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?
As I said when I wrote the first of these blog essays, the origins of the words “ale” and “beer” are a surprisingly tangled mystery, with no particularly obvious root for either word. Nor has anyone ever explained convincingly why the “continental” branch of West Germanic (the one that eventually became German in all its… Read More Words for beer (3): the big mysteries
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
In any modern account of the history of India Pale Ale, you’ll generally find a declaration that the casks of well-hopped beer sent out to India by ship via the Cape of Good Hope in the late 18th century matured and developed quickly in a way that the same beer kept at home in Britain… Read More IPA: the hot maturation experiment
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
If anybody has been missing Really Simple Beer Syndication, the American “beer blog aggregator”, since it went down apparently never to rise again a couple of months ago, a very nice chap called Pelle Stridh has put together a site called All About Beer which aggregates the feeds of all your favourite beer bloggers from… Read More All your beer blogging updates in one place
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?
A few weeks ago I went to a performance by Wynton Marsalis, whose music I have been buying since the early 1980s. He arrived then as a young trumpeter who could play jazz and classical music with equal genius: I remember listening to his recording of the Hayden Trumpet Concerto in 1983 and feeling that… Read More Cask beer equals live music, bottled beer equals CDs
Interesting piece I stumbled across from the Washington Post last week about an “abbey” beer project in the heart of the American capital: not actually brewing beer in an abbey, but a homebrewer’s bid to make beers off-site that use ingredients from the grounds of the 113-year-old Mount St Sepulchre Franciscan Monastery in north-east Washington.… Read More Note to self: it’s only beer history, must stop getting so upset by other people’s errors
