To the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End to see Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, a play set almost entirely in the public bar of a pub in Oldham in 1965. If you go to see it yourself – and you don’t have to come up to that London, it’s being shown live at more than 700 cinemas across the country on Thursday March 3, as part of the National Theatre Live initiative – I strongly recommend you have a couple of beers beforehand. Watching  realistic-looking pints of mild and bitter being poured regularly from genuine handpumps and drunk onstage with signs of great pleasure brought on in me an aching desire to get up there with the actors and join in.

Martin McDonagh, who was born in Britain to Irish parents, became famous for a string of plays with Irish rural settings, including The Cripple of Inishmaan, and also for the screenplay to In Bruges, the gangster black comedy featuring Brendan Gleeson introducing incompetent hitman Colin Farrell to the pleasures of Belgian beer. Hangmen is a very different venture, based semi-biographically on Harry Allen, one of Britain’s last hangmen, who kept several pubs in Lancashire while performing the part-time post of sending people through trapdoors to their deaths. McDonagh calls him “Harry Wade”, using the surname of another hangman, Stephen Wade, and the play opens in the execution cell with Wade trying to get “James Hennessey” (clearly based on James Hanratty, one of Harry Allen’s genuine victims) to go to the last drop quietly and swiftly, while Hennessey continues to insist on his innocence.

Watch out for the trap-door: David Morrissey, second from right, and other cast members of Hangmen on stage at the Wyndham’s Theatre

A switch of scene and the audience is now staring at an excellent imitation of a North of England urban pub interior from the middle of the last century, where Harry, played by the excellent David Morrissey and his wife Alice, rule contemptuously over a sad and sorry line-up of regulars. There isn’t a pub-goer over 50 who has not known a landlord just like Harry Wade, bow-tied and sergeant-majorly, nor a landlady like Sally Rogers’s Alice, attempting to camouflage advancing years with far too much make-up. Hanging has just been abolished, and the Oldham Gazette is sending its reporter round to interview Harry, “the second-best hangman in Britain” – number one, of course, being that other Manchester-area pub landlord Albert Pierrepoint – to see how he feels.

Pierrepoint’s pub, the ironically named Help the Poor Struggler, really was in Oldham, or Hollinwood to be exact, some two miles away, and it was owned by Groves and Whitnall of Salford. Harry Allen ran at least three pubs, the Rawsons Arms in Peel Street, Farnworth, near Bolton, 11 miles from Oldham, a Burtonwood pub nicknamed “the Stump”, in the 1940s (Allen’s Farnworth pub is sometimes given incorrectly, as the Rope and Anchor: I’m not sure there WAS a Rope and Anchor in Farnworth); the Junction, Higher Lane, Besses o’ th’ Barn, Whitefield, seven miles from Oldham, in the 1950s, which was owned, I believe, by the Crown Brewery, Bury, taken over by Dutton’s of Blackburn in 1960; and another Crown Brewery pub acquired by Dutton’s, the still-open Woodman Inn, Wood Street, Middleton, four miles from Oldham, from 1962 to 1965 (Thanks due to Peter Alexander for information on that one). On stage at the Wyndham’s, Harry Wade’s pub contains little to identify its owners, though from where I sat in the middle of row D you could see what looked like “OB”, presumably for Oldham Brewery, on the pub doors when they were pushed open.

Giving Harry Wade a pub Harry Allen never had, tied to a brewery Harry Allen was never tied to, is barely a misdemeanour in the very long list of theatrical crimes against authenticity, of course, and was done for dramatic purposes, as you’ll see if you watch the play: rather more liberty with reality was taken when McDonagh gave Harry Wade ten times the number of hangings that Harry Allen carried out, though again this was for dramatic purposes. Pub historians will not have much to complain about the staging, though: I suspect straight glasses, rather than dimples, would have been used in a real Oldham pub in 1965, and the bitter looked a little too amber and definitely too flat for a real North West of England brew at the time (though the mild was authentically dark as Barber Booth in a blackout. There was, too, plenty of smoky fug being puffed across the stage, and much use of the on-the-wall cigarette machine. Smokers, too, may wish to get well nicotined-up before seeing the play.

Even if you’re interested in plays, rather than pubs, Hangmen is certainly worth seeing: plenty of McDonagh’s darkly pointed, thought-provoking humour (“How many people did you hang, Harry? More than a thousand?” “Don’t be daft, lad, this isn’t China!”), and enough dramatic twists to keep you awake even if you DID have a couple of pints before the play started. There are a couple of areas where the plot could be sharpened up, but overall it’s a four-star drama, and David Morrissey (who displays a talent for comedy you might not think was there if you only knew him from his role as The Governor in The Walking Dead) and the rest of the cast are uniformly and pleasurably exactly on target for personality, place and time.

Harry hails his regulars. Does it say ‘OB’ on those doors?

How many other plays are set entirely, or almost entirely, in a pub or bar? Strangely, this appears to be almost exclusively an Irish idea. At least a couple of world classics fit the genre: the Irish-American Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, where the action happens in Harry Hope’s run-down saloon bar in 1912 New York, and The Playboy of the Western World, by JM Synge, which takes place in Michael James Flaherty’s shebeen in Mayo around 1907. One whole act of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars is set in a Dublin pub in 1916. Conor McPherson’s highly regarded The Weir from 1997, which I’m ashamed to say I have not seen, is set in a bar in rural Ireland.

Who’s playing (pun semi-intended) for England? There’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell by Keith Waterhouse from 1989, of course, where the eponymous Spectator journalist finds himself locked overnight in his favourite home, the Coach and Horses in Soho, and other characters from his past drift through like ghosts. The British-based Nigerian novelist and playwright Biyi Bandeele wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Mr Deka D in 1999 that is set (I’m nicking this from Steven Earnshaw’s The Pub in Literature) in an “absurdist, always closed/always open public house”. But those apart, as far as I can discover, you have to go back several centuries to find more English pub-plays. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer from 1773 opens at an alehouse, the Three Pigeons, then moves on to a mansion that two of the main characters have been fooled into thinking is an inn, “and hilarity ensues”. Does that count? Mind, Goldsmith was born in Ireland …

Earlier, in 1728, John Gay set Act II of The Beggar’s Opera, in “A Tavern near Newgate”, where Captain Macheath and his gang of robbers hang out; and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem from 1707, opens in Will Boniface’s inn in Lichfield, where the landlord boasts of the local brew:

Boniface: What will your honour please to drink, as the saying is?
Aimwell I have heard your town of Lichfield much fam’d for ale. I think I’ll taste that.
Boniface: Sir, I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best ale in Staffordshire: ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years old the sixth day of next March, old style.

But guess what? Young Farquhar, too, plays for the boys in green, having been born in Derry.

Going further back, Ben Jonson wrote a play in 1629 called The New Inn set in a fictitious inn called the Light Heart in Barnet, which was apparently so badly received it was “hissed from the stage” on its first night, though with a plot so Byzantine it included a man falling in love with a boy disguised as a girl, and marrying him/her, only for it to turn out all right because the boy was really a girl in the first place, while the woman who was the boy/girl’s nurse turns out to be his long-lost mother, and also the missing wife of the inn’s landlord, who is himself a Lord in disguise … this does not surprise.

And finally we come to Shakespeare. There is a less-well-known hostelry that actually begins a Shakespeare play: the “alehouse on a heath” where a drunk Christopher Sly falls asleep before being carried to the house of “a Lord” and having The Taming of the Shrew performed before him. But the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, where the young Prince Hal hung out with Sir John Falstaff and his cronies, drinking from a sack while waiting for his parents, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, to pop their sabatons, is possibly the most famous tavern in English literature, and certainly the one that has been portrayed on most theatre stages.

Antony Sher as Falstaff, entertaining his local, the Boar’s Head, in the Royal Shakespear’s 2014 production of Henry IV

Is the Campaign for Real Ale about to have its Clause Four moment? For younger readers, Clause Four was the part of the constitution of the Labour Party that contained the aim of achieving “the common ownership of the means of production”, and it was when Tony Blair, Labour’s new party leader, and his allies managed to get that dumped in the dustbin of discarded socialist rhetoric in 1995 that New Labour was born. Traditionalists saw the policy celebrated in Clause Four, the rejection of capitalism, as the core principle that the Labour Party was founded upon. The Blairites saw this as outdated rhetoric that was damaging the party’s election chances, and dumping it as “revitalising” the Labour Party. Camra, you may have noticed, has now launched its own self-styled “revitalisation project”, designed to get a consensus on where the campaign, at 45 years old, should be going next.

The question being asked is “how broad and inclusive should our campaigning be”, and the choices offered in the survey on Camra’s website, frankly, are totally dishonest. There are six, and they are that the campaign should represent

• Just drinkers of real ale, or
• Drinkers of real ale, cider and perry, or
• All beer drinkers, or
• All beer, cider and perry drinkers, or
• All pub-goers or
• All drinkers

The Tudor physician Andrew Boorde (c 1490-1549), one of the earliest campaigners for real ale, who complained that while ale was ‘a naturall drynke’ for an Englishman, beer ‘doth make a man fat’.

But there isn’t a commentator that doesn’t know that four out of six of those choices are irrelevant nonsense, and the only real question Camra is asking is, “Look, are we finally going to ditch Clause Four start supporting craft keg as well as cask ale or not?”

Now, I’m aware that the support for cider and perry is controversial among some sections of Camra activists, and there are even some who question Camra’s pub campaigns, but it’s dishonesty through omission to stick those issues in there as if they were really a meaningful part of the debate about Camra’s future, and a disservice to the overwhelming majority of Camra’s membership not to make it clearer what this is really all about. In the 16-page document mailed to all Camra members about the “Revitalisation Project”, reference is made to Camra’s equivalent of Clause Four, that definition of “real ale” adopted in 1973, two years after the campaign was founded by four men who knew nothing, at that time about the technicalities of beer, only that they didn’t like the big-brand keg variety, which definition insists that the only sort of beer worth drinking is “matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed” and is “served without the use of extaneous carbon dioxide”.  The document doesn’t, of course, point out that this definition is nonsense: the so-called “secondary fermentation” is merely a continuation of the original fermentation (you only get a true “secondary fermentation” if Bretanomyces or similar organisms kick in after Saccharomyces has finished). The subject of “craft keg” is mentioned in just one paragraph. But the, at a rough stab, 8,000 or so passionately active members of Camra know craft keg is the enormous elephant in the saloon bar that the debate is actually centred on. Many of the 170,000 other members who remain on the books more out of direct debit inertia than any enormous dedication to the cause of promoting cask ale may not grasp the true intent of this set of choices, which has clearly been presented in a way it is hoped will not antagonise the, at a rough stab, 4,000 or 5,000 passionately active members of Camra who would rather slash their throats with the shards of a broken Nonic pint glass than admit any merit at all in the craft keg movement, and who continue to fetishise a 43-year-old technically dubious idea of what good beer ought to be in the face of massive changes in the types of beer now available that go far beyond what Camra’s founding fathers, who knew only mild, bitter, stout and lager, would have thought possible.

If Camra remains purely a campaign for “real ale” as defined in the early 1970s, it will lose its relevance just the way its ineffectual predecessor the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood did (not that the SPBW ever had much relevance anyway). It never seems to come up in the debate about Camra’s future, but not only is the British beer scene today totally different from that of 45 years ago, so too are the beer drinkers. More than 80 per cent of pubgoers around when Camra started are now dead. To drink legally in a pub when Camra was founded, you had to have been born no later than 1953. That makes you 63 this year. Today’s latest cadre of pub goers was born in 1998, and are very probably the granddaughters and grandsons of Camra’s first members. Fewer than one in five pub drinkers today drank in pubs before Camra was around. More than half of today’s pub drinkers were not yet born when Camra held its first meetings. They know no other world except one where cask beer is widely available and exciting new styles of beer far removed from cask ale in flavour and delivery seem to arrive every month.

Camra was founded initially to respond to a very specific set of problems caused by the big brewers who dominated the British beer market becoming completely product-oriented at the expense of the customer, and threatening the availability of the sort of tasty beers a strong minority of customers still wanted to consume. At the time Camra was founded, it was necessary to defend a narrow definition of good beer that was in danger of disappearing. It is no longer the case that cask ale is in danger: but it is still true that beer in general, and British pub culture, need promoting and defending, against ill-willed health fascists, marketing moronicity and badly briefed politicians.

It is also a fact that the 52 per cent of pub goers who are under the age of 45 have been exposed most or all of their pub-going lives to new styles of beers, notable American “craft” beers, in bottle and keg, that never existed when Camra was founded and which undeniably delivering a terrific and hugely appreciated taste experience – and one that cask ale brewers need to accept as a legitimate challenge. It will do the greater campaign for beer no good if Camra tries to insist that the very best craft keg beers are still no worthier of notice than the mass-produced mass-market keg beers that arrived in the 1960s, because fans of craft keg beer know they are drinking a product made with care and they enjoy greatly what it delivers. It would be much better for Camra to be able to say to craft keg drinkers, who are a growing part of the beer drinking community, “yes what you drink is great, we appreciate it too – have you tried cask ale, when well-kept it’s even better” than for it to continue to say to craft keg drinkers, as it effectively does at the moment: “You don’t want to drink that, it’s no better than Watney’s Red Barrel,” something they know isn’t true, even if they weren’t born when Red Barrel disappeared.

A real ale brewer at work, pre-hop era (mid 14th century) © De Agostini/The British Library Board

What will happen in the Clause Four Revitalisation debate? The 8,000 will speak loudly, the 4,000 loudest of all, and of the 170,000 I expect more than 95 per cent of them to remain silent: if Camra gets more than 15,000 to 16,000 responses, online or in the post, to its survey, I’d be very surprised (though I see it’s already claiming “almost 10,000” responses online), and I’d also expect the 50 or so “revitalisation consultation events” being held around the country to be dominated by members of the 8,000. At the end of all that, the men and women behind the “Revitalisation Consultation” have been politically astute enough not to commit themselves to actually taking any notice at all of what the surveys or the meetings tell them about the way Camra’s membership wants to see the campaign go: all that will happen is “the development and presentation of a formal proposal for consideration by members at the Members’ Weekend in Eastbourne in 2017”. (A quick appreciative nod here to the clever title of the consultation – “Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale” was, of course, Camra’s original name until 1973 – and the choice of Michael Hardman, one of Camra’s four founders, to head the Revitalisation Project.)

At which point you can expect something less like the special Labour Party conference on the party’s constitution in London in April 1995 that saw Clause Four axed comparatively easily and more in line with the second congress of the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party in 1903, also in London, which saw a lasting split between Lenin and his hard-line Bolsheviks and the ultimately more conciliatory Mensheviks. Do I think that if the “Revitalisation Consultation” puts forward changes to Camra’s aims that are seen as embracing “craft keg”, there could be a split in the campaign, with the hard-line “anti-keggers” leaving to form “Real Camra”? Knowing some of those hard-liners, yes I do, and I think they could easily take two or three thousand activists with them.

On the other hand – and I speak as someone who will have been a member of Camra for 40 years next year – I doubt that more than a handful of the splitters will be under 60, and despite all that they have certainly contributed through their activism over the decades, Camra will probably be revitalised by their going, by becoming an organisation fit for a 21st century purpose, and not a 1970s one.

Danzic circa 1700: are those kegs of spruce beer on the quayside?

Spruce beer is made from the tips of spruce trees. Except that the connection is not as simple as it appears: it is pretty much a coincidence that spruce beer and spruce trees have the same name.

There are actually two traditions of spruce beer in Britain: the older, the Danzig or Black Beer tradition, only died out very recently, while the other, which could be called the “North American tradition”, was hugely popular in Regency times, and included Jane Austen among its fans, but disappeared nearly 200 years ago on this side of the Atlantic.

The first mention of “spruce beer” in English is from around 1500, when Henry VII was on the throne, in a poem called Colyn Blowbolles Testament, in which a hung-over drunkard is persuaded to write his will. Colyn lists the drinks he wants served at his funeral, including more than a dozen types of wine, mead, “stronge ale bruen in fattes and in tonnes”, “Sengle bere, and othir that is dwobile”, and also “Spruce beer, and the beer of Hambur [Hamburg]/Whiche makyth oft tymes men to stambur.”

Norway spruce

The fact that spruce beer and “the beer of Hambur[g]” were mentioned together is because both came from North Germany. The name “spruce beer” is an alteration of the German “Sprossen-bier”, literally “sprouts beer”, more meaningfully “leaf-bud beer”, since it was flavoured with the leaf-buds or new sprouts of Norway spruce, Picea abies, or silver fir, Abies alba. “Sprossen” was meaningless to English-speakers, but in early modern English the similar-sounding “Spruce” was another name for Prussia, from which country’s main port, Danzig, Sprossen-bier was exported. “Sprossen-bier” became in English the more understandable “Spruce beer”, meaning, originally, “Prussian beer”. (Chaucer called the country “Sprewse”, and it was being called “Spruce-land” as late as 1639.)

Meanwhile English had to wait more than a century and a half after the beer was named to get its own word for Picea abies, the tree known as Fichte in German and gran in Norwegian. When the tree did get an English name, first mentioned by the naturalist John Evelyn in 1670, because it, too, like the beer, came to Britain via Prussia, it was called the “Spruce”, short for “Spruce fir”, that is, “Prussian fir”. Thus “spruce beer” is not actually named for the spruce tree, and “spruce beer” in English is around 170 years older as a phrase than “spruce tree”. (The adjective “spruce” meaning “neat” or “smartly dressed” probably also comes from “Spruce” meaning Prussia, via “Spruce leather”, leather from Prussia that was a favourite, it appears, among Tudor dandies.)

“Sprossen-bier” was also called in German “Danziger bier” or “Joppenbier”. The German physician Jacob Theodor von Bergzabern, better known by his Latinised name, Tabernaemontanus, raved about it in his Neuwe Kreuterbuch (“New Book of Herbs”), published in 1588, declaring that there were “many sorts of good and hearty beers” made in the land of the Prussians, but Danzig beer, or Joppenbier, “takes the prize … there is in a little beaker of this beer more strength and nourishment, than in an entire large mug of ordinary beer.” Joppenbier, he said, was a beautiful reddish-brown colour and “thick like a syrup”, and it strengthened the blood and gave a “lovely colour” to those who drank.

“Danziger Jopen-bier” was still going in 1946, when it was described by a Czech professor in a lecture to a group of English brewers as “one of the most interesting and unique of top fermented beverages”. It was made by boiling wort for up to ten hours until it reached a gravity of between 45 and 55 per cent Balling – a stupefying 1200 to 1260 OG or so. The wort was then run into wooden vessels and fermentation undertaken by a “mixed microflora” of moulds and yeasts present in the wood, with other yeasts joining in as fermentation progressed. The final beer was only 2.5 per cent to 7 per cent alcohol, with an acidity (as lactic acid) of 1 to 2 per cent. The name “Jopen”, the professor claimed, was “derived primarily from a word meaning a large mug out of which beer is consumed”, which, given that Tabernaemontanus said you only needed a “Tafelbeckerlein”, a little beaker, of Joppenbier to get more benefit than from a “Maß” of ordinary deer, seems dubious. But the beer described in 1946 must have been considerably sweet, and very dark, and was clearly the same as the “Dantzig spruce or black beer” described by a writer in 1801 as one of the beers that were “only half fermented”. A decoction of spruce buds or cones was added to the wort before fermentation, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1890. However, a description of making Joppenbeer in German from 1865 fails to mention spruce:

Danziger Joppenbier

Joppenbier is in many respects very interesting. It is made from a highly concentrated wort – the Saccharometer degree is about 49 per cent. From 1000 Kg malt and 5 Kg hops approximately 10.5 hectolitres of beer is produced. The mash is made by the infusion method and the wort which is drawn off is – to obtain the specified concentration – often boiled more than 20 hours. The wort is cooled down to down to 12.5 degrees.

The fermentation is a so-called spontaneous fermentation. Fermentation usually begins in July – although it is the same whether the beer is brewed in January or April. The wort is first covered with a thick blanket greenish-white mould; when the mould spores are in sufficient quantity to force their way into the wort and to grow to a very characteristic yeast, then the fermentation begins, which only in September subsides enough so that the beer becomes clear and can be drawn off. The attenuation is during this period up to only about 19.

The resulting beer is dark brown and extremely rich (partly from un-broken-down glucose) and sweet. The smell is pleasant (which is probably a consequence of the extremely slow fermentation). It is not possible to drink much Joppenbier – it is full-bodied, extremely suitable for mixing with other beer and is exported to England for this purpose. The clear beer can be left a year in the vat on the yeast without being damaged – of course, however, the degree of attenuation will increase.”

When the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz set off on his third voyage around the top of Norway and Russia in 1596 to try to find the Northeast Passage from Europe to China, he and his team took with them casks of beer that included at least one barrel of “iopen”, which is specifically called in the Latin version of the account of what turned out to be Barentsz’s last voyage “cerevisia dantiscana” – Danzig beer. Barentsz’s crew were stranded on Novaya Zemla in the Arctic Ocean, just 900 miles from the North Pole, over the winter of 1596/7, when it became so cold that the “iopen” froze, bursting its cask. The crew tried to drink the beer as it thawed, but they had inadvertently invented freeze-distillation, with the alcohol unfreezing first, and “it was too strong to drinke alone”. (That “cerevisia dantiscana” was a synonym for the beer also known as “Joppenbier” ” and “Preusing” – “Prussian” – is confirmed in a book written in Latin by a German author in 1722 listing the names of all known drinks, though confusingly it also translates “Cerevisia Batavorum”, “Batavian” or Netherlands beer, as “Joppen-Bier”: Dutch joppenbier appears to be an entirely different tradition.)

Spruce beer looks to go underground in Britain after Colyn Blowbolle in the time of the Tudors, with only a couple of glimpses in the next two centuries. A writer in 1832 claimed that in 1664 an advertisement appeared in London declaring: “At the ‘Angel and Sun,’ in the Strand, near Strand Bridge, is to be sold every day, fresh Epsum-water, Barnet-water, and Tunbridge-water; Epsum-ale, and Spruce-beer.” By 1719 the “Old Brunswick Mum and Spruce Beer House” was open “next door to the Red-Lyon, over against Bridewell-Bridge, Fleet-Ditch” in London, and selling “right Brunswick-Mum, and Spruce-Beer, Wholesale and Retail”, with the proprietor, Edmund Thomas, claiming to be “the only person in London that deals in these two commodities, and nothing else.” (It was still open in April 1757, when “a large parcel of Mum” had just been imported.)

These establishments were both almost certainly selling Danzig-brewed spruce beer, and from 1720 onwards newspapers began regularly recording kegs of spruce beer or black beer from Danzig, in quantities of up to 200 kegs at a time, among the huge range of goods from around the world being imported into Britain, from lime juice out of Jamaica to iron from Sweden, with the kegs arriving in ports from London to Newcastle upon Tyne. The kegs apparently held two gallons each, and the retail price was a high eight shillings and sixpence a cask, or more than six pence a pint, when porter was three pence a quart. Part of the high cost was the duty paid: £2 per 32-gallon (wine measure) barrel, when ordinary strong beer paid only 10s.

As the 19th century continued, spruce or black beer continued to be imported from Danzig to Great Britain: 24,950 kegs arrived in 1829, for example, 98 per cent of all the spruce beer the city exported that year, at 6s 6d a keg, worth £8,108 15s. it was on sale in London in 1850 for 1s 3d for a quart bottle, or 10s 6d a keg. Import duties on spruce beer brought in £3,015 in the 12 months to 31 March 1859 (for comparison, excise duty on wine in the same period totalled £1.76 million). The following year, 1860, Danzig exported spruce beer worth 86,500 thaler, or just under £13,000, perhaps £1 million today. Much of the time it must have been drunk for its supposed health-giving properties: an Australian newspaper in 1843 reported: “Infallible Cure For Colds: Two tablespoonsful of Dantzic black beer, taken with hot water, sugar, and about half-a-glass of old rum, or malt whisky; immediately before going to bed, is said to cure the most obstinate and long-standing colds, and has succeeded where every other remedy failed.”

By the early 19th century, British firms, almost all in the North of England, had started making black beer themselves, to the same specifications as the Danzig version. One of the first known is R Barnby of Hull, “black beer manufacturer”, who went bankrupt early in 1815. Six years later, in 1821, another Hull-based black beer brewer, J Roberts, also went bankrupt. Leeds had four black beer brewers listed in 1823, though three brewed other beers as well, and Huddersfield one. Pigot’s directory of Hull in 1828 listed five “black beer brewers and importers” in the port. Sheffield had one black beer brewer the same year, Francis Parker of Trippet Lane, who also brewed ale and porter. By 1837 Leeds had six black beer brewers listed, plus one importer, while Huddersfield the same year had two black beer brewers. (Despite black beer being far more popular in the North, Dickens has the Magpie and Stump public house in Clare Market, London, advertising “Devonshire cyder and Dantzic spruce” on printed cards in the windows in The Pickwick Papers, published first in 1836). A later Leeds black beer brewer was the Cambria Vinegar Company, which was primarily a vinegar brewer based in Elland Road, Leeds, but which also supplied fish and chip shops with other essentials such as oil for their fryers. Among those in Sheffield was John Wheatley of the Dantzig Brewery, Division Street, who appears in a directory of 1862 and was advertising himself three years later as “black beer brewers and manufacturers of peppermint and raspberry cordials, aerated ginger beer, lemonade, soda water, lithia and German seltzer waters, agents for Messers Hoare and Co’s London Porter and Stout”.

Spruce beer imports from Dantzig began to fall, with the total excise duty collected in 1868 down to £1,756. (The duty collected on essence of spruce for that year was just £1.) All the same Britain still imported 398,449 litres of spruce beer from Danzig in 1877, about 28,100 kegs, at 8s 6d per keg FOB, totalling just under £12,000, and 99 per cent of the total exported from the city. One Danzig-based spruce beer (and lager) brewer, Robert Fischer, whose “best Danzig black beer” was being imported into Newcastle upon Tyne in 1855, still had an agency in Glasgow in 1886, according to the Post Office Directory that year, and spruce beer was coming “direct from Hamburg” in 1897, “the best and strongest”.

By the 20th century black beer manufacturers in Britain were concentrating on the healthy aspects of the drink. W Severn & Co of Curzon Street, Derby, said its Black Spruce Beer, 5s 5d for a large bottle in 1922, “will keep indefinitely … fortifies the system against Chills, Colds and Weakness as nothing else can … invaluable for growing children.” Another Derby-based black beer brewer, Burrows & Sturgess Ltd of the Spa Works, revealed some of the secrets of the drink’s making in an advertisement from 1920, saying that black beer, “also known as Spruce Beer” was “a strong heavy liquid, very dark in color [sic], and is produced chiefly from Malt, blended with Dantzic Spruce. After evaporation and fermentation the Beer should mature for over twelve months before being offered for sale. Owing to its dense gravity, and being a fermented product of Malt, it pays a heavy Excise duty, but its great medicinal value being recognised, it is not classed as an ordinary beverage, and its sale is free from restrictions. It has a decidedly pleasant and piquant flavour, which appeals to most people. It is of the greatest value as a preventative and remedy for Coughs, Colds, Influenza and Weakness. It is the 100% Food Tonic. It may be taken alone, or with the addition of hot water, sugar and spirits. It is fully matured, will keep indefinitely and if of the heaviest gravity. No house should be without a bottle of this wholesome and beneficial Beer. For growing children it has no equal. Supplied in bottles (six-to-gallon size) 6s 3d per bottle.”

One manufacturer, Joseph Hobson & Son (which also called its premises, in The Calls, Leeds the Dantzig brewery, and which claimed to have been in existence for over a century in 1931), declared that its black beer, “taken regularly, will prevent influenza.” (To be fair, it was estimated in 2011 that 30ml of black beer provided 25 per cent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.) Different firms combined black beer with one or another alcoholic drink also promoted, at the time, as “good” for the run-down, so that Heaton’s of Burnley in 1906 sold “Famous Black Beer and Port, The Great Food Tonic – Strengthening and Nourishing”, with the tannin in the port, “so very injurious to a weak stomach, successfully neutralised”.

Black beer from a mainstream bewer, which appears to be claiming, incorrectly, to be non-intoxicating

A rival Burnley firm sold Hartley’s Black Beer and Raisin Wine, “the Finest Black Beer and the Choicest Raisin Wine skilfully combined in exactly correct proportions … a Magnificent Tonic and Restorative for the Pale and Delicate … 1s per full-sized wine bottle.” Another supplier, A Greaves & Son Ltd, Chemists, The Market Place, Chesterfield, claimed in 1936 to have “The Tonic you have all beer waiting for! Black Beer and Australian Red Wine, only 1s 6d a big flask”. The makers of the rival Friar Brand black beer and red wine, sole agents DM Forbes of Chesterfield, said it was “invaluable for anaemic girls and all who are run-down”, and just 2s 6d a large bottle. At least one Scottish “mainstream” brewer, George Younger’s of Alloa, was making black beer in the 1920s, describing it as “non-excisable” – meaning it could be sold without a magistrates’ licence – and “so refreshing”.

The whopping original gravity of black beer, however, at 1200 or more, was nearly its death in the First World War, when the tax on beer, which was based on OGs, went up to almost 13 times the pre-war level by 1920, leading to excise rates on “mum, spruce or black beer” (the taxman still remembered Brunswick mum, if everybody else had forgotten) more than five times higher than on regular beers, at £26 2s a 36-gallon barrel. This was something which “almost destroyed” the industry, but Leeds-based MPs managed to get a tax rebate for black beer in 1923, which rebate was increased in 1924. When another massive increase in British beer tax was made in 1931, Yorkshire’s MPs succeeded in getting black beer finally exempted from tax completely, to ensure its survival. Its continued existence was helped by the fact that, despite an alcohol content of around 8.5 per cent by volume, no magistrates’ licence was required to sell it, and in 1929 it was said to be “largely sold by chemists”. (The continued inclusion of “mum” in the excise regulations confused MPs during the parliamentary debate on the budget, and the Liberal MP Ernest Brown had to explain, inaccurately, that “mum” was “similar not only to black beer, but also Berlin white beer”.)

Mather’s in its final incarnation

Hobson’s, which at one point had made “Danzovia” tonic wine, was still listing its “Hobson’s Choice” and “Spruce” brand black beers in 1969 but soon afterward merged with the wine and spirit merchant Gale Lister, leaving another Leeds firm, JE Mather & Sons, founded in 1903, as the only surviving maker of black beer in the UK. In 1950 Mather’s had been boasting that its bottles contained nearly 2,000 calories each, and recommending that purchasers mix it with lemonade to make a black beer shandy – known as a Sheffield stout. By 1992 the brand was owned by the drinks company Matthew Clark & Son, which successfully fought off a proposed imposition of a tax increase that would have doubled the price. In 1995 Matthew Clark closed its Leeds winery, but sold the brand to Continental Wine and Foods of Huddersfield, which continued to make Mather’s Black Beer. However, in 2012, as part of changes to the tax system, it was announced that the relief black beer had enjoyed since 1931 was to end the following year, which would mean the price of a 68cl bottle almost doubling to £4. Continental Wine and Foods was only selling 35,000 bottles a year, and in 2013 it ceased all production of black beer, saying the likely effect of the price rise on sales among the largely elderly buyers of Mather’s Black Beer meant it was not worth continuing with the product.

For part two of this history of spruce beer, the North American connection, click here

Jacques Cartier supposedly pictured learning from a Canadian First Nationer how to save his men from scurvey: but the chap with the buckskin suit and the metal axe with the tepees in the background looks like a Plains Indian 1,500 miles and 220 years away from home rather than a Huron

Early European explorers in North America had to be shown the healthy properties of the spruce tree by the existing inhabitants. When the Breton explorer Jacques Cartier overwintered in Quebec in 1535-36 on his second visit to the land he had named Canada, almost all his men fell ill with scurvy through lack of fresh food, leaving just ten out of 110 well enough to look after the rest. Huron Indian women showed them how to make tea and poultices from the bark of a local tree, which quickly returned them to health. That tree was probably White Cedar, Thuja occidentalis, a member of the cypress family, rather than spruce. But later French settlers turned to spruce trees, a better source of Vitamin C, and thus a better way to combat scurvy, the curse of long-distance voyagers, than cedars. The secretary to the new French governor of Cape Breton Island, Thomas Pichon, writing in 1752, noted that the inhabitants of Port-Toulouse (now St Peter’s) “were the first that brewed an excellent sort of antiscorbutic [“la bière très bonne” in the original French], of the tops of the spruce-fir”, “Perusse” or “Pruche” in Pichon’s French.

Around the same time, the Swedish-Finnish botanist Pehr Kalm, who travelled in North America from 1748 to 1751, apparently found the French in Canada drank little else but spruce beer. In his letters to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, he wrote:

“Among other liquors commonly drank in the European plantations in the North of America there is a beer which deserves particular notice; it is brewed from a kind of pine that grows in those parts and is by botanists called Abies Piccea foliis brevibus conis minimus [black spruce, Picea mariana]. The French in Canada call it Epinette and Epinette Blanche, the English and Dutch call it Spruce.” Spruce beer, Kalm said, “is chiefly used by the French in Canada; a considerable quantity is indeed made by the Dutch who live round Hudson’s river, in the most Northern parts, but the English seldom have it except in New England and New Scotland; because in Canada the tree is very common, but at Albany it is so scarce that the people are obliged to go some miles for it; and in the other English plantations it is hardly to be met with.”

Kalm gave much detail about the making of spruce beer, telling the Academicians:

“I had no opportunity to see the method of making this liquor used by the Dutch, but often drank it amongst them, and thought it very good. The account they gave me of preparing it is as follows: take 12 gallons of water and set it to boil in a copper; put into it about a pint and half or as much as can be held between two hands, of cuttings of the leaves and branches of the pine; let it boil about an hour, and pour it into a vessel, and leave it to cool a little; then put the yeast into the vessel to make the wort ferment; in to take away the resinous taste, put a pound of sugar amongst it. After it has done working, it may be put into hogsheads or barrels, but it is reckoned best to bottle it directly. It will keep a great while, and will not grow so soon sour in the summer as malt liquor. It looks clear and like common beer, has an agreeable taste, and when pour’d out of a bottle into a glass mantles like ale. It is reckoned very wholesom, and has a diuretick quality.

 

“When I afterwards came to Canada, I had several times an opportunity to see the French prepare this beer, which, as they use no malt liquor, is their only drink, except wine brought from France, which is pretty dear. Their way of brewing it is this: After having put the cuttings of the pine into the water, they lay some of the cones of the tree amongst it, for the gum which is contained in them is thought very wholesom; and makes the beer better. The French do not cut the branches and leaves of the pine nearly so fine as the Dutch; for if the branches are small enough to go into the copper, they do no more to them, and they measure the quantity no otherwise than by putting them into the till they come even with the surface of the water. While it is boiling they take some wheat, put it into a pan over the fire and roast it as we do coffee, till it is almost black; all the while stirring, shaking and turning it about in the pan, when that is done they throw it into the copper with some burnt bread.

 

“Rye is as fit for this purpose as wheat, barley is better than either, and Indian corn is better than barley. The reasons given me for putting this burnt corn and bread into the water are: 1st, and chiefly, to give it a brownish colour like malt liquor; 2nd, to make it more palatable; 3rd, to make it some more nourishing. When it has continued boiling till half the quantity only of the water remains in the copper, the pine is taken out and thrown away, and the liquor is poured into a vessel thro’ a sieve of hair cloth, to prevent the burnt bread and corn from mixing with it. Then some sirrup is put into the wort to make it palatable, and to take away the taste which the gum of the tree might leave behind. The wort is then left to cool after some yeast has been put to it, and nothing remains to be done before it is tunned up but skimming off what, during the fermentation, has risen up on the surface; and in four and twenty hours it is fit to be drank. As there is a great resemblance between the pine and that which is common in Sweden, it would be worth while to try whether ours could be made use of in the same manner.”

Black spruce, Picea Mariana

Kalm’s description of spruce beer brewing involved very little extra fermentable material, suggesting the French and Dutch found enough fermentable material in the spruce sap itself. However, John Claudius Loudon, writing in 1838, repeated an account of spruce beer brewing by the 18th century French physician, naval engineer and botanist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782), apparently from the Traité des arbres fruitiers of 1768, clearly matching French Canadian practice, but with plenty of molasses or sugar:

“To make a cask of spruce beer, a boiler is necessary, which will contain one fourth part more than the quantity of liquor which is to be put into it. It is then filled three parts full of water, and the fire lighted. As soon as the water begins to get hot, a quantity of spruce twigs is put into it, broken into pieces, but tied together into a faggot or bundle, and large enough to measure about 2 ft. in circumference at the ligature. The water is kept boiling, till the bark separates from the twigs. While this is doing, a bushel of oats must be roasted, a few at a time, on a large iron stove or hot plate ; and about fifteen galettes [flat yeasty cakes], or as many sea biscuits, or if neither of these are to be had, fifteen pounds of bread cut into slices and toasted. As these articles are prepared, they are put into the boiler, where they remain till the spruce fir twigs are well boiled. The spruce branches are then taken out, and the fire extinguished. The oats and the bread fall to the bottom, and the leaves, &c., rise to the top, where they are skimmed off with the scum. Six pints of molasses, or 12 lb. or 15lb. of coarse brown sugar, are then added ; and: the liquor is immediately tunned off into a cask which has contained red wine; or, if it is wished that the spruce beer should have a fine red colour, five or six pints of wine may be left in the cask. Before the liquor becomes cold, half a pint of yeast is mixed with it, and well stirred, to incorporate it thoroughly with the liquor. The barrel is then filled up to the bung-hole, which is left open to allow it to ferment ; a portion of the liquor being kept back to supply what may be thrown off by the fermentation. If the cask is stopped before the liquor has fermented 24 hours, the spruce beer becomes sharp, like cider ; but, if it is suffered to ferment properly, and filled up twice a day, it becomes mild, and agreeable to the palate. It is esteemed very wholesome, and is exceedingly refreshing, especially during summer.”

Loudon also quoted “Michaux”, either the French naturalist Andre Michaux or his son Francois, as saying: “the twigs are boiled in water, a certain quantity of molasses or maple sugar is added, and the mixture is left to ferment,” and also: “The essence of spruce (which is what spruce beer is made from in this country) is obtained ‘by evaporating to the consistence of an extract the water in which the ends of the young branches of black spruce have been boiled.’ Michaux adds that he cannot give the details of the process for making the extract, as he has never seen it performed; but that he has often observed the process of making the beer, in the country about Halifax and the Maine, and that he can affirm with confidence that the white spruce is never used for that purpose.”

The British Army in North America looks to have learnt from the French the importance of spruce beer for treating and preventing scurvy: there is a strong argument for saying that spruce beer helped the British defeat the French and conquer Canada, by keeping troops healthy who would otherwise have fallen ill with scurvy. John Knox, born in Sligo, who served as an officer in North America between 1757 and 1760 with the 43rd Regiment of Foot, said the troops from New England temporarily occupying Louisbourg after its capture in 1745 were supplied with spruce beer, “this liquor being thought necessary for the preservation of the healths of our men, as they were confined to salt provisions, and it is an excellent antiscorbutic: it is made from the tops and branches of the Spruce-tree, boiled for three hours, then strained into casks, with a certain quantity of molasses, and, as soon as cold, it is fit for use.” When British troops were again involved in a campaign against the French in Nova Scotia in 1757, their commander, the Earl of Loudoun, had insisted on an allowance of two quarts of spruce beer per man each day, for which the troops paid seven pence in New York currency, equal to four and one-twelfth pence sterling, later increased to five pints a day.

General Jeffrey Amherst

General Jeffrey Amherst, who followed the Earl of Loudon as commander in chief of British forces in North America, was equally insistent that the troops be well supplied with spruce beer, “for the health and convenience of the troops”, and a “Breweree” (sic) was set up when the British Army was camped at the head of Lake George in what is now north-east New York State in June 1759 with each regiment donating one man to help with the brewing, and instructions to allow five quarts of molasses to every barrel of spruce beer. When Amherst’s troops moved north to capture the French Fort Carillon, subsequently renamed Fort Ticonderoga, the next month, each regiment took with it eight barrels of spruce beer, with a barrel to each company of Grenadiers and “Light Infentry”. Amherst considered spruce beer important enough to record a recipe for it in his journal on 15 August 1759, involving boiling “7 pounds of good Spruce” until the bark peels off and adding three gallons of molasses to the spruce-water, to make 30 gallons of beer.

Later on at Ticonderoga, in 1776, after the fort had been captured by American forces from the British during the War of Independence, two enterprising sergeants in the 5th Continental Regiment from New Hampshire, William Chamberlin and Seth Spring, crossed Lake Champlain to gather boughs of spruce, brought them back and with two quarts of molasses and a “quantity” of “spicknard or Indian root” (American spikenard, Aralia racemosa, a member of the ginseng family) for added flavour, brewed a barrel of beer. It was instantly popular with the other troops, and Spring was sent to Fort George to bring back two barrels of molasses to make more beer to sell. After six or seven weeks, Chamberlin recorded, he and Spring had made three hundred dollars between them.

An edition of the physician Richard Brookes’s General Practice of Physic in 1765 said:

“Poor People that winter in Greenland under vast Disadvantages in point of Air and Diet, preserve themselves from the Scurvy by Spruce Beer, which is their common Drink. Likewise the simple Decoction of Fir Tops has done Wonders. The Shrub Black Spruce of America makes this most wholesome Drink just mentioned and affords a Balsam superior to most Turpentines. It is of the Fir Kind. A simple Decoction of the Tops, Cones, Leaves, or even of the green Bark or Wood of these, is an excellent Antiscorbutic; but perhaps it is much more so when fermented, as in making Spruce Beer. This is done by Molosses, which by its diaphoretic Quality, makes it a more suitable Medicine. By carrying a few Bags of Spruce to Sea, this wholesome Drink may be made at any Time. But when Spruce cannot be had, the common Fir-Tops used for Fuel in the Ship should be first boiled in Water, and then the Decoction should be fermented with Molosses; to which may be added a small Quantity of Wormwood and Root of Horseradish. The fresher it is drank the better.”

Four years later 1769 a book called The London Practice of Physic, listing treatments for scurvy, gave a recipe for spruce beer as follows:

Take twelve gallons of water and put therein three pounds and a half of black spruce, and boil it for three hours; then put to the liquor seven pounds of molasses just boil it up, strain it through a sieve when milk-warm, put to it about four spoonfulls of yeast to work it; it soon becomes fit for bottling, perhaps in five or six days.

Later versions of this recipe said it was called “chowder beer” and claimed it originated in Devon, adding that “two gallons of melasses [sic] are sufficient for a hogshead of liquor, but if melasses cannot be procured treacle or coarse sugar will answer the purpose.”

Captain James Cook experimented with spruce beer on his second voyage to the Pacific, from 1772 to 1775, making a batch when he arrived in New Zealand. Cook wrote:

“We at first made it of a decoction of spruce leaves [the spruce Cook used was the New Zealand rimu, Dacrydium cupressinum]; but finding that this alone made the beer too astringent, we afterwards mixed with it an equal quantity of the tea-plant, (a name it obtained in my former voyage from our using it as tea then as we also did now) which made the beer extremely palatable, and esteemed by every one on board [this was the mānuka, Leptospermum scoparium, found in New Zealand and south-east Australia]; we brewed it in the same manner as spruce beer, and the process is as follows: First, make a strong decoction of the small branches of the spruce and tea-plant, by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from off the branches; then take them out of the copper, and put in the proper quantity of molasses, ten gallons of which are sufficient to make a tun, or two hundred and forty gallons of beer; let this mixture just boil; then put it into the casks, and to it add an equal quantity of cold water, more or less, according to the strength of the decoction or the taste: when the whole is milk-warm, put in a little grounds of beer or yeast, if you have it, or any thing else that will cause fermentation, and in a few days the beer will be fit to drink. After the casks have been brewed in two or three times, beer will generally ferment itself, especially if the weather is warm. As I had inspissated juice of wort [a concentrated form or wort the Admiralty was experimenting with in the hope that it could be used to make beer on long voyages on board], and could not apply it to a better purpose, we used it together with molasses or sugar to make these two articles go farther.”

Cook and his men brewed spruce beer in New Zealand again in February 1777 on his third and last voyage to the Pacific, and also in April 1778, at Nootka Sound on the Canadian west coast, where enough beer was brewed “to last the ship’s company for two or three months”. When Cook’s two ships reached Unalaska Island in the Aleutians early in October 1778, Cook recorded that both crews were free of scurvy, putting this down in part to the spruce beer, which was drunk every other day.

Spruce beer, (not strictly, of course, a “beer”, since it was not made from malted grain) was meanwhile taking off in Britain thanks to the invention of in Canada of “essence of spruce”. Essence of spruce was advertised in Lloyd’s Evening Post in London in February 1770, but only as a cure for “Scorbutic Complaints”, with no mention of brewing with it. The following year, Dr Henry Taylor, of Quebec, patented “a method of producing an essence or extract of spruce so perfect that one pound and a quarter will make sixty gallons of fine spruce beer which will be fit to drink in three days in any climate.” Taylor’s method was to place “tops or small branches” of spruce in a still, distil off half the liquor, with “all the essential oil on the top of the glass … to be carefully saved”, then run the “residuum” in the still into a boiler where there were more “fresh tops or branches of spruce” and boil that up to reduce it. The residuum was then to be boiled again with fresh spruce tops or branches, and then the “essential oil” mixed in.

The Royal Navy quickly picked up on Taylor’s invention. A letter that year, 1771, from the Admiralty to the Treasury refers to “essence of Spruce” from Quebec, “which when brewed into beer may be of great service to the navy in preserving the seamen from scurvy.” Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, who was in command of the North America Station at the start of the American War of Independence, wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty Board from Boston, Massachusetts in September 1775 that “The Seamen always continue healthy and active when drinking spruce Beer”, and in the log of the 70-gun HMS Boyne, one of the ships under Graves’s command, are many entries of butts of spruce beer taken on while it was lying in Boston harbour in 1774-1775. (Spruce beer was still being brewed for Royal Navy ships in 1807.)

Taylor had a partner in patenting the essence, Thomas Bridge, of Bread Street, London, and by April 1774 Bridge was boasting in print that he had the rights to “the sole making and vending the said Essence.” Bridge told prospective customers that one hogshead of essence would make five hundred hogsheads of beer, and a pound and a quarter of it would make 63 gallons of beer that “may be brewed with very little trouble at sea or land, without fire … and will be fit for use in three or four days. It was, he said, “a excellent table beer, is the best anti-scorbutic yet discovered, is also a fine substitute for malt liquor to people afflicted with the stone, gravel and many other disorders,, as it is allowed to be a great purifier of the blood, by dissolving all viscid juices, opening ostructions [sic] of the viscera and the more distant glands.” By 1784 Bridge was not just supplying the essence, but also brewing “the best double American spruce beer” himself at his premises in Bread Street, “under the inspection of a gentleman long used to that business in America”, and selling it in both bottles and casks.

He had a rival, J Ellison, of St Alban’s Street, Pall Mall, and Red Lion Street, Whitechapel, who ran a lengthy advertisement on the front of the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser in September 1783 proclaiming that the virtues of spruce beer could be credited to the large amount of “fixable air” – carbon dioxide – it contained, and claiming that experiments carried out under the instructions of “Dr Higgins” – Bryan Higgins, a scientist who ran a “school of practical chemistry” in Soho, London in the 1770s – showed a gallon of spruce beer would release nearly two gallons of “fixable air” when the cork was removed from the bottle, “which … cause the intumescence and frothing which always appear when a bottle of good of Spruce Beer is quickly uncorked.” Summoning the names of several more contemporary scientists, including Joseph Priestley and Dr Joseph Black, Ellison said they all agreed that “fixable air” was “a powerful and a necessary part of the fluids and solids in sound bodies”, and to fixable air was ascribed “the most salutary effects in diverse diseases.” Since spruce beer “contains so great a quantity of this active spirit,” Ellison said, “it may fairly be inferred that the Spruce Beer is most salutary which is made to retain the greatest quantity of fixable air,” something he was “particularly attentive to.”

‘What say we get it on, kid? After all, we both like spruce beer.’ ‘I am so very sorry, Mr Knightley, truly, and I am most flattered by your expressions of regard, which I cannot but be sensible are most undeserved, but I could never bring myself to give my heart and hand for life to a man who wore a hat like that.’

Jane Austen liked spruce beer, agreeing with the anonymous author of The Family Receipt-Book or Universal Repository of Domestic Economy, published 1808, that “The salubrity of spruce beer is universally acknowledged.” Indeed, she liked it enough to make it herself, at home, more than once. In a letter dated December that same year to her sister Cassandra from Castle Square in Southampton, where Jane was living in the home of her brother Frank, then a captain in the Royal Navy, she wrote: “we are brewing Spruce Beer again”, with an oblique joking reference to the great porter casks of Henry Thrale, the former owner of the Anchor brewery in Southwark. In Emma, written in 1815, both Emma Woodhouse and her lifetime friend, the landowner George Knightley, admit to a liking for spruce beer, and Mr Knightley gives the local vicar, Mr Elton, who has “resolved to learn to like it too” (probably to try to ingratiate himself with Emma), tips on brewing it. It is more than likely that Jane Austen had been introduced to spruce beer by her brother, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1786, and had a reputation as a commander concerned with the welfare of his men.

Though it was “disagreeable to the taste of many”, spruce beer was a popular drink in Georgian Britain, with The Family Receipt Book declaring that “notwithstanding its invincible terebinthine flavour,” it “forms so refreshing and lively a summer drink, that it begins to be greatly used in this country.” Local newspapers carried advertisements for the imported spruce essence needed to make it, and for local retailers who sold it. J. Lambe, “Purveyor to his Majesty, at his Warehouse, New Bond-street” in London was advertising that he made and sold “the best double American Spruce Beer, which on trial by those who have been in America, will be found of a finer flavour than can be made there from the fresh branches.”

An advert in the Hampshire Chronicle of 5 May 1790 for “essence of Canadian spruce” sold in pots for two shillings and sixpence a time “with directions for making it into Beer” listed more than 20 retailers around the county where it could be brought, including Skelton and Macklin in Southampton, while the City Coffee House, Bath, for example, was advertising in July 1800, a few months before the Austen family moved there, that it sold “Bottled Cyder, Beer, Porter and Spruce Beer”.

The Family Receipt Book gave instructions on how to make spruce beer at home that must have been very close to the method the Austen household used:

“The regular method of brewing spruce Beer, as it is at present in the best manner prepared, and so highly admired for its excessive briskness, is as follows: Pour eight gallons of cold water into a barrel; and then, boiling eight gallons more, put that in also; to this add twelve pounds of molasses, with about half a pound of the essence of spruce; and on its getting a little cooler, half a pint of good ale yeast. The whole being well stirred, or rolled in the barrel, must be left with the bung out for two or three days; after which the liquor may be immediately bottled, well corked up and packed in saw-dust or sand, when it will be ripe and fit for drink in a fortnight. If spruce beer be made immediately from the branches or cones, they are required to be boiled for two hours, after which the liquor is to be strained into a barrel, the molasses and yeast are to be added to the extract, and to be in all respects treated after the same manner. Spruce beer is best bottled in stone; and from its volatile nature, the whole should be immediately drank when the bottle is once opened.”

Twelve pounds of molasses was the equivalent to a bushel of malt, according to a commentator in 1725, so the Family Receipt Book’s recipe would produce 16 gallons – half an ale barrel – of beer of somewhere between 5 per cent and six per cent alcohol by volume.

There is some evidence that American-brewed spruce beer came across the Atlantic: on Thursday 17 February 1785, 158 gallons of spruce beer were auctioned off, along with other goods including tea, coffee, wine and rum, at the Custom House in Bristol, a port more likely to deal with ships from the Americas than from the Baltic. There were certainly commercial spruce beer breweries operating in the United States that could have supplied it: Medcef Eden was advertising his “double spruce beer”, “to be sold at my brewery, Golden Hill,” New York in the Independent Journal in May 1785, for example. American-brewed spruce beer was , at least occasionally, made with hops: a recipe in the New Haven Gazette from 1788 included two ounces of hops –a quarter of the amount used in a recipe for malt beer – and two quarts of bran, together with “one bundle” of spruce and four gallons of molasses to make a barrel of beer.

However, plenty of British entrepreneurs were making American-style spruce beer for those who, unlike the Austens, did not wish to make their own. The Observer newspaper on 25 August 1799 carried two separate advertisements on its front page for “genuine American spruce beer” sold by Brown’s Wine Vaults and Italian Warehouse in Paradise Row, Chelsea and “Hickson’s celebrated Spruce Beer … just becoming properly ripe for drinking”, available from William Hickson at his Oil and Italian Warehouse in the Strand. One maker in 1804 in Craven Street, just off the Strand in London, was selling “Imperial Spruce Beer”. There was another spruce beer brewery operating in London, Lowthorp & Co, in the Lambeth Road, around 1806, selling White Spruce “of a most beautiful colour and flavour, almost equal to Champaigne [sic]”, as 12 shillings a dozen bottles, and “fine Brown at 6s per dozen, for Ready Money” (white spruce beer was made with lump sugar, brown with treacle or molasses), and another in Dublin around the same time, John Russell’s American Essenced Spruce Beer Brewery, claimed to have startedb in 1802. (Spruce beer’s success was helped by the fact that several Acts of Parliament, most notably in 1795/6, had established that no magistrates’ licence was needed to sell it.) John Munro, grocer and porter dealer, 10 South Frederick Street, Edinburgh, was advertising in 1804 “Fine Double Spruce Beer” at two shillings and six pence a dozen bottles, table spruce beer 2s, “Families who make their own Spruce, supplied with the Patent Essence and London Molasses on the most reasonable terms.” By 1806 the black spruce tree was growing in Britain, having been brought over from North America, and according to Richard Shannon, the inhabitants of Devon, Cornwall and Yorkshire were all making spruce beer from that tree and the Norwegian Spruce, which was also now being grown in the country.

In a few years, however, American-style spruce beer began to lose its popularity in Britain, perhaps because now the Royal Navy was using lime and lemon juice as its main defence against scurvy. Essence of spruce for making spruce beer was still being advertised for sale in 1819, by Pedley and Company of Oxford Street, London, who also made “highly carbonated” white and brown spruce beer themselves, as well as ginger beer and soda water. When William Parry’s second Arctic expedition left from London in 1821, each ship carried provisions for three years that included 144 bottles of essence of spruce and 1,200 pounds of molasses, but also 4,500 pounds of lemon juice in five-gallon casks (and 120 canisters of “essence of malt and hops”, each one enough to brew a barrel of brown stout, as well as 4,000 gallons of rum, eight tons of pork, five tons of potatoes, and much else). Mr Pedley died in 1821, and at the end of that year his executors put up for auction much of the equipment at his Oxford Street premises, including “two very expensive Soda Water Engines with metallic barrels, pumps etc by Bramah and Galloway, 700 dozen stone bottles, 1,500 gross of corks, 12 hundredweight essence of spruce”, and “part of a hogshead of molasses”. It looks as if Pedley may have been Britain’s last commercial essence of spruce brewer. “Viner’s Essence of Spruce, sufficient for 18 gallons of superior White Spruce Beer, price 3s 6d per bottle with proper directors” was still being advertised for sale in 1825 for do-it-yourself spruce beer brewers, but looks to have vanished off the shelves soon after. Imported essence of spruce was still being taxed at 10 per cent ad valorem in the 1840s, later changed to 2s 6d a pound: but in 1856 the tax brought in just £1, and 1867 it was declared that not one drop had been imported the previous year

I live half-way between Richmond and Hampton – which gave a small but still slightly odd twist to my 3,000-mile journey last month to deliver a talk in another town halfway between Richmond and Hampton. Different Richmond and Hampton, of course: the pair in Virginia, not the ones in the western suburbs of Greater London†.

The talk was in Williamsburg, Virginia, as part of a terrific two-day event called Ales through the Ages featuring more than a dozen speakers from Europe and the United States, put on by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia until 1780, when capital status was transferred to Richmond, and the town went into a decline that lasted through until the first quarter of the 20th century. Ironically, its decline was its subsequent salvation. Since there was no incentive (or cash) to knock them down and rebuild them, many of Williamsburg’s original colonial-era buildings remained standing, albeit increasingly rough-looking. Eventually, in the late 1920s, with campaigners concerned that genuine American history was literally falling to pieces in front of them, John D Rockefeller jr, whose father, one of the founders of Standard Oil, was the richest man in the world, agreed to fund what would become Colonial Williamsburg, a living reproduction of 18th century America. Today Williamsburg is a considerable tourist attraction with restored buildings, actors walking the streets dressed like 18th century colonials and, of course, demonstrations of the lifestyles and crafts of the 18th century. Naturally enough that includes food and drink, and naturally enough that includes brewing.

Colonial Williamsburg

The Governor’s Palace

The man in charge of the Historic Foodways department at Colonial Williamsburg, Frank Clark, has a deep interest in the history of beer, and gets to demonstrate 18th century-style brewing on probably the most authentic historic brewing set-up I have ever seen: several wooden tubs, a number of basins and saucepans, and a large copper cauldron that is swung over the wood fire in the scullery of the (reconstructed) Governor’s Palace to heat the water for mashing and boil the resultantwort with hops. The beers he and his colleagues make don’t get sold, but one of the local Williamsburg breweries, Alewerks, taps Frank’s knowledge to make a couple of “authentic” 17th/18th century beers for sale in the local taverns, Dear Old Mum and Old Stitch, the first loosely based on an Anglo-German spiced ale, the second the name of a brown ale found in The London and Country Brewer from the 1730s.

I’m guessing (I never actually asked him) it was Frank’s idea to put on the conference, and despite what seemed to me to be the extremely high price of $325 (£220) for the full two-and-a-half day ticket (and that’s before travel and accommodation), there were still more than 120 people in the paying audience, from as far away as California. Could we get away with anything like that in the UK? I suspect you’d start hitting serious consumer resistance at a fifth of that price, frankly. Was it worth it? Well, I enjoyed it hugely, but of course, I was being paid to be there … still, here’s the speaker line-up – see what you think:

Saturday

Travis Rupp, who combines being an “adjunct professor” at the University of Colorado lecturing on classics and anthropology with being the packaging supervisor at Avery Brewing in Boulder, was first on stage. Travis is writing a book on the beginnings of beer in the ancient Mediterranean, which, if his talk on the subject at the Williamsburg conference is a guide, will be a must-buy. He touched on everything from palaeoecology – the changes in ancient Syria, from heavy forestation around 10,000 BC to the trees being replaced by wild barley 2,000 years later – to the oldest known brewery in Egypt, at Tell el-Farkha, some 3,000 years and more BC, to evidence of brewing in Minoan culture. Travis seemed to be suggesting, if I was following him properly, that the Sumerians taught the Egyptians how to brew, who taught the Greeks how to brew, who taught the Romans how to brew, and the Romans taught the Celts and Germans: the last part, I have to say, I don’t believe at all. Still, cracking start to the weekend

Stan Hieronymus, writer of excellent books on subjects such as hops, monastery brewing and wheat beer, and owner of the Appelation Beer blog, presented In Search of an Indigenous American Beer Style, which covered territory that was pretty much entirely new to me: the tiswin corn (maize) beer drunk by the Apaches, for example, and the choc beer of the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma, which supposedly included tobacco as well as hops and barley; and also Kentucky Common and Pennsylvania swankey, among other beers and beer styles unique to America.

Karen Fortmann, a research scientist at White Labs, the yeast specialists, in San Diego, talked about the “family tree” of brewer’s yeast – a difficult pedigree to draw up, since as Karen said, “If yeast is in an environment where it’s encouraged to hybridise, it will.” And it has, except we’re finally working out exactly who the mummy and daddy were in, eg, lager yeast. Or possibly “mummies and daddies” – according to Karen, genetic studies are suggesting two “domestication events” for brewing yeasts.

Jonathan Chown’s Tavern, Williamsburg: you can just see the authentic chequers on the post supporting the tavern signboad that marked the place as somewhere selling alcohol. Identical marks on tavern posts can be seen in the paintings and prints of William Hogarth, and elsewhere

Frederik Ruis, a brewer and historian from the Netherlands, filled the tricky post-lunch slot with a presentation on “One Thousand Years of Brewing with Hops”, which had some interesting revelations and yet another controversial claim. Archaeological finds, he said, show much of the earliest use of hops in the Baltic and North Sea areas, particularly around Bremen and Hamburg, taking the focus away from Southern Germany, which is normally given primacy in the use of hops in brewing, and giving it to the Vikings. He also suggested that continental gruit or grout was not the herb mixture everyone supposes, or even herbs mixed with grain, but instead concentrated wort infused with herbs, which was then sold by the gruit houses to their local brewers. I look forward to reading more.

Andrea Stanley, of Valley Malt in Massachusetts and John Mallett, director of operations at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, then dressed up in period costume as female maltsters and brewers from the past for “Maltster-piece Theatre”, which gave the audience an insight into the lives and trials of brewsters from centuries ago, via a well-written script that succeeded in the difficult double of being both informative and ha-ha funny.

Williamsburg locals

Finally for the day, Edward Bourke, a former Guinness technical expert who wrote a book on the brewery and the family in 2009 called The Guinness Story, presented the history of brewing in Ireland, including some revelatory information from late 18th century Guinness brewing books. The ingredients for a brew of 20 barrels of ale from August 1797 were four barrels of brown malt (Irish brewers measured malt in barrels, generally reckoned to be the equivalent of 168 pounds, one and a half hundredweight ) and six barrels of pale malt, plus 38 pounds of hops, slightly less than two pounds a barrel, to give a drink of very roughly 1060OG that must have been mid to dark brown in colour: the kind of brown ale that had vanished from London 30 to 40 years earlier. The ingredients for 43 hogsheads – 64.5 barrels – of stout a year earlier, January 1796, were 15 barrels of brown malt and 35 barrels of pale malt, 30 per cent brown, against the 40 per cent brown in the ale, and 273 pounds of hops, just under four pounds four ounces of hops per barrel, to give an OG of perhaps 1080 and considerably more bitterness, though a lighter colour, than the ale would have had. Indeed, Edward suggested that to get the colour in the stout that the customers would have wanted, Guinness was perhaps charring the inside of its casks. However, that’s another theory I don’t buy …

Sunday

More Williamsburg locals

Frank Clark himself kicked off Sunday morning, dressed in his finest green suit with knee breeches, as an 18th century brewer should be. His talk was on “Home Brewing in 18th Century Virginia: Some Interesting Things They Did With Beer”. I was rather worried by the repetition of the “water was unsafe to drink” meme, but apparently Williamsburg water really was unsafe. The town’s wells were contaminated by sewage, while the water table was only some 25 feet down, which meant that as Williamsburg was on a peninsula and the sea was just three miles away, they were also sometimes filled with salt water. Colonial Virginian home-brewers used molasses, with wheat bran or oat bran, presumably for flavour, and hops and there were a fair number of home brewers around: at least 80 households brewed when the town’s population was only about 1,800.

Next up was your not very humble blogger, talking about “Industrialisation in the British Brewing Industry 1720-1850: the Rise of the ‘Power-Loom Brewers'”. Charles Barclay of Barclay Perkins had called the big London porter breweries “power-loom brewers” in the 1830s, meaning they had taken up new technology in the form of steam engines and the like the way the cotton weavers of the North West of England had leapt to mechanise. But my thesis was that (1) the brewers had grown to enormous (for the time) size even before they mechanised and (2) they beat the “power loom weavers” to it, being among the very first manufacturers to adopt steam power.

Mitch Steele, brewmaster at Stone Brewing in California followed, his chosen subject being “The True Origins of India Pale Ale in England, Scotland and the United States”. Sound man, Mitch: I sat ready to heckle, but feeling confident I wouldn’t have to, and I was right. Right behind Mitch was Ron Pattinson, demonstrating his width of knowledge with something only he could have presented, “International Co-operation in the 19th Century Brewing Industry”. You can get an idea of his talk from this article in Beer Advocate here.

Bullocks

As we headed towards the finish, two more brewers gave terrific presentations. Tom Kehoe, founder of Yards Brewing Company in Philadelphia, spoke on “Brewing Historic Beers for a Modern Market”. Yards brews several beers with a historical theme, including General Washington’s Tavern Porter, Thomas Jefferson’s Tavern Ale and Poor Richard’s Tavern Spruce, a spruce beerbased on a recipe by Benjamin Franklin using barley molasses and essence of spruce. Then Tanya Brock, manager and brewster at the Carillon Brewery in Dayton, Ohio, revealed all on the running of a brewery dedicated to making only historic beers, The brewery, which opened in 2014, is part of the Carillon Historical Park, which was set up to showcase the history of Dayton, though its name comes from the 150-feet-tall carillon in the grounds, where concerts happen every week. At the brewery, meanwhile, Tanya and her team turn out historic brews including a sour porter – I SO want to go to Ohio– and a coriander ale from 1831. It was then down to the beer writer Randy Mosher to sum up with a talk on “The Past and Future Beer”, and for everybody to file out of the auditorium thinking: “That was great! I really hope Colonial Williamsburg do it again next year …”

I fea your handpump technique needs a little work, madam …

I didn’t spend all my time in the conference hall, of course: the night I arrived I went out to the Alewerks Brewery’s taproom. I don’t believe – I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong – any new small American brewery would open now without having an on-site bar to sell its beers, but it’s still nothing like common enough in the UK. The Alewerks Tap was clearly a well-used, popular local bar that just happened to sell only one brewer’s beers, though with a dozen different ales, stouts porters and speciality brews to decide among, there was no demurring from me. The “soaking up the beer” problem was solved by the bar supplying half-pound soft petzels for the hungry: simple, cheap, effective, welcome.

Shiny … the lovely new kit at the Virginia Beer Company

The next night, after Randy Mosher had opened the conference and I had said hello to the surprising number of people I had met before, several car-loads of mixed speakers and conference attendees went off to Williamsburg’s newest brewery – so new, in fact, it wasn’t officially open – the Virginia Beer Company. It has been started by Robby Wiley and Chris Smith, two former graduates of William and Mary College in Williamsburg, (the second oldest university in the US, after Harvard) who had apparently made fortunes in the banking business despite only being in their 20s, and who had decided that running a brewery was just the tickety-boo. I was told that around $1.5m had been spent on the whole start-up, and it looked like it: lots of lovely shiny stainless-steel brewing kit (30-barrel capacity in the main set-up, five barrels in the experimental brewery) in a big tall-ceilinged former garage about a mile from the Colonial Williamsburg district. And, of course, there’s a tap: a huge drinking area, in fact, across the front of the old garage, with walls covered in wood from a barn dating from 1907 and room for more tables outside in the sun, all impressive. And the beers were good too.

Virginia Beer Co’s head brewer, Jonathan Newman, serves me a glass of pecan smoked porter: that’s not really cask-conditioned, it was racked bright into the pin, but it was excellent

Ber menu at the Virginia Beer Company, constructed from 110-year-old wood

Most of my between-lectures drinking was in the DoG Street Pub, DoG standing for Duke of Gloucester, and Duke of Gloucester Street being the main thoroughfare through Colonial Williamsburg (it was named for the son of the then Princess Anne, third in line to the throne while he was alive, whose death aged 11 in 1700, before his mother became Queen Anne in 1702, meant the British crown eventually passed to the Hanoverians). The building is a former bank converted in 2012, and the establishment styles itself as a “gastropub”. Not the smallest attraction was that it was relatively easy to find room for six or more people to sit at a table: Williamsburg being a tourist honeypot means that while the Colonial area has plenty of “taverns” where mob-capped wenches come round with stoneware mugs of ale, you’re likely to be told: “Can you come back in an hour, we’re full right now …” Bet they never said that to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Others’ stories are not totally forgotten …

Also, the DoG Street Pub has an excellent selection of beer: the first time I went in I was able to try draught Gose from the Bahnhof brewery in Leipzig, Procrastinator Batch 2, an “accidental eisbock” brewed in 2014 by the Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes in Switzerland; and something called “Strawberry Schwarzcake”, a fruit-flavoured Schwarzbier from another Virginia brewery, Wild Wolf, in Nellysford, about 140 miles from Williamsburg. (Minor aside: I know this is a naïve cliché, but here’s a classic example of just how BIG the US is: 140 miles and we’re still in the same state. An equal distance from my house in London and I’m in Sheffield.) The food, too, stepped up to the plate (pause to wonder if that joke really works – OK, moving on …) the fish and chips was fine, though I passed on the corned beef and cabbage, since like most Britons of my generation, I’d be sure, “corned beef” means disgusting slices carved from a can of Fray Bentos and served with hard tomatoes, too-old lettuce and sta;e salad cream for a summer Sunday “salad”.

The best bring-a-bottle party ever

Then on the Sunday night we had what has to go down as the best “bring a bottle” party ever: Ron P, Chris “Arctic Ale” Bowen and I had been discussing bringing some old beers to Williamsburg, and that’s exactly what we did: I donated a Whitbread 1992 250th Anniversary Ale, a 1994 Thomas Hardy and a 1992 Courage RIS, Ron supplied two-decades-old Liefman’s Goudenband, Cantillon Rosé de Gambrinus and Hertog Jan Grande Prestige, and a 1930s Truman No 1 Barley Wine, while Chris brought some John Smiths nips from the 1950s, including a Coronation Ale from 1953. Around 20 people jammed into the hotel room in the Williamsburg Lodge of Ron’s friends Paul and Jamie Langlie to enjoy those and other gems that had been brought along, including an old bottle of Double Diamond (!), a 1988 John Lees Harvest Ale, an old Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale and a Bass 200 Ale from 1977. Astonishingly, all the beers were drinkable, and some verged on excellent.

Finally, before I left on the Monday, I went to see Frank Clark demonstrate colonial-style brewing: tremendous, especially the making of essentia binae, the burnt molasses colouring brewers used to make their porters as dark as possible before the invention of “patent” malt in 1817.

Many thanks to Colonial Williamsburg and everyone who works there for inviting me over and organising a truly excellent weekend, particular thanks to Frank Clark and his team for being such great hosts, cheers to everybody I met there, well done to everyone who bought my books in the bookstore, and let’s hope it happens again.

Frank Clark with mash fork, mashing the grains for a batch of porter in the scullery of the Governor’s Palace. The hops there are East Kent Goldings, entirely in period …

Running off the wort into the copper

Addng the molasses to the iron pot before heating it to make essentia binae, porter colouring. (This was illegal for commercial brewers, but fine for home brewers)

Heating the molasses in an iron pot until it just catches fire, at which point it needs quickly dousing

Adding the watered-down essentia binae into the copper

Boiling the wort in the copper with the hops: note the used grain in the tub bottom right – this goes to feed the animals

Ladling the boiled wort though a coopered sieve to remove the hops

A better view of the hop sieve set-up

†Though Richmond, Virginia is named for Richmond, Surrey – which itself is named for Richmond, North Yorkshire, which was named for the village of Richemont in Normandy. Hampton, Virginia, however, is named for Southampton, not the one in Middlesex.

And so we say farewell to Colonial Williamsburg, until hopefully, we meet again some day …

The Elephant Gate at the old Carlsberg brewery

If anyone ever declares again that keg beers cannot ever be as good as cask beers, I shall tell them of the night I spent at the bar of the Taphouse pub in Copenhagen with Michael Rahbek, brewer at Carlsberg’s Jacobsen brewhouse, while Jens Ungstrup, the beer manager at the Taphouse, poured us glass upon glass of porter and stout (and the occasional pale ale), all of them excellent, some of them stunning.

It’s hard to pick standouts, but they would certainly include the Carnegie 175th Anniversary Porter, brewed in 2011, still presenting masses of deep, dark chewy chocolate/roast malt flavour, and worth every krone of the £10.70 per 40cl glass the Taphouse charges; the milk chocolate stout from Brewfist in Italy, like chocolate mousse and cream; Jacobsen’s own Mermaid porter, brewed in 2013; and Michael Rahbek’s latest porter, made with four per cent of peat-smoked malt from the maltings at Denmark’s Stauning whisky distillery, a lovely beer even at a few weeks old, the peat smoke giving just the right level of background spice.

I also got to contrast and compare a couple more Jacobsen beers, the 2007 version of the Golden Naked Christmas ale (named for the type of barley used, I believe) and its 2016 iteration. The nine-year-old version reminded me strongly of aged Fuller’s Vintage Ale, which would be proper, since this is described as in the “English Strong Ale” style: the foundation of sweetness still there in the new beer has dried out after nearly a decade, and there’s a tart, aggressive quality coming through. Danes have a great love for Christmas beers, and Tuborg Julebryg is the fourth best-selling beer in the country, even though it’s only on sale for ten weeks a year, but Golden Naked is now apparently challenging its position as the top-selling yuletime tipple.

Michael Rahbek is clearly a hugely talented brewer, and a terrific man to have a beer-fuelled evening of conversation with, and I can’t thank him and Jens Ungstrup enough for one of the best nights in a bar I have ever had.

Emil Christian Hansen, pioneer of pure yeast lager brewing

I was in Copenhagen for my tiny contribution to the festivities celebrating the 140th anniversary of the founding of the Carlsberg Research Laboratory: my job was to give an outside beer historian’s perspective on the work done by Emil Christian Hansen at the laboratory in Copenhagen for a film being made about the event, and the special beer being brewed for the celebration using 133-year-old yeast resurrected from an old Carlsberg bottle. The plan is to to replicate as far as possible the first beer made that followed the precepts Hansen developed at the laboratory. Hansen, for those who don’t know, pioneered single-yeast-strain brewing, isolating from the mass of different varieties of yeast present in an old-style brew just the one that made the best beer and cultivating this pure strain up: and Carlsberg, instead of sitting on this technology, threw over any competitive advantage it might have gained, and gave it away to any brewer who wanted it – including, according to a letter of thanks found in the Carlsberg archives, one Mr Heineken of Amsterdam.

Gabriel Sedlmayr, father of lager beer brewing

Mind, this followed on from the generosity of Gabriel Sedlmayr II of the Spaten brewery in Munich, the man who, in 1845, gave Carlsberg’s founder, Jacob Christian Jacobsen, his first lager yeast. Sedlmayr perfected Bavarian bottom-fermentation methods and then also handed over his secrets – and his yeast – to anyone who asked. If you go down Ny Carlsberg Vej (“New Carlsberg Way”) in Valby in Copenhagen, through the famous elephant gate, you will see on the wall of what was the Carlsberg brewery – closed 2008 – two busts in niches. One is of EC Hansen, the other Gabriel Sedlmayr. I doubt there is another brewery in the world that celebrates a rival in this way. (Spaten is now owned by AB InBev: one Carlsberg employee I know suggested, semi-seriously, that the Danish brewery ought to rescue Sedlmayr’s legacy by making an offer for Spaten that the Belgo-Brazilians could not refuse.)

I was filmed by Estonian TV in January, sitting in the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, for a programme about IPA: Baltic television viewers may be approaching peak Martyn Cornell. Filming for my slot in the Carlsberg programme took place in the Giniz bar, an “Engelsk inspireret Pub i midten af Valby”, and, fortified by a glass of rye porter from the Herslev brewery, one of my favourite Danish concerns, I attempted to sound convincingly erudite. Hopefully they won’t cut backwards and forwards in the final edit, and the beer in my glass won’t shoot up and down the way it does in the famous bar scene in Ice Cold in Alex. I think I got away with the act of appearing knowledgeable: at any rate, the film’s producer, Jesper Æro (to whom more thanks for making the process as painless for me as possible) didn’t throw me out of the bar and make me find the way to my hotel on my own, and instead invited me along to the next part of the filming.

This, I was very happy to find, was in the Carlsberg laboratory, where Erik Lund, the brewmaster at the lab, was filling one of the wooden casks that have been specially made by coopers in Lithuania for what is being called by Carlsberg the “Re-Brew” project. I’m guessing the casks are made out of the tight-grained wood once a favourite with brewers known as Memel oak, from the former name of the port in Lithuania (now Klaipėda) whence it was exported. Much care was taking with the filling: the cask itself, with a capacity of around 150 litres, was kept in a cold store before it was filled up, to ensure the beer would not get a shock when it was racked out of the cold lagering tank, and the cask was also flushed through with CO2 before the beer went in, to push out the atmospheric oxygen. Once filled, it was back into cold storage for another couple of weeks’ lagering.

After that, on 18 May, there will be a “tapping ceremony” at the brewery of this new-old beer, of which only 400 litres have been made. I’m delighted to say that, along with a fair number of other beer journalists, I’ll be there to try it: I’ll let you know how it goes.

Eric Lund at the Carlsberg laboratory fills a cask with beer from the lager tank that is as close to an authentic 19th century lager as Carlsberg can get

I was actually speaking to a senior London brewer about something else entirely on Monday 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, a partner in Bartle Bogle Hegarty, one of Britain’s most renowned advertising people, the man who gave us Vorsprung 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 negotiating to acquire 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 and 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 now 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 interested 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.

* Update: and I was right. Five months after I wrote this, AB Inbev bought Birra del Borgo, brewer of ReAle, among other beers.

I gave a talk at the Victorian Society’s “Beer and Brewing Study Day” yesterday in the Art Workers’ Guild building in Bloomsbury on “The Decline and Fall of Heavy Wet”, “heavy wet” being a 19th century slang expression for porter. I described how in 1843 the Scottish journalist William Weir called porter “the most universally favoured liquor the world has ever known,” and declared that “porter drinking needs but a beginning: wherever the habit has once been acquired, it is sure to be kept up.” But even then, the dark, hoppy, bitter beer that had been a favourite of everybody from dockers to dukes for more than a hundred years was in decline, losing sales to mild ale, a sweeter pale drink. Within 40 years mild ale had completely eclipsed porter as the favourite style of most beer drinkers, and mild was to remain number one until the 1960s – when it too, was turfed off the throne. The beer that replaced it, however, bitter, had barely three decades at number one before falling to the growing popularity of lager, which became the biggest seller in the 1990s. And I finished with this question for the audience: is there any reason why Big Lager should not, one day, follow Big Porter – and Big Mild – into oblivion?

Tom and Bob order quarts of heavy wet at a club for coal heavers (note the fantail hats, which hang down at the rear and protect the wearer’s jacket from the coaldust from the sacks they carry on their backs: the president of the assembly, on the far left, has turned his hat around) – from the anonymously written Real Life in London, 1821

Big Porter really was big. Those who brewed it became astonishingly wealthy. Samuel Johnson was talking about the opportunities available to the purchaser of a London porter brewery when he spoke about becoming “rich beyond the dreams of avarice”. Samuel Whitbread, who ran one of the capital’s biggest porter breweries, in Chiswell Street, was “said to have been worth a million at least” when he died in 1796, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a fortune equivalent to perhaps £1.5 billion today. The porter brewers’ wealth brought them considerable influence: all seven of the biggest London breweries had multiple members of parliament among their partners.

Samuel Whitbread, porter brewer, worth £1m in 18th century money

In 1823, porter output in London hit 1.8 million barrels, after a continual rise that had lasted 50 years. But this was its peak: by 1830 porter production would be down 20 per cent on its 1823 level. What was replacing it was mild ale, made for quick consumption, slightly stronger than porter, pale in colour, unaged and therefore sweeter, less acid than porter. A House of Commons select committee on the sale of beer in 1833 was told that the London drinker “will have nothing but what is mild, and that has caused a considerable revolution in the trade, so much so that Barclay and Perkins, and other great houses, finding that there is a decrease in the consumption of porter, and an increase in the consumption of ale, have gone into the ale trade; nearly all the new trade is composed of mild ale.”

In the early 19th century, ale brewers and beer (that is to say, porter and stout) brewers were still different concerns in London, with the ale brewers much smaller than their rivals. But as the demand for ale grew, so the ale brewers grew too, boosting companies such as Charrington in the Mile End Road and Courage at Horsleydown on the south bank of the Thames, almost opposite the Tower. Charrington’s trade increased almost 2 1/2 times between 1831 and 1851, for example. In 1814 it was producing just 16,510 barrels a year, all ale, when Barclay Perkins. then London’s leading brewer, was making 257,300 barrels of porter: by 1889 Charrington’s output had risen to more than 500,000 barrels a year, level with Barclay Perkins.

A couple of ads for Charrington’s XX ale in 1829 this is pale ale in the earlier sense of a lightly hopped but strong pale malt liquor, not the heavily hopped India Pale Ale: these ads are actually from an Australian newspaper

The porter brewers responded by moving into the ale market, particularly after the Beerhouse Act of 1830 dramatically increased the number of available licensed outlets. Whitbread, then the third or fourth biggest brewer in London, whose production was entirely porter up to 1834, started brewing mild ale in 1835. Ale quickly rose from nowhere to more than 10 per cent of Whitbread’s production by 1839, and more than 20 per cent by 1859, when Whitbread’s porter sales had dropped by almost 30 per cent compared to 25 years earlier. At Truman’s, then fighting with Barclay Perkins to be London’s biggest brewer, the swing from porter was stronger still, with ale making up 30 per cent of production by 1859.

Thomas Beames was still able to write in 1852, in a book called The Rookeries of London, that for the working classes “porter is the common beverage with them, just as vin ordinaire is in France.” But by then there were just two porter-only breweries left, Reid’s in Liquorpond Street, Clerkenwell, and Meux in Tottenham Court Road. Porter still made up three quarters of London beer sales even in 1863. But the pace against it, was increasing. A comparison of porter and ale sales at Whitbread and Truman, two of the very biggest London brewers, shows a steady if slow rise for ale as a proportion of total output for three and a half decades to around 25 per cent by 1864, followed by big leaps after that: 36 per cent in 1869, 45 per cent in 1874, more than 60 per cent for Truman in 1879, and 57 per cent for Whitbread,

A writer in 1875, reminiscing about the beers of 70 years earlier, during the Napoleonic wars, wrote: “It is strange how the taste of those days for old stale beer has turned to the opposite extreme in the liking for the new and the sweet by the present generation.” In 1872 Meux & Co, off Tottenham Court Road, which still held on its premises a “reservoir” of porter said to hold the equivalent of 35,000 barrels of beer, had given up its exclusive dedication to porter and stout and began brewing ales as well. Three years later, Reid’s began the construction of a new ale brewery, which opened in 1877.

Although the mild ale of the final decades of the 19th century is regularly described as “sparkling”, at some point it changed from being pale to, mostly, being brown again, as it had been in the 17th century. According to a writer in the Daily Telegraph in 1928, “The taste for a brown mild ale was developed about 50 years ago” – that is, around 1878 – “and mild ale soon became the chief and most popular drink among the lower-priced beers.” That the generality of milds were dark before the First World War is confirmed by an American brewers’ handbook of 1908, which said: “Mild ales are usually brewed of a darker color than old ales, with less original gravity and less hops … sometimes … mild ales receive an addition of caramel solution to the closure of the principal fermentation.”

By 1908 “fourpenny beer (mild ale)”, so called because it retailed at four pence a quart, was being described as “the large bulk of the trade of the country”. The pressure on brewers to lower the gravity of their beers during and after the First World War, in large part to keep prices down after huge increases in tax, saw porter drop from around 1055OG to 1036. When the war ended, former porter drinkers turned, if they could afford it, to stout, which was now the same strength as pre-war porter. Gradually brewers began dropping porter from their ranges. In 1920, Watney Combe Reid, an amalgamation of three former porter brewers, sent no porter to the Brewer’s Exhibition for sampling. Truman’s, another former great porter brewer, stopped making the beer in 1930. Taylor Walker was still brewing porter in 1936, but stopped soon after. The writer TEB Clarke in 1938 called porter “a lowly brand of draught stout selling in the Public [bar] at fourpence a pint,” about the cheapest beer available. Whitbread stopped brewing porter in the 1940s. It survived – just – in Ireland, but in 1958 the Times newspaper’s survey of Beer in Britain stated: “Porter, the strong dark staple beer of 18th century England, is no longer brewed in Great Britain.” Heavy wet was dead.

An upper-class couple come out of the Whistling Oyster in Vinegar Yard, off Catberine Street, Covent Garden after stout and oysters

There was one curious difference between porter and the beer that replaced it, mild. Porter, despite being named for the working classes, was a beer that appealed to all levels of society, and was certainly not shunned by the aristocracy. Harvey Combe, main partner in the big porter brewery in Long Acre, Covent Garden, put on a series of annual dinners at his brewhouse between 1805 and 1810 at which rump steaks cooked at the stokehole of the brewery boiler were served on a malt shovel covered with a tin lid to guests who included the Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of York, the Dukes of Devonshire and Norfolk, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Henry Grattan. The only accompaniment was “sallad”, the only drink porter, the waiters were the brewery workers, the guests sat at a trestle table with a hop sack nailed on as a tablecloth, and ate off wooden plates, though with horn-handled knives and silver forks. The Prince of Wales, after one brewhouse steak and porter meal in 1806, declared he “never was more pleased” with a dinner. A similar steak-and-porter dinner was held at Truman’s brewery in Brick Lane in June 1831 for the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, and 22 other guests, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, and other members of the cabinet. (The great French diplomat Tallyrand, then the French ambassador to Great Britain, had been invited but had to cry off to deal with a political crisis in Belgium.) The Carlton Club in the 1830s, the headquarters of the Tory party, served Guinness, and Benjamin Disraeli, then a young MP, drank it there, with oysters and “broiled bones”. Restaurants at the time supplied ale, stout or half-and-half – ale and porter mixed – to diners “as a matter of course”, Sir Walter Besant wrote in the 1880s

A small-ad from the Daily Telegraph in 1917 for a high-class establishment in the Strand: not certain what “common spirits” are – ghosts that drop their aitches?

However, mild ale had no cachet: completely the opposite. Bars would emphasise their class by advertising: “no mild ale sold”. The drink was known as four-ale, from its pre-First World War price of four pence a quart, the place where it was drunk, the public bar, was nicknamed the “four-ale bar”, and the four-ale bar was not regarded as a salubrious place “smelling like a four-ale bar” was not a complement, and “that’s the sort of language you’d hear in the four-ale bar” was a sign that social mores had been broken. According to an American writing in 1933, pubs in London would not even server mild ale in the saloon bar, where the better sort of customer drank: ” Call for ale in the saloon bar of a London pub, and the barmaid will say, ‘Other side, please,’ jerking her wet thumb in the direction of the public, or four-ale bar; for ale in London is a vulgar word. The middle classes drink bitter, a pale, golden beer so sharply hop-flavoured that foreigners find it undrinkable.”

An ad for Mann’s mild in the 1920s

Indeed, it was mild ale’s lower class associations that led to its own decline and fall. In 1959 draught mild was 42 per cent of all beer sales, outselling bitter two pints to one and representing six pints out of 10 served on draught, at 10.3 million barrels a year. But a study published by the Times newspaper in 1958 pointed up mild’s growing problem: “Traditionally bitter is looked on as the bosses’ drink. Any man reckons today he’s as good as his boss. So he chooses bitter.” In 1964 draught mild was down to 33 per cent of beer sales by volume. Around 1969 sales of draught bitter overtook those of draught mild for the first time. Six years later, in 1975, as draught mild plunged to barely one pint in eight of total beer sales, it was passed in popularity by a beer that had hardly existed in Britain in 1959 – draught lager.

Until very recently lager was still increasing its share of the UK beer market, up from 67 per cent in 2002 to 74.8 per cent in 2014. Last year, however, saw the first dip since the early 1990s (when the growth of the “guest beer” market after the Beer Orders of 1989 gave a brief boost to sales of bitter), albeit by less than 1 per cent, as “ale and bitter” pushed up its share to 21.5 per cent of a falling overall market, down 4.7 per cent to 4.25 billion litres (or 25.97 million barrels, in old-style money). With a growing (though still tiny) proportion of even the lager market now “craft”, are we seeing Big Lager start to slide just the way every “big” style has in the past?

I’d say it’s almost inevitable that, yes, Big Lager’s reign will end one day. What the timescale will be, and exactly what will replace it, is hard to guess. The change is likely to be demographics-led: new entrants in the market (those 800,000 or so fresh 18-year-olds legally drinking for the first time every year) choosing something different, rather than their elders altering their purchasing habits. I certainly don’t see those new recruits to alcohol automatically drinking Big Lager: though I may be wrong. But meanwhile the first wave of UK lager drinkers, those who powered the drinks growth in the 1970s as they themselves turned 18, are now in their mid-to-late 50s: give them 10 to 15 years and they’ll be dropping off their perches in vast flocks. That’s about how long I’d give Big Lager, at the most.

Meanwhile I’d just like to plug my credentials as a pundit: back in December, talking about the purchase of the Camden Town brewery by AB Inbev, I said: “I’d look to Italy for the next big acquisition of a craft brewer by a global marque.” Lo, five months later, at the end of April, five months after I wrote this, AB Inbev bought Birra del Borgo, brewer of ReAle, among other beers. Told you …

The Elephant Gate at the old Carlsberg brewery

If anyone ever declares again that keg beers cannot ever be as good as cask beers, I shall tell them of the night I spent at the bar of the Taphouse pub in Copenhagen with Michael Rahbek, brewer at Carlsberg’s Jacobsen brewhouse, while Jens Ungstrup, the beer manager at the Taphouse, poured us glass upon glass of porter and stout (and the occasional pale ale), all of them excellent, some of them stunning.

It’s hard to pick standouts, but they would certainly include the Carnegie 175th Anniversary Porter, brewed in 2011, still presenting masses of deep, dark chewy chocolate/roast malt flavour, and worth every krone of the £10.70 per 40cl glass the Taphouse charges; the milk chocolate stout from Brewfist in Italy, like chocolate mousse and cream; Jacobsen’s own Mermaid porter, brewed in 2013; and Michael Rahbek’s latest porter, made with four per cent of peat-smoked malt from the maltings at Denmark’s Stauning whisky distillery, a lovely beer even at a few weeks old, the peat smoke giving just the right level of background spice.

I also got to contrast and compare a couple more Jacobsen beers, the 2007 version of the Golden Naked Christmas ale (named for the type of barley used, I believe) and its 2016 iteration. The nine-year-old version reminded me strongly of aged Fuller’s Vintage Ale, which would be proper, since this is described as in the “English Strong Ale” style: the foundation of sweetness still there in the new beer has dried out after nearly a decade, and there’s a tart, aggressive quality coming through. Danes have a great love for Christmas beers, and Tuborg Julebryg is the fourth best-selling beer in the country, even though it’s only on sale for ten weeks a year, but Golden Naked is now apparently challenging its position as the top-selling yuletime tipple.

Michael Rahbek is clearly a hugely talented brewer, and a terrific man to have a beer-fuelled evening of conversation with, and I can’t thank him and Jens Ungstrup enough for one of the best nights in a bar I have ever had.

Emil Christian Hansen, pioneer of pure yeast lager brewing

I was in Copenhagen for my tiny contribution to the festivities celebrating the 140th anniversary of the founding of the Carlsberg Research Laboratory: my job was to give an outside beer historian’s perspective on the work done by Emil Christian Hansen at the laboratory in Copenhagen for a film being made about the event, and the special beer being brewed for the celebration using 133-year-old yeast resurrected from an old Carlsberg bottle. The plan is to to replicate as far as possible the first beer made that followed the precepts Hansen developed at the laboratory. Hansen, for those who don’t know, pioneered single-yeast-strain brewing, isolating from the mass of different varieties of yeast present in an old-style brew just the one that made the best beer and cultivating this pure strain up: and Carlsberg, instead of sitting on this technology, threw over any competitive advantage it might have gained, and gave it away to any brewer who wanted it – including, according to a letter of thanks found in the Carlsberg archives, one Mr Heineken of Amsterdam.

Gabriel Sedlmayr, father of lager beer brewing

Mind, this followed on from the generosity of Gabriel Sedlmayr II of the Spaten brewery in Munich, the man who, in 1845, gave Carlsberg’s founder, Jacob Christian Jacobsen, his first lager yeast. Sedlmayr perfected Bavarian bottom-fermentation methods and then also handed over his secrets – and his yeast – to anyone who asked. If you go down Ny Carlsberg Vej (“New Carlsberg Way”) in Valby in Copenhagen, through the famous elephant gate, you will see on the wall of what was the Carlsberg brewery – closed 2008 – two busts in niches. One is of EC Hansen, the other Gabriel Sedlmayr. I doubt there is another brewery in the world that celebrates a rival in this way. (Spaten is now owned by AB InBev: one Carlsberg employee I know suggested, semi-seriously, that the Danish brewery ought to rescue Sedlmayr’s legacy by making an offer for Spaten that the Belgo-Brazilians could not refuse.)

I was filmed by Estonian TV in January, sitting in the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, for a programme about IPA: Baltic television viewers may be approaching peak Martyn Cornell. Filming for my slot in the Carlsberg programme took place in the Giniz bar, an “Engelsk inspireret Pub i midten af Valby”, and, fortified by a glass of rye porter from the Herslev brewery, one of my favourite Danish concerns, I attempted to sound convincingly erudite. Hopefully they won’t cut backwards and forwards in the final edit, and the beer in my glass won’t shoot up and down the way it does in the famous bar scene in Ice Cold in Alex. I think I got away with the act of appearing knowledgeable: at any rate, the film’s producer, Jesper Æro (to whom more thanks for making the process as painless for me as possible) didn’t throw me out of the bar and make me find the way to my hotel on my own, and instead invited me along to the next part of the filming.

This, I was very happy to find, was in the Carlsberg laboratory, where Erik Lund, the brewmaster at the lab, was filling one of the wooden casks that have been specially made by coopers in Lithuania for what is being called by Carlsberg the “Re-Brew” project. I’m guessing the casks are made out of the tight-grained wood once a favourite with brewers known as Memel oak, from the former name of the port in Lithuania (now Klaipėda) whence it was exported. Much care was taking with the filling: the cask itself, with a capacity of around 150 litres, was kept in a cold store before it was filled up, to ensure the beer would not get a shock when it was racked out of the cold lagering tank, and the cask was also flushed through with CO2 before the beer went in, to push out the atmospheric oxygen. Once filled, it was back into cold storage for another couple of weeks’ lagering.

After that, on 18 May, there will be a “tapping ceremony” at the brewery of this new-old beer, of which only 400 litres have been made. I’m delighted to say that, along with a fair number of other beer journalists, I’ll be there to try it: I’ll let you know how it goes.

Eric Lund at the Carlsberg laboratory fills a cask with beer from the lager tank that is as close to an authentic 19th century lager as Carlsberg can get

So, what was it like, the ancient lager Carlsberg spent two years and hundreds of thousands of kroner recreating, resurrecting yeast out of a bottle dating back to 1883, pulling out 130-year-old brewing records, growing an ancient barley variety, hiring a floor maltings, working out the most likely hop varieties to use, reproducing the original brewing water, having oak casks made in a Lithuanian cooperage, making moulds of vintage bottles so that new versions could be hand-blown, and then flying in dozens of journalists and beer writers to Copenhagen from as far away as Malaysia and California to drink the result.

It was … OK.

What your great-great grandfather drank (if he was a Dane)

And that, of course, was entirely the point. The Re-brew project, which culminated in a tasting in Copenhagen last week, was a celebration of the unexceptional, a tribute to the work of the Carlsberg scientist Emil Christian Hansen, whose invention 133 years ago of pure yeast cultivation enabled brewers for the first time to produce guaranteed standardised beers, so that the buying public could be sure the pint they were about to open would be as good as yesterday’s, and the one the day before, and the one tomorrow, without exception. That the world’s beer drinkers appreciated this can be easily demonstrated by the wealth amassed by the Jacobsens, owners of Carlsberg, and the way Carlsberg became literally a name known in every household, not only in Denmark but around the world.

Standing in the huge pillared conservatory at JC Jacobsen’s former home in Valby, Copenhagen, sipping the re-brewed 1883-style beer, a clear, clean, bright, copper-coloured Vienna-style lager, slightly sweet, a tiny bit lacking in condition, made with a barley variety called Gammel Dansk, literally “Old Danish”, and lightly hopped with Hallertau Mittelfrüh (the records showed only that the hops game from the Hallertau region, so the variety was a guess) while Carlsberg’s chairman, Flemming Besenbacher, and CEO, Cees ’t Hart, made speeches and photographers bumped elbows trying to get shots of Eric Lund, head brewer at Carlsberg’s laboratories, filling glasses from a wooden cask (hence the lack of condition), it would be fair to wonder what the fuss was about. This was certainly not a beer to knock anyone’s socks off.

Eric Lund pours the beer, with Flemming Besenbacher and Cees ’t Hart on the left, and a thirsty crowd on the right: the keen-eyed will spot Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery, as well as beer writers Jeff Evans, Stephen Beaumont , Jay Brooks and Ron Pattinson (and, er, Pete Brown’s forehead, I believe …)

But sock-knocking potential was not what this beer was ever about. The aim of Hansen – and his boss – was to give Carlsberg drinkers value-for-money consistency, and that’s what they got. In isolating the pure strain of yeast that was then used to make the beer in the bottle from 1883, and every other bottle of Carlsberg lager since (more or less: today’s Carlsberg yeast has apparently changed only slightly, genetically), Hansen invented modern industrial brewing. If the phrase “industrial brewing” makes your lip curl like a wine drinker on first encountering a Belgian brown sour, I’m afraid you don’t really understand beer. Dismissing mass-market beers is like dismissing the Ford Focus and saying F1 racers are the only valid form of motor car. Some terrible crimes have been committed under the banner of industrial beer, that’s true. But overall, industrial beer has brought more happiness to the mass of humanity than craft beer ever will, and EC Hansen is a vastly more important person in the history of beer than Ken Grossman. (Not least because Hansen’s boss, JC Jacobsen, refused to keep the Carlsberg lab’s findings for the company’s sole profit, and made the science – and the pure Carlsberg yeast strain – available to any brewer who wanted it.)

Jacob Christian Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg, portrayed in his conservatory – see the pillars – as the thoroughly modern scientific brewer, with miscoscope, retort and books – that top one is Pasteur’s Etudes Sur La Bière

Even so, and accepting that bottle of 1883 lager’s importance in the history of beer, was it worth reproducing the beer inside it? It’s fun for geeks like me, as I told the Danish newspaper Politiken, to taste “hvad vores oldeforældre drak. Her kan jeg i så høj grad som muligt dele en oplevelse, de havde. Det er en forbindelse tilbage i tiden.” (except in English, of course.) It was fun for all those involved at Carlsberg, too: Birgitte Skadhauge, vice-president for research at Carlsberg, who was in overall charge of the project, told me that everybody at the company was very excited about it, and I’m sure that’s accurate. The level of detail in reproducing the old beer was fanatic: the brewing liquor, for example, was first purified and then mineral salts added to match the water from a 68-feet-deep well dug out in January 1883, that is, exactly contemporary with the yeast.

The excellent internal PR available from this sort of venture should never be underestimated. If, as a Carlsberger, you get fed up with sniping from the beer snobs who only rate (in all senses) brews from “craft” concerns, it’s great to get involved in something with history and heft, something no small brewery would have the resources to pull off, in time or money or technological expertise, something that underlines the history the company has, and its importance in the history of beer brewing as a whole. Carlsberg’s influence goes beyond its perfection of techniques to isolate and propagate pure yeast strains that even the tiniest craft brewer today benefits from. For example, plenty of craft brewers make their wackiest beers with Brettanomyces yeast, but Brettanomyces was first properly discovered, studied and named by someone working in the Carlsberg labs in Copenhagen.

An 1883 Carlsberg beer bottle

I’m sure when the research guys went to the Carlsberg Foundation, which controls the company, and said: “We’ve found this old beer bottle from 1883, the year EC Hansen perfected pure yeast cultures, that still seems to have viable yeast cells in – wouldn’t it be a great idea to recreate an 1883-style lager with it, and can we have the cash to do so?”, the foundation immediately spotted the trumpet-blowing possibilities, both inside and outside Carlsberg’s walls, and happily opened the corporate wallet. The 140th anniversary of the foundation itself, in 2016, was approaching, and here was something that could be tied in with the anniversary, and used to make Carlsberg people feel good about Carlsberg, as well as, hopefully, make other people feel good about Carlsberg. They could make a film about it (warning – contains scenes of me in a pub), they could fly in loads of journos who would surely say nice thinks about how clever Carlsberg was, and they could round it off with an excellent meal for 140 people prepared by a man who used to work at Noma in Copenhagen, probably the best restaurant in the world, with the Crown Prince of Denmark turning up to sprinkle his royal blessing over us. (Strangely, the last and only other time I was in a room with the Crown Prince of Denmark was when he was promoting another Danish brewer entirely, Mikkeller, during a Danish Trade Week in Hong Kong.)

And so we have it. Loads of effort for, um, something that wierdo beer geeks like me, and plenty of people at Carlsberg, certainly enjoyed, but you can watch the Canadian beer writer Stephen Beaumont and the Californian beer writer Jay Brooks struggle to be complimentary about the result here. I wonder what, say, the 15 or so journos flown in from Israel, or the guy from the paper in Malaysia, both places where Carlsberg is an increasingly big player (and wants to be bigger), thought when they tasted this new/old beer. “Is that all there is?”, I fear.

Karrysild: very tasty, but at £9.20 for one small open sandwich, it needed to be

Still, I’d like to thank Carlsberg very much for enabling me to have another great night in the Taphouse with what must be the finest line-up of beer writers ever gathered around a Copenhagen bar table, including not just Stephen Beaumont and Jay Brooks but Jeff “Beer Bible” Alworth and Stan Hieronymus, also from the US, Pete Brown from the UK, Evan Rail from Czechia and Ron Pattinson from the Netherlands. And I certainly found more challenging beers to drink in Copenhagen than Carlsberg’s Re-brew project. The next day I tried a lunch-time trip to Mikkeller’s new-ish Øl & Brød cafe, just up the street from the original Copenhagen Mikkeller bar in Viktoriagade, where I had an excellent karrysild smørrebrod –slightly spiced herring open sandwich on rye bread with a lightly poached egg – accompanied by a small glass of Hvedegoop, a fine wheat-based barley wine from Mikkeller and Three Floyds, followed by what was basically rhubarb crumble à la danoise, with a small glass of Mikkeller passionfruit Berliner Weisse, which went absolutely brilliantly together, the tartness of the rhubarb and the sourness of the beer complementing each other superbly, a marvellous example of a beer-and-food pairing where the sum was considerably greater than the two pretty-good-on-their-own parts. The one downer was that lunch for one, albeit a very tasty lunch for one, cost me 306 kroner – £32 for one small sandwich, a bowl of crumble and two small beers.

Amber ale with – yes – real amber in it, and two other Ny Nordic Øl beers as well

To put that in context, my ticket to the Copenhagen Beer Festival later that afternoon, including 20 beer tokens, only cost me 325kr, and as a Camra member I was given more beer tokens for free: indeed, I had so many tokens in the end, I gave quite a few away to Stephen Beaumont, who was returning to the festival the next day. The Copenhagen fest is “American-style”, meaning you only get “tasters” of 10cl (for standard beers) or 5cl (for strong beers): that’s fine for some of the stuff on offer, but nothing like enough for the more drinkable beers. There were some 80-plus stalls, serving mostly Danish beers, and staffed, frequently, by the brewers themselves (something Camra still mostly doesn’t get right), though there was at least one Polish brewer represented, some Americans (Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, Rogue, Widmer and others) at least two or three German (Schneider, Crew Republic, a microbrewery in Munich), quite a few British brewers’ beers (Fuller’s, BrewDog, Sam Smith’s, St Austell, Wychwood to namecheck four), some Belgians, including Westmalle and, to my personal amusement, Grimbergen (apparently Carlsberg now how the distribution rights outside Belgium for Grimbergen: big brewers from the days of Watney’s more than 30 years ago have been trying to promote Grimbergen’s abbey-style brews, with no success, for the excellent reason that they’re not very good); several from Italy, notably Baladin and Del Borgo; O’Hara’s from Carlow in Ireland; at least one Faroese brewery; Einstök from Iceland; and one stall each from the Taybeh brewery in Palestine and the Alexander brewery in Israel (these two were at the furthermost ends of the hall, a converted locomotive shed, from each other, though I was told that in fact the brewers are friends, and I believe it – beer accepts no boundaries).

The crowd looked a proper cross-section of Danish society – much more so than you would see at the GBBF, with a fair number of smart older middle-aged couples, and a definite lack of large groups of men in their 30s. The beers were solidly “eurocraft” – almost 100 per cent keg or bottled (I saw only three handpumps), large numbers of imperial stouts and double IPAs – though with a Danish spin, thanks to the influence of the Ny Nordisk Øl movement and its emphasis on local ingredients, so that there were plenty of beers around with sea buckthorn, sweet gale and the like as their bitterers, rather than hops, and even one “amber ale” with real extract of (presumably Baltic) amber in it, Cold Hawaii (the name of a Danish surfing centre), from Thisted Bryghus: distinctly resiny, and not one I’ll rush back to.

Unlike Copenhagen, which I’d definitely rush back to: lovely city, friendly, welcoming people, great bars. And if Carlsberg decide their next revival will be the double brown stout they used to brew in the 19th century from a recipe JC Jacobsen’s son Carl apparently nicked off William Younger when he was apprenticed to the Edinburgh brewer, I’d even pay my own air fare …

For more of my take on the Re-brew project, go here

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

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

Shepherd Neame brewery, Faversham

Entrance to the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham, Kent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the Shepherd Neame sampling room, with slate tasting notes

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

Hook Norton brewery

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

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

Old grist mill at the Hook Norton brewery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anyone make IPAs like this one any more?

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

*Meaning DoomBar, presumably

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

Errrr …

Me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loved and disliked in equal parts, and enjoying an unexpected renaissance in hipstery parts, despite being more than 70 years old, the dimpled beer mug is undoubtedly an icon of England.

It was invented in 1938 at the Ravenhead glassworks in St Helens, Lancashire by an in-house designer whose name is now forgotten, and given the factory identity “P404”. Although the dimple has its enemies, who dislike its weight and its thickness, it soon became extremely popular, and at a rough guess some 500 million have been manufactured since it was born.

Strawberry pink pint beer mug of the kind George Orwell enjoyed, stamped ‘Pint MxCC GR 29’, for Middlesex County Council

The dimple had much competition: even in 1938, many pubs still served beer in the pottery mugs that George Orwell praised in his “Moon Under Water” essay about his ideal pub, from the Evening Standard in 1946. Orwell declared that “in my opinion beer tastes better out of china,” but “china mugs went out about 30 years ago [that is, during the First World War], because most people like their drink to be transparent.” However, two documentary films made just before Orwell’s essay, The Story of English Inns, from 1944, and Down at the Local, from 1945, both show pint china mugs were still being used alongside glass ones, at least in country pubs. Orwell talked about the pottery beer mug as being strawberry-pink in colour, but they came in other shades (baby blue and a dark biscuit-beige, for example), all with white interiors and white handles, and also with transfer-print designs. The majority of pottery beer mugs, however, appear, in fact, to have been of the kind known as mochaware, invented around the end of the 18th century, which have tree or fern-like patterns on the sides, made by a drop of acid dropped onto the glaze of the mug while it was still wet. Most mochaware pint beer mugs seem to have been blue, or beige-and-blue, with black and white bands. Many were made by TG Green of Church Gresley, South Derbyshire, while the plain coloured mugs were the speciality of Pountneys of Bristol. TG Green stopped producing mochaware at the outbreak of war in 1939, when it was apparently the last company still making mochaware beermugs. It tried to revive the tradition in 1981, without success. The company closed in 2007.

Pewter mugs were pretty much obsolete by the middle of the 20th century, though Orwell claimed that “stout … goes better in a pewter pot”, and they were described as “old-fashioned” even in 1900, when it was said to have been replaced by the glass mug, “a thick, almost unbreakable article”. The problem, for publicans, was that their pewter pots kept being stolen, and they cost around ten times as much as china beer mugs. The better class of premises kept silver-plated pewter beermugs and, to guard against theft, carved the name and address of the pub into the base. Glass was also cheaper – and, it was claimed, the working man at the end of the 19th century liked to have his mild beer served in a glass so that he could see it was bright, and not hazy or cloudy.

Two men drinking from china pint mugs, one mochaware, the other transfer printed, from the film The Story of English Inns, 1944

Fortunately for the beer mug collector, after the Weights and Measures Act of 1878, drinking vessels used on licensed premises for draught beer or cider purporting to be a specific size – half-pint, pint or quart – had to bear an Official Stamp Number, either acid etched or sand-blasted through a stencil, a system that lasted, with tweaks, until 2007, and each district – county council, county borough and the like – had its own numbers, so that, for example, 19 was Derbyshire and 490 Bristol. They also carried the mark of the crown, and the initials of the reigning monarch of the time, something that had first been required by the Act “for ascertaining the Measures for retailing Ale and Beer” that had become law under William III in 1700. (That Act covered vessels “made of wood, earth, glass, horn, leather, pewter or of some other good and wholesome metal”, suggesting the variety of drinking vessels you could expect in a Stuart inn or alehouse, and it also only mentions quarts and pints, suggesting the half-pint was illegal – or at least extremely rare.) It is thus possible to tell roughly when an older beer mug was made, and roughly where, too. In 2007, when the CE, or “Conformitée Européenne” mark replaced the old system (leading to the Daily Mail to declare: “EU stealing the crown of the great British pint”), it became easier to tell when a glass was made, but no simpler to find out where and by whom. Alongside the CE on the glass will be an “M” and the last two digits of the year of manufacture, plus the identification number of the “notified body” that verified that the container was an accurate measure. To identify the notified body you have to go to the Nando website – nothing to do with peri-peri chicken, this stands for New Approach Notified and Designated Organisations.

Glasses specifically for drinking beer out of have been made in Britain since at least 1639, when a glasshouse (probably in Newcastle upon Tyne) owned by Sir Robert Mansell, who had acquired a monopoly on glass making, was selling beer glasses at a price half that of similar glasses imported from Venice. But such glasses were still expensive: in the 1660s a glasshouse owned by the Duke of Buckingham in London was selling “English Christall” beer glasses at six pence each, equivalent to more than £50 today. These were bowl-shaped glasses, with broad feet and heavy “knops”, the technical term for the ornamental knobs on the stem. Later, in the 18th century, beer and ale glasses became smaller and more delicate – at least in part because glass was taxed by weight from 1745 onwards – and were frequently decorated with fine engravings of hops, barley and so on. These engraved glasses held just five ounces (14cl) of strong beer or ale, or less. But they were still restricted to the rich: when all the belongings of the late Earl of Grantham were auctioned off in February 1755, for example, among all the “fine pictures, antique marble busts, large wardrobe of linnen, curious and magnificent collection of fine old Japan China, &c” for sale were 53 jelly glasses, 18 water glasses, 18 wine glasses and 30 beer glasses. Those beer glasses cost a hefty two to three shillings each, after tax, and according to a letter in the Pottery and Glass Trades Journal in October 1879, because of the expense of glass, in the pub, inn or tavern, “time was” that ale in a glass tumbler cost more than the same drink in a pewter mug: two pence per half pint, against one and a half pence.

It would take the invention of pressed glass, made by pressing semi-molten glass into an iron mould, before beer glasses could begin to come into the reach of the common drinker. Pressed glass was being made in Europe in the late 18th century, but the first patent for a commercial glass-pressing machine was granted in the United States in 1825 to John Palmer Bakewell, son of an English-born Pittsburgh glassmaker, Benjamin Bakewell. The first glass-pressing machine in Britain was installed at the Wordsley Flint Glass Works in Stourbridge in 1833, founded by Benjamin Richardson, whose firm became the first in the country to make mass-produced pressed glass tumblers. Indeed, before pressed glass, tumblers – handle-less, footless glasses, tapering (known as “conical”) or straight-sided – and glass mugs, with handles (called “cans” by the glass makers), were difficult to produce. Moulded glass made their manufacture much easier.

However, in Britain glass remained relatively expensive until the abolition of the glass tax in 1845, which caused an “immense” increase in the production of glass of all kinds. But even after that date, the evidence suggests that glass drinking vessels remained rare in pubs until the end of the Victorian period. While the catalogue of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 showed Thomas Webb of Platt’s Glass Works, near Stourbridge, exhibiting “ales” among his many types of glassware, from sugar bowls to vases, this appears to be the only specific mention of beer glasses among the more than 30 British glassware manufacturers there, and can be put alongside the porcelain porter mug exhibited by the Hanley pottery manufacturer Charles Meigh & Sons. There were more foreign exhibitors of beer glasses, from Prague and Prussia, than British. Three decades later, John Henry Henshall’s painting In the Pub from 1882, otherwise known as “Behind the Bar”, a view of what is believed to be a pub in Old Street or Caledonian Road, London from the staff side of the operation, appears to show only pewter pots on the shelves and in the sinks.

In John Henry Henshall’s 1882 London pub there are no glass beer mugs, only pewter pots

A decade later, however, there was suddenly a rush of evidence for the increasing popularity of beer in glass containers. In June 1894 the Portsmouth Evening News reported:

It has been noticed, says the Daily News, that the old-fashioned pewter pot has disappeared from public-houses and is replaced by beer glasses. In connection with the supply of these glasses – an enormous number of which is required – a serious complaint is heard from the glass trade in London. The stamping and verifying of the glasses costs a penny each – almost as much as the cost of production. Several County Councils in the north of England have been in the habit of allowing the makers to have the glasses stamped, under supervision of Council officials, on their own premises. This means a saving to the Councils, and they allow the manufacturers rebates of 30 or 40 per cent, which enables them to compete successfully with London makers. The fine machinery which the London County Council obtained to stamp the glasses is therefore now practically standing idle. A few months ago many thousands of glasses were being stamped every week, but now cheap stamped glasses are being imported from the north, the London glass trade is suffering in consequence and the Council is losing its fees. The Board of Trade has decided that it has no power to compel County Councils to stop the rebate system and do their own stamping.

The social researcher Charles Booth, in 1896, wrote in Life and Labour of the People in London that “until comparatively recent years the publican’s customers were very particular as to their ale being served in a ‘nice bright pewter pot’ … the pot is, however, being now largely supplanted by the glass.” Two years later, in 1898, a witness to a parliamentary inquiry into the materials being used to brew beer talked about “the alleged preference of the working man to have his beer in glasses” – which he denied, saying that it was the publicans leading the movement towards glass, because it was cheaper than pewter, and took up less space. All the same, the Brewers’ Journal that year carried an article on brewing “brilliant” beer, saying that there was a “steadily increasing demand for light fresh beers … capable of withstanding the critical glass test”, suggesting that the use of glass mugs and tumblers in pubs was indeed rising because of customer preference.

Although under the 1872 Weights and Measures Act all draught beer or cider sold in quantities of a half pint or more had to be delivered to the customer in glasses bearing an official stamp, there was no such requirement governing the sale of quantities less than half a pint (10 fluid ounces). Publicans asked for “a half pint” or “a pint” or “a quart” had to give their customer exactly that, in a stamped glass, but if asked for “a glass” of beer, as long as it was less than half a pint, it could be any quantity. Most landlords, it would appear, kept a stock of unstamped 8fl oz beer glasses to supply those customers who asked for “a glass” of ale or beer. The charge was a penny: but when David Lloyd George’s budget of 1910 imposed big extra costs on brewers, pushing up the price of beer, a penny for eight fluid ounces was suddenly uneconomical. To keep the retail price of a “glass of beer” at a penny, smaller glasses were needed. A “pony”, holding around a quarter of a pint, 5fl oz, was too small, so the publicans introduced a new beer glass holding four-thirteenths of a pint – 6.15fl oz – which was swiftly dubbed by customers the “Lloyd George”. (The “glass” of beer was finally outlawed by the Weights and Measures Act of 1963, since when draught beer can only legally be sold in stamped glasses holding a third of a pint, half a pint or a pint – and, more recently, two thirds of a pint.)

An advertisement for beer tumblers from 1922

Earlier Victorian beer glasses included rummers, or footed goblets, an attractive style that unfortunately died out. Glass beer mugs in late Victorian and Edwardian times seem to have been heavily ribbed, or cylindrical, while the tumblers were slightly slope-sided or conical. An advertisement for British-made beer tumblers from 1922 shows three different types, plain, with a rayed pattern on the bottom, and with internal ribs, in a style called “Venetian”. By 1930 the Crystal Glass Company, a subsidiary of Bagley & Co of Knottingley, West Yorkshire was showing just one type of beer tumbler in its catalogue, the plain conical style, but three different types of glass beer mug: plain and cylindrical; with ribs or dentition around the base; and what was to become the first iconic beer glass, the ten-sided mug.

Mr XXX leads his army of ten-sided beer mugs

Who invented the ten-sided mug, where, and exactly when – presumably in the 1920s – is not known: Jobling & Co of Sunderland apparently also had ten-sided mugs in its catalogue, George Davidson of Gateshead may have made them – somebody in Gateshead evidently did – and Ravenhead certainly did too. But they quickly became common, and when the Brewers’ Society began its “Beer is Best” advertising campaign in 1933, to try to reverse falling beer sales, it soon started using the ten-sided mug in its advertising, with the campaign’s mascot, “Mr XXX”, depicted as a cheery face inside a ten-sided pint glass, with arms and legs. While most examples were made in standard clear glass, Bagley & Co made some in yellow glass, and examples in amber glass are also known. Despite, as we shall see, being challenged and eventually being defeated by two rival designs of beer glass, the ten-sided mug was still being made, by Ravenhead in St Helens, as late as 1964, meaning it was in production for at least 35 years, and probably longer.

The first challenger to the ten-sided beer glass was the dimple mug. The design of the dimple, which seems particularly suited to reflecting and refracting the colour of amber beers, such as classic British ales, may have been inspired by the glass beer mugs with a flat hexagonal faceted exterior manufactured in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1920s and/or early 1930s. The dimple, despite being a Ravenhead design, was also picked up by other manufacturers, notably Dema of Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, which was Britain’s largest domestic glassware manufacturer, though much less well-known to the public than Ravenhead. But the dimple had its enemies, and in 1990 it was the subject of a vicious attack by Design magazine:

What’s short, fat, ugly and increasingly shunned by beer drinkers? The ‘dimple’ beer glass. You know the one; it’s barrel-shaped with indentations, a handle and eco-unfriendly walls of thick glass. An early attempt at ergonomic design, the dimple is a miserable failure. No one’s fingers actually seem to fit the depressions in the glass. The addition of a handle tacitly acknowledges this. Real ale and lager drinkers both dislike the dimple for the same reason; they don’t think the glass shows off the drink to its best advantage. What they want is something taller, slimmer, and less weighty; a thin glass through which they can admire the colour and clarity of the beer. Bar staff aren’t too keen on the dimple, either. It is heavy, awkward to store and does not stack and, because of its bulk and the projecting handle, difficult to wash, especially in the small sinks found in most bars.

Over the next decade, the dimple mug did seem to be disappearing from pubs, as did the traditional question barstaff asked someone asking for a pint: “Straight or handle?”. When the only two makers of the dimple left in Britain, Ravenhead and Dema, went into receivership within months of each other in 2000 and 2001, the headlines insisted: “Dimpled Pint Pots Doomed”. Fortunately for traditionalists, that hasn’t happened, and in the past few years the dimple beer mug has actually become trendy in pubs and bars frequented by bearded hipsters. Even the “straight or handle?” question has returned, at least in some bars. Today, however, your dimpled pint glass is most likely to have been made in China, by someone like the Zibo Hondao Trading Co Ltd of Shandong, or Bengbu Longyu Glass Products of neighbouring Anhui, or the Shanghai Jingsheng Glass Co Ltd, minimum order 100,000 glasses, cost FOB as low as 20p a glass, depending on order size.

Two pints of mild and bitter, served in ten-sided glasses in a North of England pub in 1944, from the film Down at the Local

The third “Great British beer glass” – though personally it’s one I hate as much as others dislike the dimple – was invented by a largely unsung giant of 20th century British design: Alexander Hardie Williamson. You may never have heard of him, but it is very likely you have drunk out of one or more of the glasses he designed, on thousands of occasions. Hardie Williamson, who was born in 1907, had designed for Bagley & Co in the 1930s, began designing glassware for United Glass, parent company of Ravenhead in 1944, and within a few years produced a host of simple design classics that are, in many cases, still with us today: the champagne saucer, picked up and personalised by Showerings as the Babycham glass, first made in 1948; the Paris wine goblet, designed in 1952; the “New Worthington” stemmed goblet, the Harp lager tankard and more. In all he designed 1,634 glasses for Ravenhead. But his most widely produced design, still to be found in pubs almost everywhere, was the iconic Nonik tumbler, a slightly conical beaker with a bulge around an inch below the rim, first made by Ravenhead in 1948 and given the product number P708. The bulge near the top was intended to keep the rims from being chipped or nicked by rubbing or banging together in the glass washer or on the shelf – hence the name, from “No Nick” – and had the added advantage that the bulge made it easier for the drinker to hold on to their pints when the glass was slippery than with straight-sided tumblers. Unfortunately, it’s irredeemably ugly, with what Design magazine called its “unsightly bulge”.

That has not, however, prevented it from becoming probably Britain’s most ubiquitous glass. Like the dimple, the Nonik was quickly copied by other manufacturers: Dema had the style in its catalogue by 1952, under the slightly altered name “Nonic”. Given that the glasses were produced for pubs during the last four years of the reign of George VI, there must, somewhere, be examples of Nonik/Nonic glasses stamped “GR”, though their thinness was always going to make them rarer survivors than the heavier, thicker dimples and ten-sided mugs, despite their being produced in enormous quantities. It has been estimated that 60 million beer glasses are supplied to British pubs, clubs and other drinking establishments every year (which implies that every establishment is breaking two to three a day). Let us take a very broad-brush guess and say that over the years a quarter of all beer glasses used in British pubs have been either dimples or Noniks/Nonics, with the rest tulips, straight-sided beakers, other types of tankards and so on. That would mean more than a billion individual Noniks and dimples have clattered over British bartops since the 1940s – and both look like continuing for a time yet.

Three Victorian pewter beermugs: pint (stamped James Lashan & Co Glasgow VR with the Official Number 36, for Renfrewshire, in Scotland), quart (stamped VR and G Farmiloe & Son, who were making pewter pots in St John Street, off West Smithfield, in London from 1876: the firm only seems to have ceased in 1940) and an unmarked half-pint, with glass bottom. Pewter mugs with glass bottoms are apparently rarely found with stamps, suggesting they were uncommon in pubs, and that the story about having the glass bottom to be able to see the king’s shilling is a myth …

One-pint silver-plated pewter mug, stamped ‘W Loftus 321 Oxford Street’ and engraved on the bottom ‘Sloanes Head New St Brompton Rd’. Loftus was a well-known pewterer, and also a ‘Hydrometer, Saccharometer, and gauging instrument maker, to the Government, and manufacturers of bottling and corking machines and all utensils for the spirit and brewing trades’. He was based at 321 Oxford Street from around 1880 to around 1900. The Sloanes Head was at 16 New Street from at least 1839, when it was the Sir Hans Sloane’s Head. New Street became the top part of Hans Crescent in 1904: the pub seems to have been swallowed by the growth of Harrods about 1896. The silvering has worn away in two patches on the body of the mug either side of the handle, but the handle is largely unworn, suggesting drinkers held the mug by the body with their fingers through the handle – unlike the way the two drinkers up above are holding their earthenware mugs, by their handles.

Thick, ribbed Victorian half-pint glass beer mug with a pronounced punt, stamped 324, for Gateshead, where there were several pressed glass manufacturers

Internally ribbed half-pint conical beaker in the style known as ‘Venetian’, stamped ‘GR 471’, for Ayrshire, probably from the 1920s, and almost certainly made at the Portland Glass Works in Irvine, which opened in 1920

Mochaware pint mug stamped GR 19 for Derbyshire, made by TG Green of Church Gresley, Derbyshire

Edwardian stoneware Doulton pint mug, made in Lambeth and marked ‘ER 4 LCC’, for London County Council

Two plain glazed pint pottery mugs, one with a baby blue exterior, the other biscuit-cream, both stamped ‘GR 490’ and made by Poultney & Co of Bristol

A ten-sided pint glass mug stamped ‘GR 301’ for West Yorkshire, very likely by Bagley & Co of Knottingley, with ‘British Made’ in the base

Ten-sided one-pint glass mug stamped ‘ER 301’ for West Yorkshire, again probably by Bagley & Co. Is the ‘ER’ for Edward VIII? The base of the glass has bubbles in it, and it looks more primitive than similar glasses stamped EIIR

Slightly glass-sick 10-sided half-pint glass stamped ‘GR 323’ for Gateshead, possibly manufactured by George Davidson & Go of the Teams Glassworks

A ten-sided glass pint mug stamped ‘478’ for St Helens and dated 1964 (dates were used alongside Official Stamp Numbers between 1961 and 1969), manufactured by Ravenhead – one of the last ten-sided beer glasses to be made

One-pint and half-pint glass mugs with a hexagonal tiled design, stamped ‘GR 64’ for Newcastle upon Tyne. Did this design inspire the dimple?

Two early one-pint dimples stamped ‘GR 478’, for St Helens, made by Ravenhead probably in the 1940s, showing how little the design has altered since the start

One-pint straight-sided mug marked ‘EIIR 301’ for Elizabeth II and West Yorkshire, probably made by Bagley & Co of Knottingley

A rare smooth-sided glass pint mug with a lattice design in the foot, stamped with crown and pint but no monarch’s initials, and ‘478’ for St Helens, presumably made by Ravenhead

Two hand-blown Waterford Guinness glasses, made for the national roll-out of Draught Guinness in the 1960s. The half-pint version carries the Guinness name in the font known as Hobbs-face, itself designed specially for Guinness by Bruce Hobbs, art director at Guinness’s ad agency, Bensons, in 1963. The glasses bear the official numbers 886 and 888, for Somerset, presumably where they were imported through from Ireland

Two classic tulip lager glasses, one from Carlsberg of the sort that John Mills lusted for in the film Ice Cold in Alex from 1958 (although in the book the film was based on, the beer in Alexandria was Rheingold from New York …) and the other from Barclay Perkins, once one of London’s biggest lager brewers. showing the brewery’s Dr Johnson trademark

All © Martyn Cornell MMXV including the photographs

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