As the beer world waits to see whether this really is the end for the Anchor brewery in San Francisco, flagship for an entire beer style, a number of commentators have been suggesting – wrongly – that if anyone tries to carry on with Anchor, then it cannot be done outside San Francisco. There is… Read More Steam beer from Yukon to Nevada and the strange link with Flat Beer
It was a bright, cold day in April and the clock was striking – well, 7:30am, actually, since I had a 9am appointment to mash in some finest Maris Otter at the Goose Island brewery in Fulton Street, Chicago, and I had decided to walk the three or so miles from my hotel down town,… Read More A Perfect Day
It’s a curious fact that the expression “pale ale” does not seem to appear in the English language until 1705, in a catalogue of newly published books sold at a shop in Little Britain, a street just off Smithfield. What makes this particularly surprising is that pale-coloured ales had been available for a very long… Read More Pale ale: it’s much, much, MUCH older than you think
The news that the Japanese brewing giant Asahi will be closing the Dark Star brewery in Sussex, which it acquired with the purchase of Fuller’s brewery in West London in 2019, is, of course, a tragedy for the people who work there – a Sussex martlet tells me that no attempt is being made to… Read More Rush out now and buy as much Gale’s Prize Old Ale as you can
I’m naturally drawn to iconoclasts, so for that reason alone I was eager to read Raf Meert’s new book on the history of lambic and geueze, in which he picks up a tall stack of received wisdom on the origins and development of two of Belgium’s most iconic, most revered beer styles and smashes it… Read More Is everything you have ever read about the history of lambic and gueuze totally wrong? Raf Meert thinks so…
There are some fascinating facts to be extracted from the YouGov “Most Popular UK Beer and Cider Brands” survey for Q2 2022, not least the fact that James Watt, Beer Twitter’s most hated villain, runs one of the UK’s most popular craft beer brands right across the age spectrum, from 20-year-old Millennials to Baby Boomers… Read More Everybody and their grandad loves Punk IPA
Less than two years after Arthur Guinness took over the lease of the St James’s Gate brewery in Dublin, in May 1761, aged 37 or so, he married Olivia Whitmore, a young lady “of distinguished merit, with a real fortune of 2000l.” Olivia was 19, almost half her husband’s age. Her father William, a wealthy… Read More The strange story of Guinness’s brewery, Melbourne
I had a run-in with a clown on Quora recently who was repeating the myth that medieval peasants never drank water, only ale. After I smacked him hard with actual statistics, strangely, he never came back. Pity, really, I’d have appreciated at least an apology. The usual argument for debunking the Great Medieval Water Myth… Read More So how much ale did a medieval peasant actually drink? Much, much less than you think
On Sunday June 18 1815 at around 6pm in the evening, at the height of the Battle of Waterloo, ten miles south of Brussels, a 33-year-old captain in the 7th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Hussars named William Verner, born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, was hit in the head by a French bullet — one… Read More Guinness met at Waterloo
If it wasn’t for the fact that Cooper, a mixture of porter and stout, is mentioned in one of the best-known antiquarian books on drink, John Bickerdyke’s The Curiosities of Ale and Beer, published in 1889 it might be as completely forgotten today as other mixed beers, such as brown-and-mild, or light-and-bitter. A mixture of… Read More The brief and fashionable life of London Cooper, 1860-1915
