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
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
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?
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
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
I am always alert for any comments about how beers tasted in the past. They don’t appear very often, but they’re fascinating when they do. So I leapt upon a line out of a recent blog by Ron Pattinson, in a description from 1889 of an obscure style called Adambier, which Ron had translated from… Read More So you think you know what porter tastes like …
Well, that was all rather too much: nearly 4,000 words and more footnotes than a Jerry Lee Lewis concert. So here’s the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably assume and what we can’t assume about the history of India Pale Ale, and I promise to keep it… Read More IPA: the executive summary
