An 800-year-old beer drinking song

The anonymous minstrel who, some time around 1210, took Laetabundus (“Full of Joy”). a popular Nativity hymn to the Virgin Mary written by St Bernard of Clairvaux, and rewrote it in Norman French as a song in praise of beer, Or Hi Parra, was taking a risk.
It was certainly a clever parody, leaving the last [...]

What’s a brewster? No, you’re wrong …

Or at least you’re not as right as you think you are. I, too, used to believe that “brewster” meant, exclusively, a female brewer, until a discussion recently on the excellent wordorigins site about the word spinster. Someone put up the Oxford English Dictionary entry on the –ster suffix which revealed that it wasn’t as simple [...]

What art appreciation owns a brewer’s daughter

An absolutely have-to-see exhibition has just opened at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, London featuring the very best – Constable, Turner, Reynolds, Stubbs, Gainsborough and the like – from the finest collection of British art outside Europe, a collection that owes its foundation to the unhappy marriage made by the granddaughter of the man that [...]

I Told You Those Lying Bastards Were Making It Up

It was fantastically satisfying to see the front page splash in The Times declare what I’ve been saying for years – that the government’s “safe drinking guidelines” of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women a week have no basis in fact, and were literally made up on the spot with no [...]

England v South Africa: 36 (bottles) – nil (pounds)

Whatever the score in the Rugby World Cup tomorrow, it’s a result for me, thanks to Fuller’s.
The Chiswick brewer created a poster based on its “Wallaby” ad for London Pride at the time of the 2003 World Cup, this time featuring a picture of a Springbok and the words “frequently found stuffed”. Rather than pay [...]

Making S&Nse

So the sharks have started moving closer to Scottish & Newcastle. This is the latest in a series of foregone conclusions in the British brewing scene since a Conservative government decided it would be a jolly idea to partially sever the tie between brewers and pub ownership with the Beer Orders of 1989.
The result, which [...]

More anti-alcohol brigade rubbish

Sky TV rang me up at 1.45pm today to come into their studio in Isleworth to rant at the latest rubbish from the anti-alcohol brigade. Drinkers in middle-class areas are more likely to consume “hazardous” amounts according to the North West Public Health Observatory, commissioned by the Department of Health. But “hazardous amounts”, according to [...]

Kent hops, hedgers and Pale India Ale

Here’s another titbit* from the Times archives: a report from 1840 on the hop harvest with some fascinating clues about what hops went into IPA (I was wrong, incidentally, in saying the archive is not available to the public – if you can use your public library card to access resources like the Oxford English [...]

Government ale

A mention over on Patto’s blog about Government ale reminded me of one of my favourite beer songs – Ernie Mayne’s Lloyd George’s Beer from 1917. Click that link and check it out – it’s fantastic.
Mayne was a 20-stone (that’s 280 pounds for Americans) music hall artist who died 70 years ago this year, aged [...]

Ales, churches and brides

I’m grateful to Knut Albert for bringing to my attention a review in The Economist on a new book by Sir Roy Strong, A Little History of the English Country Church. The review says that in the mid-1600s:
“the loss of income, particularly from banning the making and selling of church ales, meant that the buildings [...]