I believe strongly in the old cliché about what to do if life hands you a ton of lemons: set to and make the very best lemonade you can. So when I wound up working in Hong Kong, I thought the worthiest use of my spare time was to write the first history of beer in Hong Kong. This turned out to be vastly easier than I had feared, because the Hong Kong library service had digitised every English language newspaper produced in the colony back to the 1850s, and while the OCR wasn’t perfect (it never is), it still threw up a mass of detail about Hong Kong’s brewing pioneers, much of it fascinating. And gave me a surprise on my doorstep.

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The most beautiful setting for a brewery anywhere in the world? The Sham Tseng brewery site, New Territories, Hong Kong in the 1950s © San Miguel Corp

Beer and Hong Kong were mixed up right from the moment the British seized the island in 1841 during our row with China over whether or not our traders should be allowed to sell the Chinese opium: for some reason the Emperor of China felt foreigners flogging his subject hard drugs and getting them addicted just to turn a profit wasn’t really on. Naturally, the British went to war on behalf of the drug pushers. Indeed, as I suggested in the article that eventually ended up in Brewery History magazine, it’s arguable that if it hadn’t been for alcohol, Britain would never have seized Hong Kong.

To quote myself from Brewery History magazine: One of the crucial events leading up to the start of the First Opium War happened on July 12 1839, when seamen from two sailing ships owned by the British trading company Jardine Matheson, sheltering in the natural harbour between Hong Kong island and the mainland, were on Sunday shore leave on the mainland, Kowloon side. They were joined by others sailors, British and American, and got stuck into the “sam shu”, san shao, distilled rice liqueur, in a Kowloon inn. When that ran out, it appears, they moved on to what was then the neighbouring village of “Jianshazui”, today the district of Tsim Sha Tsui, in search of fresh supplies. Several houses were raided by the sailors, a Taoist temple vandalised, a fight broke out with the locals, in which, according to one report “many of both sexes, including children and women 70 years of age” were “desperately wounded” , and one villager, Lin Weixi, or Wei-hsi, was struck across the chest with a stick, dying the next day.

The British Chief Superintendant of Trade in China, Captain Charles Elliot, effectively London’s representative in the region, was with the merchant fleet, trying to negotiate with the Chinese over the opium question. He paid Lin’s family 1,500 silver dollars, put up $200 as a reward for evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction, and handed out $500 in general bribes to the locals. Elliot also held a court of inquiry into Lin’s death on board one of the ships off Hong Kong. Five sailors were tried for the affray and found guilty of riot, but on the evidence as presented, no murderer could be identified. The British sailors blamed the Americans, who, they said, had drunk more of the san shao.

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British toops in Hong Kong 1846: undoubtedly hot and thirsty

The Chinese High Commissioner in Canton (today Guangzhou), Lin Zexu (or Tse-Hsu), had been sent in March that year by the Emperor of China, Daoguang, to stop the British bringing opium into the country, and had already destroyed more than a thousand tonnes of British opium. With the weight of a proud and ancient nation behind him, he demanded that the British hand over the murderer of Lin Weixi. Elliot refused to hand anybody over, saying it had not been possible to identify who struck the killer blow. In addition, Elliott knew that anyone who was handed over to the Chinese would quite likely simply have been summarily executed – which would have caused outrage back in Britain. In retaliation for this refusal, an angry Lin Zexu ordered his countrymen not to supply the British ships with food or water, poisoned wells known to be used by the British, and told the Portuguese authorities in Macau, the Portuguese-owned settlement on the other side of the Pearl River delta, not to supply the British either, and to drive all British ships there out of the harbour. The Portuguese, who had been in Macau since 1557, complied with Chinese orders, unwilling to upset the Emperor.

Lin Zexu’s orders resulted in several skirmishes between British ships and the Chinese fleet in which a number of junks were sunk. The rumbling argument broke out into an official declaration of war in London early the following year, in large part to secure compensation for the opium destroyed by Lin, with 4,000 marines and four steam-powered gunboats sent to the Pearl River delta from Singapore. As part of the subsequent fighting, Elliot, apparently deciding that the Portuguese in Macau could not be trusted and Britain needed its own territorial base in China, seized Hong Kong island in the name of Queen Victoria. This de facto land-grab became de jure in August 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War and handed Hong Kong officially to Britain.

It could, perhaps, be argued that if the sailors in Hong Kong harbour had had access to supplies of beer, they would never have gone drinking san shao in Kowloon, Lin Weixi would not have died, the Portuguese would not have been forced by the Chinese to bar the British from Macau, and the British would never have decided they needed Hong Kong as a secure home of their own to conduct trade with China from. On the other hand, the natural harbour between Hong Kong island and the mainland – quickly named Victoria Harbour by the British – was a prize worth seizing by anyone.

Whatever might have happened, on January 26 1841 the British took physical possession of Hong Kong. By April 1842, even before Hong Kong’s capture had been ratified by the Treaty of Nanjing, Alexander Matheson of Jardine Matheson was reporting that beer, porter and pickles were “pouring into this market, ten times as much as a whole army could consume”, with the company’s newly built godown in Hong Kong “full of the stuff”.

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Clik here to view.That was beer from Britain, almost certainly, and for the next 30 or 40 years, beer from the United Kingdom pretty much seems to have dominated the market in Hong Kong. Quite likely much of the beer in Hong Kong was being drunk ice-cold, as it was in India and mainland China: an Austrian traveller, Ida Pfeiffer, talking about Canton in the 1840s, wrote: “Portuguese wines and English beer are the usual drinks – ice, broken into small, pieces and covered up with a cloth, is offered with each.” Much of the beer drunk in 19th century Hong Kong was porter. The British forces were particularly keen to ensure supplies of beer for the troops stationed in Hong Kong, and a parliamentary select committee on “the mortality of troops in China” in 1866 was told that without beer being available the troops would go into town and drink “a deadly liquor called samshoo” (san shao again) which cost four pence for a “reputed quart”, a container the size of a 75cl wine bottle. However, the committee was told by Colonel William Sankey, who had commanded the 2nd battalion, 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot in Hong Kong in 1864/65: “When we were, in the middle of the summer, able to purchase porter or beer from the merchants in the town, we had in the canteen a large ice box, and we kept ginger beer and similar draughts, and the soldiers drank a great deal of iced ginger beer with porter or ale mixed with it, and at that time there was very little drunkenness among the men … As long as good and cheap porter remained at the canteen the men always drank there and not in the town.”

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Clik here to view.By 1869 English beer “of excellent quality” was being brewed in Shanghai, 900 miles north along the coast, by “Messers Evans and Co, who during the season have sold between Shanghai and the outports over 50,000 gallons of beer”, that is, about 1,400 barrels. However, while it very well might have, there is no evidence that Evans’s beer reached Hong Kong. (This mention of Evans’s brewery, incidentally, knocks on the head the claim by Tsingtao to be the first Western brewery in China.) Meanwhile the colony’s tastes were changing: British ale and stout were being replaced by lager. As early as May 1876 the Hong Kong importer and retailer Lane Crawford was advertising “Danish beer from the Tuborgs Fabrikker”, Tuborg then being just three years old. In 1886, beer from the Brauerei Zur Eiche in Kiel, North Germany was being advertised for sale in the colony. By 1896 the Seattle Brewing and Malting Co had opened an agency for China and Japan in D’Agulier Street, Hong Kong, and was selling “Braun’s ‘Export’ Beer”. Lager beer from the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association (brand unstated), presumably imported all the way from St Louis, was on sale in Hong Kong in 1899. Two years later, in 1901, Hongkongers were being offered Kirin from Japan, “a delicate lager”, in quarts and pints.

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Clik here to view.Then in August 1903 the China Mail newspaper reported: “We hear arrangements have been made to start a Brewing Company in Hongkong. As Breweries have been conducted successfully in Manila [that was San Miguel, founded in 1890], Shanghai and in Japan for some years, there seems no reason why a similar success should not attend a Brewing Company in Hongkong, provided it is under able management. The amount of beer that is consumed in Hongkong in the course of a year must be tremendous, and the consumption is more likely to increase than decrease, in spite of the efforts of the Temperance Party.” The concern the China Mail had heard rumours about appears to have been the Hongkong Brewery Company Ltd, which held its first shareholders’ meeting at 15 Queen’s Road, Central on February 15, 1904. The shareholders were told that the company intended to erect a brewery alongside the Metropole Hotel, on the then Shaukiwan Road (now King’s Road) at North Point, some three miles east of what was then Hong King proper, and by what was then the seashore (land reclamation means that today’s shoreline is some 250 yards further north). The chosen site was “practically the bed of a watercourse”, shareholders were told, and via that watercourse, an “abundance of pure, good water, suitable for beer brewing purposes” ran through the site.

I was staggered when I read that: because the site of the former Metropole Hotel was literally right outside the front door of the apartment block where I was living in North Point. Indeed, the 26-storey block that now stands on the site, with shops on three floors and apartments above, is still called the Metropole Building. Could some strange Jungian synchronicity have brought me to live right by where Hong Kong’s first brewery was founded?

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The site of the Metropole Hotel today: you can just see part of that tramway in the postcard above

Alas, no: although the Hongkong Brewery Company Ltd had found a master brewer in Germany who was “ready to come out and attend to the building and fitting up of the brewery as soon as we are ready for him to come out,” the company never seems to have raised the money to build the brewery, and in 1906 it was wound up.

In fact the first brewery in Hong Kong, I discovered, the Imperioal Brewery, opened the following year, 1907, in a converted house in Wong Nai Chung Road, Happy Valley. It only lasted two or three years: but meanwhile another new brewery had started up in the colony, across the water from Hong Kong island in Lai Chi Ko, New Kowloon, which began operations in 1908. The promoters behind the venture were led by an Englishman, Alfred Hocking, who was born in Cornwall, England in 1852 and emigrated to the United States as a young man. After several years he moved to Hawaii where he ran a lumber mill and a sugar plantation before starting the Honolulu Malting and Brewing Company around 1898, building a brewery on Queen Street in 1901 which became famous for Primo lager. The advertising slogan ued by the Oriental Brewery was “The Beer that’s Brewed to Suit the Climate”, and one of its brands was “Prima”, echoing the Honolulu brewery’s Primo brand. However, in October 1912, the Oriental Brewery Limited was in liquidation, and the following year its brewing equipment was dismantled and shipped to Manila, in the Philippines.Image may be NSFW.
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That was the end of brewing for more than 20 years, until 1933, when a newly built brewery opened at Sham Tseng – a name meaning “deep well” – by the seafront on the Castle Peak Road, in the southern New Territories, and about 11 miles west of Kowloon. The entrepreneur behind the venture, the Hong Kong Brewers and Distillers Ltd, was Jehangir Ruttonjee, a member of a family of Parsee traders who had arrived in Hong Kong in 1884. The equipment was being supplied by the Skoda Works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, home, as the new company pointed out, to the original Pilsen lager, and the brewer, Mr V. Woitsch, a graduate Engineer Brewer of the Vienna Brewing Academy, was “for many years technical and commercial director of one of the largest breweries in Pilsen”, the Český plzeňský pivovar (which traded as Světovar, or the “World Brewery”), and later state superintendent of breweries in Czechoslovakia, and his assistant brewmaster, F. Drapal, was a former managing brewer in Czechoslovakia.

The brewery held its official opening ceremony in August 1933, an event attended by more than 600 prominent citizens from Hong Kong and Kowloon, driven out to the brewery site in more than 100 cars organised by the Hong Kong Hotel Garage. Catering – “teas, cakes, ices etc” was organised by Lane Crawford in a large open matshed erected for the occasion between the brewery (itself decorated with bunting and hung with flags) and the sea, while music was provided by the Band of the South Wales Borderers. Mrs Borrett, the wife of the General Officer Commanding (that is, commander of British troops in China), Major-General Oswald Borrett, formally opened the doors of the brewery with a silver key (which she was allowed to keep), after which her husband gave a “witty” speech.

The major-general was followed by a speech from the brewery chairman, Stanley Dodwell, who assured the crowd that “nowhere in the world is beer brewed in more beautiful surroundings,” while the picturesque hills behind “pour down to us a constant supply of ideal water for our purpose, water … found to be equal in quality to, and just as suitable as, the Pilsen water itself, where the famous Pilsener beer is brewed.”

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Clik here to view.Unfortunately, macroeconomic matters way outside the company’s control quickly brought it serious problems. It had paid for its plant at an exchange rate of 11.5 pence sterling to the British trade dollar (the then name of the local currency), but when Britain left the gold standard in September 1931, the pound slumped more than 30 per cent against the trade dollar, to one shilling and three pence. At the same time, for political reasons – pressure from senators representing the seven electorally important western silver-producing states – the United States government had been buying silver, which dramatically increased the price of the metal, sending it up almost threefold between 1932 and April 1935. Hong Kong and China were the last places in the world to still tie their currency to silver, and higher silver prices hammered their exchange rates. By the middle of 1935 the trade dollar was nearly two and a half times higher against the pound than it had been in 1930.

The rising value of the trade dollar made exports dear and imports into Hong Kong much cheaper, so that British beer was on sale at the same price as the local product, despite the cost of shipping it 12,000 miles by sea: Stanley Dodwell complained in June 1935 that “had exchange remained anywhere near where it was when the Brewery project was started, we could have supplied the Colony with very much cheaper beer than that imported from anywhere else except perhaps Japan.” Six months later, after the brewery had lost 300,000 (British trade) dollars, it went into liquidation. (Ironically, a week earlier the colony finally abandoning the silver-based British trade dollar and pegging its currency to sterling, introducing the Hong Kong dollar.)

The following year, Jehangir Ruttonjee incorporated a new firm under almost exactly the same name, the Hong Kong Brewery and Distillery Ltd, and bought the Sham Tseng brewery from the liquidators. In August 1939 the brewery celebrated its sixth anniversary, with a lengthy write-up in the Hongkong Telegraph. The Telegraph’s report revealed that the malt for brewing came from Australia, Canada and Europe, and the hops from Great Britain and “the Continent”. It described the landscaped garden, with flowers laid out to depict the words “H.B. Brewery”; the dormitories for the Chinese staff, “built on the plan of semi-European flats”, with messrooms and cooks; and the separate quarters for the “female operatives” who worked in the bottling hall. The women workers “live like girl students in a school dormitory” under a matron who was also the forewoman during working hours. All the female workers in the bottling hall were required to have “a complete tub bath” twice a day, before starting work in the morning and again in the evening when they left for their quarters.

The start of the Second World War seems not to have damaged the brewery’s ability to get raw materials too much, since it was still advertising its Blue Label “British Brewed” lager inside the Hong Kong Sunday Herald on June 9, 1940 when the front page of the newspaper was full of the evacuation of the BEF from the beaches of Dunkirk. At the same time Japanese beer was still being advertised in Hong Kong newspapers. But on December 8 1941 – in the centenary year of British occupation – four hours after the Japanese had struck at the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong found itself in the front line, when the 20,000-strong 23rd Corps of the Japanese Army threw itself at the 10,000 British and Commonwealth troops defending the colony. The Battle of Hong Kong lasted until Christmas Day, when the British finally accepted the inevitable and surrendered.

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Clik here to view.Jehangir Ruttonjee avoided being interned in Stanley Camp after the Japanese victory, though he supported the smuggling of food parcels into the camp, where Indians were interned along with Britons, Canadians and other nationalities, and he housed nearly the entire Hong Kong Parsee community in his home, Dina House, in Duddell Street. Ruttonjee and his son Dhun were badly tortured by the Japanese after they refused to encourage members of the Parsee community to collaborate with the occupiers. Meanwhile the Hong Kong brewery was one of a large number of local businesses, including Lane Crawford’s department store, that were “taken over” by the occupying Japanese under the new governor, General Rensuke Isogai, with the brewery apparently “farmed out” by Isogai himself to a businessman from Osaka called Inouye Yahei.

Japanese authority in Hong Kong lasted until August 1945, when, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, Japan agreed to end the war on the Allies’ terms. A British fleet under Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt arrived in Victoria Harbour on August 30, 1945, and the Japanese forces in Hong Kong formally surrendered to Admiral Harcourt on September 16. Four days before that, on September 12, Jehangir Ruttonjee, “accompanied by Royal Navy officers”, had travelled out to the Hong Kong brewery to see what sort of state it was in. Ironically, the worst damage had been caused by the United States Air Force “some months” earlier, when a bombing raid in the near vicinity had scored hits on the brewery site. The China Mail reported that “some barrels of recently brewed beer” were discovered by Ruttonjee and the RN officers, indicating that Yahei or his successors had been busy, “but these were found to have soured.”

The brewery seems to have recovered within a few months from the occupation, with Ruttonjee back in charge. By September 1946 its HB brand beer was on sale, since it appears in the official government list of price-controlled goods: HK$1.10 a pint in the shops, HK$1.50 a pint in a pub or bar. For comparison, Carlsberg, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, “Kangaroo” and Tuborg were all HK$1.70 a pint in a bar

In March 1947 Ruttonjee – who had been awarded the CBE in the 1947 New Year’s Honours List “for courageous and loyal services during the enemy occupation of Hong Kong” – was visited by the author Compton Mackenzie, who described him as “the owner of the Kowloon brewery, a wealthy and respected Parsee.” That year, however, the brewery was sold to the San Miguel Brewery Inc, the Philippines brewer. It looks to have taken some months to sort out the handover, because the inauguration of the new San Miguel brewery was not marked until the following year, on May 21 1948, with a reception at the Hongkong Hotel attended by “hundreds” of Hong Kong’s leading businessmen, along with David MacDougall, the Colonial Secretary (that is, head of Hong Kong’s civil service.) The first stocks of freshly brewed San Miguel beer would be coming onto the market “immediately”, the brewery revealed. First-year sales volume was 4,000 hectolitres – around 2,500 barrels.

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Clik here to view.That same year, 1948, Ruttonjee, who was now 68, donated HK$500,000 to fund the building of a tuberculosis sanatorium at the former Royal Navy hospital in Wan Chai, Hong Kong in memory of his daughter Tehmina, who had died of TB during an outbreak in 1943. It was said to be the largest donation to charity in the colony’s history. Ruttonjee’s total donations eventually reached HK1.3 million. The sanatorium is now the Ruttonjee Hospital.

San Miguel carried on brewing at Sham Tseng until 1996, when it moved to a new brewery in Yuen Long, a few miles to the north, and where it still brews today. Meanwhile among the new breweries to have opened in Hong Kong in the past few months (that is, after I left to come back to the UK – blimey, I left London in 2009 and the place exploded with new breweries, I left HK in 2013 and ditto: what is this?) is one called Young Master, founded by Rohit Dugar, who was born in New Delhi – and who is clearly following the tradition set by Jehangir Ruttonjee.

The architects who designed the Sham Tseng brewery, Leigh & Orange, are still running today in Hong Kong, and while all their records of the original brewery were lost in the Secondf World War, I was thrilled to find they still have photographs of the brewery from when they worked on it after the war, which they were happy to copy for me. San Miguel, too, also had photographs of the interior and exterior, and if you want to see a fine selection of those, and read an even longer version of the brewery history of Hong Kong, you can find it in the Winter 2013 edition of Brewery History magazine. Oh, and thanks are due to Evan Rail, for fnding experts who could interprete those interior shots for me, and identify the various bits of 1950s lager-brewing kit.

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A view of the mash tun at the Sham Tseng brewery in 1959, with the brew kettle visible on the left and the lauter tun in the background.

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I’ve been invited on plenty of brewery visits over the years, but never before has the invite come with the request: “Please bring wellies and a spade.” This, however, was a field trip in a considerably more literal sense than normal: to the two and a half-acre field right opposite the Hogs Back brewery in Tongham, just outside Farnham in Surrey, to witness – and take part in – a historic event: the first planting of the Farnham White Bine hop variety in its native soil since the last bines were grubbed up 85 years ago.

This is not just, however, a footnote in Farming Today magazine: this is, according to Hogs Back’s chairman, Rupert Thompson, an important step towards increasing the “localism” aspect of the brewery’s products. Once the new hop ground (the proper Surrey name for what elsewhere are called hop gardens or hop yards) are producing a healthy crop, those hops can then be used to flavour the beer being brewed just yards away: Surrey’s own hop variety, grown in Surrey, to produce Surrey beers.

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Jeff Sechiari of the Brewery History Society, one of the volunteers at the Hogs Back hop ground planting, with a Farnham White Bine rootstock prior to going into its hole

A century and more ago, Surrey was an important hop-growing area, and for a very long time, up to at least 1850, Farnham White Bines were the most favoured hop variety in the land, described as having “a most delicate flavour”. Richard Bradley, Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, writing in 1729, called Farnham “the first capital Town for Hops in Britain.” Three years earlier, the Reverend John Laurence, in a book called A New System of Agriculture, said: “The noble Plantation of Hops at Farnham where for Regularity and Exactness the appear like Woods and groves cut into Vistaes is a beautiful Sight.” Arthur Young, the agriculturalist, said in 1798 that “they grow very large quantities” of hops around Farnham, and hop grounds were let in the district “from £3 to £9 an acre, which last price is very great.” In the second half of the 19th century, Kentish hops overtook those from Farnham in favour, but Farnham hops were still ranked second in quality after those from East Kent in 1890, and even in 1909, George Clinch could say: “The Farnham hops have long been famous for their excellent quality.”

In 1886, Surrey had 2,937 acres of hop grounds: half the size of the Sussex hop crop and a third that of Hampshire, but more than either Hereford or Worcester. Disease – to which hops in general and Farnham White Bines in particular are prone, especially downy mildew – hammered the Surrey industry, and the county’s own hop disappeared from its homeland in 1929, to be replaced by more disease-resistant varieties. But even in 1959, there were still 1,879 acres of Surrey hop grounds, which made up 9.2% of all the land then given to hop cultivation in Britain. The collapse of the industry since that time is encapsulated in one telling statistic: the planting of hop bines at Tongham this week doubled the number of existing hop grounds in Surrey.

Before the planting on Monday, Rupert Thompson said: “It will be wonderful to look out from the brewery and see the raw materials we use growing in the next-door field – that’s local! That is part of what makes the craft brewing revival so exciting.” Right now all you can see is a muddy field with, if you look carefully, row after row of angled pieces of metal sticking a few inches out of the ground, all carefully spaced one foot apart. Each marks where a hop plant was planted by a small but enthusiastic squad of helpers, including me. But in a few weeks, once the hops start to grow, the trellising will be going in: and a couple of months after that, the field should be a magnificent sight: two thousand or so hopbines (slightly fewer than half Farnhams, the rest the American variety Cascade), leafy and green, climbing 15 feet or more into the Surrey sky.

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Ruepert Thompson, chairman of Hogs Back Brewery, instructs Roger Protz in the art and mystery of hop planting

It felt good to be part of this literally ground-breaking operation, even if my own contribution consisted of not much more than digging a couple of dozen holes, dropping one hop plant into each hole and filling the hole back up with the rich, loamy, slightly flinty soil (indicating chalk below) that historically made the area so popular with hop growers.

I won’t go deeply into the history of the Farnham White Bine, since Ed Wray has done an excellent job of covering that subject here and elsewhere, except to say that the variety is, effectively, the grandfather of the Golding hop, probably the best known English hop variety, which sprang from Farnham hops taken to Kent around the middle of the 18th century.

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Me, apparently trying to work out which way up the hop plant goes in the hole …

Strictly, the hops that have gone into the ground at Tongham are not the Farnham White Bines that were so popular in the 19th century, the ones developed by Peckham Williams of Badshot Place, Farnham, around 1780, but Mathons, from Herefordshire, which are descended from White Bines taken from Surrey to the West Midlands before Mr Williams got going. But Dr Peter Darby of Wye Hops, probably the greatest expert on hops in the country, who looks after the National Hop Collection on behalf of the British Hop Association and provided the original rootstock for the White Bines I helped plant, was there on Monday and said that Mathons (named for the village of the same name near the Malvern Hills) show the same spectrum of hop oils as Goldings, which pretty much confirms that Mathon, or Mathon White Bine as it was called in the 18th and 19th centuries, is a synonym for Farnham White Bine.

Whatever, the planting of the first new hop garden in the immediate vicinity of Farnham for more than 50 years, on land that grew hops for almost 200 years, is a terrific story to tell, and sell. The Hogs Back brewery is a popular tourist halt with an almost perfect score on TripAdvisor for its brewery tours: 35 “excellents” out of 38 reviews, with the other three being “very good”. Soon visitors will have the hop ground as an additional attraction, and eventually, when they buy beer in the brewery shop, they will be able to feel they are genuinely taking away the taste of Surrey, with beer made from hops grown literally on the brewery doorstep.

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A Farnham White Bine hop plant in its hole

Localism, in the context of the British pub, currently pretty much only means the Localism Act of 2011 and its introduction of the idea of “assets of community value”, through which campaigners have been trying to preserve pubs under threat of closure. But could “localism” in its rather older, more internationally understood sense, of local purchasing, sourcing what you consume as locally as possible, have any prospect of influencing the pub customer? The idea of the “locavore”, defined as “a person interested in eating food that is locally produced”, was invented in California just under a decade ago: but California is a place that can pretty much produce all the foodstuffs anyone would wish to eat, unlike rainy, frequently cold Britain, and locally sourced food is much more easily found in Los Angeles than London. However, with initiatives like Hogs Back’s, the “locaboire” – a word I just invented, meaning “a person interested in drinking beer that is locally produced” – may suddenly have a much easier time.

According to Datamonitor earlier this year (talking, admittedly, about the United States), “knowing where a product is from instils a sense of comfort and security for consumers. Origin and localism are strong consumer pulls in craft beer, which comes through in ingredient selection and product marketing, with origin and provenance featuring heavily in the sub-sector’s imagery.” I’m not sure that’s so true in the UK, but initiatives like Hogs Back’s, if taken up more widely, could help make local provenance much more important if been fans start to feel that drinking local offers a genuinely different taste experience, rather than just the warm glow that comes from pushing one’s money at neighbours, not international conglomerates.

Right now, however, Hogs Back is one of, as far as anyone seems aware, just three of Britain’s 1,100-plus breweries growing its own hops, the other’s being Iceni in Norfolk and, unsurprisingly, Shepherd Neame in Kent. Growing your own hops won’t be for every brewer, and it may be that in terms of added value for the consumer, it will turn out to be meaningless – the looked-for “locaboire” market could likely be a figment of wishful thinking. But I’d love it, personally, if the British locaboire really turned out to be a thing.

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Tamping down the soil around the planted hop – trying not to step on the plant itself

And if any brewers reading this are interested in growing their hops, but wonder if their part of the world is as suitable as Surrey, according to HS Corran’s A History of Brewing, “Hops were cultivated in no less than forty English counties, eight Welsh and five Scottish by the 1850-70 period.” Since there are, in fact, only 39 traditional English counties, I think this total must include Monmouthshire, which was often regarded as part of England, but still, the implication is that every county in England grew hops, two thirds of those in Wales, and, I’m guessing, most or all of the southernmost historic counties of Scotland. In other words: pretty much all of the island of Great Britain has seen hop-growing in the past: William Cobbett in 1832 found hops growing near the banks of the Water of Aven in Aberdeenshire, and was told of a hop garden in Lanarkshire that had been in operation “sixty years ago”, that is, about 1772.

Mind, the five hop-growing counties of Scotland in the middle of the 19th century must have been quite recent, and quite short-lived, since a publication by the Board of Agriculture in 1814 called General Report of the Agricultural State: And Political Circumstances, of Scotland declared: “There is no instance known of hops having been cultivated as a crop in Scotland except perhaps a few in gardens,” and according to Corran the Scottish hop-growing industry disappeared in 1871. (Welsh hop-growing ended three years later.) English hop growing survived outside the core areas of South-East England and the far West Midlands for rather longer: George Clinch in 1909 said Essex, Suffolk and “nineteen other English counties are recorded as having, at various times towards the latter part of the 19th century, small areas under hops.” So get growing …

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Farnham White Bine rhizomes

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The hopground laid out and ready for planting, May 2014: come back later …

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Dr Peter Darby, right, hop expert, talking with Rupert Thompson, centre, and the Reverend Claire Holt of St Pail’s, Tongham, who had come to bless the hops and the efforts of the hop-planters

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Václav Berka, senior trade brewmaster, explains the secrets of brewing Pilsner Urquell in the upper room at the White Horse, Parsons Green

I’ve taken part in many beer-related events in the upstairs room at the White Horse in Parsons Green, from tasting porter rescued from a 19th-century shipwreck to making a presentation on my historical beer heroes, but I never thought I would one day be helping to brew a lager there. Even more unlikely, this lager was made with genuine Plzeň well water – and it stood a fair chance of going into large-scale production.

The event was organised by Pilsner Urquell, the invitation came from Mark Dredge, to whom I am extremely grateful for such a fun day, it was called the London Brew-Off, and it involved three teams of beer enthusiasts, each put in charge of a 20-litre Speidel Braumeister brewing kit, handed four kilos of ground Czech malt, pointed to bags containing a selection of other speciality malts and eight or ten different hop varieties, and told to think up a recipe for a pilsner that would be good enough to go on public sale, using those ingredients, and then brew it. Our raw, hopped wort would be cooled, then have proper Pilsner Urquell yeast added, and be taken away for fermenting and lagering and, finally, bottling. On Tuesday July 15, that is, just over six weeks later, all the lagers the teams had made will be test-tasted, and the best one will be put into full-scale production – 30 hectolitres, 5,270 pints by Windsor & Eton Brewery, ready for the White Horse’s Euro Beer Fest in September.

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The Speidel Braumeister – a lovely piece of kit, albeit expensive: I’ve bought cars for less money

First, though, we had a pep-talk from Václav Berka, senior trade brewmaster at Pilsner Urquell, on the secrets of PU: soft water from the wells of Plzeň, a triple-decoction mash that heats part of the goods in direct-fired copper vessels, where hotspots on the walls create caramelising in some of the sugars in the wort, which adds to the mouthfeel and flavour of the final beer, and Saaz hops added at the start of the wort boiling for bitterness and just before the end of the boil for flavour. We wouldn’t be able to recreate all of that – no decoction vessels, for a start – but this, Václav said, was our chance to follow in the footsteps of Josef Groll, the Bavarian who brewed the very first golden lager in Plzeň in 1842.

Then we had a quick chat from Greg Tucker, an expert in people’s emotional and physiological responses to flavours, which held a number of interesting factlets – why we perceive the taste of the bitter element in a food or drink last, for example (because bitterness indicates something is poisonous, and our brain delays considering the threat indicated by bitterness so that it can analyse the good things – sweetness, indicating energy-giving sugars, for example – first.)

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The design for the label for Citron Pilsner, knocked up at amazing speed by an extremely clever guy whose name I failed to record

Finally we were divided into teams, told to put together a recipe using the available ingredients, choose a name for our lager and then start brewing. Fortunately for me, I was in an excellent team, with Andy Parker, a home-brewer of considerable experience and skill, and Justin “1970sBoy” Mason, and even more fortunately, we quickly discovered that we all had much the same idea about the kind of lager that we wanted to brew: something light and distinctly lemony. That gave us the name for our lager: Citrón Pilsner, after the Czech word for “lemon”.

We had been warned that if we wanted the sort of yellow-gold colour PU has, without the benefits of triple decoction caramelisation, we should be using a touch of coloured malt: but the team quickly decided that this would be subtracting from the lightness that we were after, and in fact, that pale-as-possible was what we wanted to achieve. So: nothing but Pilsner malt. But if you do that, you can have a mouthfeel problem: without some kind of caramelly or roasty underpinning, the beer often ends up too “thin” in the mouth. Andy’s brilliant suggestion was to add a small amount of rolled oats, to give the mouthfeel “rotundity”. (Oats also have the added benefit of giving better head retention, helping the “lemon meringue” effect we were after.)  I’m not sure anybody has ever made an “oat pilsner” before, but hey, there must always be a first time … and one quick trip to the supermarket across the road meant we were able to substitute 200g of our pilsner malt with Quaker Oats. (Václav’s only comment was: “In Czech we have a saying, ‘wheat is for cakes, barley is for beer, and oats are for horses.’” Thanks for that vote of confidence, mate …)

We had decided to use the traditional Saaz variety for our bittering hops, but to go for Kazbek, a medium-bitter Czech hop with lemon, grapefruit and spice flavours, added right at the end, and also some Sorachi Ace, the Japanese hop that also has a citrussy/lemony aroma, a pack of which Andy just happened to have about his rucksack, as you do. Unfortunately, Paddy Johnson, Windsor and Eton’s head brewer, who was also there, had to veto the Sorachi Ace, since a phone check confirmed that should we be lucky enough to win the competition, he would not be able to get hold of any for the scaled-up brew. So we went for the most light-fruit-flavoured hop we could find among those that Václav and his crew had brought along, Galaxy from Australian, a strongly bitter hop but with notes of passion fruit and peaches.

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Paddy Johnson (right) tells Andy Parker (left) ‘Sorry, mate, no Sorachi Ace”, while Justin Mason (centre) looks glum

These were to be added at flame-out, rather than, as is more traditional with a pilsner, five or ten minutes before the end, as we were looking for flavour and aroma rather than any more bitterness: because the Kazbek and Galaxy went in after boiling had stopped, we also raised the amount we were putting in by 20 per cent over what would be a “normal” amount of end-of-boil hops. Here Greg Tucker made an extremely useful suggestion: peach flavours, he said, drag lemon flavours “a long way back” in taste perception, so if we wanted the lemon side of the Kazbek hops to come fully through, we should ease off on the Galaxy. Our original plan for 25% of the final hops to be the Australians was therefore changed to 20% Galaxy against 80% Kazbek.

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Andy tastes the wort: at least it’s lemon-coloured

The final hopped wort certainly seemed to have a lovely long finish, from the oats, and also the lemon notes we were looking for, though fermentation will change some of that: quite how, we will find out in mid-July. Paddy Johnson checked our OG: 1043.5, just the area we were aiming at. I was very impressed with the Speidel brewing kits, their “Russian doll” design, combining mash tun and brewing kettle, reminding me of the rather larger “Russian doll” brewing gear I brewed a wedding stout with at the former Pitfield brewery in Hoxton. At £1,250 a pop, though, you’d have to brew a lot of beer with your Braumeister to bring the cost per pint down to something reasonable.

Still, I wasn’t paying: and I had a huge amount of fun. Apparently this is the first time PU has tried this sort of “interactive brewing” experiment/competition: it will be very popular if they roll it out as an event around the world. It will also be fascinating to taste our brew when it is finished: Peter “Tandleman” Alexander was on one of the other teams, and he’s a man, I suspect, who knows his way round a brewing recipe, so the competition will be strong.

However, strangely, a beer I had some small involvement in has already won a competition to be brewed on a commercial scale by Windsor and Eton. Paddy Johnson asked the London Amateur Brewers to brew beers that would be suitable for commemorating the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta next year – the signing, of course, took place at Runnymede, near Windsor – with the promise that the best one would form the basis of W&E’s own Magna Carta anniversary ale, and one of the LAB, Manmohan Birdi, approached me for some historical advice. I suggested using ground-ivy and yarrow in the brew would at least be a nod to the sorts of herbs they might have used to flavour ale in 1215, Manmohan did that, and woohoo, his beer won the contest and will now be made and bottled at the W&E brewery. Very well done him.

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Lowering in the wort cooler

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Andy and Justin “sparging” the malt

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Normandy, 70 years ago, and one of the biggest concerns of the British troops who have made it over the channel, survived the landings and pushed out into the bocage against bitter German resistance is not the V1 flying bomb blitz threatening their families back home, nor the continued failure to capture the port of Cherbourg – but the lack of beer in the bridgehead. On 20 June 1944, two weeks after D-Day, Reuter’s special correspondent with the Allied Forces in France wrote to newspapers in the UK that all that was available in the newly liberated estaminets a few miles inland from the beaches was cider, “and it is pretty watery stuff. I saw a British private wistfully order a pint of mild and bitter: but the glass he sat down with contained the eternal cider.”

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Tangmere, Sussex, July 1944: in front of a Spitfire IX of 332 (Norwegian) Squadron, a standard 45 gallon Typhoon/Hurricane ‘Torpedo’ jettison tank modified for use on the Spitfire (because of an expected shortage of 45-gallon shaped or slipper tanks) is filled with PA ale for flying over to Normandy while an RAF ‘erk’ writes a cheery message on the tank. The pilot sitting on the wing is wearing a Norwegian Air Force cap-badge – something no one who has reprinted this picture seems ever to have pointed out. Is the man filling the tank a brewery worker? Surely. Is the beer from Henty and Constable’s brewery in nearby Chichester? It seems very likely …

It would not be until July 12 when “real British beer” finally officially reached the battling troops in Normandy, and even then the quantity was enough only for one pint per man. But long before then, enterprising pilots in the RAF – and the USAAF – had been engaged in shipping beer into Northern France privately, using what the troops called “flying pubs”.

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Clik here to view.Some of the first attempts to bring beer over the Channel after D-Day used the expendable drop tanks, or jettison tanks to give them their proper RAF designation, carried by aircraft such as the Spitfire and Typhoon and normally filled with fuel to give them extra range. These were semi-official efforts: the Air Ministry actually distributed a photograph to newspapers showing a Spitfire of 332 (Norwegian) Squadron at Tangmere airfield in Sussex having its 45-gallon jettison tank being filled with beer from two wooden casks supplied by the Chichester brewer Henty & Constable, while the pilot relaxed on the wing.

It was presumably 270 gallons of beer from Henty and Constable that was flown in drop tanks slung under three Spitfire Mk IXbs from Tangmere to an airfield at Bény-Sur-Mer in Normandy, some 110 miles south of England and three miles from the sea, on June 13 1944, D-Day plus seven: the first known landing of beer during the invasion. One of the pilots was Flight Lieutenant Lloyd Berryman of 412 Squadron, 126 Wing, Second Tactical Air Force Royal Canadian Air Force. The airstrip at Bény-Sur-Mer would not, in fact, be finished officially for another two days when Berryman’s boss, Wing Commander Keith Hudson, singled him out at a briefing at the wing’s Tangmere base to deliver a “sizeable” beer consignment to the airstrip, known as B4. Berryman recalled:

“The instructions went something like this, ‘Get a couple other pilots and arrange with the officers’ mess to steam out the jet [jettison] tanks and load them up with beer. When we get over the beachhead drop out of formation and land on the strip. We’re told the Nazis are fouling the drinking water, so it will be appreciated. There’s no trouble finding the strip, the battleship Rodney is firing salvoes on Caen and it’s immediately below. We’ll be flying over at 13,000 [feet] so the beer will be cold enough when you arrive.’

“I remember getting Murray Haver from Hamilton and a third pilot (whose name escapes me) to carry out the caper. In reflection it now seems like an appropriate Air Force gesture for which the erks (infantrymen) would be most appreciative. By the time I got down to 5,000 the welcoming from the Rodney was hardly inviting but sure enough there was the strip. Wheels down and in we go, three Spits with 90-gallon jet tanks fully loaded with cool beer.

“As I rolled to the end of the mesh runway it was hard to figure … there was absolutely no one in sight. What do we do now, I wondered, we can’t just sit here and wait for someone to show up. What’s with the communications? Finally I saw someone peering out at us from behind a tree and I waved frantically to get him out to the aircraft. Sure enough out bounds this army type and he climbs onto the wing with the welcome: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Whereupon he got a short, but nevertheless terse, version of the story.

“‘Look,’ he said, ‘can you see that church steeple at the far end of the strip? Well it’s loaded with German snipers and we’ve been all day trying to clear them out so you better drop your tanks and bugger off before it’s too late.’ In moments we were out of there, but such was the welcoming for the first Spitfire at our B4 airstrip in Normandy.”

Later, in the 1950s in Canada, by chance Berryman actually met the man who climbed onto his wing and told him to bugger off.

Four days after Berryman’s landing, on 17 June 1944, and 11 days after the invasion started, a Spitfire of 416 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force flew over from England to the newly built airfield at Bazenville, just three miles from Gold Beach, with a drop tank full of beer slung below its fuselage. The tank had been scoured out first with steam but “tough luck; it still tasted of petrol,” according to Dan Noonan, a Flight Commander with 416 Squadron.

The heftier Hawker Typhoon could carry even more beer. Pilots of the RAF’s 123 Wing, flying rocket-firing Typhoons and based from 19 July 1944 at Martragny, a few miles east of Bayeux, would run a “shufti-kite” across to Shoreham, 110 miles away, where a local brewery would fill two 90-gallon jettison tanks attached below each of the Typhoon’s wings with beer. Then the pilot would hurry back across the Channel and the RAF personnel at Martragny would drink it, quickly. There was one problem with transporting beer in jettison tanks: according to 123 Wing’s commanding officer, the New Zealand-born RAF ace Group Captain Desmond Scott, on the trip over to Normandy the beer “took on rather a metallic taste, but the wing made short work of it.”

However, the journey over the channel, at 15,000 feet or so, cooled the beer down nicely for when it reached those on the ground: indeed, according to newspaper reports, not only did Spitfires supply beer shortly after D-Day in jettison tanks made from vulcanised paper fibre, but P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, presumably flown by the USAAF, had carried iced custard, or ice-cream, in their drop-tanks to troops on the Normandy beachheads: “They flew at 15,000 feet and delivered their cargo iced in perfect condition.” (This is not as unlikely as it seems: the US army had mobile ice-cream making machines for the troops in the Second World War, and so did many US Navy ships.)

The Typhoons’ exploits were reported in Time Magazine on July 2 1944 under the headline “Flying Pubs”:

A great thirst attacked British troops rushing emergency landing strips to completion in the dust of Normandy. Thinking of luckier comrades guzzling in country estaminets and town bistros, the runway builders began to grouse. They wanted beer. They got it. Rocket-firing Typhoons, before going on to shoot up Nazis, landed on the runways with auxiliary fuel tanks full of beer. Swarms of the thirsty gathered round with enamel mugs. The first tank-fulls tasted bad because of the tank linings; this flavor was overcome by chemical means and later loads were delicious. Just like the corner pub at home.

Unfortunately, United States Army Airforces P-47 Thunderbolts did for 123 Wing’s beer runs: the Typhoon was easily mistaken by inexperienced American pilots for the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, and according to Group Captain Scott, “our aerial brewer’s dray was attacked by American Thunderbolts twice in one day, and was forced to jettison its beer tanks into the Channel … beer cost us money, and these two encounters proved expensive.” The Wing’s draught beer flights came to a sudden halt, and Scott had to arrange for an old twin-engined Anson to fly in cases of Guinness: “The troops mixed it with champagne to produce black velvet. It was hardly a cockney’s drink, but they appeared to like it,” he wrote.

It may have been 123 Wing’s experience that was covered in a publication called The Airman’s Almanac in 1945:

A possible peacetime use for the auxiliary fuel tanks attached to the underside of fighter planes in World War II to increase their range was demonstrated in the Normandy invasion of 1944. British ground crews, rushing emergency landing strips to completion in the dust and heat of the French province, complained of thirst. Their complaint being heard, rocket-firing Typhoons coming over from England on their way to German targets landed on the newly built strips with their military fuel tanks full of beer. The first tankfuls tasted awful because of the tank linings. Before the second ‘beer trip’ the tanks were treated chemically and the air-hauled brew was reported extremely palatable.

Ironically, Thunderbolt pilots learnt what the Typhoons had been doing, and copied it themselves. Lieutenant William R Dunn of the 513th Fighter Squadron, USAAF, the first American air ace of the Second World War, was a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in Normandy. He recorded:

During our brief stay at A6 airfield, we learned another trick of the trade from our neighbouring RAF allies, a Typhoon squadron based near Caen. Periodically they’d send a kite with a clean belly tank back to England, wehere the tank was filled with beer. A flight back to France at an altitude of about 15,000 feet and the beer arrived nice and cold. We soon followed their lead, with our 150-gallon belly tanks. Those British types sure know how to take all the comforts of home to war with them.

The other method used was to attach casks to the bomb racks. Pilots with the RAF’s No 131 (Polish) wing, flying Spitfire Mk IXs, (probably 302 Squadron or 308 Squadron, both fighter-bomber units) claimed to have invented the idea of the “beer bomb”, using casks that had home-made nose-cones fitted to make them more streamlined, which were fitted to the Spitfire’s bomb racks. On 3 August 1944 131 Wing moved from England to the airfield at Plumentot, near Caen, and “beer bombing” began:

Even more popular was the ‘beer-bomb’, invented and first used by No. 131 Fighter Wing when still stationed in England. The bomb has nothing atomic about it, so the details can now be divulged. The invention is, in fact, simplicity itself: it entailed a barrel of beer, a bomb-carrying aircraft, and a willing pilot (the three were available in increasing order of magnitude). The procedure, freely disclosed for the benefit of thirsty humanity, was for the aircraft to be carefully ‘bombed up’ with a barrel of beer, flown off with every precaution to Plumetot in Normandy and landed with equal care. Never were bombs more warmly welcomed. Not least because of the dust.

Pictures exist of the “beer bombs” being put together: presumably at Ford airfield in West Sussex, where 302 and 308 squadrons were based just before they were moved to Plumentot, in which case, again, the beer may well have come from Henty and Constable, eight or so miles away at Chichester.

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Above and below, ‘beer bombs’, wooden firkins being fitted with streamlined ‘nose cones’ for transporting in bomb racks underneath Spitfires by members of 131 Fighter Wing, probably in August 1944, possibly at Ford airfield in West Sussex

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Clik here to view.One Kentish brewery that apparently supplied beer for transport across by fighter plane was Bushell Watkins & Smith of the Black Eagle brewery in Westerham. According to Westerham villager Edward “Ted” Turner

I worked at a garage called Brittain’s Engineering in Pecham in London making Bailey bridges for sending to France for the invasion … We were also making ‘jettison’ auxiliary fuel tanks for fighter planes to carry extra fuel to enable them to fly further into Europe and still get back home. Once refuelling facilities were established over there, the Westerham brewery used to fill those auxiliary non-returnable petrol tanks with Westerham ales for our troops in Europe. Black Eagle lorries delivered it in barrels to Biggin Hill [four miles from Westerham] where the auxiliary dual-purpose tanks were filled with Bitter on one side and Mild on the other. We made them of 16 gauge metal with baffles for safe landing, the RAF’s version of the brewer’s dray.

There is also a photograph of a cask at the Black Eagle brewery with a sign on it declaring: ‘This Cask containing “Westerham” Bitter was flown to France “D” day, June 6th 1944, by the Royal Air Force’. Unfortunately there are big problems with the Westerham claims. The three fighter squadrons that had been using the airfield departed in late April 1944 for Tangmere, where they would be closer to the Normandy beaches. In any case, Biggin Hill was abandoned by the RAF soon after the Normandy landings. On June 13 1944, V1 “doodlebug” flying bomb attacks on London began, and Biggin Hill – right in the V1s’ flightpath – was deemed too dangerous to continue to be used by aircraft, with Balloon Command taking the airfield over as part of the line of barrage balloons put up against the doodlebugs. Flying operations did not begin again at Biggin Hill until September 1944, and fighter aircraft do not seem to have returned until the October. However, one of the squadrons that had been based at Biggin Hill until April 1944 was 412 Squadron, which had made that first “drop-tank beer delivery” to Normandy from Tangmere on June 13. It is possible – though it appears unlikely – that the beer in the tanks might have come from the Westerham brewery, 50 miles away, which the pilots of 412 would have known very well.

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The Westerham Brewery’s ‘D-Day cask’. But were there any flights from nearby Biggin Hill over France on D-Day?

Certainly, pilots were happy to fly long distances to pick up beer. Thorsteinn “Tony” Jonsson, the only Icelander to join the RAF, was flying North American Aviation P-51 Mustang III fighter-bombers with 65 Squadron, based at Ford, when the D-Day invasion began. On June 27 his squadron moved to the temporary airfield at Martragny designated B7, five miles from Bayeux and only some 2000 yards from the German lines. However, Jonsson recorded:

Life in our camp was really quite pleasant and comfortable. Admittedly we missed the luxury of being able to pop into a pub at the end of a day’s work for a pint of beer, and to mix with the ladies that were usually to be found there to add spice to our existence. At the beginning of the invasion and for the next few weeks, beer was severely rationed in Normandy … But some bright lad in our Wing had an excellent brain-wave; why not bring beer over from England in the large auxiliary tanks that could be hung under the wings of our Mustangs? Each tank could hold 75 gallons – this would make an excellent addition to our meagre ration. Action was immediately taken.

Four tanks were sent to a factory for their insides to be coated with a substance to prevent the taste of metal, as is done with preserving cans, and taps were fitted. A contract was made with a brewery in London, and on an appointed day every week a Mustang flew with two empty ‘beer’ tanks to Croydon aerodrome and brought back two full ones; one containing mild and the other bitter. These tanks were placed on trestles in our mess-tent, which quickly became known as the best pub in Normandy. It did not take long for the word to spread to nearby military units that we had a good supply of beer, and our mess was frequently a very popular and crowded place in the evenings. The fact that nurses from a military hospital in the neighbourhood were regulars only helped to boost the attendance … It was not long before the beer trips were increased to two a week. Although most pilots likes to nip over to England whenever possible, to contact families and loved ones, the beer-run was not in demand. The reason was that a full beer tank could easily fall off if the landing was not perfectly smooth. The ‘beer kite’s’ arrival was watched by all available personnel, and woe to the poor pilot who was unlucky enough to bounce!

It was 150 miles from Martragny to Croydon (at the time the main airfield in London), making the “beer run” for 65 Squadron a 300-mile round trip. Croydon’s one brewery was Page & Overton, a subsidiary of Charrington’s brewery in Mile End, and it was presumably Page & Overton’s mild and bitter that flew back in the tanks of the Mustangs.

Confirmation that Henty and Constable supplied much of the beer to arrived in Normandy after D-Day comes from Jeffrey Quill, chief test pilot at Vickers, the parent company of Supermarine, maker of the Spitfire. Quill recalled:

After D-Day in 1944, there was a problem about getting beer over to the Normandy airfields. Henty and Constable (the Sussex brewers) were happy to make the stuff available at the 83 Group Support Unit at Ford, near Littlehampton. For some inexplicable reason, however, beer had a low priority rating on the available freight aircraft. So we adapted Spitfire bomb racks so that an 18-gallon barrel could be carried under each wing of the Spitfires which were being ferried across from Ford to Normandy on a daily basis.

We were, in fact, a little concerned about the strength situation of the barrels, and on application to Henty and Constables for basic stressing data we were astonished to find that the eventuality of being flown on the bomb racks of a Spitfire was a case which had not been taken into consideration in the design of the barrels. However, flight tests proved them to be up to the job. This installation, incidentally, was known as Mod XXX Depth charge.

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A Spitfire IX fitted with the ‘Mod XXX Depth Charge’, modified bomb racks that could carry a cask of beer under each wing. Contrary to frequent claims, this is almost certainly a Vickers Armstrong publicity photo, and NOT Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson’s own aircraft

According to one source with a slightly different spin on the story, the job of fitting the kilderkins to the Spitfire’s bomb racks was done at High Post airfield, Salisbury, one of the final assembly centres for Spitfire manufacture, “more or less as a joke”. The plan to put beer in long-range tanks was abandoned “when it was found later that the practice contaminated fuel, so Strong’s, the Romsey brewers, supplied complete barrels of Triple ‘X’. This modification was given a fictitious number to conceal the operation from more official or officious eyes.”

There was already a link between Strong’s and Spitfires: after the Luftwaffe bombed Vickers-Supermarine’s headquarters in 1940, the company’s design and administration offices were transferred to Hursley Park, Winchester, a magnificent mansion requisitioned after the death that same year of its owner, Sir George Cooper, chairman of Strong’s. That Strong’s certainly was involved in the supply of casks to be carried on Spitfire bomb racks is confirmed by the existence of a photograph of just such a cask slung under a Spitfire wing, clearly branded “STRONG ROMSEY”.

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A close-up of the “Mod XXX Depth charge” on the ground, showing clearl;y that the casks were supplied, at least occasionally, by Strong’s brewery in Romsey, Hampshire

The hint that Quill gave about the “flying drays” being replacement Spitfires ferried across to squqdrons on the Normandy front line from England is given extra support by a newspaper story from the middle of August 1944:

With beer in their bomb racks, replacement Typhoons from England are sure of a specially boisterous welcome from the thirsty troops in Normandy. For the beer shortage is just as acute over there as it is in England. So at least one Typhoon has solved its problem by importing its own beer.

Whenever a replacement aircraft flies to Normandy the pilot takes a quantity of beer, carrying it in nine-gallon barrels with special streamlined nose fittings slung in the bomb racks. This system has been found to be much better than the original method of taking the beer in petrol tanks, which gave the beer a nasty flavour.

In the event of the pilot running into trouble, the barrels are jettisoned as if they were bombs. Then another kind of trouble awaits him at the end of his journey.

Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson had landed with his 127 Wing, two squadrons of Canadians, at a newly built airfield at St Croix-sur-Mer, designated B3, and just over a mile and a half from the landing beaches, on D-Day plus 3. After several days of tinned “compo” rations, Johnson sent a note to his favourite Sussex landlord, Arthur King at the Unicorn in Chichester, asking for help. Every day a twin-engine Anson flew into St Croix from Tangmere with mail, newspapers and spare parts, and King arranged for items such as tomatoes, fresh lobsters, newly baked bread and “a reasonable supply of stout”.

When news of the arrangement leaked into the newspapers, King was visited by someone from Customs and Excise, who warned him that if he carried on, he would need an export licence. However, Johnson recorded in his memoirs,

Since its introduction to the Service in 1939, the versatile Spitfire had participated in many diverse roles … Now it fulfilled yet another role, perhaps not so vital as some of the tasks it had undertaken in the past, but to us of supreme importance. Back in England some ingenious mind had modified the bomb racks slung under each wing so that a small barrel of beer could be carried instead of a 500-pound bomb. Daily, this modern version of the brewers’ dray flew across the Channel and alighted at St Croix. The beer suffered no ill effects from its unorthodox journey and was more than welcome in our mess.

Johnson’s memoir of the war, Wing Leader carried a photograph of a Spitfire IX in D-Day black-and-white stripes, carrying a kilderkin of beer from each bomb rack, and captioned “Our version of the brewer’s dray”. This seems to have given rise to the myth that the picture is of Johnson’s own Spitfire. But the photograph in the book is credited to Vickers Armstrong, and is almost certainly one of the aircraft manufacturer’s publicity shots, and nothing to do with Johnson.

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A Spitfire IX bearing D-Day invasion stripes, and carrying beer casks beneath its wings, on the ground. It is probably significant that in none of the shots of beer-carrying aircraft can the identifying letters be seen: these were almost certainly all publicity shots

Eventually, organised supplies of beer for the troops supplanted the “flying drays”. In November 1944 the government actually ruled that supplies of beer for troops overseas should equal five per cent of total national production, meaning all stronger “export” beers, all naturally conditioned beers with a life of six weeks or more and all beers that could be pasteurised had to be put in the hands of the forces’ catering service, the Naafi. At the same time, breweries in liberated areas of France were being put to use.

By then it was the turn of the Home Front to be short of beer, however. Brewers blamed a shortage of labour, saying the women workers who had replaced men called up for the forces had themselves been evacuated with their children as the V1 and V2 threat increased. The Nottingham Evening Post reported that in some pubs there had been outbreaks of “panic drinking”, customers “gulping their beer and shouting for an encore lest their neighbours at the bar got more than they did.” At the same time, in “certain districts” only mild ale was available, because bitter, which kept better, was earmarked for the troops. Many pubs were only open for an hours and a half at lunchtimes and two hours in the evening because they had no beer to sell: and there was little relief even for those harvesting the grain that would be used to make the new season’s beers. In August 1944 it was announced that “In some parts of Lincolnshire the beer famine has become so acute that many inns have announced that they will not be able to continue the age-old custom of supplying harvest beer this season. Cups of tea will be provided instead.”

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The two Irish beer fans lowered their voices and spoke almost in awe. They had been looking through the windows of the new JD Wetherspoon pub tin the upmarket Dublin suburb of Blackrock, due to open its doors for the first time this Tuesday. “It’s got TWELVE handpumps!”, they said. That is twice as many as any pub in the Irish Republic has ever had before – and even that pub only had four handpumps actually working at any one time. Indeed, according to one (unverified) estimate, the 12 handpumps at the new ‘Spoons, the company’s first in the Republic, will boost the total number of working handpumps in the entire country by 33 per cent.

Is Ireland ready for a 12-handpump ‘Spoons? I was last in Dublin all of eight years ago, when the beer scene was still pretty dire. Since then, the country has seen a London-like explosion in the number of craft beer breweries, from a small handful to around 40 (indeed, one of the newest – N17 – actually sounds as if it ought to be in London, though it’s named after the road that runs from Galway to Sligo, and the brewery is in Tuam, rather than Tottenham).

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The bar-top line-up of craft beers at the Brew Dock in Dublin

Accompanying that has been a boom in the availability of craft beer: yes, Guinness, Budweiser and Smithwick’s are still ubiquitous, but if you’ve got the excellent Beoirfinder app, you’ve got a good chance of tracking a pub or bar with at least something more interesting on tap. And there are now bars, such as Brew Dock in Amiens Street, Dublin, near Connolly station, where the bar top has more than 20 craft keg taps, selling beers from the United States and Britain as well as Ireland.

If you can discover a working handpump anywhere, though, it’s likely to be just the one, and you could find, as I did in the Alfie Byrne bar in Dublin last Sunday, that the beer on the one handpump is almost irritatingly familiar – in this case Fuller’s London Pride. I can drink that 10 minutes’ walk from my house. Ironically, many great old Irish pubs still have a row of “policeman’s truncheon”-style handpump handles on the bartop, but they’ve not been used for 50 years. As soon as Guinness perfected the nitro-serve for draught stout, in the early 1960s, keg beer immediately replaced cask from Bantry Bay to the Derry quay, and from Galway to Dublin Town. (It was that dire situation, of course, that helped inspire them four fellas on holiday in the Republic in 1971 to form the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale.)

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That rare sight, a working handpump in an Irish bar, in this case JW Sweetman, a brew-bar in Dublin

What there seems to be in Ireland, thus, is a drinking population, certainly among the young (meaning under 35, I think) that is increasingly aware of the existence of this thing called “craft beer” and increasingly able to find it in a wider and wider variety of forms, but pretty much unused to seeing handpumps in operation and equally unused to drinking beer as delivered from a handpump: softly carbonated rather than sodawater-fizzy, and cellar-cool rather than chilled. Now, we may see the “Hong Kong effect” here, where young Hongkongers went abroad to study, became exposed to great craft beer in places like the United States, and came home to HK to demand the same exciting range of brews they had found in New York, Washington and San Francisco. Perhaps enough young Irish people have now crossed the Irish Sea and tried cask ale in Britain that their throats are desperate for it and the crowds will be pushing down the doors of the Three Tun pub in Blackrock when it opens on Tuesday, eager for a drop from the handpump. But I’ve now been in Dublin twice in the past two months, and despite seeing at least one “craft” beer on sale in many bars, there seems zero evidence of huge untapped (pun semi-intended) interest for cask ale..

Certainly, though, Wetherspoon’s is confident that the demand is there. John Hutson, the company’s chief executive, told Propel Info, the company I work for, earlier this week: “There will be 12 hand-pulls with real ale from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as local and regional beers. Cask ale is nowhere near as commonplace in southern Ireland as here. But it’s something that we’ve always championed. We’ve taken the view that Dublin is an international city and there is an expectation that we will serve cask ale. I was in Dublin last week and my taxi driver told me that he always drinks cask ale when he’s in Scotland and visits our pubs. I also remember opening our second or third Scottish pub in Paisley and a customer collared me and suggested we serve London Pride [rather than just local cask ale]. So the idea is to serve great UK cask ales.”

The pub won’t be selling draught Guinness, doubtless because Guinness charges too much, but it will have the two Cork stouts, Beamish and Murphy’s, and also a line-up of Irish craft brewers. Among the local beers on sale will be Tom Crean’s Irish Lager from the Dingle Brewing Company, Rebel Red from the Molson Coors-owned microbrewer Franciscan Well in Cork, and beers from Eight Degrees Brewing in Mitchelstown, County Cork, including Howling Gale, Knockmealdown Porter and Barefoot Bohemian Pilsner.

I was in Dublin last week for the European Beer Bloggers’ Conference, an excellent event of which more later, and the general feeling among Irish brewers and commentators at the conference seemed to be that the Irish beer scene is still a long way from the sort of mature market that the UK represents in terms of consumer awareness and choice. Dean McGuinness of Premier Beers, who tweets as Beer Messiah, said craft beer in Ireland was still “in its adolescence”, and in the same position as craft beer was in the United States was in the early 1990s. Recalling my own visit to California in the early 1990s, I’d say it was still not as good as that: even in small towns in Northern California 20 years ago you could find great craft beer bars. I don’t believe Ireland has reached that stage yet. But it’s certainly far better than it was: as Shane Long, founder of Franciscan Well, remarked, when he started out brewing in 1998, the Irish craft beer scene was “a barren wasteland”.

While Ireland has been seeing the same trend towards drinking at home rather than in a bar that the UK has, Irish people are still rather more likely to down their pints down the pub instead of behind their own front door than the British are. So it makes sense for Wetherspoon to move into the Irish market, in terms of potential customers: each new Irish ‘Spoons will have more pub-goers in a given radius than any new UK ‘Spoons. The Three Tun, which is costing £1.9m to develop, on top of the £1.27m it cost to buy the site in the first place, is only the first of what are likely to be many JDW pubs in the Republic: it is currently spending another £1.2m doing up the former Newport Cafe site in Cork, it has its eye on the 40 Foot, a pub in Dun Laoghaire, just south of Blackrock, and the company has claimed that it could open between 30 and 50 pubs in the Republic over the coming decade.

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A view of the brewing kit from the bar at the JW Sweetman brewpub in Dublin

Ireland is not England, and it would be a big mistake to think that English pub culture will automatically work in an Irish environment, but Wetherspoon are far from stupid, and they have put in a manager at the Three Tun, John Hartigan, who previously ran a Wetherspoon pub in Islington, North London, but who is Irish by birth and upbringing – and thus, presumably, knows the important cultural differences between the two sorts of establishments, English pubs and Irish pubs. (You think there’s no difference? OK, here’s a genuine Irish joke for you. An American is staying in a hotel in Dublin, and he comes down in the morning and says to the young fella on the front desk: “Say, can I smell gas?”, to which the young Irishman replies: “That’ll be the gas – it smells like that.” Irish people find that hilarious. Other nations don’t get it.)

Northern Ireland has nine Wetherspoon pubs, of which a remarkable eight are in the 2014 Good Beer Guide. However, the biggest number of handpumps in any one seems to be the 10 in the Diamond in Derry, while the Bridge House in Belfast, the largest cask ale pub in the province, only has eight handpumps. So it looks as if when it opens this Tuesday, the Three Tun will have more handpumps that anywhere else in the whole island. Will they all be still dispensing beer in a year’s time?

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I’ll be frank: one of the good reasons for becoming a beer blogger is the opportunity it gives to go places, meet people, do things that you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. (Free beer too? Well, there is some of that, true, but I turn a fair bit of free beer down, because I don’t do reviews, much.) The chance to get into places the public doesn’t get to see is one big reason why I decided to go to the European Beer Bloggers’ Conference in Dublin: I suspected there would be a chance to see extremely interesting things normally hidden from public eyes, and as we shall see, I was absolutely right.

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One for the I-Spy Book of European Brewers, at the EBBC in Dublin … Vaclav Berka of Pilsner Urquell doesn’t look as impressed with Doom Bar as perhaps Stewart Howe of Sharp’s would like him to be …

Fortunately for me, I have relatives in Dublin, so I was able to stay in the city for free: and I signed up early enough to grab one of the “bursaries” Molson Coors was offering, which effectively refunded the €95 conference fee, so mostly all it cost me was my air fare from Heathrow. When I signed up to come to the conference, I hadn’t been to Dublin since my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday in 2006, and as I said in my previous blog entry, in the past eight years – in the past TWO years – the Irish craft beer scene has exploded, so I was also keen to see how the beer offer had changed in Dublin’s bars, and what these new breweries were like.

As it happened, I had to go on a mother-in-law-related trip to the city in May, and took a day off to visit places recommended by the ever-excellent Beer Nut, Ireland’s premier beer blogger. Thus the Thursday night pub crawl organised for EBBC attendees and led by Reuben Gray of The Tale of the Ale was less of a revelation to me than it probably was to some of the other 30 or so people on the tour, since, unsurprisingly, the BN had marked my card with several of the places Reuben took us to.

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My Wedding Ale, London & Dublin Stout, still on display at the Porterhouse

They were certainly as mixed a selection as you’ll find in any good city, from the basic – Brew Dock, part of the Galway Bay Brewery’s own chain of pubs, but selling much more than just GBB beers – to the more typically Dublin elaborate-mirrors-and-dark wood of Farrington’s/The Norseman (it keeps changing its name back and forth) in Temple Bar via another very Dublin concept, the three or four-storey pub, of which JW Sweetman (named for an old Dublin brewery) and the Porterhouse are good examples, to the “stripped pine and books on the wall” Black Sheep, another Galway Bay Brewery pub, rather more like a “normal” English-style craft beer bar than most craft beer bars in Dublin, to the Bull and Castle, a substantially sized “craft beer steakhouse”. Just as a point of comparison, the only two places you would have found craft beer in back when I was last in Dublin out of that list would have been Sweetman’s, previously a homebrew pub called Messers Maguires, and the Porterhouse (which still, I was delighted to see, has the bottle of my wedding ale I presented them in 1997 on display in one of the bars).

The actual venue for the conference was another pretty much unique bar/restaurant complex, The Church, which is, yup, a converted church: not just any old converted church, but the church where Arthur Guinness married his wife Olivia in 1761, two years after buying the brewery in St James’s Gate that later became rather well-known. It was an excellent choice by the organisers, since it provided space for receptions/parties/beer tastings in the cellars and a large room for the different conference sessions.

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A bust of Arthur Guinness I in the Church restaurant and bar, Mary Street, Dublin

Hands up, I probably wasn’t as interested or attentive in the different sessions as I should have been, except for the first, by Declan Moore, “consulting archaeologist”, on the early centuries of Irish ale: fascinating stuff, and it was great to meet him for the first time. Indeed, the social side of the conference was as important as any other: it was also good to meet face-to-face, among quite a few others, Steve Lamond of Beers I’ve Known, who was extremely generous with beers he’d brought along, and to find new friends too: I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Rossa O’Neill, trombonist and home-brewer, and a fine chap – you can read his take on the conference here.

And what about the stuff civilians don’t (normally) get to do? Well, there were the two opportunities to try unfiltered and unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell tapped straight from the wooden cask, with PU’s master brewer Vaclav Berka doing the tapping: a vastly superior brew to the standard version. And the chances to chat to loads of new Irish brewers. But the event I was most hoping for was the trip to the Guinness brewery at St James’s Gate. This is simply not something that happens any more: while once Guinness would let visitors look around the site, the public today is allowed only into the Guinness Storehouse, at €18 a head, which is, I’ll grant, a praiseworthy presentation of the story of one of the world’s great drink brands, but I’ve got all the books – I know all that stuff.

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Foreign Extra Stout-marinated burger with Foreign Extra Stout

I don’t know who among the organisers of the EBBC talked to whom at Guinness, but they did a wonderful job of persuasion. Guinness, led by its hugely knowledgable master brewer Fergal Murray (it amused me to be able to startle him by saying: “Hello – you won’t remember, but I interviewed you in an Irish pub in Hong Kong a couple of years back”), welcomed us in, fed and watered us magnificently (see left for just part of it), walked us through the 19th century tunnel that connects one side of the brewery to the south of St James’s Gate to the side nearest the Liffey (which few if any civilians ever get to do) and, mirabile dictu, let us have a look around their lovely brand new £128m brewhouse, Brewhouse Number 4, which has been built on what was formerly a keg storage yard. It’s so new it isn’t officially open yet, and when it is running properly it will be able to produce all the beer Guinness previously made at four different breweries around Ireland, including all the “Guinness essence” that is exported across gloebe for local breweries to make their own Guinness Foreign Extra Stout with.

If you like big and shiny – and I’m surprisingly impressed with that sort of stuff – then the new Guinness brewhouse is magnificent. The main room is a huge space filled with vast stainless steel vessels, which, like icebergs, have far more of themselves unseen below the surface/floor. The biggest of the mash tuns are 21 feet across, meaning you could fit most microbreweries into one new Guinness mash tun two or three times over, and they hold 23 tonnes of grain each. They are, unsurprisingly, the biggest of their kind in Europe. It’s an amazing sight.

Unfortunately, Guinness asked us all not to take any photographs of the new brewhouse interior. It would be entirely wrong of me, after their incredible generosity and friendliness, to spit on their hospitality and disobey their wishes, and I am sure it would also deeply disappoint and anger the organisers of the EBBC as well, who all did such a great job, and who would undoubtedly bar me from any future beer blogging conferences, were I to disobey that request. So I have to ask you not to look at the two photographs below, and if you do accidently view them, please pluck your eyeballs out immediately.

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The interior of the new Guinness Brewhouse No 4 at St James’s Gate, Dublin. Please do not look at these pictures

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There are times when the honest historian has to put his hand up and say: forgive me, for I was wrong. Prompted by a sharp dig from Ron Pattinson, I’ve finally withdrawn a piece I wrote six years ago about the origins of the beer designation AK, in part because research by Ron has made my stance untenable. I suggested that the K in AK came from koyt, the name of a hopped beer found in the Low Countries and Northern Germany in the 15th century and later, and the A was from ankel, the word in Old Flemish for “single”. “Single koyt” certainly existed, and was the name of a lower-strength beer, the stronger version being called “double koyt”. But there’s no actual evidence at all to link “single koyt” with AK, which was a very popular designation for a comparatively light-gravity, lightly hopped (or at least not heavily hopped) pale bitter beer in Victorian England, and which is still around as a (now rare) beer name today. Good historians don’t make evidence-free suggestions.

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Clik here to view.There is certainly evidence AK was once a popular name for a beer. In the very early 1970s, you would still have found several beers called AK. Fremlin’s of Faversham, then owned by Whitbread, made one. So did another Whitbread-owned former independent, Strong’s of Romsey, in Hampshire. In Hertfordshire two brewers, McMullen’s of Hertford and Rayment’s of Furneux Pelham, also made beers called AK. These, and the Fremlin’s and Strong’s AKs were sold as light milds. In the Courage empire, the ex-Hole’s brewery at Newark in Nottinghamshire brewed an AK bitter, while the group’s Bristol brewery sold an AK that was a primed version of its George’s bitter, made for customers of the former Phillips brewery in Newport, Monmouthshire, which had closed in 1968. Just before it closed in 1985, Simpkiss of Brierley Hill in the West Midlands started brewing an AK light bitter.

At least three brewers also sold beers called KK: Greene King, which brewed a light mild under that name at the former Wells and Winch brewery in Biggleswade; Ind Coope, which made KK light mild at its Romford brewery; and Hardys and Hansons of Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, which sold a keg beer called KK.

What all these beers had in common was that they were light, in both colour and gravity, and also lightly hopped. Today only McMullen’s AK survives, and though it has risen in gravity since the early 1970s, from 1033 to 1035, and is now described as a “bitter”, it is still comparatively light and lightly hopped (with WGV, Whitbread Goldings Variety).

However, if you look at Victorian brewers’ advertisements, it becomes clear that AK, was a very widespread name for a beer. More than a dozen other brewers in Hertfordshire besides McMullen’s and Rayment’s once made an AK. A single edition of the Richmond and Twickenham Times, dated July 8 1893, carries advertisements from five different brewers in south and west London, four of whom offered a beer called AK or KK.

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Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald 1897 – XXK and AK, bitter ales, not stock ales

The noticeable point about these advertisements is that they (almost) all give AK the same price, one shilling a gallon, implying a strength of around 1045-1055 OG. The descriptions of AK are pretty consistent as well: “light bitter ale”, “light sparkling ale”, “family bitter ale”, “light pale ale” and so on. One of the few brewers not to sell AK for one and a half pence wholesale was actually the earliest I’ve found, the Stafford Brewery, which was selling AK Ale, “a delicate bitter ale”, in 1855 at 14 pence a gallon. But, again, the beer was clearly not heavy, albeit bitter. The idea of AK as a low-strength pale ale is confirmed by the few written references to the beer. Professor Charles Graham in his talk to the Society of Chemical Industry in 1881 gave the original gravity of AK as 1045, with an alcohol-by-weight percentage of 4.3, very much as the bottom end of the Victorian beer strength league. The Burton brewer James Herbert said of AK ale in his book The Art of Brewing, published in 1871:

This class of ale has come very much into use, mostly for private families, it being a light tonic ale, and sent out by most brewers at one shilling per gallon. The gravity of this Ale is usually brewed at 20lbs [that is, 1056 OG]

Crowley’s brewery in Croydon High Street in 1900 described its AK in one of its advertisements as “a Bitter Ale of sound quality with a delicate Hop flavour”. The Victorian journalist Alfred Barnard in 1889 gave almost identical tasting notes to Crowley’s on the “AK shilling ale” brewed by WJ Rogers at the Jacob Street brewery in Bristol: “most pleasant to the palate … a bright sparkling beverage of a rich golden colour and possesses a nice delicate hop flavour.” (Rogers actually used the letters AK as its company trademark.) When he visited Thompson & Son’s brewery in Walmer, Kent, Barnard wrote: ” We were much pleased with the AK light bitter – a delicious drink, clean to the palate and well flavoured with the hop.” The brewing books of Garne & Sons of Burford, Oxfordshire in 1912 show AK being brewed at an OG of 1040 and with a colour of 14, a reddish-brown hue. ( PA for comparison, was brewed to an OG of 1056 and with a colour of 18, a darker medium brown.)

So where did the name AK come from? In the First World War, drinkers joked that AK stood for Asquith’s Knockout. Herbert Asquith was Prime Minister in 1914 when the tax on the standard barrel of beer took off like a Fokker eindekker, from seven shillings and ninepence to 23 shillings, in order to help pay for fighting the Kaiser. Weaker beers paid less tax, of course, and AK was always weaker than standard bitters, leaving it a more affordable “knockout” than regular beers. (“Squiffy” Asquith was also notorious for being fond of his drink.) Unfortunately, AK as a name for a type of beer is found at least as long ago as 1855, when Asquith was only three years old. Another suggestion is that AK was invented by a Victorian brewer called Arthur King, and took his initials, a tale found at both Hole’s of Newark and Courage in Bristol. The problem with this story is that no such brewer has ever been traced – Arthur King seems to be as mythical as King Arthur – and it fails to cover AK’s sister beer, KK. As Roger Protz once said, who invented that one – King Kong?

Rayment’s claimed AK meant Ale for Keeping. Certainly, Ron Pattinson’s research has pretty much proved that, as far as London brewers were concerned, a beer with “K” in its name, or at least multiple Ks, was a well-hopped keeping or stock beer. To quote from his blog:

In the middle of the 19th century, Barclay Perkins brewed two sets of Ales: X Ales that were sold mild and K Ales that were sold matured. X, XX, XXX and XXXX. Then KK, KKK, KKKK. The equivalent beers (XX and KK, XXX and KKK) were exactly the same gravity, but the K Ales had about 50% more hops.

A couple more examples: Mann, Crossman and Paulin in the East End of London brewed a KKKK ale, and Alfred Barnard drank some in 1888: “Two years old, of a rich brown colour and with a Madeira odour, a good generous drink for those who can stand a full-bodied beer.” Barnard also revealed that Mann’s brewed a London stock ale they called KKK. Taylor Walker of Limehouse, East London brewed “KKK Burton”, which again would have been a strong stock ale. Outside London, Adey and White of St Albans made KKK stock ale and the Tadcaster Tower Brewery in Yorkshire sold KKK “Old Tom”, both costing 15s a firkin, meaning they must have been around 1090 OG.

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Burge & Co Windsor KXXX stock ale from 1885 – that’s K for keeping all right, and M for mild on the MXX mild ale

However, the problem is that AK and KK, and the rather rarer K, are always described as light bitters, which would not, surely, have been keeping ales. Yes, Mann’s brewed KKKK and KKK stock ales, but a Mann’s advert from 1898 also shows KK medium bitter ale at 10s 6d a firkin, about 1055 OG, and K light bitter ale at 9s 6d a firkin, about 1045 OG, as well as AKK Family Pale Ale at 1s 2d a gallon, around 1055 OG again, and AK Dinner Ale at, yes, 1s a gallon.

So: the K in KKK, and KKKK, and XXXK, and the other strong beers with K in their name, stands for “keeping” – there can be little doubt about that. But the K in AK and KK? K-for-keeping doesn’t seem to apply here, because they weren’t keeping beers. And what about the K Mild, ten pence a gallon, sold by Lucas, Ledbetter and Bird of High Wycombe in 1894, and the K Mild Ale sold by the Heavitree Brewery of Exeter in 1895 for 1s 2d a gallon? Or the K Light Ale Collier Brothers of Walthamstow were selling for ten pence a gallon in 1890, and the K Tonic Ale A Gordon & Go of Caledonian Road, Islington sold for the same sum in 1889? Cleary K doesn’t stand for “keeping” here. Again in 1889, Lewis & Ridley of Leamington seemed to be using “K” as equal to half an X, with XXXK mild ale following XXXX strong ale, then XXX mild ale, XXK mild ale, XX mild and and X mild ale. Again, these were milds, not keeping beers. Henry Lovibond & Son of the Cannon brewery, Lillie Road, Fulham actually called its shilling-a-gallon AK “mild bitter” in 1885.

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K as, apparently, half an X, from 1889

There is evidence that the K designation was more common in the south than elsewhere in England. Rose’s brewery of Malton, Yorkshire produced an AK, and the Tadcaster Tower brewery had a range that included four K beers. Robinson’s of Stockport sold AK Ale at the beginning of the 20th century. But few other brewers north of Newark, in the East Midlands, seem to have used Ks. In 1898 the Brewers’ Journal said the X mark was “almost universal in provincial towns, the alternative K being equally common in the London district”. But this does not help us much in finding out the origins of AK.

At least the process by which the K beers that survived to near the end of the 20th century became known as milds, when the style started out as a type of bitter ale, is easy to explain. Mild by the 1930s means to drinkers a low-gravity, low-hops, cheaper beer. In the Great Gravity Drop during and after the First World War, AKs fell to around 1030-1033 OG, and cost (in the 1930s) five (old) pence a pint, the same as best mild and less than “standard” bitter. Taylor Walker, the East London brewer, actually advertised its verson as “5d AK” probably because it sold cheaper than London dark mild, at six pence a pint. Being low-gravity, cheap and light on the hops, these AKs and KKs fell within the “modern” definition of milds.  Fordham’s of Ashwell, North Hertfordshire in 1934 sold XX mild and AX bitter at four pence a pint, XXX mild and AK bitter at five pence a pint, stout at six pence, PA bitter and XXXX at seven pence, IPA at eight pence and OO old ale at one shilling. The OG of Fordham’s AK was by now around 1030.

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McMullen’s AK Mild Bitter pumpclip from the 1950s

All those other AKs eventually vanished with the brewerrs that made them, leaviong only McMullen’s. At one stage, McMullen was describing AK on pump clips as a “mild bitter”, though the beer was sold in polypins in the 1980s as “Trad bitter”. The company dropped the description “mild” for AK only in the early 1990s.

So, although we can still drink AK, since there is no evidence to support the koyt derivation, and little support for the idea that the K in low-gravity, lightly hopped AK could have meant “keeping” the way it does in KKKK and KKK, I’m afraid we still haeeve to solve the mystery of where the K – and indeed the A – in AK come from.

Update: Bailey of Boak and Bailey has been doing some excellent searching through old digitised newspapers and pushed back the earliest mention of AK to 1846, in an advertisement from the Chelmsford Chronicle of October 23 1846 that lists Ind Coope AK. A slightly later ad, from the Ipswich Journal of June 15 1850, lists under “Romford Ales” (Ind Coope again, almost certainly) “AK, a light bitter ale” at 19 shillings for 18 gallons, as well as XK bitter ale and XXK “Ale” at 24 shillings and 31 shillings a kilderkin respectively: only the XXK looks like a “proper” stock ale, at perhaps 1080 to 1090 OG. An even more interesting ad from the same paper three years later, June 18 1853, refers to “The Romford A.K. or Light Bitter Beer, so much in request for Summer beverage”, which can be supplied for one shilling a gallon.

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The earliest known – so far – reference to AK, from 1846

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If you point out to the chaps at Meantime Brewing Company that theirs is now the second-oldest independent brewery operation in London, they won’t be thanking you. Venerability is not something that appeals to Meantime’s core demographic of 25 to 40-year-olds. But it’s a fact that of the ten or so other breweries in the capital when the company’s founder, Alastair Hook, first fired up his brewing kettle on the outskirts of Greenwich in 2000, only the positively antiquarian Fuller, Smith and Turner further up the Thames at Chiswick is still going.

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Clik here to view.Of course, in the past four or five years, London has seen an explosion in new small breweries, fuelled by the enthusiasm among just those 25 to 40-year-olds that Meantime attracts for beers of a type rather different than those an older generation seeks out: brewery conditioned, not cask conditioned, and not “boring brown” bitters, but crisp lagers and aromatic American-style pale ales, cloudy wheat beers and chocolate-flavoured porters.

It’s not just the second-oldest, but the second-biggest, too, with production this year likely to top 70,000 hectolitres: a long way behind the 342,000 hectolitres Fuller’s produced in the previous 12 months, but still probably more than the next eight or ten small London brewers put together, and certainly as much or more as a number of long-established family brewers.

And yet the man in charge of this young giant among the minnows comes from a background where even Fuller’s output would be thought of as not very much at all. In 2011, Meantime appointed Nick Miller, then managing director at SAB Miller UK’s operating company, Miller Brands, as its new chief executive. Miller was the first sales and marketing heavyweight ever to join a UK craft brewer. He had 20 years of experience in sales, strategic projects and marketing with Coors UK (formerly Bass), where he was director of sales, before he joined Miller Brands as sales director in 2005. His new employer boasted then that Miller had “a history of consistently delivering improved customer relations, sales and profit”, and he rose to be MD at Miller Brands in 2008. Under Miller, sales of Peroni, SAB’s Italian lager, rose in the UK from 160,000 hectolitres a year to 850,000 hectolitres (today, for what it’s worth, the brand is probably selling more than a million hectolitres in the UK). In other words, Miller boosted yearly sales of Peroni in the UK by as much as Meantime would currently produce in a decade.

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Inside Meantime’s new brewery in Greenwich

Sitting in the garden of Meantime’s one “proper” pub, the Greenwich Union (opened in 2001), on a sunny summer evening with a pint of the brewery’s own lager in front of me, I put it to Miller that had he stayed with SAB, he would most likely have continued on the sort of stratosphere-soaring corporate career currently being enjoyed by a former colleague, Mark Hunter, who started with Bass in the 1980s, just like Miller did, rose to be head of Molson Coors UK and then chief executive of Molson Coors Europe, and who was named at the end of July as the new chief executive and president of Molson Coors Brewing Company in the United States. So, having already risen high, and with that sort of potential career ladder in front of him, what persuaded him to make the swing away from the mega-brewery world to be in charge of an operation that makes less beer in a year than SAB Miller probably spills down the drain by accident?

“It’s a long and convoluted story how Meantime came about,” Miller replies after a sip at his own pint, “but it was one of those, ‘well, do I go abroad and do the big plc thing or do I take my chances and take a share in the business, see if we can grab hold of the craft beer revolution, shake it up, and change the way people think about beer, take a small business and turn it around?’ It’s been a great experience. I’ve always been in love with beer and the beer industry, and Meantime was one of those opportunities you would not want to miss. It took a lot of thinking about, because obviously it was a very lucrative job where I was – pensions, share schemes – it was a massive gamble. But it’s one, hopefully, that’s paying off, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s great grabbing hold of a business and working with someone like Alastair to create something different, and something exciting for beer drinkers.”

Miller (who, rather ironically, currently lives in one half of a former Shepherd Neame pub in Greenwich) actually began his working career as a shoe shop manager, before moving into the beer business. “I was born and brought up seven miles north of Burton on Trent, and weaned on things like Bass and Pedigree, and I had an interest in beer. But there was no real planning in terms of a career. I ended up, via a contact, being afforded an opportunity to work for Charrington’s in London in 1986, at the former Anchor brewery [the Mile End one, rather than either of the two by the Thames – MC]. The beer industry in 1986 was completely different to the way it is now, the Big Six brewers controlled the market place, it was still vertically integrated, the orders would come in from the pubs, which is where they made all their money, and brewing was, essentially, the poor man of the enterprises that were operating at that time.

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Wait for it … whisky casks from the St George’s distillery in Norfolk, filled with Meantime beer and slumbering beneath the brewery’s vessels in Greenwich

“I started at the bottom in sales and worked up to become a sales manager, then did the tactical, vertically integrated brewer route – retailing, ops, marketing. I did 16 years with Bass, which was bought by Coors, I was sales director for Bass looking after the on-trade, then in 2005 I had the opportunity to go and be sales and marketing director at SAB Miller, when we set up Miller Brands, and then two and a half years after that I became the MD of Miller Brands.”

The effects of the Beer Orders in 1989 “sharpened people up to making big brands bigger, to get efficiencies and overhead recovery out of having big brands, through long runs in breweries, but they probably then somewhat neglected consumer choice, variety, style: I don’t think it did the beer industry, the beer genre much good,” Miller says. “And it had a lot more competition coming in for disposable income – mobile phones, and the rest.

“When I started in the industry the off-trade was about 20% of the market place, and the market place was well over the 70 million hectolitre mark. We’ve seen an accelerated decline down to around, what, 45 million hectolitres, roughly. Why is that? The industry hasn’t engaged consumers, hasn’t engaged drinkers, hasn’t talked about the possibilities in matching with food, drinking on different occasions, styles of beer relative to different times of the day. I think that’s what Meantime tries to do – it tries to celebrate all styles of beer.

At Meantime, Miller says, “My job is to try to keep things contained, in a commercial sense. But the day you stamp on innovation is the day you start ringing the death-bell. Yes, there’s a hierarchy, but we rarely have to use hierarchical tactics in Meantime because the culture’s right with the people within it. Blending good financial systems and standards, backed by great creativity and not being frightened to fail, is absolutely crucial if you want to be a pioneering company. We will screw things up, but hopefully we get eight or nine decisions out of ten right. You have to accept that sometimes a test brew isn’t that good. Fair play. I run this company, but the one thing I will never attempt to run is the quality of the beer. I’ve got someone [Alastair Hook] who’s a million times better at judging the quality of the beer than me. Therefore you trust him to do that. I’m a marketeer. I can do the strategic framework and what I want to see delivered, but I let Alastair loose to do the work.”

The company’s board consists of two executive directors, Miller and Hook, and three non-execs, including the chairman, the South African former brewery industry exec Gary Whitlie, who was recommended to the post by Miller – “he was my first boss at Miller Brands, so if you’ve had a half-decent boss, you might as well pick him again,” Miller jokes, since Whitlie has just joined us in the Greenwich Union garden. “Best boss he ever had,” Whitlie retorts.

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Meantime’s hop garden, in sight of the O2 arena on the Greenwich Peninsula

Miller’s contacts mean he knows where to go to get advice: hence the arrival at Meantime in July of Martin Harlow as a consultant. “We are in an absolute growth spurt, and we need to become a bit more processed and efficient in how we run our supply chain,” Miller says. “Martin was our supply chain director at Miller Brands, I needed someone, so why not go to someone you’ve worked with for five years.”

His experience outside the UK while working for Miller Brands also means he can suggest ideas that others might not think of. Brewery Fresh, which delivers unpasteurised, unfiltered London Lager from special five-hectolitre tanks in the pub cellar, was Miller’s initiative, inspired by the similar “tankova” system he had seen in Prague while working for SAB. “The outlet will pay for the installation, and we’ll pay for the tanks,” Miller says. “We then sign an agreement that they must hold those tanks for a certain period of time. The cost differential between tank and keg is reflected in the price, though there’s not a lot of difference. But the beer’s been kept at a constant temperature, with no air and no light – it’s probably the purest, freshest beer you’ll ever drink in a bar. It’s had less chance to be affected because it stays at a constant 2C from the brewery to the tank. It sells about twice as much as you would do through a keg – at a price premium. So the retailer enjoys better cash margins. We’re here to provide styles, variety, choice for the drinker, but at the same time you mustn’t forget the middle man, the guy that’s actually putting it in front of the drinker. They’re investing heavily in providing an experience for the drinker, we have to supply something that’s relevant for them.”

Meantime brewed 43 different beers last year, and had brewed 14 new beers by the end of July this year, and 19 in all. The biggest is the pale ale, followed by London Lager, pilsner and Yakima Red, a “one-off” two years ago that proved so popular it became one of the brewery’s standard lines. “We’re always doing lots of NPD down at the Old Brewery [the microbrewery/bar/restaurant at the Old Naval College in Greenwich],” Miller says. “We’ll play with lots of different things. But we are firmly keg. There’s too many others playing in the cask arena. Let them get on with it. We’ll do things with modern keg beer, which is unpasteurised, unfiltered on some occasions, such as Brewery Fresh. We celebrate all styles and genres – but we are a commercial enterprise, you brew what the drinker wants to drink.”

Meantime timeline

1983 Teenager Alastair Hook, a great fan of the cask ales he drank around his home in South London, visits the Hopland Brewery in Mendocino, California, only the second brewpub to be set up in the United States, and is hugely impressed with the flavours he finds in the brewery’s chilled, kegged beers.

1985 Hook, who back-packed across Europe and Asia with Michael Jackson’s Pocket Guide to Beer at the age of 17, realises he has a growing passion for beer and quits his Economic and Social History degree at York University (where he was doing a research project on Guinness) to take up a brewing degree at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

1988 Hook graduates from Heriot-Watt, learns German and enrols at the University of Munich’s Weihenstephan campus, the most famous brewing school in Germany, for postgraduate study. His first job upon graduating is for a German brewery, Kaltenberg, in Italy.

1991 Hook is asked to set up a German-style brewhouse at the Packhorse Brewery in Ashford, Kent, brewing Continental-style beers including Dunkle (dark) lager, Vienna and Pilsen-style lagers and Dortmunder Alt. The brewery closes in 1994, and Hook turns to importing beers to sell in the UK to make a living, using his contacts in Germany.

1995 Hook helps set up the Freedom Brewing Co in Fulham with property developer Ewan Eastham, making a non-pasteurised, bottled Pilsen-style beer.

1996 Hook is poached by the restaurateur-cum-entrepreneur Oliver Peyton to open Mash and Air, a brewery-and-restaurant in Manchester.

1998 Hook and Peyton open a branch of Mash and Air off Regent Street in Central London called simply Mash.

1999 Hook raises more than £500,000 from family and friends to launch the Meantime Brewing Company on Penhall Road, Charlton, South London, close to Charlton Athletic football club, where Hook is a season ticket holder.

2000 In April, Meantime brews its first beer, Union Lager.

2001 Meantime opens its first pub, the Greenwich Union.

2007 Output at Meantime hits 13,000 hectolitres a year. A further £500,000 has been raised from shareholders to install a modern packaging line.

2008 Hook is named the Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers.

2010 Meantime opens its new brewery in Blackwall Lane, Greenwich at a cost of £2m. At the same time it opens a six-barrel microbrewery and restaurant at the Old Brewery in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, costing £200,000.

2011 Meantime announces it wants to increase production fourfold from 25,000 hectolitres a year to 100,000hl in the coming five years. Nick Miller, former managing director at SAB Miller UK’s operating company, Miller Brands, becomes the brewery’s new chief executive.

2013 Meantime launches Brewery Fresh, the UK’s first tank beer, delivering its London Lager unpasteurised and without extraneous carbonation from specially installed five-hectolitre (880-pint) cellar tanks.

2014 Meantime builds an “urban hop farm” on the banks of the River Thames directly on the Greenwich Meridian Line. Meanwhile the brewery closes in on 70,000 hectolitres a year.

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Considering it was (little-known fact alert) a European brewery that first produced canned beer, in 1933, in Lorraine, France (the Americans only followed two years later) we Europeans have been distinctly sniffy about beer in cans. One French website, talking about the record of the Brasserie Vezelise, “Premiere brasserie Française a mettre de la biere en boite”, adds: “Helas!”. In Britain, anyone who reckoned they knew about beer knew canned beer was, to quote the 1984 Good Beer Guide, “inferior” – tinny-tasting and cheap .

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An advertisement from 1933 for canned beer

In fact canned beer did not have a universally wonderful reputation even in the United States, which invented the name “Joe Sixpack” for Mr Average. When the first canned craft beer appeared there – just 12 years ago, in 2002 – it shook up considerable controversy. Even in 2005, there were not much more than a dozen US craft breweries who had followed Oskar Blues, the Colorado brewer that pioneered craft beer in cans, onto the canning line. By 2012, however, that number had grown to more than 200 brewers making canned craft beer. Today, according to the Cantastic database, the figure is 413 breweries, canning 1,484 different craft beers in 94 styles across 49 states and Washington DC (the one non-craft beer canning state is West Virginia).

But is it any bloody good? I first had canned craft beer in Hong Kong, where several small Japanese craft brewers, such as Yo-Ho, have their beers on sale in cans in classier supermarkets, and where semi-pro American beer importers bring in West Coast craft beer in cans, and lo, ’twas frequently very tasty. Indeed, Yo-Ho’s Yona Yona pale ale became one of my favourite fridge beers. Back in the UK, though, I’ve returned pretty much 100 per cent to bottles for my home beer consumption, simply because the places I buy beer from pretty much solidly don’t sell craft in cans: there still are very few craft beer brewers in Britain canning their beers. But if there were canned beers as good as some of the canned beers I tasted in HK easily available, then I’d be happy to buy them.

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Canned beer from Barclay Perkins in 1940

I was delighted, thus, to get an invitation to last week’s Indie Beer Can Festival, which was set up by the Can Makers, the trade body for British beverage can makers. It was a well-thought-out competition: brewers did not have to be canning their beer already to enter. Out of the initial entrants – and some 70 brewers put themselves forward – 12 were to be picked, and any of the 12 who were not already canning would be given a “limited edition” canning run. They would all go into a blind tasting, and three winners chosen.

All the finalists were available in can for sampling on the day, and I went round with cup, pen and notebook making my own judgment – which one of the entrants’ canned beers would I most like to take on a picnic? The “Breakfast Stout” from Arbor Ales, was tarry, sweet, smooth and warming, but at 7.4%, too strong for a picnic – too strong for breakfast, probably. Longhorn IPA, normally a craft keg beer, from Purity Brewing, 5% abv, had an initial fullness not matched, unfortunately, by the follow-through, and felt comparatively slight against many of the other beers there. Springhead‘s Roaring Meg was light for a 5.5% beer, with honey and grain: a picnic possible. There were two beers from established family brewers in the final, each of which was already being canned: Thwaites’s 13 Guns delivered a lovely mango nose, but frothed up badly in the glass (or plastic cup, rather) which lost it picnic points, while Adnam’s Ghost Ship was a solid, down-the-middle pale ale, but failed to bowl me out.

The one Irish entrant, Blacks of Kinsale‘s Kinsale Pale Ale, was restrained for an American Pale Ale, with biscuit malt more apparent than the tropical notes in the mouth, though there was a good long lingering bitter aftertaste, and I thought this was going to be the picnic test winner. Then I tried Concrete Cow‘s Dirty Cow. Did anything good ever come out of Milton Keynes apart from the A5 to London? Yes, this, a lovely 5% abv mix of American pale ale and wheat beer, a little sour, tangy, with hints of fruitbowl, refreshing when cool, but – and this is the clincher for a picnic beer – with a collection of flavours that suggest it will still taste good when it’s warmed up over an English summer afternoon. Give the picnic prize to the Cow.Image may be NSFW.
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You’ll not, I’m guessing, be surprised to hear that the official judges didn’t agree with me at all. The gold medal went to Adnams’ Ghost Ship, the silver to Thwaites’s 13 Guns, the two experienced canners taking the top prizes, while the bronze was snatched by Arbor with its Breakfast Stout.

Still, it confirmed that craft beer does indeed belong in cans. And cans, as the Can Makers will declare, do have advantages over bottles: the beer inside a can is far less likely to be affected by beer’s big enemies, oxygen and light, which ruin far too many bottled brews, while cans are also lighter than glass – ten or eleven times lighter, in fact – and cool down faster in the fridge. So are we likely to see more British craft brewers speedily follow BrewDog (who began canning in 2011), Beavertown, Camden and Fourpure of Bermondsey?

Well, not if Rob Lovatt, brewmaster at Thornbridge, is correct. In a blogpost this week that is essential reading, Rob points out that the sort of small canning line that is all most craft brewers in the UK are likely to be able to afford is not going to be able to guarantee the benefits that canning beer is supposed to bring:

Although the can format is being sold as the best way to eliminate oxygen from the beer after packaging, it is during the packaging process itself that the greatest danger lies. I am unconvinced that the canners towards the lower end of the market are capable of sealing the can without potentially picking up detrimental levels of dissolved oxygen.
It would seem that it is possible to produce good beer on a budget canner, but personally I’m not convinced. Although I am sure we could achieve extra sales and the exposure would be great having beer in can, I feel that on the flip side of the coin, customers drinking oxidised beer from a can would do no favours for our reputation.

So there we are. Today’s craft brewery canned beer is not your father’s canned beer, but it’s not necessarily the answer to a beer drinker’s prayers.

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An advertisement from 1958 for canned beer

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One of the items of news that may have shot by you recently is that Molson Coors is pumping enough money into the Cornish economy to boost capacity at Sharp’s brewery to a potential 350,000 barrels a year of Doom Bar ale, a 40% expansion. There is no guarantee it will be able to shift that amount of what is already the UK’s biggest-selling cask ale, of course. But if it did, that would mean Doom Bar had become a brand one tenth the size of Carling lager. That might not sound much, but blimey, there’s not been a cask ale brand with that kind of clout in the market for decades.

It would be fascinating to know what all those drinkers of more than a million pints of Doom Bar a week  think the beer actually is: do they believe they are drinking “craft beer”? Do they know it actually comes from one of the biggest brewers in the country?

It’s also an interesting question as to whether any other cask ale brand, even with the weight of Molson Coors behind it, could ever have contemplated looking at potential sales that recall the heyday of Draught Bass, even in an era when cask ale drinkers may be entitled to feel more optimistic than they have been able to be for almost two decades. Has Doom Bar’s popularity any connection with it coming from the village of Rock, described by the Daily Telegraph as “the Kensington of Cornwall”, populated during the summer by affluent teenagers staying at their friends’ multi-million-pound holiday homes, and surrounded by expensive Michelin-starred restaurants owned by big-name chefs? Plenty of Rock’s affluent young visitors will be drinking in the Mariners, the pub owned jointly by Sharp’s and the celebrity chef Nathan Outlaw, and Doom Bar is likely to be the tipple for many. Does that at all put a halo on the beer that helps it rise to sales levels effectively unheard of for a single cask beer brand?

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Draymen, by George Cruikshank. Note the chequers on the doorpost, an indicator of a public house.

Well, probably not, but it is certainly the case that you are indeed much more likely to find the young and affluent drinkers who flock to Rock to meet mates (and mate) drinking cask ale than you would have even ten years ago. As the latest Cask Report revealed, a third of all 18-34 year-olds have tried cask. And it’s not that they have tried it and walked away back to Carling or Peroni vowing “never again” – of all those who have ever tried real ale, 86% still drink it to some extent. Nor is it just young men trying out real ale. A third of all female alcohol drinkers have tried cask – and, again, 75% of women who have tried cask still drink it.

Sadly, this fact seems not to have penetrated deeply into the trade. Even among licensees who stock cask ale, two out of five think women don’t like cask ale. Male cask ale drinkers are considerably more liberated: four out of five think women DO, indeed, enjoy a handpulled pint.

I’m pulling these plums from the 2014/5 Cask Report (on which Pete Brown has done his usual terrific job) because they tend to be overlooked in the rush to plaster up the headline items, like the call to raise the price of cask ale to bring it more in line with the prices being charged for craft keg beers.

It is not, in fact, a new phenomenon that cask ale, one of the glories of Britain, at its best a sublime celebration of the marriage of malt and hops, is sold too cheaply. In the early 1970s, Carlsberg draught lager in London cost 18p a pint, while cask ale was 13p a pint or so: a 28% price differential. By 1984 the difference was less but cask ale, at 72p, was still cheaper than lager, at 81p. Today cask ale is only is around 6%, or 20p, cheaper than draught lager. But if draught lager can no longer command the massive premium it once did, “craft keg” is being sold for premiums vastly superior to anything the early Carlsberg marketeers ever dreamed of. The same drink has been spotted in the same North London “craft beer bar” for £3.50 from a cask and £5 from a keg. Not all craft keg is that expensive: the average in the UK now is £4.04 a pint, although some, particularly if it has been imported from the United States and it’s up at the top end of the abv range for a draught beer, say 9% and above, will be in excess of £7 a pint. But that is against an average price for a pint of cask ale of just £3.19.

So why did lager – and before it the original keg beer, such as Red Barrel and Double Diamond, your fathers and grandfathers rushed to buy, and after it the “craft keg” beers on offer from such highly regarded brewers as Meantime, Camden Town, BrewDog and Lovibond – command a premium? Part of it was and is image, or course. But much of it was the promise of consistency. Drinkers really will happily pay more if they know they’re not being invited to gamble their £3.19 on the possibility of a pint of cloudy vinegar – and then have to argue with bar staff who will try to tell them: “It’s real ale, it’s meant to taste like that.”

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Worth a premium over cask ale?

To quote from another segment of the Cask Report: “Premium bottled ale is almost twice as expensive in the off-trade as premium lager, and yet sales are growing faster, despite a wider growth of interest in budget and value brands. People are prepared to pay more for interesting, flavourful beer, and expect to do so.” Well, quite. But the point about bottled beer is that it’s almost 100% reliable. If it’s tasty and interesting as well – that’s worth paying extra for. The report declares: “The current price differential between cask ale and ‘craft keg’ beer damages both the image of the former and the sales of the latter.” But it’s hard to see how the high prices being charged for craft keg are damaging its sales: pubs and bars are pretty good at charging what the market will bear, and the market, particularly in London, seems happy to bear £4.50 and upwards a pint and more for the perceived benefits of craft keg, those benefits being (a) flavour and interest without (b) any risk of your pint being undrinkable. The problem is not that craft keg is too dear, but that cask ale is too unreliable, and what damages the image of cask ale is not its perceived cheapness but its perceived risk. Lower the risk, and pubs will be able to charge for cask ale what they are currently charging for craft keg – more, indeed, since it’s almost always, all other things being equal, a superior product.

Fortunately the trade recognises this, and the excellent work being done by Cask Marque in raising the standards of cask ale at the point of delivery is now being expanded upon with the launch of the Cask Matters website. Already, the second most looked-at item on the site is a video on looking after cask beer in the cellar from Peter Eells, head brewer at the Yorkshire brewery Timothy Taylor’s. There looks to be a mass of other help and information on the site, from offers of free online training on looking after cask ale to a CD called “A Bar Person’s Guide to Real Beer” to links to Beer Academy courses to downloadable comprehensive what-to-do lists on everything from line cleaning to glass care. As Pete Brown said at the launch of the latest Cask Report, when he brought out the first one in 2007, his job was to try to convince the industry that cask ale wasn’t dead. Today cask beer is sitting in the middle of what Brown correctly called a beer revolution, with three times the number of breweries in operation now than were operating at the Millennium. But if pubs are really going to benefit from that, they need to tackle the issue of poor quality. Hopefully, initiatives such as Cask Matters are giving them the tools they need to do that.

Unfortunately, one’s hopes are undermined in the section of the Cask Report that covers drinkers’ perceptions of how much training bar staff get in cask ale, compared to how much training licensees said they gave their staff. Edited highlight: Publicans think their staff get a lot of training in looking after and serving cask ale; drinkers don’t.

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Barman and cusrtomer, by George Cruikshank. Did the barman receive training in serving cask ale?

Nine out of ten licensees said staff get training in what to look for in a good or bad pint. Less than half of cask ale drinkers believe this to be the case. Two thirds of licensees say staff get training in how to look after cask ale in the cellar, with half saying staff get a lot more training in cask ale than with other kinds of drinks. Again, less than half of cask ale drinkers believe this happens. Four out of ten cask ale drinkers, indeed, believe bar staff get hardly any training in cask ale, while only one in 16 licensees say training is that poor. Two thirds of licensees say staff get training in different styles of cask ale. Barely one third of cask ale drinkers believe this happens. The report says: “There are only two ways to explain the difference in perceptions of training … either publicans are deceiving us (and perhaps themselves) on how much they care for cask, or drinkers don’t realise how much care and attention goes in to presenting the perfect pint.” Actually, there’s a third, and one that seems to me to be easily the most likely – that drinkers see little evidence their side of the bar of all the training publicans say goes on, because they’re getting too many poor pints, served to them by bar staff who aren’t knowledgeable about the product. The fear has to be that landlords will persist in thinking their staff (and they) know all about cask ale and don’t need the help of Cask Maters, while the evidence from the customers’ side of the bar continues to be that they don’t.

There are plenty of other important findings in the report. For example, landlords and drinkers are still in disagreement over how often the line-up of beers on the bar-top should be changed, with drinkers much more conservative than the trade. The report repeated the findings from last year, that among all drinkers who have ever tried real ale, 56% want to see a selection that changes every month, and only 20% want a selection that changes every week, while 15% want to see the same beers on the bar all the time. Publicans, however, believe they should be rotating guest beers once a week.

The report also found that the cliched image of cask ale drinkers is commoner among licensees than among cask ale drinkers themselves: Two in five publicans actually stocking cask ale still think that most cask ale drinkers are middle-aged men with beards and sandals. Only one in five of male cask ale drinkers think that.

Drinkers and publicans also disagree about what promotional activities work for particular beers: 81% of cask ale publicans back staff recommendations, against just 58% of cask ale drinkers, while 51% of drinkers are attracted by seeing brands at local beer festivals, while only 24% of landlords think this effective, and 28% of drinkers like seeing food matching suggestions on menus, while only 10% of landlords go for this. Nobody likes beer mats: just 5% of drinkers and 9% of landlords think they are an effective promotion.

Another interesting difference in perceptions is that among cask-stocking publicans, 74% think serving beer in the right branded glasswear is “quite important” or “very important”. Only 53% of cask ale drinkers feel the same, while 47% couldn’t give a stuff. Half the number of drinkers, just one in five, think branded glasswear “very important” compared to publicans who feel the same.

On the often heated subject of the definition of “craft beer”, among both cask ale drinkers and publicans stocking cask ale, six out of ten say it means “beer from a small brewer”, and half of each thought craft beer had to be “a beer you don’t find in many places”. Only one in five of cask ale drinkers thought it meant “very hoppy, American-style ales”, against a third of cask ale-stocking landlords, and just one in 20 cask ale drinkers and one in 13 cask ale-stocking landlords thought it meant “any cask ale”. Whatever the definition, while cask ale has a 16% market share of total on-trade beer, “craft beer” in other, formats (keg, bottle, can) scores only 2%.

The report is also interesting in what it reveals about attitudes to the Campaign for Real Ale. Among cask ale drinkers, 6% said they were Camra members: all of 37% of cask ale-selling publicans carry a Camra membership card. Only 2% of cask drinkers said they didn’t like Camra, against 5% of cask ale-selling landlords. Almost half – 47% – of cask ale drinkers said that while not members, they admired what the organisation did, against 36% of cask-selling licensees who felt the same. Nearly as many cask beer drinkers, however, 45%, said they had not strong feelings one way or the other about Camra, a feeling shared with almost a quarter, 23%, of landlords. If even among cask ale drinkers, 47% are indifferent to Camra or opposed to it, you have to wonder about the organisation’s claims to be “the leading voice of beer drinkers in the UK”.

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Clik here to view.Just finally, there is also a fascinating survey in the reoport of the range of beers brewed by members of SIBA, the Society of Independent Brewers, which covers around half of all the 1,500 or so brewers in the UK. Almost all – 97% –  brew a “golden ale”, although there’s no indication as to whether this is a Summer Lightning-style golden bitter, or a more West Coast American Pale Ale. Around nine out of 10 – 89% – brew a “traditional” bitter, three out of five (60%) a strong bitter or IPA (although, again, it would be useful to know how many of these are American IPAs). Less than a quarter (23%) sell a traditional mild (boo!) and only one in five (20%) a strong mild or old ale. Fewer than one in ten (9%) make a strong ale or barley wine, which surprises me, and even fewer, just one in 20 (5%) brew a stout or porter. One in five (19%) make something they call a “speciality beer”, which presumably covers a very wide category of sins. In all, SIBA members make 4,000 regular cask ales and another 5,800 seasonals and one-offs every year, which the report suggests means when non-SIBA members are added in, means almost 19,000 different cask beers every year. A ticker would have to be drinking 16 beers a day, every day, just to cover all SIBA members’ seasonals and one-offs …

This blog is (mostly) an amalgamation of two pieces that originally appeared on the Propel Info website.

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Wherever you are at 5.30pm this evening, please stop a moment and raise a thought – a glass, too, if you have one, preferably of porter – to Hannah Banfield, aged four years and four months; Eleanor Cooper, 14, a pub servant; Elizabeth Smith, 27, the wife of a bricklayer; Mary Mulvey, 30, and her son by a previous marriage, Thomas Murry (sic), aged three; Sarah Bates, aged three years and five months; Ann Saville, 60; and Catharine Butler, a widow aged 65. All eight died 200 years ago today, victims of the Great London Beer Flood, when a huge vat filled with maturing porter fell apart at Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and more than 570 tons of beer crashed through the brewery’s back wall and out into the slums behind in a vast wave at least 15 feet high, flooding streets and cellars and smashing into buildings, in at least one case knocking people from a first-floor room. It could have been worse: the vat that broke was actually one of the smallest of 70 or so at the brewery, and contained just under 3,600 barrels of beer, while the largest vat at the brewery held 18,000 barrels. In addition, if the vat had burst an hour or so later, the men of the district would have been home from work, and the buildings behind the brewery, all in multiple occupancy, with one family to a room, would have been much fuller when the tsunami of porter hit them.

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From a Dr Who cartoon novel in 2012: was the Great Beer Flood caused by time-travellers? (No, obviously not …)

Here’s about the only eye witness report of what it’s like to be hit in the back by a giant wave of beer, written by an anonymous American who had been unlucky in taking a short-cut down New Street, behind the brewery, when the vat burst:

All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Banbury street [sic – now Bainbridge Street], Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers.

Accounts today of the Meux brewery beer flood are full of claims of “besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts” and claims that “many were suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer” and “the death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma”. None of this is borne out by any newspaper reports at the time, and nor are the stories about riots at the Middlesex Hospital when victims were taken there stinking of beer, because other patients smelt the porter and thought free drink was being given away, or the floor at the pub where several of the victims’ bodies were laid out collapsing under the weight of sightseers and more people being killed. All those stories appear to be completely made up. It would be an interesting exercise to track these myths back and see when and where they first arose.

Here’s an account of the accident from a contemporary journal:

DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE

DREADFUL ACCIDENT

Monday night, the 17th October, one of those accidents which fortunately for the inhabitants of the metropolis is of rare occurence threw the neighhourhood of St Giles’s into the utmost consternation. About six o clock one of the vats in the extensive premises of Messrs Henry Meux and Co in Banbury street St Giles’s burst apart; in a moment New street George street and several others in the vicinity were deluged with the contents of 3,555 barrels of strong beer. The fluid in its course swept every thing before it. Two houses in New street adjoining the brew house were totally demolished. The inhabitants, who were of the poorer class, were all at home. In the first floor of one of them a mother and daughter were at tea; the mother was washed out of the window and the daughter was swept away by the current through a partition and dashed to pieces. The back parts of the houses of Mr Goodwin, poulterer, of Mr Hawse, Tavistock Arms, and Nos 24 and 25 in Great Russel street were nearly destroyed. The female servant of the Tavistock Arms was suffocated. Three of Mr Meux’s men employed in the brewery were rescued with great difficulty. The site of the place is low and flat, and there being no declivity to carry off the fluid in its fall, it spread and sunk into the neighbouring cellars, all of which were inhabited. Even the cellars in Russel street were inundated and breaches made through the houses. The inhabitants, to save themselves from drowning, had to mount their highest pieces of furniture. The bursting of the brew house walls and the fall of heavy timber materially contributed to aggravate the mischief by forcing the roofs and walls of the adjoining houses. It was feared at first that the lives lost exceeded 20, but we are happy to find the account reduced to eight, whose bodies have been all recovered.

And here’s a report of the coroner’s inquest:

On Thursday a Coroner’s Inquest was held on the dead bodies at St Giles’s workhouse. George Crick deposed that he was store house clerk to Messrs H Meux and Co of the Horse Shoe Brew house in St Giles’s, with whom he had lived 17 years. Monday afternoon one of the large iron hoops of the vat which burst fell off. He was not alarmed, as it happened frequently and was not attended by any serious consequence. He wrote to inform a partner, Mr Young, also a vat builder, of the accident, he had the letter in his hand to send to Mr Young, about half past five, half an hour after the accident, and was standing on a platform within three yards of the vat when he heard it burst. He ran to the store house where the vat, was and was shocked to see that one side of the brew house, upwards of 25 feet in height and two bricks and a half thick, with a considerable part of the roof, lay in ruins. The next object that took his attention was his brother, J Crick, who was a superintendent under him, lying senseless, he being pulled from under one of the butts. He and the labourer were now in the Middlesex Hospital. An hour after, witness found the body of Ann Saville floating among the butts, and also part of a private still, both of which floated from neighbouring houses. The cellar and two deep wells in it were full of beer, which witness and those about him endeavoured to save, so that they could not go to see the accident, which happened outwardly. The height of the vat that burst was 22 feet; it was filled within 4 inches of the top and then contained 3555 barrels of entire, being beer that was ten months brewed; the four inches would hold between 30 and 40 barrels more; the hoop which burst was 700 cwt, which was the least weight of any of 22 hoops on the vat. There were seven large hoops, each of which weighed near a ton. When the vat burst the force and pressure was so great that it stove several hogsheads of porter and also knocked the cock out of a vat nearly as large that was in the cellar or regions below; this vat contained 2100 barrels all of which except 800 barrel also ran; about they lost in all between 8 and 9000 barrels of beer; the vat from whence the cock was knocked out ran about a barrel a minute; the vat that burst had been built between eight and nine years and was kept always nearly full. It had an opening on the top about a yard square; it was about eight inches from the wall; witness supposes it was the rivets of the hoops that slipped, none of the hoops being broke and the foundation where the vat stood not giving way. The beer was old, so that the accident could not have been occasioned by the fermentation, that natural process being past; besides, the action would then have been upwards and thrown off the flap made moveable for that purpose.

Richard Hawes deposed that he lived at No 22 Great Russel strcet Bloomsbury, the Tavistock Arms Public house; about half past five o’ clock on Monday evening witness was in his tap room when he heard the crash; the back part of his house was beaten in and every thing in his cellar destroyed; the cellar and tap room filled with beer so that it was pouring across the street into the areas on the opposite side; the deceased, Eleanor Cooper, his servant, was in the yard washing pots at the time the accident happened; she was buried under the ruins, from whence she was dug out about 10 minutes past eight o’ clock; she was found standing by the water butt, quite dead.

John Cummins deposed that he was a bricklayer and lived in Pratt’s place, Camden Town, being the owner of some houses in New street where the principal part of the persons who were lost, resided; he attended on the spot all day on Tuesday to render assistance to the sufferers. Elizabeth Smith, a bricklayer’s wife, was the first body they found, about twelve o’clock in the ruins of a first floor. Sarah Bates, a child, was discovered in about an hour afterward in the ruins of No 3 New street. Catharine Butler, a widow, Mary Mulvey and her son Thomas Murry, a boy three years of age, were found about four o clock, on Tuesday afternoon. Hannah Banfield, a girl about four years and a half old, with her mother and another child, were at tea on the first floor; the two former were washed by the flood into the ruins; the dead body of Hannah Banfield was found in the ruins about half past six; the mother was carried to the Middlesex Hospital, and the last mentioned child was found nearly suffocated in a bed in the room.

The Jury without hesitation, returned a Verdict of Died by Casualty Accidentally and by Misfortune.

Why did they store such huge quantities of porter at the brewery in such enormous vessels? Because experience had shown that porter stored for months in vats acquired a particularly sought-after set of flavours, and storing it in really big vessels reduced the risk of oxidisation (since the surface area merely squared as the volume cubed). This “stale” (meaning “stood for some time”, rather than “off”), flat and probably quite sour aged porter was then send out in casks when ready, and mixed at the time of service in the pub with porter from a cask that was “mild”, that is, fresh and still lively, and probably a little sweet. Customers would specify the degree of mildness or staleness they would like their porter drawn, having it mixed to their own preference. Tastes changed over the 19th century, “stale” porter fell out of favour, and by the 1890s the big vats were being dismantled, the oak they were made from recycled into pub bar-tops. Quite possibly there are pubs in London now whose bars are made out of old porter vats.

The Meux (pronounced “mewks”) brewery stood at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street until the early 1920s, but production was shifted in 1921 to Nine Elms (itself now demolished and the site of New Covent Garden flower and vegetable market) and the Horse Shoe brewery was replaced by the Dominion Theatre. The Horseshoe Inn next door remained open until the 1990s or so, but eventually closed itself: you can still get a drink on the site, as a branch of Cafe Rouge now occupies the ground floor, but you can’t, alas, get a pint of porter.

At the Brewery History Society we have been trying to get a plaque put up to commemorate the event, and honour the victims, but with no success: I believe the American company that owns the Dominion Theatre failed even to reply, while the Camden Historical Society, inside whose borough the site now falls, took the strange view that “not enough people died” to make it worthwhile having a permanent memorial. How many dead women and children is enough, Camden?

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The Meux brewery at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street exactly 100 years ago, in 1914

(There’s a rather fuller account of the flood, and the history of the Horse Shoe brewery by me here.)

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Back in August last year, after encountering Siren Craft Brew’s American IPA at the London Craft Beer Festival, I promised: “I shall definitely be drinking more Siren.” I’ve now drunk the brewery’s beers whenever I find them, and I’ve never been so impressed with the products of a new brewery since we started having new breweries in Britain again. There hasn’t been one I wouldn’t score an eight, at least. It should be clear, I think, from the first sip of any of the brewery’s beers that in the 31-year-old American Ryan Witter-Merithew, Siren has found a brewer of supremely rare talent, someone with a “palate imagination” powerful enough to give him the ability to pull off stunts other brewers leap at and fail to achieve.

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Clik here to view.In particular, he seems to have an amazing ability to blend two ideas together and get a whole considerably greater than the parts. His Whiskey Sour beer contains two of my personal nightmares – beer brewed with actual lemons in it, and beer aged in oak casks sufficiently for the flavour of oak to enter the ale. Yet I find it a marvellous drink, full of depth, totally integrated, the oak, the lemon, the bourbon and the citrussy hops producing a symphony of harmonious flavours: a beer I’m eager to try matching with different foods

I was delighted to get an invite to meet Darron Anley, the founder of Siren Craft Brew at a “showcase” organised by the property agency Davis Coffer Lyons at the East London Liquor Company in Bow Wharf, East London, the first bar-with-a-distillery (actually two stills, beautiful copper affairs) I have seen. It would be very unfair to call Anley a dilettante brewer, since he is clearly serious about what he is doing and it’s not merely a hobby, but like a few others in the modern UK brewing scene, it was making a fortune elsewhere, in his case building up and then selling an IT security company, that gave him the freedom, and the finance, to become a brewer. His previous company was sold in 2011, but Anley’s interest in beer went back a lot further than that, he revealed:

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Darron Anley

“I’d been into my beers for a really long time, and by 2009 I was a lot more interested in what was coming over from the US, a lot more interested in the more hop-forward style of beer, which at the time when I got out of IT there were probably still only three or four people making those kind of beers. I had never made beer in my life, but I did a lot of playing around and I started thinking, ‘I could do this!’ I wasn’t supposed to be setting up any more businesses, I was supposed to be on a bit of a break. But it kept calling me – I had this nagging feeling, where I wanted to go and create something from scratch, have a bit of fun and do something very, very different. I’d never created a brand before. So that’s where the name ‘Siren’ comes from – I heard the music and that was that.”

Before starting, Anley went to a “brilliant” conference of small brewers in the United States, where

“two of the best bits of advice I got was, one, no matter how good your home-brewing is – and mine was OK, passable, if not quite amazing – get a professional brewer in. It just makes the whole process easier. The other was, whatever size brewkit you’re thinking of starting off with, double it, and if you can afford it, triple it.

“While in the US I met up with a bunch of people, and off the back of that they all sent out various tweets saying, ‘This guy’s looking for a brewer,’ I think I interviewed 12 people through that, and [Ryan Witter-Merithew] was one of them. [He] had been brewing some really cool beers over in Denmark [at Fanø], he’s American, very well-known for his creativity, willing to try almost anything – and that fitted with what I wanted to do. [But] it was the hardest job in the world to try to get an American in for a brand new job, [dealing with the immigration authorities] that was the stuff of nightmares.”

A base was found in Finchampstead, Berkshire, close to Anley’s home, and brand-new kit was acquired from Malrex in Burton upon Trent. Anley is happy to admit his debt to BrewDog in Siren’s line-up of “core” beers, with at least two overtly tracing an influence from brews in the Scottish iconoclasts’ catalogue:

“What we wanted from our four core beers that were going to be about all year round were beers that started off with something that takes you on a nice, easy journey to start with, up to something perhaps a little bit more challenging. So you’ve got Undercurrent, it’s an oatmeal pale ale – not overtly hoppy, not overtly bitter, lot of oats in the grist to give a nice smooth mouthfeel, the hops we use have a herbaceous quality to them, bit of floral, bit of citrus as well. It’s a nice easy balance to get started with. The next thing you’ve got is a West Coast IPA [Soundwave] which is a little bit more like Punk IPA – I’d like to say better, but I’ll let you decide on that. It’s quite aggressive on the nose, loads and loads of citrus, passion fruit, tropical fruit; we’ve gone for a less bitter approach, I didn’t want it to be overtly bitter. We’ve then got a red IPA [Liquid Mistress], and the idea behind that was one of my favourite beers from an early day, my early forays into this market, was 5am Saint, I love that kind of malty play with the hops, so we’ve gone for a much more malty version, a little higher in abv at 5.7%. Again you’ve got that nice malt sweetness and a good aggressive hope note on it. Then our 6.7% Breakfast Stout [Broken Dream] – “breakfast stout’ so you can have it for breakfast – chocolate, oats, milk and (to a response from the audience of “Alcohol!”) alcohol, that’s it. There’s a little bit of smoked malt in there to give you that slightly meaty quality, the chocolate, obviously, from the grist, milk – we add lactic sugar, to give that nice, smooth unctuousness – is that a word? It is now. The idea is to make sure we’ve got those four core, staple beers there all the time and then add a good range of things to play around with.

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Shattered Dream, an ‘imperial’ version of Siren’s bresakfast stout, Broken Dream

“Part of what we do is about cores and stability, the rest is trying to help people explore the flavour palate of what beer can be, so the first beer we brewed on our system, before we brewed any of our core beers, was a project called Maiden – the reason for the name was that it was the first beer, so a maiden voyage. It was a big barley wine, 11 per cent, we separated it out into various different barrels, including Bourbon, brandy, Armagnac, Cognac, rum and tequila. After a year we got some help from some wine guys, and Compass Box Whisky, who make some fantastic whiskies, and know all about blending stuff. The aim was to take each one of these individual components and make a blend that was greater than the sum of its parts. It was a great product, and we’re carrying it on, so the first beer we brewed 2014 was the base beer for Maiden this year – we’re got some new barrels to add to it, including some [Jack] Daniel’s, Sauternes and all kinds of different stuff. It’s all about trying to explore different ideas, different tastes, explore the flavour landscape, so that it’s not just about malt and it’s not just about hops. A lot of brewers now, it’s about how much citrus you can get pumping out of a 5 per cent IPA – I do like those beers, personally, but there’s other things to do: there’s sour, there’s barrel-aged, there’s all sorts of things. We’ve done a worm beer for a festival – the guys at Nordic Food Labs [part of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant regarded as the best in the world] did a thing called the Pestival, where every course had something to do with insects, and we were asked to make a beer with mealworms. It was originally supposed to be crickets, but something went wrong and we got sent worms instead.”

For a moment earlier this year it looked as if Witter-Merithew would be returning to the US, but fortunately for Siren, and beer drinkers in Brirtain, he decided to stay: “There was a period of time when he didn’t settle very well in the UK, they were thinking of going back but they ended up staying. Obviously we would have been gutted to see him go, because he’s a very experimental brewer, very much in the forefront of what we do,” Anley says. And I’d have been gutted, too.

The company turned over £300,000 in its first year, and is on the way to doing £1 million this year, a remarkable achievement for a start-up concern. Siren has now added to the capacity at the brewery sufficiently that it could double what it did this year, “although we won’t be doing double, the idea is to slow down a little bit, the new tanks are much more about making sure the tanks we have got are used to capacity with the core beers, and the rest will be the more experimental, the more fun stuff,” Anley says. Output is split almost exactly one third cask, one third keg and one third bottled, and around half the beer is exported, to Europe and “a reasonable amount” to the US. Little is available around Finchampstead, however: ” We have a terrible local scene – we send one van out a week locally. And we miss out on London because we’re not a London brewery either. We’re doing very well in London but it’s hard to get people to come out.”

I find that reluctance difficult to plumb. In the past few weeks I’ve been trying three of Siren’s experimental DIPAs, Ten Finger Discount, all-Citra and aged on cedar, Ten Toe Discount, same malt bill and hop dosing, again aged on cedar but with Amarillo hops; and Middle Finger Discount, the same again, but with Mosaic hops. Each is full of depth, character and flavour, a snappy retort to those who dismiss American IPAs as simply “too hoppy”, because without the carefully weighted application of masses of hop the experiences here would be weak and wimpy. These are beers made by a man who knows how to get exactly what he wants out of his ingredients, and they deliver an experience it is hard to imagine could be bettered.

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I have a new “magic beer moment” to savour: drinking 13-year-old Carlsberg Special Brew in the cellars of the Jacobsen brewery in Copenhagen.

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If you’re in Copenhagen you do, really, have to go and pay your respects to den Lille Havfrue

Actually, that was just one of a number of great moments during my trip to Denmark eaelier this month to talk about “beer and terroir from an international perspective” to a bunch of brewers not just from Denmark, but Norway and Sweden as well, as part of a conference in the town of Korsør organised by the New Nordic Beer movement (Ny Nordisk Øl, pronounced roughly “noo nordisk ohl”).

The men leading the campaign are two brewers, Anders Kissmeyer, formerly of the award-winning Copenhagen brewery Nørrebro Bryghus, and Per Kølster of Kølster Malt og Øl in the appropriately named village of Humlebæk – “Hops Creek” – north of Copenhagen, and PR man Christian Andersen. The idea of Ny Nordisk Øl is to forge a distinctly Nordic take on brewing, using Nordic traditions and, most especially, Nordic ingredients – not just flavourings, such as heather, sweet gale and wormwood, but yeast and other micro-organisms sourced specifically from a Nordic environment, in just exactly the same way as the New Nordic Cuisine movement has fused tradition and modernity to create a style of cooking that is rooted in a place and yet free to experiment (the success of which effort can be judged by the fact that the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, short for “Nordisk Mad”, or “Nordic Food”, which is one of the leaders of New Nordic Cuisine, has been voted “best restaurant in the world” by its peers in four out of the past five years). In a world where the craft beer movement seems intent on replacing one kind of ubiquity – bland Big Brewer lager – with another – highly hopped fruit-salad pale ales – it’s a trumpet-call to battle on behalf of individualistic, rooted, idiosyncratic beers, made by brewers intent on arriving at something that could only have been made in one place and at one time, that excites me greatly.

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Hærvejs Lyng heather beer: the ‘hær’ in Hærvejs is the same as the here in Hereford

Judging by the number of highly enthusiastic Nordic brewers I met in Korsør – I’m guessing, but there must have been 50 or 60 attendees – and the excellent Ny Nordisk Øl-inspired beers I drank there, it’s a movement with a good weight of support behind it, and terrific results to show those wondering if “beer terroir” is just a gimmick.

There have been various names given to the sort of products brewers involved in the Ny Nordisk Øl movement are making, but the one I like best comes from the United States – “place-based beers”. Fortunately I was able to tell the Nordic supporters of “place-based beer” that they are far from alone. In the United States, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Italy and France, there are plenty of others pursuing the same goal, of making beers with what one American called “the essence of here” in them. (I’ll be putting up my presentation on this blog, and naming names, later in the week). The bad news is that in what one might call the “Old World”, there is much less interest in the concept of “beer terroir”.

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Mark Hø Øl, or ‘Hay Ale’, once brewed in Britain

One of the ironies of trying to find “beer terroir” today is that once, of course, all beers were local, and reflected their local environment, local ingredients (local hop varieties, “land-race” strains of barley, local water, local yeasts) and local traditions. Porter, the world’s first “industrial” beer, the popularity of which powered the growth of what became the world’s largest breweries at the time, was developed in London as a local beer for local people, satisfying the desire of the city’s working classes for a refreshing calorie-filled beer, brewed using brown malt made in Ware, Hertfordshire, 20 miles to the north, hops from Kent, just to the east, and London well-water, full of calcium carbonate, which helps make good dark beers; matured using giant vats, a technique invented by and originally unique to London brewers; and served using methods of blending old and new beer specifically reflecting customers tastes, while being drunk with foods it was regarded as a particularly fine accompaniment to: boiled beef and carrots, for example, a very traditional old London dish. Even pilsner, the most widely reproduced beer style in the world began as a beer very much reflecting its Bohemian locality: made with Moravian malted barley, local Saaz hops and its home town’s particularly soft water.

Coming from the other direction, brewing traditions that are still deeply rooted in the local landscape – in particular the Belgian brews such as Lambic – now seem to be as reproducable as pilsen became, and almost as global. Every American brewer seems to want to make a Belgian ale laden with Brettanomyces bruxellensis, and they can buy that yeast right off the shelf, rather than having to move to Payottenland. When you see a brewery in Britain making a Gooseberry Gose, a variation on a style of beer from Saxony that was effectively unknown until a few years ago, you know you’re living in a world where “local” appears to mean very little.

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Xperimentet No 2, bittered with sea wormwood (‘strandmalurt’ in Danish)

Which is what the supporters of Ny Nordisk Øl are fighting against – and although they don’t have many fellow travellers in the rest of Europe, it’s to be hoped that when other brewers start tasting the beers that Ny Nordisk Øl has inspired, it will spur them to produce ales that reflect their own places. Here are my notes on some of the “place-based beers” I tried in Denmark:

An unlabelled (IIRC – although I may just have failed to record the name) ale brewed with sea wormwood (less bitter than the wormwood used in absinthe), camomile and sea buckthorn, three popular flavourings with Nordic brewers seeking to make a hopless ale. This had a lovely, deep, tongue-coating, very up-front bitterness, a pale, slightly cloudy appearance, a mouthfilling rotundity, and finally a sweetness under a full, vegetally/weedy flavour.

Ny Nordisk Hærvejs Lyng from the Vyborg Bryghus: a hop-free heather beer with a massive nose of honey, and liquid honey in the mouth but with a sharp tart lemony undertone, lightly petillant with no head. It’s alcoholic lemon and honey cough sweets. (The ale is named for the Hærvejen, or “Army Way”, a road that runs down the Jutland peninsula from Viborg to, eventually, Hamburg.)

Mark Hø Øl (“Hay Ale”) from the Herslev bryghus. Made with hay from the field at the back of the brewery: hay goes in after the wort is boiled, and fermentation using yeasts and other micro-organisms in the hay is allowed to take place for two days. The ale is then boiled again, and a “combinational yeast” added – and more hay. The result is a sharp, pale, flat beer with a taste of what I can only call “fruity feet” – but in a good way. Hay is mentioned by Thomas Tryon as one of the flavourings used by English brewers in the 1690s, so hey! Any brewers in the UK with a big field out back of the brewhouse, here’s an idea …

Thisted Bryghus Xperimentet 2, another hop-free beer with the bitterness provided by ingredients gatherer in the Thy National Park in North West Jutland, including rowan and sea wormwood (“rønnebær og strandmalurt” in Danish) and honey from bees who have been gathering nectar from “klokkeblomst” – literally “bellflowers, which I think means harebells in this case. (Trivia: “Klokkeblomst” is the name in Danish of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan.) Dark, strong (7.2% abv) and complex, it’s a drink with a deep and vegetal bitterness that rolls down the sides of the tongue and sits around the base of your mouth.

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Blueberry Berliner Weisse from Dugges Ale och Porterbryggeri in Sweden

Bärliner from the Dugges Ale & Porter Brewery in Gothenburg, Sweden, three Berliner weisse-style brews, made without hops, but including lactobacillus from the malt to give acidity, and flavoured with, respectively, lingonberries, raspberries and blueberries. The name is a pun in Swedish: “Bärlin” means “Berlin” and “bär” means “berry”. The blueberry version, strangely pink, and hugely tart and sour, with the fruit hidden below layers of pucker, is never going to find a wide market: I see that one Swedish Instagrammer called it “Möjligtvis den äckligaste ölen jag har smakat i hela mitt liv”. The lingonberry version, a rather more orange-pink, is flatter and much less tart, with the fruit in the aftertaste.

Fanø Bryghus Lynghvede (heather wheat ale) – brewed with orange peel, heather, chamomile . Heathery and honied with just a touch of Christmas oranges stored in an attic.

Ebeltoft Mols Bjerge Brygget unhopped and slightly sour ale flavoured with heather and sea wormwood from another Danish national park, the “Mols Hills” in central Jutland, brewed by the Ebeltoft farm brewery with the help of Anders Kissmeyer. Slightly sour, not over-bitter, with a light perfume from the heather.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about any of the other presentations at the conference because they were all in Danish (the organisers were kind enough to say that mine was “”i særklasse fine oplæg”), but I was able to have some revealing talks afterwards with the delegates: I asked them if the Danish craft brewing scene resented the international attention given to Mikkel “Mikkeller” Borg Bjergsø, knowing what the answer would be, and I believe you know the answer as well.

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Clik here to view.Still, the next day, I felt I couldn’t be in Copenhagen without (1) going to photograph the Little Mermaid and (2) taking a walk through the city to the original Mikkeller bar in Viktoriagade. It’s tiny and cramped, but as you can see from the picture of the interior, the line-up of beers is impressive: yes, that’s Three Floyds Dark Lord on the blackboard, which I never noticed until after I looked at the photograph on my phone back in England: I was too distracted by the collaboration beers on sale from a couple of my favourite British brewers, Siren and Wild Beer. Nice place to sit quietly and muse on the fact that the 11 per cent ABV Imperial stout you’re drinking cost DKr45 for a 20cl glass, which works out at more than £13 a pint: and on the other hand, it’s going down no faster than a pint of something a third of the strength would, while providing at least as much pleasure, or more. Good place to peoplewatch, too: the five Danish guys in their mid-40s on a table opposite where I was sitting looked the sort of solid private-business professionals I wouldn’t expect to see in a craft beer bar in Britain.

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Mikkeller has an exclusive deal with Three Floyds, hence the presence of Dark Lord on the menu …

Later that evening I hooked up with Peter Myrup Olesen, one of Denmark’s top beer bloggers. Peter is the man to turn to for top Scandinavian beer gossip: how Garrett Oliver is planning a second production plant in Europe for Brooklyn Brewery alongside the one opened in Stockholm with Carlsberg earlier this year, for example. He very kindly took me on an informative tour round a trio of Copenhagen’s other top craft beer bars, Brewpub in Vestergade, Taphouse in Lavendelstræde, which claims its 61 taps is the largest number in Europe, and the newer, and larger, Mikkeller bar, Mikkeller & Friends on Stefansgade in Outer Norrebrø. This is not an easy venue to get to without a guide, but it’s a very interesting contrast with the Viktoriagade outlet: the customers are around 20 years younger, mostly, and rather more hipstery and studenty (it’s that sort of area), which meant I was probably twice the age of most of those drinking there, and three times older than some.

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Michael Rahbeck in the Jacobsen cellars, running a taster off one of the fermenting vessels …

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Michael Rahbeck pouring out aged Carlsberg Special Brew

I was flying home the next afternoon, but a very nice man from Carlsberg, Bjarke Bundgaard, had invited me out to the Jacobsen Brewery, which is part of the Visit Carlsberg centre. Sadly, I didn’t get to see the records centre, but I did get to go down into the cellars of what was part of the original brewery, founded by JC Jacobsen in 1847, with one of the brewers who makes the specialist beers that Jacobsen provides for Carlsberg, Michael Rahbek, and, with Bjarke, drink beer straight from the fermenting vessels, and try some rarities stacked away behind doors normally locked – including Carlsberg Special from 2001. It was perfectly drinkable, since you’re asking, and actually tasted as if it would be very happy with another five years’ ageing.

The brewery kit, up in the open part of the visitors’ centre, is spectacularly beautiful, all shiny-penny copper, though I noticed it took a couple of guys with polish and rags to keep it that way. Bjarke and Michael treated me to a Danish lunch on Carlsberg, and I talked about beer, beer history and beer styles far too much. They did not seem to mind, however, since when I finally had to hurtle off to catch my plane, they loaded me with more than enough bottles of rare beers, including one of those 13-year-old Special Brews – more than enough to blow my baggage allowance, that is. Ach well …

I had a wonderful time in Denmark, and I’m very grateful to all those who showed me such tremendous hospitality: Anders Kissmeyer and Christian Andersen, for inviting me over to talk to the Ny Nordisk Øl conference, Peter Myrup Olesen for the bar tour, and Bjarke Bundgaard and Michael Rahbek for their kindness in taking me down to parts of the Jacobsen set-up other visitors rarely see. Thank you all.

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A genuinely copper copper at the Jacobsen brewery

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Some of the most beautiful brewing kit I have ever seen …

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… but it takes a lot of polishing

Please return later this week to read my presentation on beer and terroir.

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I gave a presentation in Denmark to a conference called to discuss “Ny Nordisk Øl” – “New Nordic Beer” – on “Beer and terroir from an international perspective” on Friday November 7. This, slightly tweaked, expanded in a couple of places and cut in a couple more, is that presentation.

The brewers of Denmark, Sweden and Norway are already enthusiastically making beers that reflect the place they are made, using local ingredients: you can read about some of those beers here. But what the Ny Nordisk Øl movement is doing is just part, albeit a tremendous part, of a wider movement to get away from internationally reproducible styles of beer, a movement that is finding expression in North America via campaigns such as “Beers made by walking about” and by brewers such as the Almanac Beer Company in San Francisco, the Mount Pleasant Brewing Company in Missouri, the Scratch microbrewery and farm in Southern Illinois and Plan Bee brewery in New York state, in Italy, in New Zealand, and in Australia, most eloquently by Ashley Huntington of Two Metre Tall brewery in Tasmania.

As I researched for my presentation, it became clear that the “place-based beer” movement is a growing global phenomenon, albeit as yet those engaged in it often seem unaware that others are fighting a similar crusade. This is a long blog but, I hope you’ll agree, fascinating in its implications for the future of craft beer.

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Clik here to view.Before I begin talking about beer terroir, it would be best to say exactly what I mean by the term in the context of brewing, what I think you need in order to be able to say that a beer has characteristics that fall under the name “terroir”, and some of the problems of trying to talk about “beer and terroir”.

There are plenty of complicated was of defining “terroir”, and what it takes for “terroir” to be reflected in a beer. But the one I like best was said by an American craft brewer who said he was attempting to achieve in his beers “the essence of here”.

How do you achieve “the essence of here”? In beer, there are, I hope you will agree, six major variables that affect the “hereness” of a beer:

● Grain
● Hops and other flavourings
● Water
● Yeast
● Brewing method
● Style – to the extent that style is not dictated by one or more of the other five factors.

Any one of those, I suggest, can be “local”, and capable of variations that can give the brewer a legitimate claim to be reflecting something of his or her region or people. With hops, the effects of terroir are widely accepted, though with grain there are more doubts: Mark Dorber, co-founder of the Beer Academy in the UK and a judge at the Great British Beer festival, said in 2012: “I certainly believe that the delicate citrusy Goldings grown in the East of Kent are markedly different from the more deeply perfumed Goldings of clay lands in Hereford and Worcester. But whether barley has ‘terroir’ as well is unclear. Barley’s plumpness, nitrogen content and general health may be more a function of annual weather patterns than of the soil and microclimate of its area of birth.” However, it seems unlikely that with hops, grapes, apples and other agricultural products reflecting where they are grown, barley grown in different terroirs and soils would not also show variable flavour characteristics.

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Paul Arney of the Ale Apothecary brewery, Bend, Oregon and his Finnish-style kuurna

Different yeasts have demonstrable effects on the flavours in beers, and the same is true of brewing methods. A decoction mash produces a different beer to an infusion mash. An IPA brewed in a Burton Union set will be a different beer to one brewed using exactly the same ingredients but in Yorkshire squares, and each can be legitimately said to reflect different regional traditions – including how a beer is served, with a “Yorkshire Square” beer suited to a specifically regional type of presentation, with a very tight head, that itself has implications for flavour and aroma – and different definitions of “here”. Each one of those variables can and will feed back into the others, and outside factors also reflecting “hereness”. If, for example, the local cuisine tends towards fatty foods, the local beer is likely to be more carbonated, to help cleanse the palate. If the local culture tends towards lengthy times spent socially in a bar or pub, the local beer is likely to be weaker than places where beer is more an adjunct to meals.

The difficulty we have in maintaining that there is such a thing as “beer terroir”, of course, is that all the factors that directly make a beer what it is can be reproduced, today, anywhere in the world. Grains, hops and other ingredients can be transported, if necessary, around the world. Water can now be demineralised and remineralised to match any location you like. Off-the-shelf yeasts to brew any style of beer you desire can be bought via the internet. And you can install a Yorkshire Square in Adelaide, or a Finnish kuurna in Argentina, or any other piece of kit anywhere you like, to imitate the brewing traditions of a land thousands of miles away.

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A rare example of a British ale with place-specific ingredients

Every brewing style we have inherited started as a local beer somewhere, reflecting local ingredients, local brewing methods, local tastes and local requirements for food matching and the like. Land-race barleys meant every region had malts made from barley varieties that had been bred, consciously or semi-consciously or entirely unconsciously, to suit the soils and environments in which they grew. Beers were made from local ingredients, in local styles that suited the local foods and the tastes and lifestyles of the local people. In some places this is still true. Across the Czech Republic, certainly for the majority of brewers, the barley they get for their Pilsner malts is almost always locally grown, with maltsters being very demanding in the barley cultivars they will accept, helped by the existence of an EU protected geographical indication (PGI) for “Czech Beer”, with the barley varieties allowed for production of beer that can use the “Czech Beer” PGI characterised by, among other things, a lower apparent attenuation limit, causing the presence of residual extract, with all that implies for taste, mouthfeel and so on.

Similarly the hop varieties will be limited to those traditionally used in classic Czech styles, and most be grown in one of the Republic’s three demarcated hop-growing territories, Žatec (or Saaz) and Ústí (or Auscha) in the north and Tršice (or Trschitz) in Moravia to the east, all of which have their own protected appellations. Most of the brewers of at least the “regional” size have their own labs and thus, most likely, their own yeast strains, and most breweries will use their own well-water to make their beer with. All of the beers will be made using variations on the decoction method of mashing the malt, which adds its own flavours and mouthfeels and so on. And Czech beer styles – Pilsen aside – are pretty much restricted to Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, particularly the most popular style, the pale, low-strength lager Světlé Výčepní pivo (literally “light draught beer”), which seems designed to fit into the Czech cultural preference for drinking vast quantities. So here we have an entire country whose beers strongly reflect place in pretty much every possible way: grain type, hop varieties, water, yeast, brewing methods and styles. Yet the idea that Czech beer has a terroir is seldom heard. The Czechs themselves seem not to make very much of the concept of “beer terroir”, and the rest of the world appears to regard Czech beer as just another, if generally superior, example of “global lager”, without recognising how much of it contains “the essence of there”.

Other Old World beer styles that sprang from a very specific place seem to suffer from the same problem: that because they can be reproduced anywhere and everywhere, no one regards them as particularly reflecting the “hereness” of where they sprang from. Dunkel lager may seem – it does to me – to be particularly suited to the pork-based cuisine of Bavaria, but nobody links this to the terroir of Franconia. Kölsch is another beer with PGI protection, and strict restrictions not only on the area within which it can be brewed and the types of barley and hop varieties that can be used to make the beer, but even on the style of glass it can be served in. But nobody seems to talk about how the beer is the essence of Cologne, and dozens of other breweries outside Germany make Kölsch-style beers without anyone calling them out. The same is true of other specifically geography-based German beer styles, such as Weissbier, and is happening with recently rediscovered styles, such as Grodziskie from Poland, or Gose, once very specifically a style of beer from Leipzig. Now American brewers, for example, are making their own versions of Gose, and not asking why and how this sour, salty style of beer grew up, and what it was about the region of Saxony that encouraged the development of that particular beer.

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‘Payottenland in a packet’

In Belgium, home of probably more geographically defined beer styles in a small space than anywhere else, the lack of attention paid to any idea of “terroir” is even more remarkable. Lambic has to be made in a very specific area – Payottenland – in a very specific way, allowing fermentation by wild yeasts that are very specific to that geographical area, using very specific ingredients. But nobody talks about Lambic, or its blended version, gueuze, being the “essence” of the countryside west of Brussels. Anyone can buy Wyeast 3278 Lambic blend, with its mixture of Brettanomyces and Saccharomyces yeasts and Lactobacilli, “Payottenland in a packet”, and make a “Lambic-style” beer themselves. And hundreds do, particularly in the United States, where “Belgian-style” ales of all kinds find an enormous and welcoming market. Nobody seems to mind that their “lambic” did not come from anywhere close to the Belgian village of Lambeek.

Britain had its regional beers once, and once again they became internationally reproduced, global styles. Porter originated in London, was made from London well water, excellent for dark beers, with dark malt from neighbouring Hertfordshire and hops from neighbouring Kent, and was for 150 years the beer most associated with London. Having tumbled to vanishing point in the UK for two or three decades in the 20th century, porter is back, but still a minority beer in the UK today, with only one in 20 brewers nationally making one. In London, however, 40 per cent of the capital’s new small brewers, apparently aware of the city’s brewing traditions, make a porter: is a porter brewed in London today, because of the style’s origins in London, a “bière de terroir”, to invent a phrase?

If Britain no longer has specifically regional beer styles, according to Ali Capper, spokeswoman for the British Hop Association and a farmer who grows 40 hectares of hops in the Herefordshire-Worcestershire area, the country’s second most important area for hops, British hops have a unique terroir, with lower levels of myrcene, one of the flavour oils found in hop cones, and more British hops are being exported to the United States and Australasia because they are more delicate and complex in flavour than those grown in places such as Oregon, Tasmania and Nelson. In 2012, she told a meeting of 320 British craft brewers, in an attempt to persuade them to use more local-grown hops, rather than the deeply fashionable American, ones that the country’s hop-growing terroir was found nowhere else: “Every other hop-growing region in the world is continental; hot summers, colder winters, very different to Britain’s uniquely maritime climate. As a result we grow some of the most delicate, complex and complimentary aromas in the world.”

However, while Britain has brewers who can point to their specific water supplies, or their local malts or hops, and brewers such as Shepherd Neame, of Faversham in Kent, who can and do claim to use entirely local ingredients, in this case, Kentish hops and Kent-grown barley, plus its own well water and its own house yeast, very few British brewers seems to have taken on board the word “terroir”, perhaps fearing ridicule. Even though it is noticeable that the London brewer Fuller Smith & Turner, which uses essentially the same ingredients as Shepherd Neame, makes beers with very different flavours, in large part because of the influences of the two breweries’ house yeasts, again there is no claim by Shepherd Neame to any sort of Kentish terroir. It is ironic that Kent is also home to some of England’s best wine growers, who are making some very highly regarded sparkling wines, and who are keen to point to the similarities of their soil to that of the Champagne region, and to claim a similar sort of terroir to the place where the most expensive sparkling wines come from.

One British brewer not afraid to use the ‘T” word is the Lancashire company Moorhouse’s of Burnley, which has persuaded farmers in its home county to start growing Maris Otter, the now traditional “cask ale” barley, and one which, perhaps significantly, has clear genetic links with landrace barleys of the past. In July this year, Moorhouse’s managing director, David Grant, said: “We aim to build a ‘terroir’ similar to that for French wines. We want publicans to know they can have cask ales with real provenance from Burnley – ales brewed in Lancashire from the best Lancashire malt. By ensuring a market we are helping it to survive, for our own sustainable future and for the industry.”

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Wild Beer: reflecting the Somerset terroir

Another is the Wild Beer Co of Somerset, founded in 2012 by Andrew Cooper and the perhaps aptly named Brett Ellis. Both were working at another brewery, but felt there was an opportunity to present a unique brewery concept in the UK, concentrating on barrel-ageing, wild yeasts and unusual ingredients. Among their beers is one called Somerset Wild, first brewed in October 2013, made with extra pale, wheat and acidulated malts, and yeast harvested from local apple orchards in Somerset, a county known for its ciders. The beer is very pale and hazy, dry, cidery and lemon-sour, and its use of local wild yeasts, Cooper and Ellis say, is “an homage to the Somerset terroir.”

There are a few British brewers using local ingredients, most notably, of course, Williams Brothers, which has ploughed a more or less solitary furrow since first making Fraoch heather ale 20 or so years ago. Williams Brothers has inspired brewers outside the UK to take up using local ingredients, but very few have repeated the company’s efforts back home, apart from occasional special brewings. I was involved in one such effort earlier this year, when the Windsor and Eton Brewery went to the London Amateur Brewers group and asked its members to take part in a competition to find a recipe for a beer to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which was signed (or to be historically accurate, sealed) at Runnymede, a sort distance down the Thames from Windsor. One of the group’s members, Manmohan Birdi, approached me to ask about Berkshire hops, and I suggested that it would be slightly more authentic to use herbs such as yarrow and ground ivy/alehoof in the ale, since these would probably have been used by 13th century brewers and would be found in the Runnymead area growing wild. Manmohan followed my suggestion, and his beer won the competition, with Windsor and Eton brewing a commercial-sized batch of the beer for bottling.

The brewery managed to source commercial quantities of yarrow and ground ivy, but Paddy Johnson, the head brewer, wasn’t happy with the look of the ground ivy – rather dried-up – and went out the evening before brewing was due to take place to see if he could find some growing along the Thames. He was staring at a patch he though was the plant when a man walking his dog came along and asked Paddy what he was doing. The brewer explained that he was after ground ivy, to brew with, but wasn’t sure of the plant in front of him was the right one, and the dog-walker said: “Well, I’m a botanist, and yes, that’s ground ivy all right.” What are the chances? So Paddy filled the plastic bags he had brought with him, and Magna Carta Ale contains ingredients that grew just a short distance from Runnymead.

Like the beers made by the Williams brothers, Grant, Cooper and Ellis, however, this seems to be a rare exception of a beer with the “essence of here” among the ingredients. So is “beer terroir”, the belief that you can reflect the “essence of here” in a beer, a non-idea for commercial brewers, because what makes a beer “from here” is so easily reproducible everywhere? The makers of the many traditional formerly locality-based European beers seem to think so, because even when they attempt to protect themselves with PGIs and the like, the concept of “terroir” is not one they consciously wield.

However, there ARE brewers not afraid to pick up the idea of beer terroir and run with it wherever it might take them, though ironically, it is brewers working outside the older brewing countries who are the enthusiasts for the possibilities of local beer that reflects local environments, local authenticities, local tastes and local uniquenesses. In the Americas, North and South, in Australia and New Zealand, in Japan, and in countries such as France and Italy that are familiar with the concept of terroir as it applies to wine, brewers are experimenting with local ingredients, local yeasts, local flavours and partnerships with other local alcohol traditions to make beers that do indeed contain the ineffable “essence of here”.

Sometimes these efforts seem to be nothing more than an attempt to show that something can be done: for example, the Ontario Beer Company in Canada and its two “all-Ontario beers”, 100 Mile Lager and 100 Mile Ale. Both hops and barley are grown in Ontario, but not in huge quantities, and Ontario brewers would normally get their hops from the United States and their malted barley from Saskatchewan. To make all-Ontario beer (using Lake Ontario water) in commercial quantities, 35,000 litres, brewer Brad Clifford had to buy Chinook and Cascade hops from five different farms in the province to get the 300 pounds – 140kg – he needed, and place a special order with the Canadian Malting Company for sufficient malt, well in advance of brewday. But nothing very much is being claimed for the two beers in the way of Ontarian terroir.

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Clik here to view.Rather more is made of Estate Ale, made by Sierra Nevada in California. Although it is now a substantial brewer, employing 400 people and producing more than a million barrels a year, Sierra Nevada also has a positively minute operation at its home in Chico, California where two full-time farmers look after 30 acres of organic barley and nine acres of organic hops: Cascade, Chinook and Citra. The barley is harvested and turned into malt every autumn, which is then ground to make wort, the hops are picked and added undried to the brewery kettle (since Sierra Nevada has no kilns to dry them), and a tiny 800 barrels of 6.7 per cent abv Estate Homegrown Ale is made. Unlike in a normal brewing operation, there is no chance for the brewer to blend the malts and hops used to make the beer to try to achieve consistency, and thus, far more than in regular beers, each batch of Estate Ale reflects the weather – rainfall, temperature and humidity – over the time that the barley and hops were growing, and each year’s beer will be subtly different from previous years. This is exactly the sort of “terroir” influence that winemakers talk about, and Sierra Nevada is not afraid to use the word “terroir” when describing the flavours found in Estate Ale, such as grass, green vegetables and cedar. Some of those flavours come from the use of “wet” – undried – hops, and Ken Grossman, founder and now president of Sierra Nevada, was one of the pioneers of “wet hop” beers, in 1996, a process that ties the beer made with wet hops into a very specific time: the hops, if not dried, have to be used within 12 hours or less of being harvested. Wet hop beers are becoming increasingly popular as a sort of “Beaujolais Noveau” of beer, with brewers racing to be the first to get freshly harvested hops into the copper. Few, though, are making anything to the “terroir” aspect of using fresh, undried hops.

In a slightly different take on the same “brewery farm” idea, the Oregon brewer Rogue Ales leases 265 acres from Oregon farmers for growing two varieties of barley, called Risk and Dare, and 42 acres for raising seven strains of hop, which are used to make specifically Oregon brews. The beers made from those hops and that barley go out under the Chatoe Rogue name, and the bottle label goes so far as to give the latitude and longitude of the “micro” hopyard and barley farm. Five different beers have been made so far, including an amber ale called OREgasmic Ale, a wet hop ale, again, and a black lager.

These are, however, expensive beers to make, and perhaps only big, successful brewers like Sierra Nevada and Rogue can afford the luxury of their own hopyards and barley farms. Ken Grossman has said that, including labour, it costs his company $170 to grow a pound of its own Estate hops, against the mere $2 a pound it would pay for hops on the open market. At the same time having the fields where the Estate Ale hops and barley are grown certified organic cost Sierra Nevada tens of thousands of dollars.

For brewers in the right parts of the world, there is no need to have your own farm. The Seven Brides Brewery is in the Willamette area of Oregon, the heart of the Pacific North West hop-growing area, and uses local-grown malted barley and hop varieties grown within three miles of the brewery: Willamette, an American type, but also Hallertau and Perle, originally from Germany, Fuggles from England and others. Jeff DeSantis, owner-brewer at Seven Brides, says that the soils of the Willamette valley produce hops with distinctive flavours and oils compared to their European counterparts, so that even with the same recipes and same varieties, his beers are going to show a definite Oregon terroir.

It can be argued that “terroir” was properly discovered in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when brewers in California first started deliberately using massive amounts of Cascade hops, inventing the “American Pale Ale” style, the continent’s first indigenous style, which quickly revealed a previously untapped desire among drinkers for strongly hop-forward beers. The Cascade hop’s parentage undoubtedly includes some contribution from the wild American hops that were already growing across the continent when European settlers arrived with their own hop varieties. Those European hops interbred with their wild American cousins, which contributed flavours to American varieties such as Cluster that European brewers dismissed with adjectives such as “rank”, “piney”, and “catty”. But from 1980 onwards, with the influence of beers such as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, made with Cascade, the flavours that hops with a contribution from native American varieties gave to beer became increasingly popular. Again, while American Pale Ale reflected its terroir, through the use of hops with an American ancestry, there were and are no barriers to brewers elsewhere making beers with the same hops, not any barriers to hop growers elsewhere growing those same hops, and indeed, Cascade is now grown in Australia, in New Zealand and in England: in Australia and New Zealand, at least, there is a definite “terroir” influence, with New Zealand Cascades, according to one brewer who knows both varieties well, having a more grassy/chlorophyll character.

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Neomexicanus hops: a genuinely American variety

However, brewers are now moving on from “half-breed” Euro-American hops to the full-blooded version: there is increasing interest in brewing with actual wild American varieties, and breeding those wild varieties to find types that can be cultivated by farmers. Of the three varieties of wild hop in North America, the one exciting most interest goes under the botanical name of Humulus lupulus var. neomexicanus, which as its name suggests, is found in New Mexico, and right through the Rocky Mountains area, from the Mexico border to Saskatchewan. A man called Todd Bates has been home-brewing with wild neomexicanus hops he finds around his home near Taos, New Mexico since the mid-1990s. The best varieties that Bates has discovered are now being grown on a hop farm in the Yakima Valley in Washington, and the first commercial beers made with neomexicanus appeared this year, one made by Crazy Mountain Brewery of Colorado, Neomexicanus Native Pale Ale, and the other, almost inevitably, by Sierra Nevada, which releases its Neomexicanus Wild Hop IPA next month, December. Sierra Nevada said of the beer: “These bizarre, multi-headed, native US cones have a flavour like nothing we’ve tasted, and for the first time, we’re showcasing their unusual melon, apricot and citrus aromas and flavours in our beer.” Without a doubt, a large part of the appeal of these and what seem certain to be many more neomexicanus hop beers to follow will be customers’ desire to taste a truly American beer made with a truly “essence of here” hop.

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Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan

Others find terroir in a different way. Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan of the Almanac Beer Company in San Francisco say they “aim to create something special and uniquely Northern Californian” with a brewery “dedicated to producing seasonal artisan ales, brewed specifically to complement local cuisine, sourced and prepared with the same great care and craft. Each harvest we partner with a different Northern California farm to supply the fruit used for our next brew. Every beer is a collaboration between us and the local terroir. Before brewing ever begins, we collaborate on ideas for interesting, unusual and seasonal beers. Once we’ve settled on that idea, we carefully select our partner farm – focusing on small, family-run operations, just like us. Then we start with the basics. Water, malt, yeast and hops are combined to create a balanced beer with equal parts sweet and bitter. Then the fruit is added, so that the hungry yeast can eat the sugars in the fruit as well. This creates a beer that has all of the flavours of the fruit, without overbearing sweetness. All of our base recipes are rooted in, but not limited to, classic beer styles and brewed in small batches. When ready, our beers are released to our favourite local restaurants and retailers to be enjoyed with food and friends.” Among the Almanac Beer Company’s beers is one called Golden Gate Gose, at five per cent abv.

A similar line is taken by Kim Kowalski, brewer at the Mount Pleasant Brewing Company in Missouri, who says: “Anything we can harvest locally is what I like to use. Local honey, local vegetables or fruits or herbs is really fun because it says who we are, speaks for the area it comes from.” Some go further than just harvesting herbs, At the Ale Apothecary brewery in Bend, Oregon brewer Paul Arney felled a 200-year-old spruce tree that grew down the hill on the brewery grounds in 2012 and hollowed it out to make a Finnish-style kuurna, the rudimentary, rustic trough-like log that acts as a lauter tun in sahti brewing, though he lined it with a lattice of Oregonian spruce branches rather than the juniper branches used in Finland. About the spruce, Arney says: “There’s a connection with the American colonial brewer and it grows on our brewery property.” After lautering, Arney boils the wort before adding a small amount of hops for bitterness or, in the spring, fresh, herbal spruce tips, and selling it as Sahati.

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Plan Bee brewery in New York state, run by Evan Watson

It is, however, the growing farm-brewery movement that is the among the most specifically enthusiastic about beer terroir. Plan Bee brewery in New York state, run by Evan Watson, is the only brewery to currently make every one of its beers with all-New York ingredients. The hops and barley are grown in the state, with many of the hops coming from Watson’s back yard, and his current house yeast strain was originally found on Muscadine grapes growing in his back yard as well, and developed through repeated brewing sessions. Watson is currently experimenting with other yeast strains: a peach tree strain, strawberry yeast, and a newly cultured honey yeast. Watson wants to find a larger property, of around 15 to 30 acres, put most of it to over to growing grain, with an acre of hops. With that, he hopes, Plan Bee can source every ingredient from its own property, with a larger apiary, a malthouse, a hop-oast, and a small orchard.

The Scratch microbrewery and farm in Southern Illinois “focuses on farmhouse beers and other styles brewed with home-grown and locally farmed and foraged ingredients.” The brewers describe what they are doing as “an uncharted frontier in modern brewing, showing the nearly limitless possibilities of brewing and bittering with plants other than hops in combination with modern malts, yeasts, and global beer styles.” It produces more than a dozen different sorts of gruit beer, sparking up traditional beer styles with the addition of local ingredients, including nettle, elderberry, ginger, dandelion and maple sap. The brewery’s beers include an unhopped burdock sahti, a sour Finnish ale bittered with cedar and roasted burdock root; hickory leaf IPA, an “English-style” IPA made with fresh hickory leaves, which add a dry bitterness to the end of the palate, and in particular 105, a strong saison made with 105 different “previously living organisms”, all herbs, roots, fungi, fruit. The brewers describe it as “an aroma of earth and herbs … complimented by a complex flavour of citrus, pepper and dirt created by the myriad of Southern Illinois’ ingredients: the essence of here.”

Foraged ingredients are one of the important strands in experimental new brewers’ search for a terroir of beer, a strand that looks back to pre-hop brewing traditions, and what was known on the mainland of Europe – although not in Britain – as gruit beer, when flavourings were whatever herbs, plants, roots and leaves could be found in the local woods or on the local moors. One of the forces behind the nascent “place-based beer” movement in the United States is the Beers Made by Walking project, founded by Eric Steen in 2011. Brewers are invited on hikes, and then brew beers inspired by those hikes, using ingredients found and identified on those hikes. To quote Steen, ” Each walk is different, each beer is a portrait of that landscape … Each beer becomes a drinkable look into the specific place that inspired its creation.” Among the plants that have gone into beers from the Beers Made by Walking project, a fair few are well-known pre-hop ale herbs, such as yarrow and spruce tips, but more unusual additions have included rose hips, huckleberries, Melissa mint, vanilla leaf, red cedar tips, Saint John’s wort, wild ginger, sumac, bee balm, pineapple weed and amarinth

In Britain, the Pilot brewery, which opened in Leith, just outside Edinburgh in 2013, linked up with the Vintage bar and restaurant in Leith, which has been using foraged food in its seasonal menus. The restaurant supplied the brewery with foraged ingredients for a gruit ale to be sold to diners – scurvy grass, a relative of horseradish; laver, a variety of edible seaweed; crab apples; black lovage, a celery-like plant now naturalised in Britain but originally from Macedonia; sea buckthorn; and juniper branches. The Ilkley brewery’s 5% gruit ale, called Doctor’s Orders, uses a recipe put together by beer sommelier Jane Peyton containing a couple of very traditional herbs for flavouring pre-hop ale, yarrow and bog myrtle, along with rosemary, sage, heather flowers and heather foraged from Ilkley Moor. In Corsica, Brasserie Pietra makes a wheat beer called Colomba that is flavoured with herbs gathered from the local “maquis”, or shrubland.

Other have been adding ingredients that are simply there, rather than ones that have to be foraged for. In Italy, a country with almost no native brewing traditions, the host of new small brewers have been enthusiastically throwing whatever is at hand into their brews. Several brewers have been combining local grapes with beer: Nicola Perra of Birrificio Barley in Sardinia takes Cannonau grapes right after they have been harvested, boils them for 16 hours, adds wort from mashing six types of British malt and Cascade hops and ferments it all to make a brew called BB10. Similarly LoverBeer in Piedmont brews a tart and citric beer incorporating local Fresia grape must. Many put chestnuts into their brews, in the form of chestnut flour, roast chestnuts, chestnut pieces, as in Nirra Amiata Artisinale of Tuscany’s Vecchia bastarda – “Old Bastard” – chestnut honey and chestnut jam. Chestnut beers have become such a characteristically Italian style that they now have their own category in the country’s annual beer competition. This is terroir – using local produce – almost forcing itself upon brewers.

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Clik here to view.In New Zealand, brewers have been reflecting where they are by flavouring their beers with indigenous trees and shrubs. The Good George brewpub in Hamilton made a Lime and Horopito Gose, which included lime zest and juice, leaves from the horopito shrub, native to New Zealand, and also called a pepper tree because its leaves have a hot taste, Marlborough sea salt, and Motueka hops. The Wigram Brewery from Christchurch makes a spruce beer in memory of the 18th century Captain James Cook, who himself made a spruce beer when he landed in New Zealand, and like Cook they use leaves from the native manuka tree, the New Zealand tea tree, which give menthol flavours to the beer.

In Japan, while beer has been taken up enthusiastically since it arrived in the 1870s, there has been no sense of anything that might be recognised as “terroir” about the country’s beers. A few years ago, one man, Shiro Yamada, a financier who had spent time studying in England and had fallen in love with European beers, decided that what his country needed was beers that could pair with Japanese cuisine. When I met him, he told me: “I drank a lot of beer from all over Europe when I was in the UK, 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.” Yamada picked two typically Japanese flavourings, sanshō, or Japanese pepper, and yuzu, a citrus fruit that looks like marriage between a grapefruit and a mandarin. 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 in Belgium. Thus to make his beers, Kagua Blonde and Kagua Rouge – Kagua meaning “Japanese aroma” – the sanshō and yuzu that give them their aroma and flavour are grown by “top quality producers who have exceptional reputations”, according to Yamada, harvested, and 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. Kagua is a beer that, through the flavours derived from the Japanese ingredients, certainly reflects “hereness” better than most Japanese beers, but a 12,000-mile round trip may detract from the “localness”.

Yamada’s aim was comparatively simple: to make a Japanese beer that could complement Japanese food. The most radical expression of the search for beer terroir today comes from a few thousand miles south of Japan, in Tasmania, and from a man who was originally not even a brewer, but a wine-maker. Ashley Huntington was born in Australia, trained as a wine maker, worked in the Languedoc in France for six years and came back to Tasmania, where he bought a farm with the intention of making wine. “I soon realised that 60% of Australian hops were grown all around me and yet not a single brewery was located within cooee … odd! It smelt like opportunity and, with the wine industry in meltdown, I jumped in head-first.” Huntington knew so little about brewing, he thought he had to grow his own ingredients, setting up a small hopfield and harvesting his own cereals.

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Ashley Huntington of Two Metre Brewery, writer of what could be the place-based beer brewer’s manifesto

The first brews from his Two Metre Tall brewery were hit by wild yeasts – but Huntington welcomed this, figuring that the esters and acidity the wild yeasts brought made for better, more drinkable beers. He experimented with steeping fruit from neighbouring orchards in barrels with his acidic beer. Today all the brewery’s beers are made from ingredients either grown on the farm or sourced locally. They include a Sour Cherry Ale, made with whole Morello cherries grown locally and oak-barrel fermented for seven months, and a Sour Plum ale, made with wild plums collected from along the river around the farm. Huntington says: “The fruit is thrown into the barrel with its skin on and the indigenous yeast goes to work. Wild beer is a beautiful, natural, risky technique and no result is guaranteed just the way I like it.” All his beers, he says, reflect “the desire to create expressions of place and time. Beer terroir!” Two years ago, Huntington won a $20,000 Churchill scholarship which enabled him to travel to Europe and America, talking to brewers and maltsters about farmhouse brewing, spontaneous fermentation and the use of fruits in beer. At the end of the trip, Huntington wrote a report summarising his experiences which could serve as a manifesto for those who, like him, believe in the possibility of beer terroir:

” I could envisage in my mind’s eye the very alluring prospect of travelling around the world drinking beers which were not a slavish local mimicry of some internationally ubiquitous “beer style”, but beverages produced by creative and inventive brewers harvesting their local ingredients – cereals, hops or local significant spices and aromatics – and transforming these worts into beers of provenance by harnessing the fermentative powers of the microflora indigenous to the location of the brewery. It recalled the very best of the international wine industry, and evoked the elements common to the most flavoursome, the most sought after and the most revered foods on the planet; time, place and individual. Even more alluring was that such a concept in beer could emerge from the intellectual ruin of the profiteering multi-nationals, who for their own profit, have reduced the imagination of brewers and the expectations of consumers to the very baseline. No, beer is not simply the common beverage of the poor, just as it is a fiction that wine will somehow raise the social standing of those who are knowledgeable about it. Beer deserves its place as one of the oldest, most important, most nutritious and most culturally significant foods offered to humankind and it is very much the remit of the brewing craftsman to deliver against this ambition.”

Many thanks to all those who supplied me with information for this presentation, including Kelly Ryan, Graham Reeks, Gary Gillman, Max Pivero, Eugene Tolstov, Ricardo Aparicio and Stefano Ricci

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Craft beer taps at the Narrow Boat in Islington, a Young’s pub

One fascinating statistic popped up when I was talking to Stephen Goodyear, chief executive of Young’s, this week for the day job: Young’s pubs sold a million pints of craft beer in the six months to September 29 this year.

That’s “craft beer” defined as “kegged beers made by small brewers”, in Young’s case, pretty much Meantime and Camden Brewery. To save you working it out, across Young’s 240 or so pubs, that’s equal to not quite two 50-litre kegs a week per pub of beers such as Camden Hells Lager and Meantime London Pale Ale. Since quite a few Young’s pubs don’t sell draught craft, that probably means those that do are indeed getting through two kegs a week or more. It’s also the equivalent of 7,000 barrels a year – there are plenty of small breweries in the UK that don’t even brew that much on their own.

Is that making any difference to Young’s cask ale sales? Well, according to Goodyear, cask-conditioned beer is still around 25 per cent of the total beer sold in Young’s pubs, which is considerably higher than the national average of 16 per cent (more than half as much again, in fact). Some of that is cask beer from other people, but beer branded “Young’s” as a proportion of that is about four to one. So 20% of draught volume in Young’s pubs is still Young’s beers: Special, Ordinary, Winter Warmer and the like.

Not, of course, that Young’s brews those beers any more: since it cashed in on the value of the brewery site in the heart of Wandsworth, they’ve been brewed in Bedford, by Charles Wells. But Goodyear was adamant that having a Young’s beer offer, even if the company still doesn’t brew the beer itself, is still “very important: Young’s beer has been in Young’s pubs for the thick end of 200 years and we always want to keep that going. Wells have done a great job brewing the beers, and I think it’s better than it’s ever been, frankly.”

Not, I’m sure, that many of the more Taliban-esque Camra members will agree, but haters gotta hate, and since the demise of Whitbread, Watney’s and the rest, Camra’s tiny minority of haters have turned to hating the big family brewers who were once the heroes, such as Fuller’s and Wells. Fortunately, they make no difference to the success of a company such as Young’s, which runs some of my personal favourite pubs and sells some of my personal favourite beers, and which saw revenues for the 26 weeks to 29 September up 7.8% in total, to £116.6m, and up 6.9% on a like-for-like basis.

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Oh, irony. It’s only a very short time since I mocked Nick Fell, marketing director at SABMiller, for sharing with us, in a presentation about getting more women to drink beer, the “duh, really?” statement that “no one wants a pink beer, including ladies.” But now I have discovered a beer I’m sure very many women will like – and it’s pink.

Not that they’ll like it because of its colour, of course: they’ll like it because it’s a very fine beer, with great depth and complexity of flavour, a beautiful deep bassoon-like bitterness (in contrast to the violins-and-saxophones bitterness of hoppier beers) giving structure to a sweetness that is laced through with liquorish and dark green herbal flavours. How do I know women will like it? Because when I sampled a bottle myself, right after thinking: “This is an extraordinarily good beer”, my next thought was: “I bet Mrs Z would enjoy it” – and not only did she enjoy it greatly, she relieved me of the rest of the bottle, consuming it all herself. Mrs Z is rarely a beer-drinker, touching only the very occasional pils and the even more occasional wheat brew. So if she loves a beer that I think is great too, you can bet we have a genuine cross-party vote-winner.

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It’s pink, but this ain’t no Barbie brew

What is this beer? It’s Crazy Viking, one of the brews I brought back from my trip to Denmark last month to talk at the conference on Ny Nordisk Øl, or “New Nordic Beer”, it’s made by Det Lille Bryggeri or Little Brewery, from the small village of Bringstrup, just outside Ringsted, in the middle of the Danish island of Zealand (the one Copenhagen sits on), and it’s a deep ruddy pink because it contains considerable quantities of beetroot (red beet, to Americans) and beetroot extract, added both into the wort before boiling and in the fermentation tank. It also has in it masses of liquorice and nettles, those two giving most of the bitterness, I’m guessing, and only an “extremely limited” amount of hops. Beetroot is about seven per cent sugar, of course, and doubtless that helps to lift the abv of the beer up to 7.9%.

Det Lille Bryggeret’s brewer, René Hansen, has made beers with beetroot as his contribution to the New Nordic food and beer culture movement: the first, with just beetroot and nettles, was called Red Viking, and the one I drank (until Mrs Z stole it from me) has liquorice as well and is called Crazy Viking. It’s the second New Nordic Beer movement-inspired brew to completely blow me away, after the Hø Øl (hay ale) from the Herslev Bryghus I mentioned here (more irony: the Herlsev guys are now having to fight their local bureaucrats, who are trying to ban them from putting hay in their beer on the grounds that it’s not a listed food ingredient under EU regulations. I’ve sent them a copy of a page from Thomas Tryon’s book published in England in the 1690s that mentions hay ale, to show it’s an old tradition – hope it helps, it’s a marvellous beer.)

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Clik here to view.I’m not sure the Crazy Viking beer name would recommend itself to women drinkers, and nor, probably, would the beer’s bottle label, with its image of an utterly sloshed Viking, one helmet horn drooping. But the liquid itself is an example of what a number of people have suggested since Nick Fell raised the spectre of the missing female beer drinker again back in October: that if there is going to be a style of beer that will appeal to a broader spectrum of women than drink beer now, it certainly won’t be one made by a giant corporation setting out deliberately to capture that market, and it’s much more likely to be the result of an accidental spin-off from a craft brewer or group of craft brewers, like the Ny Nordisk Øl crowd, making a beer that everybody agrees is great, regardless of gender.

Which gives me an excuse to rerun on this blog the dreadful history of the efforts brewers in the UK have made – unsuccessfully – to target women drinkers for three decades, sometimes with, yes, pink beer. For the history of beer marketing is littered with the smoking wrecks of attempts to get females to drink more beer, dating back to the 1980s.

Older readers will remember Allied Lyons, once one of the “Big Six” giants that dominated the British brewing industry until the 1990s, owner of Tetley’s bitter, Double Diamond and Skol lager. They probably won’t remember Bleu de Brasserie, a “lager for women” that Allied launched in 1986 with a huge marketing push, posters on the London Underground and the rest. It was meant to appeal specifically to female drinkers. It came in blue bottles, each with one of four different, stylish labels. And just like every attempt to market a specifically female beer since then, it sank within a short time of its launch, disappearing within a couple of years.

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Clik here to view.Other pre-Millennium failures to find beers women would like included Lacons lager and lime in the late 1980s, from Whitbread, when it was still a brewer; Miller Clear, from 1993, in which Miller allegedly “happened upon” a filtration process that takes out a lot of the carbohydrates and, with them, the colour, supposedly improving the beer’s “drinkability”, except nobody found it particularly drinkable and it disappeared within months; Anu, a nitrogenated beer named for the “ancestral mother of the Celts”, launched in the United States in 1999 and a year later pushed out to an utterly uninterested Scotland; and Carling Rock Filtered Beer, launched in 1998 at “men and women in the 18 to 34 age range” and backed by a £5m ad campaign that was more money poured down the pissoir. There was also Whitbread’s disastrous GB lager, launched in 2000 with an appeal that was meant to be “unisex” but which never got further than its regional test markets.

In 2003, Paula Waters, Camra’s new woman chairman, used the Great British Beer Festival to urge big brewers to launch a beer specifically targeted at women. But as Pete Brown pointed out at the time: “They already have, several times. Every time, they failed. The truth is that the world just doesn’t divide into pink and blue. Women like beer. More women could be persuaded to try beer. But women like beer in spite of, even because of, the fact that it it’s not aimed directly at them. They drink beer when they’re feeling a bit laddish, or just when the mood and the occasion are right. Similarly, wine producers did not have to go through a process of making their product macho to persuade men to drink it in ever-increasing numbers, they just positioned it so that blokes would find occasions when it was more appropriate than a pint. A beer aimed at women just wouldn’t feel right, like one of those creepy blokes who has no mates of his own gender.”

This wise observation failed to stop brewers continuing to pursue the mirage of the female-friendly beer. In 2004 Interbrew, as was, launched a beer in France called Extra Kriek, a version of a cherry beer already on the market in Belgium, with a recipe that was said to “take out the bitterness and accentuate its fruitiness”, this supposedly making it more attractive to women’s tastes. Interbrew said it had taken inspiration from the cosmetics sector in launching the product, which was packaged in red plastic film and marketed in women’s magazines under the slogan “At last, a beer for women”. A decade on, you’ll have noted, the product has failed to release armies of kriek-drinking females.

The following year, 2005 Anheuser-Busch brought out BE – “Bud Extra” – a version of Budweiser with caffeine, guarana and ginseng in a black glass bottle “aimed at both male and female drinkers”, and described as having a flavour “reminiscent of beer with a raspberry, blackberry and cherry aroma that delivers a beer with a sweet taste”. Jim Gorczyca, then Budweiser’s UK marketing director, said: “It’s a new and refreshing choice for consumers.” Unfortunately the drink turned out to appeal to teenagers more than women, and it was withdrawn in 2009 as part of a general clampdown on caffeinated alcoholic drinks.

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Charli: I really don’t want to think about what they believed they were doing with the shape of that fount

The urge to try to find a female beer market was driven, of course, by the decline in the male beer market, with sales falling, and the observation that only 10% of women in the UK were regular beer drinkers. In 2007 Cobra attempted to capture the female beer market with the launch of Cobra Bite, a “fruit-flavoured premium lager range” in four varieties – sweet lime, blood orange, apple and lemongrass – aimed at 25 to 35-year-old women. It was withdrawn after only a couple of years. Also in 2007, it was revealed that Heineken was testing a new “cider-based beverage” called Charli, aimed at women, and made from cider, barley malt and sparking water, with an abv of 5%. Marketing magazine wrote that it was being tested in bars in the Netherlands on tap and in bottles and “if successful, drinks industry observers expect it to roll out in the UK next summer.” It wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Coors had two attempts at marketing pink beers in 2008: Kasteel Cru rosé, a variation of the Kasteel Cru “champagne beer” brand made “with a hint of elderflower and elderberry”,  a joint idea developed with Brasserie Licorne, which made the beer on Coors’ behalf (elderberry, in Alsace, is apparently very popular as a sweetening addition to sparkling wine and beer) and Grolsch Rosé, made using cranberry juice, actually an SAB/Royal Grolsch product which was born in a mini-boom in rosé beer sales in the Netherlands at the time. Both, like Cobra Bite, were soon gone: according to an insider, Molson Coors killed both Kasteel Cru and Kasteel Cru Rose because it wanted to focus on a less expensive brand (Kasteel Cru was contract manufactured and therefore more expensive) which it could “scale up’ more “aggressively”.

In 2009, having clearly learnt nothing from Miller’s disaster 16 years earlier, it threatened to launch a “clear lager” as part of its “multi-million-pound project to increase the number of women who regularly drink beer”. The beer had an abv of 4% and was put through an ultra-filtering process that removed its colour. It was flavoured with green tea and dragonfruit, and “has a taste similar to an alcopop”. A spokeswoman for the brewer said: “We know that what turns some women off beer is the colour and the head, although they like the refreshing taste.” Apparently they didn’t like the taste of green tea and dragonfruit, though, because a year later Molson Coors was telling the marketing press that it was still going to launch the clear beer but it would now “taste more like a beer”. Six months on from that announcement, it was quietly revealed that the clear beer, which never even managed to get a name, had been shelved, on the grounds that it was “so unlike beer that it would fail to help the company’s ultimate goal of increasing the number of women drinking beer.”

Meanwhile another brewing giant, Carlsberg, was pursuing the seemingly uncatchable phantasm of the female beer drinker with Eve, a 3.1% abv “lightly sparkling product positioned somewhere between a lager and an RTD”, available in two flavours, passionfruit and lychee, trialled in Manchester in 2009 with a £500,000 ad campaign, rolled out nationally in March 2010 with a £3m ad campaign featuring Louise Redknapp and withdrawn, again, in 2012.

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Animée: more millions down the drain

By now Coors had set up a “female focused business unit” called Bittersweet, staffed by women only, charged with spending more of the company’s money on capturing the female drinker, despite all the previous failures to do so. Late in 2010 Coors announced that it would be launching a new range of beers in the middle of 2011 aimed at the female market, after research lasting 18 months, with a recipe that “fights the concerns women have around drinking beer, such as bloating, weight gain and taste.” The new beer, Animée, “less gassy and lighter-tasting than traditional beers”, had £1m spent on its development and another £2m on advertising. It was withdrawn in 2012 after less than a year, amid claims that both Coors Light and Corona were selling more beer to women than Animée was. According to one insider, Molson Coors’ own research had predicted the new beer would be a failure: “How a company could so blatantly ignore the research it commissioned itself, with Bittersweet, which basically said, ‘Don’t patronise women with pink tasteless beer’ is beyond me.”

Well, it seems there are, apparently, few so deaf as marketeers who don’t want to listen to an unwelcome message. In October 2012, despite the failure of Eve, the chief executive of Carlsberg, Jorgen Buhl Rasmussen, declared that he was now convinced women were the next big growth market for beer, and announced that he had asked Carlsberg’s 130-strong research department to dream up new “innovations and concepts” to attract women, by offering sweeter-tasting beer, because, oh yes, “females don’t so much like the very bitter taste you have in beer.” Carlsberg was already attempting to flog something called Copenhagen, a “metrosexual beer for the beer hater”, launched in 2011. Buhl Rasmussen told the Sun newspaper that while the packaging was a success, “the taste still needs work to make it more appealing.” Or to translate from marketingspeak: looks lovely, tastes like fizzy orc’s urine.

Little or nothing has been heard of the Buhl Rasmussen initiative (or “metrosexual” beer either) since then, but now SAB Miller is apparently convinced that it can finally find the pot of gold at the end of the female beer drinker rainbow. Nick Fell told City analysts back in October that the drive to making beer more female-friendly would start within six months with smaller efforts, before bigger beer launches and campaigns come to the fore from 2016 onwards. “There will be failures”, SAB Miller admitted – I’ll bet –  but Fell declared: “We’re confident of a shift in lager over the next five years to lager being more appropriate in mixed gender occasions. If we’re not seeing some movement in the next three to five years, at least in some markets, then we’re doing something wrong.”

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Cushie Butterfield: the image too many women have of a female beer drinker?

Unfortunately for Fell, and SAB Miller, I fear they are indeed doing something wrong: trying to solve the problem with entirely the wrong product. There probably IS, now, an opportunity to market beer to women generally: but not lager. Part of the problem is that the reasons women actually give for not liking beer are not the true reasons, or at least the whole reason. They might say: “It’s too bitter,” or “It’s too fattening.” But what they probably mean is: “I just don’t like the baggage that comes with being a woman drinking lager, the assumptions by too many people that you’re somehow not sophisticated, you’re unfeminine.”

That’s not the case with craft beer, however, or not so much, certainly: and if any beers are going to appeal to women, it is most likely to be versions of the hoppy, floral American pale ales and the like that have swept across the Atlantic and are now being brewed, not just by almost every microbrewer in Britain, but by increasing numbers of established brewers as well; or one of the amazing beers being produced by the “place-based beer movement” I talked about here, including the Ny Nordisk Øl guys. What’s more, they will be beers that men would not be ashamed to be seen drinking, either, even if they might actually be beetroot-pink.

(Large parts of this blog entry appeared previously on the Propel Info website)

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Compared to, say, Roger Putman, recently retired editor of Brewer & Distiller International magazine, who has visited more than 170 different breweries in his career, I’ve really not been to that many: fewer than 60, across four decades, albeit in six different countries. Pfff. Amateur status. But inexplicably, in 2014 I was welcomed into seven different brewhouses, of all sizes, that I had never been to before, from the massive new set-up at Guinness in Ireland to Twickenham Fine Ales’ current base, which may be bigger than its first home, but still produces less in a year than Brewhouse No 4 in Dublin makes in a day.

I take my camera with me around breweries, though I’m not, I cannot emphasise enough, a photographer in any sense except being the idiot pressing the shutter button. Very occasionally I get something that isn’t actually terrible. And since 2010 I’ve been using a camera that is fantastic at taking low-light shots, which helps enormously inside buildings. I have put a few of the pictures from my 2014 trips up on the blog to illustrate the pieces I wrote at the time, but two trips, to Shepherd Neame in Faversham and Hook Norton in Oxfordshire, never produced any words. So here is a small selection of snaps from two of Britain’s most traditional breweries:

Shepherd Neame brewery, Faversham

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Entrance to the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham, Kent

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An old radiator-style heat-exchange wort cooler, late 19th or early 20th century, discarded and lying around the Faversham brewery. The hot wort ran into the trough at the top and over the outside of the cooler, through which ran cold water, then poured into the trough at the bottom and ran away to the fermenting vessel

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Lovely poster from the time of the Shepherd & Mares partnership at the Faversham brewery, circa 1849-1864, hanging in the Faversham brewery boardroom

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A poster for Shepherd Neame’s bottled beers from 1926, now also hanging in the company boardroom in Faversham

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The 1914 mash tun at the Shepherd Neame brewery, refurbished 1949, still in use

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Inside the 1914 mash tun at the Faversham brewery, showing the slotted floor plates

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A copper lauter tun in the Shepherd Neame brewhouse, Faversham, with a copper in the background

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Stained glass windows in the Shepherd Neame brewhouse. Spot the icons, including a bishop’s finger signpost, and the Shepherd & Mares trademark

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Inside the Shepherd Neame sampling room, with slate tasting notes

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Framed letter in the Shepherd Neame sample room introducing the brewery’s newest beer in 1958, Bishops Finger

Hook Norton brewery

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The Hook Norton brewery, designed by the brewery architect William Bradford, who also designed Harvey’s brewery in Lewes and McMullen’s in Hertford, among many others. This is the ‘cliche shot’ of Hook Norton, the one everybody takes, but hey …

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There’s a joke in here somewhere about a work of art fit for the Louvres …

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Old grist mill at the Hook Norton brewery

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A notice on the wind trunk, a device for separating the plump malted grain from the dust and faulty, too-light grains before the malt was ground

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Inside a mash tun at the Hook Norton brewery wth the plates up after cleaning

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Disused copper cooler at the top of the Hook Norton brewery. The hot, newly boiled wort would be pumped up into the shallow cooler, and the louvres opened for the steam to escape as the wort cooled down before it was run into the fermenting vessels below and the yeast pitched. Infections? Undoubtedly …

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Copper, Hook Norton brewery. This is one of the few I have seen in a “large” brewery that does not exhibit the “iceberg” effect, where most of the copper is hidden below the floor that the operator stands on to feed in hops

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Inside the (empty, obviously) copper at the Hook Norton brewery

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I was disappointed and angry to see Rooney Anand, chief executive of Greene King, calling in the Daily Telegraph last week for minimum unit pricing for alcohol. Disappointed because the arguments for minimum unit pricing have been totally debunked, and Mr Anand should really have known he was talking rubbish – or his advisers should have told him. Angry because I cannot understand why he is using his position as boss of one of the largest brewers and pub operators in the country to promote the agenda of the neoprohibitionists for whom minimum unit pricing is but a small step on the way to totally restricting the sale of alcohol.

“Binge drinking continues to adversely affect our nation,” Anand cried, insisting that we have a “growing culture of irresponsible drinking”. And yet since 2004 there has been an 18.9% fall in alcohol consumption per head and consumption is now at its lowest level this century. Violent crime linked to alcohol has fallen by 32% since 2004 and by 47% since 1995. Where is your evidence for a “growing culture of irresponsible drinking”? Since 2005 the number of men “binge drinking” (a dubious concept in its own right, as I pointed out here has fallen by 17%; the number of women binge drinking has fallen by 23%; and binge drinking among 16 to 24-year-olds has fallen by 31% among men and by 34% among women. In 2012-13, alcohol consumption in England and Wales fell by 2.1% year-on-year, to its lowest level since 1990. “When it is possible to walk into a shop and buy a bottle of beer for less than a bottle of water, it is no surprise that, as a nation, we are moving in the wrong direction in our relationship with and consumption of alcohol,” Anand asserts. So a fall of almost a fifth in alcohol consumption in the past ten years is a move in the wrong direction, Rooney? Or do you not actually know that consumption is falling? Incidentally, that fall of nearly a fifth in alcohol consumption is actually far more than its proponents claimed would have been achieved by introducing minimum pricing. Oh, and it’s NOT possible to buy a bottle of beer for less than the price of a bottle of water, and never has been, unless you are talking about the most expensive designer water.

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The first mash at the new Greene King brewhouse, Bury St Edmunds, 1939

Anand goes on to claim that a 50p minimum unit price “could” reduce the costs to the NHS caused by alcoholic overindulgence by “as much as” £417m a year. Ignoring the two sets of weasel words there – “could” and “as much as”, the use of which sucks all the veracity out of his claim– it’s a pathetic claim anyway. £417m equals 31p per household per week. Big swing.

Next up, Anand references “a recent study by the University of Sheffield” which “indicated that minumum unit pricing” would have a larger positive impact on those in poverty, particularly high risk drinkers. Allegedly, minimum unit pricing “targets those prone to binge drinking, with their consumption expected to fall 7% through raising the price of approximately 30% of units sold to harmful drinkers.” But as Paul Chase, author of the excellent book Culture Wars and Moral Panic: The Story of Alcohol and Society (I’ve nicked all the stats here from him), has pointed out, “the Sheffield minimum pricing model is based on absurd assumptions, such as the belief that heavy drinkers are much more price-sensitive than moderate drinkers, and assumptions made about the price-elasticity of demand for alcohol that are at odds with what economic research and common sense tell us about the relationship between price and consumption.” To fill that out: there is no evidence at all that making drink dearer for heavy, problem drinkers will stop them drinking as much as they already do. Indeed, it seems more than likely that what will happen is that they will cut down on expenditure elsewhere in order to find the money to carry on drinking as much as ever.

Anand calls the failure to introduce a minimum pricing of alcohol in Scotland “disappointing”. But Scotland’s attempt to introduce minimum pricing hasn’t gone through because it is currently the subject of an investigation by the European Court of Justice, which is likely to give its decision on whether the proposal is legal, or breaks EU competition law, only at the end of 2015 or early in 2016. Expert betting is that it will be ruled illegal.

It is hard not to assume that Anand is backing the idea of minimum unit pricing because he thinks that it makes him appear on the side of the “good guys”, despite being a producer of “demon alcohol”. Perhaps, too, he thinks that minimum unit pricing will hurt the supermarkets more than it will the brewers and pub owners, and for that reason it’s a Good Thing. But he really needs to think about who he is getting into bed with by promoting minimum unit pricing. These are people prepared to lie and distort to promote their aims – the claim that “up to” 35% of A&E admissions are “alcohol-related”, for example, which is completely made up, of the equally preposterous claim that “Alcohol misuse hands a hefty annual bill of £21bn to UK taxpayers”, which is, again, based on unverifiable guesses and false reasoning. But the anti-alcohol lobby genuinely doesn’t care if its statistics aren’t true. It only wants to see its policies adopted, because it thinks it knows best what is good for all of us. To quote Paul Chase again: “Public discourse on alcohol is dominated by an absolutist, loony-left dominated, alcophobic public health movement that has become a vehicle for Big Business bashing.” Really, Rooney, do you think you should be promoting a policy these people want?

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Hard luck, haters: Greene King knows you don’t like its IPA, you think it’s too bland, “not a real IPA” at 3.6% abv, and it doesn’t care at all. Not the tiniest drop. In fact it’s probably quite pleased you don’t like it. You’re not its target market – it’s after a vastly larger constituency. If you liked its IPA, it’s fairly sure those people that Greene King would most like to capture to and in the cask ale market, young people, people still with a lifetime of drinking ahead of them, wouldn’t like it – and for that reason, the Bury St Edmunds crew have no intention of changing their IPA just to make you happy. In fact they’re not changing it at all – except to shake up its look, and put £2m in media spend behind it.

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The new look

Of course, it’s not just Greene King IPA that has hosepipes of vitriol directed at it by the Camra hardcore. Any widely available  cask ale gets the same – Fuller’s London Pride and Sharp’s DoomBar are equally hated, without the haters apparently being able to work out that the reason why these beers are widely available is because lots of people actually like drinking them, even if the haters don’t.

Indeed, it’s the popularity that is prompting the Bury St Edmunds crew into its current push. To its obvious delight, and, I suspect, slight surprise, Greene King has discovered that the flood of new young drinkers coming into the cask ale market find Greene King IPA just the sort of beer they want: there’s more to it that can be found in a pint of lager, but it’s still reasonably safe and unthreatening.

At a launch on Monday night in a bar near Oxford Circus in London to announce a new look for Greene King IPA, and other initiatives including a new website to educate licensees and bar staff on cellar management and how to serve the perfect pint, Dom South marketing director for brewing and brands at Greene King, quoted figures from a survey done last year for the Campaign for Real Ale showing that 15% of all cask drinkers tried cask ale for the first time in the past three years, and 65% of those new drinkers are aged 16 to 24. “We’re seeing a complete revolutionary shift in the drinker base coming into cask ale, which is exciting, because it means that this category, for the future, is in rude health,” South said. And where does Greene King IPA fit in here? “When you look at what those young drinkers want, from a cask ale brand, or just a beer, the three things a new young entrant wants are, first, something that feels right to them, a reflection of themselves, that makes them feel good about drinking the beer,” South said. “They want something a little bit modern, a little bit contemporary. The second thing is, they expect the beer to taste good – but let’s face it, too many pints in the UK are served sub-standard.

“The third thing is that younger people coming into the market want something that is a bit tastier than the lager market that they’ve left, but they want it to be pretty easy-drinking, the majority of them. They want something that tastes good, not something that needs chewing. That’s where the role of Greene King IPA comes in. There is a real role for a brand to play in the market, one that represents the safe choice when you enter into a product category that’s new to you, one that won’t let you down, that represents taste that is relatively easy drinking versus some of the 20,000-odd beers that you can have in the UK. With Greene King IPA, our simple strategy is to bring many more young people into our brand and the market, and also to stand for a signpost to quality, trust and assurance for people who might be about to come into the market.

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Clik here to view.“When we tested ourselves against those key things that young drinkers want, ‘Does it look and feel right for me, make me want to drink it?’, ‘Is it good quality, not going to let me down?’, and three, ‘Is it easy to drink, and something you’d want to have as your first drink?’, we were really excited by the results. We found the number one reason for people drinking Greene King IPA, time after time, is the fact that it’s easy drinking. I know a few people give it a hard time because it’s easy to drink – that’s its strength, that’s its role in the market. It’s the first drink I would recommend to someone if it’s their first time drinking cask ale, because it won’t let them down and it’s not too challenging. We did a load of blind taste tests and Greene King IPA, when it’s served right, is absolutely up there with the world’s largest cask ale brand* in taste tests, and beat significantly most of the leading brands in the cask ale market. So this product doesn’t need changing, it isn’t going to change and we haven’t changed it. It’s absolutely right.”

There we are, then, haters. Greene King has the figures to show that four out of five cask ale drinkers love the fact that Greene King IPA is an easy-drinking pint – which is, after all, the core definition of a session beer, and session beers are, or should be, the pride and pinnacle of British brewing, the beer that makes going to the pub with your mates worthwhile. If you don’t like it – tough. Go and drink something so hoppy your teeth need re-enamelling afterwards.

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Clik here to view.Not that everything in the IPA garden is perfectly lovely. There were two problems, the first relatively easy to try to solve, the second far more crucial, and difficult. On the first, South said: “We recognised, and consumers told us, we did need to move forward with the look and feel of the brand. We looked a little bit corporate, and perhaps a little bit traditional to the younger consumer. So we set off on the journey of bringing ourselves really up to date, a modern, contemporary look and feel that won’t alienate people who already enjoy a pint of Greene King IPA but that will genuinely bring younger people into the category and into the brand. I’m confident that this is going to do the job. It’s not a tweak and it’s not a small pigeon step forward, it’s pretty bold and it’s pretty big as a leap forward in terms of look and feel. Ziggurat Brands, the design agency that did it, have stripped it back to bare basics, taking inspiration from things they found in the brewery, so the copper colour is inspired by the copper kettles in the Greene King brewery, the teal colour because we wanted to evolve the green colour of Greene King IPA to something much more modern and contemporary. This is where we needed to make a big change to bring people in. At the same time it shouts heritage, with the crown and the arrows.” Teal – the hipster’s green. I’m never sure about that crown-and-arrows logo Greene King is adopting, though: it commemorates poor King Edmund of East Anglia killed by Viking archers in 869, after whom, of course, Bury St Edmunds is named.

More importantly, South said, “What we do need to focus on is making sure every pint is served perfectly. We are going to carry on with consumer support, advertising, all of those good things. But we feel it’s really important that we shift a lot of our emphasis, and put more money into the brand, with the trade. We’re going to invest heavily in supporting the trade to get quality right, and quality is the number one thing for us to focus on.” There two big initiatives here, the first a quality accreditation drive, with unannounced pub visits made by either Quality & Dispense Services, a senior Greene King representative or a third party quality agency. A pub will be required to pass ten quality tests, which include the taste, aroma and temperature of their Greene King IPA through to whether it is served in the right glass and the ability of bar staff to talk about the beer and describe it accurately. Pubs that are judged to pour a perfect pint of Greene King IPA will be awarded with a plaque and certificate, and crowners for their IPA pumpclips, “all signposts to the consumer to say, ‘This is going to be a safe bet,'” South said. Pubs that do not pass first time will be educated on the importance and benefits of looking after their cask beer range before another visit is made.

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Clik here to view.You cannot improve quality in a vacuum, however: and to that end, Greene King has launched a website giving free training, troubleshooting and best practice videos, available at www.beer-genius.co.uk.. “Beer Genius is Greene King’s open access training portal to the industry,” South said. “We recognise that staff turnover is a problem – it’s different for everyone, but let’s make an assumption, 100% every year. How on earth can licensees be expected to make sure every new bar staff member knows even how to serve a pint, let alone clean down the bar and do all the basics? So what this portal is going to do is teach cellar managers, bar managers, operations directors, BDMs, local area managers, but also bar staff, three things: how to manage a cellar, how to make the most money and yield they can out of cask ale, by getting the quality right and the yield up, and why commercially it makes sense, and third, how to serve the perfect pint.

“Why does it matter? It’s not just about giving the consumer the perfect pint – although that’s absolutely key. The benefit of giving the consumer the perfect pint is that yields in pubs will massively skyrocket, because quality and yields go hand-in-hand. A key part of what we’ve got to do is educate bar staff, as well as bar managers that when you get it right, but that tiny bit of extra effort in, your till will start ringing up more money. The numbers astounded me. About 70% of pubs, we estimate, have a yield of 91% or lower on their cask ales. It should be 97, 98, even 99%. When they close that gap, the benefit to that pub in terms of profit is enormous – it’s up to £5,000 through the till, per annum. That’s their benefit: the benefit to the consumer is no more dodgy pints. And therefore you stay in the pub, you tell your friends about that pub, the net promoter score of that pub improves, people come back. So what could be a huge loss to that pub through a dodgy pint becomes a huge gain. So it’s absolutely key that we help licensees with this.”

There we are: get the quality right, your yields from every cask will be up, and so will be your profits. The licensee is happy, the consumer is happy, the brewer is happy. Mind, I doubt the haters would be happy even if Greene King had the head brewer personally deliver every pint to their table in solid gold goblets with a £50 note for use as a beermat. Personally, I’m delighted if young drinkers find Greene King IPA a good gateway into cask ale: as they grow older, and more experienced, it’s likely that some – though not all – will start to experiment, to explore, and discover the kind of beers the haters enjoy, beers which indeed have a great deal to offer those who are ready for them. The quality initiative is excellent – other brewers, please, please copy. And the Beer Genius website, from what I’ve been able to explore so far, is a terrific resource for everybody – including drinkers, who can find out what has to go on to get them that elusive perfect pint.

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Does anyone make IPAs like this one any more?

Meanwhile, here’s a small rant directed at all those idiots who keep chuntering on about how Greene King IPA is “not an India Pale Ale” and how IPA has to be “strong and strongly hopped”, so it would survive the long journey to the Indian sub continent, over 200 years ago. You don’t have a clue what you are talking about. Let’s rush past the fact that 19th century IPA wasn’t strong at all, for the time, but comparatively weak, at around 6% abv. Do you complain because today’s porters aren’t matured in 30-feet-high oak vats for 18 months, as they were 200 years ago? Or that today’s stouts are as weak as 19th century porters? Do you complain because today’s milds are nothing at all like the mild ales of 200 years ago, 7% abv and made solely from pale malt? Beers change, and beer styles are not carved on stone tablets. A 19th century IPA would have been kept for up to a year in cask, would have lost all its hop aroma and would have developed a distinctly Brettanomyces flavour. Nobody at all is brewing an IPA like that. American IPAs, in particular, lovely beers though they often are, are nothing whatsoever like 19th century IPAs: totally wrong hops, totally wrong emphasis on hop aroma, often too strong, and meant to be drunk much more quickly after being brewed than 19th century IPAs were. After the First World War, and the huge rise in the tax on beer, all beers, of all styles, were brewed to lower strengths than they had been in the 19th century. What Greene King IPA is, is a perfect example of a mid-20th century IPA, just like those once brewed by Charrington, Palmers, Eldridge Pope, Wadworths, Wethered’s, Youngers and others in the 1960s and 1970s, all 1035 to 1043 OG. Go and get your Camra Good Beer Guide 2015 edition and look up Phipps IPA (page 844, column 2): OG 1042, abv 4.2%, “recreated from old recipes”: recreated from genuine 20th century recipes, as a genuine 20th century IPA. Just like Greene King IPA.

*Meaning DoomBar, presumably

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What sort of bastard goes along to a book launch just to point out to the author the mistakes he’s made?

Errrr …

Me.

OK, it was done in what I’d like to insist, really, was a semi-joking way, and in a spirit of, I hope, friendly beer comradeship, but if someone as highly regarded and influential as Mikkel Borg Bjergsø – founder of Mikkeller – is repeating historical beer myths in print that I (and others) have been trying to stamp on for a dozen or more years, well, somebody has to do something – even if I did come across as a prat.

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Mikkel Borg Bjergsø down in the cellar at BrewDog Camden, conducting a swift beer tasting for the launch of Mikkeller’s Book of Beer

Fortunately for me, I’ve known Jo Copestick, who works freelances for Jacquie Small, publisher of Mikkeller’s Book of Beer, for some years, so at the launch for the English language version of the book, at BrewDog Camden in North London on Thursday, I was able to give my corrections to her: (p53) no, George Hodgson did NOT invent India Pale Ale, nor was IPA brewed stronger to survive the trip to India – it was, as Ron Pattinson regularly points out, comparatively weak for an 18th century beer – and I’ve no idea where the idea came from that the beer was stored in oak barrels which “caused the beer to develop a particular complexity and bitterness that proved extremely popular” – ALL beer was stored in oak barrels. Admittedly, IPA was kept in barrels before serving longer than, say, a mild ale, and that would have added some complexity as the beer aged, but that happened to other beers as well, and if anything the bitterness would have mellowed out as the beer aged. Nor do I think it’s true that “An IPA is generally darker than an ordinary pale ale.” And (p59), porter was NOT “first brewed as a more nourishing beer for the port workers of England in the 19th century” – porter was first brewed in the early 18th century, it was taken up in London by the men called porters, hence the name, some of whom (the Fellowship porters) loaded and unloaded ships in the Thames, but many – most – of whom were Ticket or street porters, working in London’s streets, delivering parcels, letters and goods about the city. And porter wasn’t specifically designed to be a “more nourishing” beer than its predecessor and parent, London brown beer: it was designed to be tastier and more appealing. Nor does the word “stout” mean “‘robust’ or ‘solid'” – it means “strong”.

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I am a bastard – official. Mikkell of Mikkeller says so.

Having slipped Jo my corrections, I then thought it would be extremely cheeky to introduce myself to Mikkel, explain what I had done, and ask him to sign my copy of the book with the words “You bastard!” Which, as you can see, he was amused enough to be happy to do – rather than smashing me about the head with the nearest beerglass, which is what I might do if someone did the same thing to me at one of my book launches. (And yes, there most certainly ARE mistakes in my books, though I’d be grateful if you’d email them to me privately when you find them, rather than revealing them publicly in the comments below.) James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, was there as well, so I got him to also sign Mikkel’s book – thus making it a unique BrewDog-Mikkeller co-production. Offers over £10,000 gladly accepted …

Apart from that, what is the book like? Actually, it’s good, edging into very good: excellent production values and beautiful photography, which is what you’d expect from a Jacqui Small book, and rammed full of facts’n’info, about Mikkel and his early life; about Mikkeller and how it developed, including what seems to me, at any rate, a rare mention of the man who gave the operation half its name, Kristian Keller; about beer types; about Mikkeller’s different beers and what inspired them; about beer tasting; about beer and food; and also about how to brew your own beers like Mikkeller’s. The translator, Ray Ashman, has done a fine job of capturing what certainly sounds like Mikkel’s authentic voice (I’d love to know which of the original bits were written by Mikkel and which by his co-author [and wife] Pernille Pang), and the text is enlivened by drawings from Mikkeller’s in-house illustrator, Keith Shore, frequently featuring the two Mikkeller “characters”, Henry and Sally. To whom will it appeal? Well, Mikkeller fanboys and fangirls, obviously, and anyone looking to learn more about beer, and about homebrewing, will get a great deal out of it too, but even the most beer-knowledgeable will, I think, learn enough to make the book worth its £20 tag (£13.60 on Amazon.co.uk, I note, where, unsurprisingly, it’s already the number one best seller in the “beer” category). And those untruths about beer history are really only a tiny part of the whole book …

Which is more, unfortunately, than can be said about another book I just acquired, Beer: A Global History, by Gavin Smith, published last year. This appears to have been written in an alternative universe where Ron Pattinson and I were never born, and repeats big chunks of long-disproved myths about beer history. Indeed, Smith loses all credibility at the very beginning of Chapter 1, which is headed by an alleged “quote” from Plato, the Greek philosopher: “He was a wise man who invented beer.” No, Plato never said this, or anything like it – and if Smith had done any proper research at all, which would have involved reading The Barbarian’s Beverage by Max Nelson (an excellent book), he would have discovered that the ancient Greeks actually had a very low opinion of beer.

This is far from the only nonsense, Smith hits his readers with, even in Chapter 1: he goes on to make the bizarre claim that “the first nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle and grow crops are thought to have been the Sumerians” – but domesticated barley is known from 7750BC at a site now called Netiv HaGdud (sic) in the Jordan valley, 20km north of Jericho, at least 2,250 years before the Sumerians started founding settlements in Mesopotamia. Smith also claims the Sumerians invented the wheel, though the jury is still very much considering its verdict on that one, since the wheel appeared effectively simultaneously in Sumer, the Northern Caucasus and Central Europe, and he continues: “more than 5,000 years ago they [the Sumerians] recorded on a series of clay tablets a range of beer types and recipes contained within the ancient text ‘A Hymn to Ninkasi’.” This is, simply, complete bollocks. The clay tablets that contain the “Hymn to Ninkasi” come from around 1800BC, so 3,800 years ago, not 5,000. The poem does not contain “a range of beer types and recipes” – it doesn’t mention beer types at all, and the idea that it can be seen as a recipe describing how to make Sumerian beer is stretching the concept of “recipe” to breaking-point: if you read an English translation of the text, which suffers from unknown words and chunks that are now missing, you will see that it is very hard to make out what is meant to be going on. The Hymn to Ninkasi is, as I have said before, no more a recipe for beer-brewing than the folk song “John Barleycorn” is a text on how to make malt.

And so we go on: Smith repeats the myths about the alleged brewing set-up at St Gall in Switzerland, writing, as others have done, as if the map of St Gall actually described what was on the ground, instead of being an idealised depiction. He claims that porter gets its name from “market porters” – ffs, how many times do I have to repeat that this is a 20th century misunderstanding of who porters were? – and, yes, that it was “reputedly invented during the 1720s by Ralph Harwood of the Bell Brewery in Shoreditch”. No, Gavin, it wasn’t, and if you’d bothered even to Google “Ralph Harwood Shoreditch porter” you’d have found the very first link is my debunking of that myth from 2007. George Hodgson isn’t actually called by Smith the inventor of India Pale Ale, which makes a change, but he calls him “an early proponent of pale ales, which in character were light, sparkling and heavily hopped ” – showing he has read nothing about how ale, in the 18th century, still meant a lightly hopped beer – and how these pale ales were “ideal for consumption in the warmer climes of the British Empire, leading to a vigorous export trade”. Gavin – you’re making that up. Porter, as I and Ron have shown, was exported in greater quantities to India than pale ale was, and in any case the overseas beer trade in the late 18th/early 19th centuries was really pretty small. He also clams that after Hodgson “began to send its pale ales to India in 1790″ – the firm never sent the beer, it was bought by independent exporters, that is, the captains and officers of the East Indiamen sailing ships – “the generic title India Pale Ale, or IPA, was soon in circulation” – well, only if “soon” means “40 years later”.

Other stupidities include a picture of the Meux brewery at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road captioned “Messers Meux’s brewery in Liquor-Pond Street, Clerkenwell” – a completely different brewery, Meux Reid, later Reid & Co, in a completely different place; and a picture of the Fighting Cocks, St Albans with the claim that it “has a strong claim to the title of the oldest public house in England”. Actually, it has a shockingly poor claim to that title, being almost certainly no older as a pub than 1600. But that’s the standard of histocical enquiry you can expect in this book. In fact, despite the title, the “history” part only takes up 44 out of 153 pages, which the rest of the book padded out with chapters on “The Art of Brewing”, “Great Brewing Nations”, “Beer and Food”, “Beer and Culture”, “Cooking with Beer” and “Great Beer Brands”. That last chapter kicks off with Amstel, which tells you just how rigorously quality control was applied to the choice of brews listed. In all, Beer: A Global History is definitely one to avoid.

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● Mikkeller’s Book of Beer, written by Mikkel Borg Bjergsø and Pernille Pang, published in English 2015 by Jacqui Small LLP, £20

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