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
There might, I suppose, be a bar selling BrewDog Tactical Nuclear Penguin or Sink the Bismark for, what, three times the store-bought retail price, but even that wouldn’t beat it. And admittedly this is a beer that has spent a year maturing in the caves of Champagne (that’s “cellars”, incidentally, and not, as one English… Read More The most expensive beer in any bar in the world?
Here’s a top contender for “vanished beers I wish I’d tasted” – Meat Stout. A mixture of serendipity and synchronicity led me to discover Mercer’s Meat Stout this week, a brew I’d never previously heard of. Serendipity (the art of finding something valuable while looking for some other thing entirely) because I was actually searching… Read More Mercer’s Meat Stout
Silly joke: but the fact that even someone with my limited Photoshop skills can knock up an unkind photospoof of AB Inbev’s new “entry level” four per cent alcohol lager for the British market, Bud 66, in 15 minutes suggests the company’s marketing department didn’t think hard enough about the branding. And my apologies to… Read More Budweiser 666: the drink of the beast
Beer and great literature: they’re found together more often than you might think. One of the enormous benefits of the growing power of the internet is that it makes certain sorts of research almost trivially easy. Earlier this year the chaps at Beer Connoisseur magazine asked me to write a piece about breweries in novels.… Read More Mr Du Boung the Brewer
