I see Wikipedia reckons that “According to Martyn Cornell, ‘no historically meaningful difference exists between barley wines and old ales’.” Do I think that? You’ll be unshocked to learn that my beliefs are actually considerably more complex. One problem is that in the real world, beer styles such as Burton Ale that have been called… Read More So what IS the difference between barley wine and old ale?
There’s a good video short featuring the Old Brewery at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich just gone up on the Guardian‘s website here which illustrates perfectly the fact that people are best converted to good craft beer by having it shoved in their faces and being ordered: “Drink that!” When people DO try a craft… Read More If you get them to taste it, they will be converted
I was delighted to see that Amber Gold and Black, my just-published history of beer styles, has cracked the summer holiday reading market and will be seen on all the best beaches alongside Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and whatever codswallop Dan Brown is currently minting millions from, if this message… Read More Summer reading
Countless times I’ve been asked: “Martyn, how do I become a top-drawer beer historian like you and Ron? “Countless” meaning, of course, zero. But if I were putting together a course on the basics of British brewing history, here’s the ten books that would be top of the reading list: 1:Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry… Read More How to be a beer historian in just 10 books
It’s a comment on the public perception of beardy beer buffs that people who know I like pongy ale* frequently look surprised when they discover that I drink lager too. My response, of course, is that there’s plenty of great beer not brewed to traditional British criteria, that often a cold one from the fridge… Read More So what WAS the first purpose-built lager brewery in the UK?
It is a regularly repeated claim that the ancient Abbey of St Gall ran three separate breweries: but it’s based on a misunderstanding of one of the most important historical documents in Europe, the Plan of St Gall, the only surviving full architectural drawing from the seven centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire… Read More Myth 6: “As early as the ninth century, the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland had three breweries in full operation”
Beer and great literature: they’re found together more often than you might think. One of the enormous benefits of the growing power of the internet is that it makes certain sorts of research almost trivially easy. Earlier this year the chaps at Beer Connoisseur magazine asked me to write a piece about breweries in novels.… Read More Mr Du Boung the Brewer
Well, that was all rather too much: nearly 4,000 words and more footnotes than a Jerry Lee Lewis concert. So here’s the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably assume and what we can’t assume about the history of India Pale Ale, and I promise to keep it… Read More IPA: the executive summary
(Note: three years on from this post, the earliest mention of the phrase IPA has been pushed back another six years: see here.) This is a truly historic document: the first known use of the expression India Pale Ale. It comes from an advertisement in the Liverpool Mercury newspaper published January 30 1835, a remarkably… Read More The first ever reference to IPA
Brewers’ advertisements in Victorian newspapers are almost always strictly utilitarian: a list of up to around a dozen beers in three main styles, mild/old ale, pale/ale bitter and porter/stout, each style shown available in three or four strengths, and with their prices listed per gallon/firkin/kilderkin. That’s it. If you’re lucky you might get a reproduction… Read More Victorian Britain’s finest beer ad
