Here’s another titbit* from the Times archives: a report from 1840 on the hop harvest with some fascinating clues about what hops went into IPA (I was wrong, incidentally, in saying the archive is not available to the public – if you can use your public library card to access resources like the Oxford English… Read More Kent hops, hedgers and Pale India Ale
A mention over on Patto’s blog about Government ale reminded me of one of my favourite beer songs – Ernie Mayne’s Lloyd George’s Beer from 1917. Click that link and check it out – it’s fantastic. Mayne was a 20-stone (that’s 280 pounds for Americans) music hall artist who died 70 years ago this year,… Read More Government ale
I’m grateful to Knut Albert for bringing to my attention a review in The Economist on a new book by Sir Roy Strong, A Little History of the English Country Church. The review says that in the mid-1600s: “the loss of income, particularly from banning the making and selling of church ales, meant that the… Read More Ales, churches and brides
One of the particularly interesting facts to emerge from the papers prepared for last week’s BGBW seminar on wood-aged beers was that Greene King has been giving everyone, including our leading beer writers entirely the wrong tale about the name of BPA, the beer that is blended with two-year-old 5X to make Strong Suffolk. The… Read More Come-back for the Burtons
There’s an odd feeling, like you’re doing something slightly illegal, when drinking and discussion beers that would have been poured down the drain by every generation of brewers before this one for being irredeemably faulty. But 21st century brewmasters have discovered the flavour found in wood, and declared it good. Unlike wine-makers, especially many white… Read More The woodbegoods
When I was researching the etymological roots of various European beer-related words, I discovered there had been a Gaulish personal name, Curmisagios, which translates as “the beer seeker”, or, if you like, “the beer hunter”. Among the tribes who lived in Gaul, home of Curmisagios, were the Belgae, whose own name was borrowed in 1790… Read More One for the Curmisagios
When I worked on a local newspaper in one of Hertfordshire’s duller towns in the mid-1970s, the news editor rushed in from the pub one lunchtime frothing with excitement – he had just been given a story by a guy in the bar that was bound to make the week’s front page splash. This man’s… Read More Pernicious myths and a ban on hops
Co-incidence time again – I went to the Rake by Borough Market last night with Patto, who was over from Amsterdam, without knowing that it had just won the best bar award in Time Out‘s Eating and Drinking Awards. It’s not the smallest pub I’ve ever been in but it’s certainly smaller than my living… Read More Rake’s Prowess
I was born, in what Carl Jung would have insisted was no coincidence, on the site of an old pub, the Upper Flask in Hampstead, near the Heath. The pub closed in the second half of the 18th century, and the building that housed it was replaced in the early years of the 20th by… Read More The potboy in history, literature and art
Michael Jackson, whose funeral was yesterday, used to complain that people kept asking him what his favourite beer was. It annoyed him, I think, because it showed what a limited view the questioners had of great pleasures and deep enthusiasms, as if you could only like football by supporting one favourite team. I have a… Read More There Are No Favourites in Our House
