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’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…
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
In October 1736, Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and the foremost satirist of his age, published an attack on English porter, which was made, he said, of “the worst Malt, which is sent from all parts of the Country for that Use, and consequently nothing but Gin exceeds it for Badness.”… Read More Why Jonathan Swift said English porter was only fit for swine
This is a fascinating picture, and not just because of the cats: it depicts the sort of labour-intensive cellar practice that the Burton union system was invented in the 1830s to eliminate, though this engraving dates from 1875. It illustrates the scene in the cellar at Thomas Aitken’s Victoria Parade brewery in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia,… Read More How many cats can YOU spot in the brewery cellar?
