In the mid-1970s I had a girlfriend who was a student at Liverpool University. The campus pub-of-choice was (and still is, I believe) the Cambridge on the corner of Mulberry Street, which was, back then, a Burtonwood Brewery outlet. Its popularity was partly down to its closeness to the university, of course, but also for the excellent,… Read More What colour was mild?
This is going to bring me large numbers of search engine hits from people looking for something else entirely, but I’m going to talk about the joy of X, which inevitably means mentioning XX, and XXX of course, and XXXX and so on, right up to Simonds of Reading’s strong stout, Archangel XXXXXXX. The usual… Read More Everything you wanted to know about X
In February 1961, 47 years ago, Guinness paid the London brewer Watney Combe Reid £28,000 – equivalent to more than £400,000 today – to discontinue brewing its Reid’s Stout. It was part of the Irish firm’s drive to put its newly perfected nitrogen-serve Draught Guinness into as many pubs as possible: Watney’s also had a… Read More The Hunting of the Stout
One of the perks of being a journalist is that you can get married in St Bride’s, the church at the foot of Fleet Street in London which continues to be the “journalists’ cathedral”, even though the hacks and blunts have all moved out of Fleet Street and their former offices are now occupied by… Read More St Brigid and the bathwater
What does it tell you about the world that if you want to access the electronic archives of The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of the planet’s great campaigners for raw capitalism, you can do so for free, via your local council’s website; but if you want to access the electronic archives of The… Read More Stout v Porter: a northern perspective
What flavour did the first porters have? Empyreumatic, I reckon – a word you can easily work out the meaning of yourself (that “pyre” in the middle is the clue), which basically translates as “the taste or smell of something burnt”. Henry Stopes, author of Malt and Malting, published in 1885, uses it in his… Read More Legal smoking and drinking
Considering what a huge impact he had on the taste of British beer, astonishingly little is known about the man who gave his name to the Goldings hop. About all we do have comes from a book published in 1798 with the marvellously long title of The Rural Economy of the Southern Counties: Comprizing Kent,… Read More Will the real Mr Golding please step forward
They’ll be cracking open the bottles of Young’s Double Chocolate Stout in Bedford today at the news that archaeologists in Honduras have discovered that chocolate was originally just a by-product in brewing beer. What’s more, it looks as if chocolate-flavoured beer, like DC Stout, is one of the most ancient beer styles in the world,… Read More Chocolate beer is 3,000 years old
The Tudor physician, traveller and former Carthusian monk Andrew Boorde is most famous in brewing history for his attack on hopped beer, calling it, in his A Dyetary of Helth, published in 1542, a naturall drynke for a Dutche man [by which he meant Germans] … of late days … much used in Englande to… Read More West Country White Ale, a lost English beer
Where and when was the first Guinness brewery opened in England? If you answered “Park Royal, 1936”, whoops, the loud noises and flashing lights have gone off, that’s the WRONG answer, by more than 100 miles and just under 100 years. In 1838 John Grattan Guinness junior had been sacked from the brewery business in… Read More Bristol-fashion Guinness and the roast barley question
