I am green – viridian. Ron Pattinson has been dropping hints every time I see him about his secret big new project with Goose Island in Chicago, and it’s now been revealed: a reproduction of a London porter from 1840, including authentic heritage barley, properly “blown” brown malt, and blending a long-vatted beer with a… Read More AB Inbev’s new 1840 London porter and the hornbeam question
Millions of words, and dozens of books, have been written about Guinness, the beer, the brewery, and the family, and a perhaps surprising amount of inaccurate mythology (and sometimes pure nonsense) has crept into the story. Here is a short list of some of the “facts” that writers, some of them supposedly authoritative sources, most… Read More Everything You Don’t Want To Know About Guinness: ten Guinness myths that need stamping out now
In view of recent events, I thought people might be interested in a short history of Asahi Breweries … Beer was introduced into Japan by the Dutch, who were the only Europeans allowed to trade with the country after the expulsion of the Portuguese early in the 17th century, and who would take biiru with… Read More A short history of Asahi, in which beer gets called ‘bitter horse-piss wine’
The Swedes have had a fondness for porter since at least 1780, when the Swedish botanist Bengt Bergius claimed that in Sweden “a lot of English beer varieties have started to be seen on some of the wealthy tables, especially English porter, which is now brewed as good here in Stockholm.” Nothing seems to be… Read More Mumma, mixed a beer today …
The 200th anniversary next year of the “Peterloo Massacre”, the assault by mounted troops on a crowd gathered in Manchester to hear speeches in favour of parliamentary reform, has been marked by the release of a film by Mike Leigh starring Rory Kinnear as Henry “Orator” Hunt, the main speaker at the meeting in St… Read More The porter brewer and the Peterloo Massacre
Today is the 96th anniversary of the death of Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary who played a major part in the Irish War of Independence, which saw the establishment of what was known as the Irish Free State, and who was then killed in an ambush during the civil war between those that accepted the… Read More Did Michael Collins drink a pint of Clonakilty Wrestler the day he died?
Sometimes it takes 20 years and more before the significance of something you read become apparent. In January 1997, What’s Brewing, the Campaign for Real Ale’s monthly newspaper for members, ran a piece by Michael Jackson on a trip he made to what was then the Pripps brewery in Bromma, just outside Stockholm (closed by… Read More How Michael Jackson drank a beer that inspired a Yorkshire delicacy and never realised it
Every weekday morning hurrying tech workers rush out, hundreds at a time, from Shoreditch High Street station in East London, turning left down Bethnal Green Road, past Boxpark Shoreditch, clutching cups of take-away coffee, ready for eight hours of keyboard-stabbing. None of them realises, as they head towards their desks and computers, that as they… Read More Thousands of Londoners pass through a historic brewery every day without realising it
The history of beer and food in Britain is easy to summarise: we all, men women and children, used to drink beer with every meal, from breakfast to supper. Then, some time between around 1860 and 1914, due to changes in attitude and culture not easy to find a simple explanation for, we slowed and… Read More A short history of beer and food
I’ve written before on how American hops were being imported to the UK in the late 1810s, after a couple of years of dreadful summer weather wrecked the English hop harvest, but this is the first time I’ve come across a specific advertisement by a brewer for American hops. This is from the Belfast Newsletter… Read More How long have UK brewers been using American hops? 200 years, you say …
