deposits, requires special explanation.”

Now, across the Channel, in Picardy, hops were specifically mentioned in connection with brewing in 822AD, around 130 years before the Graveney Boat and its mystery cargo, when Abbot Adalhard of the Benedictine monastery of Corbie, in the Somme valley near Amiens, wrote a series of statutes on how the monastery should be run, which included a mention of gathering hops. Adalhard went on to say that a tithe (or tenth) of all the malt that came in to the monastery should be given to the porter of the monastery, and the same with the hops. If this did not supply enough hops, he should take steps to get more from elsewhere to make sufficient beer for himself: “De humlone … decima ei portio … detur. Si hoc ei non sufficit, ipse … sibi adquirat unde ad cervisas suas faciendas sufficienter habeat.”

There was another Benedictine monastery 110 miles to the north-east of Corbie, at Canterbury, and Canterbury is less than seven miles from Graveney. It seems more than probable that monks from Corbie would have visited their fellows at Canterbury. Did the Corbie monks pass on a taste for hops to their Kentish brethren? Could it be that the Graveney Boat represents a cargo of hops on its way to be used by the monks of Canterbury to flavour their brews? Well, it might: but the massive problem is that there is no evidence to support that. At all.

The word Adalhard uses for “hops”, “humlone, looks to be the same as the Old English word hymele, itself the same as the modern Flemish dialect word for hop, hommel, and a word in Old Norwegian, humli, which also meant hop. All these seem to come from a Germanic root meaning “to grope about”, referring to the way the plant’s stems twist as they grow, to try to find something to grasp and support themselves on.

Bryony – another lobe-leafed twining plant

That twisting about to try to find something to grasp and support themselves on might make a useful metaphor for people who go looking for proof that the Anglo-Saxons used hops to brew with. The hop does seem to have grown in England long before the 10th century: pollen remains dating back to the Neolithic and earlier from what were probably wild hops have been found at Thatcham in Berkshire and Urswick in Cumbria. Hymele has given us at least two placenames in England, Himbleton in Worcestershire and Himley in Staffordshire. However, the problem is that hymele may refer to the hop plant, or it may be a reference “to some similar [climbing] plant”, the Oxford Dictionary of Place Names says. A 10th or 11th-century Anglo-Saxon vocabulary glosses the Latin “uoluula”, that is, convolvulus, bindweed, as “hymele”, and the word hymele was also used for bryony (Bryonia alba), another climbing plant with hop-like lobed leaves. Even the plant name hemlock seems to mean “hymele-like”, perhaps because both it and bryony are extremely poisonous. So references to hymele are not necessarily references to the hop.

Wilson pulls up a number of references to hymele in Old English sources, and while the word does sometimes seem to refer to the hop, she struggles to find any occurances of hymele that might be connected to ale. The best is a reference in a 9th or 10th century copy of a herbal originally written in Latin around the fourth or fifth century AD, known as the Herbarium of Apuleius. In one section, chapter LXVIII, a plant named “herba brionia, which some call hymele” is recommended for “curing sore of spleen, making the disease pass out with the urine”. The writer of this version of the Herbarium (which is now in the British Museum) said the cure should be given to the sick person “to swallow among his mete“, that is, solid food, not drink, but added that “this wort [that is, herb] is to that degree laudable that men mix it with their usual drinks.” The comment about the herb being mixed with drinks is missing from some of the surviving Latin versions of the Herbarium, although a Latin version from the (Benedictine) monastery of Monte Cassino, in Italy, has that part but lacks the ” some call [it] hymele” bit, referring only to herba brionia.

Now, here’s where the analysis gets complicated, so hold my hand and I’ll try not to make this too confusing. Some commentators (influenced, apparently, by a 19th century translator of Apuleius, the marvellously named Thomas Oswald Cockayne, in a book with the equally marvellous title of Leechdoms, wortcunning and starcraft of early England, published 1864) have decided to ignore the herba brionia reference, fixate on the idea that “hymele” can only mean hops here, and conclude that “usual drinks” must mean ale. They decide, therefore, that “men mix it with their usual drinks” must means that hops went into ale in 9th or 10th century England.

But we cannot at all take it that “hymele” here means “hops”. The passage is talking about a herb that encourages urination. Hops are a mild diuretic. But bryony is much better at the job: bryony was recommended by herbalists right up to the 20th century for disorders of the urinary passages, and was “said to be one of the best diuretics in medicine”. Bryony fits the whole passage much more satisfactorily than hops do – and if “some” called herba brionia, the herb under discussion, by the name “hymele“, that would almost certainly be because bryony and “real” hymele/hops are both lobe-leaved climbing plants that throw out tendrils, and “some” were confusing one with the other. In which case it was briony that went into the “usual drinks”, not hops.

It could be argued that since some copies of the Herbarium lack the part that says “this wort is to that degree laudable that men mix it with their usual drinks”, this bit was added by a later scribe copying out the Herbarium, who was himself confused, didn’t know what herba brionia was, thought the reference to “hymele” in the original really did mean the hop plant, and added the “men mix it with their usual drinks” line because he knew that’s what happened with “real” hymele. Thus – tada! – some monkish copyist makes a mistake but in doing so “proves” to later readers that the Anglo-Saxons put hops in their ale. Except that this whole circumstantial chain relies on at least three assumptions: that the “men mix it” line is a later interpolation, that the person who interpolated it while copying out the Herbarium themselves didn’t know that herba brionia wasn’t hymele, and that “men mix it with their usual drinks” means “men put it in their ale”.

Even ignoring the fact that there is nothing in that whole passage about boiling or brewing, or ale, nor anything about using the cones or inflorescences, which would unequivocally identify this “wort” as the hop, that’s too many assumptions for me. Wilson says of the passage in the Herbarium of Apuleius that it “would seem to be an obvious reference to the making of hopped beer.” But I hope I’ve just shown that it’s a very long way from that.

Anything else? Well, there was a form of rent called “hopgavel” or “hoppegavel” in medieval Kent, which Wilson says “appears to be the name given to a money-rent replacing an earlier customary due of hops”. She quotes a German publication from 1967, Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, by the aptly named Theodor Bitterauf, which apparently details documents mentioning orchards with hop-gardens that appear in the records from 859-875 AD onwards of the (then Augustinian) Abbey of Freising, Bavaria (home, of course, of the Weihenstephan brewery). Wilson also lists printed sources from 1844, 1853 and 1909 that apparently show that “[f]rom the mid-9th century other monasteries in France and elsewhere expected dues of hops from their tenants, in such quantity that cultivation is implied, for example St Remi [Rheims, France, Benedictine], Lobbes [Hainault, modern Belgium, Benedictine] and St Germain [Paris, Benedictine]. Hoppegavel, she suggests, had its roots in similar hop dues to those found in Rheims, Hainault and Paris, and “[t]he hop dues were surely for brewing, just as on the continent.”

But again this assumes that people collecting hops were doing so to make beer: just because that was the case at Corbie does not mean it was the case in Rheims, Hainault, Paris or Canterbury. They could have been collecting hops to make dye with, or any of the other uses the plant was put to. And anyway, we may not even be talking about Humulus lupulus here: “hoppe” in Middle English could also mean the seedpod of the flax plant, and “hoppegavel” is defined in one Middle English dictionary as a rent paid in flax pods. Flax was certainly cultivated in Kent, from as early as the Bronze Age, and evidence of the plant turns up in analyses that have been made of charred plant remains found during the construction of the Channel Tunnel rail link. So Wilson’s “hoppegavel = hop dues” evidence for the use of hops in Anglo-Saxon brewing is also shaky. (Incidentally, none of the admittedly few recent palaeobotanical studies in Kent that I have seen seem to have found any evidence of ancient hops. The Graveney Boat really is an anomaly.)

Wilson concludes her study by declaring that

“We have shown that the Graveney boat was probably destined for brewing. It provides the first concrete evidence that hopped beer was known in Britain in the tenth century.”

But there is no “probably” about it at all, and the evidence is a long way from concrete: not even balsa wood. Tissue. Most importantly, for nearly four centuries there is, apart from one other anomaly, no more hints at all that hops were used in English brewing, no sign of hop cultivation in England. Hops are not mentioned anywhere in the Domesday Book, the mighty Anglo-Norman land survey completed in 1086. Hops are not mentioned at all in the compilation of 13th century records of St Paul’s Cathedral by William Hale Hale (sic) called The domesday of St Paul’s of the year MCCXXII, and published in 1856, although it gives all the quantities of oats, wheat and barley that went into the ale drunk by the priests of St Paul’s, and even lists the brewery workers. Hops are not mentioned in the section on brewing in the late 13th century Treaty of Walter de Biblesworth.

When hops and hopped beer finally do incontrovertibly appear in England, in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the English language had to adopt the name for the plant that flavoured beer from Dutch, the language of the Low Countries immigrants who brought the taste for hops with them, since the English had apparently forgotten “hymele”, if that had ever meant “hop”. The fact that hopped beer was seen as something completely new in England is clear from the violent reaction beer provoked from the 15th century onwards, with Henry VI having to step in to stop “alien” beer brewers being attacked in 1436, Andrew Boorde – who was originally a Carthusian monk – thundering against it in the 16th century, complaining that while “Ale for an Englysshman is a naturall drynke,” beer was “of late days … much used in Englande to the detryment of many Englysshe men”, and as late as the 17th century, John Taylor, the self-styled Water Poet, still moaning that compared to good old traditional unhopped English ale, “Beere is but an Upstart and a Foreigner or Alien.”

This is, I think, the big question that has to be answered by those who declare that Anglo-Saxon ale was, at least on occasions, flavoured with hops: if that is so, why did brewers in England clearly forget all about hops as a flavouring? Why did hopped beer have to be (re?)introduced from Continental Europe hundreds of years after the Graveney Boat supposedly “provided concrete evidence” of Anglo-Saxon brewers using hops? Why, if hymele meant “hops”, did we forget that word, and have to import a word for the plant from Europe? It seems to me much simpler to suppose that hops never arrived in English brewhouses until the 15th century than to suppose that we were brewing with hops in the 10th century and then dropped the idea for a few centuries until the Flemings and Hollanders came over and reminded us about the hop again.

But what about that other anomoly? In the records of the priors and convent of Westminster Abbey appears an entry dating from around 1118-1120 regarding the weekly “farm” (allowance) of the monks:

Hec est firma monachorum in septimana: ad panem: vj cumbas et lx et vij solidos ad coquinam; et xx hops de brasio; et × de gruto; et iij cumbas avene; et ad servientes j marcam argenti.

Did those Benedictine monks drink hopped ale?

“Brasio” is pretty obviously a late Latin word cognate with the medieval French “brasser”, “to brew” (from which English ultimately derives the word “brasserie”, via French eateries), so it’s clear what “hops de brasio” means – though note that they are being used alongside “gruto”, which must be “gruit/grout”, “flavouring for beer before the introduction of hops” (Oxford English Dictionary). So there we are: clear evidence that in the time of Henry I, hops were being used in brewing in London, albeit alongside gruit. “Avene”, incidentally, is “oats”, and “cumba” must be “coomb”, a measure equal to half a quarter or four bushels. Oats were commonly used in medieval brewing. But were hops?

No, I think, has to be the answer. This is the only known reference to the use of hops in brewing in England for nearly 300 years. The Westminster monks were Benedictines, like those in Corbie, Rheims, Hainault and Paris (and, by then, Freising), and Abbess Hildegard of St Rupertsberg, in Germany, who was writing about hops and brewing in 1155 or so, and if they were using hops in their beer, it seems quite plausible that the Benedictine monks of Westminster did the same. But if they did, then once again, there is no evidence at all that this practice spread out into the wider world of medieval English brewing, and credit to introducing hops to England must still go to the Low Countries immigrants of the 15th century.

Still, I doubt that my trying to drive a stake into this particular claim is going to kill it off. Here’s Francis Pryor at it again on his own blog last month, prompted by recollections of working at the “family brewery”, Truman’s, in the East End (his ancestors were Quaker brewers and maltsters from Baldock in North Hertfordshire, and one branch of the Pryor family took a lease on the brewery in Shoreditch High Street that had originally been Ralph Harwood’s: when that lease ran out in 1816 the Pryors joined their fellow Quakers at the nearby Brick Lane brewery): “The Saxon (pre-Norman) boat from Graveney, in Kent, was carrying a cargo of hops. Despite this, the myth persists that all medieval beers were un-hopped. Some may have been, especially domestic or home brews, but many weren’t.” Sorry, Francis, you’ve got no evidence at all for saying “many weren’t” unhopped.

And incidentally, your account in your blog of the latter history of Truman’s, that it “was taken over by Watneys (later Grand Metropolitan)”, is completely up the spout as well. Grand Met – then a hotel and catering company – bought Trumans in 1972, and acquired Watneys the following year.

The public bar, for working men only

When I lived in Hertfordshire, I was puzzled to discover that around the time Edward VII ended his long wait to become king, there was a pub in the small market town of Baldock called the Pretty Shades. It seemed highly unlikely this was some sort of pre-First World War Tiffany lamp theme pub. So what was the origin of the name?

Years later I discovered that a “shades” was originally the name given in the South of England to a basement bar. According to Words, facts, and phrases; a dictionary of curious, quaint, and out-of-the-way matters by Eliezer Edwards, published in 1882

The name originated at Brighton. In 1816 a Mr Savage, who had acquired the premises in Steine Lane formerly occupied by the Old Bank, converted them into a drinking and smoking shop. Mrs Fitzherbert [the Prince of Wales's mistress] at that time lived exactly opposite, and Savage was fearful of annoying her by placing any inscription in front of his house designating its new character. It struck him, however, that as Mrs Fitzherbert’s house, which was south of his, was so tall as to prevent the sun from shining on his premises, he would adopt the word “Shades”, which he accordingly placed over the door where the word Bank had before appeared. The name took, and a large business was secured. Numbers of other publicans in London and elsewhere adopted the name Shades, which is now fully established in the language as a synonym for wine vaults.

I’m not sure I believe that, but the Oxford English Dictionary confirms that “the Shades” was “originally, a name for wine and beer vaults with a drinking-bar, either underground or sheltered from the sun by an arcade. Hence subsequently used, both in England and in the US, as a name for a retail liquor shop, or a drinking-bar attached to a hotel.”

John Badcock’s Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit …, published 1823, revealed two establishments called The Shades in London. One was at London Bridge under Fishmongers’ Hall (“Sound wine out of the wood reasonable and tolerably good are characteristics of this establishment”), while The Shades at Spring Gardens [presumably the Old Shades, Whitehall] “is a subterranean ale shop.”

By 1949 Maurice Gorham could write, in Back to the Local, that “Shades” was “originally a generic term for cellars, now the name of one famous pub at Charing Cross [the Old Shades again] and of various London bars. When used for one bar in an ordinary pub, roughly equivalent to Dive”. So that explained half of the mystery. I’m still looking for a reason for the “Pretty” part.

The saloon bar, for the white-collar worker and his wife

The “shades” was just one of more than a dozen different types of bar that could be found in British pubs, besides the common public bar and saloon bar, many with careful, strict social gradations from one to the other, with a system of purdah and caste strict Hindus would appreciate: no woman would ever be found in the tap room, for example, nor any man coming straight from manual labour in the lounge or the public parlour, while only the landlord’s intimates or regular customers would be served in the snug.

Maurice Gorham stated perfectly the situation as it still stood just after the Second World War:

“One of the most fascinating things about the pubs is the way they are carved up by interior partitions into the most unexpected and fantastic shapes. It is often quite startling to look up at the ceiling and realise that all these compartments, varying so widely in their geography and in their social significance, are merely sketched on the ground plan of a simple rectangular space. Pull down the partitions, and instead of a complicated series of bars you would just have a medium-sized room.”

Today, of course – and the process was already beginning even in Gorham’s time – those partitions have indeed come down. Now it is instructive to go into, eg, one of the big old boozers in the East End of London and imagine them not as they are, just one room, frequently, if they’ve been hipstered up, with unplastered brick walls and big, clear windows, but as they were 50, 60, 80, 100 years ago, carved into three, four or more separate spaces by mahogany and etched glass barriers, each section with its own hermetic, exclusive group of customers, who would rather walk into the wrong lavatory than the wrong bar, and served, often, by its own separate door to the streets outside.

In 1960 The Times brought out a book called Beer In Britain which featured a “glossary of bars”, dividing it into “Southern Usage” and “Northern Usage”. It was produced just in time: the social divisions that saw every man know his place, and know whether that place was the public bar or the saloon, were crumbling. When I first started (illegally) drinking in pubs in the late 1960s, public bars and saloon bars were still, just, separate worlds, with the beer in the public bar, where the working man drank pints of mild, continuing to be 10 or even 20 per cent cheaper than the same beer in the saloon, where the working man’s white-collared boss sipped at a half of bitter. By the end of the 1970s the price differentiation was disappearing along with the social differentiation. Here’s The Times guide to bars from the year Chubby Checker released The Twist and Miles Davis recorded Sketches of Spain, when Harold Macmillan, prime minister of the UK, made his “Winds of Change” speech in South Africa, and Senator John F Kennedy won the American presidential election, with notes in square brackets by me:

SOUTHERN USAGE

Red Lion, Duke of York Street, Piccadilly, London in the 1950s: classic saloon bar style (and note those pies …)

Public Bar Where prices are lowest and furnishings simple.
Saloon Bar A saloon was originally a spacious reception room in a private mansion, then in an inn: applied circa 1835 to the better-furnished room of a public house. [But see later.]
Lounge originally, the hotel residents’ sitting room. Now a superior saloon bar, often with waiter service and with no sale of draught beer. [ According to Maurice Gorham in 1949, the Lounge, also known as the Saloon Lounge, "is standard to the extent that many pubs have one, but it is a refinement on the Saloon Bar. It shows, therefore, that the pub possessing one has aspirations. It caters for a class of people who want something a little better even than the Saloon Bar. In pubs that have both, the Lounge implies sitting at tables, having drinks fetched by waiters, and tipping."]
Lounge Bar/Saloon Lounge Midway in status between the saloon and the lounge.
Private Bar Midway in status between public bar and saloon bar, intended for customers wishing to conduct private conversations, or for men accompanies by women: sometimes deputising for a Ladies’ Bar
Ladies’ Bar Self-explanatory
Bar Parlour An inner room, without a street entrance, reserved traditionally for regular customers or the landlord’s inmates. Now rare.
Buffet Bar A refreshment bar (1869). Modern equivalents are the Lunch Bar and the Snack Bar, of saloon bar status. [Don't know where The Times gets that date of 1869 from: the earliest example of the phrase I have found is 1888. "Of saloon bar status" means "saloon bar prices charged".]
Tap Room Originally (1807) a room where beer was tapped or drawn from a cask. Now an old-fashioned name for the public bar of an hotel or country ale house. Not found in London. [while 1807 is the earliest date in the OED for "tap room", "tap-room" occurs in a novel published in 1750 called The life and adventures of Joe Thompson by Edward Kimber, and must surely be older than that.]
Shades A basement bar. Rare.
Dive Originally an illegal drinking den located underground (United States, 1882), now usually a basement Snack Bar.
Cocktail Bar/American Bar Hotel bars now tending to spread out into public houses, sometimes taking over the place of the lounge under the name Cocktail Lounge

NORTHERN USAGE

Bar, Public Bar As in the South
Vaults Originally a cellar for storing food or liquor; now on the ground floor – equivalent to the public bar. (Vault in Lancashire.)
Smoke Room Northern and Midland equivalent of the saloon bar. There may be two: one for men only, the other for both sexes. [The one women were allowed in would actually be called the "mixed smoke room".]
Tap Room A public bar. Sometimes a room reserved for playing games, without counter service
Lounge/Parlour/Public Parlour/Bar Parlour The best-furnished room. [in other words, "saloon bar" was very much a Southern expression, according to The Times. Comments welcome.]
Best Room/Best End Colloquial names for the lounge.
Snug/Snuggery Equivalent of the Southern bar parlour, but much more common. (Ireland only: one of a series of half-enclosed compartments within a bar.) Obsolescent. [I don't understand that last bit: if the snug was obsolescent, how was it also common?]
News Room An old-fashioned name for the tap room, dating from the period when newspapers were supplied to customers. [There are, of course, pubs today that supply newspapers for customers to read, and an excellent idea too.]
Office Bar (Midlands) An inner room without counter service, equivalent to the Southern bar parlour, generally located behind the servery or the hotel office.
Buffet Bar North-Eastern variant of the saloon bar
First Class/Second Class (Mens, Women’s, Mixed) Variants of the saloon and public bars, peculiar to the Carlisle State Management System.

PUBLIC ROOMS OTHER THAN BARS

The Bottle and Jug department

Jug and Bottle For the purchase of drinks for consumption “off the premises”. Term now obsolescent. [Serving beer for takeaway in a jug was once common: my father used to be sent up to the pub, aged 11, in the early 1930s in Willesden, North London to fetch his grandfather porter in a jug, strictly illegally, because children weren't supposed to be served beer in an open or unsealed container. Did he have a sly sip on the way home? What do you think?]
Off-Licence/Off-Sales/Outdoor Department The modern equivalent.

The “original” bar was the barrier in front of the buttery, the storeroom where the butts (casks) of ale and wine were kept in noble houses, monasteries and the like, which literally barred the unauthorised from getting too close to the drink: those in charge of the ale or wine stood one side of the bar and served it across to either the drinkers or those who carried it to the drinkers. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), the servant Maria says to Sir Andrew Aguecheek:

“I pray you, bring your hand to’th Buttry barre, and let it drinke.”

Earlier than that, around 1590, the author and playwright Robert Greene (described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as “England’s first celebrity author”) had written in a book called The Third and Last Part of Cony Catching, With the New-Devised Knavish Art of Fool-taking about a trick practised by Elizabethan wide-boys, or “cony catchers” (cony as in rabbit, of course) that began with the cony catcher chatting up two innocents in “a common inn”. After gaining their confidence he would order two cups of wine to drink with them and then, on the pretence that he was going to “step to the bar” to get the inn-servant to add some rose-water to his own wine, disappear out the front door with the cup, leaving the marks to both pay for all the wine and explain to the innkeeper where the other cup had gone. This is the first evidence we have that inns had bars, at least, the sorts of bars that butteries had, where people would be served.

Behind this kind of bar gradually developed the room that became known as the bar parlour in the South of England, the office bar in the Midlands and the snug in the North: the landlord’s office and storeroom, known at first simply as “the bar”. It was the innkeeper’s private refuge, into which special guests and friends might be invited for a drink. Charles Dickens, in his novel Barnaby Rudge, described the looting of the Maypole Inn (based on the King’s Head in Chigwell, Essex) during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, where the landlord, John Willett, sits stunned while the rioters do their worst:

Yes. Here was the bar – the bar that the boldest never entered without special invitation – the sanctuary, the mystery, the hallowed ground; here it was crammed with men. clubs, sticks, torches, pistols; filled with a deafening noise, oaths, shouts, screams, hootings; changed all at once into a bear-garden, a mad-house, an infernal temple; men darting in and out by door and window, smashing the glasses, turning the taps, drinking liquor out of china punchbowls, sitting astride casks, smoking private and personal pipes … wantonly wasting, breaking, pulling down and tearing up.

Gradually “bar” spread in meaning to mean, in Britain, “any room used for the serving of drink with a counter behind which stand the servers”, and as larger establishments would have several of these rooms, serving different classes of customers, each type or grade of bar acquired a special name. But when did the names “public bar” and “saloon bar” arrive in Britain?

Earliest uses of the phrase “public bar” are either legal, to do with “pleading at the public bar” (not a desperate call to be served, although who hasn’t made one of those, but presenting one’s case in a court or before a tribunal, either actual or metaphorical), or seemingly in the sense merely of “a bar open to the public”, which is how “public bar” (more usually “public bar-room”) was used in the United States in the early 19th century.

Tap room, or public bar price-list for Beverleys brewery, Wakefield in 1949

The first use I have been able to find of the phrase apparently used in the “modern” sense comes from a book called The Itinerant, or Genuine Memoirs of an Actor by Samuel W Ryley (sic), published in 1808: “One evening, in Manchester, we were in a public bar amongst a promiscuous company where C[ooke] [the actor George Frederick Cooke] was, as usual, the life of the party.” That’s not definitely a use of the term “public bar” in the modern sense of “down-market section of a public house”: it could, again, just mean “a bar open to the public”. But the passage is definitely (a) set in England and (b) describing something that probably took place between 1793 and 1800, since it mentions the prize-fighter Isaac Perrins, who moved to Manchester in 1793 to keep a pub, the Fire Engine in what is now George Leigh Street, and who died in January 1801.

There is another example of the term from 12 or so years later, in a moralistic tract called The Dialogists or the Circuit of Blanco Regis by the pseudonymous “Edward Meanwell”. This, the British Library says was published “circa 1810?”, but it must be circa 1821-1822, since it mentions George IV’s coronation, which took place in 1821, and also gives “Mr T Dibdin” as manager of the Surrey Theatre, and Dibdin was manager only between 1816 and 1822. Here, I think, we do seem to have “public bar” in the modern sense, implicitly contrasting it with a more private or upmarket area to drink:

“You recollect poor Anne, that beautiful young woman of whom you was so much enamoured with; who, in open defiance and violation to common decency, called for a glass of gin at the public bar, in the presence of a crowd of persons.”

Smoke room, or saloon bar prices for Beverleys, 1949

However, for the next 30 or so years the term seems to vanish, until it suddenly bursts into more regular use around 1856. Glasgow and its Clubs by John Strang, published that year, contains the passage: “champagne, hock, and hermitage, now so common, were found in few private cellars in the City, far less in the public bar of a tavern.” The same year, Dr Frederic Richard Lees wrote in An argument legal and historical for the legislative prohibition of the Liquor Trade, complaining of apparently respectable drinking places filled with prostitutes, “which can scarcely be said to come under the denomination of gin palaces, as they aim at enlisting under the banners of profligacy those who would (while sober) deem it beneath them to lounge at the public bar of a spirit shop.”

Three years later, in 1859, the report of a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption during an election in Huddersfield contained the following exchange:

“Now a word about having seen Jabez Wells at the Queen’s [Hotel]; where was that was it in the bar?” “In the public bar, I believe it was.”

That, I think, would pretty much underline that whatever had been going on before, by 1859 at the latest, “public bar” was a recognised expression for a particular sort or grade of room on licensed premises, something confirmed by a description from three years later of the Angel, Islington, a famous coaching inn now remembered mostly for the Tube station and the square on the British version of the game of Monopoly named after it:

The Angel Inn is certainly a most unangelic-looking place, reminding one of a dilapidated Mechanics’ Institute, which has taken to beer in later life and broken out into innumerable ‘bars’ in consequence. There is the public bar full of “bus cads” and costermongers, the private bar with boozy tipplers from the street; there is the retail and bottle entrance with a narrow door, and there is the supplementary tap-room, which is apparently all window, and of which the chief characteristics are sawdust and spittoons.

(London Society magazine, January 1863, p183. A “bus cad” was the conductor of a horse-drawn omnibus.)

A report in the Daily News from Saturday October 3, 1874 described the “great dram-shop at the foot of the Trongate in Glasgow, and contrasts the public bar with the partitioned-off private areas:

It is not easy to squeeze one’s way into the throng of drinkers in the public bar, consisting of frowsy men, slatternly women, ragged stockingless, palid-faced[sic], preternaturally quick-eyed children. This, you see, is the public drinking, the coram populo saturnalia of those who care not who sees. Yonder, behind the wainscoted partitions, are the shut-in boxes, the drinking pens of Scotland, the private niches at the counter, where “canny” folk sit and soak without being seen of men. These boxes are the haunts of “respectable married women” who would on no account be seen drinking at the public bar.

For the comfort and guidance of strangers, the different bars advertised themselves on the outside in ways, of course, that still often survive today. An American description of London pubs in 1878 (England from a Back Window by James Montgomery Bailey) said: “They invariably have two, and in many cases three entrances; and are subdivided accordingly. These compartments are indicated on the glass of the doors; viz., public bar, private (or luncheon) bar and jug (or wholesale) bar.”

The lounge bar of the King of Bohemia pub, Hampstead, London in the 1950s

“Saloon” is an interesting word: it goes back thousands of years to Proto-Indo-European, where etymologists have deduced that there was probably a word beginning “sel-” that meant “human settlement”: the Russian for “village” is still село, and the Lithuanian is sala. In Proto-Germanic the word seems to have shifted to mean “hall”: Saal is still a German word meaning “hall”. Old English had sele, and beór-sele in Old English, was “beer hall” – or “beer saloon”, if you prefer. The word appears several times in Beowulf, the epic Old English poem about a hero’s fight with a monster called Grendle and its aftermath, including the line

Gebeotedon beore druncne oret-mecgas, ðæt hie in beor-sele bidan woldon Grendles guðe

that is, “The sons of conflict, drunk on beer, promised they would wait in the beer-hall for Grendel’s attack.” It amuses me somewhat to think of Ray Winstone having a drunken fight in a saloon bar with a monstrous opponent before ripping its arm off: “who’s the daddy?” indeed.

However, sele dropped out of English, and “saloon” comes to the language via Italian, which picked up the Germanic word for “hall” and turned it into sala, “hall”, and then salone, “large hall”. The French then took salone and made it salon, “reception room”, and from there “salon” entered English as a word meaning originally “A large and lofty apartment serving as one of the principal reception rooms in a palace or other great house”, and then more specifically “A room, more or less elegantly furnished, used for the reception of guests; a drawing-room”. By the 1720s “salon” was also being spelt “saloon” in English, and by the 1740s “saloon” was being used to mean “A large apartment or hall, especially in a hotel or other place of public resort, adapted for assemblies, entertainments and exhibitions”.

The lounge of the Olde Greene Manne, Batchworth, Hertfordshire about 1908

Since drink – and food – would naturally be served in these saloons before, during or after the entertainments, it was equally natural that “saloon” drifted semantically to take in the meaning “a place where intoxicating liquors are sold and consumed; a drinking bar”. “Saloon”, in an American context to mean place serving alcohol, looks to date from at least the early 1840s. In Britain, Charles Dickens was using “saloon” to mean “place where drink is served” in a letter to a friend in 1841.

All the same, “saloon bar”, is in a British context and its British sense of the upmarket side of the pub, a little later than “public bar”: the Oxford English Dictionary only found its first mention in 1902. Google Books lets us do rather better, but considering how ubiquitous the saloon bar was in British pubs in the 20th century, finding the earliest reference to be only in the late 1880s is a surprise. Once again it’s a teetotaller who is our helpful guide: those people just don’t seem to be able to keep out of pubs. This is from an anonymously written book called Tempted London: Young Men, published in 1888:

The most harmful class of taverns are those which are made the usual resort of women of bad character. We have had many of them pointed out to us, which derive the greater part of their trade from the business resulting from these frequenters. One tavern at Islington is one of the most notorious of this class. Here there is a large saloon bar which, after 8 o’clock at night, is almost monopolized by the class of persons just mentioned. They are allowed to remain there as long as ever they like, and no man is safe from their impertinences, if he once ventures into the saloon.

Undoubtedly, however, the expression had been in use for some time before it was recorded in print. The next year The Builder magazine recorded, in its issue of November 9 1889, the results of a tender for “new billiard room, approaches, alterations, and new staircase to concert rooms, extension of saloon bar and general decorations” at the Tufnell Park Hotel, North London for Mr John Lees. The Tufnell Park Hotel was a rebuilding of the original Tufnell Park Arms (and was itself blown up by a German bomb in October 1940, to be replaced by the Tufnell Park Tavern). If the hotel’s saloon bar was being extended, it sounds as if it must have been in existence when the premises were still the Tufnell Park Arms.

A bar fit for ladies around 1968: note the still-surviving snob screens above the bar counter

While no one, I am sure, can regret the ending of the social snobbery and sexism that made it necessary for most pubs to have a multiplicity of bars, I’m nostalgic for the multi-bar pub, despite what it represented. I love what happened to the Princess Louise in High Holborn, London after it was taken over by the Yorkshire brewer Samuel Smith, around 2006. Sams restored it at some expense to just the way it would have been in the 1890s, complete with bar doors separating the open space into smaller drinking areas, and snob screens, the rows of small centrally swivelling little opaque windows along the top of the bar at head height, found in the saloon bar or snug. The snob screens were closed when patrons in the saloon did not want to be seen by hoi polloi in the public bar or taproom, who might otherwise be able to watch across the behind-bar serving space their “social superiors” drinking pints of pale ale. They could be opened, however, when it was time to attract the barmaid’s attention to order another drink.

The refurbishment won the hearts of the Camra pub design awards judges in 2008, who gave the Princess Louise joint first prize, commenting that it “reflects both its incarnation of over a century ago and the modern customer’s wish to drink and chat in a cosy, quiet and private environment.” Drink and chat, chat and drink: I’m not sure which one I’d put first among pubby pleasures. But when the literal social barriers came down, and the pub became one large room, it made the chatting, against the background of everybody else’s noise, a lot harder.

The Crown, Belfast, the finest pub interior in the British Isles, with its row of carrols down one side for drinkers to have private conversations together

It’s a year since the Oxford Companion to Beer arrived to some small controversy over the number of inaccuracies in its 860-odd pages. Time enough for some calm reflection, perhaps.

I apologise for lifting the lid again on what became, at times, a heated ruckus between the OCB’s defenders, proud of the achievement that had pulled together more facts about beer than had ever been assembled in one place before, and those of us that felt there were a few too many of those facts that failed to stand up under scrutiny. But yesterday was the day I finally put up the last of my own contributions to the excellent OCBeer Wiki, the “comments and corrections” website organised by the Canadian beer blogger Alan McLeod, which means I can now give a proper reply to Clay Risen, who complained after the OCB corrections wiki had been up for less than a month that the OCB’s critics had really not found very much to complain about:

The Wiki has only about 40 entries, and most of them deal with matters of interpretation. In a book that may have upwards of 100,000 factual statements in it, the presence of a few dozen errors, while regrettable, is pretty impressive.

If only. One year on, and thanks to the efforts of more than 30 contributors, the Wiki now has corrections to more than 200 entries in the OCB, almost one in five of the total. The corrections add up to, so far, just under 32,500 words. Some corrections – to “pale ale”, at more than 1,000 words, and to “Pilsner Urquell”, at almost as many – are as long as or longer than the original OCB entry.

Some of the errors in the OCB are actually rather funny. Ed Wray of the Old Dairy Brewery in Kent found a great one that, somehow, everyone missed. Under “cask” the OCB says: “After filling, a plastic or wooden stopper called a shive is driven into the large bunghole on the belly, and a smaller one called a keystone is driven into the tap hole.” However, as Ed points out in the Wiki, the keystone is actually driven into the tap hole before filling the cask – otherwise the beer would pour out onto the floor. My own “gotcha!” is in the entry for “California” (page 204), which says that “[T]he state of California’s influence on American beer culture cannot be underestimated.” It certainly CAN be underestimated. What it cannot be is OVERestimated. (For the widespread problem of overnegation see eg here)

Other error are more serious. The entry on Scotch Ale is a total waste of space, as Ron Pattinson points out here. The entry on old ale is hardly better. The entry on barrels is nonsense, because it confuses a barrel (a specific size of container, which varies from 31 to 36 barrels gallons, depending on where you are and when you were) with a cask (the name for a container of bulk liquid generally, which can be as small as four and a half gallons and as large as 240 gallons). The entry on hops contains big mistakes and misunderstandings that were refuted a decade or more ago. The same is true of the entries on porter and pale ale, and many more. I could go on – and on, and on. Do have a look at the Wiki yourself. Make your own mind up.

But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play? What I think is that Oxford University Press signed Garrett Oliver up for an impossible job. It looked easy: assemble 160 or so of “the world’s most prominent beer experts” and get them to pool their knowledge to make “an absolutely indispensable volume for everyone who loves beer”. And as those experts came together on a sunny, if cold morning in the spring of 2010, the steamy breath of their steeds rising in the chilly air, pennants flapping at the ends of spears, with Garrett at their head, booted, spurred and helmed, ready to lead them out to conquer the land of Cerevisia, who would not have wished them well?

Alas, the maps they had of the land ahead were, in many cases flawed, inaccurate and misleading: the truth they thought would be easily found and brought home was hidden in a mazy morass of myth and misunderstanding. And that truth, as I pointed out here, is often obtainable only through great expenditure in time and money: certainly more money than would be covered by the OUP’s payment to writers of five cents a word. The New Zealand beer blogger Rosalind Ames has an excellent analysis of the problem here. Let me pull a few plums out for you:

“Historic research is time-consuming and expensive, neither of which fits into the demands of the publishing industry … I think few non-historians appreciate just how long historic research takes. It’s not just a matter of accessing information as easily as you can through Wikipedia – you have to find the right source, the right tid-bit of information within that source and then fit it into the larger picture – and you have to do it over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times until you build up the big picture … if I paid a research assistant for all the information in my thesis, at a mere $15 per hour, it would’ve cost, at the very least, $64,000 … I cannot emphasise it enough: historic research is very, very expensive.”

That’s NZ dollars, of course, of which there are currently around two to the British pound. My personal freelance research rate is very considerably more than £7.50 an hour. But the OUP wasn’t even paying New Zealand rates, and the result was that at least one of “the world’s most prominent beer experts” simply copied his (inaccurate) work from one of his previous books and pasted those inaccuracies into his submission for the OCB.

Despite the massive caveats, however, I strongly believe it was right for the OUP to commission the book, which was very badly needed, right for them to appoint Garrett Oliver, a man as passionate as anybody on the planet about beer, and a charismatic ambassador for the cause, as editor in chief, and right for him to take on the task, which certainly went a long way to raising the profile of beer around the world: hey, it won the drinks category in the Andre Simon Food and Drink Awards, only the second beer book to do so in the 33 years the awards have been going, after Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion in 1993.

It is the most comprehensive reference book ever published about beer. It does encourage people to take beer seriously, to give it the respect it deserves. And if mistakes were made in the first edition – well, it was right for me to scream about it, even if some people got very upset, since my yelling at least got everybody’s attention focused. In addition, I like to believe that while Alan McLeod was the man who came up with the tremendous idea of the crowd-sourced OCBeer Wiki for corrections to the OCB to be brought together in one place, it might not have happened if I hadn’t raised the temperature around the book – and the Wiki will make it very difficult, hopefully, for the OUP to bring out a second edition that doesn’t have some serious revisions to at least some of the sections.

Meanwhile my work here is done: actually I completed the bulk of my corrections to the OCB back in May, but to be frank it’s feckin’ tedious looking out all the references to refute someone else’s inaccurate assertions, and once I’d finished “T” (600 words on corrections to the entry on “taxes”, 440 words on corrections to the entry on Truman’s brewery, and other corrections to the entries on table beer, three-threads and the tied house system) I gave it a rest for the summer and popped down to the “life” shop to get myself one. Yesterday I put up “W” (“Wales”, “weevils”, “Whitbread” and “Worthington” among others) – can’t find anything actually wrong in U, X, Y and Z so that’s it. However, I see that Ed Wray is now working through the Wiki adding his own corrections, which, since he’s a professional brewer, are considerably more technical than mine could be. Ed’s up to “D” (“diastase”, “dormancy in barley”) and looks to be doing an excellent job. I hope the OUP invites him to the launch party for the second edition.

The jokes write themselves with this one, so I’m going to try to keep it as straight as possible: brewing with peas is an ancient tradition, going back at least 400 years in Britain, and it still takes place in Lithuania, the United States and Japan.

There are no peas, I believe, in Eye Pea Ay

The earliest mention I have found for peas in beer is from Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, published in London in 1615:

Now for the brewing of the best March Beer, you shall allow to a Hogshead thereof a quarter [eight bushels] of the best Malt well ground, then you shall take a Peck [a quarter of a bushel] of Pease, half a peck of Wheat, and half a peck of Oats and grind them all very well together, and then mix them with your Malt …

This, Markham said, would make “a Hogshead of the best and a Hogshead of the second, and half a Hogshead of small beer, without any augmentation of Hops or Malt.” Even though the hop rate was just a pound a barrel, the strong beer, brewed in March or April, “should (if it have right ) have a whole year to ripen in”, Markham said, and “it will last two, three, or four years if it lye cool; and endure the drawing to the last drop.” That is probably more down to the strength of the beer – at some five and a half bushels of fermentables per barrel, the alcohol per volume was quite likely north of 11 per cent – than any magic the peas brought to the brew.

A few words about the word “pea”, incidentally: it began as “pease”, singular, with “peasen” the plural. By the 15th century “pease” was often being used as both the singular and plural, and as a “mass noun”, like rice or malt. Eventually , by the 17th century, “pease” was misanalysed as the plural of a singular “pea”. “Pease” and “peasen” survive today only in “pease pudding” and in place names such as Peasenhall in Suffolk.

The peas could be malted, and so could beans, vetch and even lupins, though Markham seems to have been talking about unmalted varieties, since he said elsewhere in The English Housewife:

Now I do not deny, but there may be made malt of wheat, peas, lupins, vetches, and such like, yet it is with us of no retained custom, not is the drink simply drawn or extracted from those grains either wholesome or pleasant, but strong and fulsome; therefore I think it not fit to spend any time in treating of the same.

“Fulsome” was being used there in the sense of “offensive”. Bitter vetch, Vicia ervilia, is a legume with, as you’ve guessed from its name, bitter-tasting, lentil-like seeds, grown today for feeding to sheep or cattle and now only rarely consumed by humans.

However, an informant called “RT”, from Derby then one of the malting centres of England, was recorded in 1683 as saying:

I have known pease and beans malted frequently, and many ale brewers desire some in their malted barley, because they make the liquor in working bear a better yeast, or barm, as here we call it; and certainly, being mixed in a good quantity with other malt, they make very strong liquor, which, as I am well informed, is apt to intoxicate and heat the stomach exceedingly.

Peas and beans, as Markham indicated, were not the only legumes made into ale or beer. Thomas Short, MD, writing in 1750 on “malt liquors” (the catch-all for hopped beer and unhopped, or lightly hopped ale in the 18th century) in a book called Discourses on Tea, Sugar, Milk, Made-wines, Spirits, Punch, Tobacco, &c, with Plain and Useful Rules for Gouty People , said:

Malt Liquors differ in respect of the Grain whereof they are made. Thus Pease, Beans, French Beans, Chick Pease &c afford a more tenacious, heavy Liquor, and such as requires a stronger Constitution to digest them, Wheat and Barley produce more nourishing and strengthening Liquors, seeing their Parts are more separable, and sooner reduced to a wholesome Spirit. Oats yield a more detersive kind of Drink, which is less viscid, has more earthy Parts, and a smaller Quantity of Oil in it.

Another writer in 1733 mentions malt made of “Barley, Pease, Beans, Oats, Vetches, Buck-Wheat, or whatsoever else is cheapest”.

According to Richard Bradley, author of The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director, published in 1732,

“Wheat-malt, Pea-malt, or these mix’d with Barley-malt, tho’ they produce a high-colour’d Liquor, will keep many Years, and drink soft and smooth; but then they have the Mum-Flavour.

– mum being the heavily herbed wheat beer originally made in Brunswick.

Four years later, William Ellis, in The London and Country Brewer, wrote

Some I have known put a Peck or more of Peas, and malt them with five Quarters of Barley, and they’ll greatly mellow the Drink, and so will Beans; but they won’t come so soon, nor mix so conveniently with the Malt, as the Pea will.

Ellis also recommended that when ageing “Stout or Stale Beer”, brewers should use an “Artificial Lee” for the beer to feed on, and while some hung a bag of wheat flour in the cask for this purpose,

… some in the North will hang a Bag of the Flower of malted Oats, Wheat, Pease and Beans in the Vessels of Beer, as being a lighter and mellower Body than whole Wheat or its Flower, and more natural to the Liquor.

He gives a recipe for a hogshead of October Beer from Lichfield, in Staffordshire which involves

sixteen Bushels of Barley Malt, one of Wheat, one of Beans, one of Pease and one of Oat Malt, besides hanging a Bag of Flower taken out of the last four Malts in the Hogshead for the Drink to feed on

which must have been an unbelievable original gravity, at more than 13 bushels of malt and malted pulses to the barrel. (Allsopp’s No 1 Burton Ale, OG 1122, abv 10.31, had only 4.5 bushels to the barrel)

It wasn’t only brewers who were making alcohol from peas and beans: distillers were, too, at least in Ireland. In 1758 the Irish parliament passed an Act “to prevent the distilling of spirits from wheat, oats, bear, barley, malt, beans and pease or from any potatoes, meal, or flour of wheat, oats, bear, barley, malt beans or pease, for a limited time”. (“Bear” is bere, the coarse variety of barley still grown in Scotland). Pea whiskey, anyone? OK – in 1708 a book called The Whole Art of Husbandry said that “out of one Bushel of Pease will come of Spirit at least two Gallons or more, which will be as strong as the strongest Anniseed-water usually sold in London,” and explained how to make it:

Let Pease be taken and steeped in as much water as will cover them, ’till they come and swell, and be order’d as Barley is for malting, only with this difference, that for this Work if they sprout twice as much as Barley doth for malting ’tis the better. The Pease thus sprouted, if beaten small, which is easily done, they being so tender, and put into a Vessel stopt with a Bung and Rag as usual, they will ferment, and after three or four Months, if distilled, will really perform what is promised.

In 1794 a book called An Agricultural Dictionary consisting of Extracts from the most celebrated Authors and Papers recommended “pease malted after the manner of barley” as food for horses. But the references to peas, malted or otherwise, for brewing continue into the 19th century. In 1839 the author of A statistical account of the British Empire, talking about malting in Great Britain, said: “Barley is the grain generally used, but oats, and other grain and pulse, viz beans and peas, are sometimes used for the purpose.”

Samuel Morewood’s Philosophical and statistical history of … the manufacture and use of inebriating liquors in 1838 revealed that “owing to their fermentive properties”, distillers “frequently” used “the meal of peas beans and oats” in making their bub, a mixture of meal and yeast with warm wort and water, used to promote fermentation. Morewood also said that in Georgia, bouza – a common word for fermented millet/grain-based drinks across the Ottoman-influenced word, apparently from Turkish, and not connected with the word “booze” – was “made from peas, which is the common basis of it in that country.”

Even the pea pods were used to brew with in the United States. A book called Five Thousand Receipts In All the Useful and Domestic Arts, by Colin MacKenzie, published in Philadelphia in 1825, declared: “No production of this country abounds so much with vegetable saccharine matter as the shells of peas. A strong decoction of them so much in odour and taste an infusion of malt, termed wort, as to deceive a brewer.” The book gave the following recipe:

To make beer and ale from pea shells instead of malt
Fill a boiler with the green shells of peas; pour on water till it rises half an inch above the shells, and simmer for three hours, strain off the liquor and add a strong decoction of wood sage or hops, so as to render it pleasantly bitter; then ferment in the usual manner. By boiling a fresh quantity of shells in the decoction before it becomes cold, the liquor when fermented will be as strong as ale.

After 1839, however, references in Britain to peas being used in brewing seem to vanish. It had been illegal for commercial brewers in the United Kingdom to brew with anything other than malted barley as their source of wort since the malt tax was introduced in the time of William IV III at the end of the 17th century. Suggestions for using peas, in the 18th century, therefore, were aimed at the (still considerable) domestic brewing sector. For whatever reason, however – I wouldn’t wish to speculate – pea beer looks to have nosedived in popularity in the UK from the start of the 19th century.

It does not seem to have vanished elsewhere, however. In 1995 Michael Jackson found beer brewed with peas being made in Lithuania. The Ragutis (“Drinking Horn”) brewery in the city of Kaunas brewed a pale bronze lager called Širvenos, after the district in northern Lithuanian famous for brewing Pea Beer, about 4.2 per cent abv, with 15 per cent or so of the grist being green peas. The brewery director told Jackson that the protein in the peas helped head retention, and that they created a “thicker body” and “richer flavour”. Ragutis is now called Volfas Engelman, and no longer brewing Pea Beer, I believe. But beer with peas in the grist is still, a reliable source (the Norwegian beer blogger Lars Marius Garshol) tells me, being made in Lithuania: the Biržai brewery in the city of Biržai, which is actually in Širvenos, Land of Pea Beer.

At least one small brewery in the UK, Nottingham Brewery, picked up the Pea Beer baton in the 21st century when it made a “mushy pea” beer, a special for the 2001 Nottingham Camra Beer Festival. The beer was given the name “Double Jeopardy”, because if the beer didn’t get you, “the peas would”. The man behind the beer, Steve Westerby Westby, the beer festival’s cellarman said afterwards:

“Philip Darby [the brewery's managing director] thought it would be a good idea if I came in and helped brew a special beer for the festival. I was keen to have a go but wanted the beer to be something a bit different. Now, there is nothing more that reflects the taste of Nottingham than mushy peas and mint sauce, which are traditionally sold at the annual Goose Fair each October. So I thought, why not brew a mushy pea beer? I put it to Philip and he thought it might work, although Niven [Balfour, head brewer], who undertakes much of the actual brewing work, had to be convinced.

“I went into the brewery to help with the brew one Sunday 11 days before the festival. We decided it should be a 4.2 per cent golden-coloured ale and it was to be brewed in the conventional way but with some mushy peas added in the mash, and, later, further peas added to the copper at the same time as the hops. We used 5 boxes of peas on each occasion, they were not pre-soaked as we felt that the brewing process would achieve this.

“The brew went well except that the residue of the peas clogged up the filter on the copper and it took Niven about five hours to transfer the wort into the fermenter instead of the usual 20 minutes. If you wish to suggest to Niven that he should brew a further batch of the beer, be sure to be wearing a cricket box for your own safety!”

Nottingham Brewery does not, indeed, appear to have repeated that experiment.

Today Bear Republic Brewing in California makes an “English Estate October Ale” it calls “Clobberskull”, with 10 per cent raw wheat and 10 per cent split peas, aged for 100 days in French oak barrels to end up with a golden colour and an abv of 10 per cent, which actually might be fairly authentic for an 18th-century-style ale made in the household brewery at a country home like Downton Abbey.

The only other country, as far as I am aware, making beer from peas is Japan – and entirely because of that country’s peculiar tax system than any heritage. Beer with less than 25 per cent malt is in a lower tax band, and Sapporo makes at least two beers, Draft One and Slims, using peas.

If anybody has any experience of brewing with peas, or drinking pea beer, I’d be delighted to hear from you: do leave a comment.

One warning: there is an alleged recipe for 18th-century “Welsh Fruited Table Ale” floating around on the interwebs which is supposed to come from a book by someone called R.K. Sykes called Instructions for Thrifty Ale Wives, published in 1797, and which has four pounds of beans in the grist, along with 20 pounds of malt, eight pounds of oats, elderberries, a “pin” of cut and crushed pears and flavourings that included betony, avens, burnet, alecost and fir rinds. It’s a total fake. R.K. Sykes and the Instructions for Thrifty Ale Wives sprang from the foetid imagination of someone calling themselves “Adam Larsen”, who said they were from the Faroe Islands, and who appeared on the Usenet group hist-brewing in 2000.

“Adam Larsen” claimed to have friends on the Isle of Man, Gotland (in the Baltic), and the Faroes, who provided him with old brewing recipes. I was writing Beer: The Story of the Pint at the time, and “Larsen” told me that “a friend” called “Filby” had a book called The Contented Home, originally written in 1728 by someone called J. Telsford-Ash from Essex, who lived from 1682 to 1731, and subsequently reprinted by the Reverend Cuthbert Ash of Essex in 1887, which contained a recipe for strong porter that included “blown” or snap malt, treacle, “Spanish juice” (liquorish), lavender and yarrow.

If this was genuine, it would be easily the earliest verifiable recipe for porter. Unfortunately, neither the British Library nor any other library, anywhere on the planet, has a record of a book called The Contented Home by an author called Ash, or Telsford-Ash. Nor does the Reverend Cuthbert Ash appear anywhere on the web. I sent several emails to “Adam Larsen” asking if his friend could supply scans or photographs of the book’s title-page and the page or pages with the recipe on. First he was evasive, them he simply failed to answer, and at the same time his postings to hist-brewing ceased.

It was clear that “Adam Larsen” might have enjoyed, as he claimed, recreating beers from old recipes, but he also enjoyed sitting under bridges waiting for billy-goats to pass by. Nothing he told me that was claimed to be unique information uncovered by him or his contacts could be verified: his contacts did not seem to exist; he did not seem to exist, as far as the Web was concerned, outside of his postings to hist-brewing, and even in 2001 it was hard to be completely invisible to the internet.

What thrill he received from fooling people with his postings, passing himself off as deeply knowledgeable about early brewing with fake sources and fake recipes, is beyond my imagination. He wasn’t actually that good at faking his sources: the Instructions for Thrifty Ale Wives is an anachronistic use of ale-wife for 1797, the English in the “extracts” that “Larsen” posted is nothing like 18th century English in its constructions and vocabulary, and the instructions allegedly by Sykes for “Welsh Fruited Table Ale” include, at one point, a direction to draw the wort off “into a coolship” – a word never, ever used by British brewers, only by Continental and American ones.

Clearly “Adam Larsen” was taking the pease.

This week’s letter comes from a Mr R Protz of St Albans, who writes:

Martyn,
I took a snap of the clip for ‘E’ in the National Brewery Centre Bar y’day. I’ve included it in 300 More Beers … in the Best Bitter section but I notice it’s now labelled Burton Ale. What are your thoughts? Thanks,
Roger

Ale fail: ‘E’ is NOT a Burton Ale.

The answer, of course, is that Roger is completely correct, Worthington ‘E’ is a pale ale or bitter with a strength that puts it in the “Best Bitter” category, and NOT a Burton Ale, which is a different style of beer altogether– darker and sweeter. (Nasty clash of 1920s and 1970s typefaces on that pumpclip there, too, but let’s move on …)

Indeed, back in the 19th century, Worthington ‘E’ was described as an India Pale Ale, as these two ads below from the early 1890s show. Apparently to distinguish themselves from all other brewers, Worthington labelled their brews with a strange and not particularly logical naming system. Their Burton Ales, strong, bitter-sweet and rather darker than an IPA/best bitter, were called G (the strongest, equivalent to Bass No 1), F (the second-strongest) and D (the third-strongest, in the 20th century sold as a mild) – they’re the ones called “strong ales” in the ads. It looks as if the beers, mostly, go up in strength from A mild through B and C and up to G – but what about M light dinner ale, and S and SS, which to most brewers would mean “stout” and “single stout”, but to Worthington mean their cheapest mild and their cheapest light dinner ale, respectively. And XE IPA looks to be weaker than the E …

One of the most interesting bits in that first ad is right down the bottom, “Special line – 570 dozen bottles Worthington’s East India Pale Ale (Winter 89-90)”. Bottled East India Pale Ale was the beer later known as White Shield, of course – the ad was published in April 1891, so those bottles were between 14 and 17 months old. Today that’s pretty much the end of the “best before” time on White Shield. Without a price, it’s guesswork if those almost 7,000 bottles were being sold because they were near the end of their shelf-life or because the age was a bonus …

The second ad, from 1892, also has some noteworthy features. For once in a Victorian beer ad we get a description of a couple of the beers, the M and SS dinner ales, “pale amber colour, extremely delicate flavour”. We also discover that Worthington was making an “ordinary” bitter under the conventional label ‘BB’ (for “best bitter”), and its porter, stout and double stout had fairly conventional names as well, XX, XXX and DS respectively. (Worthington also made an Imperial stout at one time with the perversely logical name ‘I’. although this had been discontinued by 1961 at the latest.)

The price of ‘E’ IPA, 60 shillings a barrel, in the 19th century would indicate, in most brewers’ price lists, an OG of at least 1080, but the Burton brewers always charged a premium for their IPAs, and its strength was actually down around the 1065 OG mark. That price per barrel meant that on occasions ‘E’ was actually advertised by retailers in the 19th century as “60-shilling ale” or “60-shilling bitter”. It retailed for the high price of two pence a (half-pint) glass, twice as much as ordinary mild ale, and the equivalent today of as much as £7.40 a pint.

‘E’ was Worthington’s equivalent of Bass “red triangle” pale ale, and after the two breweries merged in 1927, the two beers were eventually brewed to the same recipe: not that anybody told the drinking public, of course. Worthington ‘E’ and draught Bass continued to be sold in competition to each other as premium draught beers, despite being exactly the same brews (and bottled ‘E’ – ‘BE’ – was the same beer as bottled Bass Red Triangle).

Worthington’s “60/- Ale” (that is, ‘E’), from the Liverpool Echo in 1894.

By the end of the 1950s there was a growing trade in “keg” beer, pasteurised and pressurised, most of which started out as “premium” draught bitters and bottled pale ales. Flowers of Luton and Stratford, one of the pioneers, kegged its Flowers Original best bitter: Watney’s kegged its Red Barrel bottled premium ale. In response, Bass Worthington began “kegging” its own premium bitters. In December 1960, the new chairman of Bass, the former civil servant and wartime MP Sir Percy Grigg, told shareholders that

“in order to meet the demand which exists for a beer popularly known as keg or canister we are now producing our best pale ales in this form. There is no intention that these canister beers should supplant our Bass Triangle and Worthington E draught beers; our aim is rather to put ourselves in a position to supply a beer of character wherever and whenever it may be required.

By January 1964, after the merger in 1961 with the Birmingham brewer Mitchells & Butlers, chairman Grigg was able to say to shareholders:

There has been a spectacular growth in the sales of our canister beers although this to a certain extent has been at the expense of the traditional Bass and Worthington qualities. In producing a variety of canister beers, such as draught Bass, M&B Mild and Worthington ‘E’ we are able to offer a wide choice of excellent beers. Their acceptance by all age groups everywhere has been most encouraging.

You’ve got to love that line about “this to a certain extent has been at the expense of the traditional Bass and Worthington qualities”,  code for “it  horrifies our brewers to be making this stuff but…”. Grigg also announced that the company has introduced “a new luxury line”, the high-gravity Bass Gold Triangle, “designed to meet the most discriminating tastes”, which looks to have sold at two shillings a nip, or third of a pint – more than twice as expensive, ounce for ounce, as bottled Red Triangle pale ale. It does not seem to have lasted long.

Bass Charrington ad 1970, showing keg Worthington ‘E’ and bottled “Worthington ‘E’ India Pale Ale”. Spot the dreadful spelling mistake …

Although “canister” Bass ale remained in the line-up, the company – which became Bass Charrington in 1967 – pushed Worthington ‘E’ as its major keg bitter. Curiously, as this advertisement from The Times in 1970 shows, the bottled version of ‘E’ was still called an India Pale Ale. It was almost as odd an echo of the past as that Toby jug in the Chas Barrington logo, which was originally the badge of Hoare’s brewery in Wapping, East London, taken over by Charrington’s in the 1920s. Apart from that, the whole emphasis was on modernity: only keg draught beers, on show, no handpumps, no Charrington beers (apart from Carling Black Label and Tennents, the lager brands Charrington had brought to the marriage). That year the Bass Charrington chairman, Alan Walker, formerly the boss of M&B, told shareholders: “Worthington ‘E’ again increased its share of the ale market, the demand for Keg Worthington ‘E’ being particularly strong.”

Through the 1970s, Worthington ‘E’ was one of the leading keg beers, simply because Bass Charrington, as the biggest pub owner in the country, with more than 11,000 outlets, had so many bartops to put it on. A survey by the Daily Mirror in July 1972 found it the strongest of the six “national” keg beers, at 1037.8 OG and 4 per cent abv, but its price, 14 to 17p a pint – equivalent to perhaps £2.85 to £3.46 today – was more expensive than anything else except Carlsberg (3.1 per cent abv), at 18p a pint, and Carling Black Label (4.3 per cent abv), at 16 to 20p a pint. Batham’s bitter, for comparison, was 1043.2 OG, 4.7 per cent abv and 13p a pint. (Bottled Worthington ‘E’ was a more respectable 1047.1 OG, 5 per cent abv, and 9p for a half-pint bottle.)

Like all the leading keg beers, however, the rise of the Campaign for Real Ale was not good for Worthington ‘E’, and it became a “skunked” brand, like Watney’s Red Barrel, shorthand for all that was hideous about mass-produced, over-priced, over-fizzy national beers. It looks to have been replaced as Bass’s keg bartop offering by another of those beers advertised back in the late 19th century, Worthington Best Bitter (which as one point was being advertised on television by a series of ads apparently based on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow Advertising agencies with brewery accounts seem to have a fascination with the era of Brigadier Gerard: Whitbread used Stephen Fry (and the marvellous Tim McInnerny, in a vaguely early 19th century military romp for its own Best Bitter, and Charles Wells, of course, is currently using Rick Mayall as “the Bombadier”. Is it because they can thereby associate their brand with something macho and military, but at the same time less threatening than the horrors of 20th or 21st century war?). Keg ‘E’ looks to have survived until 1994, at least, but eventually the brand faded away.

Until, that is, Steve Wellington was put in charge of the Worthington’s brewery at the National Brewery Centre in Burton upon Trent. Steve had the run of the old Bass brewing books, and seeing entries such as “540 barrels of Bass/E” from the 1960s, decided that since he couldn’t brew Draught Bass – because Interbrew had kept the rights to that brand name when it sold the former Bass brewery to Coors in 2000, and Draught Bass is now brewed under licence by Marston’s – he could justifiably brew exactly the same beer under the name Worthington ‘E’.

‘E’ continued under Steve’s replacement at the Worthington’s brewery, Jim Applebee, and I’m guessing that it will continue to be brewed under Ian’s new replacement, Stephano Cossi, formerly of the Thornbridge brewery in Derbyshire. I doubt there was a brewery buff in Britain that did not cheer when they heard Stephano was taking over at Worthington’s: he did some terrific work at Thornbridge, including one of my personal top-10 beers, Bracia, a lovely, lovely beer. But Stephano, if you read this – do get the marketing department to stop calling ‘E’ a Burton Ale. It ain’t – it’s a genuine 19th century IPA.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for new beers to brew, can I suggest a resurrection for Worthington ‘G’? I’m guessing that because Interbrew/AB InBev still owns the Bass trademark, the Worthington brewery can’t brew a top-of-the-line genuine Burton Ale under the name Bass No 1. But it can certainly brew the same beer under the name Worthington ‘G’, which was the Worthington equivalent of No 1, undoubtedly brewed, after the Bass-Worthington merger, to the same recipe to No1 (and which also disappeared some time before 1961). That would definitely be a welcome return for another classic beer.

‘Guys, you’ll never believe this “20 most influential beers” list’

An American website called First We Feast has just announced what it declares are “The 20 most influential beers of all time”, a list put together by a “panel of beer-industry pros – brewers, distributors, publicans, and importers, as well as a few journalists.”

You’ll have some idea of the validity of this list when I tell you that half the beers on it are brewed in the US. I don’t want to diss the panel that chose these beers, but I only recognise one name on it, apart from him there are none of the commentators I turn to for insight into the North American brewing scene, let alone anyone from outside the US, and there doesn’t appear to be a single brewing historian among any of them. Which is presumably why they came up with such a totally crap list, with far, far more misses than hits.

The First We Feast attempt at naming the 20 most influential beers of all time

Gablinger’s diet beer, Rheingold, New York
Blind Pig IPA
Westmalle Tripel
New Albion Ale
Fuller’s London Pride
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
Pilsner Urquell
Anchor Steam Beer
Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye
Ayinger Celebrator
Generic lager
Cantillon Classic Gueuze
Anchor Old Foghorn
Reissdorf Kölsch
Draught Guinness
Allagash White
Sam Adams Utopias
Saison Dupont
Schneider Aventinus

I mean, Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye is more influential in the history of beer than Bass Pale Ale or Barclay Perkins porter? Don’t make me weep. Allagash White trumps Hoegaarden and Schneider Weisse? (You may not like Hoegaarden or Schneider Weisse, but I hope you won’t try to deny their influence.) Gueuze, Saison and Kölsch are such important styles they deserve a representative each in a “most influential beers of all time” list, while IPA and porter are left out? I don’t think so. And the same goes for Schneider Aventinus: where are the hordes of Weissebockalikes? Sam Adams Utopias has influenced who, exactly? “Generic lager”? I see where you’re coming from, in that much of what has happened over the past 40 years in the beer world is a reaction against generic lager, but still … And I love London Pride, but it’s not even the third most influential beer that Fuller’s brews.

Gablinger’s Diet Beer is about the only smart choice on the FWF list, because although it’s pretty obscure now, it was the inspiration for all the “lite” beers that, through big brands such as Miller Lite and Bud Light, came to dominate the US beer scene. Pilsner Urquell is a must: you could argue (and I will, in a moment) over whether there has been a more influential beer, but no “all-time greats” list could ignore the pale lager from Plzen. Westmalle Tripel: Duvel, surely, is more important. Guinness: I really don’t think Guinness is influential: it’s so sui generis, it’s just carried on being itself, without influencing anybody.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale I’m prepared to consider, as the pioneer of “hop forward” American pale ales, and the same consideration may be due to Blind Pig IPA, the first “double” IPA. Anchor Old Foghorn was itself too influenced by other beers, especially the English old ale/Burton Ale tradition, to be on a “most influential” list itself. If Goose Island Bourbon County Stout was, as it appears, the first “aged in barrels used for something else” beer, then for all the brews that has inspired, it deserves a “most influential” mention. But having both New Albion Ale and Anchor Steam on the list is far too California-centric: indeed, if you’re looking for a beer than inspired the boom in American craft brewing, them I’d put on a steel helmet and announce that it’s Samuel Adams Boston Lager: I bet that inspired far more drinkers to try something other than the mainstream than any other early American “craft” beer.

So: what ARE the real 20 most influential beers of all time? Judged purely on the size of the effect they had on subsequent beer history, I reckon they are:

Gabriel Sedlmayr: the most influential brewer of all time?

1 Spaten Dunkel The lagering techniques Gabriel Sedlmayr perfected at the family brewery in Munich, and the yeast that he used and then so generously donated to brewers from Carlsberg in Denmark to Heineken in the Netherlands were what powered the lager revolution in Europe and around the world. Without the work done at the Spaten brewery, there would have been no Pilsner Urquell. But the original Spaten lager (and indeed the first lagers brewed outside Bavaria) were all dark beers, little known by modern drinkers, which is why their importance has been forgotten.

2 Pilsner Urquell The genius of the men who set up the Burghers’ Brewery in Plsen in 1842 appears to have been in combining Bavarian lager yeast and lagering techniques with pale malt made in the English fashion, to produce the world’s first pale lager. It took another half a century or more for the Pilsner style to triumph over its darker rivals even in continental Europe, but most of the beer drunk in the world today has its roots in Bohemia.

3 Hodgson’s East India Pale Ale There’s a good case for saying that Bass Pale Ale, as the most successful IPA of the 19th and 20th centuries, should fly the flag for the style. But Hodgson’s brewery in Bow, London was the maker of the highly hopped pale beer shipped out east whose success inspired the Burton brewers to follow with their own beers brewed for the Indian trade, beers that later proved popular back home in Britain as well. Therefore it’s Hodgson that deserves to be on the “most influential” list, even though the Bow brewery eventually collapsed into obscurity.

4 Parsons’ porter We have no good evidence as to who, if anyone, first turned London brown beer into what became known as porter: it looks as if the city’s whole brown beer trade slowly moved in the first 30 or so years of the 18th century towards a hoppier, more aged style of dark beer that eventually became hugely popular. But there IS evidence that the pioneer of lengthy storage for porter in huge vats, to perfect its flavour, was Sir Humphrey Parsons, of the Red Lion brewery, by St Katharine’s Dock, to the east of the Tower of London, which would make him the most influential porter brewer, since everybody else copied his idea. And without porter we wouldn’t have stout.

5 Barclay Perkins Russian Imperial Stout A number of London brewers were exporting very strong stouts to the Baltic lands in the 19th century, but Barclay Perkins’s Anchor brewery is the earliest we have evidence for, the best-known and the longest–lasting. Its imperial stout influenced brewers in Poland, the smaller Baltic states and Germany in the 19th century, and American craft brewers in the late 20th and 21st centuries.

6 Schwechater Lagerbier Anton Dreher was a big pal of Gabriel Sedlmayr and accompanied the Bavarian on his “study tours”. At the family brewery in Schwechat, just outside Vienna, Dreher used Sedlmayr’s lagering ideas and, like the brewers in Plsen, malting techniques based on those used by English brewers, though Dreher produced darker malts than the Bohemians, to give a beer halfway in colour between Pilsner and a Munich Dunkel. Think Sam Adams Boston lager, and you’d be about right. Dreher’s is the influence on all those lagers that look more like English bitters in colour.

7 Einbecker Ur-Bock Without the Einbeckers of Lower Saxony, there would be no Bock beers.

8 Paulaner Salvator And without Munich’s Salvator, the first of the souped-up Doppelbocks, we wouldn’t have all those beers ending in -or.

9 Anheuser-Busch Budweiser Come on – of course it was hugely influential. It pioneered national beer distribution around the US, and it set the standard for what American beer was expected to be. You might not like that standard, but millions of drinkers did, and do, in the US and abroad.

10 Bass No 1 Best-known of the strong Burton Ales, this was the beer that other barley wines wanted to be, until number 16 on my list came along.

11 Schneider Weisse Who should carry the banner for Bavarian wheat beer, a style that was restricted to little old Bavarian ladies only 40 years ago but which has since bounced back hugely and now has imitators everywhere? There are several candidates, but I’ll give it to the guys from Kelheim, because they brew nothing else.

12 Hoegaarden When it comes to Belgian wheat beer, however, there can be only one original, and all the rest are imitators (even if some now, whisper it, might be doing a better job). When Pierre Celis rescued this style from the grave, he was to have far more influence than he could have possibly imagined.

13 Duvel Anyone brewing a strong, golden Belgian-style ale is bowing towards Breendonk.

14 Fuller’s ESB A winter-only brew to begin with, ESB became famous as the strongest bitter in Britain, and spawned a new style in the US.

15 Newcastle Brown Ale First and best-known of the fruity dark amber “Northern brown ales”.

16 Tennant’s Gold Label The Sheffield brewer Tennant’s launched its golden barley wine more than 60 years ago, inspiring a host of imitators among brewers who had previously believed strong beers had to be dark.

17 Fowler’s Wee Heavy Wee Heavy is a much misunderstood style: it’s not that old and it certainly shouldn’t be made with smoked malt. But Fowler’s is the one everybody copied.

18 Sierra Nevada Pale Ale See above

19 Blind Pig IPA See above

20 Goose Island Bourbon County Stout See above

Now: let the arguments begin.

Merryn and Graham Dineley, she an archaeologist specialising in exploring ancient ale-making, he a craft brewer specialising in actually making ancient ales, have produced a fabulous downloadable poster on the visible remains of Viking brewhouses in Britain, which you can find here.

The poster points out that structures which have been interpreted as Viking “bath houses” or “saunas” are much better interpreted as brewhouses, not least because they were right next to the site of the drinking hall, as at Jarlshof on the Mainland of Shetland and Brough of Birsay, a now uninhabited island off the Mainland of Orkney. And really, what do you think a Viking would rather have – a bath or a beer?

To quote from the poster:

We know that the Vikings drank ale. There are numerous references to it in the Sagas. We also know that the ale was made from malt. In the 10th Century AD, Haakon Haroldson, the first Christian king of Norway, decreed that Yule be celebrated on Christmas Day and that every farmstead “should brew two meals of malt into ale”. One brew was for family, the other for guests. There were fines for non-compliance. If they failed to brew for three years in a row their farm was forfeit.
Ale was an important part of the Yule celebrations. Every farmstead had the facilities to make it. The ale was stored in huge vats, close to the drinking hall. The Orkneyinga Saga tells us that Svein Breastrope was ambushed and killed by Svein Asleiferson, who had hidden behind a stone slab by the ale vats in the entrance of the drinking hall at Orphir, Orkney. Since huge ale vats are not easily moved, then the ale must have been mashed and fermented close to the ale store.
The products and by-products of brewing ale are ephemeral, leaving no trace in the archaeological record. Ale is drunk, spent grain is fed to animals and residues are washed down the drains. Only the installations and perhaps some equipment may survive.

Here’s a picture from the poster of the stone-built installation at Cubbie Roo’s Castle, on the island of Wyre, Orkney, a Viking stronghold of the 12th century AD , which, to quote the Dineleys again, “is ideal as a mash oven, with the cauldron sitting above the fire. It may be the best example of a Viking brew house in Britain. The room is well equipped with substantial drains. It has a stone shelf for the storage vats, with a drain beneath. It is located beside the drinking hall.”

Viking brewery, Cubbie Roo’s Castle, Wyre, Orkney

Here, incidentally, is a picture of an ale made to a Bronze Age recipe by Graham Dineley, clear as a summer’s day*, albeit with no head – no hops, y’see, hops helping to give beer foamability – and here is that same ale being made in a stone trough at the Bressay Heritage Centre, Shetland in as authentic a Bronze Age manner as possible.

And if you liked that, there’s another terrific downloadable poster here, “From Mead to Snakebite: An Ethnographic Study of Modern British University Sports Team Drinking Culture and its Parallels with Viking Drinking Rituals and Consumption”, in which Matt Austin of Cardiff University compares the social secretary of a university sports club with a Viking thane, and points to the similarities between the ways these two alpha males wield their power over their followers in the beer hall and the university bar respectively through drinking games and exploits. You’ll never look as a sweaty student rugby player trying to empty a pint glass in one go again without picturing him in a bearskin jerkin chugging his heather ale from an oxhorn as the rushlights flicker and fellow warriors shout encouragement.

*Not a Shetland summer’s day, obvs, as you’ll see if you look at the pics of the brewing taking place

For a young Japanese entrepreneur, Shiro Yamada has a perhaps unlikely-sounding hero: Baron Bilimoria of Chelsea, lawyer, accountant, son of an Indian army general, and the first Parsi to sit in the British House of Lords. Bilimoria’s establishment credentials were enough to get him in the Royal Box at the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations last year. “He’s like Steve Jobs to me,” Yamada says.

Bilimoria earned Yamada’s admiration for being the man who founded Cobra Beer in 1989, to be the curry eater’s beer: designed specifically to complement food, with lower carbonation and a smoother taste. Yamada, who had worked as a venture capitalist, and been involved in dot-com start-ups in Japan, was studying for an MBA at the Judge Business School, part of Cambridge University, around 2005 when Bilimoria, himself a Cambridge graduate, came to deliver a presentation to students at Judge on the Cobra operation.

Yamada had already become interested in beer after going drinking with fellow students around Cambridge, and taken trips to Belgium and Munich to widen his beery knowledge. Listening to Bilimoria talk about his desire to brew a beer that would match up with Indian food, Yamada had a revelation. What about a beer specifically brewed to match up with Japanese food?

The Japanese have been brewing beer since the mid-1870s, after Seibei Nakagowa came back to the town of Sapporo having spent two years learning how to make lager at the Tivoli brewery in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Today, despite a reputation in the West for mass-produced blandobeers, Japan is the home of a thriving microbrewing scene with some excellent products – Yo-Ho Brewing’s SunSun lager was one of my personal beers of the year for 2012.

However, no one seems to have thought to do anything for Japanese food what Bilimoria did for curry: design a special beer to fit in with and enhance the different dishes. That, Yamada, decided, would be his task. “I drank a lot of beer from all over Europe when I was in the UK,” Yamada says, “beer from Britain, from Belgium, from Germany, and what hit me was that beer had a history in each of those countries, but if you look at Japan, it’s not like that. So what I decided I would like to do is to develop an original Japanese beer with a taste to fit in with Japanese culture and food.”

It took four years, and 14 different recipes, making adjustments along the way, but eventually Yamada picked two typically Japanese flavourings, sanshō, or Japanese pepper, most famously used for flavouring baked eel, but also used on yakitori (chicken skewers) and other dishes; and yuzu, a citrus fruit that looks like marriage between a grapefruit and a mandarin, and also, apparently, tastes like a cross between grapefruit and sour mandarin as well. Yuzu zest, or outer rind, is used in sauces and to flavour miso soup, while yuzu juice goes into ponzu sauce, vinegar and (like other citrus fruits) cakes and marmalades.

With those two flavourings, Yamada designed two beers, best (if unfairly) described in shorthand as falling in the “Belgian strong golden ale/brune” department, one daffodil yellow and called Kagua Blonde, the other ruddy cornelian and called Kagua Rouge. The name “Kagua” comes from the two kanji, or characters, for “Japan aroma”, if I’m reading my notes from dinner correctly, and Yamada (whose surname, strangely, the 13th commonest in Japan, is made up of two of the very few kanji characters I can read, 山田, meaning “mountain field”) told me: “Kagua is the conclusion of my work – my baby.”

The beers are brewed at the De Graal brewery in East Flanders, on the edge of the Flemish Ardennes, and the sanshō and yuzu that give them their aroma and flavour, grown by “top quality producers who have exceptional reputations”, according to Yamada, are flown out to Belgium from Japan, 6,000 miles. Once the beer is brewed, then it has to make the journey back again, to go on sale in Japanese restaurants and bars. Yamada says he went to Japanese brewers to try go get his beers made “but in terms of quality and passion” nobody matched Wim Saeyens, the brewer at De Graal: “He instantly understood the concept of the beer, that the goal was to make a high-end beer to be enjoyed on high-dining occasions.”

The beer pairing dinner I met Yamada at in Hong Kong was certainly high-end: a private room off the £100-a-head Philippe Stark-designed Felix restaurant on the 28th floor of the five-star Peninsula hotel in Kowloon, with a panoramic night-time view over Victoria harbour of the lights of Hong Kong. The food, five courses of Asian-tinged French excellence, culminating in roast beer tenderloin and beer-braised beef tongue with cinnamon pumpkin, shallots, celeriac and endive, was as good as you could wish for in such a venue. The beers – well, the beers were excellent, actually, at the same time both not quite like any beers you will have had before and rooted firmly in beery tradition.

The Kagua Blonde, which was paired to start with a couple of fish dishes, scallop carpaccio and pan-seared shrimp, and accompanied them both like a concert-hall pianist with a bright young soprano, was beautifully perfumey, with a good, tight, aromatic head, a strongly rose-like nose from the sanshō, and a sharp bitterness on the swallow that came from the yuzu more than the hops. The Rouge, which more than held its own with the beef, has less of the sanshō than the Blonde does, and more of a sage-like note in the front, with less herby bitterness and a fuller, sweeter mouthfeel, while red fruits – cherries, raspberries – come through at the beginning. The Rouge is kettle-hopped with Tomahawk (alias Columbus) for bitterness and Styrian Goldings for aroma, though Yamada says he is going to stop using the aroma hop as it does not seem to be adding anything worthwhile.

The Blonde is 8 per cent abv, the Rouge 9 per cent – “It’s better to have a beer with body for food,” Yamada says – each is bottle-conditioned, each comes with a label designed to echo the traditional Japanese kimono, and each is served deliberately in a plain, stemmed wine glass, exactly as a fine wine would be. Both beers were designed with their main purpose being food pairing, Yamada says, “but I don’t want to limit the possibilities.” Certainly the Blonde is a great beer for sipping in tiny quantities, as it fills the mouth with tremendous, lasting flavour.

Shiro Yamada

The Kagua range was launched in Japan in March last year, and is now in 170 top-end restaurants and hotels in the country. Launches in Singapore and Hong Kong took place last autumn, and the beers sell in the better class of Hong Kong hotel for HK$148 a time – £12, or two to three times what you would be paying for an American imported beer in one of the city’s specialist beer bars.

Brewers have been banging on about getting diners to appreciate beer with food for many decades now, and there have been numerous attempts to launch a “beer designed to go with food” in the past. The Kagua pair are the first two I can recall which actually hit that target: and the reason, I’m sure, is because they are foremost a couple of excellent beers.

Scallop carpaccio with soy sauce mayo. roasted beetroot tartar, arugula salad and crispy onion. The great thing about Hong Kong restaurants is that EVERYBODY photographs their food, so nobody minds about it.

Four hundred years ago British brewers used “culinary” herbs, such as rosemary, sage and even mint, to flavour their ales, a tradition that has now been almost entirely lost. When Shiro Yamada’s Nippon Craft Beer company starts shipping the Kagua range to Europe and the US, which is planned to happen some time this year, perhaps it might encourage Western brewers to start looking at reviving some Tudor and Stuart-style beers, from the days when food without beer would have been unthinkable.

Filed under: Beer, Beer business, Beer with food, Food and beer pairings

There are plenty enough well-known quotes about beer. Some of the best-known, unfortunately, are made up. However, it’s still possible to come across great, genuine yet little-known snippets. Here are 20 of my favourite beer quotes in need of wider broadcasting:

“If [beer] is … the people’s beverage – and nobody, I take it, will deny that it is just that – its history must of necessity go hand in hand, so to speak, with the history of that people, with the history of its entire civilisation.”
John P Arnold, Origin and History of Beer and Brewing, 1911

If I ever worry that the history of beer is a little trivial, I re-read this passage from the American-German beer writer John Arnold and feel that, yes, I’m recording part of the story of my people, my civilisation. OK, people?

“See that ye keep a noble house for beef and beer, that thereof may be praise given to God and to your honour.”
Advice given to Leonard, titular sixth Lord Dacre, in 1570

Leonard Dacre was one of the leaders of the Northern Rebellion, a revolt designed to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne of England. But he managed to lose the battle of Gelt Bridge in Cumberland in 1570 despite outnumbering the Elizabethan forces two to one with his private force of 3,000 armed men, raised from the local tenantry. He subsequently fled to Flanders via Scotland, dying three years later. Part of the motive behind his taking part in the rebellion seems to have been his failure to claim the title of Baron Dacre of Gilsland after the death of his nephew, the fifth Lord Dacre. In the manoeuvrings before the rebellion took off, Leonard was sent a letter by one of his dependants, Richard Atkinson, telling him how to maintain the loyalty of the Dacre tenants in Cumberland, which included the excellent advice above about beef and beer.

Winston Smith buys an old prole a round of mild

“You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Winston tentatively. The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents … “The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer – wallop we used to call it – was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.” “Which war was that?” said Winston. “It’s all wars,” said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. “’Ere’s wishing you the very best of ’ealth!”
1984, by George Orwell, published 1949

Orwell described the elderly prole that Winston Smith was trying to interview as “eighty at the least”, which, curiously, would have made him almost exactly the same age as Orwell himself would have been had the consumptive socialist still been alive in 1984. “Wallop” was indeed the nickname, in the 1930s, at least, for mild ale, four old pence the price per pint, and we know George Orwell liked mild. It’s good to see beer get a mention in a book studied by so many teenagers for English literature exams. Even if they probably have to have “mild” explained to them. (The screen grab up there, incidentally, is from the 1954 BBC TV production, with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith – you can see the whole bar scene here. You’ve got to love the 10-sided beer mugs, and the wooden cask on the bar, far more 1954 than 1984. Twelve cents for two half-litres? Outrageous. And yes, that’s Wilfred Bramble playing the old man: he was, in fact, only a year older than Cushing.)

The Rat, meanwhile, was busy examining the label on one of the beer-bottles. “I perceive this to be Old Burton,” he remarked approvingly. “Sensible Mole! The very thing! Now we shall be able to mull some ale. Get the things ready, Mole, while I draw the corks.”
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908

Here’s a mention of beer in a book for children. I discovered while researching this post that I am actually referenced on the subject of Old Burton in The Annotated Wind in the Willows over this exact quote from the “Dulce Domum” chapter of TWITW, one of my favourite parts of one of my favourite children’s books. Like all great children’s authors, Grahame wrote as much for the adult as the child, and adults reading this to their small ones would have smiled with recognition at the mention of Burton Ale. The version of Wind in the Willows illustrated by Arthur Rackham (see picture) actually shows Ratty carrying bottles clearly labelled with the red diamond trademark used on Bass Burton Ale. The Rat and the Mole, incidentally, give some of the mulled ale to the (underage) fieldmice who have come round carol-singing – hem hem. Don’t try that yourself.

Some folks of cider make a rout
And cider’s well enough no doubt
When better liquors fail;
But wine, that’s richer, better still,
Ev’n wine itself (deny’t who will)
Must yield to nappy ale
John Gay (1685-1732), “Ballad on Ale” from Songs and Ballads

John Gay, today, is known almost entirely for being the writer of The Beggar’s Opera, but he also wrote a considerable amount of light verse, including the marvellously brisk “Ballad on Ale”. I love the whole poem, actually. “Nappy” in this context means “foaming” and/or “strong”.

It was this day a twelvemonth since we left England, in consequence of which a peice [sic] of cheshire cheese was taken from a locker where it had been reservd for this occasion and a cask of Porter tappd which provd excellently good, so that we livd like English men and drank the hea[l]ths of our freinds in England.
The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, August 25 1769

When Joseph Banks set out on the great exploratory voyage with Captain James Cook across the Pacific that made both men famous, the ship was well stocked with provisions from England, including London porter. At the time the porter was tapped to celebrate being away from home for a whole year, the Endeavour was heading south from Tahiti towards New Zealand. The porter they drank had travelled across the Equator down to Rio de Janeiro, around Cape Horn and then halfway across the Pacific, and was still in fine condition: so much for the idea that only well-hopped pale ales could survive long journeys to hot climes.

Paul Domby junior: give that kid some porter

Talking of beer and children, as we were earlier, here’s a quote from Charles Dickens that gets far fewer outings than the many better-known Dickens beer quotes:

It was darkly rumoured that the butler, regarding him with favour such as that stern man had never shown before to mortal boy, had sometimes mingled porter with his table beer to make him strong.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848

The boy being given the porter in his table beer, at Dr Blimber’s school in Brighton, is Paul Dombey junior, who is just six years old. And nobody raised an eyebrow. Table beer was still being handed out at British schools certainly, it appears, to at least the middle of the 19th century.

Glorious Mild, that Drink Divine,
That Nectar, far surpassing Wine,
That Noble Cordial swill’d by Porters,
And bless’d by Soldiers at their Quarters
The Hudibrastick Brewer, 1714, by Ned Ward (1660 or 1667-1731)

Ned Ward was a writer, satirist and poet and, from 1712, successively an alehouse keeper and tavern proprietor, before ending his days running a coffee house.  Judging by The Hudibrastick Brewer, he was brewing his own beer at the alehouse he was keeping in Clerkenwell Green, London when the poem was written, having decided that “Men of Sense must own is better/To live by Malt, than starve by Meter”. (Despite what Wikipedia claims, there is no evidence that he kept the King’s Head tavern by Gray’s Inn before moving to Clerkenwell: he only lived there.) We can assume that at his Clerkenwell alehouse, Ward brewed, and sold, mild ale, which in the early 18th century meant a drink low in hops, and sold quickly before it had time to sour, but probably pretty strong, perhaps seven to eight per cent alcohol by volume. Looks like porters were still drinking mild, too, rather than the drink that was to be developed in the next decade, and would take their name. “Hudibrastick” is a style of verse used in, and named after, Samuel Butler’s poem Hudibras, written in the 1660s and 1670s. Ward also looks to have written a couple of the earliest pub guides to London, A Vade Mecum for Malt Worms, published around 1718, and A Guide for Malt Worms, published a couple of years later. They are great sources for information on the drinks available in London pubs at the time (porter is not mentioned at all, and three-threads only in passing), and a surprising number of the pubs listed in them are still open.

She was luxuriously tired and her muscles felt sore from the unaccustomed strain of riding astride. Nothing had ever tasted so good as the cool golden ale she swallowed from a pewter tankard. She slept deeply that night and longer than she had intended …
Kathleen Winsor (1919-2003), Forever Amber, 1944

“Amber – Ale?” “Golden, actually.”  From the 1947 film, with Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde

Forever Amber, set in 17th century England, is the story of Amber St Clair, an orphan who – basically – shags her was to the very top of Restoration society. It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of the 1940s, condemned by the Catholic church, banned in fourteen US states and selling three million copies. Its author, a Midwestern US housewife, read almost 400 books as part of her research before writing the 972-page novel. Drying malt using coke was very probably taking place by the Restoration, and Samuel Pepys was drinking bottles of “Hull Ale” in London in 1660, which was most likely ale from the pale-malt-making Midlands shipped down via the Trent, so it might have been possible to drink golden ale from a pewter pot at the time of the Great Fire. But even if the details are wrong, sex and beer – what’s not to like, frankly.

“Only a pint at breakfast-time, and a pint and a half at eleven o’clock, and a quart or so at dinner. And then no more till the afternoon; and half a gallon at supper-time. No one can object to that.”
Lorna Doone (1869), by Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825-1900)

This is Jan Ridd, the hero of Lorna Doone, defending the 17th-century Englishman’s beer-drinking habits to an Italian woman who kept a Somerset alehouse (don’t ask, it’s an important plot point). I cannot help feeling that Dickie B is taking the micturation out of his hero here somewhat, but as Blackmore’s grave is less than three minutes’ walk from my house in West London, I’ll cut him some neighbourly slack. And it’s certainly true that in the 17th century, an Englishman could well be putting away a gallon of ale a day, with an Englishwoman not that far behind.

“Let’s have filleted steak and a bottle of Bass for dinner tonight. It will be simply exquisite. I shall love it.”
“But my dear Nella,” he exclaimed, “steak and beer at Felix’s! It’s impossible! Moreover, young women still under twenty-three cannot be permitted to drink Bass.”
“I said steak and Bass, and as for being twenty-three, shall be going in twenty-four tomorrow.” Miss Racksole set her small white teeth.
The Grand Babylon Hotel, by Arnold Bennett, 1902

The refusal by the maitre d’ at the Grand Babylon Hotel (aka Felix’s) in London to serve the American multimillionaire Theodore Racksole and his daughter Nella with an order of two steaks and two bottles of pale ale for dinner sets off a chain that sees Racksole buy the hotel just to get the meal his daughter wanted, and uncovers on the way, a murder, the disappearance of a German prince, and various other villanies. The Grand Babylon is clearly the Savoy Hotel in disguise: Arnold Bennett loved the Savoy, and the hotel honoured him in return by naming a dish after him. I like this quote for honouring pale ale with steak, an excellent combination.

When the lager lout says that beer is an old man’s drink, the reply is to ask if they have ever thought of growing up.
Beware the Barmaid’s Smile!, by “Chris Thompson” (George Williamson), 1987

George Williamson, who died in 2007, aged 68, was a Scottish architect, political activist and nuclear disarmament campaigner who, from 1970, worked in brewery estates departments. He wrote the too-little-known (and, today, almost impossible to find) pamphlet Beware the Barmaid’s Smile!, subtitled “The New Vulgarity in Our Pub Culture”, using a pseudonym, unsurprisingly, considering for whom he was working. The pamphlet was a polemic demanding that the evolution of the pub be controlled by the customers and not by the breweries, and calling for militant opposition to the remorseless corporatisation of pubs and the brewing industry. As his Guardian obituary said, “Unfortunately, this insurrection never happened.” The “lager lout” was the folk devil of the era, about whom we were all supposed to be in a moral panic: “binge drinking” had not yet been invented. The quote also nicely demonstrates that to a lot of Britons, “lager” and “beer” were then (and, I suspect, still are today) separate categories, the one pale and yellow, the other dark and brown.

Genial and gladdening is the power of good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen. He is not deserving of the name of Englishman who speaketh against ale.
Lavengro, George Borrow (1803-1881)

Lavengro, published in 1851, is a semi-autobiographical account of the wanderings around England by an anonymous hero, and his dealings with gipsies and travellers – “Lavengro” is meant to be a Romany word meaning “word master”, and George Borrow was a writer and translator. The book failed to take off until after Borrow’s death, but was then extremely popular right through to the Second World War or so. In the past 60 years Borrow’s reputation has faded: does anybody read him any more? But who among ye can deny the truth of the words quoted here? (They come, incidentally, just after the hero of the book has shared a large jug of ale with a tinker and his family, including a boy and girl “about four or five years old”, who are each given a draught of ale by their mother. Is a theme developing here?)

Good beer is the basis of true temperance
The Daily Express, 25 January 1919

The Daily Express may be a sad and unfunny joke today, but a century ago you could, sometimes, find sense in its pages. The edition of Saturday, January 25 1919 carried a editorial decrying the fact that two months after the end of the First World War, during which breweries’ production had been severely restricted, there was still a shortage of beer, and insisting: “There must be more beer, cheaper beer and better beer … Good ale and beer are the drinks of temperate men, and it must be confessed that England has bred a race of mighty fighting men on her national brew.” That last bit is a load of cock, of course. The “national brew” has nothing to do with the fighting ability of the British Army. But to the extent that good beer is not the stuff you fling past your tonsils simply to become drunk, then yes, it’s a temperance drink in the proper meaning of the word.

“In England in the late ’60′s, a chain of companies called Watney’s brought out a new beer entitled Red Barrel, which was absolutely disgusting, and they gutted all these pubs in England … they took these lovely charming olde worlde wood-panelled saw-dusty pubs and made them look all tiled and futuristic, like men’s lavatories, and had this Red Barrel stuff in there, that was all you could get, this disgusting beer, which made you go to the lavatory pretty imminently.”
Andy Partridge of XTC, speaking on WBRU radio in Providence, Rhode Island, 1989

Partridge was attempting to explain to a bemused interviewer on WBRU, the Brown University-based radio station, the story behind the track “You’re a Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel)” on the Psonic Psunspot album. I really wanted to include this quote at the start of the last chapter in Beer: The Story of the Pint, but Hodder Headline’s lawyers were apparently frightened that the publishing company might get sued for calling Red Barrel disgusting: yes, “avoid like the plague” revisited. I reckoned we could have found enough people to say it was disgusting to win any libel case anyone might have tried, in the unlikely circumstance that anyone felt their reputation could be lowered any further, when by bringing the case they were admitting to having been involved in the production of Red Barrel, already a crime against beer serious enough to make all reasonable persons think worse of them. However, the lawyers prevailed, and Partridge was replaced by a quote from Richard Boston. (Incidentally, Andy P, who as a Swindon boy probably met the dreaded Red Barrel in pubs owned by Usher’s of Trowbridge, acquired by Watney’s in 1960, was wrong about Red Barrel arriving in the late 1960s. It had been around as an export bottled beer since 1931, was served on draught in Sheen Tennis Club in south-west London in 1935, and was a best-selling keg beer as early as 1959. In 1961 Watney’s was boasting that Red Barrel was brewed with Norfolk barley and Goldings hops, just to prove that great ingredients do not guarantee a great beer.)

Whether Scurvy-grass, Daucus, Gill, Butler, or Broom,
Or from London, or Southwark, or Lambeth we come;
We humbly implore since the Wine in the Nation,
Has of late so much lost its once great Reputation;
That such Liquor as ours which is genuine and true,
And which all our Masters so carefully brew,
Which all men approve of, tho’ many drink Wine,
Yet the good Oyl of Barly there’s none will decline:
That we as a body call’d corp’rate may stand,
And a Patent procure from your Seal and your Hand,
That none without Licence, call’d Special, shall fail,
To drink any thing else, but Strong Nappy Brown Ale.
From The Bacchanalian Sessions: or The Contention of Liquors by Richard Ames (c 1663/4-1692)

Ground-ivy, otherwise gill or ale-hoof

Richard Ames was a Londoner who started out as a tailor’s apprentice before producing a host of verse, much of it in praise of women and/or drink. His precise birth year is unknown, but he looks to have died before he was 30, and The Contention of Liquors was published after his death. It’s a long poem featuring a host of alcoholic beverages arguing their particular virtues in front of Bacchus, and this section shows the ales putting up their case. I like this quote because it shows that even at the end of the 17th century hops were still far from totally triumphant in England: Ames lists five different herb ales: scurvy ale, flavoured with scurvy-grass, Cochlearia officinalis, a relative of horseradish, which is high in vitamin C, and was used by sailors as a treatment for scurvy before its place was taken by citrus fruit; daucus ale, flavoured with wild carrot seed, which apparently gives “a fine peach flavour or relish” to ale; gill ale, flavoured with ground-ivy, or alehoof, Glechoma hederacea, a widely used addition to English ale even after the arrival of hops: gill ale was still on sale at a pub in Birdcage Alley, Southwark around 1722; Dr Butler’s Ale, the “purging” brew sold at pubs called the Dr Butler’s Head, which contained half a dozen or so herbs and flavourings, including horse-radish, sage, betony and Roman wormwood; and broom ale, flavoured with the bitter yellow flowering tops of the familiar heathland shrub. Ale infused with broom after it had been tunned was one of only two “herb” beers allowed to be sold after a tax was brought in on hops in 1711. Oh, note Lambeth, opposite Westminster, is there with London and Southwark as a supplier of ale. And if you want to shorten this quote, how about: “The good Oyl of Barly there’s none will decline.” I certainly won’t.

They were drinking iced honey-beer out of tall cut-glass goblets. This had been brought by Popova as a present for Olga – it was the colour of amber and tingled pleasantly on one’s tongue. It prompted Pyotr to make some very happy remarks, but it was useless to try to get them in because of Alexei’s tiresome and unceasing chatter.
Decadence (1925) by Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)

Gorky (who took his pseudonym from a word meaning “bitter” in Russian) was living in exile in Italy when he wrote Decadence, a novel tracing the history of a bourgeois Russian family from the time of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the Bolshevik revolution. Hands up, I’ve never read it, but when I was searching for quotes for the chapter on honey beer in Amber Gold and Black, it appeared in the results. Anyway, now you know what to say if anyone rings up and says: “I’ve got some honey beer” – “Popova!”

Suppose we go and try some lager-bier? … It is a new beverage, of German origin … you will not like it for some time, because it is quite different from Barclay and Perkins’s beer.
Ten Years in the United States: Being an Englishman’s View of Men and Things in the North and South, by David W. Mitchell, 1862

This is, I think, one of the earliest mentions of “lager” in a British publication, from a book which came out when the War between the States was a year old, as an attempt to propagandise the cause of the South in Britain. Mitchell was describing Richmond, Virginia when he introduced his readers to lager, telling them that: “It affords another instance of an acquired taste; nobody liked it at first, but most people who use drinking houses get used to taking it in surprising quantities. Germans have sworn to taking sixty glasses in an evening without being intoxicated.” Admittedly most lagers at the time were weaker than most British (and, probably, American) ales, but it is still odd to read in 19th century publications of the allegedly non-intoxicating effects of lager-bier.

But there are those who think that a cloud is rising which may yet overshadow the prosperity of Burton. And on the cloud they think they see written in letters whose outlines are still faint and dim, so faint and dim indeed that the Burton brewers, who of all men should be most skilled to discern the signs of the times, refuse to believe that the writing is there at all: the ominous words Lager Bier.
“Beer-town-upon-Trent”, Murray’s Magazine, Vol IV, No XXIII, November 1888 p646

In the quarter-century after Mitchell introduced Britons to the strange German drink, it made little or no progress in this country. All the same, at the end of a piece describing a visit to the Bass brewing complex, an anonymous writer for Murray’s Magazine felt obliged to issue a warning to Lord Burton and his fellow members of the Beerage about what lay in the future. He was right, of course, though it took another 90 years for the prophecy to be fulfilled.

“I’m getting rather hoarse, I fear,
After so much reciting:
So, if you don’t object, my dear,
We’ll try a glass of bitter beer –
I think it looks inviting.”
Phantasmagoria by Lewis Carroll, published 1869

Phantasmagoria is one of Carroll’s lesser-known works, but his longest poem, a conversation between a man and a (decidedly comic) ghost, in which the ghost explains all about the ghost world and then, becoming thirsty, demands that the man he set out to haunt brings him a beer.

You’d think he would have preferred spirits.

Beer’s not my usual breakfast tipple, though I’d agree with Tim Martin, founder of the Wetherspoon pub chain in the UK, that Abbot Ale is an excellent accompaniment to the traditional Full English. But I couldn’t keep away from an invitation to “brunch” with Bryan Baird, the American founder of the eponymous brewery in Numazu, 80 or so miles west of Tokyo.

The event was organised by the Globe bar in SoHo, Hong Kong and featured six different Baird beers, all paired with different dishes and introduced by Bryan Baird himself. Like all brewers, Bryan is hugely enthusiastic about his trade, and he was well served by the Globe, which served up some excellent matches to his beers, to go with a six-course breakfast.

We kicked off with cured ocean trout, cream cheese and cucumber, served with Baird’s Single-Take Session Ale: a fine pairing, a little more classy than the traditional breakfast kipper, the only problem here being that I really, really wanted a whole pint of Single-Take, rather than a small glass. It’s a Belgian-style beer, according to Bryan, made with Belgian yeast, but “inverted” – low-alcohol, high-hop, rather than the other way round, 4.7 per cent abv and plenty of hop flavour from dry-hopping. The hops are whole-hop Tettnanger and New Zealand varieties, and the name and label are inspired by Neil “single take” Young: the label is meant to show young Mr Young performing “Rocking’ in the Free World” on Saturday Night Live in 1989. And if you look at that video, you can see the woman who designs Baird’s woodcut-style labels has indeed captured a clip from the show.

“Single-Take”, Bryan says, reflects Baird’s philosophy towards brewing: simplicity and minimal processing: “The more you process, the more you strip out.” Baird’s beers are all unfiltered and all are bottle-fermented. The malt is mostly floor-malted Maris Otter, from Crisp Malting Group in the UK (“we like tradition” – Bryan), and if it seems economically insane to bring malt from the UK to Japan, Bryan told me that he manages to get a reasonable deal by piggy-backing his own orders alongside those from some of Japan’s giant brewers, who import a very considerable amount of British malt themselves. (Incidentally, just to show that you should never assume too much about your audience, one of the people on the table behind me at the brunch stuck his hand up as Bryan was talking about floor malting and asked: “What is malting?” If you don’t know, do ask.)

Next was French toast and bacon, or rather, eggy bread with crisp pancetta, pomegranate and eucalyptus honey, served with Baird’s Rising Sun pale ale. This is Bryan’s take on an American IPA, but considerably more subtle than American IPAs normally are, Cascade and Ahtanum hops used with care, so that the sweetness of the malt is still apparent: another winning combination, the beer and the sharp honey shaking hands and slapping each other on the back.

Number three was a very Chinese breakfast dish, steamed bun with sugar-braised pork and hoisin sauce, paired with Red Rose amber ale. Red Rose is Baird’s take on the “Californian steam” style, which would be low on my list of favourite beer types: I like malty beers with pork, but this wasn’t a combination that made much impact on me. Again, it’s a reversal: while Steam Beer is usually a lager yeast fermenting at ale yeast temperatures, Baird uses a Scottish ale yeast at lager temperatures to make Red Rose. The name here comes from Bryan’s grandfather’s animal feed company, the inheritance from which enabled him to start the brewery: his grandfather’s company’s trade name was Red Rose.

Bryan Baird: brewing enthusiast

I was happier with the Angry Boy brown ale, rightly one of Baird’s most popular beers, which came with a Cumberland sausage and cheddar roll. It is, Bryan says, his autobiographical beer: “My mom used to call me Angry Boy,” not least, apparently, because he used to smash up the family home after his favourite (American) football team, the Cincinnati Bengals, had managed to lose again. The label today, he says, is a “blue-eyed samurai”, and the “anger” now is meant to reflect passion and drive. It’s an “American” brown ale, Bryan says, taking it on from the British original, plenty of malt sweetness, but with brown sugar to add more alcohol (6.5 per cent abv) and hopped “almost like an IPA”, with dry hops as well, to give a beer that’s “placid on the surface, but with a lot going on at a lower level”.

Baird’s Imperial IPA is called Suruga Bay, after the large bay that the brewery’s home town, Numazu, stands at the head of. It was served at the Globe brunch with a “mini-burger”: hoppy IPAs are a good match with burgers, cutting through and clearing the grease (this is the reason Tim Martin is so right about Abbot and the traditional English heart-jolter). Bryan confesses to being inspired by Russian River’s pioneering Pliny the Elder: Suruga Bay is double-dry hopped with American and New Zealand hops: Columbus, Nelson Sauvin, Simcoe and Cascade. Ten years ago, he says, he was told the Japanese would never drink really hoppy beers: today Suruga Bay is, with Rising Sun, one of his best-sellers: “We just can’t make enough of it.”

Chocolate and Caramel Beignets – or to you, deep-fried Mars bars in beer batter

The final dish was called “Chocolate and Caramel Beignets”, a fabulous frenchification of that Scottish classic – deep-fried Mars bars. Yes, these little, sweet puffy balls were sliced Mars bars, dipped in a beery batter, deep-fried and served with vanilla ice-cream. It was a great joke, though, um, not actually that terrific as an experience: cheap chocolate is cheap chocolate, even when pimped up by the excellent chef the Globe employs. The beer was good, though: Baird’s Kurofune Porter, 6 per cent abv, which Bryan calls a “robust porter” – don’t let’s start having an argument about whether that is in any way a valid category, this is a fine beer and an excellent choice with ice-cream. Kurofune means “black ships”, and refers to the ships that Commander Perry arrived in back in 1854 to open up Japan fully to Western trade.

Overall it was an excellent lunchtime, my one difficulty being that, these days, drinking quantities of strong beer before 2pm means I then have to take an extended nap, wiping out my afternoon. Still, many thanks to Bryan, the Globe, and the guys from Hop Leaf, the beer importers, who organised it all.

Black Eagle sign, Brick Lane

The huge sign on the outside of the building on the corner of Hanbury Street and Brick Lane is clear enough: Truman Black Eagle Brewery. Nobody passing by could have any doubt what used to happen here, even though no beer brewing has taken place on the premises for more than 20 years. But what few people know is that for a couple of decades in the middle of the 19th century, this was the biggest brewery in the world.

Today Brick Lane, Spitalfields, in the East End of London is bustling and cosmopolitan, the heart of what is sometimes called “Banglatown”. For hundreds of years Spitalfields – filled with cheap housing, in large part because it was to the east of the City, so that the prevailing westerly winds dump all the soot from the West End over it – has been a place where poor immigrants to England come to try to scrabble a living, generally in trades connected with making clothes: Huguenot silk weavers from France fleeing Catholic oppression,  Irish linen weavers fleeing unemployment in Ireland, Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia, Bangladeshis fleeing poverty, all adding their tales to a place crowded with both people and history. But it wasn’t always thus: the author Daniel Defoe, who was born in 1660, remembered Brick Lane from his childhood in the early years of the Restoration as “a deep, dirty road frequented chiefly by carts fetching bricks into Whitechapel”.

Over the decade after Charles II returned to England, as London expanded, development spread up Brick Lane itself from the south, and new streets were laid out in Spitalfields where previously cows had grazed. Two of these streets, on the west side of Brick Lane, were named Grey Eagle Street and Black Eagle Street. Thomas Bucknall, a London entrepreneur, is said by some to have built the Black Eagle brewhouse in about 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, on land known as Lolsworth Field, Spittlehope belonging to Sir William Wheler. However, it remains unclear whether Bucknall actually was a brewer: the best that can be said is that on the land he leased “in 1681-2 the lay-out of buildings on this part of Brick Lane approximated to the present arrangement of brewery buildings round an entrance yard, and that this lay-out may date back to 1675.”

Joseph Truman is sometimes said to have acquired the brewery in 1679, from William Bucknall, going on to take out leases on neighbouring property. However, it is not until 1683 that Truman is found as a brewer in any records that survive today. He appeared that year in the register of St Dunstan’s, Stepney, on the birth of his daughter, as a “brewer of brick lane” [sic]. He became a freeman of the Brewers’ Company, the city’s guild of brewers, in 1690, five years after the guild had won a charter extending its control over brewers, like Truman, in London’s suburbs. The earliest known lease involving Truman is dated 1694, and refers to a brewhouse, granary and stable in the occupation of John Hinkwell (or Huckwell). With the premises came the use of two passages, one into Pelham (now Woodseer) Street, and one into Brick Lane, which indicates a site, confusingly, on the east of Brick Lane.

Maps of Brick Lane, 1744 and 2013. Note the roads that disappeared into the growing brewery, Black Eagle Street and Monmouth Street, and how some streets changed their names while others to the north and west vanished with the arrival of the railway and Commercial Street in the 1840s. Double-click all pics to embiggen

Not until 1701 is Truman’s name known to be connected with the west side, when he obtained a sub-lease from Humphrey Neudick of a piece of land apparently to the north of Black Eagle Street upon which stood a dwelling-house and brewhouse. From this tangled narrative we can say that Joseph Truman was brewing in Brick Lane by 1683 at the latest, possibly on the east, Bethnal Green side, and had certainly acquired a lease on a brewery on the west, Spitalfields side of Brick Lane by 1701.

Who his partners were at this time is not known, but by 1716 they included his son Joseph II and Alud (or Alan) Denne, a publican. Another of Joseph Truman senior’s nine children, Benjamin, who was born in 1699 or 1700, became a partner in the brewery in 1722, the year after his father’s death in 1721. At this time there were four separate brewhouses on the site. They provided enough wealth for Joseph Truman II to retire to Trowbridge in 1730, and to be “reputed worth £10,000” (more than £20 million, in today’s terms) when he died in 1733, leaving behind only a daughter, Jane. (Jane Truman married William Butts, an apothecary from Derby, in 1742: one of her grandsons, Thomas Butts Aveling, born 1782, became head clerk at the Brick Lane brewery.)

What beers the Brick Lane concern was brewing when Benjamin Truman joined we don’t know either, but we can be pretty sure that one sort was dark brown, strong and well-hopped: the beer that eventually took the name porter, because of its popularity with the porters of London, the thousands of men who earned a living moving goods on and off ships moored in the river (the “Fellowship porters”) and around the city’s streets (the “Street” or “Ticket” porters, who also delivered parcels, letters and messages). Porter was developed around 1720 or so as an aged, hoppier version of the original London brown beer (the first known mention of porter by name comes from 1721), and it turned out to be the earliest beer suitable for mass production.

One of the necessities for making good porter was storing it in bulk for some months – as long as two years for stronger beer – to let it mature: at first it was stored in 108-gallon casks called butts, hence an alternative name for the brew, “entire butt beer”, but gradually the larger brewers began building bigger and bigger vats at their breweries to mature the beer. The best porter came from the biggest producers, who could afford the vessels to store the beer in and had the funds needed to tie up capital in maturing beer, a virtuous circle that meant the larger porter specialists began to pull away from their smaller rivals, especially those making the less popular, less hoppy brews. Eventually an aristocracy of half a dozen big porter brewers developed in London, supreme among 140 or so other much smaller concerns. Among those big porter specialists was Benjamin Truman.

In 1741 the brewery “rest book” (the end-of-year accounts) showed Brick Lane was making amber ale, three types of stout (brown stout, pale stout – stout originally meant any strong beer, not necessarily dark – and elder stout), and also “mild”. This last beer was not mild in the sense we know it today, but unaged porter, and it was already easily the most important beer produced. The brewery had getting on for 300 publicans on the books, though only 26 or so were tied houses actually owned by the brewery. The partners in the brewery were “the executors of A. Denne” with two 18ths, John Denne with six 18ths, Francis Cooper with three 18ths and Benjamin Truman with the remaining seven 18ths. A couple of years later, Truman’s share had risen to eleven 18ths, Cooper still had his three shares, and Ann Denne owned four shares.

Sir Benjamin Truman by Thomas Gainsborough

In the 1740s Benjamin Truman, who had been living nearby in Princelet Street when his brother was in charge of the brewery, had built a big new house in Brick Lane in splendid Georgian style. But he had moved out of London by 1754, to a home near Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, just within commuting distance of the Black Eagle brewery along 18th century roads. In 1757 he confirmed his position as a country gentleman by taking over Pope’s Manor, a newly built house to the east of the Marquess of Salisbury’s Hatfield Park. Four years later, in 1761, the seal was almost literally put upon his arrival among the upper classes when he was “pricked” to become the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire.

As Sheriff, it was Truman’s job that year to deliver a loyal address from the county to the new King, George III. Truman had links with the royal family from many years before, in 1737, when Frederick, Prince of Wales, George III’s father, had thrown a public celebration outside his home, Carlton House, in London, for the birth of his daughter. The story that has come down is that the crowds had rioted over the quality of the four barrels of beer provided by the Prince’s regular household brewer. The next night the Prince repeated the public party, but Truman supplied the beer instead, to the satisfaction, it is said, of all.

According to the legend, George III was reminded of this incident 24 years earlier by Truman’s appearance at court with the address, and rewarded the Brick Lane brewer with a knighthood. The truth is that Truman’s elevation was more a reward for the large loans he made to the Crown to finance the country’s wars. The brewery had made Truman an extremely wealthy man: the “weekly money” he withdrew from the concern in the 1760s ran to almost £3,750 a year, the equivalent in earnings to more than £5 million today. His portrait, with a landscape in the background, was one of the largest Thomas Gainsborough ever painted.

All this wealth came from ever-increasing production of porter. Over the decades the paler beers had mostly disappeared from production at Brick Lane, with the books listing only mild porter, stale porter (that is to say, aged, or matured, not “off”) and brown stout, plus a little pale stout, probably for export. In 1748 the Black Eagle brewery was the third biggest brewery in London – and, probably, the world – with 39,400 barrels of beer produced in a year, behind only the two concerns owned by the Calvert family, the Hourglass Brewery in Upper Thames Street and the Peacock brewery in Whitecross Street, near the Barbican, both making 53,000 to 56,000 barrels a year. By 1760 Truman’s was still the third biggest of the London porter brewers, with just over 60,000 barrels a year, narrowly behind Samuel Whitbread in Chiswell Street (though still some way behind John Calvert’s Peacock brewery, on nearly 75,000 barrels a year).

Frances Villebois by Thomas Gainsborough

In 1776 the brewery had slipped to fourth place, though output was up again, at 83,000 barrels a year. Truman seems to have been pretty much running the business himself during this growth, though between 1767 and 1776 he had a partner called John Baker, with a one-third share in the business: presumably this was the successful Spitalfields weaver of the same name, who seems to have been Benjamin’s brother-in-law, having apparently married one of Joseph Truman I’s daughters.

By coincidence, Truman’s near neighbour in Hertfordshire was the brewer just ahead of him in porter production, Samuel Whitbread, who moved to Bedwell Park, Essendon, only a mile away from Pope’s Manor, in 1765. There is strong evidence that the two did not fraternise: Whitbread and his family were patrons of Essendon church, while Truman avoided that village, travelling past it from Pope’s Manor to worship at a church another couple of miles east in the village of Hertingfordbury. It was in Hertingfordbury churchyard that Benjamin’s only son, James, was buried in 1766, the same year as Benjamin’s wife Frances. Benjamin followed his wife and son into the grave in 1780, only three years after he had commissioned from Gainsborough four paintings, of himself, two granddaughters and two great-grandsons. (In the 1980s the tomb at Hertingfordbury was half-hidden under a yew, with the inscription barely readable, but the Truman arms – three hearts – could still be seen.) That year the Brick Lane premises were valued at £8,095 – around £70 million today, on a share-of-GDP basis.

Sir Benjamin Truman’s daughter, also called Frances, born 1726, had married a man called Henry Read, a landowner from Crowood, Ramsbury, Wiltshire, and given birth to two sons, William and Henry Truman Read, and three daughters, the eldest of whom, another Frances, had married her French dancing master, William Villebois. Neither William Read nor Henry Read were, apparently, interested in brewing, although Sir Benjamin assigned a one-eighteenth share in the Black Eagle brewery to William in 1775, and left a note in that year’s rest book that suggests William was expected to be working at the brewery in the future, if not working there already: in the note, Sir Benjamin emphasised to his grandson the need for hard work to ensure profits: “there can be no other way of raising a great Fortune but by carrying on an Extensive Trade. I must tell you Young Man, this is not to be obtained without Spirrit [sic] and great Application.”

John Truman Villebois and his brother, by Thomas Gainsborough

After Sir Benjamin’s death the business took William Truman Read’s name, becoming Read’s Brewery. But Sir Benjamin left the bulk of his estate, worth £330,000 (perhaps £460 million today), including most of the brewery business, to the sons of his eldest daughter, his young great-grandsons, John and William Truman Villebois. Sir Benjamin clearly hoped that these two, at least, would enter the family business, for his will gave instructions that the brewery house in Brick Lane should be kept in good condition until the two boys were 21, and he encouraged his granddaughter and her husband to live there: “it shall be a place of Residence for my said two Great Grandsons the Villebois as they are to be bred up to the Business conceiving it must be agreeable to Mr and Mrs Villebois to see how the Trade is going on which in a few years their said Sons are designed to have the benefit of …”

With William Read apparently uninterested in being a practising brewer, the management of the brewery stayed in the hands of Sir Benjamin’s head clerk, James Grant. In 1786 Read’s Brewery was the second-biggest producer in London, with just over 121,000 barrels brewed a year. This was only some 14,000 barrels behind Whitbread, but well ahead of the third-placed brewer, Thrale’s Anchor brewery in Southwark (soon to be renamed Barclay Perkins) at not quite 106,000 barrels a year.

Two years later, in 1788, James Grant bought William Truman Read’s one-eighteenth share in the brewery, Read apparently finally having given up any pretence of involvement in the business. Shortly after, however, on July 9 1789, Grant died at his country home, in Motcombe, Dorset. Within a few weeks, by August 26 1789, a 30-year-old Quaker businessman, Sampson Hanbury, had purchased Grant’s share and come to live in the brewer’s house.

Hanbury, whose family were originally from Monmouthshire, but whose grandfather had moved to London by 1724, setting up as a tobacco importer, was a member of an extensive network of Quaker merchants, bankers and brewers. His father, Osgood, was a banker in London, his mother Mary was the daughter of Sampson Lloyd of Birmingham, founder of what eventually became Lloyd’s bank; one uncle was David Barclay, the London banker who had led the purchase of Henry Thrale’s brewery in Southwark in 1781, turning it into Barclay Perkins (and who must have had discussions with his nephew about the wisdom of purchasing a rival London porter brewery); his wife, Agatha Gurney, one of the most beautiful women of the time, was from another old Quaker family with banking connections. Both Agatha’s father and brother were partners in Barclay’s Bank in London, and the clan also had a bank in Norwich, led by another of Sampson Hanbury’s uncles, John Gurney. This network was invaluable in helping the brewery’s finances, with Sampson Hanbury taking out regular loans from his relatives’ banks.

Sampson Hanbury

While Hanbury ran the business, which changed its name to Truman and Hanbury, Sir Benjamin’s half-French Villebois great-grandsons remained majority owners but, despite their great-grandfather’s wishes, stayed strictly sleeping partners. Trade slipped badly at first, with the Brick Lane brewery falling to fifth place among the London brewers in 1792, selling only 98,000 barrels a year (Whitbread, for comparison, managed to produce more than 170,000 barrels). All the same, the business of a Truman’s pub at the time can be judged by an advertisement in The Times in January 1793 for the sale of the lease of the brewery tap house, the Black Eagle in Brick Lane, opposite the brewery. It was advertised as selling 14 butts of porter a month – 50 gallons a day – with “a considerable consumption for wine, brandy, compounds, &c” as well. As the century neared its end, in 1799, Hanbury had increased sales to 117,000 barrels a year, but Whitbread was still way ahead with more than 200,000 barrels and Barclay Perkins was making 136,000 barrels a year.

Steam power only seems to have arrived at Brick Lane in 1805, 20 years after most of the other big London porter brewers had taken up the new technology, when Hanbury ordered a beam engine from Boulton and Watt of Birmingham, at the same time building a new vat house. An earlier attempt to install a steam engine at the Black Eagle brewery, in 1788, had stalled when the partners failed to find room on the site for the engine house. Mechanical mashing only began in 1814, according to the Victorian journalist John Bickerdyke: before that date each mash was stirred the traditional way, using long oars or mash forks worked by “sturdy Irishmen”.

The year Brick Lane acquired its first steam engine, Hanbury had built his share up in the brewery from 1/18th to a third, after slowly buying more and more shares off the Truman Villebois brothers (two 18ths in 1799, for example), borrowing heavily from the brewery each time he purchased more shares, and paying the money back out of his share of the profits over the next year or two. Eventually, like Benjamin Truman, Hanbury amassed enough of a fortune to purchase a Hertfordshire estate, buying Poles, near Ware, and becoming Master of the local hunt, the Puckeridge Fox Hounds.

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet

In 1808 Hanbury’s nephew, Thomas Fowell Buxton, son of Thomas Fowell Buxton of Earl’s Colne, Essex, and Anna Hanbury, joined the brewery, aged 21 or 22. Buxton (who was not a Quaker, though his wife was) became a partner in 1811, at the age of 25, with a 1/12th share, bringing the last element to what would eventually, by 1827, be called Truman, Hanbury, Buxton and Company. By now the Black Eagle brewery was making 142,179 barrels of beer a year, some 20,000 barrels more than Whitbread, but a long way behind the number two London brewer, Meux Reid in Liquorpond Street, near Clerkenwell, on 220,000 barrels, and trailing Barclay Perkins in Southwark, on 264,405 barrels a year, by a large margin.

Buxton’s wife was one of the Gurneys of the Norwich bank, and a cousin of Sampson’s wife Agatha. A few years after he became a partner, in 1815, the shares in the brewery were redivided into 41 slices, and Buxton, evidently after bringing in some extra capital to the firm, increased his share to 8/41ths. His greatest gift to the brewery was sorting out the management of a concern that, by 1815, owned 200 pubs outright and financed another 300 landlords. But he also successfully intervened to prevent a disaster that might have destroyed the business.

The big London brewers had undoubtedly all been shaken by the disaster at Meux’s brewery just off Tottenham Court Road in 1814 when a giant vat containing 3,550 barrels of maturing porter burst, knocking down a wall and flooding out into the slums alongside, killing eight people. None of Truman’s vats seem to have been as big as that: the brewery gyle-book for 1812-1813 lists more than 60 vats, but the largest was only a little over 1,700 barrels, with the smallest 500 barrels. All the same, three years after the Meux tragedy, Buxton’s vigilance prevented a similar catastrophe at the Brick Lane brewery. In December 1817 he wrote in a letter to a friend:

“On Saturday last, in consequence of an almost obsolete promise to sleep in town when all the other partners were absent, I slept at Brick-lane. S. Hoare [a Quaker banker] has complained to me that several of our men were employed on the Sunday. To inquire into this, in the morning I went into the brewhouse, and was led to the examination of a vat containing 170 ton weight of beer [that is, about a thousand barrels]. I found it in what I considered a dangerous situation, and I intended to have it repaired the next morning. I did not anticipate any immediate danger, as it had stood so long. When I got to Wheeler-street chapel, I did as I usually do in cases of difficulty – I craved the direction of my heavenly Friend, who will give rest to the burthened, and instruction to the ignorant.

“From that moment I became very uneasy, and instead of proceeding to Hampstead [where he lived], as I had intended, I returned to Brick-lane. On examination, I saw, or thought I saw, a still further declension of the iron pillars which supported this immense weight; so I sent for a surveyor; but before he came I became apprehensive of immediate danger, and ordered the beer, though in a state of fermentation, to be let out. When he arrived, he gave it as his decided opinion that the vat was actually sinking, that it was not secure for five minutes, and that, if we had not emptied it, it would probably have fallen. Its fall would have knocked down our steam-engine, coppers, roof, with two great iron reservoirs full of water – in fact, the whole Brewery.”

Fermenting vats in the Brick Lane brewery in the 1830s

The brewery had been surrounded by poor, overcrowded housing for many years, and soon after his arrival Buxton gave some of his energies to trying to improve the lives of the local people: he sought to give the labourers in the brewery an education, with the brewery’s partners providing a teacher (the brewery workers were encouraged to learn by Buxton telling them: “This day six weeks I shall discharge every man who cannot read and write”). He then widened his attention to the poor people living around the brewery itself. In 1816 he spoke at a meeting at the Mansion House in the City of London about conditions in Spitalfields, and raised £43,000 to aid the weavers who made up much of the population of the district, and who were close to starving because of a lack of work.

Huguenot silk weavers had begun settling in the area from the 1680s – there was a French chapel in Black Eagle Street in the 18th century – to be followed later by Irish weavers. In 1831 it was reckoned there were between 14,000 and 17,000 looms at work in Spitalfields, which had a population of about 100,000, half of whom were said to be “entirely dependent” on the weaving industry. But regular crises in the industry saw many of the residents mired in poverty, and throughout much of the 19th century Truman’s as a company was making frequent donations to charities set up to help the local poor: the Spitalfields Soup Society, for example, founded in 1797, which in just five months in 1826 gave away more than 66 tons of meat and 121,000 gallons of soup, and served nearly 14,000 people a day (and which was still in action more than 40 years later); and the Spitalfields Blanket Association, which provided hundreds of blankets every cold winter to those who could not afford bedclothes. The partners in the brewery supported the opening of a school in Spicer Street (now Buxton Street) in 1812, for children aged six to 16, with a fee per child of a penny a week; but even this sum was too much for many of the Spitalfields poor. Eventually the school closed, to be replaced in 1840 by All Saints’ National School, founded by Robert Hanbury, Sampson’s nephew, and linked to the newly built All Saints church, in Spicer Street. Truman’s also supported the vicar of All Saints, who was paid £50 a year to be the brewery chaplain as well.

Two years after the Mansion House speech, in 1818, Buxton was elected MP for Weymouth, aged 32. He was noticed by the great anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, MP for Hull, who asked Buxton to in 1821 to be his partner in the struggle to get slavery banned in Britain’s colonies. The Anti-Slavery Society was founded by Wilberforce, Buxton and others in 1823, but it was another 10 years of campaigning by Buxton and the abolitionists before an Act to abolish slavery was finally voted through in August 1833, with Emancipation Day a year after that. Buxton lost his parliamentary seat at the general election of 1837, but three years later he was created a baronet for his anti-slavery work. He died in 1845, and a statue in his honour was erected in Westminster Abbey, close to the memorial to Wilberforce. The cost of the statue was £1,500, of which £450 was donated by freed slaves in Africa and the West Indies.

He was succeeded at the brewery by a younger son, also called Thomas Fowell Buxton. However, this Thomas, who lived, like Ben Truman, in East Hertfordshire, was an entirely different character from his father, if the comment of a man who had business dealings with him locally is to be believed: “As he is one of the richest men in the county, so he is the meanest. So thoroughly is he despised … not a village boy touches his hat when the wealthy brewer passes.”

Even before Buxton had become distracted by humanitarian issues, Truman’s had still felt the need in 1816 to strengthen its management, and its financial base, when the opportunity came to take on board as partners a couple of other Quaker brewers. Robert Pryor and his brother Thomas Marlborough Pryor were members of a family which ran a brewery and malting operation in Baldock, in Hertfordshire. But the two had been leasing another concern, Thomas Proctor’s brewery in Shoreditch High Street, just over a third of a mile from Brick Lane, which had ranked 23rd (out of more than 140) among the London brewers in 1792. One of the pubs the Pryors owned, and brought into the Truman’s estate was the Blue Last, Curtain Road, traditionally (although almost certainly wrongly) said to be the first pub to sell porter. (The rebuilt Blue Last is now in Great Eastern Street.)

When the Pryors’ lease on Proctor’s brewery ran out, the brothers brought to Truman’s their trade, worth 20,000 barrels a year, their capital, £47,350 (giving them three shares each in the Brick Lane brewery) and their own pubs, including the Blue Last. Sampson Hanbury thought it was an excellent deal, telling the Villebois brothers, whose agreement was needed to extend the partnership: “Our good friends and neighbours, Messrs Pryor … only wish to have as much profit of our trade, or a trifle more, as they can bring trade with them … they will add capital, more than equivalent which with truth I can say seems very advisable, if not necessary … We want capital and managers, I question if the whole trade could produce two persons who would unite so much of what we want – knowledge of the brewery in every part, economical habits, industry and respectability with money. Could you manage to come to town next week?”

The agreement was made, and for the next 138 years the brewery in Brick Lane was to be run exclusively by members of the Hanbury, Buxton and Pryor families. The immediate effect of the Pryors joining, however, was a big leap in production, to 185,412 barrels a year in 1818, putting the Black Eagle in second place among the big London porter brewers, though Barclay Perkins, then probably the biggest brewery in the world, was still far ahead, on 340,560 barrels a year.

The plaque to Sir TF Buxton on the wall of the brewery in Brick Lane

That massive dominance was not to last: a “splendid” new brewhouse was erected at Brick Lane around 1820 and by 1827 the brewery was selling 202,532 barrels of beer a year, while Barclay Perkins was pushing out 276,000 barrels a year. To reward their head clerk, Thomas Butts Aveling, who had held that job for at least 20 years, for his role in the brewery’s increasing prosperity the Black Eagle brewery partners gave him two of the now 47 shares in the brewery, the Villebois brothers giving up two of the 23 they still held. (Aveling, who was a great-grandson of Joseph Truman II via his mother, Frances Butts, had actually been allowed to be “interested in the profits and loss but not the capital” of the two shares since 1814. He and the Villebois brothers, of course, shared a great-great grandfather, Joseph Truman I.)

For more than a century, Black Eagle Street had been the thoroughfare on the southern edge of the brewery premises, running between Brick Lane and Grey Eagle Street, and then, as the brewery expanded, the thoroughfare through the middle of the brewery. But passers-by were increasingly having to dodge the brewery’s traffic: in October 1829 a complaint was made to the local magistrates that the brewery was placing its drays in Black Eagle Street by the side of the brewhouse “and suffering them to remain there until wanted for use, to the almost total destruction of the passage of the street.” Monmouth Street, which ran parallel between Grey Eagle Street and Brick Lane, had already been swallowed up by the brewery by 1826, but Black Eagle Street was not closed to the public until 1912/13, when it became the Dray Walk.

In July 1831 Brick Lane was the scene for what became known as “the Cabinet dinner”, when the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, and other members of the Government, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, and seven other members of the House of Lords, visited the brewery for a tour and dined afterwards on beefsteaks “dressed at the stokehole” of one of the brewery furnaces. According to Truman’s own company history, Thomas Fowell Buxton had wanted to provide a banquet, but Lord Brougham (like Buxton, a passionate anti-slavery campaigner) had insisted that only steaks and porter would do. Among the guests at the dinner was the Spanish General Miguel de Álava, a good friend of the Duke of Wellington, and the only man to have been present at both the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Waterloo.

The same year the partners in the brewery signed a further lease on the brewery land, for 61 years at £1,500 per annum and four kilderkins of the “Best Beer or Porter called Stout”. The brewery’s continued expansion was marked in November 1832 by the unveiling of a huge new circular fermentation tun with a capacity of 1,300 barrels, the first of four new tuns, and supposedly, according to a report in the Morning Advertiser, “the first of its size and shape ever to be constructed”. It stood on iron pillars 15 feet high, and its inauguration was celebrated by a luncheon for “the principal persons connected with the brewery” of 106 pounds of rump steak, once again “cooked at the stoke hole”, and “the best stout and ale which the establishment could furnish”.

Sampson Hanbury died childless in 1835. His heir was his nephew Robert Hanbury, who had joined the brewery in 1820, aged around 23, and who inherited Sampson’s home at Poles in Ware. According to the Victoria County History of Middlesex, Robert Hanbury “possessed great business abilities,” and when Thomas Fowell Buxton’s parliamentary and campaigning duties “withdrew him from the active management of the brewery, the superintendence and control of the business passed entirely into [Robert Hanbury's] hands.” Robert Hanbury is also credited with starting ale brewing again at Brick Lane, “an example speedily followed by other London breweries”, as the capital’s drinkers tastes began to change in the 1820s and early 1830s to pale mild ale and away from aged porter: although ale had probably stopped being made at the brewery in the 18th century, it was certainly being brewed in 1804, but probably not in the huge quantities seen later. The “ale gyle” books at the Brick Lane brewery, the records of every brew of ale, begin abruptly in December 1831 (the gyle books for porter and stout survive from April 1802 onwards), and 1831 may well be when, at Robert Hanbury’s instigation, the brewery started providing ale to its customers again as well as porter and stout. The Topographical Dictionary of England said in 1833 that to the “very extensive Porter Brewery of Messers Truman, Hanbury and Buxton”, “a very considerable addition is at present being made for the purpose of brewing ale.” In 1840 the author Andrew Ure wrote that “the two greatest porter houses, Barclay Perkins & Co and Truman Hanbury & Co, have become extensive and successful brewers of mild ale, to please the changed palate of their customers.”

Thomas Marlborough Pryor, who had married Hannah Hoare in 1802, had died in 1821, aged just 44, at his home, Pryor House, Hampstead Heath. Thomas’s second son, Robert, who was born in 1812, worked as a banker, although he remained a partner in the Brick Lane brewery until the 1880s. Thomas’s brother Robert lived until his death in 1839, aged 60, in the house reserved for bachelor partners at the Brick Lane brewery. It was Robert the elder who put up the money in 1836 for one of his nephews, Alfred, to buy a brewery in Hatfield, Hertfordshire from (of all people, in light of later history) the brother-in-law of James Watney of the Stag brewery in Pimlico. (By another of those convoluted links so common in brewery history, a later partner in the Hatfield brewery, with Alfred Pryor’s son, was the son of the Reid of Watney, Combe and Reid.)

Around the same time, Truman’s had been employing a chemist, Robert Warington, born 1807, who joined the company in 1831, the earliest known appointment of a chemist in a British brewery, and stayed until 1839. Even so, although Warington used a microscope to study the brewery’s yeast, it would be another two decades before Louis Pasteur first accurately described yeast’s role in fermentation.

The Brick Lane brewery 1842. Note the gentleman brewer at the brewery door in his apron, the draymen, and the railway bridge in the distance

Robert Pryor the elder introduced yet another nephew, Arthur Pryor, son of one of the Brick Lane brewery’s biggest malt suppliers, Vickris Pryor of Baldock, into the partnership in 1839. Arthur and his descendants were to play a dominant part in the brewery’s history. After his marriage Arthur Pryor lived in Down Lodge, Wandsworth, some seven miles from Brick Lane. In the 1850s, at least, every working day he would conduct family prayers at 7.45am for his children, their governess and the family’s 10 servants, before mounting his horse and riding to the local station. There he left the horse behind with a servant and caught the train to Brick Lane, returning home at 6pm.

Output at the brewery Arthur was helping to run was now a quarter ale rather than porter, and Brick Lane was challenging hard for the title of largest brewery in London, in the United Kingdom and, probably, the world. It looks as if the move into ale brewing instigated by Robert Hanbury rocketed Brick Lane into contention with its old rival Barclay Perkins in Southwark. In 1849-50 Barclay Perkins consumed 115,542 quarters of malt to make probably just over 330,000 barrels of ale and porter. Truman’s, meanwhile, consumed 105,022 quarters of malt to make only 30,000 barrels fewer. The whole operation now covered nearly six acres. The brewery used 130 horses that cost £70 each, managed by draymen earning the large sum of 45 shillings a week in the 1830s, to move the beer out to publicans, and consumed 500,000 barrels of water a year from its own 520-feet-deep artesian wells. It even had its own Thames-side wharf, Black Eagle Wharf, near St Katharine’s Dock, bought in 1841. Beer was being exported to the West Indies, North America and Australia.

Brick Lane was brewing nine different porters and stouts in 1850, including two different varieties of the standard mild (that is, unaged) “Runner” porter, one for town and one for country; “Keeping Porter”; Running Stout; Keeping Stout,; Double Stout and Imperial Stout (which had been around since at least 1847, when it sold for a price in bottle 75 per cent more than the ordinary porter). Research by Ron Pattinson has shown how the “runner” porter changed through the 19th century. In 1821 it was made from just under 78 per cent pale malt, and 22 per cent brown malt for colour and flavour, to give a beer around 6 per cent alcohol by volume from an original gravity of 1061, with three pounds of hops per barrel. But two years earlier Daniel Wheeler had invented highly roasted, deep black “patent” malt for colouring porters and stouts. This let brewers use more pale malt, which gave greater extract than brown malt, and was thus cheaper to use, and still get the same colour and much of the same flavour they did with a high proportion of brown malt.

Porter fermentation at Brick Lane in 1889, with the pontos from where the excess yeast issued into a trough

By 1830 the Brick Lane brewery was using just under two per cent of patent malt in its running porter, only 11 per cent brown malt and almost 87 per cent pale malt. The amount of black malt rose to almost five per cent by 1870, though the brown malt proportion was up to almost 10 per cent. But as the popularity of porter dived, breweries started using cheaper ingredients, and in a later brew that same year the Brick Lane brewers used nearly 25 per cent sugar, with around five per cent each of black and brown malts, and only 66 per cent pale malt, plus 2.57 pounds of hops per barrel to give a beer with an OG of 1054 and an alcohol content of 5.7 per cent. It would probably have tasted noticeably different from the running porter of 50 years earlier: drier, less full in the mouth and quite likely less bitter, though roastier.

Fire was an ever-present danger at a brewery, and like many other breweries Truman’s had its own fire engines. They were in action in May 1841 when a “lucifer and congreve manufactury” (that is, a place making phosphorus matches – both “lucifer and “congreve” were names for matches in the 19th century) at the back of the brewery buildings on the east side of Brick Lane caught fire. Although the Truman’s fire engines were quickly on the spot, together with “a party of men in the service of the firm, who exerted themselves in a manner which called forth great admiration,” and despite the attendance of the parish fire brigade and fire engines from four nearby London Fire Engine Establishment stations as well, the entire building, just off Spicer Street – today’s Buxton Street – was burned to the ground in less than two hours. Happily, no one was killed, in what The Times revealed was the third destructive fire at a “lucifer manufactury” in a month. In 1848 a fire engine from Truman’s attended a blaze at a “wadding factory” in Spicer Street, for which the firemen were given a reward of 30 shillings by the Mile End and New Town parish authorities – money the firemen donated to the poor-box at the local magistrates’ court in Worship Street.

Like most London brewers, Truman’s had long bought much of its malt from Hertfordshire, where the maltsters specialised in the brown malts needed for porter. In Sir Ben Truman’s heyday, from 1746 to 1766, nearly 90 per cent of the brewery’s malt came from Hertfordshire, shipped down the Lea and other rivers and canals. In 1842 the Northern and Eastern Railway Company built a line from Hertford to London, and within eight years 57 per cent of Truman’s malt from Hertfordshire was coming by rail. In 1855 the brewery went over to bringing in all its Hertfordshire malt by rail. (East Anglian malt was shipped by barge from Colchester.) But Truman’s was sufficiently concerned about the monopoly power of the railways in 1873 to step in and buy the Stort Navigation, down which barges could bring malt from the town of Bishop’s Stortford, on the Herts-Essex border, to stop it falling into the hands of the railway companies, who might have closed down this rival means of transport for Truman’s essential supplies.

In 1853 Truman’s was using 140,090 quarters of malt a year to make 400,000 barrels of beer, now ahead of Barclay Perkins on 129,382 quarters a year, or around 370,000 barrels. The Brick Lane brewery had become the biggest in the world. Fraser’s Magazine visited the brewery in 1855, describing the equipment, which included two 800-barrel mash tuns, five coppers, each 300 to 400 barrels, the coolers at the top of the brewery where the boiled wort spread out in shallow vessels over an area of 32,000 square feet to cool down as rapidly as possible, and the four 1,400-barrel fermenting vessels. As the beer fermented it gave off “an immense quantity of carbonic acid gas” – carbon dioxide, which, being heavier than air, stayed close to the surface of the beer. “The men can detect the height to which it has risen within an inch or two with the bare hand, which immediately becomes sensible of the thick warm feel of this poisonous vapour.” Like other porter brewers, Truman’s let its beer undergo an initial fermentation for “two nights and a day” before running it off into rows of “rounds”, or pontos, to finish fermentation, with excess yeast pouring out into a wooden trough that ran between the rounds.

After fermentation was complete, the porter was run into the storage vats, 134 in number, holding a total of 100,000 barrels of beer. The malt bill for the previous year, Fraser’s Magazine revealed, was £400,000, with another £1.4 million for hops. The malt all looks to have come from Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The brewery owned 80,000 casks, each costing a guinea – £1 1s – when new, and kept in good order by 60 coopers. Other workers, from storehousemen to carpenters, wheelwrights to painters (who sent out 400 new brewery signboards in 1854, and refurbished another 350, at a cost of £1,300), totalled 219, including 40 bricklayers and 21 stablemen and farriers.

The full casks were taken out to pubs by dray, and Fraser’s Magazine rhapsodised about the men who delivered the beer: “The draymen of this establishment are eighty in number. Perhaps these brewers’ labourers are the most powerful body of men in existence. They are taller than the guardsmen, and heavier by a couple of stone. The dress of the drayman is peculiar: he wears a large loose smock frock extending to the knees, and over this a thick leathern kind of tippet, which covers the shoulders and comes down in front like an apron. The simple line of the costume makes the man appear still taller than he is. The size of these men is not owing to the unlimited beer which it is popularly supposed they have at command. They are all picked on account of their inches, and are limited to a certain amount of free stout every day. The extensive stock of horses kept here necessitates a of stable attendants: of these and there are twenty-one, so that the Messrs Hanbury & Co could, if they pleased, furnish a troop of the very heaviest cavalry at a moment’s notice.”

The Mid-day Rest by George Frederic Watts, featuring a Truman’s drayman

(It never seems to have supplied actual cavalry, but in 1859 the brewery agreed to pay the expenses of a rifle corps formed by its workers in response to the nation-wide Volunteer Force movement, which began that year. The brewery workers’ rifle corps seems to have eventually become part of the 1st battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifle Volunteers, of which Charles Buxton, third son of Sir Thomas, was the lieutenant-colonel in 1865.)

In 1865 a two-man commission from the Ale and Porter and Lager Beer Brewers of Philadelphia toured the brewery, on their way to Burton upon Trent and after having previously visited Dublin and Edinburgh, and been shown round Barclay Perkins and Whitbread. They found the only difference between Truman’s and its rivals was that many of its rounds, squares and pontoons were made, not of the usual wood, but slate, a material more usually associated with Yorkshire brewers. Truman’s had been using slate vessels “long enough to test their qualities, and are highly pleased with them on account of their cleanliness and durability,” the commissioners reported. (An article in the magazine Engineering in 1868 suggested that Barclay Perkins had installed slate vessels as well, but the idea does not seem to have spread far among London’s big brewers.)

On July 10 1866 the Brick Lane brewery was visited by the 25-year-old Prince of Wales, who was met by a delegation of three Hanburys, three Buxtons, one Pryor, the brewery manager, Alexander Fraser, and Henry Villebois, who still owned a substantial slice of the business, as the great-great grandson of Sir Benjamin Truman. The Prince of Wales’s own great-great grandfather, Frederick, Prince of Wales, of course, had been supplied with beer by Truman. Villebois was master of the West Norfolk Hunt, and his home, Marham House in Norfolk, was only eight miles from the Prince’s estate at Sandringham, which had been bought for him in 1862. He had become a good friend of the Prince through a mutual love of foxhunting, hounds and horses: it seems most likely it was Villebois who had invited Queen Victoria’s eldest son to the brewery. (Three of the brewery partners who met the Prince that day were Members of Parliament at the time: Robert Charles Hanbury, MP for Middlesex, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, MP for Lyme Regis, and Charles Buxton, MP for Maidstone. Henry Villebois is sometimes said to have been MP for West Norfolk: he never was. His closest involvement in politics seems to have been that his sister Henrietta was, for a while in the 1830s, Benjamin Disraeli’s mistress.)

The Times report on the Prince’s visit dwelt with Victorian pride in the staggering statistics: 17,000 quarters of malt on the premises, about 2,500 tons, barely 10 per cent of the 174,674 quarters now used every year (suggesting an annual production of 500,000 barrels of beer), along with 900 tons of hops, again about a tenth of the total yearly requirement; 250,000 gallons of water used every day; five acres of cellars, with room for 100,000 barrels of beer. The brewery workers, in red stocking caps and white coats, showed off one huge porter vat in the cellar actually named the “Prince of Wales”, since it was finished and baptised the day the Prince was born, November 9 1841, and he was presented with a half-pint of Truman’s stout poured from a large silver jug. When he had drunk some he was cheered, literally, to the echo, as the hurrahs bounced down the vaults.

The Prince was also shown a dray being loaded with barrels using a hoist powered by a “gas engine”, an early form of internal combustion engine: alas, the report does not give the name of the manufacturer, but “Lenoir’s Patent Gas-Power Engine” was being advertised in The Times in 1864, suggesting that Truman’s may have been using one of the two-stroke engines powered by coal gas and patented by the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir in 1860. The Times report revealed that the brewery had nine steam engines and two gas engines in total, and used 9,000 tons of coal a year, as well as burning 8,000 to 9,000 tons of used hops to help power the boilers. All the furnaces for the steam engines had been fitted for the past 18 years with special “smoke-consuming” apparatus, to stop the surrounding district being covered with black soot.

Only 20 of the drayhorses were in the stables, the rest being out at work, but the Prince was shown a large painting by George Frederic Watts called “The Mid-day Rest”, featuring a Truman’s drayman, in red cap, with a couple of drayhorses, and he was also introduced to the drayman who had posed for the painting.

While the London porter brewers had coped fairly well with the rise in sales of mild ale, both they and the original mild ale brewers found themselves under pressure from the 1850s onwards from brewers in Burton-on-Trent, where the water was so much better for making the increasingly popular pale bitter ales, and where the two biggest brewers, Bass and Allsopp’s, were speedily outpacing the output of Brick Lane. By 1877 Bass was making a million barrels a year, wresting the crown of World’s Biggest Brewer from London, and the previous year Allsopp’s had hit a peak of 918,000 barrels.

Truman’s decided that if it could not beat the Burton breweries, it would join them. After a couple of abortive attempts to set up agency agreements with Staffordshire brewers, in 1873 Truman’s bought the brewery in Derby Street, Burton, next to Burton Station, founded in 1865 by the Phillips brewery of Northampton. It was not a pioneer: Ind Coope, of Romford, Essex had acquired a brewery in Burton almost 20 years earlier, in 1856, apparently to supply the export trade, and the year before, 1872, an East End of London mild ale brewer, Charrington’s acquired a brewery in Abbey Street, Burton to make bitter beers. The following year, 1874, a third East End brewer, Mann Crossmann and Paulin, opened a branch in the Staffordshire town, building a completely new brewery in Shobnall Street, Burton (now owned by Marston’s).

The Black Eagle Brewery, Burton upon Trent, pictured in 1951

Arthur Vickris Pryor, son of Arthur Pryor, who had become a partner in the brewery in 1868, aged 22, was sent to Burton to run Truman’s new acquisition, and between 1874 and 1876 Truman’s enlarged and completely refitted the old Phillips brewery. The brewery gave Truman’s the advantage of being able to sell Burton pale ales under its own name, which is why so many ex-Truman’s pubs to this day still carry the phrase “London and Burton” carved into their fascias. Research by Ron Pattinson turned up the recipes for Truman’s two pale ales at the Burton brewery in 1877, both made with 100 per cent pale malt and hops from the United States and Sussex (English brewers were regular importers of American hops in the second half of the 19th century), with the P1 at an original gravity of 1066.5 and alcohol by volume of 6.6 per cent and the weaker P2 at 1062.3 OG and 5.7 abv. By the early 1880s, at the latest, Truman’s Burton brewery was also making the typical local range of Burton Ales, sweetish, fruity beers, made from pale malt (mostly around 96 per cent) and sugar, running from the super-strong No 1, which would later be called a barley wine, down to No 8, a 1054 OG mild. Burton Ale became a popular style in London, and most London brewers offered a Burton Ale right through to the 1950s at least, before they faded from the bar-top.

At first Truman’s Burton operation – which was also called the Black Eagle brewery – lost money, and the partners considered selling it. Eventually, by 1880, trade picked up and the first profit was shown. Still, the Burton brewery generally ran well below capacity, and London publicans never rated Truman’s Burton beers as highly as Bass or Allsopp, partly, it is said, because Truman’s often blended its Burton and London beers together, not always successfully. But in 1880 the company as a whole was making 580,000 barrels of beer a year, 100,000 barrels ahead of its nearest London rival, still Barclay Perkins, though still a long way behind both Bass and Allsopp’s in Burton and also, now, Guinness in Dublin, which was making more than 940,000 barrels a year, up from 350,000 barrels a year in 1868. (Guinness would hit 1.2 million barrels in 1886, seizing for itself the title of World’s Biggest Brewer.)

While the Burton brewery made pale bitter beers and Burton Ales, Brick Lane was still brewing considerable amounts of porter, but its biggest seller by now was X mild ale, a pale, unaged beer of the kind that was the standard public bar drink in London, selling for four (old) pence a quart. In 1880, X mild was 53 per cent of output at Brick Lane, made of 86 per cent pale malt and the rest sugar, its OG hovering around 1055 to 1056, lightly hopped compared to Burton bitter, at two pounds to the barrel, the alcohol by volume probably around 4.5 per cent, so likely a comparatively sweet beer. “Runner”, Truman’s “ordinary” mild (that is, unaged) porter, represented just under 25 per cent of output, “Running Stout” 10.6 per cent, Double Stout 5 per cent, Imperial Stout 2.5 per cent, and another five or so ales and beers the rest.

About the same time as it started its Burton venture, Truman’s was expanding its sales outside its London heartland. In 1879 it acquired a “large block” of public houses in Chatham, Kent. A year later a brewery stores was set up in Swansea, South Wales. Another agency was set up in Newcastle upon Tyne, where in 1897 Truman’s acquired a bottling business.

Partners of Truman, Hanbury and Buxton 1886
1 Sir (Thomas) Fowell Buxton 3rd baronet 1837-1915, son of Sir Edward North Buxton, 2nd bart, grandson of 1st Sir TFB, MP for King’s Lynn 1865-68, Governor of South Australia 1895-1899, married to a daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough
2 John Henry Buxton 1849-1934, eldest son of TF Buxton, the 2nd son of Sir TF Buxton, 1st Bart
3 Arthur Pryor 1816-1904, 1st chairman of Ltd Co
4 Edward North Buxton (jnr) 1840-1924, 2nd son of Sir Edward North Buxton, MP for Walthamstow 1883-6, bought Hatfield Forest in Essex and donated it to National Trust
5 Arthur Vickris Pryor 1846-1927, eldest son of Arthur, married the Countess of Wilton in 1886 when he was 40 and she 50. Ran the Burton branch brewery
6 John Mackenzie Hanbury 1861-1923 2nd (& eldest surviving) son of Charles Addington Hanbury, and later chairman of the company.
7 Gerald Buxton 1862-1928, son of Edward North Buxton junior
8 Robert Pryor the elder, 1812-1889, second son of Thomas Marlborough Pryor
9 Charles Addington) Hanbury 1828-1900 or 1901 2nd son of Robert Hanbury, nephew of Sampson Hanbury
10 Thomas Fowell Buxton 1822-1908, son of Sir TFB 1st Bt,
11 Edmund Smith Hanbury, 1850-1913 son of Robert Culling Hanbury, former MP for Middx, 1823-1867, who was eldest son of Robert Hanbury, 1796-1884, nephew of Sampson Hanbury
12 Robert Pryor junior 1852-1905, 4th son of Arthur

Nine years earlier, in 1889, the partners in the brewery had finally taken the step of turning it into a limited company, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton Ltd. Other breweries had been turning themselves into limited companies since Guinness had raised millions in the first public float of a brewery three years before, but what may have pushed the Brick Lane partners into the move was the death in 1886 of Henry Villebois, last representative of the Truman family in the partnership. Villebois still had a 34 per cent stake in the business, and his surviving family wanted to take that money out. A grand £1,215,000 of ordinary share capital was issued, all of it taken up by the partners, with another £1.2 million in debenture shares. The first board of directors consisted entirely of Hanburys, Buxtons and Pryors, with Arthur Pryor, then 73, as first chairman. Pryor stayed in the chair until 1897, to be followed by Edward North Buxton, grandson of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. The share prospectus revealed that the brewery owned more than 300 pubs, leasehold and freehold.

The year Truman’s became a limited company, the journalist Alfred Barnard visited the brewery. He found work starting at 4am, as draymen loaded the drays and clerks and foremen supervised, “so that advantage may be taken of conveying the beer through the metropolis as early as possible before the traffic commences.” Barnard was hugely impressed with what he saw, proclaiming: “These London brewhouses exhibit a magnificence unspeakable … Entering the brewhouse from the courtyard we found ourselves on the floor of a most elegant and church-like structure, one of the largest of its kind in London. Looking up at the noble roof, and then right and left to the wide and spacious galleries by which it is surrounded, and the massive columns which support the various stages, on which are placed the numerous and gigantic vessels, we were struck by the beauty and utility.”

The company was still producing around 500,000 barrels of ale and porter a year, the second-largest quantity in London and the fourth-largest in the United Kingdom (which still included Dublin). It had dropped most of the strong, aged black beers: alongside the now dominant ales, the brewery made just “Runner” porter, “Country Runner”, Stout and Export Stou, with occasional brews of Imperial Stout.

Around 1900 Truman’s moved up into Essex, buying the pubs belonging to a concern called Grimstones – evidently not a brewery – based in Colchester. However, the Brick Lane brewery by and large refused to take part in the rush of take-overs that was already halving and quartering the numbers of British breweries, preferring to rely on its reputation to sell its beer. A drawing by the famous Edwardian illustrator Will Owen, published in a magazine called Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday in 1908, underlines the brewery’s reputation for strong beer: it shows a Cockney called Bob slumped against a wall and declaring to his pal that he cannot get up because he is being held down by three men – “Truman, ’Anbury and Buxton!”

A few years earlier, in 1903, the brewery had taken on its first female employee, Miss G Key, something regarded as “a great innovation”. Spitalfields was still a violent district, and rather than let Miss Key walk to and from the station to work, Truman’s made sure she was carried in a brougham, a one-horse carriage named for the Lord Chancellor who had dined at the brewery just over 70 years before.

After the First World War Truman’s made its first London take-over, when it bought Michell and Aldous of the Kilburn brewery, Kilburn High Road in 1920. Six years later, in September 1926, Truman’s acquired the Swansea United Breweries and some 100-plus pubs, to add to the 21 pubs the Brick Lane brewery already controlled in Swansea. Swansea United was the result of an amalgamation in 1890 of Crowhurst’s Orange Street brewery and the Glamorgan brewery in the town, and its trademark was the White Horse. However, the purchase was not a huge success for Truman’s, and despite the fears of Welsh brewers it was not followed by a wave of other take-overs by English firms.

In 1923, on the death of the firm’s chairman, John Mackenzie Hanbury, his widow, Christine, was appointed to the board, the first female appointment to a position of power in the firm’s history. The main Brick Lane brewery underwent a rebuild in 1924, the same year Truman’s introduced a bottled brown ale for the first time, which was being sold under the name Trubrown by 1929. A price list from Christmas 1927 showed seven different bottled beers available “per large bottle” and “per flagon”: Dinner Ale, Eagle Pale Ale, Brown Ale, Oatmeal Stout, Eagle Stout, Special Stout and No 1 Burton barley wine, the last being sold in nips (6 2/3rd fluid ounces) only. The following year the Brick Lane brewery stopped brewing draught porter, after two centuries of supplying the beer to thirsty Londoners. An off-sales price list from the mid-1930s showed the company still making a London Double Stout and a Milk Stout, as well as Trubrown brown ale, Eagle pale ale and Sparkling Mild, while from the Burton brewery came No 6 Burton Mild Ale, a penny a pint bottle dearer than the London mild; Ben Truman Best Pale Ale; and, still,  No 1 Burton barley wine.

Brewery chimney, Brick Lane

At the start of the 20th century, Truman’s still had 200 horses at Brick Lane for beer deliveries. The brewery was using steam drays by 1921 at least, and petrol drays from 1926. Gradually the number of horse-drawn drays decreased, releasing the land where the stables stood for a much-needed new boiler house. The old beam engine had been removed in 1896, and eight new boilers installed. These, too, were replaced in 1929, with a new boiler house on the other side of Brick Lane. At the same time the East End acquired another landmark, in the new 160-feet-high, 1,000-ton brick boiler house chimney, with the Truman’s name down the side. But Truman’s was still using drayhorses in the early 1950s, and in 1950 its Suffolk Punches won a prize at the Essex County Agricultural Show.

In 1930 Truman’s made another of its rare take-overs, buying Russell’s West Street brewery in Gravesend, Kent and its 223 tied houses. Russell’s, which dated back to at least 1834, when it was called Heathorn & Plane, had itself acquired four other breweries in North Kent and one in Essex. About the same time that it bought Russell’s, Truman’s seems to have acquired the six or so pubs around Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire owned by the long-defunct Flinn’s brewery there. Brewing continued at Gravesend through until the 1960s.

Meanwhile up in Burton, Truman’s brewery was still busy, sending 90 per cent of its trade away by rail. Like the other Burton breweries, Truman’s had its own sidings, and even its own engines. (The Brick Lane brewery also had a siding, built after a special Act of Parliament in 1872, and in 1952 British Railways made for Truman’s a special bulk beer tanker for journeys between the two breweries.) The Burton brewery used the union system for brewing pale ale, although in 1934, at least, most of its mild beer was fermented in vessels fitted with skimmers.

The Brick Lane brewery came through the Second World War physically pretty unscathed, unlike some of its London rivals, such as Taylor Walker in Limehouse, which was forced to close for 18 months in 1941 after being hit by German incendiary bombs. But within a month of the war starting, on October 1 1939, the brewery had lost one of its directors, John “Jock” Hanbury, son of John M and Christine Hanbury, great-great-great nephew of Samuel Hanbury, who was a Pilot Officer with the RAF, killed aged 33 when his aircraft crashed in an accident while on duty. The sheer number of men called up caused problems: in April 1943 Truman’s was advertising for a “Chemist, wanted immediately, single-handed, for brewery laboratory.”

Dray Walk, Brick Lane brewery, 1951, showing horse-drawn drays still being used alongside motorised ones

At the end of the Second World War Truman’s bought its own hop farm, and in 1947 it added its own maltings, at Long Melford in Suffolk. The first-ever non-family board member, Henry Mallen, who had joined the company as a boy in 1896, was appointed in 1954. The shock evidently spurred Truman’s, four years later, into another rare take-over, of Daniell and Sons Breweries Ltd in Colchester and West Bergholt, Essex and its 146 pubs. Brewing ceased at West Bergholt in January 1959 (it had stopped at the Castle Brewery, Colchester in 1892, five years after the two Daniell concerns had merged, though Colchester continued to be Daniell’s head office). But Truman’s kept a depot and regional offices at West Bergholt until 1986.

By the mid-1960s Truman’s had 1,300 pubs, concentrated mainly in the South East of England. It was losing some traditions: in 1967 the last apprentice cooper at the Brick Lane brewery passed out into a business where metal casks were steadily making coopers a rare species. The same year the last two dray horses, Suffolk Punches called Prince and Charlie, left Brick Lane for the West Bergholt depot.

The brewery was still a place where family members could find employment, and one was a young Francis Pryor, who joined Truman’s from university as a management trainee in 1967. Pryor, the great-great-great grandson of Thomas Marlborough Pryor, recalls that every morning the wind direction at the top of the brewery was recorded and the windows and roof vents were adjusted by the duty brewer to try to ensure that wild yeasts did not blow in from the nearby Spitalfields vegetable market. Francis did not continue his brewing career, however, going on to be an archaeologist, author, farmer, and one of the presenters of the Time Team programme on television.

Derek Prentice, now a brewer with Fuller, Smith & Turner in Chiswick, West London, also started his brewing career in the late 1960s at Truman’s in Brick Lane, and remembers that the Burton brewery, which was still going, would ship down three cask beers, called PA1, sold as Ben Truman, PA2, a “running” Burton pale ale, and, in the winter, an ale known simply as Burton, a darker 5 per cent beer “very akin to Young’s Winter Warmer, which was also originally known as Burton.”

The beers now brewed at Brick Lane included a pale ale sold as Eagle bitter with an original gravity of around 1036, a dark mild of around 1032 OG, a light mild called, internally at least, LK, for London Keeper, again around 1032 OG, and a stout called Eagle Stout with an OG of around 1040, the last survivor of a quarter of a millennium of porter and stout brewing at the Black Eagle brewery. The brewery also made a barley wine that consisted of a stock ale brewed in Burton and shipped down to London in cask at an original gravity of 1120 OG which was then blended with a “runner” beer brewed in Brick Lane at around 1065 OG. The blending rate “depended on final ABVs”, to give an alcohol by volume for the finished beer of about 8 to 9 per cent.

Skimming the yeast from a fermenting vessel, Brick Lane brewery, early 1960s

Truman’s was still using the “double drop” method of fermentation, where the beer began fermenting in one vessel and then, after one or two days, was dropped into a shallower vessel on the floor below, to complete fermentation. The idea of the system was to leave behind the products of the “cold break”, proteins that had settled out as sediment, and aerate the wort. The vessels that received the still-fermenting wort at Truman’s were known as “cleanse batches”.

The 1960s were a time of huge upheaval for the British brewing industry: new national-sized giants, such as Allied Breweries and Charrington United, had grown up, as smaller family brewers succumbed to take-over offers. But in 1968 Truman’s chairman, Maurice Pryor, was declaring his company “fiercely independent”, even though ancient rival Whitbread, which had grown to become a national concern itself, swooping on family brewers all over the country, held a 10 per cent stake in the Brick Lane business.

The Truman’s board, at that time three Pryors, three Buxtons and a Buxton relative-by-marriage, responded to criticisms of the company’s then lower-than-average profits by appointing a 34-year-old management consultant, George Duncan, as a director in April 1968. It was quite likely Duncan who persuaded Truman’s in 1970 to sign an agreement with Tuborg to brew the Danish company’s lager at Brick Lane, and sell it in Truman’s pubs. The same year Truman’s dropped its last links with traditional cask beers, spending the large sum of £500,000 on new 100-litre metal kegs, and rebuilding its draught beer packaging lines.

Late in 1970 Truman’s announced the closure of the brewery in Burton upon Trent. Its 73 pubs around Burton, plus a depot in Warrington, were to be sold to Courage, another growing national brewer, in return for 36 pubs in London and £850,000 cash, making the deal worth a total of £2 million. At one point in the negotiations it looked as if Courage would take over the Burton brewery as well. But in the summer Courage had acquired John Smith’s in Tadcaster, giving it ample capacity in the North and Midlands.

Maurice Pryor had died suddenly in December 1969, and the brewery was now being led by the outsider, George Duncan, who had become chief executive. Truman’s was being thoroughly shaken up, to give its shareholders (30 per cent of them institutions) a better return on their capital. Closing the Burton brewery had saved £500,000 a year, and the brewery in Brick Lane was being rebuilt, for £6 million, to improve costs (wastage from old, too large brewing vessels was estimated to be hitting Truman’s for £300,000 in extra Customs and Excise payments alone).

Duncan and his management team were openly admitting that profits from the Brick Lane brewery and its now 980 pubs (830 of them run by tenants) would not show a real turn-around from their level of £2.3 million pre-tax until 1972-3. Quite possibly it was this candour that led on July 1 1971 to a sudden and completely unexpected takeover bid for Truman’s from an outsider to the brewing business, Maxwell Joseph and his Grand Metropolitan pub and hotel chain. (The previous month Joseph had quietly asked Whitbread if it would sell him its 10.7 per cent stake in Truman’s, and had been rebuffed.)

Joseph, who obviously felt Truman’s and its pubs would fit in perfectly with his 250 Berni Inns and Chef and Brewer pubs, was offering £34 million, or 311.5p a share, well over their pre-bid price of 254p. If the bid was a surprise for Duncan and his chairman, Derrick Pease (a descendant of Edward North Buxton’s daughter-in-law’s family), it stunned another London brewer, Watney Mann (itself an amangamation in 1958 of what had once been the Pimlico porter brewery run by the Elliott family and the ale brewer Mann Crossmann & Paulin of the Mile End Road, Whitechapel). Over the preceding four months Watney’s had been quietly planning its own bid for the Brick Lane brewery.

Watney’s, then Britain’s fifth-biggest brewer, had a problem. It wanted to close two of its high-cost breweries, the former Tamplin’s plant in Brighton and the Mann’s brewery in Whitechapel,  and concentrate brewing at a rebuilt Mortlake Brewery by the Thames near Richmond. But Mortlake would not be ready until 1975, at a cost of £7 million. Michael Webster, chairman of Watney’s, had decided that Truman’s new plant, which had lots of capacity, could meet his company’s needs immediately, and save a great deal in running costs. Unfortunately for Webster, Joseph’s bid put a big foot in the middle of his preparations.

The first reaction from the brewing trade to the Grand Met bid was that someone, perhaps Whitbread, with its tithe of Truman’s shares, would rescue the Brick Lane brewery from the attempted embrace of the outsider Joseph. After all, the brewers had rallied together 12 years earlier when Sir Charles Clore had tried to take over Watney’s. There was also a certain amount of racism around in some quarters over the Joseph bid: the Daily Telegraph felt obliged to point out that no British brewery had ever fallen into Jewish hands.

However, Whitbread remained cool. It had decided that acquiring the Brick Lane brewery did not fit in with its own development plans. Instead Watney’s, galvanised by Joseph’s move, launched its own bid for Truman’s just over a week later, topping the Grand Met offer by £4 million. At the same time Watney’s bought almost a million shares in Truman’s on the stock market, taking its holding in the Brick Lane company to 18 per cent.

The Truman’s board, which itself controlled around ten per cent of the company’s equity, announced that it had accepted the Watney offer. But in fact the board had been completely split, with half voting for Grand Met and half for Watney Mann. The Truman’s ruling families were even divided among themselves. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the sixth baronet, was a Grand Met supporter, his cousins and fellow directors Henry and Mark Buxton voted for Watney. Only Derrick Pease’s casting vote as chairman had carried the day for the beerage against the outsider.

Joseph was far from quitting, however. Four days after the Watney bid, he raised his offer for Truman’s by more than a quarter, to £43 million. Within hours Watney Mann was back with a revised bid of its own, again topping Joseph by £4 million. What The Observer was to call “the most incredible take-over battle of all time” was under way.

By now Whitbread had pledged its ten per cent stake to Grand Met, obviously feeling that it would rather not see Watney’s get any larger. But the Truman’s board was still divided between those who wanted the extra money being offered by the Red Barrel brewer and those who pointed out that a Watney take-over would mean 20 to 25 per cent redundancies at Brick Lane, with the loss of 800 jobs in one of the poorest parts of London. Amid rumours that several other big brewers were thinking of launching a bid for Grand Metropolitan itself, Truman’s workers voted in favour of the Joseph offer, and Watney’s announced it now owned between 22.5 and 25 per cent of the Brick Lane company. On July 20 1971, just under three weeks after Joseph made his first bid, the Truman’s board voted – unanimously this time – to accept the Grand Met revised offer.

As is common in many take-over attempts, the offers from the two rivals were a combination of cash, and shares in the bidder’s own company. As the share prices of Grand Metropolitan and Watney Mann swayed up and down during the weeks, so the value of their two offers in real terms had altered. By July 29, with the fight still unresolved despite the Brick Lane board’s vote, the two offers were virtually equal, with Grand Met’s now worth £44 million and Watney’s £45 million. Watney’s felt compelled to put its offer up yet again, valuing it at £47 million. The Red Barrel men admitted their plans would involve 260 redundancies at Brick Lane, but said they could double output from Truman’s brewery within 12 months, and achieve savings of £1 million.

It took six days for Grand Met to come back with a revised offer, this time just £800,000 above Watney’s. In the meantime each side had been buying Truman’s shares on the stock market, with Grand Met happily paying almost £1.4 million to grab a block of 300,000 shares representing just 2.75 per cent of the total. By this point, five weeks after Joseph made his first bid, both sides owned about 30 per cent each of Truman’s. Grand Met still had the promise of the ten per cent controlled by the Truman’s board. But on August 14 Watney’s made another offer, this time valuing Truman’s at £49.5 million, close on half as much again as Grand Met had initially tried to pay.

This latest Watney offer again split the Truman’s board, which withdrew its recommendation of the Grand Met offer. Four of the Brick Lane brewery’s directors, led by Duncan, the chief executive, backed Watney’s. The other five, led by chairman Pease, supported Grand Met. The struggle had already bought a strike by Truman’s workers against the Watney bid. On Sunday August 16 it sparked a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral from Canon John Collins, who attacked both bidders, saying they had no consideration of national interests, let alone Truman’s workers or the Brick Lane brewery’s many small shareholders.

Each side, meanwhile, was still paying out to buy more Truman’s shares on the stock market; the Prudential Assurance, showing its normal impartiality, sold Watney’s and Grand Met 50 per cent each of its £2 million holding in Truman’s. But 350,000 more Truman’s shares, owned by a pension fund and another insurance company, all went to Joseph. By August 24 Watney’s reckoned it owned outright 38 per cent of Truman’s, with supporters bringing that up to 45 per cent. But Grand Metropolitan was claiming a beermat’s width less than 49 per cent. With the usual number of Truman’s shareholders dead, vanished, on holiday or not bothering to reply to any letters from either side, Watney’s had to concede that it could not catch up.

On August 25 1971 Watney’s waved the white flag, and agreed to sell its holding in Truman’s, worth £16 million, to Grand Met. After nearly eight weeks, eight bids and counter-bids, and furlongs of newspaper coverage, the great battle was finally over, with Truman’s being sold for around 460p a share. Watney’s could not complain too much. It made a profit of £2 million on its Truman’s shares, and also secured an agreement that the Brick Lane brewery would supply it with 400,000 barrels of beer a year for five years, to supplement its own brewing capacity.

One of the first moves after the take-over was by George Duncan, the Truman’s chief executive, who resigned from Brick Lane to take up the head man’s seat with Watney’s. He had supported Watney’s throughout the battle with Grand Met, and clearly he was never going to sit easily alongside the new owners of the Brick Lane brewery.

Loaded dray at Truman’s 1889

Duncan’s first job was to try to make sure that what had happened to his last employers did not happen at his new ones. Six months after failing to win Truman’s, Watney’s succeeded in taking over International Distillers and Vintners, the Gilbey’s gin company, in which it already had a one-third stake. Shortly afterwards Watney’s grabbed the 73 per cent it did not already own of Samuel Webster, the Halifax brewer. This left it a 6,500-pub drinks group worth some £400 million, inviolate, the Watney’s directors must have thought, against any predator.

Maxwell Joseph, however, had his own agenda. Having swallowed one brewery group, he clearly decided he liked the taste. Even though Grand Metropolitan was now smaller than the newly enlarged Watney’s, in mid-March 1972 Joseph made a £360 million offer for the Red Barrel company. The struggle again swayed backwards and forwards, enlivened by a late bid in May by the Rank Organisation, which offered £425 million for Watney’s – only to have to withdraw after a revolt by its American shareholders, who did not want to see earnings from the Rank Xerox joint venture diluted by some low-yield brewery concern. Grand Met’s eventual offer of around £435 million, easily the highest takeover price seen in the UK at that time (and equal to perhaps £10 billion today), was too much for the Watney’s board to stand against. By the end of June 1972 it was all over bar the final counting. Joseph had his revenge. He now owned both Truman’s and Watney’s, and Grand Met was the 12th biggest company in Britain.

Truman’s new brewhouse opened that same year, and in October 1972 Ben Truman Export, a keg “premium” bitter, first saw the light of bar taps. Sadly, the jokes were no longer about the ability of Truman’s beers to put you on the floor. Instead drinkers were asking what the difference was between Ben Truman and a dead frog, and giving the answer: “There are more hops in a dead frog.”

A year later Grand Met bought its two brewing wings together, merging them into a new company, Watney Mann and Truman Holdings. The Brick Lane brewery’s pubs still kept their own identity and beers, however, and in 1976 Grand Met expressed its faith in the brewery by bringing in Ove Arup, one of Britain’s foremost architects, to design new offices for Brick Lane. When Arup’s work was completed, in 1980, it brought much praise for the way a wall of glass had been made to provide a new frontage, linking the two 18th century buildings to the north and south, the brewer’s house and the directors’ house, in a surprisingly sensitive fashion.

Off-sales price list 1930s

Meanwhile Truman’s had found itself wrong-footed by the upsurge of interest in cask-conditioned ales. In 1977 it introduced a compromise beer, Truman’s Tap, cask conditioned but served by air pressure hand pumps. It never caught on, and four years later Truman’s started brewing a proper, traditionally-served beer, Best Bitter. Tap disappeared altogether in 1982, to be replaced by Prize Mild, Bitter and Sampson Extra Strong alongside the Best Bitter, all handpumped beers.

This did little to end the dissatisfaction among workers at the Brick Lane brewery, who had seen the number of people employed there fall from 1,300 in 1972 to just over 700 in 1984. The unions at the brewery produced their own action plan in 1984, decrying the lack of investment by Grand Met in Brick Lane and expressing their fears for the future. Gradually the brewery’s new real ales began disappearing – in a piece of beery comedy Truman’s had to reinvent a recipe for the last one left, Best Bitter, which had been a blend of the Sampson and ordinary bitter.

Insiders were predicting the brewery’s imminent demise in 1988. In January 1989 it was finally announced that the Brick Lane brewery was to close, after more than 300 years. The ten-acre site was to be developed – this was the top of the late 1980s property bubble, and the nearby Spitalfields Market development, over 11 acres, was estimated to be worth £500 million when finished. Against that sort of return on property, Grand Met declared that the investment necessary to refurbish Truman’s old plant and carry on brewing “was not justified”.

Almost 200 workers lost their jobs with the closure. For a while it looked as if there might still be a link with brewing, for Grand Met, which still owned four breweries and thousands of pubs after closing Truman’s, was making the Brick Lane buildings its corporate headquarters. But in the big shake-up that followed the Conservative government’s Beer Orders of 1989, Grand Met sold its pubs and pulled out of brewing to concentrate on spirits – the IDV holding that Watney’s had taken over to try to make itself safe from takeover – and food.

The collapse of the property market put redevelopment plans at the brewery into the cupboard, and Grand Met continued to use the place for offices. In 1995 it sold the site to the Zeloof Partnership, which began to turn the 10-acre site into workshops, recording studios, apartments, galleries and the like. It was sometimes a slow business – clearing the equipment from the old fermentation rooms took two and a half years. Dray Walk, the former Black Eagle Street, which was closed off in 1911, opened in July 1998 with the first of a planned 25 shops and boutiques. Today, as The Old Truman Brewery, the site is home to bars, cafes, clothes shops, art galleries, a weekend food hall in the old boiler house that has take-away food from an amazing spread of countries, markets on Saturdays and Sundays, exhibition halls, shows and festivals.

At the same time the Truman’s name is back on bar tops, after a new brewing concern started up in 2010 under the Truman’s name, and using the company’s eagle trademark. Its beers, including one called Runner – though a bitter, rather than a porter – were brewed at first at the Nethergate brewery in Essex and then at Everard’s in Leicester while the partners behind the venture searched for premises in London. But in the spring of 2013 a new Truman’s brewery is due to open in East London, in Stour Road, Hackney Wick, a little more than two and a quarter miles from Brick Lane as the soot flies.

It happened, I’m guessing, about the time that the first wave of Camra members were hitting their late 50s and early 60s, that is, at the beginning of this century. If “real ale” had been pejorated almost from the beginning as the drink of men with beards, generally accompanied by sandals, soon after the millennium the cliché became old men with beards, sitting in a corner of the pub clutching a half-filled glass of something tepid, lifeless and tan-coloured in their wrinkled, liver-spotted hands.

Rooney Anand, viridian monarch at Greene King, seems to have been one of the first to favour the expression, complaining in 2002: “It’s time to explode the myth that real ale is for old men with beards. It’s not, it’s for everyone.”

Since then, the meme has trundled on, gathering speed: “Cockermouth brewer Jennings hopes to use Cask Beer Week to shatter the stereotype that bearded old men are the only ones who drink real ale” (Times and Star, Cumbria, September 2004); “real ale … seen as only for old men with beards and beer bellies” (BBC website, December 2005); “pubs full of old men with beards who drink real ale” (Farmers’ Weekly, April 2008); ” real ale drinkers … smelly old men with beards” (Metro, October 2008); “Normally when people think real ale, they picture old men with far too much facial hair, reeking of pipe smoke” (Metro again, August 2011); “real ale drinkers … crusty old men with beards” Hull Daily Mail, October 2011; “Real ale … for old men with beards and woolly jumpers” (Scotland on Sunday, October 2011); “real ale … a flat, warm brown liquid that old men with beards drink” (Bristol Evening Post, April 2012); you’re getting the idea.

Old man with smelly pipe, woolly jumper and too much facial hair

Now, I’ve been entitled to a Boris buspass since the middle of last year, so objectively it’s hard for me to deny that by almost any measure I currently fit in the category “old”; and I also have a beard, albeit a scrubby goatee worn in a vain (in two senses) attempt to hide my lack of a chin. So I’m an “old man with a beard”. And I drink cask ale. But I’ve been drinking cask ale since the 1970s, when I was a young man, without a beard (and with much more hair on my head). And at that time, vast numbers – half or more – of Camra members were under 30, like me, and like the organisation’s founders, who had been in their mid-20s in 1971 when the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale kicked off. So there was no suggestion then that you had to be at or near bus pass age to sign up for a pint of cask beer when handpumps suddenly started popping up again in the thousands of pubs from which they had been untimely ripped just a few years before. Indeed, it was precisely because the Camra demographic was seen as young (and more than averagely affluent) that big brewers such as Allied, Bass and Grand Met decided cask ale was worth all the trouble, and stuck it back on the bartop.

Today, however, as Camra closes in on 150,000 members, fewer than 10 per cent of those members are under 30, and fewer than one in 20 is under 26, which is what I was when I joined. That’s one reason why real ale became associated with old men: because the young men who drank it in the 1970s are still drinking it after 30 or more years, but they are now 30 or more years older themselves, and thus in their 50s and 60s. And it’s hard for anyone young now to look at an old man, with or without beard, and imagine him decades younger, with a young man’s enthusiasm for the same causes he still embraces today. Surely old people’s pleasures are not the same as young people’s? And doesn’t something being an old person’s pleasure invalidate it as a pleasure for someone much younger? Isn’t this why we keep having to be told that real ale is not just for old feckers with too much chin-fuzz, but everybody?

Of course, people’s pleasures actually barely change from their youth as they pile up the years and wrinkle like a shar pei, which ought to be obvious, but seems not to be. You might add on a few more likes, such as malt whisky and Frank Sinatra, neither of which I really understood until I was well past 25, and lose a few of the stranger ones, such as wearing brown corduroy and too-tight tanktops, but pretty much all of the things I enjoyed when I was just out of university I still enjoy now: playing music far too loudly (except that today it’s my daughter who complains, rather than my parents); bacon and brown sauce sandwiches; and sitting in pubs drinking cask ale with friends.

Tom Maclagan, magnificantly bewhiskered music-hall performer of the song ‘Bitter Beer’, 1864

I don’t, to be honest, understand where this cringe about having to apologise because old men drink real ale comes from. You don’t see “Football – it’s not just for old men with scarves and inflatable seat cushions,” or “Photography – it’s not just for old men with a string of failed relationships with former models and actresses.” And I don’t like the feeling that perhaps I ought to be defensive about being both born back in the early months of our current monarch’s reign, and a real ale drinker; that the unpopularity of Britain’s great contribution to the world of fermentation is my fault; that it’s the image of my grey-goateed face poised over a pint of cask beer which is putting people half my age and less off the idea of rushing to embrace the joys of craft XXX themselves; that if I really cared about real ale, as an old man with a beard I ought to be seen in public only sipping glasses of Wincarnis.

Frankly, feck yez – if you’re going to be put off something because old people do it, let me tell you a truth terrible and dark: old people also have sex. There – urgh. Doesn’t that thought put you right off your muesli?

And actually, it’s a crap marketing campaign that brings up the perceived negatives about the product and sticks them front and centre. “The Porsche 911: not just for insecure middle-aged men with too much money and small penises”? Hardly. So if you’re trying to promote real ale, cask ale, craft ale, or any other sort of decent beer, lay off the “not just for old men with beards” line and promote the positives: “Real ale – vastly better than the other muck you might have been conned into drinking until now.” And I say that not as a bearded older man weary at the stereotype, but as an enthusiast for decent beer

Still, I’m not sure whether to applaud or condemn Fownes, the Black Country microbrewers, for their campaign to “take the stereotype of real ale drinkers being boring old men with beards and turn it on it’s [sic] head” with a “Beard of the Year” competition. Though I’m certainly pleased to see that at least a couple of the entrants appear to be not just not old, but not men, either.

However, if you REALLY want beer and beards, I’m afraid the USians seem to be doing it better. The annual Best Beards of Craft Beer contest has just been held: here are the entries and here are the winners. Love the guy with the two-tone beard: I voted for him. And after all, beards and beer have gone together for centuries:

‘There came three men out of the West, their victory to try
And they have taken a solemn oath, poor Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and ploughed him in, and harrowed clods on his head;
And then they took a solemn oath, poor Barleycorn was dead.
There he lay sleeping in the ground, till rain from the sky did fall:
Then Barleycorn sprang up his head, and so amazed them all.
There he remained till Midsummer, and looked both pale and wan.
Then Barleycorn he got a beard, and so became a man.”

Sir John Barleycorn, traditional.

Chevallier barley, revived after seven decades

In a move that has thrilled beer style revivalists, a beer has been brewed from what was Victorian Britain’s most popular barley variety for the first time in at least 70 years.

What is most interesting for historians of brewing is the way the revived malt acts when used to make beer, putting a new slant on the interpretation of old beer recipes, suggesting they produced beers using the ingredients available at the time that were both fuller in the mouth and less bitter than the same recipes using modern malts, and also beers that needed longer to mature than those made using modern malts do.

The new-old beer, a nut-brown bitter ale made using Chevallier barley, which once went into the vast majority of pints sold in Britain, will be on sale at the Duke of Wellington pub on Waterloo Road, Norwich this coming weekend in time for Camra’s annual members’ meeting in the city. But hurry: there’s only one firkin available.

Chevallier barley was revived by Dr Chris Ridout of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, an independent grant-aided plant and microbiology research centre, which hold seeds from 10,000 varieties of barley at its genetic resources unit.

Dr Chris Ridout growing Chevalier barley at the John Innes Centre

The reason for reviving Chevallier was to look again at its malting quality and yields, both of which were good enough to see the variety dominate British barley growing and spread around the world. Dr Ridout and his team have now discovered that Chevallier also has resistance to Fusarium ear blight, which, if it can be cross-bred into other varieties, could be very valuable in the fight against a fungal disease that can devastate grain crops.

While that alone has helped Dr Ridout win official registration for Chevallier as a conservation variety and a £250,000 grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council to explore the commercial potential of new varieties derived from heritage barleys, it’s the idea of being able to get closer to the taste of 19th century beers by using a proper 19th century malt that will excite many brewers and beer drinkers.

Dr Ridout also runs the tiny and obscure Stumptail brewery in Great Dunham, Norfolk, a properly registered commercial brewery that makes the occasional beer for Norfolk pubs and the Norwich beer festival, which is where the Chevallier beer on sale at the Duke of Wellington was made, and it’s fascinating talking to him about brewing with Chevallier malt and how it differs from current varieties. “There’s a definite flavour to it,”, he says, “which is quite harsh at first but matures and mellows. It has quite a full mouthfeel, and a dryness, and it seems to have an effect on hop bitterness: you need to put more hops into the beer to get the same effect as with modern malt varieties.

Dr Sarah de Vos of Stumptail brewery with the revived beer brewed from Chevallier pale malt, ‘generous’ amounts of crystal malt and Goldings hops

“The wort from Chevallier malt has slightly higher protein and a slightly higher residual gravity. A lot of old recipes might not have been as strong using Chevallier malt as we think they might have been. My experience so far as a brewer using Chevallier is that if we calculate today that the recipe would give an 8 per cent abv beer, it was probably only six and a half per cent using Chevallier – though the higher final gravity didn’t mean a sweeter beer, but one with a fuller mouthfeel.”

The fact that beers brewed with Chevallier malt need some time to mellow down may have been a factor in the variety’s disappearance: its decline looks to coincide with the rise of “running” beers in the UK, the low-gravity milds and bitters popular after the First World War that were designed to go on sale with little or no ageing. It was already losing ground to newer, higher-yielding varieties introduced at the start of the 20th century, such as Plumage Archer, a cross between a Danish barley and an old English “landrace” variety, and it fell from 20 per cent of the British barley crop to just five or 10 per cent during the 1920s. By the end of the 1930s it was down to just one or two per cent, at which point it was “more or less obsolete:, Dr Ridout says, though it was still being grown in Australia in 1957 and imported to Scotland, according to newspaper reports from that year.

It was a remarkable fall for a variety that owed its existence to two men from the opposite ends of the social spectrum in the reign of George IV, an agricultural labourer called John Andrews and the Reverend Dr John “Barley” Chevallier of Aspall Hall, near Debenham in Suffolk (best known today for its cyder). There are at least two versions of the discovery of the variety that became known as Chevallier: one has Andrews filching a few ears of two-row barley as he passed through a field one day some time about 1820. Back home he threw them to the chickens in his garden, where some sprouted. The barley plants, tall, and with plump, even kernels, caught the eye of Andrews’s landlord, the Reverend Chevallier, an amateur agriculturalist born in 1773 or1774, who took the ripe ears and cultivated them up around 1824 or 1826.

A rather different, and fuller account was given on an illuminated address presented to the Reverend Chevallier’s grandson at a luncheon at the Brewers’ Exhibition in Islington, London in November 1831 to mark the centenary of the introduction of Chevallier barley. The address quoted from a manuscript history of the history of Debenham, which said:

About the year 1820 John Andrews, a labourer of Mr Edward Dove, of Ulverston Hall, Debenham, had been threshing barley, and on his return home at night complained of his feet being uneasy, and on takingoff his shoes he discovered in one of them part of a very fine ear of barley – it struck him as particularly so – and he was careful to have it preserved. He afterwards planted the few grains of it in his garden, and the following year, Dr [John] and Mr Charles Chevallier, coming to Andrews’s cottage to inspect some repairs going on (the cottage belonged to the Doctor), saw three or four ears of the barley growing. He requested it might be kept for him when ripe. The Doctor sowed a small ridge with the produce thus obtained, and kept it by itself until he grew sufficient to plant an acre, and from this acre the produce was 11½ coombs* (about the year 1825 or 1826). This was again planted, and from the increase thence arriving he began to dispose of it, and from that time it has been gradually getting into repute. It is now well known in most of the corn markets in the kingdom, and also in many parts of the Continent, America, &c., and is called the Chevallier barley.

* one coomb equals four bushels, so 46 bushels

Although it has been suggested that the barley Dr Chevallier discovered was a variety or offshoot of a widespread British “landrace” type called Archer, which was later the parent of a couple of important malting barleys in the first half of the 20th century, genetic analysis shows Chevallier is an outlier compared to modern barley varieties, Dr Ridout says, suggesting it was a true sport rather than a close relation of native British barleys, several of which still have their descendants in modern barley fields

Chevallier barley ripening in a Norfolk field

The spread of Dr Chevallier’s barley (frequently misspelled “Chevalier”) was comparatively rapid, helped by it becoming particularly popular with brewers. It was on sale at the Mark Lane auction mart in London in 1833 only six years or so after the Doctor began distributing it, at the highest price charged for malting barley, up to 35 shillings a quarter, against 30 or 32 shillings a quarter for other varieties. The following year Chevallier was being grown from Kent to Scotland, and a farmer from Bedfordshire called Bennett told a House of Commons select committee in February 1836 that Chevallier “will grow a better quality on all lands” than other varieties, and “makes the very best malt.”

The variety continued to be the most popular among many beer brewers in Britain for more than 50 years, with one estimate suggesting 80 to 90 per cent of barley grown in Britain by the 1880s being Chevallier (without, it must be said, any evidence being given). At the same time high-quality Chevallier barley was being imported into the UK from Chile and California, while new versions were being developed, such as Webb’s Kinver Chevallier, Richardson’s Chevallier, Scotch Chevallier and Hallett’s Pedigree. Indeed, there is a suggestion that any narrow-eared or “lax-eared” two-row barley might be called “Chevallier” in Victorian Britain, just as any whitebine Kentish hop might be called a “Golding”.

The malting expert Henry Stopes described Chevallier in 1885 as “probably the most widely distributed and best known” barley variety, producing heavy crops of extremely friable grain, with an almost transparent husk, a high percentage of starch and great weight. “All the best qualities of every class of barley seem combined in this one variety, except that it is not awnless,” Stopes said. By the last decades of the 19th century it was being grown not just in California and Chile, but Australia and New Zealand, as well as every country in Northern Europe, including Sweden (although it failed in South Africa, where it was “a little too brittle and thin in the skin to stand the tropical sun”).

Rachel Goddard, a JIC PhD student, turning Chevallier malt on the maltings floor at Crisp’s floor maltings in Norgolk

More than seven decades after it effectively disappeared from British farms, half an acre of Chevallier was grown last year by the John Innes Centre, and the resultant crop was then floor-malted by Crisp Malting Group at Great Ryburgh, near Fakenham, Norfolk, to produce half a tonne of malt, or 20 sacks. The malting itself was an adventure into the unknown: “It’s a different beast to a modern malt, for sure,” Dr Ridout says. At one point towards the end of the malting process, levels of glutamine were looking alarmingly high: the experienced staff at Crisp suggested leaving the piece on the floor an extra day, which sorted everything out. It was good, Dr Ridout says, to be working with skilled maltsters who knew how to overcome such problems.

As well as being used by the Stumptail brewery, sacks of the revived Chevallier have gone to the Durden Park Beer Circle, the London-based beer style revivalists, and other brewers, and been turned into everything from IPA top porter. This year the JIC is planting half a hectare of Chevallier, which should give two to three tonnes of malting barley. That will be treated just like a modern crop, but another batch is being grown at Gressenhall Farm, near Dereham in Norfolk, where it was planted on Easter Monday using horses and a 19th-century style seed drill, and will be grown “organically” just as it would have been grown in Chevallier’s prime. That, Dr Ridout says, will enable comparisons to be made on nitrogen content and the like using the different agricultural regimes.

The hope, Dr Ridout says, is that as well as insights into potentially beneficial genetic trains to be found in Chevallier and other old and currently obsolete barley types – more of which are being planted out by the JIC this year – a market will develop among brewers keen to revive old beer styles for old barley7 malts like Chevallier. Given the eagerness with which brewers such as Fuller’s and Kernel in the UK, and Pretty Things in the United States, have seized the chance to resurrect vanished brews, I’d say brewers are likely to be beating his door down to try to get hold of authentic old malts with which to brew authentic old beers.

In Bruges

I first drank in the Brugs Beertje in Bruges in 1985. I didn’t realise at the time that it was then only a couple of years old: it already felt like a classic beer venue, small, comfortable as an old suede gardening glove, welcoming as your favourite cousin, the walls lathered in Belgian brewery memorabilia, the selection of hopped beverages extensive and eclectic.

At the time, it was pretty much unknown outside Bruges: I was guided to it by a pamphlet listing the city’s beer outlets that I picked up in the Bruges tourist office while trying to find a hotel. Would the tourist office in any British city have carried a list of good local bars and pubs in 1985? Would the tourist office in any British city carry a list of good local bars and pubs today? Not, I think.

Despite Britain and Belgium each being soaked in beer culture to their respective marrows, there still, 40-plus years after the founding of an organisation specifically set up to encourage appreciation of British beer, seems something much more celebratory about Belgium’s relationship with beer than you find among the British generally. Belgians seem far keener to announce to everybody their beery wonders, than we do in Britain, eager to hand you the massive beer menu when you sit down in the bar, cafe or restaurant, happy to let you know that this little country of 11 million is one of the four or five greatest brewing nations in the world, and pleased to point out that they make more unusual beer styles than anywhere else, too.

Seventeenth century brewing, as depicted on the side of a building in Bruges: from right to left, the copper where the water was heated for mashing the malt; the mash tun, with three men stirring the mash using mash forks; another copper, for boiling the wort from the mash tun with the hops; two cherubs, holding beer jug, mug and cup, with mash forks and huckmuck; the beer from the fermenting vessel being emptied into a cask via a hop sieve; two men with a yoke, carrying a full cask away to the cellar; the cellar, with full casks for tapping. Click to enlarge

In Bruges, there are murals of beer-making to be seen in the streets, stained glass windows showing brewing equipment in the cafes where you can have your early-morning croissant and hot chocolate (while the man at the table next door is enjoying an early-morning Belgian strong ale), and the building in the main square showing a multimedia display of the city’s celebrated golden medieval past, the Historium, has a café called the Duvelorium, where you can drink Belgium’s celebrated golden modern beer. Would a British tourist attraction go for a tie-up like that?

Of course, one big difference between Belgian and British beer culture is the one I alluded to in passing in the last paragraph: that beer is available practically anywhere other drinks are available, so that every little café or eatery will be able to offer you a range of brews. Thus if you want a glass of ale with your breakfast cheese and ham or your mid-afternoon waffles and ice-cream, it will be there. But while the Bruges equivalent of Bettys Tea Shop in York will sell you a (locally brewed) Straafe Hendrik with your peperkoek (gingerbread), Bettys Tea Shop in York would throw its apron over its head if you asked for an Old Peculier or a glass of Tim Taylor’s Landlord with your parkin.

Mr and Mrs Zythophile outside the Brugs Beertje

I was back in Bruges last month, carrying a pre-publication copy of the third edition of Around Bruges in 80 Beers, thanks to the kindness of Paul Travis of Beer-Inn Print (the first stop for all your beer book needs). If you’ve not seen the book, it’s an excellent guide to 80 bars and cafes (and a couple or three of bottle shops) in the capital of West Flanders, matching a different beer to every outlet.

Bruges will certainly give you as wide a range of drinking experiences, in place and glass, as any single city in the world. The places run from the cramped intimacy of the Brugse Beertje (the “Little Bruges Bear”, named, I have now learnt, 28 years on, for Bruges’ ursine mascot, and in my not very humble opinion one of the finest beer bars on the planet) to the Art Deco Gran Kaffee de Passage, and from the wacky Books & Brunch, a bar-cum-secondhand bookshop, to the canalside “café brasserie tea room Sint Petershoeve” in the suburb of Damme, with its red-and-white chequered tablecloths, where the menu includes eel with green herbs, and rabbit with prunes.

The beers featured, naturally, this being Belgium, are fantastically varied: strong abbey-style ales, dark and light; weird wild-fermented lambics and gueuzes; spiced wheat beers; sour oak-aged brown ales; Saisons, the farmhouse ales from the French-speaking south of the country; and a growing number of takes on styles from other countries, including stouts, bitters and highly-hopped American IPAs.

Stained glass window showing brewing implements – crossed mash forks and a huckmuck – from a cvafe in the heart of Bruges

Standouts for me this trip included Lupulus from Les 3 Fourquets on draught – whoa, lemons! – which Mrs Z, who normally can’t be dragged away from a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, enjoyed enough to want to order one herself. Unfortunately, this being a very Belgian draught beer, it’s refermented in the keg, which means your end-of-the-keg glass is likely to (1) be murky as a bad day in Beijing, and (2) taste much more yeasty than the glass served earlier – too yeasty, in fact, for a Sauvignon Blanc fan to wish to continue with. Fortunately the barman replaced that glass with a less cloudy one. I also greatly liked Troubadour Obscura, brewed at De Proefbrouwerij in Lochristi for Musketiers, a great dark dessert beer, full and just the right side of sweet.

The average Bruges bar will have probably 40 or so different beers in stock, and some will top 400 or more. It is thus comparatively easy to put together a book that covers 80 often very different outlets (did I mention Rail City, a bar with its own 165-square-metre model railway installation?) and feature a different beer with each one.

If you set out to attempt the same exercise in a comparable tourist city in Britain, however – say, Oxford, or York, both similar sizes to Bruges, both full of grand old buildings – I suggest you would not get very far. There would be beers to stand up to Belgium’s finest, and bars to match the best Bruges offers, but not 80 of one to pair with 80 of the other.

The Gruuthuse in Bruges, built from the proceeds of a monopoly in the herbs that went into beer before hops

And all this with some of the finest medieval Northern European architecture you’ll see anywhere. Bruges in the 21st century can actually thank the apparent bad luck that saw its outlet to the sea silt up about 1500, and its former pre-eminence as a trading centre disappear, because it meant that the glorious buildings built during the peak of its power were left alone as that power faded, with no money to demolish them and build something more contemporary. Thus today more than two million tourists a year flood the place to enjoy its sights: even mid-week in freezing early April the city was wedged with visitors.

The Halve Maan brewery from the canal. The louvred clerestory at the top is home to the copper koelschip

Having walked round the streets, and taken a boat trip on the canals, those tourists then hit the museums: the art museum, natch; the lace museum; the Gruuthuse museum, housed in the magnificent semi-palace built with the proceeds of selling “gruut”, or gruit, the pre-hop mixture of herbs that went to flavour Flemish ale; the chocolate museum, of course – and the beer museum. The old Halve Maan brewery, alias Henri Maes, to the south of the city’s heart, has guided tours every hour from 11am to 4pm, every day, and once again they’re rammed: two or three dozen people or more each time from a swath of nationalities, all keen to look at coppers and mash tuns. I doubt greatly that many people on the tours would normally take a special trip somewhere to go round an old brewery, but hey, they’re here, it’s €7 a ticket and you get a free glass of Brugse Zot, the Halve Maan’s undemanding but perfectly pleasant pale ale-alike, in the brewery bar/restaurant afterwards. (The local beer bars can be rude if you dismiss their myriad specialities and want Zot instead: not having had it before, I decided to try it on my first evening last month, and the waiter asked if I’d like a straw with it …)

As it happens, the Halve Maan’s age makes it a fascinating tour: as well as the old-style corrugated wort coolers, down which the hot wort once flowed on its way to the fermenting vessel as cold water circulated inside, you can also spot old mash tun rakes of the sort once used before mechanical raking took over, and even examples of the wicker strainers, known in English as huckmucks, that would be rammed into the middle of the mashtun for the sweet wort to flow into, so that it could be ladled out and conveyed to the copper for boiling with hops. I had only before seen pictures of huckmucks: to spot ones that had obviously once been used gave me an even bigger thrill than spotting a quern in the corner of a Portuguese farmyard. The tour also passes through a disused fermenting room filled with more than a dozen fermenting vessels all not much bigger than a Californian hot-tub, the like of which I’ve not seen since a trip round Paine’s now long-closed brewery in St Neot’s in the 1970s, and right up to the top of the building, where you step across an old copper koelschip, or shallow wort cooler, and out onto the roof, for a fine view of the city before and below you. Here’s a quick virtual tour:

Woe and thrice woe, York, Oxford, Bath and all Britain’s other major tourist lures have lost their old city-centre breweries, so there’s no chance of such a trip for any visitors bored, perhaps of architecture and art galleries in the UK. But how wonderful it would be to have someone set up a brewery museum alongside the old Anchor brewhouse by Tower Bridge in London. Any entrepreneur fancy the idea? If the Halve Maan is a hint, you’d be beating the visitors back with sticks. And how about properly promoting Britain’s beer culture to overseas visitors? We’re the country that invented IPA, porter, stout, barley wine, bitter ales, mild ales: the government is working, I happen to know, on a campaign to boost awareness of Britain’s beer heritage abroad to encourage exports of beer. How about an effort to encourage beer tourism of the sort that must bring Bruges a flood of visitor cash every year?

(Oh, and if you’ve not seen the film this post is named for, do so – a tremendous black comedy.)

The continuing fantastic expansion in the number of old documents scanned, OCR’d and available on the internet is presenting the lucky historical searcher with constant opportunities to push back the boundaries. The latest terrific find is an ante-dating of the first use of the expression “India pale ale” by almost six years, taking it from Liverpool in January 1835 to Sydney, Australia in August 1829.

Advertisement for East India Pale Ale, Sydney Gazette, Saturday August 29 1829

That advertisement for East India pale ale comes from the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of Saturday, August 29 1829. Unfortunately it doesn’t mention whose East India pale ale Mr Spark was selling at his stores. However, the “Taylor’s” also mentioned in the ad is almost certainly the London brewer better remembered as Taylor Walker, which was well-known in Australia, having been exporting its stout and porter to the colonies from at least 1822, but which had also been exporting pale ale to New South Wales since early in the decade, an advert in the Sydney Gazette from Thursday 20 November 1823 shows.

EIPA, ‘the best summer drink’, in the Colonial Times, Hobar,t February 19 1830

The 1829 ad seems to say that Mr Spark had two sorts of pale ale on sale, Taylor’s and East India. If there were two, the other one might have been the unhoppy version of pale ale that London brewers had long been making (see later). On the other hand, an ad just a few months later in the Colonial Times of Hobart in Tasmania on Friday, February 19 1830 lists “Taylor’s Brown Stout, East India Pale Ale (the best summer drink) and XXX Ale for sale”, meaning that whatever interpretation you put on that 1829 ad, Taylor Walker’s still (currently) takes the prize for the earliest named beer to be called an IPA (oh, all right, an EIPA – same difference). The XXX ale, meanwhile, probably WAS pale, lightly hopped ale.

We can be fairly certain that the EIPA in the 1829 ad wasn’t Hodgson’s, the best-known of the hopped pale ales exported to the East before 1830, because the Bow brewery’s beer was highly admired and regularly praised, and would have been specifically named by anybody selling it: another Sydney newspaper, the Monitor, complained in April 1828 that “Colonial beer” was “not so good as” Hodgson’s pale ale, and adverts in Australian newspapers for Hodgson’s pale ale from at least 1823 called it “celebrated” and “highly esteemed”. (Though a “Letter to a Gentleman in London” printed in the Australian newspaper in Sydney on Wednesday 16 July 1828, talking about being served Hodgson’s and Taylor’s beers on board ship on the five-month voyage out to the colonies, complained that these were “names that I had never heard of when in London”.)

East India pale ale, brewer unnamed, continued to be advertised in newspapers in Sydney to 1831 (including one mention of “India fine pale ale in casks”. Then in October 1832 the Sydney Herald carried an ad for “Barclay and Perkins’ East India Ale”, in hogsheads, showing that another big London porter brewer, like Taylor Walker, was now in the India pale ale business. (In November 1833 the Herald printed a notice for “Thirty-five Hogsheads of ‘Taylor’s’ BROWN STOUT fifteen ditto of ditto East India Pale Ale”.)

Barclay and Perkins’ East India Ale, Sydney Herald, October 29 1832

The next month, on December 20, the Hobart Town Courier included an advert for, among a long list of other items “landed in good order by the barque Forth from London”, “Ind & Smith’s India pale ale, and best brown stout in Hhds [hogsheads, 54-gallon casks] and in bottle.” Ind and Smith were the brewers from Romford in Essex who, in 1845, became Ind Coope, and who went on to open a brewery in Burton upon Trent in 1856, at least in part, it seems, to serve the export trade.

The names missing from exports of something called India pale ale to Australia, you’ll have spotted, are the major Burton upon Trent brewers Bass and Allsopp, who were, from 1823 onwards, pushing Hodgson out of the pale ale trade in India itself. Bass pale ale does not seem to appear in ads in any Australian newspaper until 1830, years after Hodgson and Taylor’s.

It’s perhaps not THAT surprising that Australia should have started using the name India pale ale earlier than Britain. Although “pale ale as prepared for India” was on sale in London in 1822, it did not become a widely available drink in the UK until after the Burton brewers started using their new railway connections to ship their bitter pale ales to London, in 1841. Only at that point was it necessary to differentiate between the hoppy pale ales the Burton brewers made and the mild pale ales that the ale brewers of London, such as Charrington’s, Mann’s and Goding’s, had been producing for many years, and calling the hoppy version “India pale ale” was a good way of doing it.

In Australia they were getting the well-hopped beers made by Hodgson AND the lesser-hopped ales, like Charrington’s XX pale ale, both on sale in Sydney and elsewhere in the Australian colonies in the 1820s, 15 or 20 years or more before Britons began seeing hoppy pale ales in quantity. Hodgson’s was well-known to Australian consumers and known to be bitter, so perhaps didn’t need calling something to flag its bitterness. Taylor’s, Barclay’s and Ind’s pale ale, however, might have been mistakenly thought by Australian consumers to be the sweeter kind of lesser-hopped ale, like Charrington’s, and so perhaps needed to be called an India pale ale to make it clear these were well-hopped, bitter drinks, something British consumers didn’t need flagging up because they weren’t getting the new hoppy pale ales yet. (I confess I don’t find that argument hugely convincing, but it has its points. And remember, when IPA-like brews did finally take off in Britain, a new term had to be invented for them by the consumer: bitter beer.)

Addendum: in the light of comments below, I should add, because it’s not clear from what I said above, that I strongly suspect the “East India pale ale” designation was strictly a retailer’s usage, in Australia, and not one used by the brewers themselves, or even by the shippers. So I wouldn’t expect to see any brewer’s records, or shipping records, talking about IPA this early.

Sydney in 1828, incidentally, had seven operating breweries, though their average output per month was only around 120 barrels each, despite “Colonial beer” selling for six pence a quart and London porter at 20 pence a quart.

(Hat tip to the Foods of England website for pointing me to “India Pale Ale” ads in early Australian newspapers.)

A label registered in Australia by Ashby’s brewery of Staines, Middlesex, England in 1876

Jamie Oliver, the thick-tongued TV chef and hugely successful restaurant entrepreneur (and son of an Essex pub landlord), has 3.3 million followers on Twitter. Which is, you’ll not be shocked to hear, about 2,600 times more Twitter followers than I have. Indeed, it’s quite possibly more followers, my very rough survey suggests, than all the tweeters about beer in the world, (including brewers, bloggers, beer writers, pubs and bars and ordinary drinkers who tweet occasionally about the drink), have  together, in one big overlapping and multiple-counted pile.

But how many “regular” beer tweeters are there? And how many followers do the most popular ones have? Here’s my entirely unscientific and probably definitely unreliable take on the beery tweeting scene.

In addition, there’s a poll for you to fill in, just to try to get an idea of the overlap between people who read beer blogs (or at least, people who read this beer blog) and people who follow tweets about beer on Twitter.

One of the great things about Twitter is that by using lists, you can set up and manage your own Twitter communities: I have 15 or 16 different lists, covering my personal interest groups, such as tweeters from and about the West London suburb where I live, tweeters about language and science and history, friends on Twitter, tweeters about the media and journalism, tweeters about politics, and so on, which makes keeping up with what is going on in those “virtual villages” much easier.

My personal Twitter list of “beery people”, which doesn’t include brewers, has 45 names in it, mostly from the UK, though perhaps six or seven of those are pubs I like to keep up with. I think I follow most of the regular British beery tweeters, but let’s say I’ve only managed to capture half of them: that would suggest some 70 regular UK tweeters about beer. That would certainly fit with the estimated number of regular UK beer bloggers.

I don’t particularly follow brewers on Twitter, but a quick survey suggests more than 80 per cent of London’s 40-plus brewers tweet, which, if repeated across the country, means some 800 “brewery tweeters”. Instinctively I feel that can’t be true, simply because of the small number of brewers’ tweets I see retweeted on my timeline, but if anyone has any proper figures, I’d be interested to see them. I’d also love to know how many pubs run regularly-used Twitter accounts: judging by the few pubs I know who are tweeting around where I live, I’d guess fewer than one in ten, but that would still mean several thousand tweeting pubs. Again, I’d love to see a proper survey.

However, a quick scrabble in the Twitter undergrowth suggests that most of those pubs have only a few hundred followers each, max, well short of even the average number of followers of UK beer tweeters (of all sorts) that I track, which comes in at almost exactly 6,000.

I cannot stress enough that the tables which follow are very probably pretty worthless, because I surveyed fewer than 150 Twitter accounts to formulate them, accounts culled from my own lists and those of about four or five other compilers, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that I have missed out people and organisations who ought to be represented here. That’s why the tables are headed “Ten top tweeters” and not “Top ten tweeters”.

That said, and errors and omissions excepted, who’s the top UK beer tweeter, according to Zythophile Polling, your wet digit in the Twitter wind? No huge surprise: it appears to be the official Camra account, with just over 26,000 followers (meaning just over one in six Camra members follow the organisation’s Twitter feed: draw what conclusions you like from that.) Most of these tables, interestingly, you’ll note, demonstrate a monopoly/duopoly distribution, with one or two names a long way out in front of the rest. The next name in the UK top beer tweeter list, and the top UK beer writer/blogger tweeter in terms of Twitter followers, has fewer than half the followers that Camra does. However, I’m personally not surprised to discover it’s Melissa Cole, who is Ms Connected in the world of British beer: if you’re on LinkedIn and you have a connection in any way with the UK beer scene, I’ll almost guarantee Melissa is the person who shares most contacts with you. She is more than 15 hundred followers ahead of the man in second place, Pete Brown, four thousand followers ahead of the third-placed UK beer writer/twitterer, Marverine Cole, alias Beer Beauty, and has twice as many Twitter followers as the people in fourth to seventh place.

The UK brewers table I’m definitely cautious about, because I’m sure I’m missing some important names, but again the number one – Adnams – is well ahead of the field. But you’ll have spotted that only four of my top ten are “old-established” brewers, that numbers two to six are all relatively new start-ups (even Meantime is only 13 years old), that the king of publicity, James Watt of BrewDog, is number two, and that Kernel, the highly regarded railway arch enterprise that only began in 2009, is number five.

I stuck in five beer retailers just for comparison: I fear the fact that four are London-based outlets is an artefact of my own bias as a person living in the capital, so don’t read a lot into it, but it’s interesting that the Real Ale shop in Twickenham is doing really pretty well, that three of the others are leaders of the “new wave London cask-and-craft-keg pub” revolution, and that Wetherspoon’s only manages an average of 16 Twitter followers per pub, which is pretty bloody poor.

There are also some more comparison tables: a list of what I believe to be the UK’s top (amateur) food twitterers, which shows that the country’s beer twitterers are all some way behind: a list of top wine twitterers, which shows that Janice Robinson hammers everybody, even Oz Clarke, but all top wine twitterers do better than beer ones; and a couple of lists from the United States, which once again undoubtedly miss out loads of people who should be in them.

The US has five times more people living in it that the UK, so of course its figures are going to be bigger than the UK’s, but New Belgium Brewing’s Twitter following is still impressive: three times as many as Brooklyn Brewery. In case you wonder where Samuel Adams is, it only has 24,000 followers: not much more than Adnams … It’s also interesting that Beer Advocate is so massively bigger than anybody else: scale its number of Twitter followers down to a UK-sized population and it would still have more than 76,000 followers. I’m not sure why it does so very much better than Ratebeer: personally, if I’m ever after information, I find Ratebeer, considerably more useful than Beer Advocado. I’m also puzzled why US beer bloggers/beer writers apparently  do so poorly when it comes to getting Twitter followers: Melissa Cole and Pete Brown have more Twitter followers than Garrett Oliver? Apparently so.

There we are, anyway: please fill in the survey on your personal beery Twitter use, put all the errors and omissions you can find in the comments, and if you want to try to lift my abysmal Twitter following up from its current pathetic 1,250, my Twitter handle is  @zythophiliac – many thanks!

How long have British brewers been using American hops? Far, far longer than you might have guessed: for around two centuries, in fact.

The earliest evidence I’ve collected so far of hops from the United States in England is from exactly 196 years ago: May 1817, when the Liverpool Mercury newspaper carried a notice of the arrival in the city of a ship from New York, the Golconda, carrying 417 bales of cotton, 319 barrels of flour, 1,322 barrels of turpentine – and two bags of hops. Rather more came across the Atlantic a few months later, in November, when two ships arrived, the Pacific from New York and the Triton from Boston, with cargos including 49 bales of hops and 30 bags of hops respectively. An even larger consignment, 185 bales (a bale being 200 pounds), arrived the following month, December, from Boston on board the ship Liverpool Packet.

Not coincidentally, these imports of hops from the United States were arriving in Britain right after the famous (to climatologists) Year Without a Summer of 1816, itself the result of the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history (with the possible exception of the putative proto-Krakatoa), when Mount Tambura in Indonesia blew up on April 10 1815 with a roar heard 1,600 miles away, sending 50 to 100 cubic kilometres of rock into the air and dumping tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur and ash into the stratosphere via a column of smoke and fumes 27 miles high, covering the northern hemisphere in a sulphate veil. Temperatures in North America and Europe dropped by as much as 3C for at least two years, rainfall rose by as much as 80 per cent, and agriculture was badly hurt.

The year after the eruption, the hop harvest in Britain, in particular, was hammered. Newspapers from September 1816 onwards engraved a picture of misery. The Hereford Journal reported that locally “the hops have nearly all been destroyed by the inclement season.” At Worcester fair, the Morning Post said, “there was not a pocket of new hops”. At Stourbridge Fair, just outside Cambridge, normally one of the country’s biggest hop marts, “the supply of hops was very small, not more than half a load.” In Farnham, Surrey, the hop cones were “uncommonly small”, and the harvest was set to be no more than a quarter of its usual size. At Weyhill fair in Hampshire in October just over 700 pockets of hops were on sale, down from 3,000 the previous year.

The final harvest was just under 100,000 hundredweight of hops, against 265,000 hundredweight the previous year and an estimated annual consumption of around 210,000 hundredweight. By December the shortages were being reflected in the prices being charged at the hop market in Southwark: £10 to £15 a hundredweight (112 pounds) for Sussex hops, £10 10 shillings to £17 for Kents, and £18 to £25 for Farnhams, all two to three times more than the prices being charged the previous year.

Normally foreign hops were kept out of Great Britain by a deliberately crippling rate of duty: in 1711, when a tax of one penny a pound (nine shillings and fourpence a hundredweight) was first laid on British hop producers, the “protective” duty on foreign hops imported into Great Britain was set at three times as much, £1 8s. (Foreign hops were banned from import into Ireland entirely, unless and until, at least in the early 19th century, British hops reach £9 a hundredweight.) Over the following century the duty on foreign hops rose to £5 18s 10 pence a hundredweight in 1787 and, by 1818, £8 11s. The tax on home-produced hops, meanwhile, had merely doubled, to 18s 8d a hundredweight.

The result was, effectively, a bar on the import of foreign hops, except, as happened in 1800, when there was a severe shortage and the government was persuaded to drop the tax on imported hops temporarily down to the same level as that on the home-grown variety, or, as in 1817-18, when the prices being charged for home-grown hops in Britain were so high that the import tax on foreign hops scarcely mattered.

Even then, however, American hops were at a disadvantage over hops from Flanders, Bavaria and elsewhere in Continental Europe, because British brewers did not like their flavour. In September 1819, Richard Rush, the United States “Minister Plenipotentiary” (ambassador) in London, visited Truman’s brewery in the East End, and asked the man showing him round, “young Mr Hanbury” (presumably Robert Hanbury), if “they ever got hops from the United States.”

“The answer was, only in years when the crop was short in England, the duty upon our hops being so high as to amount to prohibition. The price in England for their own hops was stated to be £3 per hundredweight, this was in good seasons: last year, being a very bad one, the price rose greatly higher. This had brought American hops into demand, the quality of which was better for brewing than the English, but it was said that they were injured for the English market by being dried, as was supposed, with pine wood, this being the only way in which a bad flavour imparted to them could be accounted for.”

Hanbury’s comment about American hops tasting as if they had been dried with pine wood is fascinating and revealing, since it looks to be the first ever reference to the “piney” aroma associated with some of today’s American hops, such as Chinook and Simcoe: an aroma that, along with others found in many popular hop varieties, is almost certainly derived from native American wild hops in the ancestry of American cultivated varieties. The oil that is associated with “piney” flavours in hops is myrcene, which also gives floral and citrussy flavours: wild American hops are particularly high in myrcene compared to European types. So, too, are most varieties of cultivated American hops.

You will sometimes see it asserted that hops were “introduced” to North America in the early 17th century by Dutch and English settlers. In fact, when Europeans arrived, there were already three native North American hop varieties growing across the continent, where they had been for around a million years, after migrating from Asia: Humulus lupulus var. neomexicanus, which as its name suggests, grows in the Rocky Mountains area, from the Mexico border to Saskatchewan; H lupulus var pubescens, which is found in the mid-western United States; and H lupulus var. lupuloides, which grows on the eastern seaboard from New Brunswick to the Mason-Dixon Line, and right across to the Dakotas and Manitoba.

Pubescens does not seem to interbreed with European hops (which has led to the suggestion that it should be classed as a different species, rather than a variety), but neomexicanus and lupuloides can interbreed and have interbred with European types, both accidentally and with deliberate human assistance. Indeed, today it looks as if few or no “American” hops are free from wild American hop genes. Dr Ray Neve, director of hop research at Wye College in Kent, writing in 1976, said:

“There is no doubt that the early American settlers took hop cuttings with them, but the characteristics of the present-day American cultivars indicate with some certainty that they developed as a result of hybridization between the introduced and indigenous plants.”

It looks as if, judging by Hanbury’s comment to Rush about the “pinewood” flavour of American hops, cultivated European hops had already interbred with native types in North America by the start of the 19th century (and probably much earlier): presumably the lupuloides variety that the first settlers in and around New England would have found growing in the woods and valleys near their farms. Genetic studies have shown that Cluster, one of the oldest varieties of American hops, is a mixture of native and European hops, presumably created accidentally.

In the past hundred years, interbreeding between wild American and cultivated European hops has been conducted on a more scientific basis. Brewers Gold and Bramling Cross are just two varieties created deliberately by crossing a European variety with a wild hop from North America, in the first case a wild female from Manitoba and a male English hop, in the second a wild male hop from Manitoba and a female Bramling hop (a Goldings variety) from Kent. Both the lupuloides and neomexicanus varieties are found in Manitoba, and nobody seems certain which of those two were the “wild side” parents of Brewers Gold and Bramling Cross. Quite possibly, in fact, the wild parents were themselves crosses between the two North American varieties. Rather more randomly, Cascade, frequently described as the most popular hop with the US craft brewing industry, was born in Oregon in 1956 (but not release until 1972) in a breeding programme via open pollination of a female plant of more-or-less known European lineage by a male parent of unknown provenance which later studies strongly suggest was of wild American origins.

One other interesting point arises from Hanbury’s comments to Rush: if the dreadful harvest of 1816 (and 1817 was not much better, at barely two fifths the size of 1814′s crop) “had brought American hops into demand, the quality of which was better for brewing than the English”, then were American hops used during the shortage of English ones to make pale ale for the Indian market? In other words, were American hops being used to make IPAs (which weren’t then known as IPAs, of course) two centuries ago?

Well, with the enormous caveat that we don’t have any evidence for it whatsoever, yes, it’s distinctly possible that in 1817 and 1818 the brewers shipping pale ale to India from England used some American hops in that pale ale because they couldn’t get enough English ones. Indeed, it verges on the probable that some foreign hops, from North America or continental Europe, went into ales and beers shipped to India in those years, simply because poor harvests meant the supply of English hops was so much smaller than the demand. In 1817 and 1818, almost 52,000 hundredweight of foreign hops were imported into Great Britain to make up for the poor British harvests. The Hodgsons at the Bow brewery, a few miles east of Truman’s, who were still at this time the main suppliers of pale ale to India, would have had just the same problems that Truman’s and everybody else had in buying sufficient supplies of hops after the harvest collapsed in 1816, and may well have welcomed hops from the United States, with their higher bitterness, regardless of their aroma. So American hops in IPAs may have an ancient pedigree.

However, British brewers generally continued to avoid American hops except in times of shortage. British comments about American hops frequently used the adjective “rank” to describe their aroma, which a writer in the Edinburgh Review in 1862 blamed on “the soil in which they grow”. Was this “rank” smell and taste that British brewers so deprecated the “catty” aroma many find today in American hops such as Cascade, Cluster, Simcoe and Eroica (descended from Brewer’s Gold via open pollination)? If it was, then, it’s (1) another example of the antiquity of certain kinds of flavour in cultivated American hops and (2) almost certainly another of the characteristics derived from American cultivated hops’ wild neomexicanus and/or lupuloides sides of the family.

At any rate, deterred by the enormous duty payable, imports of hops into Britain, American or otherwise, remained extremely low. In 1827, just four hundredweight of foreign hops came into the country. In 1833 barely 100 hundredweight of foreign hops arrived, all from the Hanseatic Towns (that is, probably, grown in North Germany), while the next year just 470 hundredweight of hops were imported, only 136 hundredweight of it from the United States, to be set against 14,800 hundredweight of British hops exported abroad. (Most of that year’s imports, 223 hundredweight, came from Denmark – who knew? – while Canada managed to supply 104 pounds, which seems hardly worthwhile.) American hops were also finding their way onto the Continent, incidentally: in 1834 the American Railroad Journal reported that “A gentleman from Germany informs us that American hops have been tried in that country and obtained a decided preference to the English; and that an increased demand from that quarter may be looked for hereafter.”

In 1842, as part of the general movement to cut tariffs that culminated in the repeal of the Corn Laws, the tax on imported hops was almost halved, to £4 10s. Although, as the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, recounted, “The hop-growers of Kent and Sussex said, ‘We shall be ruined: where are those employed in the culture of hops to find subsistence?’”, in the next four years only two hundredweight of foreign hops entered the country. In 1846, the same year the Corn Laws were abolished, the tax on foreign hops was cut again, to £2 5s. According to The Transactions of the American Agricultural Association, published that year, this was down to pressure from British brewers keen to import American hops precisely because of their strength:

“Last year two bales of New York grown hops were sent to London as a sample; a committee of brewers was appointed to examine them, and they arrived at the conclusion that these hops were fifty per cent stronger in aroma than those of England. The committee waited on Sir Robert Peel with this conclusion, and in the new tariff a decrease of the duty to just one half or £2 5s per 112 lbs, is proposed. A reduction of the duty has been advocated in England for a long time, on the ground that a diminution in the cost of hops would induce the brewers to use nothing else in their malting; but the protective agricultural interests have as yet proved too strong for the manufacturers. It is believed that with the proposed reduction of duty in England, this article will become one of the principal articles of export from this State; indeed, farmers in this State have, in anticipation of it, already laid out grounds enough to increase the export thirty-three per cent within two years. The average product, per acre in England, according to the London Mark Lane Express, is for the last twenty years, less than 500 pounds per acre, while the average of the American harvest is 1400 pounds per acre.

Once again the English hop growers declared that the cut “would ruin all the landowners, tenants, and labourers of Sussex and Kent, and throw thousands out of employ.” But while imports from both Europe and America certainly rose, evidence given at a parliamentary inquiry into the hop duty in 1857 suggested that every year the quantity of hops imported into Great Britain was more or less balanced by the quantity exported. The only year that American hops were imported in any quantity was after the failed harvest of 1854, when the import duty was again cut to the same level as the tax on domestic hops, and enough hops were brought in from the US (which sent 18,000 hundredweight) and Belgium to drive down the price of poorer quality Sussex hops by half.

Several witnesses to the 1857 inquiry commented adversely on the quality of American hops. Thomas Waterman, hop merchant, said:

“I should say that the American hops would never come into use in England for brewing purposes on account of the flavour, which arises pretty much from the soil on which they grow. I made an experiment with them upon my kilns in Kent to see if I could destroy the flavour, but it is impossible to do so by any sort of process whatever; it retains the same flavour, and we cannot get rid of it. I do not believe that they will ever be able to come into use.”

Robert Tooth, a hop grower in Kent (and brother to the founder of Tooth’s brewery in Sydney, Australia), said American hops were “grown too rank; they are very powerful in their flavour, and very bitter, they are naturally grown of a certain quality, which cannot be changed, by reason of the soil and climate being the only cause of it.”

The main importers of American hops seems to have been a firm called Keeling and Hunt, with offices in Monument Yard in the City of London, which commissioned a report on the US hop trade in 1847, reprinted in Berrow’s Worcester Journal. Their American correspondent described the “eastern hops”, grown in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, as

“[resembling] more in colour and flavour the English hop than any other grown in our country. For strength and flavour they cannot be equalled by any thing grown in your country … I understand that some of your brewers in the city of London have condemned our hops for the reason that they are too rank and strong … I confess our hops are stronger than yours, and to avoid the evil complained of, or to remedy the great objection made, let the brewer take two pounds of the American where he at present uses three pounds of the English, and he may rest assured of producing as full and fine an aromatic flavour upon his ale, to say the least, as he does now. The quality of the eastern hop this year is uncommonly fine, … if your pale ale brewers could be induced to give this article a full, fair and impartial trial, I have no question they would prefer them.”

Of the “western” hops, “those grown in the western part of this state” (presumably New York state: it would be another 20 years before hops were grown in the western US, although in 1846 it was said that some hops “of inferior quality are raised in Ohio and Indiana”), Keeling and Hunt’s correspondent declared: “For certain characters of ale, and for brown beer and porter, there are no hops grown in the world to compare to them … Our western hop is much stronger than our eastern, and is used almost invariably by our porter and brown ale brewers, and for the manufacture of stock liquors.” (The statistics for 1845, incidentally, showed the New England states growing 4,250 bales of hops, and New York 4,000 bales).

Despite the threat of foreign competition, however, starting in 1860 the English hop growers themselves allied their regular agitation for an end to the domestic tax on hops with a call for the abolition of the duty on foreign hops as well. This seems to have been prompted by a feeling that the free trade sentiments of the then government would not have scrapped the domestic duty without ending the duty on imports as well. At first the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, resisted the hop growers’ calls, probably because in the last half of the 1850s the hop tax had brought in record revenues, culminating in almost £400,000 being collected in 1859.

Inevitably, however, 1860 saw yet another dreadful harvest. Gladstone had predicted in his budget for 1860, set in the spring, that the hop tax would bring in £300,000 that year. In the end the take was less than £70,000. The next year was again poor, with a domestic tax take from hops of just £149,000. Prices by December were up around £9 a hundredweight, and “large” quantities of Belgian, Bavarian and American hops were being imported to make up the shortfall: large enough quantities so that a big fire in Tooley Street, Southwark in the summer had seen 5,000 bales of American hops destroyed.

Gladstone, one of the smartest operators in British political history, saw a way to make it look as if he was doing the English hop growers a favour, and at the same time end the wild swings in revenue represented by the hop duty. Even better, he could also secure the same or more tax income. For his 1862 budget, he announced that he would, indeed, be ending the hop duty, on both domestic and foreign hops: but he was putting up the cost of a brewer’s licence by three pence per barrel of beer produced. That three pence a barrel represented the former tax on the two pounds of hops that was, Gladstone told the House of Commons, the minimum that went into a barrel of beer. He also introduced, for the first time, a licence for home brewers, who would now have to pay 12s 6d a year if their rent was greater than £20 a year for private home owners (maybe £1,300 a month today), or £150 a year for farmers. At a stroke he had turned a wildly variable source of tax income into a steady one without offending too many people.

By 1889, despite the previously poor reputation that American hops had had for flavour (even in 1875 one commentator called them “strong, coloury [but] badly flavoured”, a spokesman for Bass could tell the Pall Mall Gazette that while the best hops came from Kent, “there are none to equal them in the world”, “The Americans, however, are greatly improving in their cultivation of hops, and some very fine ones come from the north-eastern states.” The spokesman also revealed that Bass used no Bavarian hops at all.

American hops were now divided in the UK market into “States” and “Pacifics”, with hops from Washington, Oregon and California all available at the hop market in the Borough. Hops from the US continued to arrive in Britain in considerable quantities: in 1908 yet another parliamentary inquiry into the hop industry (there was also one in 1890) was told that half the hops imported into the UK came from the United States, and 90 per cent of US hop exports went to Britain (with much of the rest going to Canada, Australia and India.) Until around 1905 most of the American exports of hops to the UK came from the Atlantic states, with increasing amounts then arriving from the Pacific states, notably California.

The introduction of prohibition in the United States gave the American hop industry a massive incentive to increase its exports, of course, and in the three years 1920-1922 more hops, many of them American, were imported into the UK than were grown by English hop growers. The howls of pain from the English growers were eventually met by the imposition in 1925 of a £4 a hundredweight tax on imported hops, which, except in years of poor English harvests, pushed imports of hops down to minimal levels: by the early 1950s hops imports were down to less than 1 per cent of total UK hop usage.

“All the IBUs, half the ABV” is how the American beer writer Brian Yaeger describes the newest (?) beery trend in the United States: the “India Session Ale”.

As you’ll have gathered, the ISA is meant to have the flavours of an American-style IPA, but at a more “sessionable” gravity. “Sessionable” is in the eye of the beer holder: I’d curl my lip at any beer over 4.2 per cent describing itself as “sessionable”, but to many Americans the term means anything under 5 per cent. However, what worries me most is the idea that a beer with 50 IBUs, and hopped with at least six different and powerful varieties, including Warrior, Columbus, Citra, Simcoe, Amarillo and Chinook, even if it’s only 3.5 per cent alcohol, like Ballast Point of California’s Even Keel can in any way be regarded as a session beer. Indeed, at least one “India Style Session Ale”, from the 10 Barrel Brewing Co in Oregon, is 5.5 per cent ABV.

As I wrote in this space nearly four years ago, I love session beers, but to me an essential part of what makes a good session beer is its restraint. To quote myself:

A great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention … A good, quaffable session beer should have enough interest for drinkers to want another, but not so much going on that they are distracted from the primary purpose of a session, which is the enjoyment of good company in convivial surroundings.

I’ve not, unfortunately, had the opportunity to try any of the India Session Ales (also known as “American session ales”, “Session IPAs” and “Light IPAs”) Brian Yaeger talks about in his piece, but in April I did get to try something I suspect may be similar, DNA New World IPA, the collaboration beer made by blending concentrated “essence of Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA” shipped over from Delaware with beer brewed at the Charles Wells brewery in Bedford.

I drank it on draught at the Britannia in Allen Street, Kensington (not as good a pub since they knocked the two bars into one). While it was less hoppy than 60-minute IPA, at 32 IBUs rather than 60 (and lower in strength, at 4.5 per cent ABV), there was still masses of floral flavour and aroma from both the Dogfish Head addition and the dry-hopping with Simcoe hops the beer had been given in Bedford, so that this was very clearly an American IPA, not a British one. I enjoyed my pint. But I only wanted the one. Palate overload set in after just that single glass. And that means that, regardless of its strength, DNA New World IPA cannot possibly be a session beer.

Don’t, please, think I don’t like, and enjoy, big, floral, hoppy American IPAs: I do, very much. I think Sierra Nevada Celebration is a world classic (and as I’ve finally now drunk Pliny the Elder, thanks to the very nice Jeff Alworth, who sent me a bottle as payment for looking over a couple of chapters of his forthcoming Beer Bible for e’s and o’s, I can say I believe Celebration to be better than Vinnie Cilurzo’s version of the Double IPA). But there’s a time and a place, and the time for big, hoppy beers ain’t when you’re having a session with friends.

Still, the ISA style has received a big vote in favour from Mitch Steele of Stone Brewing in California, whom I respect greatly, whose own company makes Levitation Ale, a 4.4 per cent ABV amber ale with 45 IBUs, dry-hopped with Amarillo, and who told Brian Yaeger that an ISA should be:

“kettle hopped (for bitterness up front) and dry hopped (for flavour and aroma after the boil) using similar quantities and varieties as a standard American IPA. The brewer’s challenge here is twofold: first is achieving a good flavour balance in a beer that is so low in alcohol that there isn’t much else to balance the hop character with, and second, ensuring that the dry hop character doesn’t become overly vegetal, due to the lower alcohol content of the beer.”

Yaeger lists 14 different beers he believes can be categorised as ISAs, all between 40 and 60 IBUs and 3.5 to 4.7 per cent ABV, of which four are from California and four more from either Oregon or Washington, which suggests this may well be, like the American IPA itself, a West Coast-powered phenomenon. As yet, only one brewer, my (brief) research indicates, is brewing an ISA outside the United States, and no surprise, it’s in Victoria, British Columbia, just a short (for North America) drive north of Seattle. Many of these beers seem to be summer-only seasonals, with Trader Session IPA from Uinta Brewing in Utah, 4 per cent ABV, 42 IBUs, described as ” one of the few year-round session IPAs”.

Is this a style that is going to catch on outside the US? After all, that other oxymoron, the “Black IPA”, was laughed at by many when it first arrived, but is now brewed by some very respectable brewers far from its North-Western US birthplace. There is already, I suppose, Dead Pony Club from BrewDog, at just 3.8 per cent ABV, to suggest that at least someone in the UK is already brewing an “ISA”. And Fuller’s Wild River, 4.5 per cent ABV and flavoured with Liberty, Willamette, Cascade and Chinook hops, would probably come under the “ISA” definition if it were brewed in San Diego rather than Chiswick (though while I’m sure John Keeling at Fullers probably thought he was brewing a British taken on an American Pale Ale, I’d be very surprised if he thought in terms of an ISA. To almost all Britons, an ISA, pronounced Eye-sa, is an Individual Savings Account.) All the same, some of the beers Yaeger talks about have been around since at least 2006, which suggests this is a style that has yet to take even its homeland over yet.

Before everyone piles in, of course, we’ve been drinking “session IPAs” in Britain for many decades: most of the first sessions I had as an under-age teen drinker in pubs like the Red Lion in Stevenage High Street were on (cask) Greene King IPA, yours for just 3.6 per cent ABV, and there were and are plenty of other low-gravity IPAs made by British brewers: Wadworths, Palmers and Charles Wells to name just three. But these are IPAs in the British sense, not really distinguishable from an ordinary bitter: indeed, more than 40 years ago, when I was knocking back several pints of Greene King IPA on a Friday night with mates, before weaving to the chip shop and the bus home, we never called it “IPA”, we only ever said “four pints of bitter, please”. It’s only in the past couple of decades, I think, that it has become normal to refer to the Greene King brew at the bar as “IPA” rather than “bitter”.

If low-gravity high-IBU ales do arrive in strength in Britain, however, while I think I might have the odd one occasionally, if it’s the only beer I’m planning on having and I have work to do later, I certainly won’t be settling in for a session on them.

Singing about beer: almost as good as drinking it. Except there are as many rubbish songs about beer as there are rubbish beers: which is to say, far too many. When the Beer Crimes Tribunal is convened, Tom T Hall will be among the first in the dock for “I Like Beer”, a dreadful dirge. Alongside him will be David Gordon “Slim Dusty” Kirkpatrick, for the even more awful “Pub With No Beer”, a song than which there is none so dull or so drear. Just because the song has the word “beer” in the title, or the lyrics, doesn’t make it any good.

Search among the dross, though, and you’ll find beautiful gems. Here’s my top ten selection, some of which you’ve probably never heard. I sincerely hope you’ve heard Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”, though. Written by Wesley Wilson and his wife Coot Grant, and released 80 years ago, just when it was legal to drink beer in the United States again, this is still, for all its years, as powerful a call to combine pork products and the juice of malted grain as you’ll find on the planet.

Atongo Zimba, griot and beer celebrator

“In Heaven There Is No Beer” is generally performed by cheesy polka bands, but the marvellous Atongo Zimba from Ghana had a big hit in his homeland in 2004 with a version called “No Beer in Heaven” that is so far above the accordion band renditions they should slink away off stage in shame. Why this isn’t better known in the West – why Zimba isn’t better known in the West – is beyond my comprehension.

I misspent much of my youth in Stevenage Folk Club, which served Abbot Ale and the much-mourned Rayment’s BBA straight from the cask, and of the many beery folk songs I sang along badly with, one of the tops was Oh Good Ale:

Oh good ale, you are my darling!
You are my joy, both night and morning!

Who could disagree with that sentiment? Not I. The song was part of the repertoire of the Copper family from Sussex, but the version you’ll hear if you click that link is from the Voice Squad, a three-part harmony group from Ireland, who, again, are far too little known. The lyrics are folk poetry at their finest.

Of course, the best-known folk song about beer is “John Barleycorn”, which comes in a surprising number of very different versions. The one Stevie Winwood did is perhaps the best known, but rather than all that guff about grinding him between two stones, the take I like best is performed here by the Wilson Family from, I believe Teesside (push through to 2:20, when the music starts):

“Give me my native nut-brown ale, all other drinks I’ll scorn
For English cheer is English beer – our own John Barleycorn”

D’ye know, I’d love to see that adopted as the English national anthem … how fantastic would that be?

Mind, there’s a song about beer that should be the Belgian national anthem: La Bière by Jaques Brel, of course. Pity it’s in French, but Brel was of Flemish descent, so maybe the Vlaamse wouldn’t mind.

It smells like beer
From London to Berlin
It smells like beer
God! That’s good
It smells like beer
From London to Berlin
It smells like beer
Give me your hand

(Um – Des de Moor, you’re far better at that than me …)

That’s a hymn to the all-round marvellous communiality of beer, and here’s another from an Irish singer, Pierce Campbell’s “One Pint of Porter”. There’s a truth buried in those lyrics I think, again, we can all agree with.

A pint with the lads is a fine time indeed
A talk in the social is something every man needs

And for those occasions when you’re drinking on your own – which can be good, can be very good – there’s Jake Thackray’s melancholy “The Black Swan”:

“Give us a another pint, one more pint,
Landlord, of your very, very best bitter beer –
We’ll be here all night
We’re on a bender, we’re tanking up
We don’t care”

Enough of drinking on your own: back to conviviality. Nothing, I think, is more convivial than an Irish pub, where you simply wouldn’t be allowed to sit on your Todd, even if, like the oul wan in Waxie’s Dargle, you haven’t got a farthin’:

“What will ye have?”
“I’ll have a pint!
I’ll have a pint with you, Sir!”
“And if one of ye doesn’t order soon
We’ll be thrown out of the boozer!”

That’s the version by Sweeney’s Men: I love Andy Irvine.

And now for something completely different: Captain Beefheart’s Long Necked Bottles, from the album Clear Spot, release in 1972.

“I don’t like to talk about my women
But this one sure could chug ‘em down”

I had a girlfriend like that once: nine pints of Greene King XX dark mild in an evening. OK, only 1032 OG, but since she was skinny as a broomhandle and weighed about seven stone, still very impressive. Mind, she was completely obliterated by the time I drove her home, and she received a very nasty shock when she went downstairs the next morning, suffering badly, looked in the plastic bag by the front door and discovered the rabbit I’d run over on the way back down dark Hertfordshire country lanes while she’d been unconscious in the seat next to me. Delicious it was, too, after my father had skinned it for me.

My favourite beer song of all, though, is another one from Africa, celebrating a beer I’d love to try one day: home-made South African sorghum beer, called umqombothi in the Xhosa language (that “q” is a click), in a cracking tune sung by Yvonne Chaka Chaka from Soweto and written by Sello “Chicco” Twala and Attie van Wyk.

Umqombothi‬ is magic beer
‪Umqombothi‬ is African beer
Everybody come and drink my magic beer
Everybody come and drink my African beer

Yes please.

And now, let the arguments begin …