How long did ale and beer remain as separate brews? Most* drinkers, I think, know that “ale” was originally the English name for an unhopped fermented malt drink, and beer was the name of the fermented malt drink flavoured with hops, a taste for which was brought to this country from the continental mainland about… Read More The long battle between ale and beer
It’s tremendous news that the brewery museum in Burton upon Trent is to reopen, though my joy that Britain, one of the world’s four or five greatest brewing nations, may finally get the celebration of its beery history that it deserves was turned down a notch by a statement from one of the people who… Read More Burton: NOT the first place in the world to brew pale beers
One of the great unanswered questions in the history of beer is why it took 9,000 years or so after brewing began for brewers to start using hops. Today there are very few beers made without hops. They give beer flavour and, most importantly, they keep it from going off. The shelf life for unhopped… Read More A short history of hops
It’s apparently fashionable now to be sticking one’s boots into BrewDog, since the Aberdeenshire duo revealed they had reported themselves to the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, just to get the publicity. I’m always happy to join in a fight if the other side is outnumbered, so let’s have a go at them for… Read More BrewDog Atlantic IPA: is it worth it?
Sound like a trio of Victorian lawyers, don’t they? Kieve, Tierce and Bubb, solicitors and commissioners of oaths: I can picture their brass plate, polished and worn, at the top of a set of stone steps, screwed to the slightly crumbly brickwork of a flat-fronted three-storey town house with a shiny black-painted front door, somewhere… Read More Kieve, tierce and bub
Finding factual errors in Wikipedia is, of course, easier than machine-gunning a cask full of cod, and I’ve done it here before. I can’t stand reading Wikipedia’s pages on beer, since I constantly think: “No, that’s wrong … no, that’s not quite right … no, that’s a misinterpretation …”. What particularly gets me shouting at… Read More Beer: NOT the oldest drink in the world
(Update – for the definite answer to these questions, see here) Bang, bang, another beery myth hits the floorboards, or at least staggers back badly wounded, after excellent work by Kim Cook in an article called “Who produced Fuggle’s Hops” just published in the latest (Spring 2009, issue 130) edition of Brewery History magazine. The… Read More Befuggled: doubts about a hop’s birth
One of the top 10 questions people who end up at this site put into search engines such as Google is a query about how to distinguish between porter and stout, something I’ve not actually tackled head-on yet. So – what difference is there between the two beers? Er … None. Not now, anyway, not… Read More So what IS the difference between porter and stout?
You know you’re a historic beer geek when … well, certainly when you immediately recognise a drawing of the plant bog myrtle on a bottle among the crammed shelves at Utobeer in Borough Market. The name of the beer, Gageleer, from the Flemish word for the bog myrtle or sweet gale bush, gagel, confirmed what… Read More Gale warning
Ping! It’s an email from the chaps at Thornbridge with details of their Bracia chestnut honey beer, the one raved over by more than just me at the Guild of Beer Writers dinner last week. The press release details exactly what goes into the beer, and also reveals where they got the name from: Bracia… Read More Bracia: great beer, shame about the dodgy history
