Time to give another popular pub name myth a thrashing. There are more than 150 pubs around Britain called the Chequers, which puts it into the top 30 pub names, and yet the explanation given in most pub name books for the origin of the sign is complete cobblers.

The likeliest source of the problem seems to be Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which declares that “the arms of FitzWarren [that is, blue and gold checks], the head of which had the privilege of licensing ale-houses in the reign of Edward IV, probably helped to popularise this sign.”

Almost every writer has repeated this story without making any checks (pun intended). Brewer’s itself looks to have nicked the claim from the Gentleman’s Magazine , which printed the story of the FitzWarrens, their chequered arms, and alehouse licensing as the origin of the pub sign in September 1794. However, every claim in the tale is nonsense. For a start the Warenne (not FitzWarren) family, Earls of Surrey, whose arms were indeed “chequy azure and or”, died out in the direct line in 1347, during the reign of Edward III, more than a century before Edward IV.

The right to their chequered arms passed down through their relatives the FitzAlan family and on to the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk, who still quarter the Warenne arms with those of Howard and FitzAlan and their ancestor Edward I’s son Thomas. John Howard, the first of the family to be Duke of Norfolk, was treasurer of the royal household under Edward IV. But there is no evidence that he, or anybody else, had “the privilege of licensing alehouses”: Edward VI was king when the first Act bringing in licences for alehouses was introduced, in 1552, and granting licences was a right given to local magistrates.

In fact, although the alleged “Fitzwarren” connection to the Chequers innsign has been republished as recently as the Wordsworth Dictionary of Pub Names, printed in 2006, it was trashed as far back as 1875, by Mark Antony Lower, author of a book called English Surnames, which includes a chapter on pub names. Lower calls the idea that the pub sign represents the arms of the Earls of Warenne/Earls of Surrey “foolish”, and says, politely, that any charter giving the Warennes the right to issue alehouse licences “would be very difficult, I think, to produce” – meaning that it never blahdy existed.

Lower also points out that the chequers seen on alehouse signs were generally red and white, not the Warennes’ blue and gold, and he links the red-and-white chequers to the “red lattice” that seems to have been a popular painted indicator that the premises on which they appeared was an alehouse. William Shakespeare mentions a red lattice window on an alehouse in Henry IV, and Thomas Decker wrote in 1632 in English Villanies that “A whole street is in some places but a continuous ale-house, not a shop to be seen between red-lattice and red-lattice.”

The chequers on the post, from "Beer Sreet" by Hogarth

The transformation of the red lattice to painted chequers seems to have taken place between Decker’s time and that of William Hogarth in the mid-18th century, whose engraving of Beer Street shows checked squares painted on the signpost of the Barley Mow pub in the foreground, and on the wall of the Sun pub in the background. It looks as if, at a time when many other buildings on unnumbered city streets would have borne signs, the specifier of a pub or alehouse was now painted chequers. (Perhaps, as some have suggested, the chequers meant “boardgames played within”, or “money exchanged here”, but I can’t see the former being a big enough deal to advertise or the latter being so common that both Hogarth’s Beer Street pubs would engage in it.)

By the 19th century, if not before, the chequers that showed a place sold alcoholic liquor were being painted on the doorposts of pubs: both Charles Dickens and William Thackeray refer to it. Thackeray described in one of his lesser known novels, Men’s Wives Mr Eglantine arriving at the Bootjack Hotel, Berkeley Square, an inn owned by Mr Crump, saying: “Eglantine leaned against the chequers painted on the door-side under the name of Crump, and looked at the red illumined curtain of the bar.” Dickens, in David Copperfield mentions briefly the “chequered sign on doorpost” of a public house where a glass of water for Dora was obtained. For Lower in 1875 the “chequered square painted upon the doorpost” was still “common to many inns bearing a more specific [sign].”

It is quite possible that some, at least, Chequers pub signs are derived from the Warenne arms, most likely from their appearance as one of the quarterings in the Howard arms: the Howards were big enough landowners to be honoured multiple times in such a way. (A slap, incidentally, for Dunkling and Wright’s A Dictionary of Pub Names for saying that “In the village of Lytchett Matravers, Dors[et], the sign relates to the chequered battle-flag of the Duke of Arundel.” No such person – Dunkling and Wright confuse the Duke of Norfolk with the title traditionally given to that duke’s oldest son, the Earl of Arundel.)

Some Chequers pub signs may come from other armigerous families besides the Warennes/FitzAlans/Howards who bore chequered shields, such as the Fiskes of Laxfield in Suffolk and the Moltons of Pinho in Devon. A few may come from the game of chequers, or draughts, some from the name of the chequer tree or wild service tree, which certainly grows in or near several Chequers pubs in Kent and Sussex. I’m not convinced that the sign has anything to do with moneychangers, another popular claim in pub name books: I know of no evidence that inns ever acted as moneychanging operations. My bet is that many Chequers pubs were originally unnamed alehouses that had a chequered pattern painted by the door to show strong drink was sold inside, and which subsequently, in the absence of any other name, became known as “the Chequers” by default.

This post was prompted in part, incidentally, by my extreme grumpiness at having ordered the Wordsworth Dictionary of Pub Names from Amazon and discovering when it arrived that it is simply Dunkling and Wright’s Dictionary of Pub Names rebadged, and with none of the errors in Dunkling and Wright corrected. For a book on pub names to talk about the Vital Spark pub in Glasgow, for example, and show no knowledge that the name comes from the fictional “Clyde puffer”, or steamboat, called the Vital Spark in the Para Handy stories by Neil Munroe, which have been on British television in three separate incarnations, is appallingly sloppy.

The Long Ship, where I misspent much of my youth, was everything you would expect of a pub run by Watney’s on the ground floor of a 1960s office block. Its attractions for the students who made up most of the customers, however, were that it was central, large, mostly dark inside and, crucially, the bar staff never asked any questions about your age.

The beer, of course, was generally awful (Red Barrel! Star Light!), but the Ship did stock Worthington White Shield, originally called Worthington IPA, and named for the “white shield” trademark on the label .

The beermat produced to publicise "Beer and Skittles"

In 1976 my then girlfriend had bought me my first ever book on beer, Richard Boston’s Beer and Skittles. Boston wrote one of the pioneering columns on beer and pubs, in The Guardian, which started in 1973, and probably did as much as Camra to turn people on to a proper appreciation of the glories of British beer. Beer and Skittles devoted several pages to White Shield, then one of only five surviving naturally conditioned bottled beers in Britain, correctly describing it as one of the world’s greatest.

Because it contained a yeasty sediment in the bottle, Boston revealed to his wondering readership, White Shield altered as it aged. The beer came into prime condition about four weeks after bottling, Boston informed us, and would then stay in condition for up to another nine months, As this was the 1970s, “best before” dates were still in the future, and the only indication of when a bottle had been filled was through the numbers, one to 13, printed on the label, and the nicks, one, two, three or four, cut into the label’s edge. The nicks indicated which quarter of the year the bottle had been filled in, the numbers showed which week of the quarter.

After 10 months, Boston, said, White Shield went out of condition, and could develop a sulphury taste (not surprising, since it was made with the notoriously sulphury well-water of Burton). But if the drinker could hang on for “as long as fifteen months, one of two things may happen. If you are very unlucky, it will develop a really unpleasant flavour. Most bottles, however, should come back into condition with a flavour that is different from the original but which some connoisseurs consider to be even better.”

My one experience of “off” White Shield was in the Long Ship, when I ordered a bottle that fobbed furiously as it was opened, with foam pouring out onto the bar top. Not realizing, in my inexperience that this was a signal of bad beer ahead, I left the bottle to sit on the bar counter and calm down while I talked to the friends I was with. As we talked, we grew aware of a strong smell of apples. When I finally picked up the White Shield to pour it out, it became clear that the beer was the source of the appley aroma – at a guess (not that I had any clue at the time) I’d say the yeast in the bottle had gone overtime on producing ethyl caproate (alias ethyl hexanoate).

Since then I’ve noticed apples as one of the regular background flavours of White Shield, suggesting it’s a characteristic of the strain of yeast used to brew the beer, though it’s never been so overpowering again. That mid-1970s White Shield was brewed in the Burton Unions at Bass in Burton upon Trent, Subsequently sales of the beer dropped to a point where Bass decided it was not economic to brew it at a plant designed to make thousands of barrels at a time, and production of White Shield went on a journey around the country, being made at one point in Sussex.

It returned to Burton earlier this decade (where, until I pointed it out, the redesigned label said IPA went on the journey to India from Burton via Cape Horn – tee hee, wrong cape, wrong continent, wrong direction). Back at Burton, White Shield has been a remarkable, and cheering success, gathering considerable sales in supermarkets: at first it was brewed in the small museum brewery plant in a corner of the Bass (now Coors) campus, but as I write, production is being moved to the main brewery, where it will be lifted to 100,000 barrels a year.

Today, of course, you don’t need Richard Boston’s codebook to tell you how old your White Shield is, since it has a clear Best Before date on the label, which looks to be exactly two years after it was bottled. But does it still mature in the same way? Four years ago I put a bottle of WS aside to test this out, and yesterday I opened it alongside a bottle that was only five months old.

This year’s brew was creamy and dry, with hints of apple strudel, a tiny amount of sulphur on the nose, slightly grassy, with toffee maltiness in the background and hints, if you looked hard, of mint and Marmite. The bitterness was only apparent if you sought it, and certainly did not dominate, as it does with too many modern IPAs, but added to the structure of a beautifully complex, subtle, well-orchestrated beer.

The four-year-old version was clearly related, and very drinkable, but everything was now sharper, tarter. The Marmite notes were meatier, the apple more acidic, and a vague strain of chocolate had appeared from somewhere, though the toffee/maltiness still acted as a foundation. This was definitely a beer to enjoy with food, though I was disappointed that, as the glass emptied and the beer warmed, it became, in the last fifth of a pint or so, flabby and thin.

It’s an experiment worth repeating, but next time I’ll try to remember to drink the beer at three years old, that is, one year past its BB date, rather than four, since I suspect it will hold up better: this is a beer with only 5.6 per cent alcohol by volume, and not designed for lengthy ageing.

With the announcement by O’Hanlon’s this summer that they can no longer afford to brew Thomas Hardy’s Ale, this means that White Shield and Gale’s Prize Old Ale (now with Fuller’s in Chiswick) are the only two left of 1976’s five surviving bottle-conditioned British beers (Guinness having stopped bottle-conditioning its bottled stout, and Courage Imperial Russian Stout having vanished in the early 1990s). Long may it pour.

Brewers will tell you that designing a beer to have “sessionability”, the indefinable something which keeps bringing the drinker back throughout the evening to refill their glass from the same fount, is one of the most difficult problems they can set themselves.

Simple one-off tasting sessions are unlikely to tell you if you have achieved your goal: it’s just like the “Pepsi Challenge”, where, in the battle of the colas, the sweeter drink wins in a head-to-head comparison, but over the distance the drier fluid wins. The only way to find out which new beers have sessionability, one brewer once told me, is to set a table up with a variety of free beers and ask the public to help themselves: the beer that is drunk the most, the beer that people come back to most often, will be the most sessionable.

Back in February, Lew Bryson, one of America’s leading beer bloggers, flattered me by asking for my comments about session beers, to go into an article he was writing. I found I had written several hundred words by the time I had finished, and as Lew couldn’t possibly use them all, and it’s long enough after his piece was published, here they all are, plus some extra just for you.

I love session beers. I love the way they make a good evening down the pub with friends even better. What makes a good session beer is a combination of restraint, satisfaction and “moreishness”. Like the ideal companions around a pub table, a great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention; at the same time its contribution, while never obtrusive, will be welcome, satisfying and pleasurable; and yet, though each glass satisfies, like each story in the night’s long craic, the best session beers will still leave you wishing for one more pint, to carry on the pleasure.

What is “moreishness”? Like a great many qualities, defining it is hard, but you recognise it when you taste it. Strength doesn’t have that much to do with it: that is, a weaker beer isn’t automatically a session beer. Obviously if you’re drinking large quantities it’s easier if the beer is weaker, and the British traditions of drinking in pints and buying in rounds means that a session is unlikely to be less than five or six (British) pints – nine or so US 12-ounce glasses.

My impression is that Britons drink larger volumes than Americans, and for that reason the beer in the UK is weaker. The reason why Britain has recognised session beers and the US does not springs, I suspect, from the differences between British pub culture and American bar culture: in British pubs drinkers will stay all night long, and you want a beer you can drink all night long. I may be wrong (you’ll tell me if I am), but American bars seem to be geared for shorter stays than British pubs. The requirement that a session beer shouldn’t be too strong is secondary to the need for it to be a beer that can be drunk all night without the drinker tiring of it: “quaffability”.

A good, quaffable session beer should have enough interest for drinkers to want another, but not so much going on that they are distracted from the primary purpose of a session, which is the enjoyment of good company in convivial surroundings. Like the chamber music that composers Mozart and Handel wrote for their patrons’ soirees and divertimenti, a good session beer is a backgrounder to human interaction: capable of being appreciated as a work of art if you pause from conversation and consider it, but good-mannered enough not to intrude unless asked. A good session beer is a string quartet playing quietly, rather than The Messiah.

The “session” itself, the long night drinking down the pub with mates, has, I think, always been a feature of British working-class life, even when beers were stronger (I’m not going to present the evidence here but I’ve got it if you want it), and I’m sure that “session beers”, beers that were satisfying, moreish and not too obtrusive, existed even before high taxes made it too expensive to sell beers at their pre-First World War strengths. The skill of British brewers was that they were able to carry on making tasty, satisfying, sessionable beers at lower gravities from the 1920s onwards.

The public evidently appreciated these lower-gravity beers, since they carried on drinking them, and when draught lagers arrived in the UK they were brewed at the same low gravities as the milds they were replacing, to fit in with the “session” of five or six pints. Ideally, a session beer shouldn’t be much more than four per cent alcohol by volume, simply to allow the drinker to wake up the next morning still able to remember how they got home.

The actual style of a session beer does not matter much: it shouldn’t be too packed with flavour, too hoppy, too dry, too sharp or too sweet, because that will place the beer too much in the foreground. I’ve had sessions in German bierkellers with lager, and in Liverpool boozers with dark mild. A session is not about the beer: it’s about the people, the conversation, the company. The beer, if it’s a good session beer, makes the session flow, provides the salt. You’d enjoy the company without the beer: but the beer lifts it to a better, more satisfying level.

For me, bitters work best as session beers, because, I think, it’s easier to hit that “quaffability” target on the hoppy side of the circle than anywhere else. Among my top session beers – and this is very far from an exclusive list – are Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, which once made me stay all night in a pub in St Albans after a meeting of the National Union of Journalists (the NUJ, as it happens, is how I first met Roger Protz) simply because it was so good; Woodforde’s Wherry bitter, which I have enjoyed enormously since I first tasted it at the Cambridge Beer Festival in the early 1980s and was struck at once by how good it was; London Pride, a delight almost everywhere I drink it; and another bitter local to me in West London, Twickenham Brewery’s Naked Ladies, an excellent, balanced, hoppy 4.4 per cent abv brew. (Pete Brown probably wouldn’t approve of this beer’s name, but it commemorates a set of 19th century marble statues of water nymphs, or, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Oceanids, in a council-owned public garden by the Thames. Twickenham people are very fond of the Naked Ladies, big-bottomed Victorian gels who look as if they would be very surprised if you pointed out to them that they didn’t have any clothes on.)

What do those four beers have in common? Three are in the “best bitter” abv range and only one less than 4 per cent alcohol, none is backwards in the hops section, but all are very different in their flavours. Ultimately, though, any one of them would keep me in the pub with mates for much longer than a single pint.

Sound like a trio of Victorian lawyers, don’t they? Kieve, Tierce and Bubb, solicitors and commissioners of oaths: I can picture their brass plate, polished and worn, at the top of a set of stone steps, screwed to the slightly crumbly brickwork of a flat-fronted three-storey town house with a shiny black-painted front door, somewhere near Carey Street.

They’re actually, however, not minor characters from Bleak House but three obscure words linked to brewing, the first and least obscure being an old term for a mash tun, which I mentioned in my last posting about a 13th century Norman French poem describing the brewing of ale. I said kieve was “still used in Ireland”, leading Beer Nut, one of Ireland’s finest beer bloggers (you can pay me later, John), to ask: “Is ‘kieve’ used for mash tun outside of St James’s Gate? I’ve never heard it in the context of any other Irish brewery.”

I was originally going to write a short reply to Beer Nut’s comment saying yes, indeed, other people than Guinness used the term “kieve”, but the interwebs is an increasingly marvellous resource for historians as more and more information from the past becomes digitised, and very quickly, as I chased after extra facts on kieves, I was distracted by bub, and then off in pursuit of tierce.

Kieve first: the word can refer to any sort of tub or vat, and is found in the bleaching, cider-making and mining industries (tin and copper ores are, or were, washed in vessels called kieves). It was certainly a term used by English brewers: the Oxford English Dictionary (which suggests the word may be linked to the German kübel, bucket) quotes from the second edition of William Ellis’s London and Country Brewer, published in 1743, in which he says: “In Winter they ferment a little first in the Kive or Tun to put to the Wort in the Barrel.” An advertisment for the sale of an inn called the Kings Arms in Hampshire in The Times in September 1813 includes a brewhouse with 100-gallon copper, “mash tun and kieve tubs”.

However, 19th century references in the archives of The Times (my library card gives me free access over the net to the digitised version – almost makes my appallingly high council tax bill seem worth paying) to kieves seem to be almost entirely Irish-based (there’s one to a tin mine in Cornwall), though not just linked to Guinness, and not just linked to brewing either: Irish whiskey distillers also called their mash tuns kieves. A fascinating report from February 1820 reports a raid by excisemen and soldiers on an illegal distillery operating near Clonmel, with the kit seized including “ten fermenting vessels, cooler, mash-kieve, underback etc.”

In January 1840 The Times printed a sale advertisement for a distillery at Nun’s Island in Galway town, run by James and Patrick Joyce, in which the equipment included stills, three brewing coppers, seven fermenting backs and one “mash kieve” capable of mashing 200 barrels of grain (it was the Irish tradition to measure malt and grain by the barrel, rather than the bushel and the quarter, as done in England). The distillery also had “utensils for making bub and barm”.

Barm, of course, is yeast, as in barm cakes, but bub? I had recollections of seeing the word used as a cant term for strong drink by 17th and 18th century writers: that did not seem to fit the circumstances here. The Oxford English Dictionary (full version also available on the net via my library card, another win for the council tax) supplied the answer:

“Bub – 1. A slang word for drink, esp. strong beer. 2. A mixture of meal and yeast with warm wort and water, used to promote fermentation.”

So there we are: if your fermentation is sluggish or sticking, bung in some bub, bud. (I’ve reproduced this ad, especially for BN, as it also contains a reference to the sale of a former brewery in Castlebar, Mayo.)

In April 1856 The Times ran a small ad that said: “Wanted, an estimate from a person who will undertake to erect a brewery, capable of producing 2,500 to 3,000 tierces of porter per week on the newest principles. The above must include boiler, steam engine, kieve, malt rollers, steam vats, fermenting tuns, hop vats, refrigerators etc … Estimates for the above to be addressed to X.Y.Z,, post-office, Dublin.”

I was going to bet that this was inserted by Alexander Findlater, a Dublin wine merchant who founded the Mountjoy brewery to take on Guinness and the other Dublin porter brewers, such as D’Arcy, but the sources I have say he opened his brewery in 1852, four years earlier than the advertisement here. So which brave entrepreneur (or idiot) was looking to start yet another porter brewery in Dublin, then? Anyway, whoever it was, they called mash tuns kieves, more evidence that the word was in use outside St James’s Gate.

They also talked about tierces of porter, rather than barrels or hogsheads. Ever heard of a tierce? Nor me, or at least, I don’t remember having come across it before. The Oxford English Dictionary has, though, hurrah, and says it’s a cask equivalent in size to a third of a pipe, a pipe being 126 “wine” gallons (the “wine” gallon is the basis of the modern US gallon). The tierce (the word comes ultimately from the Latin tertium, meaning, you’ve guessed, “a third”) is therefore 42 “wine” (or US) gallons, 35 Imperial gallons, halfway between an old Irish barrel (34 gallons) and a British one (36 gallons).

There are almost no descriptions of brewing processes in Britain from the medieval period, a reflection of the universality of ale and the universality of the knowledge of how to brew it: similarly “everybody” in the British Isles today knows how to make a cup of tea, and nobody wastes their time writing down a narration covering how to mash the Assam and when to add the milk.

One odd account of brewing “cerveyse”, or ale, was recorded in a late 13th century collection of poems written as an educational guide called the Treatise of Walter de Biblesworth, or, in his own words and spelling, “Le treytyz ke moun sire Gauter de Bíbelesworthe”. Biblesworth, or Bibbesworth, who was born in or before 1219 and died some time in or soon after 1270, was a knight who owned Bibbesworth manor, in Kimpton, Hertfordshire, and he was friends with some powerful people in the England of Edward I, such as the de Lacys, earls of Lincoln, and the de Veres, earls of Oxford. His rhyming treatise is written in the Norman French of the 1200s, with many obscure words. Here is the section on brewing:

Seyoms ore entour cerveyse
Pur fere gens ben à eyse
Alumet, amy, cele lefrenole
E kaunt averas mangés de brakole
En une cuwe(1) large e leez
Cel orge là enfoundréz
E kaunt sera enfoundré
E le ewe seyt escouloé
Mountez sel haut soler
Si le festes nette baler
E là cochet(2) votre blée
Taunke seyt ben germé,
De cele houre appelleras
Brès(3), ke blé avant nomas
Le brès de vostre mayn muez
En mounceus ou en rengeés;
Pus le portez en un corbel
Pur ensechuer au toral.
Le corbel e le corbiloun
Vous serviront au fusoyn.
Kaunt vostre brez est molu
E de ewe chaud ben enbeu,
Des bertiz ver cervoyse
Par art contrové teise.
Ky fet miracles e merveyles,
De une chaundelie deus chaundelis,
De homme lay fet bon clerc
A homme desconu doune merk
Homme fort fet chatoner
E homme à roye haut juper,
Taunt de vertu de la grees
De servoyse fet de brès,
Ke la coyfe de un bricoun
Teyndre seet sanz vermilloun.
Ceste matyre cy repose
Parlom ore de autre chose

(1) This appears to be the same as kieve, the word for a mash tun still used in Ireland.
(2) Couch, still the technical term used in malting.
(3) From the Celtic bracis, and root of the French brasseur, brewer

The would-be brewer looking to turn orge (barley) into “cerveyse” (still, in a modernised spelling the French for unhopped ale) was enjoined to rise early (early enough to still need a “lefrenole”, evidently a rushlight or candle), have a bite of “brakole”, or spiced cake for breakfast and proceed to steep – “enfoundré” – his “orge”, or barley in a large vat. When it was soaked and the “ewe” (eau, water, in modern French) drained off, he was to carry the grain to a clean-swept “soler” or upper floor and there “cochet (“couch”, still the word used by maltsters) the grain – spread it out – until it had properly germinated: it should now be called “brès”, or “malt”, and not “grain”, Bibbesworth said. The malt should be stirred by hand, and left to stand in “heaps or rows”, an essential practice to stop the grain over-heating as it sprouted and to ensure the growing sprouts and rootlets did not get so tangled the malt turned into an unseparatable lump.

The malt had then to be carried in a “corbel” or basket to the “toral” or kiln, where it was dried in the basket or spread out on a “corbiloun”, a wicker tray or rack. When the dried “brez” or malt (consistency in spelling wasn’t a 13th century necessity – this was “brès” just a few lines earlier) had been “molu” or ground (literally, “milled”) it was soaked in hot “ewe” after which the resultant “bertiz” or wort was changed “by skill” to ale, which makes “miracles and marvels”: two candles out of one (a good description of drink-induced double vision); the layman would become a good clerk, the “unknown” man – one without a reputation – acted like one with a “mark”, someone who had earned their badge or coat of arms ; strong men would fall down and high-born men shout, while the roisterer’s face needed no dye to turn it red.

Here’s the translation that John Bickerdyke gave of Bibbesworth’s poem in The Curiosities of Ale and Beer in 1889:

Ale shall now engage my pen
To set at rest the hearts of men
First my friend your candle light
Next of spiced cake take a bite
Then steep your barley in a vat
Large and broad take care of that
When you shall have steeped your grain
And the water let out drain
Take it to an upper floor
If you’ve swept it clean before
There couch and let your barley dwell
Till it germinates full well
Malt now you shall call the grain
Corn it ne’er shall be again
Stir the malt then with your hand
In heaps or rows now let it stand
On a tray then you shall take it
To a kiln to dry and bake it
The tray and eke a basket light
Will serve to spread the malt aright
When your malt is ground in mill
And of hot water has drank its fill
And skill has changed the wort to ale
Then to see you shall not fail
Miracles and marvels. Lo!
Two candles out of one do grow
Ale makes a layman a good clerk
To one unknown it gives a mark
Ale makes the strong go on all fours
And fill the streets with shouts and roars
The good ale from the malt at length
So draws the barley’s pride and strength
That a roysterer’s figure head
Needs no dye to make it red
Here then let the matter rest
To talk of other things were best

Several points come out of Bibbesworth’s description of brewing ale in the 13th century. The first is that there is no mention of pitching or adding yeast to the wort to turn it into ale: this is likely to be because the brewers and brewsters he knew depended upon wild yeasts or the residue of previous brews left behind in the fermenting vessel to start the fermentation in a fresh batch. Second, there are no flavourings or herbs mentioned, just barley and water. It’s also interesting that an aristocratic knight should know so much about the processes of malting and brewing, though, of course, land-owning knights in the 12th century were closer to being armed farmers than the companions of King Arthur’s Round Table or crusading warriors that we are perhaps used to picturing knights as.

Kimpton is just a few miles from where I grew up, and I’ve had quite a few pints in the village’s two surviving pubs, the White Horse (there’s a nice typo in that link – “a priesthold behind the bar” – that would be “priesthole”, secret hiding place, unless it’s some sort of gripping device for clerics who won’t pay for their round) and the Boot, so I feel a geographical connection with Sir Walter, even though we’re separated in time by more than 700 years.

Finding factual errors in Wikipedia is, of course, easier than machine-gunning a cask full of cod, and I’ve done it here before. I can’t stand reading Wikipedia’s pages on beer, since I constantly think: “No, that’s wrong … no, that’s not quite right … no, that’s a misinterpretation …”. What particularly gets me shouting at the computer screen is statements that two seconds’ critical thought would show can’t possibly be true: like the assertion in the opening words in Wikipedia’s main article on beer that “Beer is the world’s oldest … alcoholic beverage”, a claim that is repeated in the “alcoholic beverage” article.

The “beer” article justifies this claim by citing in a footnote the book by the German-American author John Arnold with the lengthy title Origin and History of Beer and Brewing: From Prehistoric Times to the Beginning of Brewing Science and Technology, written in 1911. Arnold wrote one of my favourite beer quotations, about the study of the history of beer, “the people’s beverage”, being the study of the history of the people. My copy of the reprint of his book by the guys at Beerbooks.com is a long way from where I’m writing this, so I can’t currently check exactly what he said. But if Arnold did say beer is the world’s oldest alcoholic drink, he was writing (excuse the Britishism) bollocks.

Think. Beer is not a simple drink to make. To get the sugars that the yeast will turn into alcohol, the starches in grain must be converted by enzymic reactions to sugar. If this is done by malting, that is, soaking grains and then letting them begin to grow, the malting process must be controlled and growth halted before the sprouting grains consume all the sugars they are making from their starch. Human intervention and control is effectively essential. Beer – alcohol derived from grains – does not happen in the wild, because the conditions to make beer do not occur in the wild.

However, alcohol is most certainly produced in the wild using other sources of natural sugar: this is what yeast, opportunistic scavengers of sources of energy, evolved to do. Ripe fruit can, and will, ferment spontaneously as yeast arrive to grab the sugar in the fruit and flood the surroundings with alcohol to keep their rivals away. The story of elephants getting drunk on over-ripe and fermenting fruit may be a jungle myth. But if you walk through an untended apple orchard in the autumn, after the apples have fallen from the trees and been lying on the ground, the scent of cider will envelop you, as yeasts attack the rotting fruit. Right now, I’m in a Middle Eastern city where thousands of date palms line every road, and in the evening the strong smell of vinegar is on the warm air: this is because dates that have fallen to the ground have fermented, and then gone on to the next stage, where alcohol is converted by specialist bacteria into acetic acid.

We can thus trump Arnold’s claim about the antiquity of beer with a quotation from a book called Fermented food beverages in nutrition, by Gastineau, Darby and Turner, written in 1979, that “Fruit wines were probably discovered as soon as man tried to collect and store sweet fruits and berries.” Fermentation of the juice that runs free from grapes simply piled on top of each other is the basis of the Hungarian wine Tokay Eszencia. Ripe dates soaked in water were used to make a sweet drink in Arabia, and if left for even a day the sugary date water would ferment to make a drink called fadikh, which an Arabian traveller called Yūsuf ibn Ya’qūb Ibn al Mujāwir found still being made in the 13th century.

I’d suggest humanity, which has been gathering and eating fruit since before it was humanity, and making baskets and preparing gourds and baskets to store things in for, at the least, tens of thousands of years, discovered fruit wine a very long time before it found out how to make beer. The kit needed to make fermented fruit drinks is very simple, and certainly within the capabilities of palaeolithic (that is, pre-agriculture) people. To make jackfruit wine in India, “earthen pots, wooden vessels, bamboo baskets and sieves, stone slabs and flat stones are the only equipment used in traditional procedures” (Handbook of indigenous fermented foods by Keith Steinkraus). Substitute gourds for earthenware pots, and Bob’s your jackfruit.

'This watery hunny is making me *hic* feel funny'

Fruit is not the only source of natural sugar that will turn into alcohol without any help from anything except wild yeasts. Honey will ferment naturally, under the right conditions, particularly when diluted. Don and Patricia Brothwell, who wrote Food in Antiquity in 1969, said rather censoriously: “It is sobering to consider that the neglected jar of fruit juice or pulp, or the half-empty honey-pot left out in the rain, set man along the road to alcoholism and the illicit still.” (Lighten up, guys – it didn’t happen to Winnie-the-Pooh …)

Palm sap contains 12 to 15 per cent sucrose, is very easily tapped by cutting off the palm flower and putting a container such as a gourd underneath the resultant stump, and will ferment in 24 hours to give an alcohol content of around five per cent or more. This is the drink known as palm wine or toddy, and it is consumed wherever palm trees grow, from South America through Africa and the Indian sub-continent to Indonesia. Again, the technology for making palm wine was available to palaeolithic peoples. Similar sorts of drink are pulque, from Mexico, made from sugary cactus juice, and spruce beer, made from the sap of spruce trees.

Milk – horse’s milk, camel milk, yak milk, even cow’s and sheep milk – will also ferment under the right conditions, resulting in drinks such as koumiss and shabat in Central Asia and khoormog in Mongolia. However, these drinks (which don’t get much above around two per cent alcohol) must have had to wait until after the domestication of animals to be discovered, and thus are going to be younger than beer, since it is generally agreed that agriculture came before animal husbandry. I tried some koumiss at a party a couple of weeks ago, which one of the IT guys at the place where I am working had brought back from Kyrgyzstan (they’re like that, IT guys), where it is sold in plastic bottles in supermarkets, apparently. The mare’s koumiss was white and fizzy, the camel’s brown as chocolate milk shake, if I remember correctly (I’d had several beers by the time it was revealed that there was koumiss in the fridge, and I wasn’t taking notes), and both were tart and sour: an interesting experience, but one I won’t be catching the next flight to Kyrgyzstan to repeat.

There is also a method of making alcohol from starchy foods without malting, available to every human being, and which is the basis of drinks such as chicha in the Andes regions of South America. Human saliva contains amylases that will hydrolyse starch into sugar, something we evolved early in our history to help us eat starchy foods. You can test this yourself by chewing some bread, or a cracker: do it long enough, and as the starch is broken down, you can taste what is in your mouth getting sweeter. Traditionally, chicha is made by grinding dried maize kernels, then slightly moistening the flour and making it into balls which are popped into the mouth and thoroughly mixed with saliva, using the tongue. The ball of salivated maize flour, called muko, is then flattened against the roof of the mouth, popped out, and left in the sun to dry. According to Keith Steinkraus, “Muko production is generally carried out as a social event by groups of older women, sometimes with the help of young girls, who all sit in a circle.”

The wonder of enzymes means that when you’re ready to make chicha, the muko can be added to more ground corn mixed with water, and the saliva amylases will now work on the new starches. Heat this mixture for 20 minutes to give the enzymes the maximum chance to convert starches to sugars, strain it, boil it to kill any unwanted bugs, let it cool and then either let wild yeasts in the air ferment it, or add a source of yeast: berries will do, since these will almost certainly have yeasts on their skins. Eventually the vessel you use to ferment the chicha in will build up its own colony of yeasts that will do the job every time. Similar drinks can be made from other sources of starch, such as cassava, and even (in Mozambique) yucca plants. (Don’t try that one at home …)

One important point about chicha: I’ve never seen the possibility discussed that something like it was one of the roads that led to barley beer brewing in the ancient Middle East, but it seems to me entirely plausible that before they discovered malting, Neolithic brewers in the “Fertile Crescent” first made beer by utilising the power of saliva amylase, chewing barley flour to make barley muko. Mothers would have chewed starchy food to give to their babies as they weaned them, food which would have become sweet and more palateable to the baby as the enzymes in the mother’s saliva worked on the barley starches. Doubtless the busy mothers would have prepared some pre-chewed food in advance, which they would have dried to store, and then soaked before giving it to their young child. Yeasts falling on soaking sweet muko would have fermented the sugars quickly in the Middle Eastern heat, and beer is born …

But if beer was born that way, then it came when humanity already knew about alcohol. Beer isn’t the oldest alcoholic drink in the world, not even the second or third oldest. Instead, I’d suggest*, in order of age, the first fermented drinks were fruit-based, followed by honey-based drinks – mead and its variants – next fermented sweet tree-sap drinks such as palm wine, and only fourth, beer.

*Although I’d probably be wrong, it appears, about the order of the first two – see the comment below from Dr Garth Cambray of the Makana Meadery.

I just caught up with BBC 4’s Food Programme from last Sunday, which was about the British hop industry, and as a side issue, IPA in a couple or so of its current incarnations – there are just two days left before it disappears from the BBC website, so if you’re quick, and you’ve got RealPlayer or similar installed on your computer, you can catch it here (oh, and you have to be in the UK, or be able to fool the BBC’s website that you’re in the UK, or it won’t let you listen – sorry.)

Anyway, I though it was a fair treatment of the subject, with a quick scamper through what hops do for beer (flavouring and preserving – but you knew that), and interviews “in the field” with David Holmes, head brewer at Shepherd Neame; Tony Redsell, a Kentish hop grower; and Dr Peter Darby of the National Hop Collection at Queen Court Farm, near Faversham, who talked about the more than 300 different oils found in hops, and the different flavours that, singly and in combination, they bring to beer, from mint to passion fruit.

Back in the studio, the presenter, Sheila Dillon, talked to Roger Protz, and to Martin Dickie, brewer and co-owner of Brewdog Brewery. In a quick tasting, bottles were opened of Brewdog’s Punk IPA, made with Chinook and Ahtanum hops from the US and Nelson Sauvin hops from New Zealand, and Atlantic IPA (which spent two months in cask on a fishing boat being rocked by North Atlantic waves and will cost you £10 a bottle), and, for contrast, Meantime Brewery’s IPA, flavoured with nothing but finest English Fuggles and Goldings. It was excellent to hear Sheila Dillon saying “Wow, that’s good!” as she tried the Punk IPA, and expressing surprise that, at 65 or 70 units of bitterness, twice as much (at least) as, say, a best bitter, it didn’t pucker your mouth, as Roger and Martin explained that this was because the bitterness was balanced by the alcohol, at 6.5 per cent by volume.

It was also cheering to hear Ms Dillon declare at the end of the programme: “I really hadn’t grasped before today the complex character that hops bring to beer – it makes beer much more interesting.” Well, yes – that’s what the beer community has been saying for decades.

But bah, grrr, I was hopping round the room (pun unavoidable) at Ms Dillon’s introduction to the programme, in which she repeated the old myth that Henry VIII tried to ban his brewer from using hops. As I explain in this post, he did not: what happened on at least a couple of occasions was that the king’s ale brewers were told not to use hops in their brews, but the king’s beer brewer, a separate functionary, used hops just like every other Tudor beer brewer.

Dr Peter Darby and David Holmes ©The BBC

To those of you who have noticed that nothing has been happening here for almost six months, apologies for my absence – this has been caused mostly by the need to try to earn a living, which rather came before beer blogging, and which has taken me a long way away from home (and sources of varied good beer).

However I’m delighted to say that I’ve found a “printed copy” publisher for Amber Gold and Black, my book on the history of British beer styles, which appeared as an e-book last year and which is due to appear as a “proper” book in the UK in April next year – it’s already on Amazon UK, why not pre-order it now and help the cash flow at The History Press, my publisher?

The imminent arrival of a printed copy, incidentally, does mean that the e-book has now been pulled – many thanks to all those who bought it, who included some very famous names in the brewing industry on both sides of the Atlantic, many thanks to Fuller Smith and Turner, who sponsored the website for the e-book, and many thanks to Miles Jenner and Harvey’s of Lewes, whose generous loan funded the preparation and updating of the manuscript for the printed version. I did say that anyone who bought the e-book would get money off any printed version, and I intend to keep that promise – more about that next year, when the printed version comes out.

In addition to updating Amber Gold and Black, what little beer blogging I’ve been doing has been for a new American operation, Beer Connoisseur, which asked me to be its resident blogger on beery history – you can sign up for it here should you be so minded, it’s as good a take on the varied and fascinating American brewing scene as any I know (self-interest alert: a very tiny amount of money comes my way if you sign up via my blog on Beer Connoisseur and use the code that you will find there …)

However, I hope to be able to start putting up some entries here again: there are several topics I want to air that don’t fit into my brief for Beer Connoisseur, and I promise it won’t be another six months before I blog again here.

Meanwhile, I’m surprised to say that my writing appears on YouTube, to the bemusement of both me and my 10-year-old daughter, who cannot understand why her very uncool dad even knows about YouTube, let alone has a snatch of video on it devoted to a book he wrote 10 years ago. However, someone calling themselves kehdi22 has put up one minute 10 seconds of someone turning over the pages of the American edition of Beer Memorabilia, which I wrote in 1999 – no commentary, no sound, except for the rustle of the pages being turned. Why? Dunno. Have a look for yourself …

Out of the 49 million adults in the UK it apparently only takes three idiots to complain for a 60-year-old advertising slogan to be banned by the Advertising Standards Authority.

The phrase “Take Courage” has been in use by the brewers of Courage since at least 1950, when the beer still came from the Anchor brewery hard by Tower Bridge: the earliest mention I have been able to find is from a book on “Royal Windsor’ published that year which contained an advertisement for the Royal Oak pub:

For good beer, good cheer, a friendly atmosphere and a ready welcome, at all times, visit the “ROYAL OAK” Opposite Windsor Station LUNCHEONS PARTY CATERING tel Windsor 1179
Whenever you see a cockerel
take COURAGE

the cockerel, of course, being the Courage trademark.

Another early mention of the slogan comes in an article from a publication called the American Magazine, which covered a trip to Europe in 1952, and which is worth reprinting because of the fabulous picture it gives of pub life in the first year of Queen Elizabeth II:

Stopped next at a family-style pub with little old ladies lining the wall like chaperones at a school dance. They gossip and watch goings-on, including us. A woman in spectacles and a tired fur piece got up and sang a song. Left pub early because we fly to Paris at 9am.. Saw sign saying ‘Take Courage Here.’ Learned Courage is a brand of beer. Long live England!

Alas, in the 57th year of Liz’s reign, when Wells and Young’s, who now brew Courage beers at Bedford, decided to press the old slogan into new service, a trio of feckwits complained to the ASA that the ad showing a woman in a new dress clearly asking the question all men know must be answered “No, darling, certainly not” really implied that the beer the man was drinking “would give him confidence to either make negative comments on the woman’s appearance or take advantage of her.” Take advantage of her? What strange planet do this people beam down from?

The ASA, demonstrating that you have to have a senseofhumourectomy before you can become an advertising watchdog, has ruled that “Although we understood the humorous intention of the scenario” – well, no, I don’t think you do, actually – “we concluded that the poster breached the [advertising] code by suggesting that the beer could increase confidence.” Clearly no one at the ASA ever has a drink, either, because as a number of commentators have pointed out, alcohol DOES increase confidence, whether the ASA wishes it or not, and making jokes about that fact is perfectly legitimate.

Since the number of people who have turned on the ASA over its decision – see for example the commentators on Pete Brown’s blog here, the wonderful mickytake by the Daily Mash here and the pretty predictable ranting by the commentators at the Daily Mail – now vastly outnumber the three plonkers who complained, justice demands that Wells and Young’s succeeds in its planned appeal against the ASA decision. However, what justice demands and what justice gets frequently don’t match up.

Still, as the hoo-ha has gathered publicity for Courage bitter around the world, in Russia, in China and Italy to finger only three places, cynics might almost think W&Y got three of its own people to complain to the ASA, just for the global column inches. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be true: instead it’s just another example of the new puritanism. If you have been affected by the issues raised in this blog, contact the ASA and tell them they’ve turned their own organisation into a joke by failing to get the joke, and they should rescind this stupid ban ASA-P.

Bang, bang, another beery myth hits the floorboards, or at least staggers back badly wounded, after excellent work by Kim Cook in an article called “Who produced Fuggle’s Hops” just published in the latest (Spring 2009, issue 130) edition of Brewery History magazine.

The story repeated everywhere about Fuggles, one of the two classic English hop varieties, first appeared 108 years ago in an article called “The Hop and its English Varieties”, by John Percival (1863-1949), then professor at the agricultural college in Wye, Kent, in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, vol 62, and reprinted in the Brewers’ Journal March 15 1902 edition, pp 10-16. Percival wrote of the Fuggle hop that

“The original plant was a casual seedling which appeared in the flower-garden of Mr George Stace, of Horsmonden, Kent. The seed from which the plant arose was shaken out along with crumbs from the hop-picking dinner basket used by Mrs Stace, the seedling being noticed about the year 1861. The sets were afterwards introduced to the public by Mr Richard Fuggle, of Brenchley, about the year 1875. (Letters from Mr John Larkin,. Horsmonden, Mr W.J. Noakes, Goudbury and others.)”

Horsmonden and Brenchley are two villages in the Kentish Weald, about a mile apart. The Fuggles variety grows well in the stiff, damp, clayey soils of the Weald, and better than hops such as Goldings do in such soils. If a new, hardy, heavy-cropping hop, comparatively very rich in lupulin, and well-suited to Wealden conditions suddenly popped up in the district, a Wealden hop farmer was indeed likely to spot it and introduce it commercially. So do the records support Percival’s account of the birth of Fuggles?

Unfortunately, Kim Cook’s investigations show, they don’t. There was nobody living in Horsmonden in 1861 called George Stace: the census returns that year show no families called Stace, or anything like it, in the village at all, nor any Georges whose surname bore any possible resemblance to Stace. A wide-ranging search uncovered several people called George Stace living in and around the Wealden area at the right sort of time, but none with any good connection to Horsmonden.

Fuggles hops 1902

What about Richard Fuggle? More problems. Later narratives than Percival’s specifically identified Richard Fuggle as being of Fowle Hall, then in Brenchley but later assigned to Paddock Wood. The Fuggles certainly lived at Fowle Hall, but in the period 1861-1879 the head of the household was Thomas Fielder Fuggle, not Richard. Thomas Fielder Fuggle did have a son called Richard, his seventh child, but he was only 13 in 1861, and he emigrated to Ontario around 1871-72, aged 23 or so, and thus wasn’t around in 1875 to promote the Fuggle hop.

There WAS a Richard Fuggle farming in the area, at the right time, at Old Hay, about a mile or so north of Brenchley village proper. Old Hay was then a detached part of the parish of Mereworth, seven miles further north. Kim Cook’s provisional family tree for the Fuggles of Old Hay shows Richard Fuggle senior was born around 1806, dying in 1864, and his son Richard junior was born in 1841, inheriting the running of the farm at Old Hay from his father. Some time between 1874 and 1878, however, just the time when the Fuggles hop was supposedly being introduced, Kim Cook shows that this Richard Fuggle moved from Old Hay to Owley Farm, Wittersham, around 20 or so miles to the south. By 1891 he was living in Wittersham village and working as an overseer for someone else, and he died in 1913. His son, another Richard, born 1872, emigrated to Australia, where his wife died only in 1962.

One little piece of evidence Kim Cook didn’t have was a notice in The Times from July 6 1871 about the sale of West and East Old Hay farms, with East Old Hay “in the occupation of Mr F. [sic] Fuggle”, presumably a typo for R. Fuggle. Both farms had hop kilns attached and were “proverbial for their excellent growth of hops and corn”, according to the sale notice.

Strangely, the two people Kim Cook has been able to definitely identify are Professor Percival’s two named informants. John Larkin was a farmer at Ashdown, Horsmonden in 1901, the village of his birth in 1843, while William John Noakes had been at Burr’s Hill, Brenchley from at least 1861 to around 1890. They ought to have been good witnesses, and it is very strange that little or no evidence can be found to stand their story up.

Kim Cook suggests the true originator of the Fuggles hop might have been Ann Fuggle, half-sister, it seems of Thomas Fielder Fuggle and daughter of John Fuggle, of Gatehouse Farm, Brenchley, who was the largest hop farmer in the Fuggle family in Brenchley before she married William Durrant in 1848. This is too far a stretch for me: if I had to bet, I’d put my money on Richard Fuggle senior and/or junior of Old Hay farm.

But if this Richard was the originator of the Fuggle hop, why didn’t he make enough money from introducing the new variety to not have to end up working for someone else 20 miles away from the family home? And since this Richard was still alive in 1901, why didn’t Professor Percival contact him to find out about the hop’s origins, rather than having to rely on Larkin and Noakes?

Certainly the new variety caught on quickly. The earliest mention of Fuggles hops I have been able to find comes from the Brewers’ Journal of September 1883, where a reprint of a talk given a year earlier by Dr H. Braungart of Weihenstephan to the Swiss Brewers’ Congress in Geneva mentions (twice) “Juggles Goldings [sic] (Weald of Kent)” being grown in 1881, six years after the variety’s supposed introduction. Juggles is obviously a typo for Fuggles (the same article also talks about “Brambling” hops, when Bramling is meant), and Fuggles were occasionally regarded as a type of Goldings in the variety’s early decades.

Brewers eventually began to value the variety as well. A report on the hop market in The Times on November 13 1895 said: “The attention of brewers is being more and more centred upon Fuggles, of which the best and medium sorts passed off very well.” Ten years later, in a monograph on The Hop and its Constituents, Professor Percival wrote:

In the less favoured districts with damp, stiffish soils, or where the climate is against the production of the finest quality, Fuggle’s Hop is a variety extensively grown, and its cultivation is spreading. It is a heavy cropper, hardy, with a green bine. The hops are somewhat large, square in section, pointed at the tip, with thickish petals. The basal petals of the “cone” are dirty green in colour. The hops are rich in lupulin, but their aroma is second rate. For use in the copper this variety is as good as any, and, when well managed, gives a remunerative yield to the grower.”

Three decades later, when the variety was, if the story of its origins is correct, getting on for 80 years old, The Times wrote on February 1 1938 that “The Fuggle … is more largely grown than any other variety in this country. It is at present practically the only variety grown in the Weald of Kent and Sussex and is also grown in Herefordshire.”

Even in 1949 Fuggles hops made up 78 per cent of the English hop harvest, but the variety proved particularly susceptible to a virulent strain of the fungal infection Verticillium wilt that started to hammer the hop gardens of Kent and Sussex from the 1940s. This, together with the development of varieties of hop with higher levels of alpha acids, saw Fuggles crash to only some nine per cent of total hop acreage in England.

Fortunately committed brewers have kept the variety alive because they desired to maintain the traditional flavours of British beers, particular bitter: there doesn’t seem to be another hop that gives the mouth-filling rotundity of Fuggles to a comparatively low-strength ale. The classic combination is the grassy Fuggles and the more citric Goldings. My local Sainsbury’s supermarket has been selling cheap bottles of Harviestoun’s Haggis Hunter, 4.3 per cent abv, which is brewed solely with masses of Fuggles and Goldings, far more, I suspect than usually go into a British beer. The result is revelatory: brisk, uplifting, tangy, a marvellous rejoinder to anyone who thinks that super-hoppy beers need to have American hops in them.

Whoever really first spotted that little hop plant supposedly grown from a seed thrown out of a hop-picker’s dinner basket, we’re all very grateful.