Matching Chinese food and beer

One of the opportunities I was looking forward to in Hong Kong was the chance to match beer with Chinese food, a surprisingly under-explored area. I believe strongly that most beers go with most foods: but that doesn’t mean some pairings cannot be particularly felicitous, and that’s especially true with Chinese cuisine.

China is easily the biggest beer market in the world, almost twice as large as the US, the next largest, and in 2010 China drank very nearly a quarter of all the world’s beer. But annual consumption per head, at around 30 litres, while rising at some five per cent a year, is still almost a third of the US figure (81 litres). In addition, most of that consumption is of pale, undemanding lager.

What that means is that the Chinese DO drink beer with food, but it will be Tsingtao, or Blue Girl (from South Korea) or something equally bland and dull. Fortunately, Hong Kong takes advantage of its position as one of the biggest trading centres in Asia by importing good beer from all over the world: you won’t find Gale’s Prize Old Ale in Chiswick right now, for example (there’s none in stock in the Fuller’s brewery shop and I bought the last two bottles they had in the Mawson Arms next door back in October) but you WILL find it in stock in Hong Kong bars run by the El Grande group, such as the Happy Valley Bar and Grill – or at least you will until I buy up their complete current holding and the 2012 version gets shipped out. And, amazingly, Prize Old Ale is a beer that goes fantastically well with Chinese food, so well it could almost have been brewed for it.

There is probably a proper expression for this, but I don’t know it, so let’s call it “food imagination”, or “food intelligence”: the ability to summon up in the mind two different tastes and decide how they would go together, even if you have never actually matched or paired them in life. I’m sure it’s possible to test “FI”, with questions like: “what beer would you recommend with fennel?”* Good chefs need “FI”: good brewers, too. Great chefs (and brewers) have “food imagination” in wagons. You need to have at least a little “food imagination” to match beer with food, to even be able to write about beer and food matching: someone like Garrett Oliver obviously has “high FI”, and I think I have a reasonable “FI quotent”, or I wouldn’t dare write about beer and food together myself. So some of this is based on experience, some on speaking to Chinese beer lovers in Hong Kong, and some on “FI”.

Roast pork and Guinness soy sauce with glutinous rice balls and stir-fried broccoli, pak choy, mushrooms and Chinese chives

Of course, “Chinese food” is about as misleadingly general an expression as “European food” would be: Cantonese cooking is as different from eg Szechuan as Greek from Scandinavian. But you can still put down some general rules. Roast pork is an excellent match for stouts in any cuisine, and perhaps even more so in Chinese traditions, with the flavours of soy sauce in particular chiming very well. I just marinaded a small piece of pork in the local version of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout (6.8 per cent abv) with a dessertspoonful of soy, a splash of anchovy sauce and a good shot of five-spice powder, then, while the pork was roasting, turned the marinade into a thick sauce. Sliced the pork and spooned the sauce over it, alongside glutinous rice balls and stir-fried pak choi, broccoli, mushrooms and Chinese chives.

Authentically Chinese? Not at all, but delicious: there was a surprising sweetness in the sauce. Beers to go with: Prize Old Ale (the sherry of beers, its sweet/sharp flavours and its depth of finish complement Chinese sauces brilliantly) and Samuel Adams Boston Lager: any malty darker lager would do well with dark-meat Chinese dishes. I haven’t tried a Vienna-style lager with Chinese roast duck yet, but I’d be confident that would work: better than stout, maybe even better than POA. Although for Peking duck, I think it would have to be the Gale’s. A funky Belgian abbey beer, such as Orval, would also work with roast duck: and if I ever get the courage to eat conch meat or cuttlefish (available still swimming about at the fish stalls down by the piers in HK), it will be Orval or Chimay I’ll be looking to partner it.

Cuttlefish: not just for budgies

Also on my wish-to-try list: tangerine beef and something like Fuller’s Vintage Ale, or ESB, both with that marmalade-y “house” character that should fit well with such a dish; Chinese steamed fish with St Austell Clouded Yellow; and a match suggested to me by Marc Chung, assistant manager at the Hong Kong beer and wine importer Bacchus in Sheung Wan, chicken with lemon sauce paired with a Belgian cassis beer.

Talking of Belgian brews, one of the most popular draught beers in HK is Hoegaarden, particularly, apparently, among Chinese women: I’m not sure if they’re drinking it with food, but they should. Cantonese food is not over-spicy, and a beer that brings its own spicy flavours to the table is a great match, while the “mildness” of wheat beers also suits the local cuisine. Bavarian wheat beers, in particular, with those banana and clove flavours, and good grease-cutting ability, line up very well alongside spring rolls.

You can also go in completely the other direction and line up a good hop-stuffed American double IPA with rice-based, quite bland dishes, such as Hainan chicken (which is boiled whole in a pot), where the floral, citrusy flavours of the beer are going to be the dominant partner over the food – but in a good way.

Much authentic Chinese food is what might be called, in the European tradition, broth-based, and right now (this being Chinese New Year) a huge number of families will be sitting down to a traditional New Year dish known as hot-pot, or steamboat, which is a bit like fondue without the cheese: each diner has a selection of raw food which is dipped into a boiling pot of broth in the middle of the table to cook. This is where you DO need lighter beers: malt-forward British-style pale ales, for example.

Blue chicken: tastier than it looks

One of the people who helped me put together a piece on Chinese food and beer for the South China Morning Post last week was Annie Lam, a former metals trader who has been importing British beers to Hong Kong for 10 years via her company The Beer Bay. She recommends straight pale ales with Chinese chicken and fish dishes (you certainly don’t want anything too hoppy or assertive with the often delicate flavours of, eg, fish ball soup, but if you’re roasting one of the local, they’ll take something more powerful), and IPAs with stronger-tasting dishes such as smoked duck or barbecued pig with hoisin sauce (smoked duck – there’s a dish I might be persuaded to break a habit and try a Rauchbier with, and a whisky-barrel-aged stout would be an interesting, if perhaps too combative a combination). Stronger, darker, more malt-oriented ales – we’re talking Adnam’s Broadside, Fuller’s XX – “these beers would be fantastic with all kinds of red meat, with strong flavours, like beef, lamb: they would really bring the flavours out with oyster sauce, soy sauce, every kind of sauce, Peking-style, Shanghai-style, even Szechuan style food,” she says. And I’m not going to disagree.

I also went to Bacchus, which specialises in Belgian imports, where Marc Cheung quickly matched a list of Chinese dishes with beers. Roast pork with plum sauce, he suggested, paired well with Gulden Draak or a similar dark tripel (although I’d like to try Rodenbach Grand Cru: sadly, I’ve not seen this in Hong Kong); beef with hot chilli pepper Marc matched with a couple of strong Belgian ales, Dulle Teve and Lucifer; and for stir-fry clams with garlic and black bean sauce he lined up the Belgian “champagne beer” Deus: at HK$250 a bottle (£21/US$32 currently) this would not be my immediate first choice, on cost grounds, and I think I’d rather try Deus with those fish balls. For spicy/garlicky food, FI suggests to me a good abbey triple. Finally, for the typical Chinese dessert of deep-fried egg whites with red bean paste filling, Marc shoved forward what I always think of as the red-nosed, baggy-trousered clowns of the beer world, Mongozo Banana and Mongozo Coconut. Don’t know about those two: but Wells Banana Bread Beer might be an interesting pairing.

* Not a lot, but a porter or stout with liquorice as one of the ingredients would be an interesting match.

The most notorious brewer in history

Antoine-Joseph Santerre

In the autumn of 1775, Henry Thrale, owner of one of the biggest porter breweries in London, took his family on a trip across the English Channel to Paris. With them went Dr Samuel Johnson, the dictionary-writer and author, and one of the great literary figures of 18th-century England, who had been good friends with Thrale and his wife Hester for 10 years. In Paris the Thrales and Johnson toured the sights, visited palaces, churches and gardens, and educated themselves with a trip to a manufacturer of mirrors. Henry Thrale also called in on Paris’s biggest brewer, a man called Antoine-Joseph Santerre, taking Johnson with him.

Johnson’s notes of the visit say that Santerre’s Hortensia brewery, in the Rue de Reuilly, part of the Faubourg St Antoine, although the largest of 17 brewing establishments in the city, brewed just 4,000 barrels a year. This was barely a 20th of the annual output at the time of Thrale’s own Anchor brewery in Southwark. Johnson also recorded that Santerre made his own malt, and used about as much malt per barrel as Thrale did; and he sold his beer for the same price as Thrale, though he paid no malt tax, and only half as much beer tax.

Johnson – an oak-hard Tory, who had recently produced a pamphlet attacking the American colonists for their rebelliousness against the British crown – would have been horrified to learn that he was shaking hands with a man who, 14 years later, would aid the mobs of the Faubourg St Antoine in their successful assault of July 14 on the Bastille, and who, four and a half years after that, would escort the King of France, Louis XVI, from his prison to the guillotine.

Johnson was five years dead when the French Revolution broke out, but Hester Thrale remembered Santerre, and suggested after the Parisian brewer became notorious that he had become a revolutionary because of an incident that happened around the time the Thrales were in Paris. A fine horse belonging to Santerre got in the way of a royal procession and an officer in the army drew out his pistol and shot the animal dead, an act that, according to Hester, filled Santerre with anger.

Caught on the horns of a yard of ale

You’ve read the stories, I’m sure: you’ve probably got, as I have, a mental picture. The mailcoach rattles through the arch into the straw-strewn innyard, chickens flying out of the way, the outside passengers ducking to avoid losing their hats – or heads. The ostler and stable-boys, alerted by the sound of the guard’s horn as the coach came down the High Street, rush to unhitch the old, tired, sweat-spattered team of horses and lead them away, at the same time bringing out a fresh team. The red-faced landlord, in tan breeches, black waistcoat, white shirt and white apron, his hair tied back in a short ponytail by a black bow, hands up a yard-long glass brimful of ale to the overcoat-laden mailcoach driver, who has no time in his schedule even to get down from his box. In a swing perfected by daily practice, the driver drains the long glass without a spill, hands it back down to the cheery publican and, refreshed, whips up his new horses, who gallop off back out onto the highway, the passenger-laden coach bouncing behind them and 10 more miles of muddy, rutted road ahead before they can all rest at the next stop. If there’s not a painting of that scene on the oak-panelled walls of some pub dining room with 18th century pretentions somewhere in England, I’ll swallow the nearest tricorn hat.

It’s a great tale, repeated often, and I never dissected it until I read it again in the Oxford Companion to Beer, where it appears in the entry for “drinking customs”:

“The diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706) mentions a yard of ale being used to toast King James II but the vessel has more plebeian origins. It was designed to meet the needs of stagecoach drivers who were in a rush to get to their final destinations. At intermediate steps the drivers would be hand ale in a yard glass through an inn window, the glass being of sufficient length for the driver to take it without leaving his coach.”

Perhaps because this occurs just four paragraphs after a claim that King Edgar, a pre-Conquest king of England, tried to limit villages to only one alehouse each in an attempt to cut drunkenness, which is definitely a pile of Anglo-Saxon pants (the permanently established alehouse as a village institution was probably at least three centuries away when Edgar was on the throne, and there wasn’t the infrastructure in his time to enforce such a law anyway – and nor is there a single parchment scrap of evidence for such a decree), myths were at the front of my brain, which is why this time when I read about coach drivers and yards of ale I finally went: “?”

Guidance for 2012

It’s 2012 here in Hong Kong, and has been for some hours. My resolution for this year is not to be such a grumpily aggressive bastard online, although I have at least one rant to get out of the way first. However, I have tried to put together a list of precepts to blog by over the coming 12 months, rules I hope we can all agree on. There are, in fact, just three:

1) It’s only beer.

2) It’s all about the taste.

3) You like what you like. I like what I like.

There: who could possibly object to any of that? You agree? Excellent. Now I’m going to test you. Have a brown paper bag handy, and read this, which is a genuine comment grabbed from the web during 2011:

So, under the recommendation of a few people online, I bought myself a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. And I have to say… It’s one of the best beers I’ve ever had. Normally I stuck to more mainstream pale lagers, such as Corona Extra, Budweiser and Peroni, so was a bit cautious about trying this, and as I opened it up, the rich beer smell really hit me, and I was expecting a bitter, overpowering flavour. Nevertheless, I tried a gulp of it… And it went down like water! Yet, the flavour was there, and strong, but not overpowering by any means. It’s fairly refreshing, although I will say you should only drink it when it’s cold, it tastes much better to me.

OK, blow into the brown paper bag and place it over your nose and mouth … breathe in and out slowly … repeat after me: “It’s only beer … It’s all about the taste … You like what you like. I like what I like.” Feeling better now? Good.

Really, if people like things you don’t like, it doesn’t matter. And nor does it matter if they don’t like things that you adore. There are, in fact, amazingly few things a majority of people can agree on, and almost none that everybody votes for: we live in a world of pluralities and minorities. You can live with that, or you can drive up your blood pressure. If you enjoy something that someone else doesn’t, well, just enjoy your enjoyment. And if they enjoy something you can’t see the point of, that’s really not your problem. Have a good year.

Roast beef, plum pudding and ale

I blame Charles Dickens. If he hadn’t ended A Christmas Carol with the by-then thoroughly reformed Scrooge ordering the prize turkey to be delivered to the Cratchits’ home in Camden, perhaps we wouldn’t now be persuaded in Britain that a tasteless, monstrous bird should be the centre of the December 25 dinner, and we would have stuck to the traditional yuletide treat – roast beef, lots of it, accompanied by plum pudding and strong ale.

If you search through 19th century newspapers, it quickly becomes clear that the trinity of beef, heavy dried-fruit-stuffed pudding and good ale was at the heart of the Christmas festivities everywhere in Britain, literally from palace to poorhouse. Here’s the Liverpool Weekly Mercury for Saturday September 29 1855:

The origins of pils: a reality Czech from Evan Rail

If there is one blessing the Oxford Companion to Beer has brought us, it’s the beginnings of a much better, and myth-free understanding of the origins of the world’s most popular beer style, pale pils lager, and the brewery that first made it, Pilsner Urquell, which is in what is now the Czech Republic. We didn’t get this new understanding from the OCB itself, obviously, but from Evan Rail, who lives in Prague, who writes with insight and erudition about Czech beer, Czech beerstyles and Czech brewing history, and who knows the number one rule about writing history: go back to the original sources – an apt commandment here, since “Urquell” – “Prazdroj” in Czech – means “original source”.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read his latest blog post adding, clarifying and correcting the OCB’s Czech-related entries.

Evan has done something few, if any, writers in English about the origins of Pilsner Urquell, the “world’s first pale lager”, have bothered doing. He has uncovered, and read, the document in 1839 which effectively founded the brewery in Pilsen, the “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse”, made by 12 prominent Pilsen burghers. He has also read the brewery’s own history, written for its 50th anniversary, Měšťanský pivovar v Plzni 1842-1892.

Among the fascinating facts that Evan has revealed so far, the following seem particularly worthy of note:

• The town of Pilsen was already being “flooded” by bottom-fermented “Bavarian-style” beer in 1839, the 12 would-be founders of the new brewery declared, and it seems one big reason why they wanted to build their own new brewery was to fight back against imports of lager beers from elsewhere, by making their own bottom-fermented brews in Pilsen.
• The builder of the new brewery, František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December 1839, the brewery’s architect, Martin Stelzer, “travelled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”
• The yeast for the new brewery was certainly not “smuggled out of Bavaria by a monk”, as far too many sources try to claim (did anybody with their critical faculties engaged ever believe that?), nor even, apparently, brought with him by Josef Groll, the 29-year-old brewer from the town of Vilshofen in Lower Bavaria who was hired to run the new brewery. Instead, “seed yeast for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria,” according to the 1892 book. (The Groll family brewery, incidentally, no longer exists, but another concern in Vilshofen, the Wolferstetter brewery, still produces a Josef Groll Pils in his memory.)
• The maltings at the new brewery were “dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”, that is, loosely, “equipped with English-style malt kilns”, according to an account from 1883. That meant indirect heat: the same 1883 account says the kilns were “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření“, which looks to mean “heated by heat from the boiler-room”. Indirect heat makes it easier to control the heating, and easier to produce pale malt, which is just what the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery did to make its pale lager.

That still leaves THE big mystery: if the burgher brewers of Pilsen wanted to compete against Bavarian-style bottom-fermented lagers, which would still have been quite dark (think “Dunkel”), why did they make a pale beer? Were they attempting to imitate English pale beers? Since pale bitter beers were only just taking off even in Britain in 1842 (although pale mild ales had been around for a couple of centuries), I don’t personally find that particularly likely.

However, Evan has promised “more on the origins of Pilsner Urquell coming up”, and I am hugely looking forward to reading additional revelations. I was delighted to read that Stelzer had toured the big breweries of Munich before the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery was built, because I suggested in an article for Beer Connoisseur magazine in the US two and a half years ago that he must have done. In Munich he surely met Gabriel Sedlmayr II, of the Spaten brewery, who had been round Britain looking at the latest brewing and malting techniques being practised in places such as London, Burton upon Trent and Edinburgh, and Sedlmayr would have been able to tell him about English malting techniques. Munich, at that time, was becoming a magnet for brewers in Continental Europe because of the advances in brewing methods being made by Sedlmayr, as he perfected the techniques of lager brewing.

Sedlmayr wasn’t, at that time, making pale malts: however, the man who accompanied him to Britain on one of his trips, Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery near Vienna, DID come back and start producing paler English-style malts, allied with Bavarian-style lagering, which resulted in a copper-brown beer, the first “Vienna-style” lager. Vienna was then, of course, the capital of the Austrian empire, of which Bohemia (and Pilsen) were still a part: it would not be surprising if Stelzer, a citizen of the Austrian empire, also visited Vienna and met Dreher (whose name, it always amuses me to note, translates as “Tony Turner”), and talked about malting techniques, but there seems to be no evidence as yet that he did so.

I’d also love to know why Josef Groll was hired (apparently by Stelzer) to run the new brewery: Vilshofen, while nearer Pilsen than Munich is, is a comparative backwater, and if Stelzer had been to Munich, why did he not bring a Munich brewer back with him to Bohemia? This site claims (on what authority I know not) that Groll studied under both Sedlmayr and Dreher, but both allegedly complained about his rudeness, obstinacy, stubbornness and lack of self-control. If that’s true (I have no idea), it doesn’t look as it Stelzer bothered checking up on Groll’s references before he hired the young brewer …

A short history of water

An artesian well dug at Christie & Co's brewery, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire around 1926

In November 1799 a brief paragraph appear in the Times newspaper:

“A Porter Brewery is about to be established at Portsmouth, by a number of opulent Gentlemen, who have subscribed £5000 each. The Thames water for this undertaking is to be conveyed by shipping.”

The reason for the appearance of the second sentence is that many drinkers, at the time, were convinced that good porter, then easily the best-selling beer in London, and perhaps the most popular style in the British Isles, could only be brewed with water from the Thames. The “opulent Gentlemen” behind the proposed Portsmouth venture clearly felt that if they could say their porter was made with Thames water, it would give them instant credibility.

In fact, although several of the big London porter breweries stood by the banks of the Thames, including Barclay Perkins in Southwark, Calvert’s Hour Glass brewery almost directly opposite Barclay Parkins on Upper Thames Street in the City, and Hoare’s by St Katharine’s dock, even the Thames-side ones took their water from wells, or, like Whitbread in Chiswell Street, on the northern edge of the City, from reservoirs supplied by the New River, constructed in the 17th century to bring water to London from near Amwell in Hertfordshire.

In the “pre-scientific” era, writers on brewing knew that different waters had different effects on the final brew, and regularly recorded myths about which waters were best. A brewing book from 1719, A Guide to Gentlemen and Farmers for Brewing the Finest Malt Liquors insisted that “Upon the whole, the best Liquor to Brew with, is that which is taken from a small clear Rivulet or Brook, undisturb’d by Navigation or Fording,” though

“Possibly much the best Water in England is that at Castleton in Derbyshire, commonly called, The Devils Arss, Which Owzes from a great Rock, covered over with a shallow Earth … I have seen the Ale made of Castleton-Water as clear in three days after it was Barrelled, as the Spring-Water it self, and impossible to be known by the Eye in a Glass from the finest Canary Wine.”

Some had preferences that seem frankly bizarre today. A book called A Treatise on the Brewing of Beer, self-published in 1796 by one E Hughes of Uxbridge, declared that when it came to brewing liquor:

How they brought the good news from 1700 to today

Now I understand why those nice people at Brains Brewery wanted to invite me to be on their table at the British Guild of Beer Writers’ annual dinner and awards last night. They knew – which I, of course, didn’t – that I’d won the “Best Use of Online Media” award, perhaps better described as “beer blogger of the year”, which Brains sponsored.

Alas, the need to earn a living kept me 6,000 miles away from the dinner, so I never found out until checking Twitter this morning, to see what people were saying about the event, that I’d won the online category. Thank you, Zak Avery, for letting me know. And very well done to all the other victors, especially Marverine Cole and Des de Moor, both first-time category winners, and Ben McFarland, who picked up his third Beer Writer of the Year tankard, a feat which puts him on a par with Michael Jackson and Allan McLean as a three-times winner, and makes him easily the most successful writer in the awards in the past 10 years. Only Alistair Gilmour has won more golds overall, and his first one came in 1998.

I was actually hoping for a runners-up mug – seriously, I’ve never won one of those, and I genuinely didn’t fancy my chances in the online category over-much, so I’d ruled myself out as a category winner: there are currently a large number of VERY good beer blogs from UK operators, all much more accessible than my 2,000 to 4,000-word rants and essays, I thought. Evidently the judges this year disagreed. Yay!

That was the particularly good news of the week: but there was excellent news from earlier, too. I love the British Library: it keeps making my life as a beer historian easier and more rewarding. You may have seen the announcement that thousands of old newspapers from 1700 to 1949, from the holdings of the British Newspaper Library at Colindale (a subsidiary of the BL at St Pancras), have now been scanned and put on line. Suddenly, from my own computer, and while supping a Mackeson XXX (brewed in Trinidad – more on that another time) I can seek answers to all sorts of interesting questions.

Such as? Well, were they really drinking pale ale in London early in the reign of George I? Why yes: here’s a tragic story from the Ipswich Journal of 18 September 18, 1725:

Are you thinking of another Martyn Cornell?

It’s truly a bizarre experience reading false stuff about yourself on the internet. Over on Beerpal they’ve been having a discussion about the differences between ale and beer, springing from this post. Someone said: “Who is this Brit who can’t understand that the way we Americans use a word is the way a word must be used?” (or something to that effect), and someone called Mark Fraghert responded with seven totally wrong claims about me:

The writer is Martyn Cornell, considered the foremost expert on beer in the world …

Great Dionysus, no, no, I’m most certainly not considered that, not at all, not by anybody, not even by me. How did Mr Fraghert make that one up? I wouldn’t call myself even “a leading beer historian”. A following beer historian, quite a lot of the time.

… and the person who worked with the late beer expert Michael Jackson on many of his books.

No I didn’t – I never worked with Michael Jackson at all. I was quoted in one of his books, back in 1990 or so. That’s my only link to any of his publications.

Martyn has been writing about beer for more than 30 years …

Trivially true: I’ve been seriously writing about beer only for 15 years, however.

… has authored over a dozen books

No I haven’t – three, that’s all.

… is the founder of the British Brewing Guild …

No I’m not. There’s no such organisation. I was at the meeting held to set up the British Guild of Beerwriters, but so were a lot of other people.

… and is a multiple award winner of the British Beer Writer of the year award.

No I’m not. Once. Eight years ago.

He is currently in the news doing his best to discredit Garrett Oliver’s efforts as a editor with Oliver’s Oxford Companion to Brewing.

No, I’m, definitely, absolutely not doing that at all. I have no wish to discredit Garrett Oliver, for whom I have great admiration.

Cornell is definitely not a student.

Well, THAT he got right. But now these “facts” about me are out there, how soon before they get repeated, and turn up at the top of every Google search? Let’s hope I never get a Wikipedia page …

London’s brewing, London’s brewing …

The London Brewers Alliance beer festival at Vinopolis, by Borough Market, a couple of Saturdays ago was a terrific event, thoroughly enjoyable. In one room were gathered a dozen or more (I forgot to count) stalls representing breweries from in and around London, with the brewers themselves serving their beers and happy to talk to the punters about them.

It was the kind of “meet the brewer” show common in the US but almost unheard of in the UK that we really should be seeing repeated across this country. And it’s good to see London’s brewers working together in the 21st century to support each other in exactly the same way their ancestors did almost eight centuries ago, when the Brewers’ Guild was founded at All Hallows’ Church, London Wall.

It was also good, for me, to see that the Brewery History Society had a stall there: the LBA clearly has an interest in London’s history as a world-class brewing city, and everybody needs to be reminded of this almost forgotten heritage. I’d argue that, historically, London has an excellent claim to be regarded as the greatest brewing city in the world. Yes, I AM a Londoner, so of course I’m biased, but I dare you to deny that over the centuries London has given the world more new beer styles than any other brewing centre on the planet: