Category: Pale Ale

Your Slightly Subdued Beery News Notes for Mid-September

I was thinking of what to post as an image this week, given this time of mourning for HM**** QEII. And here it is – the declaration of the passing and proclamation of the new sovereignty… in British Antarctica. The penguins now know. Which is good. Because they told the bees, too. It’s been an unsettling week for a mildly pro-Commonwealthy Canadian like me and some of mine. A cousin stood in line for hour in Edinburgh to pay respect. Others including others of mine are acting as if Thatcher died again.* I get it… though I don’t get Americans (the land founded on and continuing to benefit from genocide, slavery and treaty denial) joining in the kicking – while denying any such assessment applies to them. But this is not about sanity. This is about feelings. And folk have many sorts of numb dumb feels that come forward at times like this. And sad feels. And respectful feels. It’s OK. Feel your feels. But just remember that we have section 176 of the Criminal Code here in Canada, buster. No harranging.

Moving away from that news and a little bit, what has gone on out there this week? Well, one lad named Brad has moved to the future – to the Coronation of CRIII in fact – and has an posted an image of the two bottles he plans to open for that big day: a 1952 paired with a 1911! Click on the image for some crisp labeling action.  You may moderate your jealousy safe in the knowledge that the contents taste like cardboard – BUT… it’s the thought that counts.

Regardless of how you are feeling… how about just getting outside. Stonch marched 45 km on Tuesday in the Black Forest. And the season of harvest is still upon us guiding us to visions of the ease of making ales along with the joys of home home growing. Kate Sewell posted an excellent photo essay on her team’s efforts, including a bit of child labour enlistment…

Now… maybe giving equal time in the free time political broadcast sense, we turn to The Beer Nut of Ireland who (like B+B) posted this week about getting out in about… visiting London, England and crawling, as they say, amongst its bars. He shared a very firm recommendation on one particular supp:

A&H London Black is a masterpiece of stouty complexity, absolutely packed with flavour. Not way-out or weird flavours, it’s still predominantly chocolate and coffee as it should be, but present to an intensity that’s almost too much, almost too busy. Yet it pulls back at the last instant, aided by a modest 4.4% ABV. The result is an absolutely perfect balance of porter’s sweet and bitter sides, both represented in a big way but not clashing. It is a very different proposition to Draught Guinness and I don’t get why you’d mention them in the same breath. Regardless, I would be very pleased to see this beer becoming commonplace.

It has its own Twitter identify, too. And speaking of Guinness, the Mudge himself provided some good insights this week on its first UK national competitor when he discussed the business of Bass:

The business model of the original Bass company was to a significant extent based on selling its beer into the free trade across the country. Before Draught Guinness, Bass was the first nationally-distributed draught beer. This still lives on to some extent in areas like the West Country and North and West Wales… Another aspect of this approach was concluding trading agreements with family brewers to sell Draught Bass in their pubs, giving them another string to their bow and Bass more sales. Most of these were swept away by the merger mania of the 1960s, but one that survived into more recent time was with Higson’s of Liverpool.

From the “Is / Not Is” file, Alistair linked to an interesting video on the inflationary pressures brewers face, primarily focused on packaging and energy costs. He made a canny observation:

Inadvertently skewers the whole “our beer is expensive because of ingredients” line. The main drivers of prices are packaging and energy use. In theory, a local brewpub, that goes from tank to tap should be cheaper, at least a little.

Boak and Bailey also raised questions about the lack of critical thinking about good beer may be due to the finger wagging set shutting down voices. For the contrary view, please note: beer is not there for your discussion… it is there for you just to buy along with all the nice trinkets from those who profit from beer. Obey. Buy the tee.** Frankly, Fuggled is the home the best Statement on Style this weeks:

… the hopping is too much for the Munich Helles style. The BJCP guidelines on the other hand have it both to strong and having too many IBUs. As a “Festbier”, which GABF calls “German Style Oktoberfest/Wiesn”, it is just a touch too strong, and again has too many IBUs, but BJCP has it being too weak and with too many IBUs for its Festbier definition. A random thought popped into my head, maybe it’s a Dortmunder….? Nope, GABF says it has too many IBUs for Dortmunder, but acceptable abv. In BJCP world, where Dortmunder is called “German Helles Exportbier”, both ABV and IBU are within the expected bounds. Do we have a winner here then, it would appear to be a German Helles Exportbier? But wait, what about the guidelines for the European Beer Star categories? Basically it could be either a Festbier, or an “Export”.  There are times when I have flashbacks to my days studying theology.

You know, all this all discussion about discussion might serve as good motivation to answer the call issued by the Craft Brewers Conference, a request for proposals for seminars at the 2023 get together:

Seminar proposals are reviewed and selected by the CBC Seminar Subcommittee, a group of mostly brewery members of the Brewers Association, selected annually as experts in the specific seminar tracks for that year’s conference…. Seminars are expected to provide actionable takeaways for attendees to help improve their businesses. Proposals should clearly outline the skills and knowledge that attendees will learn from the seminar.

Sounds a bit bureaucratic… but still – send in your idea and get some fresh discussions going at that level. An opportunity for some new voices raise some new ideas.

Related perhaps, Jeff wrote a very interesting piece on many of the ways status affects the good beer world. I generally see this tiny culture as riddled with claims to status, many dubious. So, I was interested to read his thoughts which touch on reputation, signaling, ambitions and traditions:

In the small group of beery obsessives who write blogs or rate beers online, though, status does come into focus. It seems undeniable that the appearance of hazy IPA is one of the reasons it succeeded, especially in Boston, where status is a big deal. People could see across the room what you’re drinking.

That idea of projecting fad status as a goal oriented habit is what my eldest might now call a loser move, by the way, as a keener of experience over the numbing ways of the older gens. This sort of craft as status isn’t really the thing today’s young are much interested in. Hard to believe but that cover of The New Yorker is coming up on its eighth anniversary. But that is to be expected. Status chasing is, as Jeff points out, hunting a moving object.  Today, those hazy IPA young are in their thirties now – and you know what people in their seventies now said when they were teens about people in their thirties!

And finally, one of the better sort of shameless junkets I’ve seen so far. But just remember: no one at Peroni is actually your friend…

There. A distracted week in many ways. A few B.O.B.s*** out there to read if you are into that sorta thing. A few strained efforts to identify something as a new style as well. What can you do? Well, we hope for a better future. As you find your bearings, please check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and perhaps now from Stan once in a while on a Monday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the mostly weekly OCBG Podcast on most Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays – and also sometimes, on a Friday, posts at The Fizz as well (Ed.: we are told ‘tis gone to 404 bloggy podcast heaven… gone to the 404 bloggy podcast farm to play with other puppies.) And the long standing Beervana podcast (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now… nope, there was a post on July 25th… in 2022 even.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Still gearing  up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too. (Ed.: give it a few weeks to settle in and not be as agreeable.) Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There has also been the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now wound up after ten years.

*These observations from a self-described republican heavy of the “them” approach to understanding illustrate the condition of the smug view, a view describing respect as self-abasement: “They loved the novelty of the switch, but also the continuity it represents. A large chunk of my country seems to revel in self-abasement, and is then delighted to present this subservience to the world as something magical. I wish I knew why we do it, but I don’t. It’s a continuing mystery to me.” Must be swell to be that much better.
**Previous sightings of the control freaks: 2009, 2016. 
***Beer Owner Bios. They are all amazing. And the same.
****Crushingly corrected. The shame… the cutting shame…

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week Of The Big Jab

It’s a good thing that as a teenager I drank really really bad red wine a few times so I had something to measure the reaction I had to the AZ vaccine against. Worst hangover ever. But a welcome one. I was actually more nervous about the immediate reaction than any fear of a slight statistical bump for this or that anomaly. I feel like I expect many did after a night on the old Champale, as illustrated. Mock not. It is apparently still made, has review on BeerAdvocate and been around since 1939.

Trends. That’s why folk read the internets, right? This is my favorite trend story of the week, the state of Heineken sales in 2021:

Volumes jumped 5.4% in the Asia Pacific region, led by double-digit growth in Vietnam, Singapore, and South Korea. Beer sales volumes grew 9.9% in the Africa, Middle East, and Eastern Europe region, driven by Nigeria and South Africa.  Sales volumes fell 10% in Europe, where many countries remain under strict lockdown measures to combat a third wave of Covid-19 infections… Net profit for the period was €168 million ($201.7 million), up from €94 million in the virus-hit first quarter of 2020 but down from €299 million in the same period in 2019.

Lesson #1: things are looking up even if things are not looking up where you are. Lesson #2: folk elsewhere may be deflecting the realities.

You want more interesting information about the place of alcohol in the response to Covid-19… at least in Europe? Most nations are down (like me) but some are up… well, one:

So has COVID-19 got us drinking more, or less, than before? Public health researchers are trying to find out — to see if the events of 2020 have helped the world to sober up, or if we’re all heading for the mother of all hangovers. They’re finding that age and outlook on life drive our response to lockdown. Younger drinkers seem happier to find other things to do, while their stressed-out parents are more likely to be seeking solace in the bottom of a glass. And, surprise, surprise, it looks like we British have reacted to COVID-19 by drinking the most.

Beer as deflection?  Cultural standby? Beer as identify. Contract brewing as an attack on national pride has struck in Finland:

“The brand is owned by Finns, and the product development, warehousing, administration, marketing and sales all take place in Finland, and our office is located in Kontula. Production alone occurs at the factory in Tartu, where beer has been skillfully made since the 19th century,” Matti Pesonen from Kontula Brewery said. The Finnish Food Workers’ Union called on consumers to opt for beer produced in Finnish breweries instead for the purpose of preserving local jobs.

I like that. It’s good and mercantile. I saw this observation from Jeff this week and I have to agree… but how different is it from the the Finns above?

Craft beer used to lean heavily into corporate ethics. This was partly a rebuke to big breweries, laser-focused on the bottom line, and also slightly self-serving (look at how green we are!), but in the main it represented an authentic commitment to community. Lately, not so much. Many breweries still try to lead ethical lives, but they aren’t showy about it, and with some notable exceptions the trend overall has tailed off.

What’s left? Identity? Is that what they brew the beer for?  This question leads directly to a bit of a continuing discussion about England’s Cloudwater selling Scotland’s BrewDog brewed beers structured on worthy collaborations in the Tesco supermarket chain which led to an number of comments. When I find something interesting in GBH, I am careful to start at the end as they do tend to flail and one needs to see the pre-determined point the author was making. It was unfortunate to see their classic but utterly damp conclusion being applied again in this case:

What the long-term impact of one of the U.K.’s most influential breweries going into a national retailer will be remains up for debate.

Yawn-a-rama. Jordan and Robin took a harder line in their weekly podcast which, it being a podcast, I can’t draw a quotation from except to point out that Jordan used the word “crab bucketing” and both spoke of the point of brewing to be primarily to sell beer so that any sales of this sort are certainly good sales to be welcomed.  They also use the word “we” to describe the brewing trade… which I find odd. But GBH doesn’t which I find way weirder given its use of observations like “[t]hat experience is shocking to hear” and the constant self-citation. A shame given they also get money quotes like this one which is effectively the buried lede:

“I must say I do find it distasteful that it’s Tesco,” says Hayward. “Many pub goers will find a trip to their local now a trip to a Tesco Express store.”

But more to the point, I would also point out that k-os provided us with “Crabbuckit” in 2009 which perhaps really is the point that needs to be understood. He also has provided us with the song of summer 2021.*

Somewhat relatedly, Mudgie has posted an interesting set of thoughts about the problem with the UK’s beer drinking cultures and those making fun of the beer drinking cultures:

Much criticism of craft brewers revolves around them supposedly being just in it for the money and not practising what they preach. The same charge is often levelled at climate campaigners. But, in both cases, surely the sense of unshakeable moral certainty is equally worthy of satire. Within craft beer there are strong elements of wanting to change the world and stick it to the man, and self-congratulatory mantras such as “beer people are good people” which are frankly inviting ridicule. If it was just a case of a bunch of geeks who liked weird beers but kept themselves to themselves nobody would be bothered. You can’t really satirise bellringers or metal detectorists.

Hmm… and Prince Phillip was laid to rest this week. A beer man apparently. Who liked his beer from the bottle. But also from the glass in a pinch. His preference was documented in 1976:

I served Prince Phillip a beer years ago when I worked at the Westin (Hotel Nova Scotia). He pushed the glass away and draink from the bottle. Had a Keith’s.

He looked at me once on that same tour. Then he looked away.

We also lost someone central to my understanding of brewing history tis week, Ian Hornsey. Ian wrote A History of Beer and Brewing which I reviewed in 2006 as well as Alcohol and its Role in the Evolution of Human Society which I discussed in 2013. His passing has not been marked, with even his old brewery Nethergate not noting it in social media or on their website. If you see an obit, please forward it along.

That is it for this week. The jab hangover has passed and it’s been snowing on my veggies. Meantime, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (who marked their 100th episode with gratitude for all) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plus a newcomer located by B+B: The Moon Under Water.

*I have to declare a conflict as realizing k-os liked this tweet of mine was one of the happiest five seconds of my 2021.

The Day After St. Paddy’s Day Beery News Notes

There, at least that’s over. That’s him there to the right, apparently ordering two. You know, this may have been the St. Patrick’s Day that I’ve always wanted. Quiet. By force of law. Even last year, during the first week of something being quite wrong, there were college idiots half smashed on a Tuesday loitering around the downtown square, wearing green things made of plastic. Amateurs. Appropriating plastic coated amateurs. In 2017, I asked why craft beer hated the day. I don’t think that is the same now but it’s mainly because craft beer has ceased to exist in the same sense four years on. Not much taking a unified stand against anything these days. Not much of a soap box to stand on anymore so much as being an object of the inquiries.

Breaking: craft beer loves generic globalist multi-internationalism.

In days of yore brewing news, Martyn has undertaken the work I’ve been begging him to undertake for at least a decade: exploring the 1898-1899 Canadian Inspectorate of Foods and Drugs study on stouts and porters:

…the average strength of the Canadian porters was 5.73 per cent abv, nearly 20 per cent less than the average stout strength. The two beers had almost identical average apparent attenuation, at 81.4 per cent for the porters, and 81.5 per cent for the stouts. Other analyses show big differences, however. The average percentage of maltose in the finished beer was 0.594 per cent for the porters, and 0.747 per cent for the stouts. The average percentage of solids in the finished beers was 4.99 per cent for porters and 5.6 per cent for the stouts…

Whammo! Kablammo!! Now you can all shut your pie holes about it and face facts.  “What about McDonagh & Shea porter out of  Winnipeg, Manitoba brewed to 8.8 per cent abv?” you say? Shut up. Get out.

Speaking of relatively recent history, sad news of a pub closing trade in Burton England was tweet-paired with this fabulous image of a 1962 price list for brewers and pub chain operators, Mitchells and Butlers. A great opportunity to identify grannie’s top drinks as well as the relative price of things. Fact: Dubonnet is not vermouth.

And in even more recent recent history, this picture of Eugene Levy and John Candy as the Shmenge Brothers of SCTV fame in the 1984 Kitchener Octoberfest parade posted this week by the University of Waterloo Library is as cheery as it gets. Careful fans will recall how pivotal the same parade is in the plot of the 1983 film Strange Brew, staring fellow SCTV alumni Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. That’s an actual production vehicle, by the way – a Messerschmitt Kabinenroller.

Thing you couldn’t do in 2019. Going back into past restaurant reviews and finding evidence of unidentified covid-19 symptoms being the unwitting basis for complaint.

Not quiet sure what to make of this supply chain news out of Australia, whether it means Asahi are switching their malt purchases to be more local or just that it is now going to be tracked as local:

The new supply chain means that local barley will be used to brew Australian beers like Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught for the first time in decades. Asahi, which developed the new direct sourcing program after it purchased Carlton & United last year, will now buy more than 70,000 tonnes of malted barley direct from farmers in Victoria and southern NSW to be used at its Yatala and Abbotsford breweries. Growers in northern NSW are expected to join the scheme before this year’s harvest while the first beers brewed under the program will be rolled out in April.

This one program appears to include 7.6% of Australian malt production so what ever it is it is significant.

Not unrelatedly, though he will fully disagree and it pains me when he does, Stan captured one of the best examples of craft beer nonsense that I’ve ever seen:

Breweries have terroir as well. But instead of revolving around a patch of land, ours are centered on a group of people. We operate our business on a human scale and with a human face. 

Remember when people used to say stuff like that? Many copyright law suits later and the firings of all the women in the craft beer bar and… and… and… Speaking of which in a sort of contrapuntal way, diversity in brewing and the craft beer trade continues to be a big discussion circling about the topics of both inclusion and actual identify as this article in Foodism Toronto discusses:

Sandhu has a beer on his menu dedicated to his grandfather, Chanan, which includes Indian coriander as one of its ingredients. “I actually do see a high percentage of Indian customers ordering the beer that’s named after my grandfather,” Sandhu says. “I think these populations feel safe and they feel comfortable at our brewery. We don’t just see them coming in just once, but they become regulars.”

Unlike the samey “I miss the pub” teary tales or the quite uncomfortable “beer has been the only thing that gives my life meaning” confessionals, Mr. G. Oliver has looked to the future and sees hope as well as these three interesting trends:

What use is a “share bottle” you can’t share? It’ll be interesting to see if the stemming of the pandemic brings the 750 back at all. I think people are doubling down on case sales; we haven’t wanted to make any more trips to retail than necessary. People are also buying fewer expensive specialty beers.  I also think that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of the non-alcoholic category. A lot of people are now home for lunch every day. What are you going to drink with your sandwich for lunch? NA beers can provide a perfect answer, and there’s nobody watching you “drink a beer” at lunch in your kitchen. NA is getting normalized faster than it would have otherwise.

By the way… does anyone know how you are supposed to find a story on GBH? What a hot mess of a front page.

Stonch, well known pub lad and operator of Britain’s longest-running beer blog, praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

Yes, there’s been a growth in excellent keg, and that has perhaps pushed cask ale out of the limelight in many beer-focused bars. Yes, the immediate after-effects of the pandemic will produce challenging conditions for cask-centric brewers. CAMRA has plenty to be keeping busy with, and without doubt can remain relevant and vital if it so chooses. Speaking as a publican, I can say with confidence that there is no way that a significant part of today’s pub-going public would be happy to visit a pub that didn’t offer reasonably well-kept cask conditioned ale. That commercial reality will preserve this particular part of Britain’s heritage for years to come.

And from the other side of the bar as well as knees under the organizational table, the Tand praised CAMRA on its 50th anniversary this week for, yes, achieving its goals:

I’m a relative newcomer, my tenure in the Campaign being a mere 40 years, but happily my anniversary as a member coincides, more or less, with the fiftieth year of our venerable organisation.  Like many, I’m looking forward to Laura Hadland’s book outlining CAMRA’s rich history and to reading the tales of those who have made this epic campaigning journey, both with and before me. Of course, while the organisation is to be congratulated, it is also an excuse for members to raise a glass to themselves, whether they are grey in beard and sandal or – like some of us – still youthful and inspired. Young or old, we are all the Campaign for Real Ale, and we can justifiably bask in our own reflected glory, even if just for a day.

For an alternative view, consider the Viz magazine perspective.

Best actual brewing thing I have seen this week? This:

OH MY GOSH – sooo excited!! Today’s the day we’re brewing our 1st 2021 Vintage Ale @FullersBrewery and I got the honour of mashing it in! Thanks @FullersGuy!

Me, I’d make my own now… but they employed a cunning strategy and reversed the image so we will never know how the beer was made. One thing is for sure. There aren’t any ambering hops in there.

There. Saturday is spring. Yes, the second spring of a pandemic but still spring. So while you turn the soil and plant the seed, check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft  podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword – when he isn’t in hiatus as at the mo, more like timeout for rudeness. And remember BeerEdge, too.

Some Thursday Beery News Notes For A Normal Mid-October Week

It’s normal now, right? All normal. Despite what we think and do, it’s definitely normal to get locked inside when the cold creeps in around the nooks and crannies in mid-October.  Yet people are still running around outside, the massive idiots. Wear your masks! And don’t complain about sensible pandemic safety processes!! And write short sentences with many exclamation marks!!! Hmm… the only thing that has really ticked me off this week is I haven’t found any good images to plunk to the right of the first paragraph. Bet Max has something… let me check…  nope. Jeff? Yup. Wear your masks.

Now that that is clear, first up we have a post by Stan is always cause for some serious noting, especially as it relates to the sense of smell and does not advise that loss of the sense is tied to Covid-19:

Researchers at Kyushu University found that the olfactory sensory neurons can exhibit suppression or enhancement of response when odors are mixed, meaning that perception is not the simple sum of the odors. In their experiments, mice that were genetically modified to have their neurons emit green light depending on the amount of calcium ions in them — an indicator of activity — upon absorption of excitation light, the researchers were able to record the response of the neurons in the mice’s noses.

Mice. Noses. Little mousie noses. As with most things, I do not actually understand what is going on here but I trust and have a firm belief in science that gives me an abiding sense of comfort. I am also a good smeller. That sort of thing regularly appeared on my middle school report cards.

Aaaaannnd…. I also don’t understand this from an email received from Pellicle… exactly… which states they will be converting from $ to £:

With recent exchange rate fluctuations the amount getting paid to us has become an uncertain factor, and we’re aware that most of our supporters are UK-based, so this will also avoid any extra fees from your bank when you are paying in dollars. It means we’ll get stronger idea of what we’re receiving each month, and can build more concrete editorial plans in advance. 

Govern yourselves accordingly. I do hope they still take my money. And I hope they take yours once you sign up, if only for pieces like this drinky travel piece taking us to rural England by Kate published this week under the title “With Provenance to Guide Us — Visiting The Moorcock Inn, West Yorkshire“:

It’s late February and sleeting sideways; the sky is an impressive shade of gritstone. Smoke plumes diagonally from the restaurant’s brick ovens outside, which have been slowly roasting mutton all night. Hot roast potatoes will be pulled from them throughout the afternoon, served with aioli as the bar snack of your dreams.

Kate also made the news. News? Oh. News! Oh, well. Let’s see what’s going on. Parts of Britain are now shutting again. In Glasgow, bar and restaurant workers dumped piles of ice in the street as a hospitality shutdown came in and the work went away. The commentary by, I assume, Jimmay is fabulous. Pub man Stonch unpacked an interesting aspect of the laws that applied in his area: the meaning of a “substantial meal”:

… this means the Coronavirus regs on this can be interpreted using case law relating to the ‘64 Act. In Timmis v Millman (a 1965 case) “a substantial sandwich accompanied by beetroot and pickles was a table meal”. So there you go. Get your beetroots ready, publicans!

And Mr. Mudge wrote on the same worthwhile issue:

If you are not going to have an objective yardstick such as price, then you will need to resort to a more subjective definition. Government minister Robert Jenrick* tied himself up in knots by saying that a Cornish pasty on its own wasn’t a substantial meal, but put it on a plate and add chips or salad and it magically becomes one. Few would dispute that a burger and chips would qualify, and the health-conscious should surely be allowed to substitute a salad for the chips. If a burger, then surely also a steak ciabatta, which is in principle the same kind of thing. And a cheese or hummus one for the vegetarians. Before too long, you have a cheese toastie with a couple of lettuce leaves qualifying.

You know… I don’t actually know what a toastie is exactly, either. I assume a toasted sandwich. Or a sandwich made of toast. That was on my middle school report cards too: “..the child thinks a toastie is a toasted sandwich… no hope…”

That’s pivoting. Everyone pivoting. Even though we are staying still. Here in Ontario, Ben has been writing upon his blog (taking a break from narrowcast poor radio impersonation) and decided that Covid-19 has been somewhat good for the Ontario booze trade or at least increased consumer access:

But there is an upside to this — if you’re the kind of person who can find the upside to a viral pandemic increasing our substance use – and it’s that the vigour with which we’ve all embraced the drink has actually had an affect on the availability, politics, and culture related to beer. Yes, this pandemic is a lot of things, most of them terrible, but it also might just be the best time to drink beer in Ontario.

Not necessarily a great deal for consumers medium or long term unless wholesale rates come down – but a good survival technique and good for us all to take part in now. New shops like Byward Market Wine Market (fine booze plus small takeaway meals) will be a next model… until the next next one comes.

In other good news here in eastern Ontario – as reported on Canadian Beer News and also discussed on OCBGTP – Slake Brewing in nearby Prince Edward County (just south of the very questionably named county seat of Picton) has opened. I post to remind myself to go.

Pivoting #2. Or is it #3? Or #4? Something called the Drinking Studies Network (that also looks a lot like a blog) posted “Threat or Opportunity? COVID-19 and Working Men’s Clubs” by Ruth Cherrington:

The post-COVID future of clubs could lie to some extent in drawing upon their enduring ethos and ideals which include their not-for-profit status. The 21st century setting has brought new challenges but also some tools that can help such as social media. With the usual club experience and contact with members impossible, club committee members had to make more use of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. Nearly 9% of those surveyed used social media to build up the club’s community and membership over lockdown. Facebook groups became more important for clubs’ committees, especially to let members know what was happening, when they would be reopening and how.

I’d go to an old farts club if they had them around here. Maybe. Would I? Dad peeling potatoes in Yorkshire during the Berlin Airlift might even qualify me for the Legion. But would I go during these the early dark ages? Do I go anywhere? Well, other than the used record shop…

Unrelatedly, this thread on the habits of those in sports and entertainment who passed through this person’s former job at a hotel bar is fun: “Bob Seeger: Honestly he looked like anybodys grandpa with his flannel and orthopedic shoes“; “Stevie Nicks …difficult.” Remember hotel bars?

Now, in this week’s History Comes Alive corner, Gary is finding the time and steam power to get some of the beer history researched and writ… the opposite of my efforts, a personal failing that gnaws within me. One of many. This week he posted about the first draught beer sold in bottles and began with a handy definition:

Pasteurization is used in brewing, including for most imports and mass-marketed beers, not to make it safe for consumption as in the case of milk, say, but to render it stable from a microbiological aspect –bar  to retard souring in particular. Thus, for modern, bright, bottled or canned beer that is not pasteurized, which is the first?* Coors beer is a notable early case, at least the domestic U.S. Coors.** Coors did not abandon pasteurization in bottles until 1959 though…

Elsewhere in space and time, Martin asked “where does Bristol end?” and found a pub that went all snug for Covid-19. BB2 replied: “One of our guidelines is unless there’s an open field separating it, it’s in Bristol.”

Beer… should reference something beery… The proper brewing of lager was discussed in Craft Beer & Brewing through a piece by Steve Holle of the KC Bier Company in Kansas City, Missouri:

Traditional lager brewing requires “more” than a typical ale fermentation. Because the “more” requires additional costs and resources to achieve very subtle, small, and incremental enhancements to flavor, there is always the temptation to take shortcuts by buying cheaper ingredients, skipping decoction, pitching less yeast, raising the fermentation temperature, shortening the conditioning time, or using artificial carbonation.

This neatly illustrates nicely the need for a separation of traditional lager from macro gak conceptually. I was thinking of that when I was writing back and forth with Jeff yesterday about his excellent SNPA post. Others were also thinking of proper lager brewing. Alistair was asking about if decoction mashing was practiced in Victorian Britain.

And finally, Kate Bernot has written about Canada’s ice beers… though sorta missed the twin towers of the phenomenon, Maximum Ice and all the future goth TV ads especially the one with The Smiths*, in favour of something about… a penguin. Still, it is a handy primer and notes importantly that the ice beer boom never busted as it traveled south:

Ice beers are a Canadian invention dating back to the early 1990s; they’re essentially stronger versions of the domestic lagers North Americans had been drinking for decades. American beer companies swiftly copied this “innovative” idea and mass-produced their own versions including Milwaukee’s Best Ice, Keystone Ice, Bud Ice, Busch Ice, and Natural Ice. 

Why does it live on? It’s richer as well as stronger. So curlers dig the stuff. Goes with rye and K-Tel LPs.

There. Enough! I’m rating this a mid-grade week. Or maybe just a mid-grade post. Either way, another week has passed. Like the grains of sand passing through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives. Remember there’s  Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan shits on tweens!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Plenty of good writing. Only a little journalism. Journalism. Yup. Apparently all writing is ultimately… journalism. Sorry Shakespeare. You aren’t in any give-away trade papers.

*Someone at the Labatt PR firm back then knew the value of good music in a beer ad.

Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week The Patios Reopened

A better week. Not a perfect week in any sense but a better week. Here in Ontario, more coming back to life. As of this Friday, where I live I can get a haircut, go to a church that is 30% full and hang out with ten people at a time. Things are moving forward. One key issue: should pubs still have a proper level of grot as they reopen? Hmm… And when Her Majesty the Queen told us “we will meet again” did she imagine it would be on asphalt in a parking lot?

Furthermore on the hereabouts, on Monday the AGCO announced the expansion for outdoor service on Monday, effective in most of Ontario this Friday. Toronto and the surrounding areas as still considered too much at risk and will open at a later date. The rules for creating a bigger outdoor area are interesting:

1. The physical extension of the premises is adjacent to the premises to which the licence to sell liquor applies;
2. The municipality in which the premises is situated has indicated it does not object to an extension;
3. The licensee is able to demonstrate sufficient control over the physical extension of the premises;
4. There is no condition on the liquor sales licence prohibiting a patio; and,
5. The capacity of any new patio, or extended patio space where the licensee has an existing licensed patio, does not exceed 1.11 square metres per person.

Even more interesting, those who meet the above criteria are not required to apply to the AGCO or pay a fee to temporarily extend their patio or add a temporary new licensed patio and they are not required to submit any documentation to the AGCO to demonstrate compliance with the above criteria.  We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Elsewhere, Boak and Bailey have celebrated another step towards liberation with the takeaway service at their local micropub being now a going concern:

…the reopening of The Drapers is definitely next level, game-changing stuff. Not necessarily because every single beer is utterly brilliant, but because [w]e suddenly have access to a range of cask beers, not just one at a time; [w]e don’t have to decide a week in advance what we want to drink, and we (probably) don’t need to worry about running out between deliveries[; and T]he range that’s been on offer so far includes things we would not have been able to get hold of easily. It also includes new-to-us beers that we wouldn’t have wanted to risk buying in bulk, on spec.*

Stonch tweeted about one of the pains in the neck he has to deal with as he moves to reopening:

The shysters trying to cash in hospitality operators’ anxiety about re-opening at the moment are something else. Steady trickle into the inbox offering weird, unscientific and unnecessary products and services in the name of “COVID-19 secure”. Fuck off, spivs.

The timing and rules for reopening in Britain remain murky at best but Mr. Protz celebrated one  wonderful milestone, the return to brewing cask at Timothy Taylor’s:

We are incredibly chuffed to announce that today is the first day since lockdown that we have produced CASK!! Thank you so much to every single one of you for your support through this incredibly difficult period! Slowly but surely, we are getting there!

Katie wrote an excellent bit on the lockdown’s effect on small brewers… when they weren’t brewing including preserving, returning to home towns and this:

For the synth-aware, Adrian’s current kit (at the time of writing this) was his Eurorack, AKAI Pad controller, Yamaha mixer and Roland Boutiques SH-01, TR-09 and TB-03. If you fancy hearing his creations in action, find him on twitter at @wishbonebrewery.

Catching up elsewhere, Gary has been busy and I particularly liked this piece of his on a 1935 conference which added helpfully to the question of 1800s adjectives in North American beer labeling:

Rindelhardt stated that cream ale and lively ale, which he considered synonymous, were devised in the mid-1800s to compete with lager. He said they were ale barrelled before fermentation had completed to build up carbonation in the trade casks, or krausened in those casks, and sent out. In contrast, sparkling ale and present use ale – again synonymous – might also be krausened, and later force-carbonated, but were a flat stored ale blended with lager krausen. This form, provided the lager krausen was handled correctly, still offered an ale character but in a fizzy, chilled way as lager would offer.

“Cream ale”  and “cream beer” are of special interest as careful readers will recall. Check out his thoughts on the revival of Molson Golden, which I can only pronounce as if I were from Moncton, New Brunswick.

Speaking of history, I was reading through Canadian artist Tom Thompson’s diaries of the summer he disappeared over a century ago and was struck by this:

June 7, 1917: I had a hell of a hangover this morning. The whisky we had yesterday hit me hard but at least I didn’t go blind. That happened numerous times after the Temperance Act went into effect and people started making their own alcohol  Sometimes the alcohol wasn’t right and people would go blind drinking it.

Note that he did not say prohibition and indicated activities not akin to prohibition. Never really right to use the US term and apply it to the Canadian context.

Closer to the present, Jeff wrote about the great Bert Grant (and I added my two pieces in the cheap seats of Twitter replies), Canada’s true gift to craft beer:

The West Coast was divided into segments, and the cities of Portland and Seattle followed a parallel but separate track. The breweries there had their own founders and in one is a historical lacuna that explains a great deal about the influences that guided hoppy ales in the Pacific Northwest. That forgotten figure is Bert Grant, who left the hops business to start his own brewery in 1982 and whose first beers created an instant appetite, decades ahead of the rest of the country, for hoppy ales.

Read all three pieces as you only understand 1982 if you understand 1944.

Jordan celebrated a milestone, hitting a decade in the beer soaked life.  What did he learn? “Soylent Green is people!!!” No… let’s check that… no, beer is people:

If you wanted to play around with ingredients, you’d be a home brewer. A professional brewer, by default, brews for someone else. One assumes that a professional brewer does that because they enjoy it. One assumes that they make a product they believe in to the best of their ability and share it with the world. One assumes they are mindful of all the collective effort that goes into that.

Speaking of home brewers, in 1973 the BBC sent the fabulous Fyfe Robertson in search of the perfect pint made in an English basement. Have I posted this before? If I have it’s worth a second look. Speaking of Auntie Beeb, Merryn linked to a BBC 4 story on bere barley in Orkney.

One last thing. I have seen a few calls from part time editors feeling adrift who are encouraging vulnerable beer writers to turn to them in exchange for the usual pittance and a scraping of your voice in exchange for theirs. Do not be fooled! This is the time for you to be you:

Beer writers! What have you wanted to cover that might not appeal to a mainstream site? An underreported subject that merits a quick dive? An aspect of beer culture that deserves a closer look? Get a blog!

[What is a “quick dive” anyway?]

There. A better week. Keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin uppitry. Check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. Thanks for stopping by while not leaving the house. Except now you can leave your house a bit more. Do it!

*Edited only to make things as I wish they were.

The Two-Thirds Into Spring 2020 Edition Of Thursday Beery News Notes

I am having trouble with time. I thought it would drag but it’s racing for me. I thought it was maybe May 9th when I woke up. 11:45 am comes at an alarming pace each day. Things are opening up here. Tennis but no football. Playing catch as long as no one get tagged out at home. It’s sensible as we have done a good job locking the damn bug down… but then what. Society is temporarily reorganizing to maximize activity safely. I want to get a beer at a patio but so far it’s still my own patio in my own backyard. Just grateful that this isn’t happening in any November I’ve known.

As excellently illustrated above by Yves Harman, Reuters reported that the Mons of the Saint-Sixtus abbey are up and at’em:

The Saint-Sixtus abbey, home to 19 monks, launched an online sale on Thursday evening of 6,000 crates, with pick-ups starting Friday. Exceptionally, customers can buy three crates. Normally it is just two. Customers can come as usual by car, but are told not to leave their vehicles while queuing until they pass a newly installed traffic light before the pick-up point. There, a lay worker in mask and gloves passes their 24-bottle crates through a small gap in a plastic screen. 

Good for them. I am not obsessive about the stuff but nice to see money flowing. Beer Ritz is opening, too, and Buckfast is back – buct Cookie wants more. You know, it’ll be interesting in the post-mortem if we learn that Covid-19 can actually be transmitted though small gaps in plastic screens.

Matthew has gotten his game going, too, as illustrated by this post on how beer bloggers are coping with Covid-19. I must be losing my touch as all the targets are not obvious to me (but interesting to see Tandyman disappointed in being left out):

Any kind of pub-type experience is at least ten weeks away at this point, so at best we’re not even halfway through this yet.  But if you, dear reader, think that you are suffering, imagine the travails of those most affected by this ordeal – the pub and beer bloggers of the UK.  As this particular blog is among those that are most well-regarded and connected, we at Seeing The Lizards have asked a select group of other bloggers on how they’re coping while cut off from their usual stimuli.  And, importantly, how much they’re drinking as a result.

Dr. J. J.-B. tweeted some excellent thoughts about her role in the overall construct of social justice advocacy within craft brewing and lessons learned from both Covid-19 and her carpentry skills:

Keynote speaking, workshops, and intensive on-site consulting are simply not tools that we can rely upon in a post-COVID world. And those tools had severe limitations that I am enthusiastically addressing over these weeks of physical distancing.

Good. She has shared hints of this before and I have to admit I am pleased. I have had at times a role in advocating for indigenous rights among legal circles as well as the importance of records related privacy rights and the public speaking role can seem to trigger a easy nod from the audience rather than a revivalist’s commitment. I am rooting for her. Fight!

Gary has posted a very good discussion on California Steam Beer which I like most of all because it aligns with my own thoughts on the matter while going into more detail:

The one area I do not necessarily agree with these authorities, contemporary as they are, is their assignment of steam beer as solely bottom-fermented. Clearly they state this, indeed Wahl & Henius state that lager yeast is a special type of bottom yeast. Kummerlander simply states that steam beer yeast is “a bottom-fermenting yeast”, but that’s clear enough. Buchner ditto. I find the area much less clear. To scientists and technical brewers after about 1900, classification was increasingly important, as of course today. Between 1850 and 1900 when steam beer was in ascendancy in California and still often made in rude conditions, e.g., without mechanical cooling of wort, such distinctions would have been less important.

It also serves as a good companion to Jeff’s post on Anchor Steam of a few weeks ago. It is settled. “Steam” was just useful techno-branding.

Speaking of early 1900s brewing, Ron posted an interesting piece on German WWI brewing constraints:

I’ve seen UK brewing records where ther’s (sic) the odd much stronger version brewed, which is then blended with weaker beers post-fermentation. The point being to get healthy yeast to be pitched into later brews. And that was when worts were in the 1020ºs, considerably higher than the 3º Plato (1012º) they had been forced down to in Germany.

And in more brewerio-historique news, Martyn has made a plea for today’s brewers to record what is happening during this pandemic for the future Rons out there:

…even though brewers have plenty and more to do just to try to survive right now, I have a request, as a historian: when this IS all over, or even before, if you have a moment, please, take time to record what you did, what you’re doing, to survive, what strategies you adopted, what changes you made, from organising home deliveries to turning your beer into hand-sanitizer. Because in ten, 20, 50 years’ time, people will be looking back at this and saying: “Wow – what must it have been like to have lived through that, to have tried to run a company, keep it going, while all that was going on?” And you can let them know.

Katie is taking sensible breaks.

For the double and as part of the Twitter discussion on the utility and limits of style as a construct, Ron has posted a challenge to identify which late 1930s British ales were branded at IPAs:

To emphasise the difficulty, nay, impossibility of splitting apart UK Pale Ale and IPA in the 20th century, I thought up a little game. It’s called spot the IPA. The table is of various beer brewed in 1938 and 1939. Some were called as Pale Ale and some were called IPA. Can you tell which is which? The IBU value is my calculation, based on the recipe. Got gospel, but at least a general indication of the bitterness level.

I am of the “style = branding” school of grump but many other well stated views are in the thread which may have started back here with Jeff (double) on May 10th… (who cites Ron which may make for a treble.)

And, if you squint, you can read Beth‘s contribution to Craft Beer & Brewing mag on the situation in Oakland. Excellent.

That’s it for now. Might have a couple of beer after work tomorrow. Now that the blood pressure is back down. Gotta watch out for bad habits in these times of stress. Keep writing and reading and keeping up with the chin uppitry. Check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. Thanks for stopping by while not leaving the house.

 

 

Wouldn’t We All Prefer A Nice Quart of Dorchester Ale… Or Beer?

Have my mentioned my last two and a half years have been a bit of a blur at work?  The history blogging has suffered.  But it’s always the things we hold most dear that fall away, aren’t they.  Well, as I expect is the case with you, it’s a bit quieter in the evenings around here so I thought I would pull out some of the delayed research and have a look at Dorchester Ale and Beer starting with a summary of the known information to date.  First, if you look at this notice in The Literary Gazette of 1819, you will see something that is apparent from the research: there is both Dorchester Ale and Dorchester Beer.  For purposes of this bit of writing, I am not going to get into the distinction but it is important to note that they likely were not synonyms.

Dorchester is the county town of Dorset, which sits on the middle of the bottom of England on the Channel. Daniel Defoe praised it in his book A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain (1724–26):

“The town is populous, tho’ not large, the streets broad, but the buildings old, and low; however, there is good company and a good deal of it; and a man that coveted a retreat in this world might as agreeably spend his time, and as well in Dorchester, as in any town I know in England…”

Dorchester was a key departure port for Puritans emigrating to New England in the 1600s. Dorchester beer was popular before and after the American Revolution from at least the 1760s in New York City to the early 1800s. It is not mentioned by Locke in 1674. There was a song about it published in 1784 praising its power to even sooth political disunion.  Coppinger described its ingredients in this way in the 1815 edition of his fabulously named book The American Practical Brewer and Tanner:

      • 54 Bushels of the best Pale Malt.
      • 50 lb. of the best Hops.
      •   1 lb. of Ginger.
      •   ¼ of a lb. of Cinnamon, pounded.

So, a spiced pale ale says he. You can figure out the 54 bushel to 14 barrel ratio but his version of it does not look like super strong stuff.  That would seem to go against the cross-Atlantic shipping market for it so we can think about that a bit more. Or we can turn to North American’s best beer writer who doesn’t write book nor blog, Gerry Lorentz, who added a great whack of information in a comment left at this here blog posted in October 2018 which I add here in full simply because I can:

I’m sure that Dorchester beer probably didn’t stay constant over the centuries. Coppinger’s recipes contain a long list of additives, so that fact that he says Dorchester beer contained ginger and cinnamon probably doesn’t amount to much. Friederich Accum indicated that “Dorchester Beer is usually nothing else than Bottled Porter,” this coming after a discussion of Old Hock, or white porter. In Observations on the Diseases in Long Voyages to Hot Climates (1775), John Clark also indicated that Dorchester beer was similar to porter. He discussed “country beer,” noting it as one of “the usual diluters” of meals for the fashionable sort in India: “Country beer is made by mixing one part Dorchester beer, or porter, with two or more parts of water.” Others writers viewed Dorchester beer as similar to brown stout. One early twentieth-century researcher looking to get more information on Dorchester Beer put out a question in Notes and Queries in 1905 asking about a footnote in William Gawler’s 1743 poem, Dorchester, that indicated that “an eminent Dealer in Dorchester Beer, now living in London, reckons amongst his Customers the late Czar, the Kings of Prussia and Denmark, as well as his late and present Majesty of Great Britain,” which points to a Baltic trade similar to porter.

Both William Ellis in the London and Country Brewer (1837) and John Farley in The London Art of Cookery, 7th edition (1792) point out the “chalky water” used in making Dorchester beer. Farley writes that “The Dorchester beer, which is so much admired, is, for the most part brewed of chalky water, which is almost every where in that county ; and as the soil is generally chalk.” So, perhaps it had some Burtonesque qualities to it.

Thomas Hardy probably has the best, and least helpful, description of Dorchester Beer in his book The Trumpet Major, in which he states: “It was of the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body, yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet with a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste, but finally, rather heady. The masses worshipped it, and the minor gentry loved it better than wine, and by the most illustrious country families it was not despised.”

Excellent. Clearly a strongish ale. And Gerry is always right. I would but quibble the slightest bit about the qualities “Burtonesque” but I have my own theory about the vomit inducing levels of sulfur that spawned that region’s Satanically hopped styles a generation or two earlier that Dorchester rose into popularity.

In the 1922 book Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, by R.T. Hopkins, we read

Dorchester has now lost its fame for brewing beer. But about 1725 the ale of this town acquired a very great name. In Byron’s manuscript journal (since printed by the Chetham Society) the following entry appears:

“May 18, 1725. I found the effect of last night drinking that foolish Dorset, which was pleasant enough, but did not at all agree with me, for it made me stupid all day.”

A mighty local reputation had “Dorchester Ale,” and it still commands a local influence, for this summer I was advised by the waiter of the Phoenix Hotel to try a bottle of “Grove’s Stingo” made in the town. It is a potent beverage–and needs to be treated with respect, to be drunk slowly and in judicious moderation.

Hopkins continues with the same passage from Thomas Hardy that Gerry L. noted in his comment, above, as well as others from Hardy as well as a mid-1700s song “The Brown Jug” that references a Dorchester Butt as a measure of at least one lad’s girth.

Acknowledging the love-hate relationship we have with records, the earliest i have found Dorchester Ale is recorded as being delivered to North America relates to a shipment to Virginia mentioned in a letter dated, oddly, June 28th and July 25th 1727 from one Robert Carter to Edward Tucker, the latter of whom died in 1739, merchant of Weymouth, Dorset who served as mayor in 1705, 1716, 1721, 1725, and 1735, and also as a member of Parliament:

…Your Portland is gon to York to fill up I have Six hhds of my Crop Tobbo: on board her which Sent you a bill of Lading had Russell bin at liberty to have Sent a Sloop for this Tobbo: he might have got redy for this Fleet I must desire you to Send me in the next year in one of your Ships a hogshead of your fine Dorchester Ale well and Carefully bottled of and under very good Package Your Master Britt will tell you how I was abused in the last. The Southam Cyder the Portland brought me I doubt will never be fine it is not yet Bottled If you can Send me a hogshead of it in bottles that is right good Such as I had two Years ago, it would [be] Acceptable but in Cask I will have no more I am with a great deal of Sincerity…

Hmm… it is fine and worth being shipped. In 1752, Frances Monday was before the judge in London’s Old Bailey indicted for that she assaulted John Hall and stole from him one half guinea in gold.  The evidence of Hall begins thusly:

Last Thursday se’nnight I had been in the Borough, staid late, and was in liquor. I could not get into my lodgings in Grey’s-Inn-lane. I was going from thence to Westminster to an acquaintance there, and passing by the new church in the Strand this woman came cross the way to me and asked me to go with her and drink some Dorchester ale. I went to a place which she said was the Black Swan between the new church and Exeter Change. I drank but one glass of beer. She then asked me to give her some shrub. which I did, and a bottle to take home with her.

Ms. Monday was acquitted based on her alternate version of events, backed by witnesses: “The gentleman made me a present of it. After he had what he desired of me, he said he would have it again, or he’d swear a robbery against me.” So… perhaps a sort of beer that was name dropped perhaps to show a bit of unwarranted class?

In his MA thesis for the Université de Sherbrooke submitted April 2014, Mathieu Perron stated that Dorchester ale (or beer) was mentioned among numerous other beers in the notices published in La Gazette de Québec during the early years after the fall of New France:

De 1764 à 1774, sur 28 mentions relatives à la bière dans les petites annonces de La Gazette de Québec, 15 occurrences appartiennent à la catégorie « Porter », le restant étant réparti entre différents Malt Liquor. Ces bières (Dorchester Ale/Beer, Yorchester Ale, Taunton Ale, Welch Ale) aux degrés d’alcool élevés, génèreusement houblonnées,  raditionnellement consommées par les classes moyennes anglaises, attestent du transfert des habitudes de consommation chez les classes marchandes de la province…

Fabulous references to the variety available to the military elite in that garrison town.  And I need to see the ad for “Yorchester” ale now.

Further south, in his diary of 1775-76, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper, pastor of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts – a bit of a coffee fiend –  records being treated to “a Glass of Dorchester Ale” on one occasion as he made his way around his fellow revolutionaries in Boston during its bombardment by the British.

After the war, as part of reparations claims which were made with various degrees of success, Henry Howell Williams a 1775 tenant on Noddles Island in Boston Harbour claimed for goods “Destroyed by a Detatchment of the American Army or Carried off by said Detatchment, for the Use of the United States” claimed just in terms of the liquor in his cellar:

3 Barrls. Cyder 36/2 Q. Casks Wine 220
1 Dozn. Ditto Bottled		 1412.–
1 Hamper Dorchester Ale. 6 Dozn. Excellent Cyder 3.16.–
3 Dozn. Carrl. Wine 1 keg Methegalin Sweet Oyle &c. 6:4:–
2 Hogsheads Old Jamaica Spirit 231 Gallns @ 5/- 57.15.–
3 Hogsheads New Rum Just got home from the
W. Indies Quanty. 234 Gallons a 3/4-		 39:0:0

Which seems like a lot – and also places Dorchester Ale in fine company.* And on both sides of the Revolution in Puritan Boston, a century and a half after being founded by Dorset folk.

At about the same time back in England but on the same end of the cannon demographically speaking as Mr. Williams of Noddles Island, we read about a pleasure garden named Jenny’s Whim in the Pimlico area of London, “a very favorite place of amusement for the middle classes”:

This feature of the garden is specially mentioned in a short and slight sketch of the place to be found in the Connoisseur of March 15th, 1775:—”The lower part of the people have their Ranelaghs and Vauxhalls as well as ‘the quality.’ Perrott’s inimitable grotto may be seen for only calling for a pint of beer; and the royal diversion of duck-hunting may be had into the bargain, together with a decanter of Dorchester [ale] for your sixpence at ‘Jenny’s Whim.'”

Then things get all scientific. In the 1797 essay “Experiments and Observations on Fermentation and Distillation of Ardent Spirit” by Joseph Collier the pre- and post-fermentation densities of four type of beer are described: Porter, Ringwood Ale, Dorchester Ale and Table Beer. It is interesting. Of course it is. If it was not interesting why would I have mentioned. it? The author uses a “saccharometer” like this. Without knowing the details of the calibration or the scale, the relative ratio is enough to tell us that Dorchester is sweet and a bit strong, a bit more than double that of Table beer. Dorchester drops 39 degrees of the “whatever scale” where Table beer drops 18. Ringwood drops 44 degrees but has a final gravity that is two-thirds of Dorchester.  Notice too that these are “the most celebrated malt liquors” – which is interesting.

In an 1816 German text entitled Jenaische allgemeine literatur-zeitung, Volume 3, it is listed in another list of English ales. I include the whole passage because it’s pretty interesting as a snapshot of the times. Ron or someone cleverer that I will be able to translate but quite neato to see the references to Queen’s ale and Wittshire ale . 

More science. In 1829, Dorcehster Ale is listed in the book Description and Use of the Brewer’s Sacchatometer as having a “proportion of alcohol” of 5.56 which placed it below Burton and Edinburgh Ale and above London Porter.

Does it start to become faded? After his fall from grace and the financial support of the Regent, Beau Brummell exiled in Calais in the 1820s was said to drink it according to this 1860s account and an 1855 article in Harpers:

 Not even for Lord Westmoreland, his creditor for frequent loans, would the Man of Fashion consent to “feed” at an earlier hour. Being a pauper, Dorchester ale, with a petit verre, and a bottle of the best claret were his usual beverage when alone; but he counted largely on invitations to dinner from passing Englishmen. As he grew older, gluttony grew upon him; ho had not the heart to refuse an invitation, no matter what the hour of ” feeding.”

In Slaters Directory 1852/3 it was written:

The spinning of worsted yarn and the manufacture of woollen goods , formerly ranked as the staple here; but these branches have greatly declined, if they are not entirely lost – blanketing and fiuscy being the only articles now manufactured. Dorchester ale has long been famed, and it still maintains a superior character; the mutton of this district is liekwise held in great and general estimation. 

The same source for that text has a helpful page on one Robert Galpin of Fordington in the County of Dorset, Brewer, which give a helpful sense of scale of brewing operations then or at least his operation at the time.

What to make of it all?  Dorchester Ale / Beer appear to be a Georgian thing that arcs in parallel to Burton and Nottingham, coming after 1600s and early 1700s strong English ales like Lambeth, Derby, Hull and Northdown/Margate.  Like Taunton, it is exported to North America and perhaps elsewhere in the colonies. It is not as strong as others and seems to have chalky water with a pronounced residual sweetness.  Premium while not necessarily being a headbanger.

Interesting also to note how these strong pale ales named after the city or region in which they were brewed generally (but not exclusively) fit between (i) the Medieval and Tudor pattern of naming beers according to their heft: half-penny, two penny, double double and (ii) the brewer branded beer, scientifically made proto-styles we start seeing beginning in the 1800s. Like the climactic observations on the reason French bread in great in the recent excellent article in the New Yorker “Baking Bread in Lyon“, they would have been remarkable for some local characteristic that set them apart.

I will have to organize these posts on English Stuart and Georgian era regional strong pale ales into some better categorizations. They need an umbrella term. They are not styles in the same sense as their predecessors or their descendants. But they were clearly recognizable and sought out for their prestige.

*And I trust that table rendered well at your end of the internets.

Your Brief Beery Thursday News Notes For Boxing Day

Like you, I am tired. End of year tired. I was tired on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day offers no rest. It feels like the end of a university term and tomorrow we travel. 2019 was a good and busy year – and next week, in my fifty-seventh year, I enter my seventh decade on the planet. I need a rest. So I will be brief this week if only to see if I can get in another nap. Ray of B+B perhaps captured my mood with the tweeted image to the right accompanied by the one word “England.”

I had no idea that Dec 23rd was celebrated as Tibb’s Eve in Newfoundland. Fabulous. And Cookie gave tips on how to survive the 25th by being sensible on the 24th.

Jeff at Beervana had a good bit on style evolution. He uses the example of an oat ale from twenty years ago. Somewhere, I have similar notes on a hot IPA from the late 1980s. I am not sure if these illustrate a continuity of evolution or the fact that evolution is a cycle of organic unplanned diversification of traits followed by crisis out of which only a few of the diversifications survive followed by more organic unplanned diversification of traits.

Alistair at Fuggled is reviewing the year in a number of posts, including on his pale beer experiences of 2019.

@oldmudgie noted something endtimsey in the Morning Advertiser‘s round up of the year 2019 in craft. Seems like most popular craft brands in the UK are part of big industrial brewers’ portfolios. Only four years ago, it was something just starting to get confusing. Where will be be in another four?

Gary did us all a big favour with finding and exploring a reference to Labatt IPA from 1867 as yet uncovered in the English discussion:

I searched carefully and could not locate an English version, I believe none was prepared. The author was A.C.P. R. (Phillipe) Landry, whose biography may be read in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, here. He wrote the study when at Laval University in Quebec City. He was trained in chemistry and agronomy, and was later a noted federal politician, surviving to 1919. I’m not aware that his work has been previously cited in Canadian beer historiography. I have not read every single brewing history resource, so if anyone did raise Landry’s study, I’m happy to know of it.

What thrills me is how it fills a gap in my much suspected continuity of indigenous strong ale in eastern North America from the 1700s to today:

This creates a very useful stepping stone chronologically from NY state strong ales [edit: ie those brought in by the Loyalists] to Albany Ale (1830s) to Labatt (1860s) and Dominion White Label (1890s), to EP Taylor (1930s), to Bert Grant (1980s) and to today’s high test craft IPAs.

This is a different branch from the sequence that goes Albany Ale to Ballantine IPA to Sierra Nevada that Craig wrote about almost four years ago now. The idea that we can link the transmission of experience from generation to generation as part of general culture seems much more reasonable to me than anyone involved in first gen micro brewing having an “a-ha!” out of which the rest came.

And there was a hot blast of unhappiness aimed at the Cicerone server training program, much of which was unhappier than I thought warranted but much of which was also based on some obvious limitations. This is at the heart of objections: “…dropping coin on some private co. that clearly hoards prestige on specious grounds.” Plenty of people responded with the sort of authorized Party Central Communications Committee invocation of craft’s inherent right to silence we are sued to… or, stunningly, rooted for rote memorization as a intellectual pursuit. These, of course, are some of the most depressing things about good beer** and something I attribute to money or rather a lack of money in the complainant’s accounts. One does not bite the hand that feeds you.

My take is that it is always funny when folk compare it to law school* (as if the standards and candidates are equivalent) when the course and others like it isn’t formal education and not a source of new ideas like an academic process. It’s a social media propagated, non-accredited, proprietary, non-peer reviewed program that (given the intellectual property controls) sits outside of the marketplace of ideas. But it is a reasonably affordable and accessible certification for educating front of house staff to a proper standard. Which is good enough. And the basis for a good next step. Best new observation? Robyn’s:

Gonna give a slightly spicy take and add that it’s an industry cert that is both prohibitively expensive and made as a necessity for women and other marginalized folks to get in order to be taken with 1/10th of the seriousness a straight white male homebrewer gets by default.

Me? Until I see the published archive including the thesis of every graduate, I’m not going to look to the program for too many interesting new ideas. But whenever someone serves me a good beer with a reasonably knowledgeable comment, I welcome the skill and assume they are a graduate with some level in their back pocket.

Actually seriously, New Belgium’s owner-employees voted to sell to Kirin despite, as noted two weeks ago, the problems with a profitable authoritarian military branch in Myanmar being in the mix. As one report noted:

Activists are hoping the publicity surrounding the trial will increase the pressure on international businesses like Kirin to sever ties with the Myanmar military. “The profits are being pumped back into the military, helping to fund their operations,” said Mark Farmaner, director of the Burma Campaign UK, which has published a “Dirty List” of about 80 companies linked to the Myanmar military. “Kirin are literally helping to fund genocide.”

Remember: it’s about money. Strike another brewery off my list of interests.

Well, that was more than I intended. As we head toward a new year, don’t forget to check in with Boak and Bailey’s on Saturdays, at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes a mid-week post of notes from The Fizz as well. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too.  I’m off to sing some Boxing Day carols and eat leftovers. Happy New Year to you all!

*Yet never oddly engineering of medicine…
**…not just my view…

The Halloween Edition Of Thursday Beer News. Boo.

I’d be a bit nervous at the Sing Sing Kill Brewery

Ah, Halloween. A right nor-easter is promised meaning 100 mph winds, lashing rain – and me lonely and all dressed up at the front door looking at a bowl with a minimum of 15,000 calories per handful. We get maybe 12 kids max in a good year. Maybe. I have a vegetable garden on my front lawn. I am marked as a neighbourhood weirdo. But I get ahead of myself. Halloween is tonight. The Future. What’s gone on this past week?

Last Friday just as the weekly news cycle began, Jeff posted about the problem with novelty as it turns into longevity:

Every brewery that was once an emblem of a shining new future—Widmer, Hair of the Dog, Ninkasi, Boneyard (to cite local examples)—has seen trends move on without them. Great Notion and Ruse are the current trendsetters, but time continues to march. We have absolutely no experience of what happens when four thousand breweries immediately become “old school” before our eyes.

Coming up on three years ago now, I wondered about novelty and whether it was possible that today’s twenty somethings could “actually get a bit verklempt over memories of weird fruit flavoured gose thirty years from now.” Interesting that weird fruit flavoured gose is sorta dead to us all now. It’s so 2017. Novelty’s pace has increased. The Pub Curmudgeon posted about another aspect of the same phenomenon, the pervasive presence of recently but no longer quite cool craft:

 It’s not the absolute bleeding edge of craft, but even so it’s a pretty respectable selection, including the likes of Vocation, Magic Rock, Thornbridge, Five Points, Crate, Toast and Camden. It’s interesting that pretty much all of these beers now seem to have moved from bottles to cans. The German discounters, Aldi and Lidl, have introduced their own-brand “craft-a-likes” at even lower prices. This has attracted a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the craft influencers, complaining that such low prices will devalue the concept and won’t give brewers a decent return.

Good value should always be something we are grateful for. In any other marketplace, this is called The Victory Of The Consumer! What? You disagree? Did I miss something?

Note: he didn’t drop the beer.

Ron unpacked an advert he found for the sale of Barclay’s Russian Stout from that part of the foreign land known as the past, aka 1922:

…another Barclay’s Russian Stout advert. With some more interesting claims. The oddest being that Bismarck liked Russian Stout. Especially as the advert is from just after WW I, when there was still considerable anti- German feeling.

These things are funny. In 1816, a year after the end of a bitter border war with the US of A, Albany Ale was being sold in my fair military town.

Business Insider posted an interesting short video bio of Celeste Beatty, the first African American woman to own a brewery in the US, the Harlem Brewing Company in New York City. Here is a Forbes story on her from a few years ago with more background.  Speaking of vids, here is a scene from a Scottish pub the very noo.

The shadowy Portman Group is at it again but this time I fully agree if only because the Bearded Brewery defended its cider named Suicyder because “the noose references reflected the owner’s previous career at the Forestry commission where a noose was used to dismantle unsafe trees“! If one is going to attorn to the jurisdiction of a trade tribunal please do not be silly. I am an owner of The Ashley Book of Knots and I know no one in their right mind would every use a noose to take apart a tree given a noose is used to tighten on to a short stubby think like a head. To be clear, I give you a selection of arborists knots. Knots don’t lie.

Health news update. Or really not an update as this is old news. Again, there is no j-curve. Don’t believe otherwise – alcohol is just about degrees of badness:

…for a long time, the consensus was that abstaining from alcohol is unhealthier than consuming moderate amounts of alcohol (equivalent to one or two drinks a day). But that “J”-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption, and death and disease, has come under criticism. It’s now widely understood that a lot of this data could be flawed: people abstaining from alcohol may be doing so because they’re unwell, rather than becoming unwell because they’re abstaining.

Here in Ontario, we have no need to worry about the j-curve or not as, woohoo, the new government is passing new relaxed liquor laws left right and center:

The Ford government is pledging more changes to alcohol access in Ontario — announcing plans on Monday to allow international airports to serve booze 24-hours a day, and to remove limits on how much beer, wine and spirits can be brought across provincial or territorial borders for personal use. Those two promises are among a sweeping list of changes, packaged as the ‘Better for People, Smarter for Business Act’… The Bill also promises to ease restrictions on bringing dogs onto restaurant patios, and inside certain breweries in the province.

Those booze runs I made into nearby Quebec all those years ago? Smuggling. NO MORE!!! What a great law. Huh? Holy crap! “The Bees Act is repealed“!!!

I enjoyed the personal essay, photo set and brewery founder interview by Lily Waite run in Pellicle this week on the Table Beer produced by London brewery, The Kernel:

“The other thing—and I think it helps Table Beer more so than the others—is the fact that we still put all of our beers through a second fermentation,” Evin tells me over a shared bottle. “The extra little bit of yeast character and fermentation by-products that you get—hop biotransformations, too—those really hard-to-define things, they’re key to Table Beer.” Though I’ve drunk many brown-papered beers in search of that fugitive quality, I’m reluctant to believe it’s simply down to a second fermentation. I’m much more inclined to believe that it is, in fact, a little bit of magic.

It’s good not always to dissect something but convey the pleasure of it all. I think the author has done that. These pieces, like Matt C’s before, are love letters. But there are technical tidbits, too: (i) “…as with all of their beers, the strength varies from batch to differently-hopped batch…“; (ii) “…[i]t’s now brewed weekly, every Friday…“; (iii) “…a fullness of body, achieved through high mash temperatures and oats in the grist…” All of which add up to a story that is telling you that the beer is borne more by the technique than the ingredients. Very interesting.

The proud Canadian company formerly known as Molson is still theoretically out there, now going through another hybridization and perhaps some degree of bionic implantation:

Most support functions, including finance, information technology, procurement, supply chain, legal and human resources, will be consolidated in Milwaukee. The company will continue to maintain global business services offices there and in Bucharest, Romania. The Molson Coors International team, meanwhile, will be reconstituted, with its Latin American team becoming part of a new North American Emerging Growth team headed by Pete Marino. Its Asia, Pacific and Africa team will fold under the Europe business unit, which will be led by Simon Cox.

Interesting to note that they are branching out into other areas including a “forthcoming line of cannabis-infused nonalcoholic beverages in Canada.” Sounds hellish to me but the baby boomers love this sort of stuff apparently.

That is it for now. Get going on the tricking and the treating. For further beery links, check out the Boak and Bailey news update on Saturday and then bend an ear towards the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays. The last one featured a great interview with Ren Navarro, owner of the consulting and education firm Beer. Diversity.  And look for mid-week notes from The Fizz as well.

 

I Get It. It’s Lambeth Ale. But Why Is It “Lambeth” Ale?

For a while now I have been noodling around 1600s English brewing history and have a bunch of posts that you can generally find here with a few other topics from that century woven in. The important things to understand are: (i) there were distinct forms of beer easily recognizable by the consumer, (ii) they mainly were defined by their geographical source and (iii) they are often but not solely described according to that location. So, brewing elements like a local water table, the local produce including husbanded post-landrace barley malts and traditional local malt bill blends combined to create reliable and recognizable categories of beer called Northdown/Margate, Hull or Derby. John Locke’s letter of 1679 gives a good example of contemporary understanding. Poor Robin’s Almanac in 1696 sets a similar marketplace of diverse offerings under the definition of Cock-Ale:

But by your leave Mr. Poet, notwithstanding the large commendations you give of the juice of barley, yet if compar’d with Canary, they are no more than a mole-hill to a mountain; whether it be cock ale, China ale, rasbury ale, sage ale, scurvy-grass ale, horsereddish ale, Lambeth ale, Hull ale, Darby ale, North-down ale, double ale, or small ale; March beer, nor mum, though made at St. Catharines, put them all together, are not to be compared.

However, the penny has yet to drop in relation to one prominent beer in that system. Lambeth Ale.  Don’t get me wrong. It is pretty clear what it was:  a lower alcohol bottled pale ale that was highly carbonated. Consider this line from the 1712 play The Successful Pyrate at Act ii., scene 1:

Ha, ha, ha, faith she is pert and small like Lambeth ale.*

But why was it called “Lambeth” after a shoreline district along London’s southern bank?  One would think this is an easy question to answer but if we look at the facts on the ground at the time it is not one so simple to answer. For today’s purposes, let’s even call this part 1… or perhaps part 7… in my thought process.  A winnowing. A ruling out perhaps. See, what bothers me the most about it is how I can identify the who and why and what about 1600s Derby or Hull or Margate but there is a bit of an issue when it comes to mid-1600s Lambeth. There ain’t much there on the ground.

Let me illustrate my conundrum. If you look up at the image above, which I am informed is a 1670 illustration of the sights at Lambeth, you will note two things: a big church complex and a lot of grass. Here is a similar version dated 1685. I have further illustrated the concept here for clarity. Lambeth Palace is and was the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England.  It sits in what is known as – and what was at the time in question – Lambeth Marsh. Grass.

To the right is a bit of a map from 1574 which shows the scene. Lambeth faces Westminster across the Thames, combining to embody the authority of the church and state. But to the south there are a few buildings, you note. Yes. And it appears Lambeth as a zone was narrow and long with northern and southern districts. So Lambeth Ale could be from the south of the Palace and the Marsh. It is, after all, a parish. Could be. But the south seems to really only develop after the building of Westminster Bridge in the very middle of the mid-1700s.  And, as I noted a couple of years ago, when Samuel Pepys was downing lashes of Lambeth Ale, he was traveling over by boat when he was not finding it in town proper. Lambeth was a place, apparently, where one could do all sorts of things once the boat got you across. Here is Sammy P from his diary on the 23rd of July 1664:

…and away to Westminster Hall, and there sight of Mrs Lane, and plotted with her to go over to the old house in Lambeth Marsh, and there eat and drank, and had my pleasure with her twice, she being the strangest woman in talk of love to her husband sometimes, and sometimes again she do not care for him, and yet willing enough to allow me a liberty of doing what I would with her. So spending 5s or 6s upon her, I could do what I would, and after an hours stay and more, back again and set her ashore again.

Heavens. So, was it a pleasure ground with its own ale like the later Vauxhall? There is one problem I find with that. If we remember that Mr. Pepys is mentioning Lambeth Ale in the first half of the 1660s, we also find that there was a certain local someone who was not a big fan of brewing prior to that date. The Archbishop himself. Or rather an archbishop… as they come and they go. The one I am talking about is one who went in rather dramatic fashion: William Laud.

William Laud was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to either 1640 when he was arrested in the English Civil War or 1645 when he had his head cut off.** In a 1958 article on 1630s English politics,*** there is a explanation of the word Laudian which indicates High Church Anglican and sits in opposition to Puritan reforming rabble. The illustration of the distinction is the Puritan distaste for churchales – local church fundraising fetes of a drunken happy sort. Laud took a political stance in support of this but mainly as a means to exercise his power early in his term of office, to fund his church repair project and to tick off the growing Puritan element within the church. He is not considered to have been all that pro-beer at the time.

He continues to not be a big booster of brewing. Writing to one Bishop Bridgeman, from Lambeth on 29th October, 1638, Laud enclosed a letter he had written to the Dean of the Cathedral of Chester “concerning your quadrangle or Abbey-court, & the Brewhouse, & Maulthouse there.” He stated that they had better do as he instructed or “I promise you they shall smart for it“! Here is some of the enclosed letter: 

After my hearty commend: &c. I am informed that in your Quadrangle, or Abbey-Court at Chester… the BP’s House takes up one side of the Quadrangle; and that another side hath in it the Dean’s house and some Buildings for singing men; that the third side hath in it one Prebend’s house only, and the rest is turned to a Malt house; and that ye fourth side (where yo Grammar School stood) is turned to a common Brewhouse, & was lett into lives by yo” unworthy Predecessors. This Malt house and Brew house, but the Brew house especially, must needs, by noise and smoke and filth, infinitely annoy both my Lo: ye BPs house and your owne… hitherto this concernes your Predecessors, and not your selves. That won followes will appeare to be your owne fault… Now I heare ye Brewer’s wife is dead, and you have given mee cause to feare that you will fill up yo Lease againe with another life. And then there will be noe end of this mischiefe…  And in all this I require your Obedience in his Ma’yes Name, as you will answer it at your p’ill. So I leave you &c.” 

In early 1640, Laud wrote another letter. This time to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford:

I received a Letter this Week from Oxford, from an ordinary plain man, but a good Scholar, and very honest. And it troubles me: more than any Letter I have received many a day. “Tis true, I have heard of late from fome Men of Quality here above, that the Univerfity was Relapfing into a Drinking Humour, to its great Dishonour. But, I confess, I believed it not, because I had no Intimation of it from you. But this Letter comes from a Man that can have no Ends but Honesty, and the good of that Place. And because you shall fee what he writes, I fend you here a Copy of his Letter, and do earnestly beg of you, That you will forthwith set yourself to punish all haunting of Taverns and Ale-Houfes with all the strictness that may be, that the University, now advancing in Learning, may not sink in Manners, which will shame and destroy all.

After his arrest in December 1640, Laud faced a number of charges including one that he caused the shutting and pulling down of a number of brew-houses across the river in Westminster because their smoke disturbed his enjoyment of life at Lambeth. Just there to the right under the thumbnail is the charge as published in a 1695 book, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and Blessed Martyr William Laud, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. There are two witness supporting the charge, Mr. Bond and Mr. Arnold of the second of which the following is said by Laud in his response to the charge:

2. The other Witness is Mr. Arnold ; who told as long a Tale as this, to as little purpose. He speaks of three Brew-Houfes in Westminfter, all to be put down, or not brew with Sea-Coal; That Secretary Windebanck gave the Order. Thus far it concerns not me. He added, that I told him they burnt Sea-Coal : I faid indeed, I was informed they did; and that I hope was no Offence. He fays, that upon Sir John Banks his new Information, four Lords were appointed to view the Brew-Houfes, and what they burnt. But I was none of the four, nor did I make any Report, for or againft. He fays, Mr. Attorney Banks came one day over to him, and told him that his House annoyed Lambeth, and that I fent him over. The Truth is this; Mr. Attorney came one day over to Dine with me at Lambeth, and walking in the Garden before Dinner, we were very fufficiently annoyed from a Brew-House; the Wind bringing over fo much Smoak, as made us leave the place. Upon this Mr. Attorney asked me, why I would not fhew my felf more against those Brew-Houses, being more annoyed by them than any other ? I replyed, I would never be a means to undo any Man, or put him from his Trade, to free my felf from Smoak. And this Witness doth after confess, that I faid the fame words to himself. Mr. Attorney at our parting faid, he would call in at the Brew-House: I left him to do as he pleased, but fent him not : And I humbly defire Mr. Attorney may be Examined of the Truth of this.

So. What to make of all this. First, it is very unlikely that there was a brewery at Lambeth Palace that was putting the stuff out as an estate ale. Laud did not like brewing and malting on church property and his found the resulting smoke annoying and after Laud it was turned into a prison. Tauntingly to the contrary is one small reference I have found related to London’s Training College of Domestic Science:

The College was founded in 1893 by the National Society in the disused Brew House of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. Here, training was provided for teachers of Cookery and Laundry. Housewifery was added to the curriculum in the first decade of the twentieth century after the College had acquired additional premises in Charles Street, Southwark.

For now, I am putting that brew house down to the 230 years or so between the restoration of Charles II and the founding of the College.

Second, Lambeth Ale really isn’t referenced at that exact time. It shows up very neatly a couple of decades later at the other end of the English Civil War. As early as 1660 Pepys, a fairly high government official, is drinking Lambeth Ale and apparently having time of his squalid life. The wonderfully named Lord Beverage in his Prices and Wages in England notes it as recorded by the Lord Steward from 1659 to 1708. Click on that thumbnail if you don’t believe me. I haven’t not found, in fact, any reference to it much before 1659 but I would welcome any who have.

Perhaps Lambeth meant more than just the place, just the Palace as a building. As I noted before, three years after Laud’s execution in 1648, Parliament placed a garrison and prison in Lambeth House which they also used as a prison. With the Restoration, came the rebuilding of Lambeth Palace as viewed by Pepys in 1665 but still he went there to gypsy fortune-tellers in 1668. And all this must be somehow laced into his contemporary understanding of the word Lambeth. Is it possible it started not as a geographical reference like Hull, Derby or Margate but as a bit of pre-Restoration political satire? Is the popping of the cork the popping off of the Archbishop’s head? The lightness and the fizz, a comment on his character?

I have no idea. But it does seem odd that the term appears in the middle of the great upheaval, comes out of a holy place turned into red light district and then continues on for decades, even respectably mentioned by John Locke in 1679 and the French Ambassador in the 1680s. It was so popular that it pretty much killed Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, the Governor of Jamaica in 1688:****

Albemarle’s medical troubles began before leaving for Jamaica. In general the duke spent his nights, Sloane wrote, “being merry with his friends whence he eat very little … [and] drinking great draughts of Lambeth ale,” a practice that had secured him what Sloane termed a “habituall Jaundice if I may call it Soe.” Referring to the duke’s jaundice as “habitual” was no accident, for Sloane placed the responsibility for it squarely upon the duke’s lifestyle. Thirty-three years old in 1686, Albemarle practiced no regimen, “loves a Sedentary life & hates exercise, as well as physick,” his physician lamented. Prior to departing for Jamaica, the duke was attended by several physicians who prescribed “temperance & keeping good houres,” warning that “the voyage he intended for Jamaica it being a very hott place could not in probability agree with his body.”

Laud left a deep scar. He continued to be hated for his gross authoritarian excesses as we see from this 1730s letter from the non-conformist Samuel Chandler to theologian William Berriman:

Oh! how happy are the present times, and with what satisfaction may I congratulate my country, when titled divines, when reverend Doctors, when the dignitaries of the Church, hold up the blessed Laud as a perfect pattern for the imitation of the reverend Bench, and insert him into their calendar of Saints and Martyrs! How will discipline flourish under such spiritual Pastors! How effectually will the mouths of saucy laymen be stopped, and the liberty they take in censuring God’s anointed priests be suppressed J How secure will the Gentlemen of England be in their lives and properties and estates, when instead of the Courts of Westminster-Hall, they shall be again subjected to the Star Chamber, High commission and spiritual Courts! Oh what infinite blessings must spring up from a revival of the Laud, an principles and times!

I know this is a leap but it strikes me that the contemporary beer drinker could not but help make an indirect connection somehow between the role of Lambeth Palace and name Lambeth Ale. But, if so, what is the connotation? What is the connection? And despite that connection, it still appears to have been a singular beer – weaker, fizzy, bottled and worth rowing across a river for. And high status stuff. Worth shipping to France. Worth a Governor drinking  himself to death.

*See A Supplementary English Glossary, Thomas Lewis Owen Davies, at page 369 which defines Lambeth Ale based on that quote, concluding “seems from the extract to have been brisk and not heady.” Is that it? Is the idea that it is not “heady” the joke on the beheaded Laud?
**I really did not know that folk other than Charles I had his head cut off so this bit of research has already been instructive.
***“County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Churchales, 1633: The Alexander Prize Essay,” by Thomas G. Barnes, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 9 (1959), pp. 103-122 at footnote 1, page 103.
****at page 225.