Endangered beers

Beers, like animals, can be endangered species: some can even go extinct. Nobody’s seen West Country White Ale in the wild for more than 125 years.

Camra, I’m very pleased to say, has recently decided that it could be doing much more than Make May a Mild Month for promoting endangered beers, and has set up a Beer Styles Working Group to look at ways of plugging and encouraging endangered beer styles of all sorts.

I’ve managed to blag my way onto the working group, mostly because I’m keen to point out to Camra members, and beer festival organisers (and brewers) that endangered beer styles in Britain go a long way beyond mild, stout and porter, and to try to get the other half-dozen or more endangered British beer styles recognition and promotion as well: and maybe even get some of the extinct beers remade. (That’s the advantage of beer: it may turn out to be impossible to resurrect the mammoth, but reproducing a vanished beer style generally only requires the will, a recipe and the right ingredients.)

So what ARE Britain’s vulnerable and endangered (and extinct) beer styles? Here’s my personal checklist:

Vulnerable
Porter
Porter, once made by thousands of brewers, large and small, in the UK, actually went extinct in Britain in the early 1950s, and in Ireland in 1973. It was brought back to life in 1978 by a couple of brewers, Timothy Taylor in Yorkshire and Penrhos in Herefordshire. A fair number of small brewers make porters today, but it is still far from the mainstream beer it was in the 19th century, when it was the most popular drink in the country.

Stout
Guinness aside, stout – today’s version began as simply the stronger version of porter – also suffered a sharp decline in the second half of the 20th century. London was once a huge centre for stout brewing (as it was for porter brewing): in the early 1950s the London brewer Watney Combe Reid made one draught stout and seven different bottled stouts. But by the mid-1980s a survey by What’s Brewing found just 29 brewers in the UK and Channel Islands still making stout, most of them milk stouts (qv), and as older breweries closed, few of the newcomers were making a stout. Stout has seen a small comeback among Britain’s new brewers in recent years, but one problem is the extremely blurry line today between stout and porter: some modern brewers actually make a stout that is weaker than their porter.

Endangered
Light mild
Twentieth-century light mild was the descendant of the strong pale light mild ales of the 19th and 18th centuries (qv), still lightly hopped, but with the strength drastically lowered in response to the huge rises in taxes on beer, and the restrictions on production, seen in the First World War. Together with dark mild (qv), this was the most popular draught beer style in Britain from the end of the 19th century through to the start of the 1960s. However, the drink failed to capture new generations of pub-goers, and it suffered a catastrophic decline in sales over the next 30 years. Arguably, since most modern drinkers expect a “mild” to be dark, “light mild” should really be in the “critically endangered” category.

Dark mild
Dark mild is pretty much a 20th century invention, and overlaps with (and sometimes includes) the weaker Burton Ales/Old Ales. It is related to Brown Ale (qv), but Brown Ale was always a bottled beer style. It may have sprung from an attempt by brewers during the First World War to produce a weaker beer that still had a full mouthfeel, by using darker malts (but this is just my guess). Dark mild suffered from the same late-20th century catastrophic decline in demand as light mild: both also had a marketing problem in the 1990s and 2000s as some brewers tried to revive them, that many drinkers apparently would not buy a beer called “mild”, though they would happily drink it if it was labelled something like “dark ale”. This may now be less true, as drinkers become keener on trying the beers their grandfathers drank.

Light bitter
Another product of the “Great gravity crash” of the First World War, light bitter has its roots in large part in the AK, KK and XK light bitters of the 19th century, which were themselves only “light”, at around 4.5 per cent alcohol by volume, in comparison with other 19th century beers. Twentieth century light bitter, between 3 per cent abv and 3.5 per cent abv, included the “boy’s bitters” of the West Country, as well as the AK and KK beers brewed in places such as Kent, Hampshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex and Monmouthshire. There appear to be very few examples around today.

Old ale
The boundary between Old Ale and Mild is blurry, simply because, historically, Old Ale was Mild Ale, but aged. Old Ales were generally stronger, however (which means they sometimes cross the line into the region known as “barley wine”, a catch-all for many different varieties of strong ale/beer) and a number of Old Ales still survive, including Robinson’s Old Tom, Theakston’s Old Peculier and Adnam’s Tally Ho.

Honey ale
One of the oldest styles in Britain, going back to Old Welsh bragaut, but killed off in the 18th century by a tax regime that wanted only (taxed) malt and (taxed) hops to go into beer. Revived in the late 20th century, but despite the success of honey beers from Wells & Youngs (Waggle Dance) and Fullers (Honeydew), still too much of a minority beer.

Imperial stout
One of the finest strong beers in the world, but extinct in Britain in 1994, after the last brewing (at that time) of Courage Imperial Russian Stout. However, it was successfully revived in the US, where it fitted perfectly the market for extreme beers, and a small number of UK brewers now make Imperial Stouts. In 2011 Wells & Youngs brought out a new version of Courage Imperial Russian Stout, but it is style a style more celebrated away from the country of its birth than in Britain.

Critically endangered
Burton Ale/winter warmer
Burton Ale, dark and slightly sweet, was one of the three most popular draught beer styles in Britain up to the 1950s, particularly in London, where it was a winter speciality. It then crashed out of favour, so that in 1971 Young’s changed the name of its own Burton Ale to Winter Warmer. Ind Coope thoroughly muddied the waters in 1976 by bringing out a beer called “Burton Ale” that was actually a draught IPA, a totally different style. Burton Ales came in every strength: Bass No 1 was an example of the strongest variety, Marston’s Owd Rodger is another strong Burton Ale, but some could be as low as 4 per cent alcohol, when they were sold as milds. A few examples of this classic and largely forgotten style survive: Fuller’s 1845 is one, and Fuller’s is reviving a version of its Old Burton Extra strong ale from the 1930s for its Past Masters series of beers. BPA, the beer that is blended by Greene King with two-year-old 5X to make Strong Suffolk, is a Burton, made with dark sugars and crystal malt: the initials stand for Burton Pale Ale. Almost no new brewers have ever made a Burton, one of the rare examples being Smiles Heritage.

Scotch Ale
Scotch ale is the Edinburgh version of Burton Ale: dark, with a bittersweet, sometimes slightly metallic tang, and generally strong. It survived in Belgium as Gordon Highland Scotch, which is sold (at a slightly lower strength) in the UK as McEwan’s Champion. Hopes are that Wells & Youngs may revive Younger’s No 3, a draught Scotch Ale.

Milk stout/sweet stout
In the late 19th century a taste arose for sweeter stouts, but such beers would quickly lose their sweetness as they aged. The perfection around 1907 of stouts made with an addition of unfermentable lactose sugar, derived from milk, eventually resulted in one of the most popular beer styles of the mid-20th century: even in the early 1970s there were still more than 40 sweet stouts being brewed in Britain. The style again crashed as older breweries closed down, with few or no new brewers making a sweet stout. There has been a small revival very recently in interest in the style, led by the Bristol Beer Factory and its draught Milk Stout.

Vatted old ale
About the only survivor of vatted old ale in Britain is Greene King 5X, which is, alas, almost never made available on its own, but generally blended with other beers to make, eg, Strong Suffolk. Up to the end of the Second World War, however, Old Beer, matured for a year or more in huge oak vats, was still popular in the West Country, particularly in Bristol. Few brewers, alas, have the time or space to make long-aged beers today.

Sour aged ale
A variety of vatted old ale is the sour aged ale represented now only by Gale’s Prize Old Ale, where a proportion of each brew is held back, solera-style, to add to the following year’s fresh ale. The complexity and depth available from such long-aged beers, particularly after several years in bottle, is stunning. Fuller’s rescued POA when Gale’s closed, but again, few brewers have the time or space to devote to such a minority beer.

Brown ale
Modern brown ale in Britain was the invention of Thomas Wells Thorpe, managing director of the London brewer Mann Crossmann & Paulin, who introduced Mann’s Brown in 1902. It did not take off until after the First World War, but by the 1930s every British brewer had at least one brown ale in its portfolio. A number of brewers made stronger Double Brown ales. Again, the closure of so many breweries from the 1960s onwards saw the number of brown ales made fall off a cliff, not helped by the sharply ageing profile of brown ale drinkers. Seriously endangered today.

Extinct
Brett-fermented stock ale
Brettanomyces yeast was first isolated by the Danish brewing scientist Niels Hjelte Claussen in or just before 1903 from an English “stock beer”, in the Carlsberg brewery’s laboratory, in Copenhagen, and the name Claussen gave them honours their origins: Brettanomyces literally means “British fungus”, as Saccharomyces, the name given to the standard brewing yeast, means “sugar fungus”. Brett gave cask and vat-aged stock beers their particular flavours, at it does to Belgian lambic beer, and at least one former classic British beer, Colne Spring Ale, from the Hertfordshire brewery Benskin’s, was deliberately infected with Brett in its production. The last brewing of CSA was in 1970. Today a number of American brewers have been making beers with Brett, but to my knowledge no British brewer has put out a commercial Brett ale.

Strong pale mild
London once had a set of brewers who specialised in making pale ales at around 8 or 8.5 per cent abv that were sold “mild”, that is, unaged: they included the former Lion brewery that stood on the site of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. Strong milds gradually gave way to “four-ale” milds (weaker beers sold at four old pence a quart pot), which themselves were transformed by the restrictions of the First World War into the even weaker light milds of the 20th century.

Gale ale
Ale flavoured with bog myrtle, or sweet gale, Myrica gale, and a host of other herbs from yarrow to rosemary were being made in Britain until an Act of 1711 that brought in a tax on hops and banned any other “bitter ingredient (to serve instead of hops) in brewing or making any ale”. One of the few beers made today that contains sweet gale is Williams Brothers’ heather ale, Fraoch, which tastes, in fact, more of the gale than it does of the heather.

West Country White Ale
West Country White Ale, a “naturally fermented” ale containing eggs and wheat, was one of the oldest British beer styles known, made in Cornwall and Devon from at least the Medieval period. It was still being produced in the 19th century, but died out around 1875.

Mum
A beer style originally brewed in Germany but popular in Britain from at least the 1660s, mum was a heavily herbed, strong, bitter wheat beer. It had vanished by the start of the 19th century.

There are other beer styles you could argue should be on that list, such as oatmeal stout, and the East India Porter Ron Pattinson successfully persuaded the Pretty Things brewery in the US to resurrect. You can argue (I’m sure you will) about which category different beers should go in. And, of course, Continental Europe has its own selection of endangered and extinct beers. But I hope that’s a start to making EVERY month Endangered Beers Month.

Real Camra versus the revisionals

Is this newspaper report about ructions on Tyneside the start of civil war in the Campaign for Real Ale between “Real Camra”, those who hold to the original verities, that all keg beer is bad, and “Revisional Camra”, a younger set who argue that the campaign needs to accept “craft” keg?

I very sincerely hope not: Britain needs a “beer drinkers’ union”, and whatever criticisms anyone might have, Camra is and is likely to remain the best organisation to represent the concerned beer consumer that we have.

But the division in the Tyneside and Northumberland Camra branch reported on by the local Sunday Sun newspaper under the headline “Beer war erupts” does seem to have taken place along a faultline that I predicted 18 months ago, when I suggested that if Camra did not take care

it is going to become increasingly irrelevant to the real concerns and desires of keen younger drinkers unfettered by a too-rigid application of the tenets of the Founding Fathers. Instead it will become a beery equivalent of the Royal British Legion, the only active members those at or approaching bus pass age.

The problem is that any Camra member younger than 40 wasn’t born when the Campaign began, cannot remember what all those beers that so revolted the Founding Fathers, such as Whitbread Trophy and Courage Tavern, were like (and they were, truly, very poor indeed), and they simply will not accept the mantra “all keg is bad” if it clashes with their own current experiences.

Those experiences, I suggest, are that some modern “craft” keg can be very good indeed, and certainly much better than badly kept cask. And if you try to tell them that it’s irrelevant whether or not they enjoy a particular beer, if it’s not served from an unpressurised cask it must automatically be cast into the outer darkness, they will regard you as an unreconstructed old beardy who is stuck back in the days when “internet” is where you tried to put a football.

I’m not in any place to pass judgment on the argument between the Tyneside and Northumberland Camra old guard and the youth squad, since I know only what little I have been able to gather from the Sunday Sun article, a comment piece from the local Journal newspaper’s website and from links provided by Tandleman on his blog. The battle seems to encompass a number of different issues, including proposals for a new website, and the choice of beers and ciders at the branch beer festival, as well as “craft” keg, and it has ended up with two different websites running under the “Canny Bevvy” label used for the branch’s newsletter, one (the “official” site) dot-co-uk and the other (the “revisional” site) dot-com.

But I suspect the statement on the website run by the “revisional” wing of the branch sums up what a lot of Camra members under 35 feel:

Beer and cider should be most of all about having fun, experiencing new things and if you can, supporting local producers and pubs. We don’t mind if a landlord wants to use more modern technology to keep their beer in tip top shape, or if there’s another fruit flavour in our cider. We don’t even mind if a brewery wants to have their beers served from a keg. After all, surely it should be up to the person who creates something how they think it’s best to drink it, and for pub-goers to decide if they like it?

You can argue all night about whether that’s the best position to take in modern Britain to safeguard great beer. All I will say is that it’s an argument Camra is going to be increasingly hearing from its younger members, who have tasted and liked craft keg beers. What happened in Tyneside and Northumberland branch when the “revisional” wing put forward that argument, according to the “revisional” website, is that

the “beards” started shouting things about “mutiny” and “bringing the campaign into disrepute” and a great deal about why they didn’t want to change.

which might, some may suggest, be the surest way to drive away the new young enthusiasts Camra needs to keep it going as the Founding Fathers pass through their sixties and head towards their seventies.

How Brazil’s favourite beer arrived from Scotland

‘If the man who invented the censorship bar had drunk Skol, it wouldn’t look like this – it would look like this. Skol goes down round’

It is one of the stranger results of global beer marketing that the biggest-selling beer in Brazil, which is also one of the biggest beers in Africa, from Algeria via Guinea to Rwanda, and is sold across large parts of Asia, from India via Malaysia to Hong Kong, began life more than 50 years ago in a small Scottish town on the north side of the Forth estuary.

I doubt too many drinkers of Skol in Rio de Janeiro know that the drink that “goes down round”, according to its advertising, came originally from 6,000 miles away. Today a beer that was one of the pioneers of mass-market lager in Britain is seen in Brazil as so Brazilian that drinking it turns Argentinians into supporters of the Canarinhos.

Skol is also huge across the South Atlantic in the Congo, where it inspires what I suggest may be one of the best music videos in support of a beer ever, by the too-little-known Bill Clinton Kalonji. (Give yourself eight minutes 33 to watch, and if you’re not grinning broadly by two minutes in at the latest, you can have your money back. The Portman group would turn into steam.) In Malaysia (where the beer is brewed by a Carlsberg subsidiary) and the Far East, meanwhile, it has been launched as a “value for money” brew.

In Britain, Skol was the biggest-selling beer in the market 25 years ago. But it had fallen out of the top 10 by 2004 and is now a commodity lager, sold in cans at just 2.8 per cent abv to take advantage of the UK’s new low-alcohol tax band. Skol is currently the fifth best selling beer in the world, thanks to its popularity in places such as Brazil and the Congo. But in the country where it began, Skol is a sad, tired brand.

The other curiosity is that brewery mergers and takeovers mean that Skol-the-brand is owned by Carlsberg in Britain and Asia, A-B InBev in South America, and UniBra, a Belgian company, in Africa. How all did this happen to a beer from Alloa? It’s a long story, and it properly starts in Burton upon Trent more than 110 years ago, where a substantial but struggling pale ale brewer, Samuel Allsopp & Sons, decided in 1898 to get into the lager-brewing business.

Allsopp’s Lager ad, Daily Mirror, 1906. Love that typeface …

Hong Kong’s first ever beer festival

The Beertopia crowd around 3pm: already pretty full …

Until last weekend, Hong Kong had never seen a beer festival: not a proper one, with a choice of beers from a range of different brewers. Odd, perhaps, for the home of Asia’s oldest microbrewer, the Hong Kong brewery, still running after 16 years in Aberdeen, on the south side of Hong Kong island. But most Hongkongers don’t seen enthusiastic about beer except as a thirst quencher or a relaxer. And yet … since 2009, Singapore has been running a hugely successful beer festival, Beerfest Asia, which attracted 30,000 people over four days last year, to try 300 beers on 40 stands. So Asian cities CAN run successful big beer festivals.

Mind, Singapore, despite having a smaller population than Hong Kong, manages to support far more micro-brewers too: seven, Beer Avocado suggests. Hong Kong still only has two, albeit one is probably the only brewery dedicated to reproducing hand-pumped British cask-style ales in the whole of Asia, the tiny Typhoon brewery, founded by an airline pilot from Devon, Pierre Cadoret, in 2009.

But among the attenders at the 2010 Beerfest Asia in Singapore was a 28-year-old Canadian called Jonathan So, whose parents had emigrated to Toronto from Hong Kong in the 1970s. Jonathan had moved to Hong Kong to work for a software company, bringing with him an appreciation for craft beer picked up while a student at Columbia University in New York. The Singapore festival impressed him deeply: “I thought, ‘How come Hong Kong doesn’t have anything like this, even a fraction of its size?”

Cooking with Stella – no, no, come back …

George Reisch: hugely enthusiastic

Where I come from, if you suggested cooking with Stella Artois, you’d be comprehensively jeered, by both the many fans of what is probably the fourth or fifth best-selling beer in Britain, for being a pretentious twat, and by Stella’s many haters, for promoting a mega-lager seen as, at best, bland and pointless. But where I am right now is Hong Kong. Here, the entire concept of cooking with beer is still so novel, so unheard-of, so likely to send Cantonese eyebrows rocketing up Cantonese foreheads, that any attempt to promote beer cuisine has to be supported, no matter what brew is involved.

That’s why I was at the Hong Kong Jockey Club in Happy Valley, to watch George Reisch, fifth-generation brewer and “director of brewmaster outreach” for Anheuser-Busch InBev, preach on the joys of beer and food, and beer IN food, to an audience of Hong Kong bar owners, restaurateurs, food bloggers, magazine and newspaper journalists. Plus me, ostensibly representing the South China Morning Post, and bemusing the Hong Kong.food blogging community, who had never met a beer blogger before, nor knew such a beast existed.

A-B InBev might be the Evil Empire to some, but its products are big sellers in Hong Kong. In particular Hoegaarden is hugely popular with Chinese beer drinkers, especially women. I was in a bar called the News Room in Quarry Bay drinking something pale, American and very hoppy a couple of weeks back, and of the seven nearest tables to me, six were occupied solely by Hoegaarden drinkers, all Chinese, male and female. (Of course, the theatre of the big glasses helps, but primarily they like the taste: spicy, not over-bitter.)

Stella is also in almost every bar in Hong Kong that is likely to attract expat customers, for sale to homesick Britons who react well to a familiar face met far away. If you are going to push the idea of beer with food, and beer in food, to people totally unused to the possibilities of such a pairing, it’s much better to do it (I think, and so, obviously does A-B Inbev) using beers they are familiar with. Since Hong Kong restaurateurs and bar people and beer drinkers know Hoegaarden and Stella very well, then Hoegaarden and Stella are good beers with which to introduce the concept of beery cuisine to them.

And George Reisch is a great guy to do the introducing: American beer enthusiasts know him well; he’s a judge at the Great American Beer Festival, among other high-profile activities in the North American beer world. It’s immediately clear he is hugely enthusiastic about beer and all its possibilities, which makes me like him at once. Brewing is obviously in the family DNA: his great-great grandfather founded Reisch’s brewery in Springfield, Illinois, closed 1966, and his son is currently learning the trade while working for Spaten (an A-B Inbev subsidiary) in Munich.

In praise of brown beer

If you have a “favourite beer”, you don’t really like beer. Similarly, you don’t really like beer if you have a “favourite beer style”, any more than you can really like music if all you listen to is folk, or rock, or only classical, or only jazz.

That said, I would cope for quite a time if all I could listen to was Bach (there’s a Polish internet radio station, Radio B.A.C.H., that plays nothing but the works of “Jana Sebastiana”) or the sort of “modern” jazz played in New York clubs between 1954 and 1964. And I would be very happy to spend – well, weeks, certainly, maybe months – drinking nothing but bitter, specifically the loose-headed amber-cornelian cask bitters of Southern England, cool, low in CO2, lightly aromatic, just bitter enough to stimulate without overwhelming, hints of toffee, marmalade and apricot, maybe a touch of fruitcake or blackcurrant, and with a strength – not much more than four per cent abv at the most – that means you can swallow pints at a leisurely rate while chatting, relaxing, chilling, eating, watching the world or listening to, say, Miles Davis play Walkin’.

Do I love that style of beer because it was the one I drank growing up? I’m sure sitting at rustic tables in rural pub gardens in Hertfordshire on long, warm, sunny summer evenings, talking with friends, clouds of cow parsley nodding over the car park wall and martins high above swooping through the flying ants like little fighter planes, while dimpled glasses of Rayment’s BBA or Wethered’s (RIP the pair of them) were slowly emptied, fixed in my mind the idea that English bitter equals quiet, unpaced enjoyment. But I never grew up in Elizabethan England and I still adore Thomas Tallis. Nor did I live in St Petersburg in the reign of Catherine the Great, but I rate Imperial Russian Stout as highly as the Empress apparently did.

No, I love English bitter because, while beer can be many things – that’s one of the drink’s strengths – from terrific taste experience to brilliant enhancer of food, and while there’s plenty of room in my beeriverse for everything from souped-up extremobrews to simple refreshers, the subtle joys to be found in a pint of well-looked-after cask “ordinary” are what I would miss the most if I was told: “You can never drink beer again.”

So: surely that makes Southern English bitter my “favourite” beer style? Well, no, it’s the beer I love to drink when I’m socialising, and if I couldn’t drink beer when I’m socialising, then I’d really be suffering. But it’s not the beer I like drinking at the very end of an evening, or the beer I’d generally choose for accompanying food, and it’s not the beer I’d automatically lunge for when eyeing up the choices in a strange bar: I like to try something new, too, when there’s a chance. Then in the winter I love a good Burton, or a porter, in the summer a brisk Czech or North German lager or a golden ale, or a Bavarian wheat beer. Sometimes I listen to Irish traditional music, sometimes to Mozart operas. I don’t like smoked beers much, or artichokes, or Bob Dylan’s singing (some of his songs are good, though). I love a good brown bitter, Thelonious Monk, Richard Thompson, Dr Strangelove, Donatello’s David, blackberries with clotted cream, and roast duck. But I don’t have favourites.

The stout that dare not speak its name

Have public perceptions of beer styles become so skunked that it would be a marketing disaster to call a beer by its proper name? On a rare trip to Sainsbury’s I picked up something from the supermarket chain’s current Taste the Difference beer range that it calls “Celebration Ale”, and which announces itself as “A rich, dark winter warmer”. It’s brewed by Black Sheep of Masham, which is a recommendation, for me, and since I couldn’t see McEwan’s Champion Ale on the shelves (a truly excellent Edinburgh Ale/Burton Ale) I though it might make a good substitute.

I know I’m not the average supermarket beer shopper – I write a beer blog, for a start. So my expectations might well not be the same as everybody else’s expectations. But when I see a 6 per cent abv beer described as “a rich, dark winter warmer”, I’m expecting something ruby-coloured, fruity, strong and slightly sweet, though, hopefully, with a good bitter kick. Back home, however, when I opened “Celebration ale”, it poured dark brown-to-black, with a firmly chocolate-roast nose.

A look at the back label (printed, as is typical for back labels, in the tiny 4pt type that requires anyone over 45 to find their glasses) shows that this is in fact, as you’ve probably guessed, not an Owd Rodger-style ruddy ale but “a dark, velvety stout”. Indeed, the allergy-alert ingredients listing on the back reveals that “Celebration ale” contains “cow’s milk”. What that must mean is milk-derived (and unfermentable) lactose sugar: and there’s only one style of beer I know that contains lactose. Yes, “Celebration ale” is not just a stout, it’s a milk stout, albeit a milk stout that seems afraid to reveal itself as such.

Why? I can imagine Sainsbury’s corporate lawyers might fear the wrath of the neo-temperance army if they sold a product with the word “milk” in its description that contained alcohol (supermarket promotes beer to milk-drinking children shock! horror!), but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Bristol Beer Factory promoting its own Milk Stout, with pictures of milkmaids and cows.

Is it the word “stout” that is the problem, fit today only to be printed in tiny letters on the back label, in case it frightens the shoppers? Is “stout” so completely associated with the Guinness-style product that Sainsbury’s fears that non-Guinness drinkers won’t buy a beer too clearly labelled a stout, and that Guinness drinkers will take the bottle back once they try it and find it’s nothing like the beer they’re used to?

Whichever, it’s a backwards step in beer education if a major UK supermarket feels it cannot describe properly a beer appearing under its imprimature, in apparent fear that the beer-buying public won’t understand accurate terminology. If you’re selling a milk stout, Sainsbury’s, call it a milk stout, not “Celebration ale” or “dark winter warmer”. THEN we can celebrate.