The Dove, Hammersmith – a tiny mystery

The Dove in Upper Mall, Hammersmith is one of London’s favourite riverside pubs, famous for good beer, for a fine view of the Boat Race and for what is supposed to be the tiniest public bar in Britain, at just four feet two inches wide and seven feet ten inches long. This is the story [...]

Chocolate beer is 3,000 years old

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, dating [...]

West Country White Ale, a lost English beer

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 the [...]

Bristol-fashion Guinness and the roast barley question

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 Dublin [...]

The forgotten story of London’s porters

It’s a mark of the low status given to working class history that the role in London’s life and economy played by the city’s thousands of street and river porters, the men who gave their name to the beer, is almost completely forgotten, only 70 or so years after the last of the porters died.
Almost [...]