Why oh why am I still having to write lengthy corrections to articles about the history of India Pale Ale? Well, apparently because the Smithsonian magazine, the official journal published by the Smithsonian Institution, is happy to print articles about the history of India Pale Ale without anybody doing any kind of fact-checking – and William Bostwick, beer critic for the Wall Street Journal, appears to be one of those writers who misinterpret, make stuff up and actively get their facts wrong.

The article Bostwick had published on Smithsonian.com earlier this week, “How the India Pale Ale Got Its Name”, is one of the worst I have ever read on the subject, crammed with at least 25 errors of fact and interpretation. It’s an excellent early contender for the Papazian Cup. I suppose I need to give you a link, so here it is, and below the nice picture of the Bow Brewery are my corrections.

The Bow Brewery in 1827: picture from the Mueum of London

“The British Indian army” – most of the British troops in India in the 18th century were in the three private armies run by the East India Company. There was no such thing as “the British Indian army” at that time.

“Soaking through their khakis in the equatorial heat” – khaki uniforms were not used by the British until the 1880s. Calcutta is almost 1,500 miles from the equator.

“The first Brits to come south were stuck with lukewarm beer—specifically dark, heavy, porter, the most popular brew of the day in chilly Londontown, but unfit for the tropics.”
Ignoring the fact that to get to India from Britain you travel east, porter continued to be exported to India from Britain for more than a century from at least the 1780s, with the East India Company in the 1850s ordering large quantities of porter from London brewers. The troops drank porter, and enjoyed it. Dark beers can be very refreshing in hot weather, and stouts are still made in hot climates, from the West Indies to Indonesia.

“One Bombay-bound supply ship was saved from wrecking in the shallows when its crew lightened it by dumping some of its cargo — no great loss, a newspaper reported, ‘as the goods consisted principally of some heavy lumbersome casks of Government porter.'”
The ship was trying to get away from Bombay, not into it, and this is a quote from 1851, just to underline the point about how long porter was exported to India.

“Most of that porter came from George Hodgson’s Bow brewery, just a few miles up the river Lea from the East India Company’s headquarters in east London.”
While Hodgson exported porter to India, there is no evidence that he was supplying “most” of it. The East India Company’s headquarters weren’t in east London, but in Leadenhall Street in the City. What was in “east London”, or more accurately, at Blackwall, on the Thames three miles to the east of the City, were the moorings used by the East Indiamen. They weren’t “a few miles” from Hodgson’s Bow brewery, but 1.3 miles as the crow flies and 2.5 miles if you follow the meandering Lea.

“Outward bound, ships carried supplies for the army, who paid well enough for a taste of home, and particularly for beer”
The articles carried on board the East Indiamen from London to India were for sale mostly to the European civilians living there, including the “civil servants” of the East India Company, not for “the army”. Beer was only a small part of what was carried, which included wine, brandy, Madeira and cider, plus all kinds of foodstuffs and many other items, from china to furniture to leather goods to clothes, unobtainable in India.

“Its clippers rode low in the water, holds weighed with skeins of Chinese silk and sacks of cloves.”
A clipper and an East Indiaman are two entirely different sorts of sailing ship, one built for speed, the other for carrying cargo and passengers. If you call an East Indiaman a clipper, you just make yourself look stupid. And the majority of the goods on board an East Indiaman was likely to be tea and cotton.

“The trip to India took at least six months” – no, it took between four and six months

“Hodgson sold his beer on 18-month credit, which meant the EIC could wait to pay for it until their ships returned from India, emptied their holds, and refilled the company’s purses.”
But it wasn’t the East India Company buying the beer from Hodgson, it was being bought by the East Indiamen captains and commanders to sell on their own accounts.

“Still, the army, and thus the EIC, was frustrated with the quality Hodgson was providing. Hodgson tried unfermented beer, adding yeast once it arrived safely in port. They tried beer concentrate, diluting it on shore. Nothing worked. Nothing, that is, until Hodgson offered, instead of porter, a few casks of a strong, pale beer called barleywine or ‘October beer.’”
This is complete rubbish. There is no evidence for any of this, no sending unfermented beer out – that would never have worked, as anyone who claims to know about beer would surely realise – and no concentrating it and then diluting it. There is no indication that “the army” (not an institution that existed anyway) or the East India Company cared at all about Hodgson’s beer. “Barleywine” is an anachronism: the term isn’t used by British brewers until the late 19th century, and even then as two words, not one, which is an Americanism. In any case, Hodgson was exporting both pale ale and porter to India from at least 1790, and pale ale – brewer unknown – was being exported to India from at least 1784.

“It got its name from its harvest-time brewing, made for wealthy country estates “to answer the like purpose of wine” — an unreliable luxury during years spent bickering with France. … these beers were brewed especially rich and aged for years to mellow out. Some lords brewed a batch to honor a first son’s birth, and tapped it when the child turned eighteen. To keep them tasting fresh, they were loaded with just-picked hops. Barclay Perkins’s KKKK ale used up to 10 pounds per barrel. Hodgson figured a beer that sturdy could withstand the passage to India.”
October beer was brewed months after the harvest, and was not, in any case, the same beer that country gentlemen drank in place of brandy – not French wine – nor the same beer that the landed gentry laid down until their sons became 21 – not 18. They weren’t “loaded with just-picked hops” to keep tasting fresh – that’s something the writer has made up – and Hodgson didn’t work out on his own that well-hopped beer would survive the journey East, that was known since at least the 1760s.

“He was right. His first shipment arrived to fanfare. On a balmy January day in 1822, the Calcutta Gazette announced the unloading of ‘Hodgson’s warranted prime picked ale of the genuine October brewing. Fully equal, if not superior, to any ever before received in the settlement.'”
This is nonsense. The 1822 shipment was just the latest in more than 30 years of shipments of pale ale by Hodgson to India.

“Hodgson’s sons Mark and Fredrick, who took over the brewery from their father soon after”
Mark Hodgson was running the brewery by 1811. It was Frederick Hodgson, not Fredrick.

“They tightened their credit limits and hiked up their prices, eventually dumping the EIC altogether and shipping beer to India themselves.”
I repeat: it wasn’t the East India Company shipping the beer to India, but the EIC captains and commanders, acting as private individuals.

“By the late 1820s, EIC director Campbell Marjoribanks, in particular, had had enough. He stormed into Bow’s rival Allsopp with a bottle of Hodgson’s October beer and asked for a replica. Allsopp was good at making porter — dark, sweet, and strong, the way the Russians liked it”
It was 1822, not “the late 1820s”, that Marjoribanks spoke to Allsopp, at Marjoribanks’s home in London, not at Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent. Allsopp was not a porter brewer, but a brewer of Burton ale, a totally different beer. Porter wasn’t necessarily sweet.

“When Sam Allsopp, only a few years shy of turning the business over to his sons, tried the sample of Hodgson’s beer Marjoribanks had brought, he spit it out — too bitter for the old man’s palate.”
Samuel Allsopp was 42 in 1822, so certainly not an old man. He would run the company for another 16 years. There is no evidence he spat Hodgson’s beer out.

“He asked his maltster, Job Goodhead, to find the lightest, finest, freshest barley he could. Goodhead kilned it extra lightly, to preserve its subtle sweetness – he called it ‘white malt’”
The author is making that all up again. There is no evidence Allsopp asked Goodhead to find “the lightest, finest, freshest barley he could”, nor that Goodhead called the pale ale malt he made “white malt”. “White malt” and pale ale malt are different types.

“To recreate Allsop’s legendary brew, I’d need the best ingredients available today, and that meant Maris Otter malt and Cascade hops.”
It’s “Allsopp”. And to recreate it you would need an authentically 18th/19th century hop such as East Kent Goldings, not Cascade, which is the kind of American hop British brewers dismissed in the 19th century for their supposedly unpleasant flavours.

That article looks to have been based on a chapter in a book Bostwick had published last year, called The Brewer’s Tale: A History of the World According to Beer. I hadn’t come across this before, thankfully, and I have absolutely no intention of buying it, but I took a peek at what is available via Amazon’s “Look Inside” function, and it appears to be as crammed with errors as the article on IPA is. You can only see the first 60 or so pages via Amazon, but here are some of the errors I found even in that short section:

“Dark-age tribes had spice cabinets full of henbane, ergot and other bog-grown oddities”
Henbane doesn’t grow in bogs, unless you’re making a bad British English pun (Nicholas Culpepper said in 1653 that “whole cart loads of it may be found near the places where they empty the common Jakes”). It grows on chalky and sandy soils. Ergot is a fungus that infects rye (mostly) and wheat and barley (sometimes), Again, it’s not something that grows in a bog. Nor is it something that is known to have ever been deliberately used by humans to induce hallucinations, unlike henbane.

“Brewers eventually learned through trial and error to reproduce those warm, oxygen-rich environments Saccharomyces likes best” – ah, really? My understanding is that while you need oxygen at the start of fermentation, to encourage yeast growth, you soon want more anaerobic conditions, or the yeast won’t make alcohol.

“Caked in a Neanderthal molar discovered deep in a Belgian cave, a single charred kernel of barley, last munched some thirty thousand years ago, is our earliest record of that agricultural revolution”
This is a wildly exaggerated and highly inaccurate version of the findings of Amanda Henry, Alison Brooks and Dolores Piperno, reported in 2010, from their analysis of the dental calculus found on the teeth of Neanderthal skeletons found in the Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Spy Cave (pronounced “spee”), Belgium. It certainly wasn’t “a single charred kernel of barley” that was found, but dozens of tiny grains of starch. Some of those grains of starch were identified as coming from barley, and some of those from cooked barley – but only on the Neanderthal teeth from Iraq. It would be absolutely staggering if evidence pointing to barley consumption dating back 36,000 years was found in the area of modern Belgium, since this would be 30,000 years before barley and other grains are reckoned to have reached northern Europe, brought by farmers from their original home in the Middle East. Anybody studying the history of beer really ought to know that talking about barley in Northern Europe that far back is nonsense. Shanidar Cave is in the Zagros Mountains, on the edge of the area where, long after the Neanderthals disappeared, settled agriculture developed, using just those varieties of grain, like barley, that the Shanidar Neanderthals were evidently gathering wild – and cooking – 40,000 years ago. So there is a fascinating link between the Neanderthals and modern agriculture – but it ain’t the one Bostwick claims it is.

“the Greek wit and poet Athenaeus contrasted his own civilized ways with savage tribes who drink, he wrote, “a beer made of wheat prepared with honey, and oftener still without honey.”
Athenaeus was quoting another writer, Posidonius, in that passage, talking about the Celts of Gaul, and neither writer called them “savage tribes”. Posidonius was actually contrasting what the wealthy Celts drank – wine – with what “those who are poorer” drank. Bostwick uses the translation of the passage by CD Yonge from 1854: I prefer that of Max Nelson: “Among those who are poorer there is wheaten beer prepared with honey, and among the majority there is plain [beer]. It is called korma.”

“Germanic tribes were cultivating wheat and barley by 5000BC and Celtic bands on the British Isles soon after”
It is total nonsense to talk about “Germanic” and “Celtic” tribes 7,000 years ago. We’re barely in the time of the Proto-Indo-Europeans that far back. Germanic tribes cannot be identified until around 1500BC, while the origins of the Celts are normally pitched around the same time or slightly later.

“Stranded on the windswept Scottish border in fortresses at Bearsden and Vindolanda, Augustan legions …”
Ignoring the anachronism of taking about the “Scottish” border at the time of the Romans, Bearsden is in Glasgow, 80 miles north of the modern Scottish border, while Vindolanda is 26 miles south of the border. The legions weren’t “Augustan” – Augustus died 70 years before Roman troops were stationed at Vindolanda.

“The first brewer in British history we know by name, in fact, was a Roman: Arrectus”
The name was Atrectus. We don’t know what nationality he was, but Atrectus is reckoned to be a Gallic or Gallo-Belgic name, so the Vindolanda brewer was unlikely to be Roman.

“Some beer writers are sticklers about the difference between beer and ale, saying beer refers to a drink made with hops and ale to one without. I find that distinction arbitrary and etymologically suspect and will ignore it”
I don’t know any beer writer who says ale can only refer to a drink made without hops. I DO know beer writers who point out that when you’re talking about historical malt liquors, it’s important to distinguish between beers and ales in the context of their times, when the two words meant different things at different periods. That’s not an “arbitrary” distinction, but an important historical one, and etymology has nothing to do with it.

I have a new book out, A Craft Beer Road Trip Around Britain, with snapshots of 40 of Britain’s top small breweries from Scotland to the South West. Don’t rush to try to buy it from Amazon/your favourite independent bookseller, however, because it’s only available via Beer 52, the craft beer club people, who are giving it away to people who sign up to their “case of beer a month” service. Putting it together was quite fun, but hard work: getting craft beer brewers to co-operate in supplying information about themselves and their beers turns out to be like trying to herd cats, and my deepest sympathy goes to anyone who has had to put together one of those 666 beer to try before you’re dragged off to Hell-style compilations.

Still, at the end I found I had ended up with a big enough stack of information about a sample of craft brewers in Britain to pull out some interesting, if ultimately probably dubious, statistics. If we take the 40 brewers I interviewed for the book as typical (and I’m sure we can’t), we can draw the following conclusions about the British craft brewing industry:

Eight per cent of British craft brewers have a PhD
Probably the dodgiest stat of the lot; but it’s a fact that at least three of the 40 brewers in the book, James Davies of Alechemy in Livingston, Scotland (PhD, yeast genetics), Gaz Matthews of Mad Hatter in Liverpool (PhD, criminology) and Stuart Lascelles of East London Brewing Company (PhD, chemistry) are entitled to call themselves “Doctor”.

35 per cent of British craft brewers wear black T-shirts/polo shirts with their brewery’s logo on them
If the uniform of the 19th century brewer was a white apron and a red stockinette cap, as sported by Mr Bung in the Victorian Happy Families card game, and the uniform of the 20th century brewer was a white labcoat with pens in the top pocket, worn over a dark suit, then the uniform of the 21st century brewer is a black T-shirt, jeans and industrial boots – possibly, if the woman from Health and Safety is visiting, coupled with a hi-vis jacket and goggles.

Gregg Irwin and Bryan Spooner of Weird Beard Brew Co – named for one of the distinguishing features of the British craft brewer?

48 per cent of British craft brewers sport a beard
The least surprising stat: while the craft brewers of Britain don’t normally go for the “big enough to hide several small birds and a couple of squirrels” face-bushes preferred by their American rivals, the bearded brewer has become almost a cliché, and almost half the brewers in the book had clearly not recently passed a razor over their chins.

35 per cent of British craft breweries have an address that begins with “Unit” followed by a number
Is it surprising that out of every 20 small breweries in the country, at least seven will be on an industrial estate? Probably not …

12 per cent of British craft breweries have an address that includes the word “Farm”
It’s on the face of it not that surprising, either, that out of 40 craft breweries, five should be based on farms, since farms today often have unused buildings – dairies, for example – that can be cheaply and easily adapted to provide a home for a small brewing set-up, while there are likely to be few neighbours in the immediate vicinity to annoy. And, after all, back in the 19th century thousands of farms had their own breweries, where they made beer for the farmer, his family and the farm workers. Indeed, quite a few commercial breweries began as farm breweries that expanded into supplying local pubs: Arkells of Swindon, to name one survivor of that tradition. On the other hand if you scale that five-out-of-40 up across the whole craft brewing sector today, that suggests more than 150 farms have breweries on them: I CBA to go through the breweries section of the Good Beer Guide to check, but than sounds dubious to me.

Eight per cent of British craft breweries are based in railway arches
And not only in East and South East London: Tickety Brew of Stalybridge, for example, is underneath the arches, too. The seminal role played by Network Rail in helping Britain’s craft brewing boom by supplying homes to small breweries to thrive in really should be chronicled. Mind, this is another probably dodgy statistic to draw from my book, since again it implies an improbably large number of railway arch brewer nationally, around a hundred.

Five per cent of British craft brewers have artistic graffiti all over the interior walls of the brewery
All right, I’m sure this really is one you cannot scale up from my small sample of 40 brewers, but at least two, BrewDog in Scotland and Tiny Rebel in Wales have brought in graffiti artists to liven up the inside of their otherwise boring boxes.

When Tiny Rebel got the painters in …

45 per cent of British craft brewers use Cascade hops in at least one of their beers
The only surprise here is that the number seems positively too low: Boak and Bailey have pointed out how incredibly influential Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has been on the craft brewing scene in the UK, so the fact that so many brewers in Britain use the hop found in SNPA should startle no one. At least Cascade has one British parent, Fuggles – does anyone make a beer with both Cascade AND Fuggles in it? Hmmm …

30 per cent of British craft brewers use Maris Otter barley
Fifty years old this year, and still popular, despite being more expensive than other varieties, Maris Otter is perhaps THE craft beer barley: though many bigger brewers won’t and don’t use it, and suggest its popularity is more down to the fact that it has a great marketing story to tell for any brewer using it .

40 per cent of British craft brewers have a home brewing background
Again that seems ostensibly too small, when only another 20 per cent of those I surveyed had an actual brewing industry background: did the other 40 per cent just fling themselves into the business with no experience of wetting malt at all? Well, some people do, actually, such as Otley, where the founders’ background was in running pubs.

No good running away, Andy …

Anyway, there we are: the typical British craft brewer is bearded, wears a black T-shirt, is based on an industrial estate, and brews at least one beer with Maris Otter barley and Cascade hops. Is there anyone who fits that description: Well, apart from the industrial estate, yes there is: step up, please, the bearded, black-T-shirted Andy Paterson, brewer at Dark Star Brewing in Sussex of Hophead, made with Maris Otter and Cascades. You, sir, are Mr Craft Brewer 2015!

Two of the more than 300 bronze dwarfs to be found on the streets of Wrocław. They commemorate the surrealist anti-Communist Orange Alternative protest movement of the 1980s, whose symbol was a dwarf, and which started in Wrocław. ‘Opiłek’ means ‘metal chip’

Wandering around the Festival of Good Beer outside the football stadium in Wrocław, southern Poland last weekend with the Welsh beer blogger Simon Martin, it was quickly clear I was in the presence of a genuine superstar. A stream of young Poles – mostly male, but including the occasional female – were rushing up to Simon, greeting him by name, shaking his hand warmly and asking if they could have their picture taken with him. During a break in the flood of fandom, Simon wryly told me that he wished he was half as famous back in the UK as he is in Poland. His YouTube video blog, Real Ale Craft Beer, has just under 10,000 subscribers and gets around a thousand views a day – respectable numbers. But while, clearly, many of those viewers come from the UK – after all, Simon is based in this country, and speaking in English – a surprising number come from Poland. The reason seems to be that in the past four years, Poles have developed a growing thirst for craft beer, and an equal thirst for information about the subject, and access to easily digested, enthusiastically delivered knowledge about new craft beers. That is what Simon’s beer-reviewing video website brings them, and they love it – and him.

Poland, you may be surprised to learn, is the third largest brewing nation in the EU, and looking to soon overtake the UK and move into second place. It produced around 40 million hectolitres in 2013, from 155 breweries, 96 litres per head per year, up 10.4% in four years, against 42 million hectolitres a year in the UK from 1,490 breweries, 66 litres per head per year, down 7.1% since 2009, and 94.3 million hectolitres a year in Germany, 107 litres per head per year, down 3.8% in four years, from 1,350 or so breweries.

From those figures you would be guessing that the Polish brewing scene is dominated by big concerns, and it is. SAB Miller has around 38% of the market through Kompania Piwowarska, including the Tyskie and Lech brands. Heineken has another 35% through Grupa Żywiec, and Carlsberg has 14% through its Polish subsidiary, which includes Okocim, leaving just 13% for the independent sector. But that independent sector is thriving: Tomasz Kopyra, the Polish beer blogger who invited me to the Wrocław festival (and who is even more of a superstar among Polish craft beer fans than Simon Martin – Tomasz has 50,000 followers on his own video beer blog and could not walk two yards across the festival grounds without being mobbed by people wanting selfies with him) told me that there were 500 new beers launched on the Polish market last year, a number that will certainly be exceeded by a considerable margin in 2015, when 100 new beers were launched in April this year alone.

Poland now has some 30 newly built craft breweries, and around 30 or 40 other craft brewer concerns contract-brewing their beers on the plant of older-established businesses. The beers they are brewing, just like the beers made by craft brewers elsewhere, largely reflect what is happening in the United States, with big, hugely hoppy IPAs and thumping stouts (though Poland has had a long tradition of very strong porters dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries, when London brewers such as Barclay Perkins exported porter and stout to the Baltic region and local brewers were forced to compete with their own versions).

Atak Chmielu, the most influential beer in Poland’s craft brewing scene, and another brew in the Pinta line-up, a ‘rice IPA’

However, the Polish market for really hoppy beers only started in 2011, when a couple of home-brewers, Ziemowit Fałat and Grzegorz Zwierzyna, upgraded from running a home-brew supplies shop, started a concern called Pinta and launched a commercial brew called Atak Chmielu – “Hop Attack” – with 58 IBUs and 6.1% abv. It was the first commercial beer in Poland made with American hops (Citra, Simcoe, Cascade and Amarillo, since you ask) and it absolutely revolutionised the Polish craft beer market, stunning drinkers with its flavours the way Sierra Nevada Pale Ale once did British beer drinkers, spurring all the other craft brewers in Poland to produce their own American IPAs.

Pinta is a contract brewery, its beers made at Browar na Jurze (“the Jura brewery”, based near the Polish Jura) in Zawiercie, to the east of Wrocław, itself founded only in 1997. Tomasz Kopyra told me that the success of contract brewers making more “modern” brews has persuaded the old-school brewers whose kit they use to start brewing their own craft-style beers, instead of continuing solely to imitate the bland euro-lagers made by the multinational concerns that dominate Poland’s beer scene. Ironically – some might say inevitably – Atak Chiemlu is regarded today by many Polish craft beer drinkers as not hoppy enough any more, with accusations that as it has grown more popular, so its quality has, allegedly, declined, though I found it a fine beer, darker than American IPAs normally are, with deep and mellow fruit flavours and not (comparatively) overly assertive.

Pinta, which also now has its own bar, in Krakow, called Viva La Pinta. makes a large range of beers – more than 30 in the past four years, including several “collaboration” brews, one with Simon Martin, named Call Me Simon (you can see him making the latest version here) and one with O’Hara’s in Carlow, Ireland, with the pleasing name Lublin to Dublin. This is a “robust milk stout” made with the two most popular Polish hop varieties, Marynka and Lubelski, the latter named for Lublin, the city in Eastern Poland that is the centre for Polish hop growing. It comes with lovely chocolatey aromas and flavours, and at 6+ per cent abv, makes Mackeson look like an eight-stone weakling.

The Wrocław Festival of Good Beer – “Festiwal Dobrego Piwa” – attracts around 60 or so brewers, mostly from Poland, though a few are from Germany, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, including one, as we shall see, from England. They occupy open-air stalls in the huge space outside Wrocław’s football stadium, on the edge of town, which was built for the 2012 European football championships, and more often than not the brewers themselves are on the stalls, pouring their beers: why British brewers rarely seem to do this, I don’t know. Food is provided by a dozen or more stalls and trucks offering everything from burgers to traditional Polish szaszłyk (kebabs) to herring and carp to huge open-faced sandwiches, and it’s extremely good: vastly, vastly better than the “there to soak up the beer” stodge you’ll be offered at the average Camra festival. The  Wrocław festival also attracts a vastly more varied crowd than you’ll see at a British beerfest, with Poles of all ages, including some with very young children, along to see what is happening.

One of the food stalls at the festival: ‘Pajda chleba’ means ‘chunk of bread’

I arrived at the festival about noon on the Friday, and Tomasz very kindly whipped me round the breweries, in his opinion, that should not be missed. Doctor Brew, like Pinta, is a contract operation started by experienced home brewers, Marcin Olszewski and Łukasz Lis, who are based in Wrocław, though their beers are made by Browar Bartek in the village of Cieśle, about 20 miles east, a small brewery that opened in 1992. Doctor Brew began in 2013, which makes it positively ancient in Polish craft beer terms, and like almost all the brewers I tried in Poland, its beers are exceedingly well-crafted and very worth drinking. The Kinky Ale, for example, is made with Equinox, the latest hot American hop, which was released to huge excitement last year, and the beer was filled with deep orangey flavours. As well as a line-up of keg brews on its stall, Doctor Brew also had two Jack Daniels barrel-aged beers, still in their barrels, one a barley wine made with American hops at 10.5% abv, which had spent three months conditioning in the brewery and then four months in the barrel, and the other a Russian Imperial stout. Each was tapped for the first time at the festival – “it was a scary moment,” Łukasz Lis admitted. But for a first attempt at barrel ageing, each was remarkably fine, with huge amounts of coconut and vanilla from the oak and considerable remaining sweetness making for dangeriously drinkable beers.

Jacek Domagalski of Browar Nepomucen

Next up was a brewery only two months old, Browar Nepomucen, which had been built from scratch in a former bakery in the village of Szkaradowo, just over 30 miles north of Wrocław, by home brewer Jacek Domagalski and the brothers Piotr and Mariusz Musielakówie. Jacek had been a home brewer for eight years, and again this experience has translated with impressive ease into a professional set-up. As well as the usual line-up of beers, Nepomucen (named after a local saint, Jacek told me) brews its own version of the newly revived Polish smoked wheat beer style Grodziskie – Grodzisk Wielkopolski, the town where the style originated, is about 50 miles north of Szkaradowo (and about 80 miles from Wrocław). Nepomucen’s Grodziskie is made from smoked barley malt, smoked wheat malt, and Saaz and East Kent Goldings hops, to a strength of 3.9%, and as my first introduction to the style I thought it very fine.

A genuine Grodziski from Grodzisk

Soon after I was drinking my second example of a Grodziskie, this one from Grodzisk itself, made from 100% smoked wheat malt, 3.1%, beautifully drinkable, not over-smoky, brewed by a man with the excellent name of Aleksander Chmielewski (chmiel is the Polish for ‘hops’) and his colleagues at the Browar w Grodzisku Wielkopolskim and served in a lovely old-skool Grodziskie glass, which is also embossed on the bottle. Although Grodziskie is an ancient style, this was from an even younger brewery than Nepomucen. Albeit a revival in original brewery buildings, using the original recipe and the original malt, the first “genuine” Grodziskie for 22 years only hit the bartops this month. The brewery is also making three other beers, including a very fine redcurrant-flavoured one and a stronger, more smokey, leathery Bernardyńskie, named for a 16th century saintly monk who allegedly blessed a dry well in Grodziskie that then began flowing again, supplying water for the brewery..

Other beers I noted:

● A double oatmeal stout, aged in Jack Daniels oak barrels again, but only for a few weeks, from the Artezan brewery in Błonie, near Warsaw (and nearer the other Grodzisk, Grodzisk Mazowiecki). This was the first “purpose-built” craft brewery in Poland, as opposed to contract craft brewing set-up, opening in June 2011. The oak had supplied vanilla again, but dialled down compared to Doctor Brew’s beer, with coffee, a touch of chocolate and just a sniff of sourness.

● Hard Bass Stout from the Fine Tuned Brewery in England. Pawel Kubinski, the Polish head brewer at Glastonbury Ales in Somerton, Somerset also produces beers as Fine Tuned, and was in Wrocław to promote his English-brewed beers to fellow Polish drinkers. This is a good 6% abv stout, hopped with British and American hops – Challenger, Northern Brewer, Chinook, Cascade, Fuggles and Citra – and alarmingly smooth, with a nice, slightly liquorish-ish, follow-through, possibly from the rye that is one of the seven grains used. Once again, dangerously drinkable

Michał Saks of AleBrowar

Two of AleBrowar’s striking bottles

● Rowing Jack from AleBrowar, another contract-brew collaboration by three home-brewers, led by Michał Saks, in 2012 and using the Gościszewo brewery in the village of the same name in Pomerania, northern Poland, 30 miles from Gdańsk. Many of Poland’s craft brewers have clearly grasped the importance of stylish branding, and AleBrowar’s bottle labels are among the best: individualistic and striking. (The name, incidentally, appears to be a bilingual pun: “ale”, pronounced “ALay”, means “but” or “however” in Polish, and certainly Poles pronounce the name of the operation as “ALayBROOar” rather than “ail-brooar”.)

● A minty wheat beer from Browar Trójmiejski Lubrow in Gdańsk called Kolender z Miętolina, “coriander and mint”, 4.2% abv. This could easily have failed as a product, especially for me, as I’m not fond of mint flavours generally, but it works very well – I really wanted some mint ice-cream with it …

While the Polish craft beer scene is still tiny – Tomasz estimated craft beer sales at only around 1% of total beer sales in the country – it seems clear craft beer will get bigger, with a rush of new brewers into the market, while the rise in the number of beers is being matched by the rise in the number of what in Poland are called “multitaps” [sic], craft beer bars. Thanks to Tomasz, I got to see three new small breweries in and around Wrocław last Saturday morning. One, Widawa, in a restaurant in a small village 20 minutes outside Wrocław, was opened in March 2012, but of the other two, one, Browar Stu Mostów, started only last November, and the other, Browar Profesja, opened its doors just two months ago.

Inside the Widawa restaurant brewery in Chrząstawie Małej.  On the left is the combined mash tun and copper, on the right the lauter tun.

All are already producing excellent, impressive beers. The Widawa brewery, in Chrząstawa Mała (which means “Little Horseradish Pond”, unless Google Translate is lying to me), is run by Wojciech Frączyk, who installed the beautiful copper-coloured brewing kit, plus conditioning vessels, all made by Kaspar Schulz of Bamberg, Germany, at the family restaurant two years ago. The kit being designed for a small version of your standard continental brewing operation, the vessels are a combined mash-tun and brew kettle “heater/boiler”, and a lauter tun – so mash in the heater/boiler, everything into the lauter tun for separation of grains from wort, and back into the heater/boiler for boiling with hops. It was only brewing a standard line-up of beers – pils, hefeweizen – when Tomasz Kopyra turned up on the doorstep to find out what was happening. Tomasz quickly told Frączyk his beers were boring, and persuaded him to brew a stout. Since then the pair have brewed an extensive range of beers, including a coffee pale ale, a wood-aged IPA and a milk stout.

Michał Gref in the brewhouse at Browar Profesja

The kit at Profesja in Wrocław, which must be the only brewery based in a former Nazi parachute factory (for the high ceilings) was made and put together by the founder, Michał Gref, and his head brewer, Przemysław Leszczyński, simply because they couldn’t afford to pay large sums to buy ready-fabricated vessels. “Profesja” means “occupation” or “profession”, and the brewery’s bottle labels and beer tap handles all show a dwarf who is following an occupation linked to the name of the beer: Bursztynnik, for example, an amber ale, from the Polish for “amber”, bursztyn, shows a long-bearded amber jeweller holding a fishing net to haul the amber from the Baltic, where it floated onto the shore. (Dwarfs are one of the symbols of Wrocław, from the Orange Alternative, an underground protest movement which started in the city during Communist times in the 1980s, and which sprayed pictures of dwarfs on walls where the authorities had covered up anti-government slogans. On one occasion ten thousand people marched through the centre of Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats. Now, in commemoration of the Orange Alternative, there are large numbers of small bronze statues of dwarfs found around Wrocław.)

Przemysław Leszczyński and Michał Gref of Browar Profesja

Bursztynnik is hopped with Willamette hops and bittered with Hallertau. Alchemist, a “Brettanomyces IPA”, which has a drawing of a mad-looking dwarf chemist on the bottle labels, is made with Brettanomyces bruxellensi trois, a comparatively mild variety of Brett, fermented very warm, at around 28C/82F, hopped in the kettle with Chinook, Cascade, Galaxy and Saphir and dry-hopped with Citra. It’s the best all-Brett beer I’ve had, with just a touch of “cheesy feet” to give it a character apart from the usual run of assertively hoppy American IPAs. Michał Gref says Profesja “could have brewed for the geeks, but we’re brewing for the people.” Przemysław Leszczyński appears to find this a little frustrating: we found him later competing in the homebrewing contest that is also part of the Wrocław beer festival with brews he admits are too far out for his colleagues at Profesja ever to agree to brew commercially.

Part of the very impressive set-up at Browar Stu Mostów, where a balcony bar looks down on the brewing area. That’s the mash tun on the right, if my translation of ‘kocioł zacierno warzelny’ is correct.

In complete contrast to Profesja, Stu Mostów (which means “hundred bridges” – Wrocław sits on the Oder, and the river’s braidings and channels mean there are indeed around a hundred bridges in the city) was founded by a former banker, Grzegorz Ziemian, with backing from ex-banking colleagues, and has a beautiful new 20-hectolitre set-up from the German company BrauKon, erected in a former cinema (high ceilings again) which looks as if it cost a very great deal of money. It only opened in November last year, but again the beers, which include, for example, a chocolate mint FES, are all impeccable. It has three separate brands, WRCLW for “more traditional styles”, Salamander for “new wave” brews, and Art for “collaboration brews” and the like. It has a bar on a mezzanine floor inside the brewery, looking down on the brewkit, which is doing well enough that Ziemian wants to expand by putting a beer garden on the roof of the building.

David Twigg, of Kraców via Cambridge, and Paulina Golec of Browar Twigg

Perhaps the most surprising brewery I came across, though, was Browar Twigg, from Kraców, which occupied one of the 50 or so stalls at the Wrocław beer festival. If that name doesn’t look Polish, it’s not – Browar Twigg was founded by David Twigg, from Lincolnshire via Cambridge, where he gained a Phd in particle physics (yet another craft brewer with a Phd), practised his home-brewing skills, met an attractive young Polish woman called Paulina Golec, and came out to Poland 18 months ago with Paulina to open a craft brewery. Social media has been very important in promoting the growth of his brewery, David told me – not for the usual reasons, but because Poles found the “twi” sound in Twigg as hard to pronounce as English speakers find “szczy”, until the rise of Twitter, when suddenly they got it. The brewery, the only one now in Kraków itself, is based in part of an old steel works. The kit, from Dave Porter’s PBC in Bury, near Manchester, is 25 hectolitres and many of the beers have “astrophysicy” names, such as Dark Matter, a black IPA, and White Dwarf. “The start was quite hard, but now it’s starting to gain momentum. Poland is in the middle of a beer revolution, people are wanting American-style beers, and I think the market is going to go the way of craft beer in the Western world,” David told me.

Wrocław, pronounced, very approximately, “Vrotswaf”, and around 740 miles almost exactly due east of London, is a very attractive old city in its own right, with some fine medieval buildings (or reconstriucted medieval buildings) to admire and a fascinating history: the city is known to German-speakers as Breslau, it was the biggest settlement in ancient Silesia, and its ruler changed repeatedly: Bohemia around 1000AD, then Poland, Bohemia again in the 14th century, the Hapsburgs of Austria in 1526, and Prussia in 1742. It remained ruled from Berlin for more than 200 years, as Prussia grew into the German Empire and Germany eventually mutated into the Third Reich. But in 1945 Silesia became Polish again, as Stalin shoved post-war Poland violently west, annexing much of the country’s eastern side to the Soviet Union. German speakers fled, and Wrocław and its surroundings were repopulated largely by Poles displaced from what had now become parts of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. Wrocław is due to be the European City of Culture next year, and its Festival of Good Beer, the biggest in Poland, will be in its seventh year – and doubtless bigger than ever. It will be well worth a visit.

The Old Town Hall in Wrocław, Poland’s fourth largest city

Meantime Brewing’s surprise sale to SAB Miller, the second largest brewing company in the world, was prompted by a growing realisation at the Greenwich-based craft brewer that it did not have the resources and capability itself to move on up to the next stage of its growth journey, the company’s chief executive has revealed.

Nick Miller, who joined Meantime as CEO in 2011, said that he and Alastair Hook, the company’s founder, and the rest of the board were already looking at a tie-up with a big brewer as one of the strategic options that could be followed to enable the company to grow further. “We were on the cusp of making a decision that partnership was a better route than going to refinance,” he said. “I think we may have gone to a process later this year, could have gone for a float, could have gone for private equity money, could have gone to AIM, though that’s a hugely costly and time-consuming exercise, could have gone for a joint venture with a PE house, could have sold out to a major brewer, could have gone crowd-funding, could have borrowed money from the bank. But it’s a bit more than just a financial requireement. It’s ‘have you got the brewing capability, the engineering capability, the route-to-market capability, the global reach capability?’

“The financial side wasn’t that much of an issue to us, because we’ve got a very good relationship with our bank. They’ve been trying to chuck money at us for a while now. It was more about, ‘how do you sustain the growth, relative to the capabilities within the organisation?’ That was the key strategic challenge for us, and the partnership with SAB really helps with that.”

A chance meeting in March this year began the process that led to the sale, Miller revealed: “A very old friend of mine, who I had worked with, was having his 50th birthday party, and he rang me up and said, ‘I’d like to buy some pale ale to complement Peroni at my party.’ So he came over, and we sat down and had a beer and a bite to eat, and he said, ‘What are you doing with the business?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re coming to a stage where we need to look at capability and resources. We’ve got a number of options, we could do it ourselves, but we might be better off with a partnership with a brewer that gives us the capabilities that we need.’ Four or five days later his boss at SAB Miller came to me and said, ‘Look, here’s an opportunity for you, would you consider it?'”

A board meeting at Meantime took an hour to debate the deal, and Miller and Hook then visited most of the company’s 60-plus shareholders individually. “We’re very close to our shareholders, we know them well, we’ve talked to them, we’ve communicated with them on a regular basis, they know they can pick up the phone and talk to Alastair or myself at any time,” Miller said. “They’re all very happy people They’ve known the company’s journey intimately, and they’re delighted, not just because of what they’re going to get but because of where Meantime is now going. They can see the appetite SAB have for taking it to the next level.” Many shareholders are Hook’s family and friends, and around 40 per cent, Miller estimated, have been shareholders from the start of the company in 1999, while about a quarter of the employees of Meantime Brewing Company are also shareholders.

Looking at further possible takeovers in the UK craft brewing scene, Miller said: “From a modern craft beer perspective, ie keg, cold, unpasteurised, modern styles and genres of beers, there’s not really that many that can be bought, I would suggest, in the UK. Our peer group is essentially Camden, BrewDog, Thornbridge. At Thornbridge, Jim [Harrison] is probably happy doing what he’s doing, I can’t speak for what his next steps or strategy are, but it’s clear what’s happening at Camden and BrewDog, they’re going down the crowd-sourcing route and they’re trying to build their capability incrementally. That’s a thoroughly commendable route, but it’s a tougher one than partnering with a global brewer that will let you get on with it and support you.”

On the possibility of Meantime beers being brewed away from Greenwich, Miller said: “We’ve got plans to take the brewery up to a quarter of a million hectolitres [150,000 barrels] within the next 18 months to two years, and we can go a bit further than that in Greenwich.” The new experimental brewery at Greenwich is due to be commissioned in August, “and then I’m going to have to hold Mr Hook back! Anything that is shiny and goes ‘ping!’, he’ll be on it like a rash!”

There was “a buzz of excitement” among Meantime’s senior managers after the news was announced, Miller said. “We’re all looking forward to the opportunities that partnering SAB Miller brings. This isn’t a deal where we’re putting our feet up, going and lying in the sun. This is, ‘Right, how do we kick on again?’ I know Sue [Clark, managing director, SABMiller Europe, to whom Miller will now report] is extremely excited – she runs all the markets in Europe, and you can see her eyes lighting up. I think this is a great story for British beer. If we can take Meantime around the world under the SAB capability, I think it’s really a great news story for Britain.”

SAB Miller is certainly buying into a success story. Beer volumes at Meantime grew by almost 60% in 2014, to something on the order of 80,000 hectolitres, and the company has grown tenfold since 2010. Turnover was £17m, and that will at least triple if it does hit that quarter-of-a-million-hectolitre target by 2018. (That makes it a very interesting exercise to try to work out what SAB Miller paid, because it won’t have been based on past earnings, but future ones: somewhere around £20 million to £30 million would be my guess, though if anyone wants to tell me I’m totally wrong I’m prepared to delete this comment …) SAB Miller is involved in two big markets in Europe where craft beer is rocketing away, Poland and Italy, and Meantime makes just the kind of stylish, not too far out product that would bee an ideal introduction to people wanting to explore craft beer, but not be frightened by it.

Of course, the haters and sneerers fell upon the news of Meantime’s sale with joy, although typically, they couldn’t get their stories to agree: while many commentators seemed to believe Meantime beers really weren’t up to much, one would declare that “Yakima Red remains one of the most insipid and uninspired beers I’ve ever tried,” while another insisted that “Yakima Red is the only decent one in their line up.” (Both genuine comments, one from Facebook, the other from a commenter on the Guardian‘s story about the takeover.) Come on, haters – do try at least to sneer from the same songsheet.

I also felt sorry for Tom Stainer, head of communications at Camra, who, asked for a comment on the story by the Guardian, felt obliged to parrot the party line and say: “We would urge the brewery to consider returning to brewing real ale in the future.” If he wasn’t a mate of mine, I’d have rung him up and said, “Hey, grandad, you really, really don’t get the craft beer scene, do you?”

I don’t mind admitting I’m a Meantime fanboy, and I’m delighted for everybody there that they’ve now got the strength of a brewing giant behind them to power their expansion. Anybody who knows Alastair Hook will be very aware that he’s not a man to compromise (which is why he won’t do cask ale), and I don’t doubt at all that as long as he still has anything to do with the brewery, its beers will continue to be among the best and most reliable available.

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 Peynton to open Mash and Air, a brewery-and-restaurant in Manchester.

1998 Hook and Peynton 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.

2015 Meantime is acquired by SAB Miller for an undisclosed sum, to spearhead the brewing giant’s assault on the European craft beer market.

One of the biggest mysteries in the history of beer concerns a drink called three-threads, and its exact place in the early history of porter. Three-threads was evidently a mixed beer sold in the alehouses of London in the time of the last Stuart monarchs, William III and his sister-in-law Anne, about 1690 to 1714. For more than 200 years, it has been linked with the development of porter: but the story that said porter was invented to replace three-threads was written eight decades and more after the events it claimed to record, and the description that the “replaced by porter” story gave of three-threads early in the 19th century does not match up with more contemporary accounts of the drink from the late 17th century.

So what exactly was three-threads? Well, I now believe that enough people have dug out enough information that we can make a firm and definitive statement on that.

It was a tax fiddle.

To understand what was going on, you need to know that from the time when taxes were first imposed on beer and ale, in 1643, during the English Civil War, and for the next 139 years the excise authorities recognised only two strength of beer and ale for tax purposes: “small”, defined as having a pre-tax value of six shillings a barrel, and “strong”, defined as having a value of more than 6s a barrel. To begin with, the tax represented only a tiny proportion of the retail cost, at less than a tenth of a penny a pint for strong drink and not even two tenths of a penny per gallon for the small stuff. But in 1689, when William III of the Netherlands and his cousin, wife and co-ruler Mary had arrived in Britain and pushed Mary’s father James II off the throne, the need to pay for the “war of the British succession” and the continuing Nine Years’ War against Louis XIV of France saw the duty on beer and ale bounced upwards, from two shillings and sixpence a barrel to 3s 3d. The following year, 1690, the tax was doubled, to 6s 6d a barrel on strong ale and beer, more than a farthing a pint, when strong liquor retailed at a penny-ha’penny a pint, or 3d a quart “pot”. The rise in the tax on small drink was proportionate, to 1s 6d a barrel, but still the total tax on small beer and ale equalled only a half-penny a gallon.

The flaw in the system was that extra-strong beer or ale paid the same tax as “ordinary” or “common” strong beer. Unscrupulous brewer, and retailers, could therefore – and did – take a barrel of extra-strong beer and two of small beer, on which a total of 7s 3d of tax had been paid, mix them to make three barrels each equal in strength to common strong beer, which should have paid tax of 14s 3d in total, and save themselves 2s 4d a barrel in tax. This may have been equal to only a fifth of a penny a pot, or thereabouts, but it was still 6% or so extra profit. (Incidentally, for those of you new to this, “ale” at the time meant a drink with less hops in, and generally stronger, than “beer”.)

The excise authorities were certainly wise to this fiddle, and laws banning the mixing of different strengths of worts or beers were passed by Parliament in 1663 and again in 1670-1, 1689, 1696-97 and 1702, with (in William III’s time) a fine of £5 per barrel so mixed. That certainly did not stop people. Some time between 1698 and 1713, on the internal evidence, a manuscript was written, now in the Lansdowne collection in the British Library, titled An account of the losse in the excise on beer and ale for severall yeares last paste, with meanes proposed for advanceing that revenue. It was probably produced by an anonymous Excise or Treasury official, because he had access to official tax data from 1683 to 1698, and it gives a fascinating account of the prices and likely strengths of beers and ales at the time. “Very Small Beer” retailed pre-tax at 3s a barrel, and paid (since 1693) 1s 3d a barrel tax. “Common Strong Beer and Ale”, made from “four Bushells of mault” – suggesting an original gravity of 1075 to 1085 – sold for 18s a Barrel and paid, at the time, 4s 9d a barrel tax. “Very Strong Beer or ale the Barrell being the Strong from 8 Bushells”, suggesting a huge original gravity, perhaps north of 1160, sold for £3 a barrel, but still paid the same 4s 9d a barrel tax as common strong beer or ale.

The fact that very strong brews paid the same tax as “common standard strong drinke” had “begot a kind of trade of Defrauding”, the anonymous author wrote, and he declared that “the notion thereof and Profitt thereby” of mixing very strong ale or beer with small beer and selling it as common strong ale or beer “has been of late & now is generally knowne”, and “the traders therein have turned themselves more and more to the practice of Brewing it,” “very strong Drinke being now Commonly a parte of the Brewers Guiles, and the whole of many who Brew nothing else.” The result, he said, was that “the Consumption of it is everywhere, which you have under several odd names, as Two Threades, 3 Threades, Stout or according as the Drinker will have it in price, from 3d. to 9d. the quarte.”

That “3 threades” was a mixture of ordinary small ale or beer and very strong beer is confirmed by a publication called The Dictionary of the Canting Crew by “BE” (the “canting crew” being those who spoke in “cant”, or slang), published around 1697/1699. This called three-threads “half common Ale and the rest Stout or Double Beer”: both “stout” and “double beer” meant “extra-strong beer”, while “common ale” was the same as table ale or small ale, and brewed at one and a half bushels of malt to the barrel, giving an OG of around 1045. Mix a beer that was perhaps 10 or 11 per cent alcohol by volume with one that was only 4.5 per cent or so, and you’ll have a beer of around 7.5 per cent or so, of course, about the same strength of common strong ale: but one that gave the retailer a better profit that “entire gyle” strong beer did, because it had paid less tax.

In 1697 a tax on malt was introduced alongside the taxes on the finished product, at the bizarre-looking rate of six pence and sixteen 21sts of a penny a bushel. (My best guess on that odd sum is that it works out to not quite 4s 6d a quarter – but six pence and five eighths of a penny a bushel is 4s 6d a quarter exactly, so why the approximately 2% difference? If anyone has a good answer to this conundrum, I’d be grateful …) For the first time, the country’s very large number of private household brewers had to pay tax, if they bought their malt from commercial maltsters, while brewers were also now paying more tax when they brewed extra strong beer than when they brewed “common” strong beer, because of the extra (taxed) malt used. But even on double beer at eight bushels to the barrel, that only came out to around three farthings per gallon more tax, and it failed to stop brewers continuing to cheat the revenue by mixing small drink with extra-strong. A disgruntled former General Surveyor of Excise, Edward Denneston, “Gent”, who had been involved in inspecting breweries since at least the early 1680s, wrote what amounted to a 40-page rant in 1713 with the unsnappy title A Scheme for Advancing and Improving the Ancient and Noble Revenue of Excise upon Beer, Ale and other Branches to the Great Advantage of Her Majesty and the general Good of her Subjects. It claimed that the brewing profession had become rich solely because of the “Frauds, Neglects and Abuses” practised by the brewers to the detriment of the country’s tax take. Brewers, he said, were “Vermine … that eat us up alive” and he told them he wished them “all boiled in your own brewing Cauldrons, or drowned in your own Gile Tunns”.

Denneston was a man with a grievance: he claimed that when he was a General Surveyor of Excise in London, he had spent several hundred pounds of his own money uncovering fiddles at the royal brewhouse in St Katharine’s, by the Tower, which brewed beer for the navy. One such fraud cost the government £18,000 a year, and he had been promised a reward by the House of Commons for stopping it, which, he said, he had never received. He also claimed that the country was losing £200,000 a year in unpaid tax – equivalent, in relative terms, to more than £4 billion today – because of the wider fiddles practised by brewers and publicans, and declared: “before there was a Duty of Excise laid upon Beer and Ale, it was not known any Brewer ever got so much by his Trade as what is now call’d a competent Estate; but since a Duty of Excise was laid upon Beer and Ale, nothing is more obvious, amazing and remarkable, than to see the great Estates many Brewers in and about the City of London have got, and are daily getting.” This, he said, was because “the Brewers in general, ever since there was a Duty upon Beer and Ale, have been more or less guilty of defrauding that Duty in several Methods,” including bribing the excise officers (in October 1708, “T– J–, Brewer” was put on trial at the Old Bailey for allegedly giving 40s a week to four officers of the excise to ignore his mixing of small beer with strong, though he was found not guilty), illegally brewing with molasses rather than malt , like the brewer “lately and remarkably in Southwark”, who was “fined several Hundred Pounds, for using of Molossas in his Beer and Ale”, and, in particular, avoiding the tax on strong beer and ale by mixing extra-strong drink with small.

One such fiddle Denneston claimed to have uncovered when he was working for the Revenue in London as General Surveyor involved the publican at the Fortune of War in Well Close, Goodman’s Fields, just to the east of the Minories, and on the edge of the City. Denneston said that while visiting Well Close on official business, he spotted a sign outside the pub which said: “Here is to he Sold Two Thrids, Three Thrids, Four Thrids, and Six Thrids.” “My Curiosity up on this Subject, led me into the House,” Denneston said. “I call’d for my Host, desir’d to know what he meant by the several sorts of Thrids ? He answer’d, That the meaning was, Beer at Twopence, Threepence, Fourpence, and Sixpence a Pot, for that he had all sorts of Drink, and as good as any in England; upon which I tasted all the four sorts, and found they were all made up by Mixture, and not Beer intirely Brew’d ; upon which I order’d the Surveyor of that Division to go and search that House, where he found only two sorts of Drink, viz extraordinary Strong Beer, and Small, so that according to the Price he Mixt in Proportion; the same Fraud being more or less practis’d through the Kingdom.”

Denneston must have had an extraordinary palate to detect the difference between mixed beers and “intirely brewed” ones, but ignoring that, “Three Thrids” is obviously the same as three-threads, and Denneston confirms that it was a mixture of extra-strong beer and small beer, sold for three pence a pot, or quart, with two-threads costing two pence, four-threads costing four pence and so on. Why “threads”? One definition of “thread” is “a thin continuous stream of liquid”: the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe wrote of “thrids of rayne”, while another writer in 1723 wrote of “fat Liquor” that when poured out would “go on in a long Thread whose Parts are uninterrupted”.

Three-threads is mentioned several more times during the 18th century, but by 1760 the practice of retailers mixing extra-strong and small beers and ales had evidently ceased, and “three-threads”, if talked about, had to be explained. In November that year a letter by someone calling himself “Obadiah Poundage” (“poundage” being another work for duty or tax) and claiming to be an 86-year-old clerk at one of the great London breweries, living at Newington Green, Islington, was published in the London Chronicle under the title “The History of the London Brewery since 1688″ – “brewery” here being used in the sense “brewing trade”. Poundage was detailing the rise in the tax on beer and ale in the times of William III and Queen Anne, and how the brewers dealt with that. In a passage that was to become famous, he wrote: “Our tastes but slowly alter or reform. Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others what was then called Three-threads, at 3d per quart; but many used all stale, at 4d per pot. On this footing stood the trade until about the year 1722, when the Brewers conceived there was a method to be found preferable to any of these extremes; that beer well brewed, kept its proper time, became racy and mellow, that is, neither new nor stale, such would recommend itself to the public. This they ventured to sell at 23s per barrel, that the victualler might retail it at 3d per quart. At first it was slow in making its way, but in the end the experiment succeeded beyond all expectation. The labouring people, porters etc. experienced its wholesomeness and utility, they assumed to themselves the use thereof, from whence it was called Porter or Entire Butt.” (“Stale”, here, incidentally, means “matured”, not “off”, and it was the opposite of “mild”, or fresh beer: a mixture of old, matured, sharp beer and fresh, sweet, new beer was a favourite with many drinkers through to the 19th century at least.)

This was the first time that three-threads had been linked with the birth of porter, albeit obliquely, and with the two drinks apparently having nothing in common except the fact that they both retailed at 3d a quart. Poundage’s words were quickly plagiarised – they were reprinted, without acknowledgement in The Gentleman’s Magazine the same month, and reappeared in various publications over the next 40-plus years. More recently the pot has been muddied by the former brewer HS “Stan” Corran, who wrote A History of Brewing in 1975 and seems to have had access to a different version of Poundage’s letter, because he printed a lengthy extract from it in his book in which the line “Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others what was then called Three-threads, at 3d per quart” was replaced by “Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others ale, mild beer and stale blended together [my emphasis] at 3d per quart.” Corran apparently found this alternative version in the archives of Guinness in Dublin: how it got there is not known and, alas, Guinness’s archivists cannot find it now. It has been suggested by James Sumner, to whom I am grateful for much of the research in this post, that it ended up in Dublin via the private papers of the 18th century Hampstead brewer Michael Combrune. If that alternative version, or another copy, was around at the end of the 18th century, it may have influenced what happened next in the narrative history of three-threads: because suddenly, decades after it disappeared, the drink was given a completely different description to the one Denneston gave it, and it was plugged firmly into the story of the development of porter.

Early in 1802 the Monthly Magazine printed a piece on the history of what was then easily London’s favourite beer which said: “The wholesome and excellent beverage of porter obtained its name about the year 1730 … [formerly] the malt-liquors in general use were ale, beer, and twopenny, and it was customary for the drinkers of malt-liquor to call for a pint or tankard of half-and-half, ie a half of ale and half of beer, a half of ale and half of twopenny, or a half of beer and half of twopenny. In course of time it also became the practice to call for a pint or tankard of three threads, meaning a third of ale, beer, and twopenny; and thus the publican had the trouble to go to three casks, and turn three cocks for a pint of liquor. To avoid this trouble and waste, a brewer, of the name of HARWOOD, conceived the idea of making a liquor which should partake of the united flavours of ale, beer, and twopennyy He did so and succeeded, calling it entire or entire butt, meaning that it was drawn entirely from one cask or butt; and as it was a very hearty nourishing liquor, it was very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained its name of porter.

There are many problems with that story: porter was actually first mentioned in 1721, and while Ralph and James Harwood were porter brewers in Shoreditch, theirs was a small concern compared to the giants such as Truman, Whitbread and Parsons, and there is no evidence from the preceding 80 years that they had anything to do with the development of the drink, apart from a couple of brief and obscure references which themselves said nothing about three-threads. Porter was indeed also known as “entire butt”, but not because it was a one-cask-only reproduction of a drink that had originally been served from three different casks. It was so called because it was brewed “entire”, the technical term at the time for a beer or ale made from a combination of all three mashes of the malt, instead of the first mash being used to make strong ale or beer and the others standard beer and small beer, as was usual, and it was then matured in butts, 108-gallon casks. There is no evidence at all that porter was brewed to replace three-threads; and most importantly to our story, the description of what three-threads was, a combination of ale, beer and “twopenny” from three casks, is totally at odds with what Denneston described being served at the Fortune of War nearly 90 years earlier under the name three thrids, a mixture of just two drinks, extra-strong and small. Just to undermine the Monthly Magazine‘s narrative some more, “twopenny” WAS ale, according to Obadiah Poundage in 1760, who described it as a pale ale retailed at four pence a quart, or two pence a pint, made by the London brewers in imitation of the beers the country gentry “residing in London more than they had in former times” were “habituated to” at home. So according to the Monthly Magazine, three-threads was a tautological mixture of ale, beer and ale – though, admittedly, if the second was pale ale, the first could have been brown ale.

Unfortunately, within a very short time the Monthly Magazine‘s version of history was being reprinted, first in a guidebook called The Picture of London, also published in 1802, and then dozens – hundreds – of times over the next two centuries. Occasionally there were variations: John Tuck, writing in 1822, in a book called The Private Brewer’s Guide to the Art of Brewing Ale, Stout and Porter, said that “a mixture of stale, mild and pale, which was called three-threads, was sold at four pence per quart as far back as 1720,” which, as we have seen, was wrong on both ingredients and price. But everywhere it became the accepted truth that three-threads was a mixture of three different drinks, and porter was brewed to replace it.

I hope I have shown that three-threads was not the drink the Monthly Magazine and almost every other writer on the subject from 1802 has said it was, and also that, fascinating though the story of three-threads is, it has nothing to do with the development of porter. If any beer did, in fact, it was the strong “twopenny” pale ale that the gentry brought a taste for to London. According to manuscript histories of the brewing trade written out by Michael Combrune in the 1760s, this pale ale became “spontaneously transparent” and the established London brown-beer brewers decided to try to match this by ageing their own product much longer than they had previously, adding more hops to help it keep. As it aged, it mellowed, and this mellow brown beer, “neither new nor stale”, as Poundage said, and retailing for 3d a quart, became the beer that porters quickly grew to love above all others.

Not everybody will agree with me. John Krenzke, whose PhD dissertation on the industrialisation of the London beer trade 1400-1750 I have leaned on for much of the information to be found in this post, believes porter to have been brewed specifically to imitate the taste of three-threads. I have the greatest respect for John’s scholarship, which uncovered far more facts about the early history of three-threads than I was able to. But I cannot go along with his conclusion: I see no evidence that porter was anything other than an improved version of London brown beer, and that three-threads was something completely different. No writer until the Monthly Magazine in 1802, in a story demonstrably wrong in many ways, ever said porter was a replacement for three-threads. It looks like my journalistic ancestor missed the true, and much better story – that with every slurp, the three-threads drinker was diddling the tax man

You can hardly get fresher beer than from a bottle snatched off the production line by the managing director of the brewery, only seconds after it had been filled and capped – and, indeed, it’s excellent, cold, refreshingly flavourful and welcome, even at 10.30 in the morning. Mind, there are few or no Anglo-Saxon breweries where this would be possible, since health’n’safety barriers would be in place to prevent anyone from being able to reach across into the filling machinery and grab a passing bottle from the conveyor. However, this is Italy: while in a British brewery everybody would be forced into hi-vis jackets, ear protectors and goggles, here, where life is visibly more relaxed, visitors can wander about unworried by the HSE.

Menabrea brewery managing director Franco Thedy pulls a bottle out of the line

I am at Menabrea (pronounced roughly “MENahBRAYah”), one of the few surviving family-run Italian breweries, with roots that go back to before Italy was a single country. Menabrea is based in the town of Biella in Piedmont, 1,400 feet up in the foothills of the Alps, 40 miles from Turin to the south-west and 50 miles from Milan to the east. It is a town of 46,000 people, with soft water coming down from the Alps that, with plenty of nearby pastureland for sheep, has encouraged a local woollen industry: the town is home to Cerruti and Fila, among others. That same soft water is also very good for brewing lagers.

Inside the Menabrea brewery in Biella

The brewery was started in 1846 by a couple of cafe owners, Antonio and Gian Battista Caraccio, and Antoine Welf, from Gressoney in the Aosta valley, to the north-west of Biella. Welf was a Walser, that is, a speaker of the Walliser dialect of German found in the Swiss canton of Valais and surrounding territories such as Aosta. Welf disappears, and in 1854 the Caraccio brothers started leasing the brewery in Biella to another Walser, Anton Zimmermann, also from Gressoney, and his compatriot Jean Joseph Menabreaz (sic), who were already running a brewery in the town of Aosta itself. Piedmont – and Aosta – were at that time part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy, but in 1861, with some help from the French and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, was able to declare himself King of a more-or-less united Italy. Three years later, in 1864, Zimmermann and Menabreaz – now, post-unification, with Italianised first names, Antonio and Giuseppe, and, in the latter’s case, a more Italian-looking surname as well, with the final “z” disappearing – bought the brewery in Biella from the Caraccios.

In 1872 Zimmermann left the Biella partnership to concentrate on the brewery in Aosta. However, he died the following year, and the Aosta brewery fell under the control of his nephew, Antonio Thedy. A couple of decades later, in 1896, Antonio Thedy’s brother, Emilio Thedy, who had married one of Giuseppe Menabrea’s granddaughters, was helping to run the Biella brewery, and it is Emilio’s descendant, Franco Thedy, who is now the MD there. Strangely, considering how many old-established Italian breweries have vanished, the Aosta brewery where Joseph/Giuseppe Menabrea started in the beer business is also still going, albeit on a different site, and is now one of four Italian brewing plants operated by Heineken, and producing Moretti, among other beer brands.

The town of Biella

Menabrea itself ran into financial problems in the early 1990s, but in 1991 Paulo Thedy, Franco’s father, signed a deal which saw the company acquired another family brewer, Gruppo Birra Forst, founded in the South Tyrol village of Forst in 1857 (when the area was still part of Austria-Hungary: it passed to Italy after the First World War). The deal saw Menabrea keep a considerable degree of independence, with the Thedy family still in charge. Today production is around 180,000 hectolitres a year, 45 per cent bottled and 55 per cent keg, and 90 per cent sold in Italy – and of that, 50 per cent is sold in the north-west of the country, making Menabrea pretty much the Italian equivalent of a family-owned regional brewer.

Franco Thedy

The remaining 10 per cent is exported to 28 countries around the world. It is Franco Thedy’s ambition to grow that export figure that is the reason why I am in Biella, along with a bunch of style bloggers mostly about a third of my age, courtesy of Tennent’s the Glasgow-based brewer that is now importing Menabrea beers into the UK. Peroni, the SAB Miller-owned Italian beer brand, is massive – massive – in the UK, with sales in this country not far off ten times Menabrea’s entire output. Nobody at Tennent’s, or Menabrea, actually says so over the weekend I was in Piedmont with them, but clearly the thinking is that even a small slice of Peroni’s UK market would be very welcome for the Biella boys and girls. The company has already started to gain a small toehold: if you’ve been in the Zizzi pizza restaurant chain recently, you’ll have found Menabrea’s pale lager on sale.

The brewery is on a 7,000 square metres (1.75 acre) site on the Via Ramella Germanin in the centre of the town, with some of the buildings dating back to the earliest years of the operation, including the circular former icehouse where ice was stored to enable the beer to be cold-lagered. The cramped site makes it difficult to expand, but Menabrea is now planning to build in 2016 a €2.5 million new modular brewhouse – the fourth on the site – with German kit that will take potential capacity up to 200,000 hectolitres. The current brewhouse, although put up only in 1986, “is at the end of its life”, Thedy admits: the equipment was second-hand when Menabrea acquired it, from what had been a test brewery for Heineken at one of its plants, and is now more than 40 years old, having been built in 1974. The new brewery will also give Menabrea the ability to produce more specialist beers, and seasonal brews – “It’s what the Italian market wants now”, Thedy says. Menabrea will not, however, he says, be producing the sort of wacky barrel-aged beers and so on that new Italian micros have been coming out with in the past few years: it sees itself as a brewer, not an experimenter. The latest expenditure comes after a €16 million spend over the past ten years to refurbish the plant, which includes €700,000 of German bottling equipment that flushes the oxygen from the bottles twice, to try to ensure there is as little oxygen inside the bottles to stale the beer as possible before they are capped.

Conical fermenting vessels at Menabrea

Factbox time: the brew length is 175 to 185 hectolitres – about 4,000 gallons, or 110 barrels. The beers are made with 73% malted barley from France and 27% maize, and, today, Danish yeast, though for a while the yeast was coming from the Carlsberg-Tetley operation in England, flown in to Milan airport, and soft water from the mountains that can be seen from the brewery. In the past the brewery made its beers from malt and rice, with the rice coming from the neighbouring Piedmontese province of Vercelli, famous for rice-growing. It started using maize 35 years ago, because it found that rice was too difficult to deal with in the brewery. The hops are pelleted Hallertau and Saaz. The main brews are the 4.8% abv “bionda” pale lager and a tasty 5% abv amber beer, with hints of chocolate and coffee, which is also being imported into the UK; three beers made under the “Top Restaurant” brands, including a pils and a bock, sold in Italy and the United States, but not in the UK; and a regular Christmas special. The brewery also produces a number of oddities besides its own beers, including all-malt “private label” beer for an Italian retailer, and also Allsopps Strong Lager, a 7.5% bottled beer brewed under licence from Carlsberg – today’s owned of the Allsopp name – for the Italian market, a last echo of the pioneering role Kirstie Allsopp’s ancestor’s played in introducing lager brewing to Britain.

The current fermentation cellars have 15 tanks, each holding 650 hectolitres, and all fermenting the beer at 14ºC for two weeks. Once fermentation is completed to the brewers’ satisfaction, the temperature is taken down to 0ºC and the yeast drops to the bottom of the fermentation vessels. The yeast is drained off to be reused, up to a maximum of seven or eight times, after which it is sold for pig food, and the fermented beer is run into vessels in the maturation cellar, where it is lagered for four weeks at the usual 0ºC. The company is building a new fermentation cellar with four new tanks to increase capacity, and also installing extra kegging capacity to give the brewery the ability to fill one-way kegs for the export market. It also fills 1,000 litre and 500-litre tanks for beer festivals and restaurants with unpasteurised, unfiltered beer, though currently only five retail outlets, one in Biella itself, the others in or near Milan, are being supplied with tank beer.

A Sbirro cheese round

Most of the spent grain is sold to farmers as cattle feed, but some goes across the road to the Botalla cheese-making plant, where it goes into a “beer cheese” called Sbirro, which is also an Italian slang word for “cop”, policeman. The collaboration, Thedy says, came about 11 years ago when he and the owner of the cheese factory were having a 6pm beer together before going home. “I asked him, ‘hey, Andrea, how can we make a beer cheese?’, because when I went to Belgium I saw a lot of beer cheese. He said, ‘I’ve no idea, but we’ll try – why not?’ So we started the Menabrea beer cheese project. We were the first to produce a beer cheese in Italy, and now it’s a phenomenon, really popular.” The cheese is dropped into Menabrea’s “ambrata” amber beer, then covered on the outside with spent grain, which makes it look very different, and spends three months in the cellars of the cheese factory, maturing. A wholesaler is now selling the beer cheese in the UK, and if you see it, I can recommend it: a firm, tangy cheese with a hint of hops, good on its own and excellent melted on top of pizza.

Early gas-pressure lager font using wooden barrel, at Menabrea’s museum

Menabrea’s USP, Thedy believes, is the passion its people feel for the product. Modern craft brewers are using computers and automatic systems to make their beer, just like the really big breweries, Thedy says: “People are not really connected with the product.” At Menabrea, however, he insists, they are: the workers have been there for decades, with some retiring after 35 years at the brewery, and people whose fathers and grandfathers worked there. “Menabrea is one big family.” The people who work in the brewery, he says, “they are connected with the beer, they love this product. We want to keep the feeling, the passion, the tradition in this brewery. We want to sell our product, and our passion for the product, around the world. It’s not just beer – it’s a part of the Italian beer story.”

The Blsck Madonna shrine on a wall at the Menabrea brewery

It was certainly fascinating, for me, to contrast and compare Menabrea with the Hook Norton brewery in Oxfordshire, which I went round last year: the two breweries are almost exactly the same age, both are still run by descendants of the founder, and the management of both breweries clearly have the same passion for the beers they produce, and the same urgent desire to see their companies survive and thrive. The kit is rather different, of course: Hook Norton is able to use equipment that is a century old or more, while the Biella operation’s brewing vessels are considerably newer, and much shinier. Both breweries, interestingly, have space devoted to artefacts from the past, though Menabrea’s is the more interesting simply because itr’s rearer, in my experience, to see items from an old lager brewery than stuff from an old ale brewery. Italy being Italy, the Menabrea brewery has a very good restaurant attached, in converted stables, which despite having easily 150-plus covers was packed out the night I and the style-bloggers threw ourselves at the typical Italian six-course blow-out: I’m not sure they’d be able to maintain that level of gastronomic intensity in the rural Cotswolds. Nor can I see any British brewery having anything like the picture of the Black Madonna of Oropa to be seen on one wall of the Menabrea brewery, a shrine marking the fact that the brewery was the first stop on the parading round the town of this ancient religious relic.

So: what chance for Menabrea in the UK market? I’d certainly like to see the ambrata widely available, there aren’t enough examples of that style of beer on sale here. Judging by my experience with the beer pulled right off the production line, the bionda will succeed if Tennent’s can crack one of the hardest problems facing any beer operator: logistics. I’ve increasingly grown to understand that the main problem with much of the lager sold in the UK isn’t that it’s not very good, but that it’s too old, and/or it’s been handled badly in the supply chain. This is true of many beers, but particularly so with lager: it really does need to be as fresh as possible.

And now, since while searching for background material for this post, I came up with a fair amount of information about the Biella brewery’s past, here is

A short history of Birra Menabrea

A Menabrea staff photo from 1897

The roots of the current brewing operation in Biella lie 30 miles away, where Anton Zimmerman, a member of the German-speaking Walser community in Gressoney-Saint-Jean in the Aosta valley, born 1803, who had studied brewing in France and Germany, and Jean Joseph Menabreaz, also from Gressoney, started the Birra Zimmermann in Via Xavier de Maistre in Aosta itself in 1837, using barley grown largely in the nearby valley of Great St Bernard. According to one source, Menabreaz and Zimmermann were the first brewers in the Kingdom of Sardinia to use Bavarian-style bottom fermentation techniques. Meanwhile a third Walser from Gressoney, Antoine Welf, went into partnership in 1846 with two brothers, Antonio and Gian Battista Caraccio, cafe proprietors in Biella, to found a brewhouse there, taking advantage of the water that flows down from the nearby Oropa mountain. In 1854 the Caraccios, who were from from Bioglio, a village six miles north-east of Biella, began leasing the Biella brewery to Menabreaz and Zimmermann, who were presumably introduced to it through the Gressoney connection.

The Menabrea brewery frontage circa 1900

On October 3 1864 the brewery was bought by Menabreaz (now, since the unification of Italy, called Giuseppe Menabrea) and Zimmermann (now Antonio rather than Anton) for 95,000 lire, £3,800 in contemporary British currency, or about £330,000 in modern money. Three years later, on September 17 1867, a partnership agreement was drawn up which gave Zimmermann a 25 per cent share of the Biella brewery, Giuseppe Menabrea a 50 per cent share and two of Guiseppe’s sons, Francesco and Carlo, 25 per cent between them. In 1869 Giuseppe gave Francesco and Carlo another 12.5 per cent each, so that all four partners each now owned a quarter of the operation. Three years after that, Zimmermann, now in his 70s, evidently decided to concentrate on the Aosta operation, and on July 6 1872 a new company was formed to run the Biella brewery, G. Menabrea and Sons, the sons this time being Carlo, and Alberto, who was just 19.

Guiseppe Menabrea, centre, and his two sons Carlo and Francesco

Alberto died on August 5 1880, aged just 27, and just eight months later, on April 18 1881, Giuseppe Menabrea died as well. Carlo carried on with the business, forming another partnership with his brothers-in-law Antonio Mehr and Giuseppe Bieler to make beer and soda water and sell it “retail and wholesale”, paying himself and his partners a salary of two thousand lire a year. By 1882 the brewery was producing at least two types of lager, a blond Pilsner style and a dark version in the Munich dunkel style. The beers received praise that year from the Italian finance minister, Quintino Sella, who called it ” squisita”, and it may have been the minister’s praise that prompted the King of Italy, Umberto I, to make Carlo Menabrea a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy

19th century wort cooler at Menabrea

Three years on, in 1885, Carlo Menabrea also died, leaving his widow, Eugenia Squindo, a member of another Walser family originally from Gressone (and originally called Squindoz – like Joseph Menabreaz they lost the “z” to look more Italian), with three young daughters Albertina, Eugenia and Maria, aged 12, nine and seven. The widow Eugenia carried on with the brewery, helped by her brother Pietro Squindo, who ran an iron foundry in Biella. After her death, two of her sons-in-law, Emilio Thedy, a nephew of Antonio Zimmermann, who had married the young Eugenia, and Agostino Antoniotti, husband of Albertina, founded a partnership in 1896 to run the business. Among the changes they brought was the replacing of the brewery’s old wood and coal-fired coppers by modern copperrs heated by steam. Soon after, in 1899, the brewery won a silver medal at the Turin esposizione, followed by a Diploma of Honour and Cross in Dijon, and other prizes in Munich and Ghent, and then in 1900 a Grand Prix at the Paris World Exhibition, the first of a string of awards over the past century.

About this time the brewery had more than thirty employees, and production was about 8,000 to 10,000 hectolitres a year, hitting 10,814hl in 1910-11. About 90 per cent of production was of dark Munich-style lager, rather than the pale Pilsner kind.

The Menabrea stand at the Esposizione Agricola Industriale di Vercelli in 1930

The brewery came through the First World War, though it lost the services of Federico, Emilio Thedy’s eldest son, who was called up to fight for his country. Production rose to 19,611 hectolitres in 1920-21. Under the Thedys, in 1930, Menabrea bought several “prestigious” taverns in the two biggest cities in Piedmont, Turin and Novara, to help advertise the brewery’s beers. It survived a period of high beer taxes in Italy in the 1930s, and the tumult of the Second World War, still with Emilio Thedy in charge, and when Emilio died in 1949 he was followed at the helm by the second of his five sons, Carlo.

Lagering vessels at the Menabrea brewery circa 1900

By 1964 the brewery was still being run by Carlo Thedy, with the help of his nephew Paolo, son of his youngest brother, Franco. Eventually Paulo took over, and production crept up, passing 36,000 hectolitres and then 40,000 hectolitres in the 1980s. Menabrea had also begun importing beers from Britain and Germany, including John Bull Bitter. But financial worries caused Paolo Thedy to enter into a deal that saw the company become part of the South Tyrol-based family-controlled brewing operation Gruppo Forst, albeit with considerable autonomy and with the Thedy family still in charge. Thus when Paolo died in 2006, two years after production hit 100,000 hectolitres, he was followed as managing director by his son Franco, born in 1968.

Meanwhile in Aosta, Anton Zimmermann died in 1873, aged 70, and his nephew Antonio Thedy, one of six sons of Federico Thedy and Marta Zimmermann – whose younger brother Emilio, born 1876, was to marry Carlo Menabrea’s daughter Eugenia – took over. Thedy updated the brewery, and started the brewing of Munich and Pilsen-style lagers. Thedy’s daughter Matilde had married a man called Corrado Vincent, and in 1915, after Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, the concern dropped the Germanic Zimmermann ( the name means “carpenter” in German) and became a limited partnership under the name Birra Aosta di Matilde Vincent e Compagnia, though with Thedy still in charge, since Corrado Vincent did not become the boss until 1925.

Corrado’s and Matilde’s son Roberto Vincent took over, aged 20 in 1936, and pushed production up from just 2,600 hectolitres in 1931 to 7,000 hectolitres in 1955, despite having to serve in the Italian army during the Second World War. When Roberto Vincent died in 1965, aged just 51, after a serious illness, the company was sold, and in 1966 a new concern, Socièta Industrial Birraria, was set up to run the Aosta brewery. A new brewery was built in the nearby village of Pollein, and capacity eventually pushed up to 500,000 hectolitres.

SIB was bought by Henninger Brau of Frankfurt in 1973 and then sold to Dreher, owner of breweries in Trieste, Padua, Genoa and Turin (and controlled by Heineken since the early 1970s) in 1988. Plans were put in place to boost production to one million hectolitres, and the brewery is still running in 2015, one of four Heineken plants in Italy, producing brands including Moretti, Dreher, Prinz and Von Wunster, with an agreement signed earlier this year that it will continue in operation until at least 2026.

Of all the different styles of books about beer, the old-fashioned anecdotal ramble, as exemplified by John Bickerdyke’s classic Curiosities of Ale and Beer from 1889, or Richard Boston’s Beer and Skittles from the 1970s, seems to be the rarest. I’m delighted, therefore, to be able to add to the genre with Strange Tales of Ale, a collection of 28 stories involving beer, brewing, breweries or pubs in some way.

Regular readers of this blog will have come across many – though not all – of the stories in Strange Tales of Ale here over the years, as the book is a bit of a “best of Zythophile” collected between hard covers. There’s the Great London Beer Flood of 1814, of course; the story of Spitfires ferrying beer to the D-Day troops in their fuel tanks; why England’s aristocrats brewed beer that was meant to be laid down and only drunk after 21 years; the mystery of the yard of ale; the true origins of the Red Lion as a pub name (with a picture of the attractive Art Deco innsign from the Red Lion, Fulwell, my local); the most notorious brewer in history; what to order in a Victorian public house; the history of the ploughman’s lunch; what Pliny the Elder really said about hops; how the Dove in Hammersmith got its tiny public bar; pea beer; the British National Dinner, and others that are among my personal favourites from the 300-plus posts, totalling more than 600,000 words, that I’ve stuck up here over the past eight years. There are a couple you might not have read even if you have been a Zythophile follower since 2007, on Dutch Schultz, the beer baron of Brooklyn (here’s a beer trivia question for you – which New York brewer, born in Leeds, was played on film by Bob Hoskins?) and on “the brewery that salami-sliced itself to death”.

If you’re looking for some beery holiday reading for yourself, or a birthday or Christmas present for someone you know likes beer, and reading, can I recommend STOA? Indeed, I’d hope you don’t even have to like beer to enjoy the book: the tales are in themselves engrossing, from the link between beer and bridal gowns to how the Jerusalem Tavern near Smithfield became the Trigger’s Broom of pubs to potboys in literature and art.

Strange Tales of Ale is published by Amberley Publishing, and costs £12.99 hardback, £7.80 as an ebook (unlike Amber Gold and Black, my last book, from a different publisher, I get rather less of a royalty on the ebook version of STOA than on the Finnish forest version, so I’m happier for you to go traditional …) You can support small businesses and buy it from my good friend Paul at Beer Inn Print here or if you don’t mind tax-dodging conglomerates you can put more money in my pockets by buying it though my Amazon Associates page here. (Or, if you’re in North America,

A rare picture of The Dove, Hammersmith – then still the Doves – when the landlord was Samuel Richardson Gamble, the name on the (birdless) signboard, some time between at least 1874 and January 1881, the month the licence was handed over to Henry Thomas Saunders. The window to what became the smallest public bar in Britain is on the right of the door. If you look at a modern picture of the pub, you can see the bracket for the innsign is still the same piece of wrought iron, albeit with a bit missing …

If you want a single statistic that shows how the craft beer movement has become a world-wide phenomenon, let it be this: there are now seven eight craft breweries on the Mediterranean island of Majorca.

Miquel and Felipe Amorós of Beer Lovers brewery, Alcuida, Majorca

They are part of the spectacular rise in new small breweries which means  almost 300 craft breweries across the whole of Spain, 600 in France, 800 in Italy and so on.

Life is a little different on Majorca from, say, Italy, where Italian craft brewers are making much-admired pilsner-style brews: no Mallorcan brewer makes a lager, simply because they could not compete with the Spanish giants, Estrella Damm and Mahou San Miguel, on price, but all seem to make a wheat beer (“blat” in Catalan), which is evidently seen as the entry-level craft beer for locals, and there are pale ales, IPAs, and speciality beers. Most breweries seem to be bottle-only, although Beer Lovers in Alcuida, in the north of the island, kegs some of its pale ale. The quality is very occasionally dodgy, as you would expect from operations with hand-bottling lines, but then, of the last five pints of cask ale I was offered in London, one was cloudy as a wet weekend in Wicklow and another tasted like it had been brewed by Sarsons, so quality is not just a Mallorcan problem.

Sullerica Original, flavoured with rosemary, lemon verbena and orange blossoms – ‘flor de taronger’ in Catalan

I managed to find beers from six of the island’s brewers, and generally the Mallorcan craft beers were a vastly better choice than their eurolager opponents. Several were excellent: I particularly liked the brews from the Sullorica brewery, in Sóller, in the west of the island, which makes a very good wheat beer flavoured with local lemon peel, and an equally fine amber ale, Original, which includes rosemary, lemon verbena and orange blossoms, though I was disappointed not to find the beer brewed with bitter olives the brewery was apparently making last year. I also had a first-class sour cherry beer, Cor de Cirera, from the Cas Cerveser brewery in Galilea, about eight miles to the west of Palma, which is aged for a year in French oak barrels that had previously contained red wine from the Bodegas Son Puig in nearby Puigpunyent.

Of course, the vast majority of beer consumed in Majorca is still big-brand eurolager, or, if you’re in somewhere like the fake Irish bars of Cala D’Or, keg Guinness. You can find Mallorcan craft beers in some of the island’s large supermarkets, in specialist shops, in restaurants that like to offer Mallorcan food and in Majorca’s craft beer bars, though I’d advise you to check out the brewers’ websites for advice on where their beers are available bewfore you go hunting. I was lucky and met a Barcelonan beer blogger called Joan Vilar-i-Martí, of the Catalan beer blog Birraire.com, earlier this year in Poland, who sent me details of Mallorcan brewers and bars. I only managed to visit one of the bars he recommended, Lórien in Palma: I normally keep at least the length of three or four bargepoles between me and bars with names taken from Tolkein, but this small, dark, hidden-away place, now 25 years old, is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the city: the beers on draught when I was there included examples from Italy, mainland Spain (from Pamplona, an excellent sour wheat beer, though definitely not the “hefeweizen” it claimed to be) and Ireland.

The outside of the Beer Lovers brewery in Alcúida

I also visited the Beer Lovers brewery in Alcúida, in the north of Majorca, which was founded in 2012 by Miquel Amorós Crawford and his brother Felipe, sons of a Mallorcan father and a mother who is half Welsh and half English. The brewery is down a narrow street, hard to find even with the help of Google Maps, in the heart of the attractive centre of old Alcúida, in a former barn built of the local honey-coloured limestone, attached to a house that has been owned by the family for 300 years, and it was not until I was ten yards from the front door and smelt the unmistakable aromas of mashing malt that I knew I was close to my target. Originally, the barn, which still has troughs on one wall for animal food, “was where the horse and cart were kept – it was full of stuff, so we emptied it, and added a bit – we couldn’t touch much, because all the old buildings are protected,” Miquel says. “We put in a new floor, but the floor had to be like the old house’s floor, the walls have to be built of the same old stone.”

The brewery name is in part a pun on their surname – “amorós” literally means “loving” in Catalan – and was chosen because it would be easy to understand and pronounce, by Mallorcans and tourists. They could have chosen a locally based geographical name, Miquel says, but they didn’t want one of those: “We wanted to escape from all those products that are being sold because they’re Mallorcan rather than because they’re good.” The name “doesn’t sound so strange to us,” he says, though he admits that “there are people who like it a lot and people who don’t like it, who say, ‘why an English name when you’re based in Majorca?”

Miquel is a semi-reluctant professional brewer: “I tell everybody, I prefer drinking beer to brewing it,” he says. “We were home-brewers, but I was working in construction, and that was badly hit by the recession, while my brother was a translator, and Google Translate means that’s not a good job to have nowadays. So we made some numbers, we visited a few breweries and we decided to get into the brewing business. Come back to me in two years and I’ll tell you if we were right or wrong!”

The brewhouse at the Beer Lovers brewery in Alcúida, with the lauter tun/whirlpool in the foreground

The brewing equipment – combined mash tun and kettle, and alongside that a combined lauter tun-whirlpool, plus in the front room of the barn three small conical fermentation vessels – comes from a firm in Catalonia that previously made kit for wineries . The boom in small breweries in Spain, now up to nearly 300, has been a blessing to such manufacturers, after the bodegas stopped expanding in the recession. Brewing capacity is 750 litres at a time, with brewing currently taking place once a week during the summer months, less during the island’s quiet season. There is actually a well inside the barn itself, but it smells musty, and Miquel says Mallorcan well water is not normally suitable for brewing: Beer Lovers actually tanks 3,000 litres at a time from a well in a place called Can Sales, around seven miles to the west, at the end of the Sierra Tramontana, which runs up the island, where the water has apparently spent less time travelling through Majorca’s limestone rocks, and needs no treatment to make darker beers with and only a little tweaking for pale ones.

The porter in Majorca that tastes like wot it oughter

The brewery produces both bottled and keg beers, and their beer is on tap in a few bars in Palma. It makes five different beers, the original three, Blat, a Belgian-style wheat beer, and the brewery’s best-seller (“It wouldn’t be a beer I would have done as a home brewer, but this is a business, you’ve got to brew the beer people will buy, not the one you like”, Miquel says); Broll, a pale ale (“sales are growing, and if in one or two years we sell more of the pale ale I it will be mission accomplished!”), and Bram, an amber ale, “difficult to sell in Majorca, people see dark beers, they’re a bit taken aback”, plus, now, a porter, made just twice a year with English malt from Crisp (the one beer I tried at the brewery – a fine, deep ruby-brown drink with chocolate and coffee in the depths that enabled me to justify the joke in the headline*) and Llop, Catalan for “wolf”, an IPA that Miquel confesses began as an accident after they over-hopped a batch of the amber ale. Miquel and his team decided to dry-hop the beer as well before releasing it, and it found enough of an audience for them to have brewed six more batches since. “For me it’s the best one we’ve got”, he says. Most of the malt, except for the porter, comes from Weyermann in Germany via the Spanish mainland: “there’s plenty of barley in Spain, but the maltsters are owned by the big companies, so you can’t buy it even if you want,” Miquel says. All the bottles, incidentally, carry a full list of the malt and hop varietiers found in the beer inside – other brewery please copy.

The first stage, Miquel says, was to make sure they were happy with the standard of the beers they were making. The next stage, which they are working on now, is “to be easy to find. People come here, they try the beers, they like it, they ask, ‘where can be get hold of our beer,’ and that’s the difficult question. The most difficult part is distribution.”

The brewery is open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays, when Miquel and his team showcase the suitability of their beers to be matched with food. It certainly matches extremely well: right after my visit to the brewery I had a lunch of gambas (prawns) in a garlicky, buttery sauce with a bottle of Broll in a restaurant 100 or so yards away that was marvellous. As news about Beer Lovers spreads, Miquel is also finding holidaying brewers from Denmark, Germany and other countries – and beer writers like me – arrive on the brewery doorstep.

The brewery’s major problem, like other small concerns, is distribution: Miquel is still struggling to find one who an do a good job for craft beer in a culture that, despite a growing number of craft beer bars, is still heavily biased towards drinking the same very few big names. Still, when Beer Lovers started there were two small breweries in Majorca – now there are seven or eight.

My personal suggestion to the brewers of Majorca, for what little it may be worth, is to do what Sollerica appears to be trying to do, and Cas Cerveser, and make distinctively Mallorcan beers using Mallorcan ingredients: beers that could not come from anywhere but Mallorca.

* Punning on the old Heineken ad from the 1980s

‘Rossa’ English bitter-style bottle-conditioned ale from the Pla brewery, named for Es Pla, the flat plain of central Majorca, in Algaida, about 15 miles east of Palma

A wheat beer from the Talaiòtika brewery in Porreres, a small town in the middle of Majorca

Cor de Cirera sour cherry beer, a lovely brew, aged in former red wine barrels for a year, made by the Cas Cerveser brewery in Galilea, Majorca, about eight miles west of Palma

Moli Balear wheat beer, flavoured with coriander and bitter orange peel and brewed in Campanet, about six miles south-east of Alcúida:although this gives the impression of being brewed in Majorca, I’m told by a reliable source that it’s actually from the Huyghey brewery in Belgium. The label shows a typical Mallorcan windmill.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a blogpost I agreed with more than Simon Wiliams of CAMRGB’s take on the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia last week versus the London Craft Beer Festival, also last week, in Hackney. Read it here. Basically, the problem with the GBBF, 40 years on from the very first one in Covent Garden, is that it’s utterly unimaginative, dull, unengaging and uninspiring. Too much of the beer is too samey (mind, that’s a reflection of the state of the British small brewing scene), and while there are interesting and challenging beers to find, it’s a pain in the butt trying to track therm down. What’s more, reports suggest that if you go at the end of the week, all the most interesting beers will be long sold out. It really needs a serious rethink in terms of presentation, approach, purpose: in particular, there should be far more involvement from the breweries supplying the beer than just turning up with casks and pumpclips and then buggering off. At the LCBF, in contrast, the beers are almost without exception challenging and exciting, the stalls are staffed by people from the breweries involved who are delighted to chat. Despite the room the LCBF was held in being far too hot, I enjoyed myself, and enjoyed the beers, far more than I did at the GBBF. I could say much more, but Simon has said it all, and very well.

When you’re enjoying yourself down the pub, there will generally come a moment when urgent necessities need to be taken care of. But increasingly, pub owners seem to be putting difficulties in people’s way – by shifting their ground-floor conveniences to somewhere decidedly more inconvenient, involving negotiating often steep and narrow stairs. I am happy to give the opportunity for a guest rant on the subject of upstairs (and downstairs) loos to my good friend Mr James Castle of the parish of Twickenham in Middlesex – take it away, Jim:

A brief list of pubs and restaurants now with “grade separated” toilets in the Twickenham area: the Prince Blucher, near the Green, the Osteria Pulcinella in Church Street, the Eel Pie, also in Church Street, and the Waldegrave Arms and the Railway in Teddington. Al this is ostensibly to increase seating space for punters which, I suppose, is for rugby days, as these new areas are never occupied. Other pubs which have been like it for some while have their own quirks. The London Road (or whatever it is called now) allows some drinkers to use the downstairs loo; the Fox in Church Street leaves the disabled loo open for all and sundry; as does Twickenham’s JD Wetherspoon pub, the William Webb Ellis, where I do notice old blokes sneaking into the “universal”/disabled loo, sometimes having to queue. I think the staff might not lock it as part of their customer service.

The fermenting room at Fuller’s Griffin brewery about 1970, showing the “dropping” system in use: fermentation would be started in the upper rounds, and after a day or two the wort would be dropped into the shallower squares below to finish fermentation.

To use these ground floor loos the pubs usually provide a key from behind the bar but I’ve also noticed that some of the big chains (in other areas) allow the “RADAR” key scheme for access. In Twickenham, the George on the main drag, the Brouge/Old Goat or whatever on the Hampton Road, the Three Kings, also in the centre of town, the Barmy Arms by the river and the Sussex Arms by the green are all fine places where a gentleman does not have to climb the stairs to find relief, as are most pubs in Teddington, Hampton Hill, Whitton, Richmond (except the White Cross) and Kingston. But all the pubs I used to go in Putney are now “grade separated” (the Eight Bells a proud exception). I let the White Swan by the river in Twickenham off this “naughty” list as I don’t suppose it ever had a gents’ loo on the level of the bar.

In terms of culprits for all this aggravation, Messers Fuller, Smith & Turner seem to be the main offender, and I’m hearing rumours about the Prince Albert in Twickenham, which I understand is to undergo a refurbishment The “destruction” of their decent pub in Isleworth, the Royal Oak, is appalling, although I suppose there was no room to move the loos upstairs.

Anyway, how “disabled” do you have to be to use the designated ground floor loo? As a sufferer from the after-effects of prostate surgery, I try to avoid unnecessary flights of steps, which can lead to embarrassment, but it’s not as though I use a stick. I am not really disabled (or am I?). In any case, all this extra space the pub companies/breweries have created by moving the loos upstairs/downstairs never seems to be full!

The other problem is the under-supply of cubicles in gents’ toilets. One is not enough. It seems more and more men are eschewing urinals, not just us victims with urological difficulties, but also those with fly-button trousers, small willies and drug problems.

And another thing, the 2015 budget took a penny of a pint. Basically it didn’t happen as most boozers saw it coming and raised their prices by ten pence before Budget Day, and then reduced them by a penny. Pubs are still increasing prices twice a year, although I am told we do not have any meaningful inflation. No wonder pubs are empty. There’s only a certain amount of overpriced second-rate food a pub can sell to compensate for the missing regulars put off by prices. We’re not all baby boomers on generous final salary pensions …

JC

Fuller’s brewery, Chiswick in the late 1960s, with the brick chimney still in place. The land for the petrol station on the corner was sold by Fuller’s to the fuel company, and later had to be bought back at considerable expense as the brewery expanded

The “IPA shipwreck” is one of many long-lasting myths in the history of India Pale Ale. The story says that IPA became popular in Britain after a ship on its way to India in the 1820s was wrecked in the Irish Sea, and some hogsheads of beer it was carrying out east were salvaged and sold to publicans in Liverpool, after which the city’s drinkers demanded lots more of the same. Colin Owen, author of a history of Bass’s brewery, called the tale “unsubstantiated” more than 20 years ago, and others, including me, being unable to find any reports of any such wreck, nor of any indication that IPA was a big seller in the UK until the 1840s, have dismissed it as completely untrue. Except that it turns out casks of IPA did go on sale in Liverpool after a wreck off the Lancashire coast involving a ship carrying hogsheads of beer to India that, literally, became a landmark – though not in the 1820s – and the true story is a cracker, involving one of the worst storms to hit the British Isles in centuries, which brought huge destruction and hundreds of deaths from one side of the UK to the other.

The story of the IPA shipwreck first turns up in 1869 in a book called Burton-on-Trent, its History, its Waters and its Breweries, by Walter Molyneaux, who described how the Burton brewers began brewing beer for export to India from 1823. Molyneaux wrote: “India appears to have been the exclusive market for the Burton bitter beer up to about the year 1827, when in consequence of the wreck in the Irish Channel of a vessel containing a cargo of about 300 hogsheads, several casks saved were sold in Liverpool for the benefit of the underwriters, and by this means, in a remarkably rapid manner, the fame of the new India ale spread throughout Great Britain.”

Molyneaux’s story has been regularly repeated in the past century and a half. But no one has been able to find a wreck that matched up with his story. This turns out to be, not because the wreck didn’t happen, but because he was 12 years out with the date.

The year after Molyneaux’s book came out, a different version of the tale appeared in the “notes and queries” section of an obscure publication called English Mechanic and World of Science. The account was written by a man who gave himself the name of “Meunier”, and it said: “Forty years ago [ie about 1830] pale ale was very little known in London, except to those engaged in the India trade. The house with which I was connected shipped large quantities, receiving in return consignments of East Indian produce. About 1839, a ship, the Crusader, bound for one of our Indian ports, foundered, and the salvage, comprising a large quantity of export bitter ale, was sold for the benefit of the underwriters. An enterprising publican or restaurant keeper in Liverpool purchased a portion of the beer and introduced it to his customers; the novelty pleased, and, I believe, laid the foundation of the home trade now so extensively carried on.”

Ships off Liverpool in the Great Storm of 1839, painted by Samuel Walters.

The two clues – the ship’s name and the later date – together with the fact that large numbers of newspapers from the time have now been scanned and made available on the web make it easy to trace the story at last. The Crusader was a 584-tonne East Indiaman, or armed merchantman, described as “a fine large ship with painted ports [that is, gun-ports] and a full-length figurehead”, “newly coppered”, that is, with new copper sheathing on the hull to prevent attacks by wood-boring molluscs, and “a very fast sailer”, under the command of Captain JG Wickman. She had arrived in Liverpool early in November 1838 after a five-month journey from either Calcutta or Bombay (different Liverpool newspapers at the time gave different starting ports) with a cargo including raw cotton, 83 elephants’ tusks, coffee, wool, pepper, ginger – and opium, which did not become illegal in Britain until 1916. Captain Wickman and his crew were due to leave for Bombay again on Saturday December 15, after five weeks of roistering in Liverpool, with a cargo that included finished cotton goods, silk, beef and pork in casks, cases of glass shades, iron ingots, tin plates, Government dispatches – and India ale in hogsheads, brewed by two different Burton brewers, Bass and Allsopp, the whole lot being insured for £100,000, perhaps £8 million today.

However the Crusader did not leave on the 15th, possibly because of adverse winds, which certainly kept increasing numbers of ships in Liverpool from Christmas onwards. Finally, on Sunday January 6, 1839, the wind changed, blowing a south-westerly breeze, and some 60 vessels, including the Crusader, left the port. What none of those sailors on board the fleet sailing out from the mouth of the Mersey knew was that a massive, fast-moving depression was coming in across the North Atlantic, travelling from the west-south-west at around 40 to 50 knots, It was bringing hurricane-strength winds, which would batter towns and cities from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of England, uproot millions of trees, smash down thousands of chimneys, sink hundreds of boats and kill several hundred people. In Ireland, where estimates have suggested between 200 and 400 people died, that Sunday became known as the Night of the Big Wind. Thousands of houses and cottages were stripped of their roofs from Galway to Armagh, with many left on fire. Limerick resembled “a city on which a park of artillery had played for a fortnight.” In Belfast “not a roof escaped”, while Dublin looked, according to one newspaper report, as if it had been sacked by an army, with houses burning or levelled to the ground, and “the rattling of engines, cries of firemen and labours of the military” presenting “the very aspect and mimicry of real war”.

The winds seem to have struck the west coast of Britain late on the evening of Sunday 6th, and did not finally ease up until Tuesday morning. The lowest air pressure measured was about 922.8mb at Sumburgh Head, Shetland around 2pm on Monday 7th, the third lowest figure ever seen in the British Isles. The effects of the storm were felt in London, with “numerous” chimneys blown down in and around Islington and Camden Town, but were far worse in the North: nowhere from one side of the Pennines to the other seems to have been spared serious damage. In Liverpool, thousands spent a sleepness night listening to slates and bricks crashing down into the streets, as even “the best built houses rocked and shook” with the winds, and at least 20 people were killed by falling masonry. In Manchester, where six people died, so many factory chimneys were blown down, it was reckoned between 12,000 and 15,000 workers would be laid off for weeks before the chimneys could be rebuilt and the steam engines that powered the factories restarted. In Bolton, it was said, “not a house escaped”, in Blackburn alone 11 factory chimneys were felled, and in Newcastle upon Tyne “almost every building suffered, more or less”. In Ayr “the streets are covered with slates and chimney cans”, and in Dumfries “the noise during the entire night was more deafening than the battle field”. Birmingham and Wolverhampton, like many other towns and cities, had scarcely a street where houses had not suffered: much of the roof of Birmingham Town Hall was torn off, with lumps of lead weighing almost half a ton crashing into the street or onto nearby houses. Among the windmills demolished were five at Bridlington: others, such as the water company’s windmill in Newcastle upon Tyne, were set on fire by the friction caused when the fierce winds set their sails rotating far faster than their builders had thought possible. In Barnsley, the lead roof was lifted off the Methodist chapel and more factory chimneys demolished, while Leeds saw at least eight mill and factory chimneys levelled, and a church lose 24 feet off its spire. Hayricks were destroyed, pedestrians blown into the air and innsigns made to fly. One remarkable phenomenon reported by the newspapers after the storm was a covering of what appeared to be seasalt on hedges, trees and houses in districts far inland, such as Huddersfield, more than 50 miles from the coast.

Out at sea, the effects of the storm were terrifying and terrible, with ships in peril from the mouth of the Shannon to the mouth of the Humber. Many of the vessels that had left Liverpool on the Sunday escaped the rage of the winds: but many others did not. Ships on their way home from ports far away, and close to the end of their journeys, were also caught. Between 30 and 40 vessels were either sunk or run aground in the Mersey area alone. Several went down with all their crews drowned. Those ships that ran onto sandbanks were then battered by the high winds and huge waves, and began to break up. Lifeboats could not get out to rescue the passengers and crews until the storm lessened, and when rescuers did arrive, they found many of those they were seeking to save had died of exposure in the preceding hours, on deck or in the rigging. The Lockwood, an emigrant ship bound for New York, which had got as far as Anglesey on the Sunday before being driven back by the storm, had then struck sandbanks and begun to list. Of the 110 passengers and crew, 53 died before they could be taken off by rescuers. One of the Crusader‘s fellow East Indiamen, the Brighton, returning from Bombay, struck a sandbank in the mouth of the Mersey on the morning of Monday 7 January and started breaking up. Some 14 of her crewmen made a raft and launched it into the mountainous waves to try to reach land. They were never seen again. The captain and his remaining crew had to cling to the rigging until Tuesday morning before they could be saved by the Liverpool lifeboat.

Packet and Emigrant Ships Ashore, another image of ships from Liverpool in trouble during the Great Storm, published in 1841.

What happened to the Crusader while she was out at sea appears to be unrecorded, but like other ships she was driven back by the violence of the storm, or, having failed to get past the tempest, tried unsuccessfully to return to the safety of port. On the morning of Tuesday 8th January, nearly two days after she had left Liverpool, and after a “fearful night of wind, hail, thunder and sleet and forked lightning”, the Crusader was seen just off the coast at Blackpool, more than 25 miles north of the Mersey. She had struck a sandbank that is still, today, named Crusader Bank, in her memory, and suffered “much damage”. The ship’s crew were firing the Crusader’s guns to try to attract attention onshore, but soon after, according to the Blackburn Standard newspaper, “two boats put from her, and after crossing the breakers, landed a crew of 26 seamen, when a loud huzza proclaimed their safety.”

While the crew were safe, however, the ship had broken her back, and with her hull being almost covered by water at half-tide, her cargo began to wash up along a 15-mile stretch of coast from the Ribble in the south to the Wyre in the north. “A great deal” of the cargo, however, was gathered in by customs officers and locked up, including 79 hogsheads of ale that had been driven on shore, along with other goods, on January 16. (There was much cargo from other ships also cast up on the coast, along with dead bodies from ships that had sunk.) The Crusader began properly to break up only on Sunday 17th February, more than five weeks after she had run aground, though she then fell to pieces within four days. However, the first sale of cargo saved from the wreck of the Crusader had already taken place in Liverpool on Thursday 7th February. It included cotton fabrics, woollen cloth, silk scarves and veils, tin plates – and “India ale, Bass and Alsop’s [sic] brands”.

Advertisement from the Liverpool Mail, Thursday 31 January 1839, for the sale of India ale rescued after the wreck of the Crusader East Indiaman in the Great Storm three weeks earlier

Another two sales of goods saved from the wreck of the Crusader, including more India ale, were held in Liverpool on March 14 and March 28. (There were three more sales of items from the ship, in May, June and July, including broken rigging, chains, pumps and anchors, but no more beer).

The story is true, then, that casks of beer destined for India and rescued from a shipwreck in the Irish Sea did go on sale in Liverpool, though at the end of the 1830s, not the middle of the 1820s. But were these sales in Liverpool of several dozen hogsheads, at least, of India ale brewed by Bass’s brewery and Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent the foundation on which was built the popularity of IPA in Britain? Alas, there is still no hard evidence for that part of the story: and what evidence there is suggests even Liverpool knew about IPA before the Crusader went aground. Beer brewed for the India market had been available in Liverpool since at least 1825, when the Middlesex brewer Hodgson’s of Bow, one of the earliest suppliers of pale ale to the Far East, had an agency in Liverpool for the sale of “pale bottling ale” to “merchants and others”. The first known use of the expression East India Pale Ale in a British publication actually comes from a Liverpool newspaper, but in 1835, four years before the Crusader shipwreck, when Hodgson’s beer, again, was being offered to “merchants and private families”.

Judging by the surge in adverts for IPA in London newspapers, the real take-off for the beer’s popularity appears to be a couple of years after the Great Storm, in 1841. That was certainly the year when Bass finally opened a store in Liverpool for the sale of “pale India ale”, declaring in a notice in Gore’s Liverpool General Advertiser on April 22nd that announced the new store that “This ale, so long celebrated in India, has now become an article of such great consumption in this country (where it is almost superseding every other sort of malt liquor)”, and at the Burton Ale Stores in Ironmonger Lane “a Stock is kept of an age suitable for immediate consumption”. Was this, two years on from the wreck of the Crusader, a result of that ship’s cargo having gone on sale in Liverpool? The verdict here, I think, has to be “not proven”.

Why Molyneaux got the date of the IPA shipwreck so wrong is a puzzle, when there would have been many alive in 1869 who could still remember the Night of the Big Wind 30 years earlier. But while it is part of Ireland’s folk memory – there are poems, and a novel, written about it – the 1839 storm is pretty much forgotten in Britain, probably because in this island it was only the second-worse storm of the 19th century, beaten in impact by the so-called Royal Charter storm of 1859. This was named for a ship that went down off Anglesey with the loss of 450 lives. Another 350 people also died during that storm, which sank 133 ships.

As a footnote, although large numbers of factories were damaged in the 1839 storm, breweries seem to have got off lightly. Newstead and Walker’s brewery in Bolton saw “considerable” damage. In Borrisokane, Tipperary, “the chief part of the Ormond brewery was blown down”. In Dublin, nine horses belonging to Guinness & Co were killed in their stalls by a falling wall. That, however, appears to be it.

Tank beer – “tankova” – may be a hot new trend in London, with Meantime in Greenwich and Pilsner Urquell delivering fresh unpasteurised beer to pubs in beautiful shiny big containers, but the idea of putting beer in cellar tanks to deliver better quality is, even in London, more than a century old.

The first “tank” beer system in the capital appears to have been introduced by Hugh Abbot, a brewer at Watney’s original Stag brewery in Pimlico, London, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace. In 1913 he had three standing butts fixed up in the cellar of a Watney’s pub, and beer delivered in an old horse-drawn tank wagon of the sort that brewers used to transport beer to their bottling stores. The experiment was successful enough that by 1920 Watney’s had electric-powered tanker lorries, fitted with copper tanks, taking beer around to its pubs It was still using electric vehicles in 1949, though by then tank deliveries to pubs were done using trailers mounted behind standard tractor units.

Large ceramic cellar tanks made by Royal Doulton in a Hull Brewery pub cellar

Another of London’s “big seven” 20th century brewers, Charrington’s, of the Anchor brewery in Mile End, was also delivering tank beer by the early 1920s, and a Charrington’s brewer, Alfred Paul, described the system to the Institute of Brewers in a talk in May 1922. Only “bright” mild beer, chilled and filtered, was delivered by Charrington’s tankers to its pubs, he said, although “experiments are being made with a tank for the bulk delivery of naturally conditioned beer.” The road tanks, made of copper lagged with iron, had a capacity of 24 barrels each, that is, 864 gallons, and the tanks in the pub cellars generally held three barrels each. “On arrival of the delivery tank, or road tank, at the house, the hose, is let down through the cellar-flap or any other available aperture, and the beer allowed to run down into the cellar tank. Should the fall from the street to the cellar be insufficient, a band-pump attached to the foot-board of the chassis could be used.” Charrington’s cellar tanks were generally made of earthenware, Paul said, being upright, cylindrical vessels, with a glazed inside, but ” experiments are now being carried out with aluminium and glass-lined steel.” The tanks, he said, “are carefully examined prior to filling, with a powerful electric torch. The men, who are carefully selected, are definitely instructed not to fill a tank unless, in their opinion, which by constant practice has become expert, the tank is scrupulously clean.”

According to Paul, the savings from using cellar tanks were considerable: each barrel’s worth of trade required three actual wooden barrels, one in the cask-washing shed, one on the road and one in the pub cellar, he declared, so one three-barrel cellar tank, costing £30, was the equivalent of nine wooden barrels. If a brewery went over entirely to cellar tanks, he said, it would eliminate coopers, cask washers, cask racking and the clerks needed to track all the casks as they left and returned

An electric-powered beer tanker used by Watney’s in 1929

Despite Charrington’s and Watney’s advocacy of tank beer, by 1936 Sydney Nevile, who worked for Whitbread, could only say that while “a substantial number of brewers have adopted for a portion of their trade the principle of delivering filtered beer in tank wagons into tanks in the licensed house,” and “this has met with a considerable amount of success,” still “for one reason or another” the tank beer movement “does not appear at the present time to be making further progress.”

One problem seems to have been that tank beer was most suited to pubs with a quick turnover of large amounts of beer, and London looks to have had a smaller proportion of that kind of outlet than the North of England, which is where tank beer seems to have been most popular. Like Charrington’s, the Hull Brewery in Yorkshire began installing huge glazed earthenware jars in its pubs from the early 1920s. They came in sizes of 108, 54 and 36 gallons (the capacities of the traditional butt, hogshead and barrel), and were made by Royal Doulton.

A Thorneycroft beer tanker belonging to the Hull Brewery Co

The beer was delivered to the pubs by specially built Thorneycroft tankers, and while the earthenware jars eventually gave way to stainless steel, much of the brewery’s beer was still brought by tanker to many of its pubs, and served up by compressed air from mild steel tanks fitted with disposable plastic liners, through until the brewery closed in 1985.

Other breweries in the North of England, such as Burtonwood, Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and Nimmo’s in Castle Eden, County Durham, also installed cellar tanks in their pubs, many of them 90 or 180-gallon capacity and made in stainless steel by Porter-Lancastrian of Bolton, or the now-closed Grundy’s of Teddington, in West London (which also made aluminium casks and kegs, supplying Truman’s with its first 100 litre/22 gallon kegs in 1971). But tank beer was particularly popular with the “club” breweries, such as the United Clubs Brewery in South Wales, and the Northern Clubs and Federation Brewery (the “Fed”) in Newcastle upon Tyne, set up after the First World War to give working men’s clubs a cheap, reliable source of beer.

At least one of the attractions of tank beer for the club brewers was the speed and convenience with which clubs could be supplied with beer. In 1970 the transport manager at the Federation brewery in Newcastle revealed that “Friday is the busiest day for us, with clubs suddenly realising that they want extra beer to meet the weekend demand.” It was much easier to send out a tanker and pipe the beer into the clubs’ cellars than hump casks or kegs.

Beer tanker used by the Northern Clubs Federation Brewery in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970

One of the big proponents of tank beer was the Cornbrook Brewery of West Gorton, Manchester, which had most of the larger outlets in its estate of 230 or so pubs fitted with five-barrel refrigerated cellar tanks by the end of the 1950s, all supplied by Porter-Lancastrian. According to Anthony Avis, this was because Cornbrook’s managing director from 1958, David Constable-Maxwell, was “connected” with Porter-Lancastrian. When the Cornbrook Brewery was acquired from its owners, the aristocratic Fitzalan-Howard family, by Eddie Taylor’s fast-expanding United Breweries in 1961, Constable-Maxwell persuaded William Tudor Davies, the managing director of Hammond’s, the largest component in United at that time, that tank beer should be rolled out around United – allegedly without revealing his connection with the manufacturer of the tanks.

Davies was enthusiastic, and a trial was held in Bradford, with all the company’s pubs being converted to tank beer on the same day. Unfortunately, what no one had apparently considered was that the Cornbrook brewery’s beer had been brewed to be delivered through the tank system, while Hammond’s pubs were serving beer brewed at the Tower brewery in Tadcaster which was made to be served from casks. At the same time, Porter-Lancastrian had rushed to complete the contract for the new tanks, and the quality of the equipment they supplied was, in many cases, poor, with the CO2 pressure regulators often not working properly, meaning the beer foamed too much when it was dispensed. After a week, according to Anthony Avis, Hammonds had hardly any pubs serving beer: all that came out of the nozzles in the bars were pints of froth.

Bedford-based beer tanker used by Nimmo’s of Castle Eden

The solution was discovered by the wife of one Hammond’s tenant who had taken her rage out on the new cellar tank by beating it furiously with a broomhandle. When she stopped, the beer suddenly flowed freely, with much less froth. Every ironmongers in Bradford was immediately bought out of broomhandles, and tenants were instructed to belay their cellar tanks regularly during opening hours, to knock the excess gas out of solution and allow the beer to flow.

That was not the last of the problems United had with exporting the Cornbrook cellar tank system to other parts: it was discovered that keeping the tanks clean was beyond most licensees, resulting in cloudy beer. In addition, pubs that might only turn over four barrels a week had two five-barrel tanks in their cellars, which meant stale beer. The plastic linings inside the tanks started reacting with the acid in the beer; and the mild steel the tanks were made of began rusting. The problems cost United Brewers, and its successor companies, Charrington United and Bass Charrington, many thousands of pounds to solve.

While brewers such as Hull (or North Country, as it became in 1974) filtered and carbonated their tank beers, it was perfectly possible to treat the tank like a giant cask, and add finings to the beer once it had been delivered, to allow it to settle and mature naturally. The disadvantage for brewers was that unless they were the “disposable liner” type, as Hammond’s found, the tanks then had to be thoroughly cleaned when empty.

Dennis ‘Horla’ tank vehicle owned by Watney’s in 1948

In the early 1970s a brewery such as Mansfield was putting nearly two thirds of its beer into tanks. But by 1994, changes in tastes had cut that to less than 20 per cent, and tanks were coming out of cellars. Ironically, the demise of tank beer in Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s proved a boon to the growing craft beer movement, both here and, especially, in the United States. Redundant pub and club cellar tanks, cheap and easily available, some of them 50 years old, were converted into fermenting vessels and conditioning tanks in their thousands for new small breweries, and “Grundy tank” became the general term in the United States for imported UK-built pub cellar tanks, even though many were not actually built by Grundy.

(An even shorter version of this history appeared in Beer magazine in 2013)

As the only beer writer on the planet with an MBA (probably), it falls to me to give a business school-style review on behalf of beer drinkers to Business for Punks, the just-published “how we succeeded and how you can too” guidebook from BrewDog co-founder James Watt.

Not that any review is likely to make much difference to the book’s popularity: it is already the number-one best seller in the “entrepreneurship” section of Amazon’s UK website, and in the top 350 best-selling books on the site overall, despite only being published last week. The book, it appears, is as popular as the beer.

Selling like hot … um … ale … James Watt and book

Business manuals from stars of the American craft brewing scene have been popping up like mushrooms in the past few years: Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada, Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, Tony Magee of Lagunitas, Steve Wagner and Greg Koch of Stone Brewing and Jeremy Cowan of Schmaltz have all written books about how they started and grew their businesses, Calagione has a second book out in December, Off-Centered Leadership: The DogFish Head Guide to Motivation, Collaboration and Smart Growth, and Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, has his “how I did it” book out in April 2016 .

Britain’s craft brewers have been slower to get their experiences on paper: maybe they’re too busy brewing. It’s not as if we lack an audience for how-to-be-a-successful-brewer books: large numbers of people apparently want to brew commercially. Some 200 new breweries have opened in the UK in the past 12 months, and the country now has more than twice as many breweries per head as the United States: 1 to 38,000, against 1 to 80,000. More likely, we lack the “superstar” brewers that the US has, people whose name on the cover will attract the buyers. I doubt that Watt wrote the book and sought a publisher: much more likely that someone at Penguin Random House approached Watt with the idea

Watt, of course, and his fellow founder of BrewDog, Martin Dickie, are among the very, very few candidates for “star brewer” in the UK. More than 6,000 people turned up to BrewDog’s annual general meeting in Aberdeen in June. Six thousand people. In Aberdeen. Admittedly this is not so much an AGM as a beer festival-cum-love in, with something on the order of 40,000 pints of beer consumed. But there isn’t another brewery in Britain that could hope to attract that level of support. And as Pete Brown once pointed out, when even his Stella-drinking mother in Barnsley has heard of BrewDog, you know you’re looking at a powerful brand.

So: what’s Watt’s book like? The tone is much what you’d expect: cocky, iconoclastic, egotistical (there are more than a dozen pictures of Watt in the book, and a gratuitous plug for Musa, “a great local restaurant in Aberdeen”, which Watt fails to mention that he owns), occasionally outrageous, with parts that are guaranteed to make some people very angry. Take the claim (p28) that “back in 2007 craft beer did not exist in the UK”, and it was BrewDog that created and established the British craft beer market and “built a committed audience from scratch.” Let’s be frank: this is egregious nonsense. Even if we’re extremely generous and decide to define “British craft beer” the way Watt appears to be doing, as “beer inspired by modern American styles”, there were brewers making this sort of “craft” beer in Britain long before BrewDog, with pioneers in the 1990s such as Sean Franklin at Rooster’s in Yorkshire, and Brendan Dobbin at West Coast Brewing and Alistair Hook at Mash and Air, both in Manchester. Hook’s next venture, Meantime, which started in Greenwich in 2000, was “craft” by anybody’s definition. Other brewers of “British craft beer” before BrewDog include Dark Star with Hophead, Kelham Island with Pale Rider, Champion Beer of Britain in 2004, and Thornbridge – where Dickie brewed before co-founding BrewDog – with Jaipur IPA. These were the brewers starting to create a market in Britain for the beers American consumers had been drinking for 20 years.

If Watt and Dickie were pushing at a door already being opened by others, though, it cannot be denied that they shoved that door wide open and – to stretch this metaphor to its limits – loudly announced its existence, allowing others to find it and pour through. The success of BrewDog certainly encouraged a host of other brewers to brew other beers than mainstream British cask ales, dramatically widening the availability of craft beer, which meant craft beer bars could open up that did not have to rely on expensive American imports. At the same time, Watt is certainly correct in saying that the BrewDog ethos “engaged a new breed and generation of customer” in way that other brewers had not been able to do. This engagement is demonstrated by the way BrewDog has been able to raise £13 million from 40,000 investors (according to the Daily Telegraph this month – £15 million from 30,000 investors according to Business for Punks) through its “equity for punks” crowdfunding scheme. The Equity for Punks scheme has been heavily criticised by some – one senior industry member told me it was ” a huge con” that “verges on the fraudulent”. Watt takes time to insist in Business for Punks that “We went through a full and formal regulation and approval regulation and approval process with our share offering, going through the same standards as any large-scale public listing, giving our investors a level of security that you simply do not have with other crowdfunding platforms.” In five years, Watt says, early investors have seen their shares in BrewDog increase by more than 500%. But for BrewDog, “the real beauty is not the financial side. It is in terms of how it entrenches the relationship between us and the people who enjoy the beers we make. We don’t just have investors, we have a community of loyal and dedicated brand ambassadors, our very own army of craft-beer evangelists.”

Some of the 6.000 Equity for Punks shareholders at the 2015 BrewDog AGM

This message – be passionate, carry that passion into everything you do, from the product to the marketing to the interaction with customers – is a large part of Business for Punks: “You need to make sure your product is awesome.” “If you can’t get your staff to fall in love with your business, you haven’t got a chance in hell of a customer to even consider liking it.” The very first chapter is headed: “Don’t Start a Business, Start a Crusade”. But an important swath consists of extremely sensible, if aggressively presented, business advice, including a segment headed “Cash is Motherfucking King”. Most businesses fail, Watt points out, and they always fail for financial reasons: “The first lesson in business is cash flow … lack of cash flow can kill your business instantly, like being shot in the face with a sawn-off shotgun.” Watt glosses over his background as a law graduate, and insists in Business for Punks that “Before Martin and I started BrewDog we did not have a clue about finance. I struggled to make sense of my own bank account.” That, frankly, I doubt: I would be very surprised if part of Watt’s studies for his law degree did not touch on accounting and/or finance somewhere. Still, he says, once the brewery was running, “Embracing the original punk DIY ethos of learning the skills we needed to be completely self-sufficient I went on numerous finance and accounting courses. I devoured finance books, I spent as much time as I could absorbing knowledge from the best finance experts. I listened to podcasts and even stayed up at night watching online finance lectures. OK, I maybe only did the last bit once. But you get the point.”

The sensible advice – avoid giving credit if you can, and if you have to, keep the terms tight, do daily bank reconciliations, always look at the opportunity costs (what does paying for that new bottling line stop you doing that might be even more profitable?), competing on price is a hiding to nothing – comes with other statements that seem more deliberately provocative than smart, however: “The whole gap-in-the-market approach is an outdated fallacy … don’t look for a gap in the market … you have to narrow your focus to such an extent that there is no current market for what you are about to do.” But of course, BrewDog aimed precisely at a gap in the market: one for British versions of American-style well-hopped pale ales and imperial stouts. They knew there was a market for such beers, because the successes of Pale Rider and Jaipur told them so.

Watt also fails to point out that while start-ups fail because they run out of cash, the primary reason for not having enough cash is most likely to be a business idea that is simply not competitive or attractive enough to sell in sufficient quantities. The three pillars of the Business Punk, Watt says, are
1) Company culture
2) The quality of the core offering
3) Your gross margin (“Defend your gross margin like a junkyard Rottweiler”)
and each feeds into the other. But however much you and your team believe in your product, there is no guarantee others will agree. Watt admits: “People in North East Scotland hated our beers when we first launched them. Completely hated them. They hated the flavour, the packaging, the branding, everything. We sold almost nothing at all for our first six months. But we did not care … We knew that if we stuck to our guns and did things the way we wanted to and never compromised that we would eventually find our audience and our audience would eventually find us.” Without that confidence, BrewDog would have failed, of course. But just because you’re confident there’s an audience out there, that doesn’t mean there actually is. Launching a business is a huge risk: Watt is good on some of the practical ways of reducing that risk, such as cutting deals with suppliers – he repeats the story of Lagunitas, and how it struck an arrangement with its bottle supplier which cut its costs and eventually paid off tremendously for both parties – but he doesn’t cover how to reduce the uncertainties surrounding whether the product you’re putting in the bottles you’re done a deal on will actually find a market.

Watt is very good on how to leverage a non-existent marketing budget to get the maximum bang: guerrilla marketing is BrewDog’s speciality, and however much others tut and sigh at the stunts, such as packaging a 55 per cent abv beer in roadkill, the story “was on broadcast news all over the world, in pretty much every major newspaper globally and to date over 100 million people have viewed this story online.” You literally cannot buy that sort of publicity. The loyal BrewDog fans, of course (and one chapter in the book is actually headed “Fans not customers”) loved the outrage the stunt elicited, since it fitted exactly their idea of being part of an organisation happy to upset people. But Watt is also smart enough to know that publicity has an opportunity cost too: “There is only so much a journalist will cover a company or a project: the more information you send, the less receptive he or she will be to that information. In the run-up to a big BrewDog release or event, we always go quiet for a couple of months to ensure the media is ready and hungry to give our big story maximum exposure.”

He also takes time, in a section headed “Get People to Hate You”, to give a kicking to BrewDog’s early critics, including those in the brewing industry who queried the company’s tremendous early growth: ”

One bunch of desperately stupid Scottish brewers concocted a document that basically called us liars anc cheats. It cited we had simply made our sales and growth figures up. To add fuel to the libel, the chairman of Innis & Gunn (a Scottish beer company), Mr Sharp, made a statement, and I quote, ‘It is a well-known fact that BrewDog falsify their accounts. They are widely seen as the laughing stock of the brewing industry. Like an anorak with nae knickers.’ I would personally like to thank Mr Sharp. I had his quote pinned up on my office wall for two years. I looked at it every morning and it motivated me to redouble my efforts.”

Another Watticism is: “Don’t waste your time on bullshit business plans.” But while vision and passion are vital – and Watt and Dickie had a clear vision of people drinking their beer, and a passion to make that happen – business plans are an excellent way to crystallise your thinking and decide what you shouldn’t be doing. All the same, no one should be tied to a rigid plan. Watt tells the story of BrewDog’s first and vital break, early in 2008, when, out of nowhere, its beers came first, second, third and fourth in the Tesco Drinks Awards. (I was a judge at several of those awards, but alas, they were always done blind, so I have no idea if I judged those beers). Tesco told Watt it wanted 20,000 cases a week, and Watt said: “Of course!”, though at that time the brewery’s capacity was a tiny fraction of that figure. The BrewDog partners went to their bank and asked for £150,000 to pay for a bottling line and extra storage tanks. The bank, as bankers do, laughed in their faces, not least because BrewDog wasn’t even paying its existing loans off. So Watt walked over to the rival bank across the road and told them that he had just been given a great offer on a loan, but if they could beat it he would give them all the brewery’s business, publicise them on the BrewDog website, and recommend them to other small firms. Bank number two fell for it, obviously believing they were getting one over on bank number one, the loan for the kit came through, the first bottles for Tesco came off the new loan-financed bottling line three days before they were due to be delivered, “and the rest is history”.

That story illustrates more about the requirements for business success than just the importance of grabbing opportunities with every available limb and telling small porkies to bankers if necessary. BrewDog won the Tesco competition because its beers stood out: that was part of Dickie’s and Watt’s vision, to brew beers with impact. But a different set of judges might not have ranked them at all: palates tuned to American-influenced beers were not universal in 2008. It was partly luck that won them the competition. The second bank could have said no, just like the first bank: bankers are generally risk-averse with small businesses. Again, luck stepped in. You can teach the importance of cash flow: but you can’t teach luck.

Will someone who buys Business for Punks, given luck, be able to turn themselves into the next BrewDog? Well, no, probably not, or not in the UK beer market, because as far as what BrewDog now represents, there is only room for one iconoclastic, rule-breaking, self-proclaimed punk brewery, Dickie and Watt spotted that gap in the market and filled it extremely successfully. We may well see firms start up that will be “the BrewDog of grocery retailers”, “the BrewDog of software manufacturers”, even “the BrewDog of estate agents”. But no sector, I suggest, can sustain more than one marketing guerrilla, and guerrilla marketing is what BrewDog does brilliantly and what its fans respond to enthusiastically. Ironically, considering it has always been an accusation made about the consumers of mega-brand beers, BrewDog drinkers really are drinking the marketing first, and the beer second.

Business for Punks: Break All the Rules – the BrewDog Way, by James Watt, is published by Penguin at £14.99

Flag on the top of the Mortlake brewery 1932

It is one of history’s ironies that just as London hits more breweries than at any time in the past 110 years, its brewing capacity is more than halved with the closure of the last of the capital’s remaining megabreweries, at Mortlake.

That the brewery at Mortlake, which has been pumping out hundreds of thousands of barrels a year of Budweiser for the past two decades, should have survived to be at least 250 years old this year is remarkable: it lost its independent in 1889, and the guillotine has been poised above its neck for the past six years.

The Mortlake site, famous as the home of Watney’s Red Barrel, was one of eight huge breweries still operating in London in the mid-1970s, which between them made one in every five pints drunk in Britain. Four closed between 1975 and 1982: Charrington’s in Mile End, Whitbread’s on the northern edge of the City, Mann’s in Whitechapel and Courage by Tower Bridge. Truman’s brewery shut in Brick Lane in 1989, and Ind Coope in Romford in 1992. In 2005, Guinness closed the Park Royal brewery. With the shuttering of Young’s in 2006 (yes, I know there’s still brewing on the site, but it’s not a commercial operation), in 2007 brewery numbers in London hit what was almost an all-time low, of just 10.

It’s instructive to see how brewery numbers have fluctuated over the past 300 years:

1700 London had 190 breweries, producing a total of 1.7 million barrels of ale and beer.
1786 Still around 161 brewers in the London area, though the top 12 London porter brewers made up half the capital’s beer production
1826 London has 93 commercial brewers, and 61 retail or pub brewers
1850 More than 40 London breweries had closed in the previous 20 years. However, the capital can still boast some 160 brewers
1904 London still had 90 breweries, out of a total of 1,503 in England and Wales. It also had just one pub still brewing its own beer, although in the rest of the country there were another 3,108 home-brew pubs.
1913 Brewery numbers are starting to drop, with just 65 left still operating
1919 The First World War, and high beer taxes, have see a big cull, with only 46 breweries now left in London
1923 London is now down to some 42 or so operating breweries
1952 London still had 25 operating breweries, run by some 19 or so companies, out of around 560 breweries in the whole of the UK.
1960 16 breweries left, including some surprising survivors – Harman’s in Uxbridge, for example; the Wenlock Brewery, off the City Road in Shoreditch; Woodheads, running at the South London Brewery in Southwark Bridge Road until 1964; and the Essex Brewery in Walthamstow, which was being run by the Ipswich brewers Tolly Cobbold when it closed in December 1971
1976 After all but two of London’s smaller breweries had shut, and with the closure of two of the largest, Charrington’s and Whitbread, the capital reaches an all-time low of just nine breweries
1981 A burst of pub-brewery openings lift numbers to 20
1998 The growth of the Firkin chain helps push brewery numbers up to a post-Second World War high of 34
2000 Closure of the Firkin breweries sees numbers fall to just 20
2007 While the rest of the country sees brewery numbers rising, London is now down to just ten
2010 Brewery numbers start to climb again, to 14
2012 A surge of openings sees a new post-war high of 36
2013 Brewery numbers almost double in a year, to hit 70
2015 Numbers now believed to be around 80, more than for 110 years

We’re one more down, now though: and whatever you thought of the beer it brewed in recent years, it’s still, I think, a little sad that this is the end of an important chapter in London’s industrial heritage. So here’s my small tribute:

Weatherstone’s brewery, split by Thames Street, from Samuel Leigh’s 1829 Panorama of the Thames

Much of the commentary about the brewery’s closure claims it was founded in 1487, when a Welshman, John Morgan, was “induced” (to use a term first used by an antiquarian writing in 1886) to start a brewery at Mortlake, supposedly to supply the largely Welsh household of the new Tudor king, Henry VII, who was to base himself at the palace at nearby Sheen – shortly to have its name changed to Richmond. It has also been claimed that the brewery sprang from a brewhouse at Mortlake Manor House, which was occupied by the Archbishops of Canterbury from at least the 11th century. But the archbishops continued to own the manor house until 1535, after which it went to a multitude of hands, before being demolished, apparently, soon after 1700. There is absolutely nothing currently known to link either Morgan or the manor house to the two small breweries recorded in 1765 either side of Thames Street in Mortlake, leading to the Town Dock, one owned by James Weatherstone and the other by William Richmond, which are the first recorded commercial breweries in what was then a small village.

By 1780 Richmond’s brewery had been bought by a man called John Prior. Weatherstone meanwhile went into partnership with Carteret John Halford. In 1807 Weatherstone and Halford bought land next to the river with a frontage of 104 feet and extended their brewery premises northward. Four years later, in 1811, they acquired Prior’s brewery, merging them into one, though Thames Street still separated the two halves. Weatherstone passed on his brewery to his nephew Thomas, who carried on the partnership with Halford until he died around 1825. The business was substantial enough by now that it employed a clerk, called John Stephenson and a brewer called George Dyson, who signed the codicil to Weatherstone’s will in 1824. Halford was then in partnership at the brewery with William Topham: at one point they were “brewers to her Majesty”, according to a directory entry. By 1840 Halford was dead, and Topham had entered into a new partnership with George Streater Kempson, who looks to have been a relative by marriage of Halford’s. In 1841 Kempson and Topham’s operation at Mortlake was described as a “considerable establishment”.

Charles James Phillips, son of a corn and coal merchant, became a partner in the firm in 1846, which was listed in 1849 as CJ Phillips and GS Kempson. Then in 1852, James Wigan, aged 20, the son of a hop merchant, bought a half-share in the business for £15,000, and it became Phillips and Wigan. By that time the brewery was using around 5,000 quarters of malt a year, suggesting an output of between 20,000 and 25,000 barrels of beer. In 1865 Phillips and Wigan bought the freehold of all the properties along the river frontage, for £2,350, and in 1866 they moved to shut the alleys and streets that ran through the brewery premises, including Thames Street and Brewhouse Lane. The people of Mortlake fought to prevent this, but the brewers eventually won, after a court case. The brewery was then substantially rebuilt, and a stone in the main wall still marks this, with the monogram P and W and the date 1869. In 1876, however, Wigan bought Hawkes’ brewery in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire and although he continued to live in Mortlake, control of the brewery passed in 1877 solely to the Philips family.

The brewery is often said to have “held lucrative contracts for supplying beer to the Army in India”, but if it did, it was not alone: in 1873 the India Office revealed that there were “about eighteen” of the “great London brewers” on the list of suppliers of beer to the Indian army, a trade worth 150,000 barrels a year. Two sets of recipients of Mortlake brewery beer every year were the crews who took part in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race: Charles Phillips regularly held a lunch for them at his home at the end of the race.

Mortlake brewery from the Middlesex side of the river in 1931

By the end of the 1880s brewers were starting to gobble each other up as the only way of acquiring new pub customers, with, particularly in the South of England, very few free houses left. In 1889 the Phillipses accepted a takeover offer from Watney’s of the Stag brewery, Pimlico, once one of London’s Big 12 porter brewers, and two of Charles Phillips’s sons, Charles junior and Herbert, joined the Watney’s board. It was not just the Mortlake brewery’s pubs that Watney’s was after: the Pimlico concern needed somewhere that could make the increasingly popular pale ales and bitter beers, and the Mortlake brewery seems to have had a good reputation for them. For many years after the acquisition, all the bitter for Watney’s London trade was brewed at Mortlake and taken down river by two barges, called Mollie and Ann.

In 1898 Watney’s merged with two other long-established London porter brewers, Reid’s of Clerkenwell and Combe’s of Covent Garden, to become the largest brewing concern in London. Reid’s brewery was closed, but Combe’s ran for another six years, until the Mortlake brewery had been rebuilt enough to supply the enlarged operation, including an I eight-storey maltings built by the riverside in 1903 on the eastern corner of Ship Lane.

With the restrictions on beer production brought about by the First World War, brewing at Mortlake actually ceased for a while during the conflict, and the site was used for the production of (unrationed) honey sugar, sold under the Union Jack brand in cut-down quart beer bottles.

Coppers in the ‘pale ale’ copperhouse at the Mortlake brewery around 1938

Mash tuns at the Mortlake brewery circa 1939

In 1930 Watney’s bought a bulk beer pasteuriser from a firm in Germany, installing it at Mortlake, and began experimenting with “container” bitter – pressurised keg beer. The first customer was the nearby East Sheen Lawn Tennis Club, where a Mortlake brewer, Bert Hussey, was a member. But “keg” beer was also being installed in pubs as early as 1933: when the Chequers Inn in Isleworth, a few miles from Mortlake, was rebuilt, the Watney’s house magazine, The Red Barrel, said:

“A feature of this house is an innovation in the system of supplying the beer to the bar from the cellar. It is delivered under pressure direct from the cask and does not go through any pump of beer engine. It is one of the most hygienic methods of service known and this is one of the first houses in the country to be so equipped. It ensures that the beer is served to the customer in the same condition as that in which it leaves the Brewery.”

Rolling barrels in the Mortlake brewery yard 1932

Two years later, in 1935, the company launched the Mortlake-brewed Watney’s Special bitter, stronger and more expensive than the “ordinary” bitter, at eight pence a pint in public bars, nine pence in the saloon

In 1959 the original Watney’s site in Pimlico closed. Mortlake was still not big enough to brew all the company’s beers, and a year earlier Watney’s had taken over Mann’s brewery in the East End to ensure it had enough capacity. By 1971 Mann’s was looking old and cramped, however, and Watney’s set in train plans to shut Mann’s and expand the Mortlake brewery again. In the meantime the company decided that since Mortlake would not be ready until 1975, at a cost of £7 million, it needed to buy more capacity. It was about to bid for another East End brewery, the recently refurbished Truman’s in Brick Lane, when Joseph Maxwell of Grand Metropolitan made an unexpected move on the Brick Lane brewer. The two-month fight that followed seems to have exhausted Watney’s, the loser, so much that it succumbed itself to a bid from Grand Met the following year.

Mortlake brewery on Boatrace Day around 1938

By the 1980s, under Grand Met, Mortlake was essentially a massive lager brewery, with Fosters and Holsten Export the big brands, though according to one ex-Mortlake brewer, Watney’s Special and Watney’s Pale Ale were still “reasonable” volumes, with Watney’s Pale Ale a “significant” bottled beer brand. However, automation meant that the number of employees had plunged, from 1,400 in the 1960s to just 400.

The brewery changed owners several times in the 1990s as the reverberations of the 1989 Beer Orders saw Britain’s giant brewery companies merge, evaporate or quit brewing, and in 1995 the Mortlake site, which had been given the former name of Watney’s premises in Pimlico, the Stag brewery, was leased to Anheuser-Busch to make Budweiser. It still had a capacity of a million barrels a year in 1995, though it has probably not been making more than about 650,000 barrels a year in very recent times: even now, probably more than all the rest of London’s breweries put together.

An announcement that the site was to close was originally made in 2009, by which time only around 180 people were employed there, though a year later it appeared that a surprise increase in sales of Budweiser had stayed the axeman’s hand. Now, however, AB, or rather AB InBev, as it has become, which eventually bought the leasehold of the 21-acre site, has shut it down, and sold it to a Singapore-listed company, City Developments Ltd, for £158m. There are, apparently, no firm development plas yet, but one extimate reckons 850 homes could be fitted onto the site – you can see how big it is here.

Are you a mature but still lively Victorian brewery? Do you worry that younger breweries, with their weird American hop varieties, shiny stainless steel lauter tuns and one-off wacky recipes, are luring your customers away? Is your 150-barrel minimum brewlength too inflexible to make experimental brews on? Worry no more: install your own microbrewery on the premises, and you too can be hitting the bartops with mango-flavoured double IPAs and smoked malt saisons. Comes with clip-on manbun and removable extra-bushy beard for all brewhouse operatives …

That’s unfairly sarcastic: I have no problems at all with big brewers who respond to the craft micro-brewery challenge by bringing in their own tiny set-up: I had great fun playing with the 10-barrel mini-brewery Brains installed at its site in Cardiff. The Brains plant, like those installed at Shepherd Neame in Kent, Hook Norton in Oxfordshire and Adnams in Suffolk, is designed to brew short-run one-off beers for selling in the company’s pubs. The Caledonian brewery in Edinburgh, however, has gone for something craftily different: an on-site microbrewery that is solely for experimenting with, making brews that, should they prove to be successful, will then be scaled up for commercial production in the main brewery.

The Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh in 1989

I last visited the Caledonian brewery more than a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, which was just two years after it had been the subject of a management buy-out to acquire it from Vaux, the Sunderland brewer, which had bought it in 1919. The brewery was founded by George Lorimer and Robert Clark in 1869, and Vaux took it over to supply the North East of England with Scotch Ale, a style of dark, fruity beer then very popular in the region. Edinburgh was once the third biggest brewing city in Britain, after Burton and London, and even in 1958 it has 18 surviving breweries. One upon one they closed: Vaux announced it wanted to shut the Caledonian in 1985. Fortunately for posterity, its then managing director, Dan Kane, an active Camra member, and his head brewer, Russell Sharp, felt there was enough demand for the traditional beer it made for the business to be viable on its own. In a regular irony, the lack of investment by Vaux over the years meant the Caledonian brewery still retained old-style equipment long replaced elsewhere, most notably open direct-fired coppers, which gave the brewery an excellent marketing story.

Steaming wort runs into an open copper at the Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh, in 1989

Despite a couple of fires at the brewery in the 1990s, those coppers are still there (though one is a replica, replacing a vessel lost in the fire of 1998, and they now appear to have suspended lids I don’t remember from before). Brewery manager Craig Steve says the now unique coppers give all the brewery’s beers a distinctive rotundity he always recognises in blind tastings. In 1991 the brewery launched a golden IPA using the name of another old Edinburgh operation, Deuchar’s, which had closed in 1961. That beer’s popularity was cemented with the award of the Champion Beer of Britain title by Camra in 2002, and it remains one of the UK’s best-selling cask ales. Then in 2004 the Caledonian Brewery lost its independence again, being bought by Scottish & Newcastle after S&N closed the old McEwan’s Fountainbridge brewery in Edinburgh. Just four years later the Dutch giant Heineken swooped on S&N, and Caledonian is now the second-smallest brewery (out of 165-plus) in what is currently the world’s third-largest brewing group.

Marble bust of George Lorimer, founder of the Caledonian brewery

Which is why, presumably, they can afford to fly me up to Edinburgh, stick me in a four-star hotel, take me out for a very fine dinner in one of the Scottish capital’s best eateries, and all so I can see the new “Wee George” microbrewery (named for George Lorimer) and try the first beer to be scaled up and rolled out after trials on Wee George, an American-style IPA called Coast to Coast. There are those beer writers who would turn down being filled full of roast venison at a brewer’s expense in the belief that it would compromise their independence: I like to claim I’m not that cheaply influenced. (That is to say, you CAN influence me, but it will cost you lots …)

Talking of independence, Caledonian’s MD, Andy Maddock, who joined the Scottish brewer in March last year after six years as a senior sales and marketing man at Heineken, says his operation has an “arm’s length” relationship with its Dutch parent, allowing it to be entrepreneurial and to follow its own path as a “modern craft brewer”. There seems to be considerable fondness for the Caledonian brewery at the top in Heineken: they like its hands-on old fashionedness, and Michel de Carvalho, husband of Charlene Heineken, who inherited the business from her father Freddie in 2002, has apparently said Deuchars is his favourite beer.

The advantages Caledonian has over most of its rivals, of course, are that as part of a huge conglomerate its financing is cheaper to arrange than a totally independent operator could manage, though it still has to have “all the rigour” in its budgets that any commercial operation has to have; and it can use its Heineken connections to get into other markets. Currently 95 per cent of sales are “domestic”, but in the next four to five years, Maddock says, he wants to see exports increasing, with Deuchars in particular and also Coast to Coast and the brewery’s new “craft lager”, Three Hop, being aimed at Western Europe. He also wants to see Caledonian’s beers making a bigger impact in the off-trade (“We haven’t punched our weight there yet,” Maddock says), and a greater awareness among drinkers that Deuchers is a Caledonian beer: it appears many Deuchars drinkers don’t actually know who makes it.

An original Deuchar’s brewery mirror, now in the tasting bar at the Caledonian brewery, rescued from a pub in Bath

On the other hand, they know why they drink it, or at least Caledonian does: “drinkability”, that mysterious characteristic no brewer knows for certain how to achieve, but which is vital for a beer to win a substantial slice of the market. Strangely, Caledonian is one of the few breweries I’ve visited where “drinkability” has been emphatically placed in the heart of the business strategy. Maddock says that the future of Caledonian will be based on a “modern” range, with beers such as Coast to Coast, that emphasises “distinctiveness and accessibility”, and a “traditional” range, led by Deuchars, where “drinkability is really important”. The idea, clearly, is that if you fancy trying one of those new craft beers, you can be reassured by the Caledonian name that it won’t be a frightening experience you’ll never want to repeat; and if you’re looking for something comfortable and more familiar, Caledonian has that for you as well. “Comfortable and familiar” are, frankly, far too under-rated among beer raters: most people most of the time don’t want to be challenged by their beer. Indeed, probably, most people don’t want to be challenged by their beer any of the time. “Predictable but not boring” is a great position for your brand to take, if you can capture it. “Predictable” also has to mean “predictably good”, of course, and part of that means making sure your raw materials are top quality: Caledonian has insisted for a long time on using what it says is the best malting barley in the world, from the east coast of Britain, both Southern Scotland and East Anglia, it also only uses whole-leaf hops, and it has now altered the way it buys hops, eschewing the traditional hessian hopsack for vacuum-packing in foil, believing this to keep the hops fresh for longer.

The ‘Wee George’ microbrewery set-up at the Caley: note mini-hopback above the drain

So to Wee George: Caledonian’s answer to the fact that there are now 100 breweries in Scotland, very few of which can match it with the popularity of its “traditional” line-up, but at least some of which offer are going to have widespread appeal – “widespread appeal” being the market sector Andy Maddock and his crew would like to own most of, thank you. It’s a £100,000 collection of hand-assembled stainless-steel kit capable of producing just 400 litres at a time, around a thirtieth of the main brewery’s capacity, but it has its own filler that can be used to put the beer into bottle, cask or keg, and it even has a hopback, just like the “big” brewery. Hopbacks are an old-fashioned item of kit today, replaced almost everywhere by whirlpools, but brewers who have kept them have realised that a hopback can be a terrific tool for adding all sorts of flavour to your hot wort. The new kit went in on June 1, and since then it has been producing one beer a week – the first being a version of Deuchar’s IPA, presumably to see how different the recipe would turn out on the Wee George kit compared to the Big George kit. Scaleablity was a problem at first, but the Caley brewers are getting better, they told me, at working out what tweaks were likely to be needed to translate a brew from Wee George to the main brewery.

The first Wee George beer to make it from experiment to scaled-up bar-top brand, Coast to Coast, was pushed through in eight weeks, which shows that for a 146-year-old, the Caley can be nimble enough when it wants to be: most big breweries barely have a meetings cycle that short, never mind the NPD pipeline. The name comes from the combination of West Coast of American hops – Simcoe, apparently – with East Coast of Britain barley. It’s a perfectly fine craft-beer-with-training-wheels, I suspect there’s an as yet untapped market for such brews among people looking for a beer to have when you’re only popping in for one and you want something with more flavour that usual but not TOO much, and I’d give it a fair chance of doing very well. Though if I were any good at predictions, I’d be much richer than I am.

Many thanks to the Caley crew for taking me north to meet Wee George, and I look forward to tasting future roll-outs.

Mash run with Steele’s masher, Caledonian brewery

Inside the drained mash tun, with the grains still waiting to be removed

Filling a copper at the Caledonian brewery, 2015

One of the three copper coppers at the Caledonian brewery

A lovely rocky head in a fermenting square at the Caledonian brewery

A steaming louvre over the copper room at the Caledonian brewery

Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh, 2015

I was actually speaking to a senior London brewer about something else entirely on Tuesday when he asked me if I had heard that AB InBev had bought the Camden Town Brewery, and my instant response was: “That’s the least surprising news I’ve ever heard.”

Jasper Cuppaidge, evil mustachio-twirling villain – that is, if you believe Twitter …

Camden Town has always seemed to me the Brewery Most Likely to Sell Out to a Big Buyer – certainly since its beers started appearing on bartops all over London. It’s got a great brand name, picking up the associations of a part of the capital that is somehow, at least in its image, gritty, urban, young, trendy and authentic all at the same time (possibly relevant trivia: Camden is where Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit and his family lived, which suggests the place has had a reputation for cheery grittiness since Dickens’s time).

But it ought to be expected that the brewery is a great brand: founder Jasper Cuppaidge is married to the daughter of Sir John Hegarty, founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, one of Britain’s most renowned advertising people, the man who gave us Vorprung Durch Technik and Nick Kamen stripping to his boxers in a launderette to advertise Levi’s, and who is – or was – Camden Town’s chairman. If Hegarty and his ad world pals didn’t stump up the initial funding that allowed Cuppaidge to install all that shiny brewing kit from Germany’s Braukon in a Kentish Town railway arch in 2010, then I WOULD be surprised. And if there wasn’t always the possibility of a trade sale in the business plan, I’d be pretty surprised there too. (More trivia: Hegarty apparently designed Camden Town’s logo, with the horseshoe shape a nod to the Horseshoe in Hampstead where Cuppaidge started brewing)

I see the Guardian is suggesting ABI paid a total price of nearly £85m for Camden Town, which is within throwing distance of the £100m a (different) senior London brewer suggested to me that SAB Miller paid for Meantime Brewing earlier this year. That same man also suggested that I wasn’t far wrong when I said at the time that Meantime was actually worth about £25m. “Worth” here means “what you ought to pay based on a realistic return on your investment, given a company’s current turnover and pre-tax profit”, though in the real world, of course, “worth” means “what someone is prepared to pay. So in that sense, Meantime IS worth £100m. But when I was at business college, a company’s worth was generally reckoned to be one times turnover or ten times PTP, which would put a value on Camden Town of £9 million tops – maybe £18 million if you were being optimistic.

But it’s all about snatching territory before others do: the craft lager/craft beer market is where the growth is, and ABI knew that if it didn’t grab Camden Town, someone else would, which would leave it struggling to find an equivalent scaleable brand. (Incidentally, nobody seems to have pointed out the irony of ABI buying one London lager brewery barely a month after it had closed another one.)

Of course, while ABI was negotiation to aqcuire Camden Town it was also hunting very much bigger game, namely SAB Miller, and it must have been embarrassed to realise that with SAB in the bag, it was going to own TWO London craft brewers, with Meantime as well. Hence, no doubt, the announcement that Meantime is to be sold off, along with other brands such as Grolsch an d Peroni. In many London pubs, where you find Camden Town you often find Meantime as well: competition authorities would not smile on ABI owning both. But that raises the interesting question: who’s going to buy Meantime? I am told that a management buy-back is not considered likely, but apart from Heineken, which already has Caledonian developing a craft offer for it in the UK, I can’t think of an obvious buyer.

The Twatterati have been going bonkers at Camden Town’s alleged sell-out, with comments such as “Another one to avoid from now on, like Meantime”. It is the panto season, I suppose, where moustachioed villains called Jasper are there to be booed and hissed. But Mr Cuppaidge has done extremely well for his investors, and under ABI Camden Town looks like continuing to supply London’s – and Britain’s – bar tops with considerably more interesting beer than might otherwise have been available. Not in BrewDog bars, of course, where James Watt, who has never knowingly ignored a publicity opportunity, has announced that Camden Town beers will not be boycotted.) But of course, they’re missing the point: the overwhelming majority of drinkers simply do not care who brews Camden Town’s beers. They’re only intersted in enjoing drinking them.

Meanwhile the question is – who’s next? I’m not sure anyone in the UK has both the immediate brand clout and the availability to be a realistic acquisition target (BrewDog has the clout, of course, but Messers Watt and Dickie are having far too much fun to want to sell, I suggest, and anyway if they did there would be an irony explosion so huge it would leave most of North East Scotland a glowing desert.) Instead, I’d look to Italy for the next big acquisition of a craft brewer by a global marque, followed closely by Poland.

On the 12th day of Christmas my True Love gave to me
Twelve draughts of Duvel
Eleven pints of porter
Ten Landlords leaping
Nine Lagunitas
Eight Mackeson milk stouts
Seven Silly Saisons
Six Geuze spraying
Five Golden Prides
Four Caley beers
Three Speckled Hens
Two Ola Dubhs
And a pint of Partridge in the Pear Tree

© Martyn Cornell 2015

It’s depressing and frightening, sometimes, if you start tugging at loose threads in the historical narrative, because the whole fabric can start unravelling. This all began with the Canadian beer blogger and beer historian Alan McLeod emailing me about claims that the “Hull ale” that was being drunk in the 17th century in London was really ale from Burton upon Trent, shipped down that river to the sea, and taking the Yorkshire port’s name on the way. Did I have any views, he asked?

I confess I’ve repeated the idea that “Hull ale probably really means Burton ale” myself, but Alan had several good points to make against it: Hull, like other ports, was known for its own ales, Burton lacked common brewers until the start of the 18th century, and in any case, until the opening of the Trent Navigation in 1712 it was not easy for Burton brewers to get their ales shipped out anywhere. So I hit the internets.

It all began to fall down with Peter Mathias’s reference in the otherwise magisterial The Brewing Industry in England (p150), written in 1959, to Samuel Pepys drinking Hull ale in London in 1660. Mathias wrote that “of course”, this Hull ale was “probably” from Burton upon Trent, with the town allegedly being “well known in the capital for its ale in the seventeenth century”, and the first consignment “reputedly” sold at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane London in 1623. However, once you start digging, these claims appear to be completely wrong. The reference Mathias gives, to back all this up, The history and antiquities of Staffordshire by Stebbing Shaw, published in 1798, Volume 1 p13, is only available in Google Books via snippet view but it appears not to give a specific year for Burton Ale being sold at the Peacock at all. What it says, talking about Burton, is:

“And so great is the celebrity of this place for its ale brewed here, that, besides a very considerable home consumption, both in the country and in London (where it was first sold at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, a house still celebrated for the vending of this liquor) vast quantities have been exported to Sweden, Denmark, Russia and many other kingdoms.”

– but with no date for when Burton Ale was first sold at the Peacock.

Almost a century before Mathias, William Molyneaux, in Burton on Tent: Its History, Its Waters and its Breweries (1869 ) claimed in a footnote (p223) that

“About the year 1630 Burton ale was sold at the Peacock inn in Gray’s Inn Lane and had even then acquired a high reputation amongst the famous ales of England.”

But Molyneaux offered no reference to back this up. This claim was subsequently repeated in several books. However, there is no evidence at all that the Peacock was even open in the 17th century.

Gray’s Inn Lane around 1810 or 1820

One big problem is that very little seems to be recorded of the early history of the Peacock, though what is know is certainly tied up with Burton Ale. The pub was definitely going by 1751, when George Ash, “who was servant to Mr Ford at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane,” opened his own pub under the same name at Charing Cross, where he had in stock “a quantity of Burton Ale, to be sold wholesale or retail”, according to an ad in the London Daily Advertiser on May 25 that year. But the tavern does not appear in the Vade Mecum for Maltworms, the anonymous guide to London pubs and taverns written circa 1718, which if it was famous I would have expected (that book, incidentally, mentions Derby Ale twice, and Burton ale once – and Oxford Ale three times). It was briefly mentioned again in 1755, still being kept by Mr Ford. The poet John Langhorne is said to have drunk Burton ale at the Gray’s Inn Lane Peacock, and he lived in the vicinity of Gray’s Inn around 1764-66. Two other writers, Gilbert Stuart, and William Thomson, both Scottish exiles, drank in the Peacock in the 1780s, where, according to Thomson’s obituary, “in rivulets of Burton ale [they] not unfrequently quaffed libations to their favourite deity, until the clock informed them of the approaching day.” Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1796 said the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, “where Burton ale is sold in nyps”, was known as the “nyp-shop”.

Gilbert Stuart, Burton Ale fan and regular at the Peacock

The antiquarist Richard Warner, writing in 1802 in the orotund style popular with Georgian essayists, called Burton Ale “that rich and glutinous beverage named after the town and well known in the neighbourhood of Gray’s Inn Lane, ‘balm of the cares, sweet solace of the toils’ of many an exhausted Limb of the Law who at the renowned Peacock reinvigorates the powers with a nipperkin of Burton ale and a whiff of the Indian weed,” indicating that the pub was popular with barristers from Gray’s Inn. It was frequented by those who needed barristers, too. In October 1814 a 68-year-old woman named Elizabeth McDonald was sentenced Old Bailey to be hanged after she attempted to pass a counterfeit shilling at the Peacock and was seized by the landlord, William Kilsbey. The pub seems to have changed its name to the Fox and Peacock by 1845, but was back as the Peacock again in 1870, by which time Gray’s Inn Lane was Gray’s Inn Road. It was described as “totally modernised” in 1880, and was still being kept in 1882 by the marvellously named Nicholas Pollyblank who had been there since 1875, according to the 1882’s Post Office Directory. However, it disappears some time after that, evidently when that part of Gray’s Inn Road was redeveloped.

Is it possible that the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Road was actually much older than the year 1751, its (currently) first known appearance in the records? Certainly the advert in the London Daily Advertiser hints that the pub had been going for some time, to built up enough of a reputation that George Ash would want to boast of his connection with it. But it would be wrong to push the pub back more than ten years at the most just based on that. It is certainly true that pubs can stay under the radar for many decades after their founding: there was one pub in Mile End, East London with the excellent name of Why Not Beat Dragon, which first surfaces in an Old Bailey court case from 1723, but which has a name that refers to a race at Newmarket four decades earlier, in 1684, when a horse called Dragon was beaten by (you’re ahead of me here) another called Why Not. The pub must have been opened as the Why Not Beat Dragon very soon after the race took place, but apparently stayed unrecorded for almost 40 years.

An even longer example of an apparently “invisible” pub is the (now closed) Eagle and Child in Whitwell, Hertfordshire. It looks to take its name from the crest of the Stanley family, Earls of Derby, who were lords of the manor of Stagenhoe in nearby St Paul’s Walden from 1488 until 1582. The implication has to be that the pub opened, or at least received its name, some day during this 94-year Tudor timespan when the Stanleys were a big name in the area. But the pub’s first known mention comes in 1725, implying that it remained unrecorded by history for more than 140 years, at least, from the time when the Stanleys were local landowners to almost a century and a half after they had gone.

All the same, despite these examples, I find it highly implausible that a pub in as central a site as Gray’s Inn Lane/Road could have been open for 120 years before 1751 without anybody making some kind of record of its existence that would survive until today. On the evidence, I’d be surprised if the Peacock was much older than the 1710s or 1720s.

I don’t know where Molyneaux got his claim that the Peacock sold Burton Ale around 1630 from, but the reference to Burton ale being sold in London in 1623 appears to come from John Bushnan’s Burton and its Bitter Ale (pub 1853), which says

“In 1623 the Burton ale made itself known in London as Darbie or Derby from which town it used to reach London as we find in a singular work published that year entitled Panala a la Catholica or a Compound Ale.”

What that pamphlet, written by the deeply obscure William Folkingham (and also known as Panala Alacatholica, according to some souces, while the author’s surname is also found as Folkington) talks about, according to the extract reprinted by Bushnan, is:

“a cup of nappie ale (right Darbie, not Dagger ale, though effectually animating) well boyled, defecated, and cleared, that it shall equall the best-brewed beer in transparence, please the most curious palatt with milde quicknesse of relish.”

“Defecated” there, of course, means “cleared of dregs” (what did you think it could mean? Wash your mind out now). But all the evidence is that Bushnan is entirely wrong in asserting that “Darbie Ale” actually meant Burton ale. Derby was famous in its own right in the 17th century as a centre for brewing, with a large number of malthouses and inns, and it was only five miles by packhorse from the Trent, from where ale could be carried away by water to Hull, and from there to London and elsewhere. “Darbie Ale” being mentioned in Folkingham’s pamphlet does not prove it was on sale in London, though it, and other mentions, underline the idea that Derby Ale was well-enough known in the capital in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There is a reference to “Darbie Ale” in an anti-Puritan pamphlet called Martin Junior, published around 1589/90. William Camden, in his great survey Britannia, published in 1607, declared that Derby was “vero celebritas” – truly famous – for “ceruisia, quam coquit optima“, excellent ale. The pseudo-Chaucerian The Cobbler of Canturbury, published in 1608, says that “there must be admitted no compare betweene a Cup of Darby ale and a dish of durtie water.”

Derby in the early 17th century

In 1611 a play by John Cook, Tu Quoque or The City Gallant, performed in front of James I, included the lines: “I have sent my daughter this morning as far as Pimlico to fetch a draught of Derby ale, that it may fetch a colour in her cheeks,” suggesting that Derby Ale was indeed on sale in London in early Stuart times. In 1637, John Taylor, the “Water Poet”, and one of the last campaigners against hops and in favour of traditional unhopped ale, wrote Drinke and Welcome: or The famous historie of the most part of drinks, in use now in the kingdomes of Great Brittaine and Ireland, which hailed the ales of “Yorke, Chester, Hull, Nottingham, Darby, Gravesend”, but does not mention Burton at all. A Civil War Royalist newsletter, Mercurius Pragmaticus, spoke sarcastically in 1649 of “a flagon of Darby Ale” that would make someone’s brains “runne over with the froth of non-sense”. “The froth of non-sense” looks to be a good description of Bushnan’s assertion that “Derby ale” was a synonym for Burton Ale.

Bushnan goes on to say that

“The Dagger Ale here alluded to was that sold at a house in Holborn in the same manner as the ale of Burton was about the same period at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane.”

and this appears to have led Colin Owen in The Development of Industry in Burton upon Trent (1978, p31) to claim that

“by the early 1620s Burton Ale (sometimes under the name of ‘Darbie Ale’) was being sold at the Dagger in Holborn and at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, where it was held in high esteem”

referencing Bushnan. But, of course, Bushnan doesn’t say the Dagger sold Burton or Derby ales – it was selling its own Dagger Ale – and Bushnan also gives no source for the claim that the Peacock was selling Burton ale at this time.

However, Burton had 46 licensed victuallers in 1604, so it is certainly not impossible that some of those inn or alehouse operators, who would all almost certainly have been brewing their own ale, were shipping some outside the district. Benjamin Printon, the first known common brewer in Burton, started operations probably some time around the year of his marriage, in 1708, and his business was very likely boosted by the opening of the Trent Navigation in 1712, but there is a hint that Burton innkeepers were already using the Trent to ship beer to other markets before then (Owen, p33), probably carrying casks by horse or cart to where the Trent started being navigable (which would have been Nottingham, six to eight hours away).

The frequently repeated claim that Printon actually began brewing in 1708, incidentally, is again based on Stebbing Shaw. But what Shaw actually wrote in 1798, talking about brewing in Burton, was that

“The first origin of this business here was about 90 years ago, and simply commenced with a few public houses ; and, one Benjamin Printon was the first, who began in a small way (by employing only three men) any thing like the business of a common brewer.”

Taking “about 90 years ago” in 1798 to mean 1708, other writers have used Shaw’s words, wrongly, to make a definite claim that Printon starting brewing that year. But you’ll note that Shaw doesn’t actually say it was Printon that began “about 90 years ago”, merely that Printon was the first common brewer, rather than innkeeper-brewer, in Burton, with the public house brewers being the ones who started exporting their beer “about 90 years ago” and Printon coming along later. (John Bushnan got into a terrible mess over the claim that Benjamin Printon is really Benjamin Prilson, which itself, Bushnan tried to claim, was a misreading of Benjamin Wilson, founder of what became Allsopp’s brewery: all total nonsense.)

Printon, by the way, is regularly said to have been the (or “a”) “chief client” of William Bass before Bass gave up working as a carrier and started in the brewing business himself in 1777. But this is impossible: Printon died in 1729, when Bass was nine years old, and Bass only moved to Burton to start as a carrier in or around the late 1750s. It is possible that Bass carried beer for the family that took over Printon’s brewery, the Musgraves (or Musgroves), whose “genuine Burton ale” was advertised for sale at the St Dunstan’s coffee house in Fleet Street, London in 1751 at the extremely high price of ten pence a quart: ordinary porter was only 3d a quart. But someone else can investigate that …

An advert for Musgrove’s Burton Ale from the London Daily Advertiser of June 15 1751, one of the earliest ads featuring a named brewer from outside London

Incidentally, A Topographical History of Staffordshire: Including Its Agriculture, Mines and Manufactures … By William Pitt, published 1817, claims:

“The origin of this lucrative business was in the year 1610 [sic], when Benjamin Printon began a small brewery, and his success induced others to engage in the same business.”

surely a misprint (or misprinton).

The first definite evidence we have for Burton Ale on sale in London comes from a report printed in the edition of the Spectator magazine for May 20 1712, when at the end of a trip to the Spring Gardens pleasure grounds at “Fox Hall” (Vauxhall) on the south side of the Thames, the author and the fictional Sir Roger de Coverley “concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale and a slice of hung beef.” The Vade Mecum for Malt Worms around 1718 shows Burton Ale on sale at the Guy of Warwick in Milk Street, in the City of London, while on January 11 1718 a London-based newspaper called the Post-Man published an ad showing “Fine Burton Ale, Bottled or in Hogsheads” on sale at “the sign of the Sawyers near Fleet Lane Bridge”.

Still, what about the famous quote from Daniel Defoe, writing in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, that “the best character you give to Ale in London is calling it Burton Ale”, a quote regularly repeated by authors writing about Burton beer? Well, the problem is, Defoe never said it. It’s actually a quote from another travel writer entirely, the Scots spy John Macky, in A Journey through England, which was published just before Defoe, in 1724. Macky, talking of Lichfield, said:

“The Ale is incomparable here, as it is all over this County of Stafford. Burton is the most famous Town in England for it, as also Stafford and Newcastle in this Shire. And indeed the best Character you give to Ale in London is calling it Burton Ale; from whence they send vast Quantities to London: Yet they brew at London some that goes by that Denomination.”

I suspect (though I haven’t researched it) that later editors of Defoe’s work lifted chunks of that quote from Macky and stuck it into later “enlarged and improved” editions of Danny boy’s works. But we can still gather from the quote that by the early 1720s Derby ale had lost its pre-eminence, to be replaced by its neighbouring rival across the border in Staffordshire. And, indeed, mentions in London newspapers in the 18th century of Derby ale are rare to non-existent. (Defoe, incidentally, did not mention Burton ale at all in his original first edition, and says only of Derby: “What Trade there is in the Town is chiefly in good Malt and good Ale.”)

So, to conclude or round up: claims that Burton Ale was on sale in London in the 17th century are unsubstantiated, though Derby Ale certainly was, and despite claims by Burtonians there is no evidence that “Derby Ale” was another name for Burton Ale: Derby ale was exactly what it said on the tin, or rather cask. By the 18th century Derby Ale had been pushed out of the London market, however. Of claims about Benjamin Printon, one is based on a misinterpretation and one is nonsense. There is no evidence that the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane was the first place in the capital to sell Burton ale, and it looks unlikely it was doing so in the 17th century. That’s six myths scotched. Thanks, Alan.

If Dame Sally Davies had really wanted to be honest, she would have said: “Here’s my advice on how to live a possibly longer but almost certainly less pleasure-filled life …”

Instead the chief medical officer for England completely failed to address why people drink – because we enjoy it – and concentrated solely on why we shouldn’t, insisting that the new recommendations on alcohol limits were “hard science” based on the health risks of even moderate drinking. With the old guidelines for men, compared to the new lower ones, “an extra 20 men per 1,000 will get bowel cancer. That’s not scaremongering, that’s hard science.” But why did she say “20 per 1,000” instead of the equally accurate “two in a hundred”? Because 20 sounds worse than two, of course. Scaremongering …

I realised recently that it will be 50 years this summer since I first drank beer, in the garden of the Rose in Bloom in Seasalter, Whitstable. My father (illegally) bought a pint of bitter for me, thinking correctly, that though I was only just 14, I would enjoy it, and thank you, Dad, I did, greatly: that cellar-cool, floral, hoppy initial pint was the start of a lasting love. If Dame Sally Davies had popped up over the fence as I was drinking and assured me that I was increasing my chances of cancer of many kinds, I hope that my 14-year-old self would have replied: “If all the pints for the next 50 years are as good as this one, I genuinely don’t care.”

The point about risk is that, as we all see every day, it’s calculable, all right, but totally random. My mother hardly drank at all: a Snowball, advocaat and lemonade, at Christmas, with a cherry on a cocktail stick balanced across the glass, was her limit. She certainly never smoked. She died, aged 60, having survived breast cancer when she was 45 but eventually being taken out by cancer of the oesophagus. My brother – a cancer survivor himself, having come through Hodgkin’s Lymphoma nearly 40 years ago – still rides motor bikes at the age of 59, big ones, Harley Davidsons and the like, and in the past few years he has taken motorbike tours through South Africa and the eastern United States. For a rider, the chances of dying in a motorcycle crash during your lifetime are about the same as the chances of getting bowel cancer through drinking alcohol. Do we see Dame Sally Davies on daytime TV urging us to cut down on the number of motorcycle journeys we take each week, to reduce the risk?

We do not, of course, because it would be preposterous. Risk is part of motorcycle riding, as it is of many activities, from mountaineering to hang-gliding. As it happens I had a friend who died in a hang-gliding accident in his early 50s. The risk of dying in a hang-gliding accident is one in every 116,000 flights, apparently. Let’s make the mathematics easier and say you go hang-gliding every weekend, and get in two flights each time for 100 flights a year. In a lifetime’s hang-gliding that gives you just over a three per cent chance of dying in a crash. Set the undoubted joy of soaring silently over fields and woods, one with the winds and sky, against a risk of death if you did it every weekend for 40 years of 33 to one against, and I’m sure most of us would vote with my friend Bryan.

And now we know, because Dame Sally won’t let us forget, that risk is a part of even moderate drinking, too. But as another friend of mine says, stay in bed to avoid all risk, the ceiling will probably fall on your head. Indeed, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, declared that the risk level Dame Sally wants us to lower ourselves to while drinking alcohol is lower than the risk from eating a bacon sandwich, or spending an hour watching a film.

The lifetime chances of a woman who doesn’t drink getting breast cancer, like my mother, are 11 in a hundred. If a woman drinks, that risk goes up to 13 in a hundred. It’s an entirely valid decision to weigh decades of the pleasures that drinking wine and beer bring against a one-in-50 greater change of breast cancer, and say: “I believe the risk is worth it,” just the way a hang-glider or a motorcyclist weighs up similar risks.

The big problem in the health-and-drink debate is that the pleasures of drinking are seldom discussed, and never calculated. Winston Churchill, speaking around 1953, after 60 years of regular solid drinking, including pints of champagne, and having Carlsberg invent Special Brew for him, declared: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” I have had huge enjoyment from drinking beer since that first pint of Fremlin’s bitter in the garden of the Rose in Bloom – in a coincidence Carl Jung would have appreciated, the pub’s address is Joy Lane – and if Dame Sally popped up at the end of my bed tomorrow with a scythe and hourglass to declare my time was over, adding that if only I had been a teetotaller I could have had an extra ten years, I’d spit in her eye and say it was more than worth it.

A new British beer style is being born as you read this. Indeed, “being born” is almost certainly wrong: “building up bulk” is probably much better, since it’s been on bar tops, arguably, for at least 15 years, albeit without being properly recognised and catalogued as the fresh branch in the evolution of pale ale that it is.

Redemption Trinity light ale: a classic modern Hoppy Light Ale

This new style of beer is, effectively, the British equivalent of the American “session IPA” or “Indian session ale“, though not inspired by those beers, which are still often stronger, at 5 per cent abv or more, than a British session beer would ever be. Instead the new brews take the floral, tropical hoppiness of a typically strong standard American Pale Ale or IPA and presents that at a much more comfortable UK session strength, 4 per cent alcohol by volume and below.

As with all truly sustainable movements, this has been an example of push and pull: demand was pushed by the makers, individual brewers deciding that they wanted to brew just such a beer, crossing true sessionability with dramatic New World hop flavours, and pulled by consumers, drinkers who had been converted to loving American hops and were very happy to find drinks with all the American IPA taste assertiveness they wanted but low enough in alcohol that they could comfortably have several pints over an evening, not something that is possible with your usual Seattle or San Diego hop soup thumper.

As the trend spread, it seems to have escaped recognition as a different style of British beer, not the least reason being, I suspect, that there wasn’t an easy name to apply to this new family of brews, the way Golden Ales, the last new British beer style, could be badged and corralled back in the 1980s when they initially arrived, with a name based just on their colour. Mark Dredge was one of the first to spot that there was actually a new movement happening, putting a selection of similar low-gravity but hop-filled British brews into a chapter in his 2013 book Craft Beer World and calling the category “pale and hoppy session beers”. His examples included Moor Revival (3.8% abv, brewed with Columbus and Cascade hops); Cromarty Happy Chappy (4.1%, Columbus, Cascade, Nelson Sauvin and Willamette); Hawkshead Windermere Pale (3.5%, Goldings, Fuggles, Bramling Cross and Citra); and Buxton Moor Top (3.6%, Chinook and Columbus). Mark also gave an excellent definition of the category:

“The love for American Pale Ales and their citrus and fruit-forward hops, combined with the British drinking culture of going to the pub and sinking a few pints, has pushed these beers ahead and created a new British beer style … hitting somewhere between 3% and 4% abv, these beers, pale straw to gold in colour, are made to be refreshing, light in body, powerfully hopped, dryly bitter and drunk all day long. Bitterness can be very high set against the lightness of the alcohol, reaching 50-plus IBUs, although typically it’ll be in the 30s … it’s the hops that elevate this from a Golden Mild or Bitter: brightly aromatic, full of fruitiness, and often crisply bitter at the end with a dryness that makes you want to drink more – it’s the combination of huge hop flavours and the quenching bitterness that best defines these beers.”

Light ale – the ancestor of Hoppy Light Ale?

As a name to label this new category with, however, “pale and hoppy session beers” fails to satisfy: the three descriptors could equally fit American-style “Indian session ales”, and it does not emphasise the most important differentiator: these beers are less strong than their American equivalent. However, there is a solution we can find in the history of British brewing. Throughout most of the 20th century, brewers in the UK would make two different strengths of bitter beer, often called ordinary bitter, at 3.8 per cent abv or less, and best bitter or special bitter, 4.2 per cent to 4.8 per cent or so, and each had its bottled equivalent, where the stronger was called pale ale and the weaker one light ale. What we are trying to find a name for is hoppy, but weaker than American hoppy pale ales – it’s hoppy light ale.

I am sure many are now going to argue that Hoppy Light Ale is not a separate thing from hoppy pale ale: Boak and Bailey discussed “pale and hoppy session beers” in All About Beer magazine in November and traced the roots of the style back to Sean Franklin’s Rooster brewery’s Yankee from 1993. They also threw Oakham Brewery’s Jeffrey Hudson Bitter and the same brewery’s Citra into the “pale ’n’ hoppy session” bin. But for me, Yankee was Franklin’s attempt to make Sierra Nevada Pale Ale at a strength (4.3 per cent) Britons would be comfortable with, rather than specifically aiming for a session hoppy beer, while JHB is a Golden Ale (in the Venn diagram of beer styles, it cannot be denied, Golden Ales and Hoppy Light Ales overlap somewhere between a little and a lot) while Citra, at 4.2 per cent, is also too strong.

Dark Star’s pioneering Hophead Hoppy Light Ale

You can go right back to beers such as Hartley’s much-missed ordinary bitter from Cumbria, just 1031OG but mouth-warpingly rammed with hops, and similar brews in the now effectively vanished North West of England style of very pale, very bitter beers, such as Boddingtons before Whitbread wrecked it, to show that the new Hoppy Light Ales have a pedigree rooted in an English tradition of pale ’n’ hoppy ’n’ weak. But these were beers made with traditional English hops, not New World ones. If you are looking for the real pioneer in the Hoppy Light Ale category, it has to be Dark Star’s Hophead, I suggest. Brewed since 2001 at 3.8 per cent alcohol, and using Cascade and Amarillo hops and Extra Pale malt with a tough of Caramalt, it’s the brewery’s most popular beer, it actually self-describes as “light and hoppy”, and I strongly suspect it has influenced many of the Hoppy Light Ales that have arrived since then, from Burning Sky’s Plateau (3.5 per cent) to Redemption’s Trinity (3 per cent – which brewer Andy Moffat specifically labels a “light ale”, it being weaker than the next beer up in his range, Redemption Pale Ale). It is revealing to see how the Camra Good Beer Guide‘s description of Hophead altered over the years: until 2006 it was merely “a light, hoppy, refreshing bitter”, but in 2007 that changed to “Wonderfully hoppy and clean-tasting … flavours remain strong to the end”. It looks like this was the time Britain became properly in love with, and appreciative of, American hops.

The country is also increasingly in love with lighter-coloured ales. Last year Mitchells & Butlers’ Nicholson’s chain, which controls 80 or so cask ale-oriented outlets, revealed that sales of paler-coloured ales were up 25% in its pubs, at the expense of traditional amber-coloured bitter. Its top-selling beers in volume terms were still traditional amber ales, it said, but with the introduction of new hops from countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand, “customers are opting for more lighter-coloured ales.” Paler ales flavoured with New World hops are a great entry for lager drinkers, Nicholson’s said, “appealing equally to both men and women”. More evidence to back a prediction that the Hoppy Light Ale category will grow and grow.