When you’ve been working on a project for more than seven years, finally being given a finishing date is almost anti-climactic. I started writing what became Porter and Stout: A Complete History in January 2018. I’ve now been told it is due to be published on June 4. I feel I ought to be much more excited. This is the most in-depth book on a single beer style ever written: 400,000 words covering 300 years and 56 countries, from Norway to New Zealand and Chile to China, 61 chapters, four appendices, 120 illustrations, five maps. A huge amount of research went into this: 630 different books consulted by authors from W.W. Abbot to Bill Yenne (including six by people called Guinness), almost 900 different newspaper titles read, from the Aarhus Stifts-Tidende to De Zuid-Afrikaan, 100 magazine articles filleted, eight PhD and MA theses borrowed from, translations made from 20 different languages, including Finnish, Indonesian, Serbian and Portuguese. 

Ironically, in the past couple of years while I have been writing this, stout has become, in Britain, a hugely trendy beer, so in demand among drinkers mostly young and frequently female that there were reports of rationing at Christmas. I really should have written a popular history of stout, short and cheerful, and cashed in. PASACH is not going to be a big seller, mostly because of its cost. It was written as an academic book, and is priced as an academic book: $75 in the United States, £54 in the UK.

Still, there is, I think, from the comments I get about beer history stuff I put up on my blog, a tiny but enthusiastic group who will be delighted at the book’s (confessedly obsessive) thoroughness and who will regard its length as part of the attraction, and I am sorry that the price is likely to put it out of the reach of many of those who would, were it a quarter of the price, eagerly buy it and enjoy it.

I didn’t start with the intention of writing such a doorstop. When Macfarland, the American academic publisher, approached me and asked if I had any ideas for a book, I immediately knew this was the excuse to sit down and write the history of porter and stout I had been pondering. But I suggested that it would probably be 80,000 words long, and take maybe six months to write: at the time I believed I already had most of the research sorted.

That, of course, was mad-eyed optimism both in time and in length. My problem is that I firmly believe if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing extremely thoroughly. I can’t leave off half-way through and say: “That’s enough.” Once I start down a road, I can’t stop until I am sure I have explored every byway off, left and right, right to the end. There’s a word for that condition, and it means jerking away from Google Books, or the online British Newspaper Library, and realising it’s 4am and I have been sitting in front of my computer for 16 hours. This is, I can tell you, not good for one’s relationships.

On the other hand it IS good for uncovering facts that have remained hidden for centuries, such as why Arthur Guinness opened a separate brewery at the back of James’s Gate in the name of his 13-year-old eldest son Hosea in 1778 (THAT’S got one or two of you rushing off to the Irish News Archive site to check out), or who opened the first European-style brewery in India, and when (another Irishman, in 1825).

There has never been a better time to be a historian than this, the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. In effect, practically every book ever published is searchable via Google from the comfort of your own desk, and if it’s 70 years or more since the death of the author you get to read the whole book. If the Google Books scan is limited to “snippet” view, or it’s a relatively modern book where much but not all of the text is viewable, well, you’ve learnt that the information exists and, via sites such as the excellent ABE Books, which aggregates secondhand book sellers around the world, you can pretty much always obtain a copy of the book Google won’t let you see for less than a tenner. This explains why, in the past ten years, I have spent almost £10,000 buying 535 books. Yes, that IS far, far more than I’ve made from selling my own books, but I do at least get to put that down as legitimate expenditure on my tax returns.

Similarly, tens – possibly hundreds – of millions of newspapers from around the globe, back to the early 1700s, are now scanned and searchable. The online British Newspaper Archive alone holds 90 million pages. There is massive coverage of old newspapers in the United States (PASACH references porter and stout brewing in 34 different US states). Ireland’s newspaper archives are extremely good, as are those of Australia. Most major countries around the world have digitised newspaper archives now. This is an unbelievable resource, even if the OCR is very frequently extremely dodgy, and PASACH would not have been possible without the vast numbers of searchable old newspapers on the net from Newfoundland to New Zealand. It is a long way from when I started this historical research caper back in the early 1980s, when searching newspapers meant booking an appointment at the Herts County Archives storehouse and humping heavy ancient bound volumes of the Hitchin Gazette or the Royston Crow down from the racks to go through page by page, hoping I would spot something. (Some of the photographs I took of brewery advertisements in those century-old, slowly browning, slightly crumbly newspapers 45 years ago ended up in the book that came out last year, Brewing in Hertfordshire …) Oh, and subscriptions to newspaper archive sites go down as legitimate business expenses on the tax return, as well.

Another enormous boon is Google Translate. I bought big, comprehensive histories of Carnegie’s brewery in Gothenburg, entirely in Swedish, and the A. Le Coq brewery in Estonia, written in Estonian. Scanning the pages with OCR software – also vastly advanced over the past 10 to 15 years – and putting the results through Google Translate mean I had fascinating information I could use that it would have been incredibly difficult, and hugely expensive, to get hold of even at the start of the century. It was from the Estonian book that I learnt that Albert Le Coq, a hugely important figure in the history of Russian Imperial Stout, was not, in fact, Belgian, as every English language source claims, but a Huguenot Prussian … (One amusing hitch with the OCR, the software refused to work properly until I told it that it was reading Finnish …)

Ultimately, though, yes, I AM excited that in less than four months’ time I am going to be holding the condensation of all those years of work in my hand. I AM extremely proud of it, I hope people won’t decide that, at 375 pages of text, it’s too nerdy about a very niche subject, and I am quietly confident that it will be a valuable resource for anyone in the future wanting to write about the historic roots of what is still a highly popular beer style.

(That illustration at the top there, incidentally, is a reference to PASACH’s opening chapter, which starts by talking about three contemporaries, George Washington, Catherine the Great and Joseph Haynes, a waterman from Shadwell, East London, who had nothing in common except that they died within three years of each other and they all had a huge fondness for porter … Haynes could apparently swallow two gallons of beer in three draughts, and lost his life in March 1798 “in consequence of excessive drinking of porter”.)