December 2017 – A Good Beer Blog

Thursday Beer Links For Year’s End, Hogmanay and New Year’s Eve 2017

What can we say about 2017? Not as many celebrity rock star deaths as in 2016, I suppose. And we are not yet into the Putin war years. So, all in all a year to look back upon fondly. It is the time of triumphalist beer pronouncements, whether by blogger or brewer, at bit at odds with the infantalization, death on the shelf and often resulting profiteering that really misses the key point: that being that the beer drinker really needs to be at unending war with the breweries she or he supports. If I have any message for you during this holiday season, it is that.

What else is going on out there? The Braciatrix has a very good piece about Vikings, brewing and Yuletide. One of the things I like best about her point of the post, which focuses on the roles of women in Norse brewing, is how there is a weaving with the roles of men in brewing. Given what I have learned and am still learning about Renaissance brewing in Tudor England and the Hanseatic Baltic, I suspect that the range of intimate scale household brewing to the ale house to public festive celebratory consumption to early industrial export brewing held places for both women and men, in contexts likely quite strange to we moderns. Fabulous stuff.

Also fabulous? Any post by Ron where he is wandering in and out of pubs. And any post by TBN where he is proving again that no more than about 50% of craft beer is worth it given the other better and often cheaper 50% of craft beer. Or a brewery tour post when Ed has to use the washroom.

Mr. Lawrenson has posted a rather special year in review, one a bit unlike the others – not the least of which was him noting his own lack of activity. I quite like his Teletext tweets, especially how the medium de-aggrandizes the puff he like to waft away. There is so little rejection of the brewery owner as wizard theme going around in these days of the great schism and resulting gap filling that his commentary is always welcome relief. I look forward to more editions of his News in Brief in 2018.

Remember: pay your taxes. And quit complaining about paying taxes with your beer while you are at it. You want western civilization? Pay for it.

You know, much is being written on the murk with many names. Kinderbier. London murk. NEIPA. Gak from the primary. Milkshake. It’s gotten so bad in fact that even Boston Beer is releasing one, a sure sign that a trend is past it. Some call it a game changer, never minding that any use of that term practically guarantees something isn’t. They need to live as the hero in an exceptional time, I suppose. No such luck. My comfort is that the sucker juice of 2017 is so identifiable and so avoidable. My prediction? Clarified murk will be the hit of 2018. Which will take is full circle. To Zima. Then on to the low and no-alcohol ones.

Boom: “The late, great Don Younger (founder of the Horse Brass Pub) used to encourage beer competition by saying that a rising tide raises all boats, if that’s true than 2017 may be the year those boats began taking on water.”

And keep your US craft in the US, thanks very much. We have more than enough of our own elsewhere.

Finally… you know, time was this would be when I was rushing around getting the Yuletide Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest results are. How happy is the house that the tears and denunciations that went along with that are over. I found the prospect of transferring the entire set of contest posts to this the new site too daunting. Fortunately, the wonderful Wayback Machine has saved about 379 versions of the original website over the years and you can go browse the decade of 2006-15’s worth of the photo contest posts. To pique your interest and as a Yuletide treat, here are all the winners from the ten years including the favourite of all time from 2007 above which Stonch, then co-contest administrator, described this way:

First, the best image depicting some element of beer culture comes from John Lewington. He calls it “Two pints of bitter”. This is candid photo John took of two old boys enjoying their Sunday afternoon ale in a 17th century pub in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Perhaps they’re old friends, or maybe they barely know each other. When this photo was taken, it didn’t matter: they were immersed in their own worlds for a moment. It’s a beautiful photo, and my favourite overall.

Click on the image for a larger version of each year’s winner.

Contest Year	Photograph	Artist
2006		Dave Selden of Portland, Oregon
2007		John Lewington of England
2008		Matt Wiater of Portland Oregon
2009		Kim Reed of Rochester, New York
2010		Brian Stechschulte of San Francisco, California
2011		Jeff Alworth of Portland, Oregon
2012		Robert Gale of Wales
2013		Fabio Friere of New York City
2014		Thomas Cizauskas of Virginia (co-winner).
2014		Fabio Friere of New York City (co-winner).
2015		Boak and Bailey

There you are. Another year over and deeper in debt. Don’t go crazy at New Year’s Eve. There’ll be another one in 12 month’s time.

The Dragon, The Lyon, The White Hart and The Rose

What a charming image. It is a tiny bit of a map of Portsmouth, England from 1552. These four structures are The Dragon, The Lyon, The White Hart and The Rose – the four brewhouses built in 1515 by Henry VIII that I mentioned in my blog post on my first scratching about (what I should have called) Tudor brewing and Tudor naval victualing from earlier this month. There is much written* about Portsmouth, the Tudors and navel power but I am thinking about only one corner of it all. That being the corner in the image above. and these four brew houses. They are consistently illustrated throughout the 1500s as this passage from an academic article by one Dominic Fontana describes:

The four brewhouses are labelled on the 1584 map with their names; The Dragon, The Lyon, The White Hart and The Rose, and are clearly shown as being located around a pond, probably a freshwater spring providing the significant quantities of water essential for brewing. The four brewhouses were established in 1515 by Henry VIII to provide beer for his ships. They produced considerable quantities, making 500 barrels per day in 1515 (Eley 1988). Provisioning of Henry’s fleet and shore forts was an enormous task requiring significant organisation and by 1547 naval victualling was regularly accounted to the Exchequer (Knighton and Loades 2014). The engraving shows the brewhouses as timber framed buildings located almost as though they were mounted on stilts above a pond which extends underneath and around the buildings. Evidence for the brewhouses is also provided in the maps of 1545 and 1552. In the 1545 map they are shown as four rectangular buildings with a small square extension added to one side of each building, with the four brewhouses being grouped around a square pond. In the 1552 map the buildings are presented in bird’s-eye view as a group of low buildings with pitched roofs set around an irregularly shaped pond.**

The 1545 map of Portsmouth mentioned above illustrates the same brewhouses with a little less of a lyrical touch but perhaps more to scale. The red arrow is mine, in case you were wondering. This handy tool allows an overlay of the 1545 upon a map showing Portsmouth today. So regularly they sit. Clearly a work of joint undertaking. One thing I notice is how four regular standardized breweries would have had more fire resistance that one single larger brewery. They are spaced as well. Embers from one might not reach the roof of another.

There is another image, the Cowdray Engraving which is a copy of painting from between 1545-1548 depicting the Battle of the Solent and the sinking of the Mary Rose. Almost a pictograph. Whatever a pictograph is. The relevant wee snippet of the 1545 map-like diagram*** can be viewed with the merest click on the thumbnail to the right. As you can see, it is more than a map in that there are all sorts of folk well out of scale because it is not really about the mapping of Portsmouth but a description of the naval battle that was occurring right outside the mouth of the harbour. Again, it gives a sense of uniformity but also notice they seem to be on stilts and over the pond in this image. That would not jive with the two maps.

The pond itself was described in a modern footnote to an edict issued by Elizabeth I on 7 December 1562 included in the Extracts from Records in the Possession of the Municipal Corporation of the Borough of Portsmouth and from Other Documents Relating Thereto:

These springs of remarkably fine fresh water from which the inhabitants at this time derived their chief supply, were situated within the ancient walls in a triangular shaped meadow at the upper or eastern end of Penny and St. Nicholas Streets: the meadow was called ” Four House Green,” from its proximity to the Four Houses, which were erected by Henry VII. as Brewing Houses for the supply of his Navy; this site is now occupied by the Clarence Barracks. In the time of Charles the II., when the fortifications were reconstructed, in the star like form as they remained until their recent demolition, Four House Green was absorbed, and the greater part of it excavated to form the moat, and cast ravelin which was opposite to what is now known as King’s Road, Southsea. The springs were then enclosed in stone cisterns, which were approached by a postern through the rampart, and an iron bridge across the moat, and were used by some of the older inhabitants until a recent period.

So the site was restructured to the point no archaeology can be expected. Hmm. Notice up there the statement about the scale of production: “[t]hey produced considerable quantities, making 500 barrels per day in 1515 (Eley 1988).” I have not laid my hands upon a copy of Eley 1988 but have identified it as Portsmouth breweries, 1492-1847 by Phillip Eley, published by Portsmouth City Council in, yes, 1988.**** It is comfortingly affirmed by Dr. Fontana but, still, I checked with my man who sits in the same buildings as one of the world’s great libraries, the New York State Library, in Albany but no luck. If you have a copy, let me know. I say this because I find the scale extraordinary. Even on a 200 working day year that is 100,000 bbls a year. Kristen D. Burton in this 2013 article describes the scale of brewing being undertaken in the whole of the City of London during Tudor times:

The beer brewers of London established England’s capital city as the leading producer of beer throughout Europe by the end of the sixteenth century; a notable feat considering the late arrival of hopped beer to England. In 1574, London beer brewers produced 312,000 barrels of beer and by 1585 that had increased to 648,690 barrels. This stood in addition to the beer produced for local consumption, which made up the bulk of the brewers’ business…

I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with these numbers so much as they mean the four naval brewhouses of Portsmouth were operating at a fabulous scale. I even saw one reference that suggested that each produced 500 barrels a day. Now, that would be scale and in the pre-scientific pre-industrial era certainly something that. Within sight of the porter breweries of the 1830s.

Again, I am going to leave this at that for now. I need to scratch around a bit more. Do let me know if you have a copy of that book by Eley under a table leg. I would love to see the primary record behind that number.

*You may wish to start here.
**See: “Charting the Development of Portsmouth Harbour, Dockyard and Town in the Tudor Period” Dominic Fontana, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Vol. 8, No. 2, Special Issue: The Social Archaeology of Ports and Harbours (DECEMBER 2013), pp. 263-282. Abstract: “Portsmouth was crucial to the defence of Tudor England and consequently it was mapped for military planning purposes throughout the Tudor period from 1545. The resulting sequence of maps records much of the town and harbour. The maps offer opportunities for furthering our understanding of Tudor Portsmouth and its population Additionally, images of the urban landscape provided by the ‘‘Cowdray Engraving’’, which depicts the loss of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose on the 19th July 1545, may also be considered and compared with those presented in the early maps of the town. This paper considers the Portsmouth maps of 1545, 1552, 1584 and the chart of Portsmouth Harbour dating from between 1586 and 1620. These are examined in relation to one another and compared with evidence from the Cowdray Engraving.” The author is, in fact, Dr Dominic Fontana, FRGS, of Portsmouth University.
***Most fabulously of all, while the original painting burned in the 1790s, “in the 1770’s the Society of Antiquities became interested in the paintings and commissioned James Basire” to engrave it and make notes on the colours… AND between 1772 and 1778 the same “Basire had a young apprentice who most likely also helped with these engravings, his name was William Blake.” Wow!!! You can play a bit of Where’s Waldo on this bigger snippet.
****ISBN 10: 0901559733

Your Beery News For A Yuletide Thursday

Ah, December 21st. The kids’ Christmas pageant at church was already a few weeks back now. Gifts are bought and parcels have been mailed. Mainly. I will go out for a pint after work tonight but generally this is the time of sweet sherry and cups of tea. Times are a bit too Dad-ly to get overly tinseled. I’ll take a moment to think of Zimbabwe. Play a few tunes. Then I’ll check in with the news.

Starting on a very cheery note, there is nothing better than accusations of marketplace corruption and political underhandedness in Canada’s tiniest jurisdiction – not that I’d have any idea of why this would be the case.:

Now you take your kid’s to a grocery store, and not only can adults purchase Gahan beer, they can even sample it. Why not sell Gahan beer in the emergency waiting rooms across the Island. Also, a keg of beer (Gahan) would be nice for patients in the back of an ambulance to take their mind off their issues. I am only using Gahan, since they are currently the only ones allowed to sell privately here on the Island. Maybe the other brewers never thought of this idea or are not Liberal donation givers

Frankly, I blame them getting rid of the bootleggers in 2004.

Next, apparently elsewhere in this fine nation the Canadian craft brewer alert status about the impending implosion of their entire industry has been raised to an alarming all time high: concerned. Let that give you pause, global brewing industry.

South of the border, it’s funny watching the brewing trade groups go on and on about the tax cut benefits the ownership class has received without any apparently awareness that these savings are built on relieving 13 million of their fellow citizens from access to health care. Andy has the right take as does Jason: a gratuitous three and a half bucks a barrel back in the owners’ pocket. Forbes has the extraordinary details on the windfall that has fallen in the laps of the brewery ownership class. Just in time for Dunkin’ Donuts beer.

Antipodeanly speaking, you will be please to know that one retail business in New Zealand considers non-alcohol beer a gateway drug. Reminds me of how, as an undergrad in a college half-run by clerics, we learned how High Anglicans thought the danger with stand up… relations are that they could lead to dancing. Fabulous. Remind me to never shop there.

I love how one farming publication seems to suggest we set the birth of Jesus aside at this time of year to remember… the farmer. Friggin’ farmers.

One last thing. You really will have to pardon me. I really don’t care about the best beers for Christmas. I don’t. Not for me. Not for you. I hope you find something else to do like being happy, annoying little nieces and nephews, doing something good and not telling anyone, staring at the conifer in the living room and eating unfamiliar poultry. Or find a 45. Or listen to this. And, for God’s sake, don’t do this. Try this. Have a holly. Have a jolly. But enjoy yourselves and don’t fret about the beer.

Your Thursday Bullet Points For A Beery Yule

Are we in Yule yet? I think we are. The old town is at least looking wintery as you can see above. Our warm spell has flipped to cold snap so fast that the last of our garden tomatoes ripening on the window sill looked out at -17C this morning. But enough about comfort and joy. This blog is about beer, not… not beer.

First up in the news is all this fuss about the shadowy Portman Group telling a brewery with childish colours and cartooning in their branding that childish colours and cartooning might be attractive to children. Infantilization indeed. I am pleased that the response of the UK brewery in question is so sensible and support the take by B² in large part. BUT… a bit shocked was I by the (i) weepy hand wringing over the decision, (ii) weepy hand wringing over the process, and (iii) the collective amnesia about the Portman Group rulings on 2008. So much #poohwiddowcwaft! Now, I realize that the demise of most actual beer blogging has left an imprint on the minds of some that beer blogging was never all that good but it is rewarding to reach back in the archives to find sensible discussion about those events in a way that neither social media or trade-based beer journalism can apparently cope with these days.

Speaking of sensible application of the law, good to see that Beyoncé got here reputation unshackled from those freelancers who would attach their profit making to her hard earned fame. It is quite stunning how we see this appropriation by craft brewers of the intellectual property of others. I still haven’t heard who drew and, so, owned or owns the copyright as opposed to the trademark as it relates to that White Stag. Yes, yes… it’s all a bit of fun. But that’s what the sexists and racists say, too, right?

Gerald Comeau, hero.

Robin and Jordan got a generous amount of coverage by TVO, Ontario’s public TV and interwebs broadcaster this week. My only sadness is the entire misrepresentation of the sixty years from 1927 to 1987 and the glory that was E.P. Taylor’s contribution to the world of brewing with his war on waste under the banner of lightness and modest price. The point, however, on “local” is especially well made and avoids our muddiness about all of Ontario being “local” to the entire 13,000,000 persons province.

Finally, interesting news about the jump in Canadian malting barley sales to China including this tidbit:

Canadian malting barley commands a higher price, especially for China’s premium beer market, because of its dark color and higher protein, which allows for better foaming, Watts said.

Because its all about the foaming. Good to see us kicking some Argie-Aussie-Euro butt for one in something other than curling.

I am off. Not like Stan is off. I should be back sooner than he is. I am going to think about Thursdays. Gonna think some more.

A Short Update On That Apparently Very Fine Thing, Lambeth Ale

This is a real puzzle. As discussed a few weeks ago, we are largely unaware of what was Lambeth Ale in the second half of the 1600s in England and how it set itself in the hierarchy of drinks. I am just going to note a few more findings in this post with the hope of narrowing the uncertainties. First, this is the account of the costs related to the horses required for a Royal weekend jaunt from the 1680s:

In this series we find the subjoined computation ” of the charge and expence of the Horse Liveries, according to the following rates,” viz. : Hay £4 per load, straw 30.S’. per load, oats 24.9. per quarter, beans 6s. per bushel, shoeing and medicining 2.f. per day ; more for each hunting horse 205. per annum. Each horse was allowed 1 bottle of hay, 1 peck of oats and 1 peck of beans per day, and 8 trusses of straw per month. Four “hunting horses” and 36 “hunters coursers and pads” was the established yearly allowance in the royal stables. The total cost of keeping each horse is set down at £52 10s. a year. Yearly charge for diet, etc, commencing April 1, 1689. Yeomen of the field to the King and Queen on hunting days were entitled to receive from the royal larder 2 manchets of bread ; 2 bottles of Lambeth ale ; 1 bottle of champagne, 1 bottle of Rhenish, and 1 bottle of Spanish wines…

What sort of bread is a manchet? A snazzy sort, I suppose. Anyway, it is clear that Lambeth ale is something kept in the Royal larder, the only beer or ale mentioned, next to the bread of the elite not to mention the champers. Its high status nature is confirmed by this account of another 1680s gesture at court:

In 1687, the French ambassador in London was sending to the marquis de Seignelay regular consignments of English ale, “known as Lambeth ale” and not “strong ale, the taste of which is not much liked in France and which makes men as drunk as wine and costs just as much.”

Interesting comment. It was not as strong as strong ale. A lighter thing. We see it referenced from the same decade again in a discussion of alms as recorded the account books from 1689 for the court of William and Mary compared to that of Charles II from a few years before:

…the alms are set forth as a money payment, and we do not see gifts to the poor mentioned as of yore amongst ” daily liveries of bread, beer and wyne for the several dyetts,” but, in company with wages and pensions and “board wages to old servants,” we notice that the sum of £219 is set aside for these” Daily Alms.” It crosses our minds that this allocation of £219, larger than that of Charles II, who had almost doubled the yearly allowance for “Daily Alms” made by the Tudors, may have been so expended by William and Mary partly in compensation for the dwindling contents of the alms-tubs under the economical regulations of the semi-Dutch Court. Careful record is kept of the ” manchets” or small rolls of bread and of the loaves required by the entire household. The King, Queen and Court were obliged to content themselves with 136 1/2 gallons of beer and 30 bottles of Lambeth ale as against 240 gallons which, under Charles II, had been distributed to the” poor at the Gate,” and we have only the item of I gallon of beer and a loaf per day for the porter. But as regards the consumption of beer at Court, we must bear in mind that ale and wine were no longer the exclusive beverages in the fashionable world…

Well, now we know what a manchet was. A small loaf. A bun. I shall order them accordingly in the future. Notice that Lambeth ale is reserved for the top dogs and measured by the bottle even if it might have been consumed by the stoneware mug. Its finesse did not mean it was consumed only in a dignified manner, if this passage from the 1693 farce The Richmond Heiress: Or, a Woman once in the Right is to be believed. Here we see the character Sophronia confronting a group of young privileged men including one named Hotspur and comments on their average day:

Sophr. Come, Sir, for once I’ll be a little satirical, and venture to describe the course of life of all you Men of the Town: In the Morning the first thing you do is, to reflect on the debauch of the Day before; and instead of saying your Prayers as you ought, relate the lewd Folly to some other young rakehelly Fellow, that happens to come to your Leve: The next thing is to dine, where instead of using some witty of moral Discourse that should tend to improvement, you finish your Desert with a Jargon of fenceless Oaths, a relish of ridiculous Bawdy, and strive o get drunk before ye come to the Play.

Hotsp. The Devil’s in her; she has nick’d us to a Hair.

Sophr. Then at the Play-House ye ogle the Boxes, and dop and bow to those you do not know, as well as those you do. Lord! what a world of sheer Wit too is wasted upon the Vizard-Masks! who return it likewise back in as wonderful a manner. You nuzzle your Noses into their Hoods and Commodes, just for all the world like the Picture of Mahomet’s Pigeon, when he gave the false Prophet his ghostly Instructions. Fogh! how many fine things are said there, perfum’d with the Air of four Claret! which the well-bred Nymph as odoriferously returns in the scent of Lambeth-Ale and Aqua vitae.

Hotsp. ‘D’s heart, what shall I do! I shall ne’er have patience to hear this.

Sophr. Then at Night ye graze with the hard-driven Cattel you have made a purchase of at the Play, and strut and hum up and down the Tavern with a swashy Mien, and a terrible hoarse Voice, which the Lady (to engage your liking) returns with some awkward Frisks, instead of Dancing, and a Song in a squeaking Voice, as untenable as a broken Bagpipe. Then supper coming in, the Glasses go about briskly. The Fools think the Wenches heavenly Company, and they tell them they are extream fine Gentlemen; ‘till at last few Words are best, the Bargain’s made, the Pox is cheaply purchas’d at the price of a Guinea, and no repentance on neither side. What think ye, Sir, am I not a rare Picture drawer?

I quoted from that extended passage mainly to capture the endearing Jeeves and Bertie aspect of it all – and not at all like Tom and Bob in 1821. Which again confirms its elite nature even if those of the elite, as is often seen, have charms which are less to be desired than they might think. If you add that to the suggestion that it is lighter than strong ale and served in a bottle and kept in royal larders next to the champagne, I am thinking that it sounds a lot like the role porter played one hundred years later in New York City, perhaps another drink which was also “ripe and brisk“?

Did the bottling make it more bubbly? More charming? Dunno. But that would certainly explain its particular attraction just as the paleness of Derby ale set it apart perhaps a few decades earlier. Soon, Burton comes alone and steals the spotlight but for now, in the last two decades of the 1600s, Lambeth seems to hold a very high spot amongst the available offerings.

Hopped Beer As Part of Elizabethan Naval Victualing

Another topic sure to capture the attention of the good beer crowd… even though it is becoming apparent that there are only good beer crowds now. Or perhaps another topic to just shelter me from all the other stuff flying around. Hmm. Perhaps a contemporary account* of the romantic of life the sea will will add a bit of zip from the outset:

…their bread was musty and mouldie Bisket,
their beere sharpe and sower like vinigar,
their water corrupt and stinking, the best drink they had, they called Beueridge, halfe wine and halfe putrified water mingled together, and yet a very short and small allowance…

That opinion was from William Clowes, the Lord Admiral’s surgeon, reporting in 1596. Not quite the “yo-ho and a bottle of rum” thing the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean would have us think. But, if we are honest, we never suspected the life of the Elizabethan sailor was a kind one, did we? While a gallon of beer a day seems insanely generous, it’s not as compelling now we know it was like drinking vinegar.

So, what was going on between 400 to 500 years ago in the ships of the English navy when it comes to beer? One thing we know already is that they aimed at taking along a gallon of beer for each person on board for each day. We know that because, as I first wrote in 2014 and mentioned again in the first issue of MASH magazine, Sir Martin Frobisher provisioned his voyages in 1576-77 to the Canadian High Arctic with that much beer. This was a pretty fabulous expedition, funded by a company of investors made up of aristocrats and even “QE the 1” herself. So they also got to take along two firkins of prunes and other treats.

One other thing we always like to see is the reference to malt. If you click on the thumbnail to the right you will see a record from a record for 18 January 1596 from a sort of annual journal of notable events from the day in which the need to ensure the provisions of the navy was discussed at some sort of vague high level (aka “the Council”) and included malt among the other provisions including pease and cheese. Perhaps not a firkin o’ prunes but still a pretty good list of foodstuff for the ships. This is a very good thing as I have, in the past, noted malt in shipments to Newfoundland at around the same time. Which is very cool. Because to ship malt is to prepare to make at least ale if not beer. If they are shipping the malt.

In a set of papers entitled Elizabethan Naval Administration edited by Knighton and Loades and published in 2016, we see this passage in a report from Edward Baeshe, General Surveyor of Her Highnesses Victuals for Sea Causes** dated 23 July 1586. In it Mr Baeshe complains of losing money on his agreement to supply and is invoking, quite politely, a right to terminate early. He points out the prices he has had to put up with including malt at eight to twenty shillings a quarter as well as “hops from 13s 4d the 100 to 53s 4d the 100.” The report is made to the Right Honourable the Lord Charles Howard, Lord High Admiral of England with a copy to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principle secretary, so it is not a small matter. It seems Baeshe has supplied such victuals to the navy for forty years but is now having to stop seeing as he is losing money on the deal. A footnote from Messrs Knighton and Loades tells us that the price of all grain rose 71% from 1580 to 1586 so his case appears well founded. These were the years leading up to the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Another footnote related to 1562 tells of the nimbleness in which malt at scale needed to be obtained for government business:

Extra provisions were required in the north in anticipation of the Queen of Scots and a train of 1,000 en route to an interview with Elizabeth. Articles for the meeting at York or as far south as Nottingham, were concluded at Greenwich on 6 July. On 8 July the Privy Council*** ordered 200 quarters of wheat and the like of malt to be bought in Buckinghamshire and sent to Berwick. Arrangements were still being made on 12 July, but the meeting was cancelled three days later…

Scale and speed. Interesting to note how the movement of large quantities of malt was a thing, thinking back to 1600s Derby ale. We think of brewing only as an industrial process at scale starting in the latter 1600s but forget the earlier public sphere. Incorrectly. Henry VIII add four new breweries in Portsmouth to supply ale for his fleet.**** We know this because the BBC said so. Other naval brew houses were also built in East Smithfield and London. The four additional breweries built in Portsmouth in 1512 were the Rose, the Lyon, the Dragon and the White Hart and were reported to be “the goodliest” ever seen.***** the year after they were joined by ten storage houses to keep the ale the beer from spoiling before being loaded on board.

These were important brewing facilities. They sat on the one water source which, on 7 December 1562, became the subject of the following by the borough of Portsmouth:

Also where as many indiscret persons not considering the quenes ma(?) affayres nor their owne helthes nor ye comodity for the hole town, hath usid and yet do use to wash both bucks and up(r) clothes in the diche and springs of the iiij houses. We geve in charge yt none hereafter prsume to do the lyk in paine for x(?) for evry offense.

All of which is very interesting. You have a brewing complex that brings in large quantities of hops and malt and strategically protects its water supply. I was going to add more to this post but I think I am going to leave it here as an introduction so that I can go off and explore this a bit more. It leads in neatly to the idea that in the 1600s before industrialization there was certainly organized brewing at scale as we saw with Derby ale. It may be that bulk manufacturing for military purposes in the Tudor era is an early example that later gets applied or at least mirrored for commercial purposes in the next century.

One thing I want to see if I can find about is pre-hop ale use on naval ships. You will recall that the earlier we go back in the 1500s the closer we get to the practical acceptance of hopped beer. Which makes me wonder if there were ale brewers on board before a certain point, preparing fresh ale for consumption by the crew within days – like might be found on farms and estates or in contemporary brew houses. Gotta see what I can find out about that. In the meantime, more 1500s beer and brewing here.

*See Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580-1603, page 298, 1998 McMaster University Phd Thesis by Cheryl A. Fury.
**Clearly the greatest title which was ever bestowed.
***Clearing up the “which Council?” question above.
****The first built by his father Henry VII in 1492. Note in a note: 1492 – Brewery ordered built by the King. Called the “Greyhound” it cost £145 and was probably situated in High Street.
*****See Tudor Sea Power: The Foundation of Greatness by David Childs (Seaforth Publishing, 2009) at page 96.