One of the great unanswered questions in the history of beer is why it took 9,000 years or so after brewing began for brewers to start using hops.

Today there are very few beers made without hops They give beer flavour and. most importantly, they keep it from going off. The shelf life for unhopped ale can be as short as a fortnight or so before it starts to spoil and sour. Hopped beer can last for years. But it took many millennia for brewers to discover this, though they had been using a huge range of other plants to flavour their ale in the meanwhile: the bushy, aromatic moorland shrub bog myrtle, for example, the grassland weed yarrow, the hedgerow plant ground-ivy, even rosemary and sage.

The first documented link between hops and brewing comes from Picardy in Northern France, in 822, where Abbot Adalhard of the Benedictine monastery of Corbie, in the Somme valley near Amiens, wrote a series of statutes on how the abbey should be run. The many rules covered areas such as the duties of the abbey’s tenants, which included gathering of firewood and also of hops – implying wild hops, rather than cultivated ones. Adalhard also said that a tithe (or tenth) of all the malt that came in should be given to the porter of the monastery, and the same with the hops. If this did not supply enough hops, the porter should take steps to get more from elsewhere to make sufficient beer for himself: “De humlone … decima ei portio … detur. Si hoc ei non sufficit, ipse … sibi adquirat unde ad cervisas suas faciendas sufficienter habeat.”

It is important that the Corbie statutes should link hops with beer brewing, because hops had other uses they might have been collected for: to make dyes, for example (brown dye from hop sap and yellow dye from the leaves and cones). The stems can also be used to make ropes, sacking and paper. Thus any mentions in old documents of hops being collected from the wild, or even cultivated, does not mean automatically that the hops were going into beer

But Adalhard’s statutes do not say whether the hops were being used to preserve the beer, or merely to flavour it (the way brewers today dry-hop their beers). Proof that hops were being used the way they are today, as a preservative, does not come for three more centuries, at another Benedictine establishment at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, in the Rhineland. About 1150, Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), mystical philosopher and healer, published a book called Physica Sacra, which translates best as “The Natural World”. Book I, Chapter 61, “De Hoppho”, or “Concerning the hop”, says of the plant: “It is warm and dry, and has a moderate moisture, and is not very useful in benefiting man, because it makes melancholy grow in man and makes the soul of man sad, and weighs down his inner organs. But yet as a result of its own bitterness it keeps some putrefactions from drinks, to which it may be added, so that they may last so much longer.”

By itself this does not prove hops were used in beer, just “in drinks” (in potibus in Hildegard’s original Latin). But in a later chapter, on the ash tree, the abbess wrote: “If you also wish to make beer from oats without hops, but just with grusz [gruit], you should boil it after adding a very large number of ash leaves. That type of beer purges the stomach of the drinker, and renders his heart [literally ‘chest’ or ‘breast’] light and joyous.” Clearly Hildegard knew about brewing beer with hops. The passage also suggests that Hildegard knew about boiling wort, without which just adding hops is not much help in keeping away “putrefactions”.

What probably kept the usefulness of hops from being discovered for so long is that the bittering, preserving resins in hop cones are not very soluble, and the hops need boiling for a long time, around 90 minutes, for what is called isomerisation – the physical change in the hop acids to a more soluble form of the molecule – to take place. Nobody would have boiled hops that long, and thus discovered the isomerisation, without a prior good reason (it takes a lot of fuel, a precious commodity when you have to gather wood by hand, to boil quantities of water for an hour and a half). How was it found out that a good long boil improved both the flavouring and the preserving ability of hops? One possibility is that a dyer, boiling hops to dye cloth, made the discovery that the dye water had a pleasant bitter taste, and told her friend the brewer. But this is just a guess.

When exactly hops began to be cultivated for putting into beer, rather than just being gathered wild from forests, is surprisingly unclear. German sources today claim that hop gardens appear in records dating from the second half of the ninth century in and around Hallertau, in Bavaria, Southern Germany, which is still the world’s largest single hop-growing area. However, they do not specify exact documents in which these hop gardens are mentioned, which makes it impossible to rely on their assertions. The best evidence seems to be that commercial hop cultivation happened in Northern Germany first, and not until the 1100s or 1200s, feeding the breweries of the Hansa trading towns, which were exporting hopped beer from at least the 13th century onwards. (Merchant beer brewers in North German cities eventually became rich enough to join the local aristocracy, something not found in Britain until the 18th century).

The buyers of this beer brewed in cities such as Hamburg and Bremen included the richer inhabitants of Flanders and Holland. Local brewers in the Low Countries reacted by brewing hopped beer themselves, and by the 1360s or thereabouts Dutch towns were growing hops to supply their brewers. From around 1390 brewing of hopped beer took off in Holland, with Flanders following a decade or so later.

The first import of Low Countries “beere” into England seems to have come in 1362/63, when James Dodynessone of Amsterdam paid a toll on beer at Great Yarmouth in 1361-62. (There is a reference in the Norwich Leet Roll of 1288-9 to cervesiam flandrensem, or Flanders ale, which “Ricardo Somer”, Richard Summer, was fined 2s for selling occulte, secretly, thus depriving the bailiffs of money due on the ale of ale. However, this was probably too early to be a hopped brew). Further mentions of beer imports followed, gradually increasing in frequency: Henry Vandale (a man with a Dutch-sounding surname) bought four barrels of “beere” in London in 1372. A ship’s captain named Clays Johanson arrived in London in July 1384 with a cargo that included earthenware dishes, Holland linen cloth and beer. Other records of beer imports in the late 14th century come from Newcastle, Scarborough, Lynn, Ipswich, Winchelsea and Sussex. At the end of the 14th century Great Yarmouth was importing 40 to 80 barrels of beer a month, while in 1397-8 Colchester imported 100 barrels of beer.

However, the first brewer of the hopped drink in England does not appear until 1412, when Agnes Smyth, “Dutchman” (sic – and “Dutch” meant “German” at this time, rather than “person from the Netherlands”), was making beer in Colchester. The English beer trade seems to have stayed in the hands of immigrants from the Low Countries for the next century, as the conservative-minded natives stuck to their unhopped ale. As a result, the first beer brewers in England apparently imported all their hops from across the Channel, with no attempt to cultivate the plant here until early in the 16th century.

When exactly the first hops were grown in England is, again, uncertain – dates given by different writers range from 1511 to 1524. But the place where they were first planted was almost certainly Kent: one tradition says the first hop garden was established in 1520, in the parish of Westbere, near Canterbury. By 1569 English hop cultivation was sufficiently advanced for one agricultural writer, the Sussex landowner Leonard Mascall (or Mascal), to claim that “one pound of our hoppes dried and ordered will go as far as two poundes of the best hoppe that come from overseas.”

Five years later, in 1574 the first book in English solely devoted to hop growing was written by a 36-year-old Kentish landowner called Reynolde (or Reginald) Scot. His A Perfite Platform of a Hoppe Garden, filled with woodcut illustrations to aid the less literate Elizabethan farmer, went to three editions in four years. By 1577 hop cultivation had reached Herefordshire, where a “hoppyarde” was running at Whitbourne, near Bromyard. The differences found in the terminology used between the West Midlands and South East England – hop yard for hop garden, hop kiln for oast house, crib rather than bin for the container the hops are picked into, for example – suggest hop-growing was started independently in the two places.

In 1655 hops were being grown in at least 14 English counties, including Somerset, though Kent accounted for a third of the total crop. The use of bitter hop alternatives such as broom and wormwood was banned by Parliament in 1710 to ensure brewers did not try to avoid the new hop tax of a penny a pound. However, although it was reckoned an acre of hops would bring in more profit than 50 acres of arable land in a good year, the hop farmer’s life was more insecure than any other branch of agriculture. An old Kentish rhyme said of hops: “First the flea, then the fly/Then the mould, then they die.” Annual yields swung wildly: 1.57 million pounds of hops in 1726, for example, 20.39 million pounds the following year.

John Banister of Horton Kirby in Kent, in a book called Synopsis of Husbandry, published in 1799, identified a long list of different types of hop, including “the Flemish, the Canterbury, the Goldings, the Farnham etc.” Goldings is still regarded as one of the great English hops, though it now comes in several varieties: it was supposedly propagated from an especially fine plant spotted about 1790 by Mr Golding of Malling, who was still alive in 1798.

Stourbridge fair, just south of Cambridge, was the biggest hop mart in England in the late 17th and early 18th century. By the late 18th century Southwark, in London, which was handily placed on the road up from Canterbury, had become country’s most important hop centre. (When “three-letter” telephone exchange names were introduced in London before the First World War, Southwark’s was HOP – even today, many Southwark telephone numbers still contain the numerical equivalent, 407.)

There were 35,000 acres of hops under cultivation in Britain by 1800, and 50,000 by 1850. Hop farming hit a peak of 71,789 acres in 1878, with hops grown in 40 English counties, though the tiny Scottish hop industry, which operated in just five counties, disappeared in 1871, and Welsh hop growing ended in 1874. Hops from Farnham in Surrey were regarded as the finest, followed by Kentish hops, though some brewers paid a premium for North-Clay hops grown on the stiff clays of Nottinghamshire, which were reckoned to be the best for strong keeping-beers.

New varieties of hop were still appearing: Bramling, an “early” variety of Goldings, named after the hamlet near Canterbury where it was discovered, was introduced about 1865. According to later writers, Richard Fuggle of Brenchley, Kent unveiled the hop variety that still bears his name, the second great English hop, in 1875, though this has since been thrown into doubt. The first Fuggles plant supposedly originated from a seed thrown out with the crumbs of a hop-picker’s lunch at George Stace’s farm in Horsmonden, Kent in 1861. A book on English hops published in 1919 listed more than 30 different hop types.

However, tastes were changing away towards sweeter, less-hopped milds, and at the same time imports of hops from Europe and the United States were increasing. total hop acreage plunged to 51,000 in 1900, a drop of almost 30 per cent in 22 years. The restrictions on brewing of the First World War also hit the industry, and by 1918 there were just 16,000 acres under cultivation.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was realised that the soft resin content in hops, that is, the part that contains the alpha acids, which was first measured in 1888, was the best test of the keeping qualities they would bring to beer. Gradually brewers began to buy hops on their soft resin content, and growers began to plant varieties that contained a higher proportion of soft resins.

Researchers at Wye College, near Ashford in Kent cross-bred English hop varieties with native American hops, which generally have twice the alpha acid content of Europeans, but a “fruity” aroma English brewers had looked down upon. One, Bramling Cross, born in 1927 of a female Bramling hop with a wild male hop from Manitoba in Canada, has become appreciated for its “blackcurrant” nose. Others have had the fruitiness bred out, and the high alpha acid kept in. Many hop varieties in use today in Europe, the United States and Australia are based on hops first developed at Wye College.

However higher alpha acid content in the hops means fewer hops are needed in the beer means fewer hops need be grown. Total hop cultivation in England in 1976 was 17,000 acres. By 1997 it was just 7,500 acres, with 2,400 acres in Kent, 2,300 in Herefordshire, 870 in Worcestershire, 300 in Sussex and tiny amounts in Surrey, Hampshire and Oxfordshire. In 2006 that total had dropped to only 2,400, just two per cent of the worldwide acreage.

Actually, I’m not mad so much as grumpy and depressed, after reading an article by a beer writer I know and admire that contained this piece of nonsense about the hop:

In 1079, the Abbess Hildegarde of St Ruprechtsberg in Baden referred to the use if [sic] hops in beer.

No she blahdy didn’t, because as the American writer John P Arnold pointed out in 1911, when this error was already being repeated, the Abbess was not yet alive in 1079: she was born in 1098 and died in 1179, something that is very easy to check. And actually, as I wrote in Beer: The Story of the Pint six years ago, the Abbess didn’t talk about hops in beer, she talked about using hops “in potibus“, “in drinks”, to prevent putrefaction. And while there are several variants of the name of her religious settlement near Bingen, in Germany, the usual German version is Rupertsberg.

Unfortunately the internet is the most efficient method of disseminating bollocks ever invented, and what depresses me is that my attempts to stem the tide of inaccuracies are wrecked by people like the writer referred to above, and like Laurie Gilchrist of Crush, “Southwest Florida’s leading food and wine magazine” (fill in your own sarcastic comment here). Earlier this year Laurie wrote an article about hops now up on the net and ironically headlined “The Bitter Truth”, which is full of untruths about hops, picked up by Laurie out of whichever book or article he (?) plagiarised to write his piece and now stuck on the net for the next plagiariser to come along and steal and repeat. Laurie’s regurgitated errors include the following completely mistaken statements:

“The first recorded instance of hops being used in the making of beer was documented by Jewish slaves in Babylon around 400 B.C., who believed that the resulting drink was a cure for leprosy.”

No – this is a misunderstanding of something actually written in the 11th century AD, and the original plant referred to was not the hop, which would be at the very limit of its growing range in Babylon anyway.

” Hop plants have been cultivated since at least the 8th century.”

There’s no evidence for this at all, despite this claim being made frequently.

“The Germans began using hops to replace other beer additives in 1079 A.D.”

See above. Note how the original claim that something was talked about in a particular year has now become a claim that something actually began in a particular year. Why is Laurie Gilchrist so unthinking, or ignorant of history, to believe that we could possibly know exactly which year something like using hops began, especially since we’re talking about events that supposedly took place over a millennium ago?

“Medieval brewers in other European countries were skeptical about the hop plant, calling it a ‘wicked and pernicious weed’.”

I tried to kick this myth to death here, which is actually the top hit if you bother to Google “wicked and pernicious weed”.

“The English … deemed [beer] a ’saucy intruder’ and the plant was even banned for use in brewing in some parts of that country.”

Another long-standing myth that I tried to squash here, which is the number two hit on Google for the words hops ban England. (I’m kept out of the number one searchslot by a commentary piece on the possible ending of the ban on liquids in containers over 100ml in aircraft passengers’ hand luggage, which uses “hop” as a verb.)

Anyway, to try to make myself feel better, I’ve stuck up Six More Myths About Hops in the “FAQ – False Ale Quotes” section of this blog, in the hope that future Laurie Gilchrists will Google first and write later. Some time in the next few hours I’ll also be putting up a short history of hops, which should give the plagiarisers something more accurate than most sources on the net to nick from.

It’s apparently fashionable now to be sticking one’s boots into BrewDog, since the Aberdeenshire duo revealed they had reported themselves to the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, just to get the publicity. I’m always happy to join in a fight if the other side is outnumbered, so let’s have a go at them for gross historical inaccuracy over the publicity for their Atlantic IPA.

Unless you’ve been stuck in a dark bar with no internet access for the past year, you’ll know this is the brew BrewDog poured into casks and then left on a trawler sailing the North Atlantic for two months, in an attempt to replicate what happened to the original IPAs as they travelled by sea from Britain to Bombay or Calcutta.

This, BrewDog proclaimed, would be “the first IPA aged in oak casks at sea for 200 years!” Oh, really? What were Bass, Allsopp, Hodgson and the rest doing in the 19th century, shipping chopped liver out East? I don’t know when brewers in Britain stopped sending beer in casks to India to be bottled (and neither do BrewDog) but it was certainly still happening not much more than a century ago. Here’s Cornelius O’Sullivan, head brewer at Bass, one of the great Burton export pale ale brewers, giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry in 1899:

“Do you export beer in the cask to places like India?”
C O’S: “Yes.”
“Which do you do most of exporting in cask or in bottle?”
C O’S: “We sell no beer in bottle. We export a considerable quantity of bulk beer in cask to India and also to Australia and America, not so much to Australia now but still what we send we export in cask. A large quantity of our beer is bottled by exporters and exported: we sell them the beer and they bottle it and export it.”
“Your beer goes out to India in casks?”
C O’S: “Yes.”

So Atlantic IPA is certainly not, as BrewDog claim, “the first commercially available, genuine sea-aged IPA in two centuries” – very far from it. Nor can they have used “a 210-year-old recipe of a traditional India Pale Ale”, since there was no such thing as India Pale Ale in 1799: the name India Pale Ale did not come into use for another 30-something years, and what brewers were exporting at the time to India was almost certainly a standard strongly hopped stock bitter beer. Nor is it true to say that “India Pale Ale was born when brewers realised that together, hops and alcohol act as a natural preservative ensuring that the beer could withstand the voyage and arrive in good condition” – brewers had known about the preserving effects of alcohol and hops for centuries before IPA, and beers were being transported around the world from the earliest years of European exploration.

It’s also a bit cheeky to say that Atlantic IPA contains “classic English hops such as … Bramling Cross” – I’m very fond of Bramling Cross, it’s a lovely hop, but it’s a cross with a wild hop from Manitoba that first appeared in the 1920s and was hardly available to the earliest IPA brewers. Nor should BrewDog be implying that two months on a North Atlantic trawler in any way replicated four months or more on an East Indiaman sailing vessel going round the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the equator twice.

All that said, what’s the beer like? I spotted it on the shelf in my local specialist beer store in East Twickenham and reeled slightly at the price: north of £9 for 33cl of beer. Centilitre for centilitre, this is the equivalent of £20 for a bottle of wine. However, something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it, and balancing my desire to try this much-hyped beer against its high price, I decided I was prepared to buy one bottle (but not two).

It was, as you’d expect of a beer with 90 IBUs, strongly hoppy and heftily bitter. The nose had a fair bit of bruised apple and vinegar, and while the beer poured with a good head there was little condition apparent in the mouthfeel. There was oak in the background from the time spent sloshing around in casks, and a hint of orange, doubtless from the East Kent Goldings. This was definitely a sipping beer, not just because of its eight per cent abv, complex, but ultimately somehow less than the sum of its parts: the bitterness and the toffee sweetness from the malt seemed to be fighting each other rather than integrating. It reminded me most – and not in a good way – of a souped-up Innis & Gunn. I suspect Atlantic IPA could improve with time spent in the bottle, but I’m sorry, I’m not going to invest another £9 to find out.

I paired Atlantic IPA with another beer I knew would be towards the hop bomb end of the shelf, Sierra Nevada Anniversary 2009. This year’s Sierra Nevada anniversary beer is in the style of an American IPA, with pocketfuls of American hops, Chinook and Cascade. It’s still strongly hoppy and bitter, with passionfruit and ginger coming through, but the complexity is subtler, the integration better – and the price barely a quarter of Brewdog’s Atlantic. I have greatly enjoyed beers that Brewdog have made in the past, and I commend them for constantly pushing the beery envelope, but on this occasion I fear it’s an experiment that didn’t quite come off.

When I started this blog I promised to give recipes with beer as one of the ingredients. There’s not been enough of that, so here’s a great dish for winter evenings – Sussex Steak.

Port and porter are an old combination, known in Ireland as a “corpse reviver”. In 2000 John O’Hanlon, born in Kerry, South West Ireland but now brewing on a farm in Devon, used this idea to produce a new style of bottled beer, containing two bottles of port to every 36 gallons of a “stout” that is really the strength of an old-time porter, to make O’Hanlon’s Original Port Stout. The beer won a top prize in the Campaign for Real Ale’s Champion Winter Beer awards for 2002. This dish is also an old one, and why it is called Sussex Steak no one seems to know. However, the long, slow cooking makes for beautifully tender beef, and delicious gravy. To make it a bit more “Sussex” you could use Harvey’s Imperial Russian Stout, from Lewes, the county town, as the “porter” bit, but any strong porter or stout will do.

This would never make it into a Delia Smith cookbook, because it’s too easy to get wrong: if the steam level inside the dish drops while cooking, you’ll end up with steak like boot leather, so as the instructions say, no peeking: trust your oven.

INGREDIENTS:
1kg (2lb) lean rump or chuck steak, sliced 2.5cm (1in) thick
Flour and seasoning
1 large onion, sliced
30ml (1fl oz) mushroom ketchup
100ml (3 fl oz) port
100ml (3 fl oz) porter
(or substitute 75ml port and 125ml O’Hanlon’s Original Port Stout)

METHOD:
Season the flour, rub into the sliced steak. Lay the steak flat in an oven-proof dish.
Layer sliced onion on top, mix and pour in the ketchup, port and stout.
Cover as tightly as you can, using layers of and cooking foil tied round the dish with string.
Cook in oven at 135C (275F) for three hours. Do not be tempted to peek while the dish is cooking: it relies on the tight seal to keep in the steam from the port and porter, which tenderise the steak to perfection.

Serve with mashed potato, steamed green vegetables of your choice and field mushrooms baked for an hour with butter in a sealed dish.

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.