Arctic Ale: a 158-year-old adventure revived

Back in Victorian times, no polar explorer worth the name set north without as much Allsopp’s Arctic Ale stashed in the hold of his ship as it could carry. This was a mighty brew, more than 11 per cent alcohol, descended from the strong, sweet ales Burton upon Trent once exported to the Baltic. Now an American home-brewer, Christopher Bowen, has decided to recreate Arctic Ale – by actually brewing it in the Canadian arctic, taking a 2,000-mile journey to the shores of Hudson Bay with brewing equipment and a film crew.

You can read about his plans here, while more information is available on the Arctic Alchemy Facebook page here, and the Canadian beer blogger Alan McLeod has some very interesting stuff about the original Arctic expedition in 1852 here.

Pete Brown, who famously went the other direction, to the tropics, for his book Hops and Glory, transporting a cask of Burton’s better-known product, India Pale Ale, has declared himself filled with “admiration mixed with seething jealousy” over Chris Bowen’s plans, and I feel about the same. Arctic Ale is the king of Burton Ales, the strongest of a family of beers that have almost vanished now (Young’s Winter Warmer is one of very few left, and Fuller’s 1845 can claim to be a modern revival of the style). I feel a great fondness for Burton Ales, since to my knowledge I was the first person to write about them in the “modern” era (post-1970) when I had an article on the subject printed in What’s Brewing in 1998. I’d love to be standing in the frozen Canadian north with a glass of Arctic Ale held in my mitten.

I devote several hundred words to Arctic Ale in the “barley wines and old ales” chapter of Amber, Gold and Black (just 12 weeks to publication day, people – order it through this link and put a little extra money in my pocket) and I thought, as a teaser for the book and as a way of spreading interest in what Chris Bowen is up to, I’d put up the Arctic Ale extract here:

Arctic Ale

Among the drinks mentioned in the Vade Mecum for Malt-Worms, the rhyming “Good Pub Guide” to London written about 1718, are “Humming Stingo” at the Peacock in Whitecross Street; October at the Fountain in Cheapside; Bull’s Milk Beer at the Bull in Wood Street; and Burton Ale at the Guy of Warwick in Milk Street. This last beer was probably the same as or similar to the nut-brown, sweet, extremely strong ale that brewers in Burton upon Trent were exporting to Baltic cities such as St Petersburg and Danzig, Riga and Königsberg from at least the 1740s. This trade lasted, with hiccups during the Napoleonic Wars, until the Russians imposed heavy tariffs on beer imports from Britain in 1822, and the Burton brewers turned to brewing paler, more bitter beers for the Indian market.

However, the Burton breweries continued making darker, sweeter beers, at a range of strengths, the strongest being around 1110 OG, and 10 to 11 per cent alcohol by volume, (The top-of-the-range Burton ales were generally known as Number One, as they were at the Bass, Ind Coope and Truman breweries in Burton, though Worthington, in typically perverse fashion, called its best strong ale “G”). These were beers with astonishing longevity: the Ratcliff Ale, a version of Bass’s No 1 strong ale brewed and bottled in 1869 to celebrate the birth of a son, Harry Ratcliff, to one of the company’s partners, is still drinkable today, 140 years on. After surviving unopened for the whole of the 20th century in bottles in the cellars at the brewery in Burton, the beer is now completely dry, with a flavour like a cross between sherry and smoky Christmas pudding.

The Burton brewers occasionally reproduced beers of the strength of the kind once exported to the Baltic, for Arctic explorers to take with them. Alfred Barnard, on his trip to Samuel Allsopp & Sons in Burton in 1889, wrote that “the celebrated ‘Arctic ale’ of which we have heard so much in days gone by” was specially brewed at the request of the government for the five-ship Arctic expedition in 1852-54 under Sir Edward Belcher (which was looking for Sir John Franklin’s famously lost expedition of 1845). Belcher reported that the ale was “a valuable antiscorbutic” (that is, scurvy-preventer) and “a great blessing to us, particularly for our sick, as long as it lasted”, and that it refused to freeze until the temperature dropped to 12 degrees Fahrenheit, or -11 degrees Celsius. Even when the temperature went down to -55 Fahrenheit (-48 Celsius) the beer was unharmed by being frozen, Belcher said.

It was brewed again for the 1875 Arctic expedition under Sir George Nares, which set out to reach the North Pole and managed to get to within 400 miles of the top of the world before scurvy forced the men, by now on sleds, to retreat, four of them dying. Nares wrote of the beer in February 1875: “Excellent. Would recommend as large a quantity as can possibly be stowed away to be supplied to every future voyage.” The expedition’s senior medical officer wrote to Allsopp’s that it “kept splendidly in the Arctic region, and the fact of its freezing did not appear to detract from its good qualities in any way. It was highly appreciated by the men.”

Barnard was disappointed to find there was none of the 1852 vintage left, but he tried the 1875 version, then 14 years old, and “found it of a nice brown colour, and of a vinous, and at the same time, nutty flavour, and as sound as on the day it was brewed.” He wrote that it “did not show a very high alcoholic content”, though the OG was all of 1130, about 47lb per barrel of extract, and an analysis in 1881, he said, “proved that it contained not much more than about nine per cent alcohol by weight” (though since this is 11.25 per cent abv it sounds about right) and “owing to the large amount of unfermented extract still remaining in it, it must be considered as an extremely valuable and nourishing food.” For comparison, William Molyneux writing in 1869 said the ale brewed for the old Russian trade varied from 42 to 48lb of extract to the barrel, while the brewery’s “normal” strong ale in the 1860s only went up to 42lb, an OG of 1116.7.

The Arctic Ale was, again, a long-lasting brew. William Henry Beable, writing in Romance of Great Businesses, published in 1926, said “favoured visitors” to Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent were “sometimes invited to taste a bottle of ale similar to the celebrated ‘Arctic Ale’ supplied to the Polar expedition of 1875” [ie 50 years earlier]. Beable said of the beer: “It is mellow as old Burgundy and as nourishing as a beefsteak.”

Some time in the 1930s, after the big merger with its Burton neighbour Allsopp of 1934, Ind Coope renamed its No 1 Burton barley wine Allsopp’s Arctic Ale. The beer returned to the polar regions in 1952 when cases went off with that year’s British North Greenland Expedition. However, while contemporary advertising in the 1950s called Arctic Ale a barley wine, The Book of Beer by Andrew Campbell, published in 1956, described it as “less sweet than a barley wine”, suggesting that 50 years ago not everybody put all strong ales in the barley wine category.

Arctic Ale appears in an Ind Coope price list of 1959 at a public bar price of one shilling and five pence ha’penny a “nip” bottle, that is, one third of a pint. However, it looks as if Arctic Ale was no longer as strong as it used to be, because Colne Spring Ale, which had an OG of 1093, was a third dearer at one shilling and elevenpence ha’penny the nip (a pint of bitter, for comparison, was one shilling and threepence, three and a half times cheaper, per fluid ounce). By 1961, the beer’s name had changed to Arctic Barley Wine. It was still being brewed in 1965, but the brewery knocked it on the head a few years after that.

(end of extract


Chris Bowen tells me that Arctic Ale was also brewed in 1857, and he has full bottles of the 1852 and 1857 brewings, the lucky barsteward. I shall be following his venture with lolling tongue.

0 thoughts on “Arctic Ale: a 158-year-old adventure revived

  1. I might be wrong but I thought that Ind Coope brewed Arctic Ale until at least the early 80’s under the name of Triple A Barley Wine. A friend who worked at the Burton brewery always said that the 3 A’s stood for Allsopp’s Arctic Ale. It sounded reasonable to me.

    1. That would certainly make sense, and my one doubt is that (see ad above from 1950s) the brewery seemed to call the 20th century version “Ind Coope Arctic Ale” rather than “Allsopp’s AA”.

  2. Teignworthy brewed Edwin Tucker’s Celebrated Arctic Ale a few years ago, which was 9%, while North Cotswold have the Global Arctic Warmer which is 15% and rather delicious, but I’ll leave it to you to say whether they are authentic or not.

  3. References to the antiscorbutic qualities of beer are still found occasinally, but I’ve never believed them. I don’t see how either malt or hops would have vitamin C. Ditto for spruce beer. I remembered that Capt. Cook looked into the problem of scurvy, and supposedly found remedy form both. The above claim for the Arctic Ale lead me to do a little Googling and found this paper

    http://apjcn.nhri.org.tw/server/apjcn/volume12/vol12.2/fullArticles/Stubbs129.pdf

    which contains this summary in the abstract:

    “Despite the inconclusive nature of his own experiments, he reported favourably after his second voyage (1772-1775) on the use of wort as an antiscorbutic sea medicine (for which purpose
    it is now known to be useless). Cook thereby lent credibility to erroneous medical theories about scurvy, helping to perpetuate the use of ineffective treatments and to delay the discovery of a cure for the disorder.”

    A 1924 paper http://www.biochemj.org/bj/018/1129/0181129.pdf also reported that beer was not antiscorbutic.

    Further evidence in a belief in the antiscorbutic value of beer on Arctic expeditions is hinted at in this enticing excerpt (full text available only to subscribers) on Google results for [beer antiscorbutic] for a 1973 article by M.H.Oliver:

    “the antiscorbutic merit of beer died hard, though, and Arctic expeditions as late as 1896 carried brewing apparatus, hoping to exploit the antiscorbutic …”

    I, for one, will pop a vitamin C pill daily with my Arctic Ale ration on my next Arctic expedition.

  4. The 8.62% alcohol would no doubt have been by weight, which works out to 10.9% by volume by my calculations (alcohol having a specific gravity of 0.79), but 11.46% using ProMash calculator (homebrewing software).

    Further, playing around with the ProMash % alcohol calculator, a residual 14.3% sugar would mean an actual residual extract (without the effect of alcohol) of 1.068, which calculates out to OG 1.1365, FG 1.0519, 8.62% abw, 11.46% abv.

    Definitely sweet and alcoholic. I wonder what the hop bitterness was.

    1. “Definitely sweet and alcoholic. I wonder what the hop bitterness was.”

      About 70 IBU’s, but as with many old recipes, one can only speculate on Alpha Acid content of the day, according to our calculations however, and without too many other details, it was about 27 ounces per 10 gallons, and a fair amount of that contributing to aroma and dry-hopping in the barrel.

  5. Good calculations, perhaps indeed the figure given was by weight.

    The recreation of this beer is a great project, and one wishes the planners much success.

    Excellent notes, Martyn, thanks for all the material and Barnard especially gives us a real idea of how this tasted.

    Gary

  6. A correction that I realized last night while I was falling asleep, but hanged if I was going to get up and correct it then!

    I mistranscribed 14.3 residual extract (14.3 Plato) as 1.068; it is actually 1.058. I should have recognized this as out of line. Using 1.058 and alcohol 8.62% abw with ProMash, we get these corrected values:

    OG 1.126(4)
    FG 1.042(2)
    abw 8.62%
    abw 11.36%
    Residual extract 14.3%, 1.058

    The last decimal place of OG and FG are insignificant, which is why I placed them in parentheses. I feel confident of these revised values.

  7. Also, many mention the 1852 and 1875 offerings, but one only needs to look to the publication of Leopold McClintock’s 1857 voyage ( which was helped by Lady Franklin ) “The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas” , there you again find Allsopp’s Arctic Ale along for the task.

    Here’s the three brewing’s in the 19th century

    1852 Sir Edward Belcher
    1857 Sir Francis Leopold McClintock
    1875 Sir George Strong Nares

  8. Thanks for all the comments, chaps, fscinating: the original Burton ales were certainly very sweet, as it was said that if you spilt any on the table and left your glass in it, the glass would stick to the tabletop.

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