The time is 10am and there are 20 different beers to be drunk before lunchtime. It must be another supermarket beer judging.

I judged for the twice-yearly Tesco Beer Awards quite a few times, but this week’s was the Sainsbury’s Beer Competition, and although Sainsbury’s has brought in the same PR team to organise the entries and judging as previously ran its rival’s event, the Morrice Partnership, there are several significant differences between the two contests.

For a start, the beers in the Tesco judging were drunk “blind”: nobody except the organisers knew which brewery produced which numbered beer. But Sainsbury’s deliberately has “shelf appeal” as one or its judging criteria, alongside flavour, aroma, appearance and aftertaste, believing, correctly, that no shopper will pick up a beer and take it home to find out how good it is without initially being attracted by the packaging. So all the bottles bore their labels.

Second, while the Tesco competition had only two winners at a time, Sainsbury’s was looking for the best 15 beers out of the more than 90 being judged, The brewers of those 15 beers will each then get an order for 40,000 bottles, equivalent (for 500ml bottles) to 170 or so barrels, and worth, at wholesale prices to the brewer, maybe £30,000. Those 15 beers will be on sale in Sainsbury’s supermarkets from August 14 for a month as part of the chain’s “drinks festival”. The two best-sellers out of those 15 will them get 26 guaranteed weeks on Sainsbury’s shelves, which could be worth £150,000 or more.

For a microbrewer, even getting through round one is a real prize: if your entire turnover is less than £300,000 a year, then a 10 per cent boost is great news. Sainsbury’s and the Morrice Partnership offered help and advice to small brewers keen to enter but worried they did not have the skills and experience in such areas as label design and marketing, with the supermarket even supplying names and addresses of bottling firms and label printers.

This is all part of Sainsbury’s plan to increase the amount of shelf space it gives to premium bottled beers by 50 per cent in October. The off-licence bottled ales and stouts sector is now worth just under £400 million a year, makes up more than one sixth of all supermarket beer and cider sales, and has grown, according to Sainsbury’s, “1.5 per cent in the past 12 months”. I don’t know if they mean per cent or percentage points (I hate people who don’t make that distinction clear, I really do) but if it’s percentage points, that’s good growth in an otherwise static or declining market

Thus a rugby squad of experienced beer tasters, including Roger Protz, Michael Hardman (co-founder of Camra and currently PR man for Siba, the small brewers’ association), Paul Bayley, ex-head brewer at Marston’s, and my fellow beer blogger Melissa Cole, met at Sainsbury’s headquarters, the former Mirror building at the foot of Holborn in central London, to taste the entries. (Question: is it significant that the HQ of Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, is a dull industrial building in a dreary quarter of Cheshunt, in the drab Herts/Essex borderlands north-east of London, while Sainsbury’s occupies a prime central London site with massive atrium, expensive interiors and the rest? Discuss …)

After a welcome from Sainsbury’s beer and cider buyer, the tall and enviably skinny Chris Craig, and a short briefing from RP, we picked up our bottle openers, 200ml tasting glasses (all branded with the logo of Fuller’s, oddly, though Fuller’s wasn’t one of the brewers in the contest) and scoresheets and tackled the first crown corks of the morning. On the tables in front of us were beers from 56 different brewers, ranging from tinies I’d never heard of through well-known regionals such as Brains, Adnams, Hydes and Hall & Woodhouse to the semi(?) national Greene King, and even one American, High & Mighty from Massachusetts. The only criterion for entry was that the beers had never been on sale in a supermarket before: they could be old beers, or new ones.

Each judge had 20 beers to try, meaning each one would be drunk by three different people. Methodology: start at the low end of the abv ladder, pick up bottle, study front and back labels, pour about two or three fluid ounces of beer into the glass, hold glass to light to check clarity and colour, swirl glass, shove nose into glass and sniff. Take mouthful of beer, slurp, swallow. Follow with another mouthful or two if not immediately convinced of beer’s worth. or worthlessness. Throw remainder of beer away, rinse glass with bottled water, write up score, move on to next beer.

Is it really possible to “speed date” a beer like this? Is it fair on a brewer who has put a massive amount of effort into his product, in the hope and dream that he will win a substantial commercial prize which could give his brewery a considerable financial boost if he wins? Well, yes, actually, it’s surprisingly easy to form an accurate opinion of a beer very quickly, and it’s about as fair as any judging can be If you don’t like a beer on first tasting, it’s really not very likely to grow on you if you drank another pint or two.

Only one beer almost tripped me up at Sainsbury’s, Amarillo from the St Peter’s brewery (not a tribute to Tony Christie but made with Amarillo hops), which did need several tastings before its worth came through. Though that may be because I’m not an automatic fan of citrussy American hops, which many British brewers seem to fling into pale golden ales without any thought about achieving balance and in the apparent believe that the mere presence of lemon/grapefruit flavours in their beer makes them cutting-edge brew dudes.

There were, in fact, far too many pale golden ales entered into the Sainsbury’s competition: can we move on from this category, now, British brewers? There are more interesting places to go if you want to make an impact. I did find some appealing darker beers, though: I was disappointed my fellow judges didn’t like Brain’s Milkwood, which I though was very attractive, and which Dylan Thomas himself might have approved of (according to one source the poet’s favourite tipple was mild-and-bitter, and not the whisky that legend incorrectly claims killed him). They did, however, agree with me about Bath Ales’s Barnstormer, a lovely dark ale (and not the “dark bitter” it claims to be on the bottle label).

Talking of, the labels were almost all visually attractive, though too many fell into the pit of printing too much information in tiny type: many of us older ale drinkers can’t read six-point any more, particularly when it’s printed in a colour that doesn’t contrast sufficiently with the background. And please – no more “brewed with the finest hops and malt …” Who’d have thought? Today many drinkers are interested in what sorts of malts, and what varieties of hops.

Few of the beers, for me, really stood out – I only gave five of my 20 higher marks than 40 out of 60, and the highest was 44, or 73 per cent. I’d have hoped for at least one 80 per cent score. There were very few real duds, though I didn’t like the one whisky beer: tasted just like someone had topped an own-label scotch into a glass of flat beer, with no integration of flavours at all. But I think the selection that came out at the end as the top 15 will almost certainly contain at least one, if not two, real stars.

The names of the winners were meant to be embargoed until Monday, to give the competition organisers time to tell the brewers they’d got through to round two, but since one of the judges, who works for a grocery trade website, put the names out on the net yesterday (that means you, Mike Dennis) I feel I can list them myself:

• Old Tom Ginger from Robinson’s – despite my doubts about Old Tom, I thought the addition of ginger worked very well. A chocolate version, however, didn’t succeed with the judges
• Crazy Dog Stout from Red Rat brewery near Bury St Edmunds – great to see a new minnow get success
• Sundance, from Red Rat’s neighbour, Greene King: the “pinch” of the name from the beer Marston’s brewed exclusively for Wetherspoon’s caused Paul Bayley to raise his eyebrows …
• Amarillo from St Peter’s brewery; fine beer, horrible label, with the letters of “Amarillo” printed in different colours. Hope they change it before it gets on the Sainsbury’s shelves …
• Barnstormer “dark bitter” from Bath Ales: excellent beer, but it’s not a bloody bitter!
• Beer of the Gods from High & Mighty: a genuine, and much-rated American brewer apparently named after the outsize menswear chain. (Late-breaking news – apparently not …)
• Good Times from Williams Bros, the innovative Alloa brewer
• Harvest Sun, also from Williams Bros, the only brewer to get two beers into the top 15 (though they entered at least five, as far as I could see
• Scotts 1816 from Copper Dragon of Skipton, a brewery I confess I am entirely unfamiliar with
• Golden Glow from Holden’s, the Black Country brewery – several judges rated this very highly, although it did little for me - sorry
• Arthur Pendragon from the Hampshire brewery
• Dr O’Kells IPA from Okells on the Isle of Man
• Prize Fighter from the Arundel Brewery
• Highgate Old Ale, one of my favourite draught old ales from a wonderful, historic brewery – I hope very much this does well, I shall certainly be buying lots of it
• Honey Spice Wheat Beer from Sharp’s of Cornwall

Cheers to Sainsbury’s, and Richard Morrice and his crew, for a very well organised and enjoyable morning, thanks to all the brewers, and can I come back again next year please?

When Fuller’s announced in 2005 that it was acquiring Gale’s of Horndean, I couldn’t get very upset, in large part because I was angry at what Prize Old Ale had been allowed to become.

This should have been a proud and heavily promoted flag-carrier for British beer, about the last survivor of the “strong old ale” type made by almost every brewery in the country in the 19th century, still bottle-conditioned at a stomping nine per cent alcohol by volume and still, amazingly, available in corked bottles.

By the beginning of the 21st century, however, there was something very wrong: when you opened the bottles the ale inside was utterly flat, showing no condition at all, and the flavour was one-dimensional and over-sweet. Gale’s apparently bottled Prize Old Ale without adding extra priming sugar or yeast, relying on the yeast cells still in the beer, and the unfermented sugars that remained after the primary fermentation, to bring it into condition. Obviously, whatever the yeast used to do in the bottle in the past, it wasn’t up to the job any more. But nobody at Gale’s seemed to care, and what should have been a triumph was a disaster and an embarrassment.

The news that one last brewing of Prize Old Ale had taken place at the Gale’s brewery in Horndean just before it closed in March 2006, and the fermented beer had then been trucked up to Fuller’s brewery in Chiswick for maturing, gave me a little hope. At Horndean the beer was apparently matured for six to 12 months. Fuller’s looks to have taken at least 19 months: the last Horndean Prize Old Ale was only bottled in December last year, given the three months that Fuller’s likes to give its bottle-conditioned ales before it puts them on sale (believing they take that long to settle down after bottling), and they were released to the public in March.

The prime market looks to be the United States, since the labels are American – 500ml becomes “1pt 0.9 fl oz”, the Surgeon General gives his warning, and so on – and the only way you can get the beer in the UK is as a member of Fuller’s Fine Ale Club or directly from the brewery shop. Hurrah, I live about 15 minutes’ drive from Chiswick, so picking up a case was easy. But would it be worth buying?

The first fear – that the beer would once again be flat as pondwater – disappeared when the cap came off with a healthy “chffff”. There was very little head as the beer was poured, and what there was disappeared quickly, but a curtain of bubbles on the sides of the glass revealed that the Fullers-matured version of Prize Old Ale had plenty of condition. So that problem was solved, at least.

The colour was the expected dark oak, with hints of red, and the mouthfeel was certainly sharp, at first a shade too carbonated. The nose was almost grapey, with tar and treacle as well. First impressions found traces of apple and maybe mint, a touch of caramel from, I suspect, a long boil, rather than anything in the malt, and a sourness in the background that sets off very well the surviving slightly honeyed sweetness. Despite the dark colour, there are none of the up-front chocolate, coffee or roast malt flavours you would get in a member of the porter/stout family – this is a proper “old ale” of the sort your great-great grandfather would have known, a full-bodied ale of the kind almost nobody brews any more.

The grain bill, according to Roger Protz’s 300 Beers … is pale Maris Otter and black malt, this latter, having a “sweet or acrid flavour”, Hough, Briggs and Stevens’s Malting and Brewing Science says, and pushing the colour to 90 units, plus around 10 per cent brewing sugar. Hops, says Protzie, are Worcester Fuggles and East Kent Goldings, in quantities enough to give 53 units of bitterness, although there’s no great hop bitterness comes forward in the matured beer, at least not to my palate.

Roger says the beer was first brewed by Gale’s in the 1920s when a new head brewer brought the recipe from Yorkshire, which would put it in the tradition of the XXXXX Stingo Dr Keith Thomas of the University of Sunderland found in the brewing records of Hammond’s brewery in Bradford dating from 1903, using 82 per cent pale malt and 18 per cent glucose, with the wort boiled for three hours to concentrate it and give it more colour, an OG of 1100 and an ABV of 9.5. per cent.

My impression was that the Fuller’s-matured Prize Old Ale still needed a while in the bottle to calm down and be a fully integrated beer. But the more I drank, the more I got out of it. I had worried that a pint (or 500ml) was too much, but by the end, even at 9 per cent abv, I was thinking that one bottle might not be enough. It doesn’t come across as over-strong, but a full, upstanding ale packed with interesting flavours and subtleties, enormously appealing on its own, but also a beer that would be tremendously versatile at the dining table.

Prize Old Ale, because of how it is made and what it is made from, with its sweet-sour flavours and hints of tastes you cannot get from grapes, does the job wine can’t do. You could have it with traditional English dishes from roast beef and roast pork to lamb steaks (exactly the yeoman food, I am sure, it and its fellow strong ales were first brewed to go with – it would be just tremendous with mutton), you could have it with fish, with creamy Southern European food, with spiced Eastern dishes, with desserts from heavyweight puddings to fruit fools to ice cream, and with almost any cheese, and that sweet-sour-malty body, with its manifold subtle flavours tucked away inside, would uphold and enhance whatever you were pairing it with.

Fuller’s Fine Ale Club magazine suggests Prize Old Ale is “very similar to a Belgian Lambic beer”, which is code, I think, for “ooer, you might not like this”, and wrong both in how they are brewed and the final result: Lambic, deliberately exposed to as much wild yeast as its brewers can encourage, is much more sour, Prize Old Ale’s sourness, after its time maturing in the microbiological climate of West London, rather than west of Brussels, is subtler, less in-your-face.

It’s joyous to discover that Prize Old Ale can be such a great beer when properly looked after. I look forward to seeing how the last Gale’s-brewed beer develops over the years – Michael Jackson, who gave the OG for Prize Old Ale as 1094, suggested five or six years’ ageing brings out a brandy or Calvados smoothness, and one Gale’s brewer apparently believed 20 years’ ageing was merely an optimum. Over that time the alcohol content will certainly increase, though not to the “12 per cent or even more” Jackson suggests, I suspect.

The cash-flow problems involved in storing a beer for a couple of years before it can go on sale must put Fuller’s accountants in need of a strong drink, although at least excise duty no longer has to be paid as soon as the brewing part is completed. I’s love to see Fuller’s brew some Prize Old Ale themselves, to continue its availability, now that the experiment of maturing the beer at Chiswick has ended so well.

I’ve just put up a new myth page on this site completely debunking the story that medieval ale conners ever sat in puddles of drink in order to test it - so it’s a bit naughty to plug this page, which tells the (totally inaccurate, remember) story of the ale conner and the leather breeches test, using Lego figures, and is just simply terrific. Click on the links below to see the pics:

How to be an ale conner

Are you fed up with cleaning up other people’s mess? Want a job that’s a bit less smelly? (and a bit more sticky!) Do you like drinking beer and wearing leather trousers? Then you should become an ale conner! These vignettes will teach you the basics…

1) Find a place that serves ale

2) Buy a pint of ale to test

3) Pour half the beer onto a wooden stool

4) Sit on the stool (and drink the rest of the ale!)

5) After 30 minutes stand up - if your leather trousers stick to the seat then the ale contains too much unfermented sugar. Fine the brewer (and confiscate the ale!)

Enjoy - but don’t forget, ale conners never did sit in puddles of ale.

In the mid-1970s I had a girlfriend who was a student at Liverpool University. The campus pub-of-choice was (and still is, I believe) the Cambridge on the corner of Mulberry Street, which was, back then, a Burtonwood Brewery outlet.

Its popularity was partly down to its closeness to the university, of course, but also for the excellent, well-priced food - ham and cheese cobs – and the more than acceptable beer. The Burtonwood dark mild, although top-pressure, was always good, and cheap, and it sometimes looked like most of the pub was drinking Guinness: tables loaded with inky-black pints.

Burtonwood also brewed a light mild, but that was a rarity for the time, both as a beer in its own right and as a style. An analysis of the 1976 Camra Good Beer Guide shows that of 130 milds being brewed by 106 brewers, 101 – 77.7 per cent – were coloured dark through to black, while just 29, or 22.3 per cent, were pale or light. Even some of those, like McMullen’s AK, were actually misunderstood low-gravity bitters, not really pale milds at all.

Mild was a style that came into its ascendancy from the 1830s onwards, pushing out the previously dominant English beer style, porter, until itself being replaced after 1960 as the best-selling style by bitter. You’d assume, I think, that dark mild, easily the leading variety, nationally, in the lifetime of any drinker alive today, must be the ancient, original version. Most commentators certainly believe this was the case: the Handbook of Brewing, by Priest and Stewart, published in 2006, for example, says:

Victorian mild was … a strong dark brown beer …

Ron Pattinson of Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, however, seems to have demonstrated convincingly that dark mild is actually a 20th-century phenomenon. Looking through the records of brewers such as Barclay Perkins, Whitbread and Truman, Hanbury & Buxton at the London Metropolitan Archives, and analysing the grains they used, Ron found that

… all these beers use only pale malt. They weren’t dark as we would expect milds to be.

Further investigation has led him to say more recently, looking at the standard X mild ale of the last half of Victoria’s reign, that

In the 19th century X Ales were usually pale in colour, but with fewer hops and a lesser degree of attenuation than pale ale. At the end of the 19th century, fashion turned back to darker beers and ales became darker again … Mild [moved] from pale to amber to dark in the period 1890 to 1940.

You can’t dispute the facts as recorded in the contemporary brewing books, and you can’t brew a dark beer from just pale malt (or, not unless you run the wort off at a very high OG and boil it long enough to induce caramelisation, and as these were cheap “running beers”, that wasn’t happening). But it all seems counterintuitive: the general trend over the past century and a half is for the popular drinks to move from dark to pale, so red wine was replaced in popularity by white wine, whisky and (dark) rum by gin, vodka and white rum, bitter by pale lager. Why did mild apparently go the other way?

Let’s take a closer look at the history of mild as a beer style. In London, at least, it springs from the malt liquor called simply “ale” which was a speciality of the ale brewers, who included names such as Goding of Knightsbridge (and, later, Lambeth), Stretton of Golden Square, Charrington and Mann of Mile End, Courage of Horsleydown, and Wyatt of Portpool Lane, Clerkenwell. Their operations were all, in the early years of the 19th century, much smaller than the London porter brewers, Whitbread, Barclay Perkins, Truman, and so on. In 1814 even the 12th largest London porter brewer made 50 per cent more beer in a year than the largest London ale brewer.

What was this “ale” like? The Cyclopaedia of Several Thousand Practical Receipts, and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures and Trades by Arnold James Cooley, published in 1846, gives a recipe for “Ale, London” that uses all pale malt, at just under two and a half barrels of ale to the quarter of malt, which would give an OG of around 1070 or 1080 – ale was stronger than porter –  and 3lb 5oz of hops to the barrel, 8lb to the quarter of malt (6lb to the quarter if the ale was “for immediate use”). This would be a lot of hops today, for a standard beer, but even now about right for an ale of 1070, according to Hough , Briggs and Stevens’s Malting and Brewing Science of 1971.

The Cyclopedia gives several other recipes for different ales from around Britain, not all of which used only pale malt: “Dorchester ale”, for example. used one third pale malt to two thirds amber, which must have been a ruddy shade. at least. But John Tuck’s Private Brewer’s Guide of 1822 confirms the Cyclopedia’s account of the style of ale brewed in the capital, giving a recipe for London Ale that was 92 per cent “good Herts white” malt, and just eight per cent Hertfordshire amber malt.

London’s semi-hard water extracted more colour from malt than the permanently hard waters of Burton upon Trent, the iron mash tuns used by many brewers were reckoned to darken the worts obtained from them, and these were stronger liquors than most pale ales/bitters, with a higher percentage of everything from fermentables to colouring materials in the wort, than Victorian bitter beers, So even if they were brewed with pale malt, London ales, in the first 75 or so years of the 19th century, were very likely darker than the pale ales of Burton; but they were not the dark brown to almost black brews that made up the bulk of mild ales in the later 20th century.

These Victorian ales were either sold mild (that is, unmatured, just a couple or weeks or so old) from at least the early years of the 19th century, or before; or eventually became sold only in a mild condition; so that “ale”, at least in London, became a synonym for “mild”. To quote Maurice Gorham’s Back to the Local of 1949, “In London pubs ale stands for mild ale”. Tom Berkley, who was a trainee pub manager in the early 1950s in Poplar, East London, learnt quickly that when the stevedores walked in after work and said: “Ghissile”, they wanted mild, while bitter was “pinta bi’er”.

The evidence is, at any rate, that whatever ale was like in Georgian times, by 1830 it was being sold mild. Gourvish and Wilson, in The British Brewing Industry 1830-1980, quote a witness to the 1833 House of Commons select committee on the sale of beer who said that the London drinker

will have nothing but what is mild, and that has caused a considerable revolution in the trade, so much so that Barclay and Perkins, and other great houses, finding that there is a decrease in the consumption of porter, and an increase in the consumption of ale, have gone into the ale trade; nearly all the new trade is composed of mild ale.”

However, while the big porter brewers gradually began moving into brewing mild ale (Whitbread started ale production in 1835, for example) because of this slow change in public taste, and the capital’s ale brewers started to see their sales rise, it was, in fact, decades before porter lost its pre-eminence and the ale brewers grew to be on equal terms with the former porter giants. Here’s a table cobbled together from various sources:

As you can see, while the ale brewers grew dramatically in percentage terms between 1830 and 1850, their climb to challenge the former porter brewers in size – and thus, we can take it, the real rise in the market for mild – happened in the three decades after the Great Exhibition of 1851.

(Admittedly the ale brewers moved into making porter and stout, just as the porter and stout brewers moved into making ale, but the real rise of Mann, Charrington, Courage and so on must have been because of the growing popularity of ale. Their brewing of porter as well as ale was a reaction to the porter manufacturers encroaching on their prime market, and a desire to ensure that they too could supply the publican with all his wants, in the same way that several London brewers, such as Charrington and Mann, opened breweries in Burton upon Trent to supply their London publicans with Burton-brewed pale bitter ales, rather than surrender that sector to Bass, Allsopp and the like.)

One cautionary point: this was the London market, and different things were undoubtedly happening outside the capital. There is, for example, a small ad in The Times from November 1845 which reads:

WANTED to HIRE, a COUNTRY BREWERY, of about an eight-quarter plant, with public-houses and trade attached. It must be in a mild beer country. A distance from 30 to 50 miles from Cambridge would be preferred.

What this suggests is that parts of regional England, at least, were already given over to drinking mild beer. Thirty to 50 miles round Cambridge would take in a chunk of East Anglia, which was certainly “a mild beer country” later in the century: at Steward & Patteson of Norwich the XX mild made up 45 to 50 per cent of production in the 1890s. (An “eight-quarter plant”, incidentally, was one that could mash eight quarters, around 2,500 pounds, of malt at a time to produce around 32 barrels of beer.)

In London, however, porter seems to have kept up its end for another 35 or 40 years, despite the rise of the ale brewers. Only in September 1887, the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, did the Brewers’ Journal complaint that

There will be few to challenge the correctness of the assertion that there is a marked and increasing diminution in the amount of porter sold by London brewers.”

The Journal was surprisingly certain that

… the decline in the porter trade has little, if anything, to do with the public taste. Porter has long been esteemed by the British workman, and there is no doubt that his affections are as traditionally conservative in this respect as in most others.”

The Journal then went on to assert that the British workman was changing from porter to mild solely because of price:

Porter has found favour with him because … above all he has hitherto been enabled to obtain a long draught at a cheap rate. It is the latter inducement that has secured its ready demand, rather than any preference for it over good, sparkling mild ale. It has not only been a cheaper beverage than ale, but a very much cheaper one, and it is in the main due to an alteration of the relative prices of ale and porter that the falling off in the sale of the latter is to be attributed … As retail rates now rule, there is but a difference of one halfpenny a ‘pot’ between ale and porter, and this being insignificant the choice is given to the ale.”

The Journal added that publicans were also less inclined to promote porter because the habit of illegally diluting it to increase retailers’ profits – “black beer told no tales, at least to the unsuspecting artisan” – had been made too dangerous as the authorities wielded the provisions of the Inland Revenue Act 1885 against those who watered down their porter. It urged the brewers to adjust the wholesale price of porter downwards so that it could compete again against mild ale, warning them:

Many brewers who are now prospering will have cause to regret the change if the demand for porter should be allowed to expire for want of a slight readjustment in its wholesale price. It is of great importance to the industry that porter should continue to be brewed in large quantity.”

Not everybody agreed that price was the only determinant in working men choosing between ale and porter. A few months earlier, in the Journal’s January 1887 issue, the brewing scientist Frank Faulkner, writing about London well waters, commented that their high sodium carbonate content, which meant high colour extraction and “a certain roughness or rawness in flavour”, which also meant that they

could not well be employed in producing pale ales … London brewers for years allowed their tenants freedom in reference to pale ale requirements, Burton firms supplying the London publican with his pale beer.”

However, Faulkner said,

Within the last few years a practical revolution has taken place. Public taste has changed in favour of a perfectly mild as compared with a matured beer, while the London brewer has discovered that by manipulating the [water] company supply he could, with a suitable blend of malt, produce a mild pale ale, not requiring, and indeed not suited for long storage, but still one that enabled him to satisfy the requirements in pale as well as in black beers, while, as a result of this, we shall, sooner or later, see London pale ale gradually driving out the Burton production, although it may not exactly equal it in general quality.”

Even as the Journal was urging London’s brewers to preserve porter brewing, those brewers were ripping out their porter vats to make more room for storing casks of ale. When Alfred Barnard visited Mann’s brewery in the East End in 1889, he found large numbers of huge vats, capable of holding up to 18,000 gallons and made from 22-feet-long staves of English oak,

have all been removed within the last five years …simply because the fickle public has got tired of the vinous-flavoured vatted porter and transferred its affections to the new and luscious ‘mild ale’.”

As Faulkner’s comment confirms, the beer that was driving out porter was “a mild pale ale”. So when and why did darker milds start to arrive? The date of the change seems to be around the 1890s, since dark milds appear to be firmly in existence at the start of the 20th century – about the time, which may be significant, that Mann’s was developing the modern sweet brown ale. By 1902 Wahl and Henius’s American Handy-book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades could write: “Sometimes black beers and mild ales receive an addition of caramel solution in the fermenting vessel just prior to the close of the principal fermentation.” Caramel would darken the colour of the mild, as well as sweeten it.

A few years later we get the first mention of a specific “mild malt”, in The Brewer’s Analyst: A Systematic Handbook of Analysis Relating to Brewing, by R Douglas Bailey, published 1907, which says: “A diastatic power for a pale-ale malt ought not to be below 35° or more than 44°, a mild-ale malt from 23° to 30°, and a high-dried malt from 15° to 23°.” The reduced diastatic power for the mild ale malt, caused by it being heated longer and to a higher temperature than pale malt, would be matched by a darker colour, clearly midway between pale ale malt and high-dried malt. The darker-coloured malt would, of course, give a darker colour to the beer.

In confirmation of the use of darker malts in mild, the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 reported:

pale ales are made either from pale malt … only, or from pale malt and a little flaked maize, rice, invert sugar or glucose. Running beers (mild ale) are made from a mixture of pale and amber malts, sugar and flaked goods.”

It added that

good mild ale waters should contain a certain quantity of sodium chloride”

which, as we have seen, would have increased the colour extraction from the malt.

By the second half of the 20th century, mild was established as a darker beer than pale ale/bitter. Maurice Gorham said in 1949 that mild ale was “reddish-brown in colour, not unlike Burton to look at”, while light mild “is a mild ale lighter in colour than the ordinary mild: more the colour of bitter. This is not often met with in London pubs.”

Andrew Campbell writing in 1956 said mild beer grists “may be of up to two thirds pale ale malt, and the balance a blend, in almost equal proportions, of amber malt and sugar.” Hough , Briggs and Stevens in 1971 suggested a grain bill for mild ale of 10 per cent wheat flour, 15 per cent invert sugar, 73 per cent mild-ale malt and two per cent black malt. The invert sugars used for milds were the Nos 2 and 3 grades, both dark in colour.

Why did this change in colour take place? I haven’t got a clue. All I can do is quote Richard Wilson, writing in The Dynamics of the International Brewing Industry since 1800 on “The Changing Taste for Beer in Victorian England”:

… no aspect of the history of brewing is more difficult to reconstruct than types of beer and subtle changes of taste of more than a century ago.”

If anybody has any ideas I’d be glad to hear them.

Fuller’s was not the only brewer with a viral ad on the stocks for last year’s Rugby world cup: the Wychwood chaps had one lined up for their Hobgoblin beer called How to convert a lagerboy.

The video shows a chavvy lager-drinker wearing a Burberry baseball cap and slumped at a table, Suddenly a goblin runs up and, rather than attempt to convert the lagerboy by force of argument, boots him hard up the aris, making him soar over the bar of some nearby rugby goalposts, in a “conversion” Jonny Wilkinson would be delighted with.

However, Rupert Thompson, Wychwood’s MD, confessed last might that he bottled out of releasing the video on the net, fearing that it might be misinterpreted – and certainly some beer bloggers would not have been impressed.

Thompson was talking at a presentation in the Hobgoblin pub near Marylebone station in London to launch the “new” 4.5 per cent abv cask version of Hobgoblin. This is not to be mistaken for the “old” 4.5 per cent version of Hobgoblin, which was boosted to 5 per cent in 2004. At the same time the bottled version was dropped from 5.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent, and the recipe was tweaked, with some crystal malt joining the chocolate malt to add a little sweetness to the dryness, and Fuggles hops replacing Progress alongside the late-added Styrian Goldings.

The “new” 4.5 per cent version has had another small tweak, Jeremy Moss, Wychwood’s head brewer, said last night, with three “secret” hops being added in small quantities. He refused to reveal what these were, on the grounds that they might well be change in future, but I’d bet at least one is an American variety, giving a hint of citrusness.

The need to earn a living means I’m not normally free for beery events like last night’s, but I was glad to have a rare chance to go out and join fellow beer hacks, since Wychwood was also showcasing two other versions of Hobgoblin, the 3.5 per cent abv version that is the only one legally allowed to be sold in Swedish supermarkets, and the 4.5 per cent American keg version.

Hobgoblin is about taste rather than strength, Thompson said last night, and the Swedes certainly get a beer with plenty of flavour, but it’s inevitably a thinner, less rounded beer. The surprise hit was the keg version, which had a very pleasant smooth rotundity and perfectly acceptable carbonation. Dark beers generally seem to survive kegging better than pale ones, and in my distant youth, if there was nothing in a strange pub that looked acceptable, I’d go for the keg dark mild, since it would almost always be drinkable. (Alas, even keg dark mild is rara cervisia today.)

Wychwood is quite open that it has dropped the strength of cask Hobgoblin back down to 4.5 per cent to sell more beer, even though sales are already up 24 per cent year-on-year at the moment. It surprised itself, I suspect, with the success of its positioning as the “unofficial beer of Hallowe’en”, when it managed to get into some 4,500 accounts at the end of last October, against 600 to 700 normally. If the beer can have that sort of success as a one-off, Thompson and his crew clearly decided, then it should be able to do it all the time.

The aim now, Thompson said last night, is to make Hobgoblin a top 10 cask beer by 2010 at the latest. The drop in gravity is part of the strategy to achieve this, making the beer more “sessionable”, and meaning that drinkers who might have had one at five per cent abv will have two or more at the lower gravity.

Wychwood’s take on the changes that are taking place in pubs since the smoking ban is that older drinkers are coming back and replacing younger smokers: and what the oldies want are beers that deliver flavour, that go with food, but that aren’t too strong. Hobgoblin in its new iteration fills that slot, Thompson feels.

The brewery is also pushing the idea of cool Hobgoblin, with a promotion to win a fridge full of the beer in bottles. It will be continuing with the lagerboy campaign, despite the critics – outside a small though vociferous group, “people love it”, Thompson insists. People who object, he said, are suffering from “a sense of humour failure”, and while some seem to think lager drinkers ought to be offended, no one actually is: the Advertising Standards Authority has received just one complaint about the campaign, from Hampshire, and told the complainant to “get stuffed”.

However, Wychwood is stopping referring to Hobgoblin as “strong” and “dark”, preferring now to call it “ruby” and “legendary” – presumably regarding the new descriptors as less frightening to potential new recruits.

Thompson is confident that at its new strength the beer can attract new drinkers, which is “what every cask ale should be doing”. Wychwood is proud that out of 34 colleges in Oxford, a short distance from its home, Hobgoblin is on the bar of 30, and being “actively drunk” by 19 and 20-year-olds. Applause all round, I think. And thanks for the lagerboy T-shirt …

This is going to bring me large numbers of search engine hits from people looking for something else entirely, but I’m going to talk about the joy of X, which inevitably means mentioning XX, and XXX of course, and XXXX and so on, right up to Simonds of Reading’s strong stout, Archangel XXXXXXX.

The usual (and only semi-likely) explanation of the original use of X and XX as markings on ale and beer casks, and subsequently as beer names, was that they were used as a guarantee of quality by monastic brewers: Frederick Hackwood’s Edwardian-era Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England says that

in shape the crosses were at first more akin to the crucifix, and served to indicate that by the oath of the monks, ’sworn on the cross’, the beer was of sound quality, fit to drink.”

though, of course, there is no contemporary documentary evidence given for this, and it seems unlikely, frankly, that monks would use Christianity’s holiest symbol on casks of ale. In any case, † is † and X is X.

Another explanation is that it comes from the habit of excisemen from the middle of the 17th century, when beer was first taxed, marking XX on casks of strong ale or beer and X on casks of small beer. The problem with that idea is that the excisemen’s marks were X for strong beer and T for table beer.

But in this we do at least have evidence of X being used to indicate beer strength: indeed, by the end of the 18th century the Burton upon Trent brewer Benjamin Wilson was using “Xth” in his letters to customers as shorthand for “strength”. We also know that XX was used in the 17th century: in 1695 the Anchor brewery, Southwark was sending “15 Tunns of XX beer” to “Beerbadoes”.

While there is, as far as I am aware, no known documentary evidence of monastic brewers using the X and XX marks for their ale and beer, there would be a perfect reason for them to do so, from the widespread practice of making what was known as “double beer”. The 17th century writer William Yworth, in a book called Cerevisiarii Comes or The New and True Art of Brewing, published in London in 1692, said double beer was “the first two worts, used in the place of liquor [water], to mash again on fresh malt”, so that, in theory, the wort ended up twice as strong. A single run-through of liquor would produce weaker single beer.

A similar idea is behind the name of Double Gloucester cheese, which contains the cream from two milkings, evening and morning, in contrast with Single Gloucester, which is made from the cream of just one milking, and thus has a higher proportion of thin skimmed milk.

Double beer is a style at least a thousand years old: a medical manuscript in Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) dated to early in the 11th century mentions twibrowen ealath, twice-brewed ale. When medieval monastic brewers referred to the same drink they called it cervisia duplex, a Latin phrase meaning double ale, which is found in texts written in Britain, probably by monks, in the 13th century.

Birra duplex, double beer in Latin, occurs in a document from 1480, and the same phrase comes up again in an account from 1554, in the reign of Queen Mary. Duplex, the Latin word for double (and meaning literally “two-ply”) sounds like “double-X” in English – and simplex, the Latin for single, sounds like “single X”. It is easy to imagine medieval monk-brewers marking the casks of their birra duplex with a double-X to show that what was inside was the stronger stuff, while the simplex was marked with a single X.

Double beer was also brewed by “civilians”: the borough accounts of Southampton for 1497 show that the expenses of the “law-day” feast on the official perambulation of the borough boundaries included 20d for half a barrel of “dobell beere”, and 12d for half a barrel of “fyne dobell beere”. In the records of the county of Middlesex during the time of Edward VI, that is, around 1550, one Peter Jool was charged with illegally brewing too-strong “dobell dobell” beer, which would presumably have been called “XXXX”.

Although few, if any, commercial brewers today make strong beer with a “double wort”, or return wort, the abbey brewers of Flanders and Brabant still use dubbel and tripel to describe their different-strength beers, and at least one, the Schaapskooi brewery at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Dear Lady (”Onze Lieve Vrouw) in Koningshoeven, North Brabant, whose beers are sold under the La Trappe name, still uses Xs on its bottle labels to denote the brews.

The brewery made Dubbel and Tripel for a long time and has “reinvented” (Tim Webb) the terms Enkel and Quadrupel to extend its beer range at either end of the strength scale. The terms double and single for different strengths of beer were used across Northern Europe: the three commonest styles of Swedish beer before the middle of the 19th century, for example, were dubbelt öl, or double ale, enkelt öl, or single ale, and svagöl, “weak ale”.

When Henry VIII set about dissolving the monasteries of England, many of the redundant monk-brewers and their non-ordained employees must have been available to set up commercial breweries. Did they carry with them the habit of marking strong “duplex” beer with a double X (and “triplex”, with a triple X)?

Early brewing books, unfortunately, do not seem to cover the use of X in beer names. References before the 1850s, such as the mention of “Charrington’s XX ale” in the Pocket Magazine of 1821, are rare, and it is not until the arrival of newspapers with advertising from brewers that it becomes clear how widespread the use of X and powers of X was to name beers. Indeed, a children’s “Alphabet of Trades” published around 1856 gratefully recruited the brewer when it got to the 24th letter of the alphabet:

The letter X no trade will show
Unless we to the brewer go;
One who ready has for sale
Rows of XX and XXX ale

Every brewer, practically without exception, brewed a couple or more beers with X in the name. John Steed’s brewery in Baldock, North Hertfordshire was typical: in 1867 it was selling eight different beers, a pale ale, a family bitter ale, a porter, an “extra double stout”, and then XX mild ale at one shilling a gallon, probably around 1045-50 OG; XX “stock ale for harvest” at the same price; XXX strong ale, one shilling and four pence, around 1055-1060 OG; and XXXX “extra strong, highly recommended” at one shilling and eight pence, somewhere north of 1080 OG.

The X designation was almost always applied, where it was used, to milds, to plain “ales” (which even in the 19th century normally meant a less-hoppy brew), and to porters and stouts, while pale ales and bitters would have other letters applied to them: PA, BA, KK or AK, and the like. Brewers seemed to feel that if it was going to have nothing but one or more Xs in the name, a beer had to be dark, or lightly hopped, or both. Certainly almost all the solely-X-designation beers that have survived until recent times have been dark milds, including Greene King XX, Brakspear’s XXX and Devenish XXX, to name just three. However, enough exceptions exist, including the now-vanished Paine’s XXX bitter from St Neots and XX light bitter from the old Starkey, Knight and Ford Brewery in Tiverton and 6X bitter from the Yorkshire Clubs Brewery, York (which also brewed 4X bitter); XXX bitter at the Three Tuns, Bishops Castle, and 6X bitter from Wadworth’s of Devizes.

Few brewers went above XXXX, though EJ and C Healey of Watford, Hertfordshire sold XXXXX Christmas Ale for two shillings a gallon in the 1890s, which must have been over 1100 OG, and Simonds of Reading’s Archangel Stout, described by the writer Andrew Campbell in 1956 as “very powerful … dry and strong to the taste” was advertised in the 1930s with the alternative name of “XXXXXXX”

There seems general agreement as to how strong a beer would be for a given number of Xs: Professor Charles Graham, speaking to the Society of Chemical Industry in 1881 about beer strengths, said the gravities of the standard X and XX milds were 1055 and 1061 respectively. Certainly Courage, one of London’s biggest mild ale brewers, brewed its XX mild in 1891 to a gravity of 1060. XX was the standard “running ale” or “fourpenny ale”, so called from its price of four pence for a quart, which is why the public bar, where XX mild was mostly drunk, was sometimes called the “four-ale bar”.

However, “country” strengths may have been different from “London” strengths: Steward & Patteson, the Norwich brewer, in 1914 was brewing its XXXX mild at around 1065 OG, its XXX at 1055 and its XX at 1047. The different strengths would also, it seems, be different colours, though this would probably range only from “dark” to “very, very dark”: Garne’s brewery of Burford in 1912 gave the colours of its X beers as 25 for the XX, an old-oak brown, 30 for the XXX and 35 - very dark brown - for the XXXX (which, with oat malt in the grain bill, was probably meant to be regarded as a stout).

This did not always apply, however: the Northants & Leicestershire Clubs Brewery in 1935 brewed two grades of mild, XX and XXX, each in three varieties, Light, Medium and Dark. Sometimes, too, the Xs were merely relative indications of strength: at Guinness the two main brews were referred to internally until 1929 as X or SS (for single stout), which was 1058 OG before the First World War, and XX or DS (for double stout), which was 1074 OG, though their official, public designations were porter and extra stout. It took a board resolution that year to force the brewery staff and workers to refer to the beers by their “correct” titles.

The X designation was carried abroad to all Britain’s colonies by emigrating brewers: to give just a few examples, William Peel at the Umlaas Brewery in Natal was selling “fine flavoured table ale X”, strong pale XX and “extra strong” XXX ale when he opened in 1862; Molson, the Canadian brewer, was brewing an XX mild in 1869; while Carlton in Melbourne was selling XXX mild in the 1880s. In 1924 Castlemaine of Brisbane introduced its XXXX Bitter Ale, which was to become one of Australia’s best-known beers. In New Zealand, Ford’s of Hokitika brewed XXXX Pale Ale, In the United States, XX ale was being brewed in Philadelphia in 1857 and Ballantine’s of Newark’s XXX Ale was a famous brew, its cans immortalised in bronze by the artist Jasper Johns in 1960.

Today only a handful of beers sold solely with Xs in their name survive in Britain, against the thousands there must have been in the 19th century: XX dark mild from Greene King; Sussex XX mild from Harvey’s; Tressler XXX mild from Nobby’s of Guilsborough; XXX bitter from the Three Tuns brewery in Bishop’s Castle; the strong (and rare) XXXX from Hyde’s in Manchester; Nimmo’s XXXX from Cameron’s; XXXX bitter from the Spectrum brewery in Norwich, the only other one brewed by a “new” brewer; and 6X from Wadworth’s. Greene King blends two-year-old 5X into its Strong Suffolk but doesn’t, alas, sell it separately.

In February 1961, 47 years ago, Guinness paid the London brewer Watney Combe Reid £28,000 – equivalent to more than £400,000 today – to discontinue brewing its Reid’s Stout. It was part of the Irish firm’s drive to put its newly perfected nitrogen-serve Draught Guinness into as many pubs as possible: Watney’s also had a draught “container stout”, presumably using the keg system that powered Red Barrel, and the Dublin boys were happy to pay to eliminate this potential rival.

Reid’s, whose original brewery was in the aptly named Liquorpond Street, near Hatton Garden, before it merged with Watney and another London firm, Combe’s of Covent Garden, had been one of the great stout brewers of the 19th century, The journalist Alfred Barnard wrote in 1889: “Who has not heard of Reid’s stout? And what better accompaniment to a dozen of oysters could be found?”

With the demise of Reid’s, and all the other once-famous stout brewers of England’s capital, such as Meux, which once brought a beautiful aroma of malt and hops to delight passengers on the tops of buses at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street, the title of “sole big stout brewer” fell to Guinness.

Effectively, the only sort of stout still brewed in England was the sweet Mackeson-style version that had become popular in the 20th century. London’s formerly enormous role as a centre for brewing the original, 19th century-style, stout became forgotten, so that Michael Jackson could assert, in his first Pocket Guide to Beer, published in 1982,

English stouts are sweet … Irish stouts are dry.”

Surviving English stouts were, in 1982, pretty much in the sweet Mackeson-type style only. That certainly hadn’t been true 20 or 30 years earlier.

But if Watney’s had turned down the Irish brewer’s money in 1961, and Reid’s had continued as a rival to Guinness, a living example of the beers once made by all the biggest London brewers, would we, today, be talking about “Irish stout” as the synonym of not-sweet stout? Is there actually such a thing as “Irish stout”? Would Guinness and Reid’s not be known as two examples of “stout”, geography unstated? If a tighter description were needed, to differentiate the Mackesons from those stouts not made with unfermentable lactic sugars, should it not be the retronym “dry stout”, to include all the English versions alas, no longer with us?

It looks, in fact, as if Watney’s did come to regret selling out Reid’s, since it twice later tried to challenge Guinness with a rival draught black beer. It launched the Cork-brewed “Colonel Murphy’s” in the UK in 1968, withdrawing it after just over a year, and in 1984 it came out with a cask-conditioned hand-pumped beer called, after another old London brewery it had taken over, Hammerton’s Porter. Hammerton’s was delicious where it was well looked after, but the demographic of draught Guinness drinkers did not overlap the demographic of cask-conditioned beer drinkers, and poor sales meant it disappeared as quickly as the Colonel 15 years earlier.

In fact there is a version of “London” stout still being brewed, in Belgium, by InBev, and sold under the name Whitbread Extra Stout. How is this 5.1 per cent abv beer described? Here are a couple of genuine comments culled off the web:

A good dry Guinness-type roasted stout”

“Une bière noire stout typiquement irlandaise Le goût torréfié et amer se révèle lors d’une persistance agréable.”

So a stout produced today using the name of another of London’s vanished big stout and porter brewers, and presumably made to the same recipe as it was when it was brewed in London, is described by modern drinkers as just like an Irish stout, with a “goût torréfié et amer” – a roasted, bitter flavour. More evidence, I’d suggest, that London and Irish stouts differed only in geographical origin.

This is not the site for giving the BCJP guidelines a good kicking – for that you want Patto’s blog. But the BCJP perpetuates the idea that “Irish Stout” is a qualitatively differentiated style, like Irish whiskey, and not just a geographical description, like Irish Cheddar. Its website insists that “dry stout” is “otherwise known as Irish stout or Irish dry stout”, and “the dryness comes from the use of roasted unmalted barley in addition to pale malt, moderate to high hop bitterness, and good attenuation.”

The idea that Irish stout was different from other types of stout because it contained roast barley, and this was/is what gives it a “unique” dry flavour has already been knocked on the head. Roast barley was a comparatively late introduction to the Guinness grain bill: since I wrote my last blog on the subject I’ve acquired a copy of the 1931 Guinness guidebook for visitors, and that’s the one which first mentions “roasted malt or barley” being used to make the company’s beers, while the 1928 edition lists only roasted malt as the article giving colour and flavour to the stout. So we can narrow down the likely date when Guinness first added roasted barley to its beers to around 1929/30, or 120 years or so after it first started making “a stouter kind of porter”.

(It may be significant that this happened just after the death in 1928 of Edward Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh, who had effectively controlled the company for the previous 60 years: had he stood out against using roasted barley and, after his death, did the “progressives” at St James’s Gate finally get its use approved?)

To state the case for the defence, a lengthy article in The Brewers’ Journal in June 1890 by Frank Faulkner, author of The Theory and Practice of Modern Brewing, who devotes some 5,000 words to the brewing of stout and porter, declares

… the black product of the Emerald Isle is totally different on palate to any that is met with in England, softness being a predominating characteristic, while sweetness is almost entirely absent.”

The reasons for the difference, Faulkner said, were the very soft water used by Irish brewers; their using pale malt plus six to eight per cent black or patent malt only, not the “some half dozen varieties of malt, pale and coloured”, plus sugar, used by English stout brewers; “pressure boiling” the wort, which, Faulkner said, guaranteed a good head on the beer; extended primary attenuation, to get as low a final gravity as possible; and “worting” the beer, otherwise known as kräusening or gyling, adding a small amount of fresh still-fermenting wort to the product just before it left the brewery to give it condition.

London stout brewers, on the other hand, Faulkner said, employed pale, brown and black “and in many cases crystal or amber” malts in making their stouts, generally in a ratio of eight or 10 per cent black and 12 to 25 per cent brown, with the rest “full-bodied pale”. In recent years, he said, the “monopolists” had also started using “black invert sugar of high-class quality” as a malt substitute. This meant the “London black beer producer” could carry out a speedier fermentation, and also “cask his product at a much higher range of gravity”, while “the main portion of it is consumed perfectly young and green” – and presumably comparatively unacidic and quite sweet.

This “green” beer, however, seems to be lower-gravity “3d pot” porter, all of 25 per cent cheaper than the standard “four-ale” mild. For “the superior kinds of stout and coating porter”, Faulkner says, the product is vatted before being casked, and undergoes a secondary fermentation in the cask, “although this cannot possibly be so pronounced as in the case of the competition Irish article.”

If we accept Faulkner’s argument that the pale malt-plus-black malt Irish stouts were indeed “totally different” from their London rivals with their more complex grain bills, then we end up with three different styles of stout: “dry” Irish stout, a more “full” London stout and the sweet Mackeson-style stouts that came along around 20 years after Faulkner wrote his Brewers’ Journal article. (Note, incidentally, that Faulkner doesn’t mention roasted barley anywhere …)

But I have hunted through a considerable number of books on brewing and beer over the past few weeks, and I have failed to find a single reference apart from Faulkner in the 1890s and Michael Jackson in the 1970s to the idea that Irish stouts could or should be differentiated by consumers from London’s classic stouts of the kind Reid, Meux, Whitbread, Barclay Perkins and the rest produced. The typical sort of comment from a brewer is one I’ve quoted in the past from Herbert Lloyd Hind’s Brewing: Science and Practice, published in 1938, which says:

There are a number of distinct types of stout and porter, for which different blends of materials are used. On the one hand, are the stouts brewed from malt only, or from malt and roasted barley, On the other are the sweeter stouts, for which a fairly high percentage of sugar is employed.”

no mention of Irish or English there, just the split into “ordinary” and “sweet”.

A little booklet on beer produced in 1956 by the now-vanished men’s magazine Lilliput lists almost 50 different stouts from British and Irish brewers, of which not quite half and marked as “sweet”, including Mackeson (and one from Beasley’s brewery in Plumstead, London called “Arsenal” – named for the nearby Royal Woolwich Arsenal). London-brewed stouts that were, like Guinness, not marked as “sweet” included three from Watney’s, Hammerton’s, Reid’s Special (described elsewhere as “rather bitter”) and Export; one from Whitbread; one from Taylor Walker; one from Mann’s in the East End, Cream Label; and one from Barclay Perkins, Velvet Stout (not to be confused with the “sweet” Velvet Stout brewed by Simonds of Reading.)

The result of this “hunting of the stout”, therefore, is that, like Lewis Carroll’s Snark the idea of Irish stout being a separate, distinctive category has “softly and suddenly vanished away “, the Boojum, in this case, being the generality of unsweetened stouts, of which Guinness, like D’Arcy, Findlaters, Murphy’s and the other versions brewed across the Irish Sea, were examples just exactly the same as Reid’s, Whitbread’s, Meux’s and the other London brewers, and indeed those unsweetened stouts made in places such as Luton, Tadcaster and Sunderland. “Irish stout”, I’d suggest, has no meaning other than “stout brewed in Ireland”.

If, like Faulkner, you accept that Irish stout was different, because of its simpler grain bill and complete absence of sweetness, to the stout produced in London, it is still clear that London stout was nothing like the sweet Mackeson-style stouts made with a proportion of lactic sugars. In that case there are three historic types of stout, Irish, London and sweet – though since drinkers seem to put the flavour of Whitbread Extra Stout in with Irish-style stouts, it seems to me that Irish and London are all one category of “dry” stout.

It might be going too far, judging by what Faulkner says to argue that “Irish” is no more a proper name for a stout style than it is for a cheddar cheese style. However, it is certainly the case that “Irish stout” is not a synonym or catch-all for the “dry stout” category, and London stout needs considerably more recognition.

So Scottish & Newcastle falls to the Carlsberg/Heineken combo, thanks to what now turns out to be its foolish involvement in the Russian beer market, leaving not a single one of the former “Big Six” British brewers in existence, and plenty of questions to be answered - what will happen to S&N’s stake in Caledonian, for example? What about WaverleyTBS, the distribution company S&N owns that delivers many independent small brewers’ beers to British pubs?

Just as important, does Heineken have the ability and experience to make any decent sort of run in the British beer scene, now it has become UK brewing’s biggest player, covering everything from keg and cask ale through standard lager to cider? It’s a much more complicated market than any other the jolly green Dutch giant deals in (even if the head of the Heineken family does live in Britain).

Two other news items you may have missed if you don’t read the trade press suggest that big continental companies can’t hack the intricacies of the UK beer market. First, Inbev is withdrawing the strong Artois Bock after less than three years.

The idea of seling a “super-premium” lager in draught and bottle under the Artois name alongside Stella, in the sort of “brand extension” familiar from companies such as Cadbury’s that must have appealed to some marketing twit. Unfortunately, despite the big effort InBev put into the brand, including getting Mark Dorber, then still of the White Horse at Parson’s Green, involved in the beer’s development, it’s been a flop: British lager drinkers prefer volume over strength. (It was also, sorry Mark, a rubbish beer, too sweet and with no depth, but that doesn’t normally hobble the success of anything with a good marketing story.)

At the same time InBev is reaping the rewards of allowing the UK’s supermarkets to sell Stella itself for as little as 33p a bottle, while trying to continue the idea that the beer in the pub is “reassuringly expensive”, with the news that Young’s is delisting the lager from those of its pubs that stock it and replacing it with other brews such as Pilsner Urquell - news that produced an extraordinary rant from InBev over the loss of what it claims is the sort of business it could make up in a day.

InBev’s problem is that Stella’s cheapness in supermarkets means it’s become the beer your dad drinks when there’s something good on Sky Sports. If you’re down the pub, and you’re paying well over £3 a pint, you want something a little more aspirational …

From all the iterations of Fuller’s Vintage Ale produced so far, my favourite is still the 2002. The only hops used were Goldings: coincidence? I don’t think so. Actually, I’m drinking one as I write this, and it’s still marvellous, at six years old: musky, biscuity, honeyed, marmalade and toffee, perhaps the faintest lick of lavender – yum! Goldings is one of my favourite hops: I love the apricot aromas Meantime in Greenwich gets out of the variety in its bottle-conditioned IPA.

There are surprisingly few “pure” Goldings beer on the market: Shepherd Neame’s Bishop’s Finger and Hop Back’s Summer Lightning being two. But the “classic” English combination of Goldings and Fuggles hops is used in a swath of bitter ales of high repute: Brakspear’s Special, St Austell HSD, Young’s ordinary, Wadworth’s 6X, Adnam’s bitter, Brain’s SA and Marston’s Pedigree. I wouldn’t rush past any pub selling those.

One remarkable aspect of the hop Mr Golding found more than 220 years ago is the degree to which its genes have contributed to other popular varieties of hops. Even in the 19th century different types of Goldings began to be recognised. One of the most important was Bramling, an early-ripening variety (about 10 days before “main crop” Goldings) selected, according to George Clinch, writing in 1919, by a farm bailiff called Smith on a farm run by a man called Musgrave Hilton at Bramling, a hamlet in the parish of Ickham, near Canterbury.

The Bramling became popular around 1865, and, with other Golding varieties, took a large share of the hop farm acreage in East Kent between 1880 and 1890. Bramling itself gave rise to another variety, Amos’s Early Bird, discovered by Alfred Amos of the village of Wye in Kent in 1887 and described by Clinch as “an excellent variety of early crop [which] thrives in good districts.”

Main-crop Golding varieties included Canterbury Goldings, Rodmersham, or Mercer’s, selected by Robert M Mercer of Rodmersham House, Sittingbourne from hops growing in a garden at Malling in Kent; Petham Goldings, presumably from the village of the same name near Canterbury, which has side arms that, unlike older Goldings varieties, point stiffly upwards; Eastwell Goldings, which were being grown at Eastwell Park, near Ashford in Kent, before 1889; and Bates’s Brewer, selected by John Bates of Brenchley around 1879/80 from a hop garden in the Sevenoaks Weald district. The six cuttings from the original plant selected by Mr Bates are said to have been sold for a bottle of whisky each.

One Golding variety, as classified by the old Hop Marketing Board, which was not originally from Kent is Mathon, a main-crop hop named after a hamlet near Malvern on the Worcestershire/Herefordshire border. George Clinch in 1919 describes it as closely resembling the Bramling, and “principally” grown in the counties of Worcester and Hereford, being “certainly suited to their soils”.

Its origin, as far as I have been able to dig out, is a puzzle: One source says “drawings of this variety were used in porcelain factories in Worcestershire in the 1790s,” and claims a plate showing the Mathon hop survives dated 1794. If Mathons are a variety of Golding, 1794 seems early for them to have developed from Mr Golding’s original find as a separate variety. The Reverend Luke Booker, a poet and clergyman who had charge of parishes in both Herefordshire and Worcestershire at various times, wrote in The Hop Garden, published in 1799, that

thy preference demand/The Mathon-White, and far-fam’d Golding-Bine

suggesting he was familiar with seeing both types growing locally. Both “the Golding vine” and “Mathon-White” are named in A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Worcester, published in 1810, as growing locally. In 1826 the “Mathon white” was described as “superior to any other. It not only affords a more pleasant and mild bitter, but a much more pleasant aroma than the Kent or any other Worcestershire hop.” My personal suspicion is that the Mathon white was, like the Golding, descended from the Canterbury White-bine, and that accounts for the Mathon being put later in the Goldings family.

In 1894 Wye Agricultural College was founded near Ashford in Kent as part of the University of London, and after the arrival of Professor Ernest S Salmon in 1906 (who was to remain there for 50 years, until he was 85) it became a centre for developing new varieties of hops, many based on Goldings crossed with. American hops.

Perhaps the most important hop developed by Professor Salmon was Brewer’s Gold, sprung in 1919 from a wild female hop collected as a cutting in Morden, southern Manitoba and “open pollinated” in the hop gardens at Wye. Mummy contributed both disease resistance the high alpha acid content brewers were (and are) looking for, and also a slightly “catty” and “blackcurranty” touch to the aroma; Daddy, whoever he was (and with Goldings and Fuggles the most common hops in Kent at that time, one of those two must be the most likely) brought a more “English” flavour to the union.

Brewer’s Gold, which was released in the 1930s, was grown in both Belgium and Germany because of its disease-resistant properties and high alpha acid content, but its greater significance has been as the ancestor of other high alpha-acid hops. Of these the most important is Northern Brewer, a cross between a Canterbury Goldings female hop and a seedling raised in 1934 by Professor Salmon at Wye College which itself was a cross between Brewer’s Gold and an American male. Named, apparently, because a North of England brewer (perhaps Newcastle Breweries) was looking for a hop with a combination of good aroma and high alpha acid content. It became widely grown in Germany because of its resistance to several of the ills that hops are heir to. (There is, incidentally, an “ornamental” variety of Northern Brewer, with dark, purple-ish leaves and stems.)

Northern Brewer itself became the parent or ancestor of more than a dozen different hop varieties. It was crossed at Wye College with a Downy Mildew-resistant male hop descended from a plant supplied by a hop researcher in Germany called Zattler to produce Northdown, a popular hop for dry-hopping English ales introduced in the early 1970s and found in, for example, Holt’s bitter from Manchester (alongside Goldings itself) and Batham’s dark mild (again alongside Goldings).

Meanwhile an Eastwell Goldings female had been crossed with a male descended from a powdery mildew and verticillium wilt-resistant open-pollinated wild American seedling: their (male) offspring was then crossed at Wye with another female offspring of Northern Brewer and a downy mildew-resistant male hop to give Target, released in 1972, which thus has two different types of Goldings among its ancestors. Target is also very popular with English brewers: the very different Fuller’s London Pride and Theakston’s Best use the hop, for example, and it appears in Mann’s Brown Ale.

Dr Ray Neve at Wye developed a “cousin” of Target, Challenger, again released in 1972, some nine years after it was first grown, which has Northern Brewer as a grandparent and Goldings in its family tree: the “mummy” of Challenger was the offspring of another hop from Herr Zattler “open-pollinated” in the fields at Wye, the “daddy” another cross between Northern Brewer and an open-pollinated Zattler-supplied offspring. Despite its limited Goldings parentage, Challenger appears in many top English ales: it’s the only variety in the award-winning Coniston Bluebird Bitter, and it also appears in Black Sheep Best, Bateman’s XXXB and Greene King Abbot Ale.

Professor Salmon also crossed a Manitoban wild hop with the Bramling variety of Goldings in 1927 to produce Bramling Cross, a hop with a distinct blackcurrant aroma that is not as widely used as it probably ought to be: it turns up in the recipe of both Harvey’s Best from Sussex and Theakston’s Best from Yorkshire, and it would seem ideal for stouts and dark beers as well.

One hop Salmon did not have a hand in was Whitbread’s Golding Variety or WGV, which was developed in 1911 from Bates’s Brewer at the hop farm in Beltring, Kent later owned by the London brewer Whitbread, and which proved to be highly resistant to the verticillium wilt that devastated hop farms in Kent in the 1930s. WGV is used today in McMullen’s AK.

However, Salmon took WGV and crossed it at Wye in 1951 with the offspring of an open-pollinated wild American hop to create the Progress variety, another of the hops used in Theakston’s Best, Harvey’s Best and Black Sheep Best, and also Highgate Dark Mild.

WGV is the parent of First Gold, a “dwarf” hop (all things being relative, this means it only grows eight feet or so high) bred at Wye and introduced with a fanfare in the 1990s as a way of cutting growers’ costs, since they would not have to use as much wiring, or buy mechanised hop pickers with as great a reach, as with traditional varieties.

Varieties or descendants of Golding also appear in the ancestry of several American hop types. Chinook, popular with brewers of American IPAs, and developed as a “super-alpha” hop in Washington State in 1974, is a cross between Petham Goldings and Brewer’s Gold. Nugget, another high alpha acid hop, has one-sixteenth East Kent Goldings in its ancestry, along with five-eighths Brewer’s Gold, some Bavarian and some unknown. Perle, which became popular in Germany for its disease resistance, is a cross between Northern Brewer and a German male hop.

In all, there can’t be a drinker of English ales who hasn’t tried something flavoured with one or more of Mr Golding’s descendants. I’d love to see a Goldings beer festival, featuring only beers brewed with at least one hop variety descended from the original plants found in Malling when George III was still king.

One of the perks of being a journalist is that you can get married in St Bride’s, the church at the foot of Fleet Street in London which continues to be the “journalists’ cathedral”, even though the hacks and blunts have all moved out of Fleet Street and their former offices are now occupied by bankers and lawyers.

St Bride, or Brigid, is, of course, an Irish saint, from Kildare, and when the lovely E and I married, she being Irish and me being a journo, there seemed no better place to have our marriage blessed than a church dedicated to journalism and named for an Irishwoman.

While I was putting together the order of service, I even found a suitably beery quote from The Life of St Brigid the Virgin, written by a Kildare monk, Cogitosus Ua hAedha, around AD650, to use as one of the readings:

On another extraordinary occasion, this venerable Brigid was asked by some lepers for beer, but had none. She noticed water that had been prepared for baths. She blessed it, in the goodness of her abiding faith, and transformed it into the best beer, which she drew copiously for the thirsty. It was indeed He Who turned water into wine in Cana of Galilee Who turned water into beer here, through this most blessed woman’s faith.

Cogitosus, of course, was keen to chalk the bathwater-into-beer event up as a miracle, just like the one at the wedding at Cana, but there is, in fact, a possible non-miraculous explanation for how St Brigid was able to make the thirsty lepers happy. A record of a fire at the monastry of Clonard in Ireland around AD787 speaks of grain stored in ballenio, literally “in a bath”, which seems to mean the grain being soaked as part of the initial processes of malting. What St Brigid drew off, I’d suggest, may have been water from the ballenium where the grain was steeping in the first stage of malt-making.

Quite possibly, if the grain had begun to sprout wild yeasts had already started multiplying in the water, and making alcohol. Cogitosus heard the story, already more than a century old, about Brigid giving the lepers water from the ballenium to drink and, presumably because he knew nothing about brewing, thought this ballenium was an ordinary bath for washing in. While water from the grain steep might have made a passable ale substitute if you were a thirsty leper, for “bath water” to taste like ale must have seemed a miracle to the confused Cogitosus.

Ale was an important part of Irish society: the Crith-Gablach, an Irish law book compiled about the middle or end of the 7th century AD, declared that the “seven occupations in the law of a king” were:

Sunday, at ale drinking, for he is not a lawful flaith [lord] who does not distribute ale every Sunday; Monday, at legislation, for the government of the tribe; Tuesday, at fidchell [a popular Iron Age board game]; Wednesday, seeing greyhounds coursing; Thursday, at the pleasures of love; Friday, at horse-racing; Saturday, at judgment.”

Who’d be an Irish king, eh?

When I was researching for BTSOTP I hoped to include a chapter on Irish brewing history, which was dropped because the book was already too long, I did manage to include a translation of a a glorious poem to Irish ale that occurs in a record of the life of a Scots Gaelic prince called Cano, who fled to Ireland and was killed in AD687. The poem, which lists more than a dozen different ales from Kerry to Antrim, was written about the 8th or 9th century.

The version that appeared in BTSOTP missed out all the footnotes which cleared up some of the many obscure references. Here is the full version, with footnotes: proclaim it aloud, with foaming oxhorn in one hand and the rushlights flickering on the stone walls of your banqueting hall, and be transported back 1200 years.

Though he were to drink of the beverages of lords
Though a lord may drink of strong liquors
He shall not be a king over Eriu
Unless he drink the ale of Cualand (1)

The ale of Cumur na Tri nUisce (2)
Is jovially drunk around Inber Ferna. (3)
I have not drunk a juice to be preferred
To the ale of Cernia. (4)

The ale of the land of Ele (5)
It belongs to the merry Momonians;
The ale of Fórlochra Ardaa (6)
The red ale of Dorind. (7)

The ale of Caill Gortan Coille (
Is served to the king of Ciarraige (9)
This is the liquor of noble Eriu
Which the Gaedhil pour out in friendship.

In Cuil Tola (10) of shining goblets –
Druim Lethan (11) of good cheer
An ale-feast is given to the Lagenians
When the summer foliage withers.

Ale is drunk in Feara Cuile (12)
The houses are not counted. (13)
To Findia is served up sumptuously
The ale of Muirthemne. (14)

Ale is drunk around Loch Cuain (15)
It is drunk out of deep horns
In Magh Inis (16) by the Ultonians
Where laughter rises to loud exhultation.

By the gentle Dalraid (17) it is drunk –
In half measures by [the light of ] bright candles
[While] With easy-handled battle spears
Chosen good warriors practise good feats (1

The Saxon ale of bitterness
Is drank with pleasure about Inber in Rig (19)
About the land of the Cruithni, (20) about Gergin (21)
Red ales, like wine are freely drank.

1) Eriu is another name for Ireland, and Cualand, or Cuala, is East Leinster, the parts of County Wicklow and County Dublin around Bray: the old tradition seems to have been that getting an ale-tribute from the land of Cuala was an essential part of being recognised as High King of Ireland
2) The meeting of the rivers Barrow, Nore and Suir, near Waterford: “na tri nUisce” means “of the three waters”.
3) The mouth of the Barrow
4) Probably the river Muilchearn in north-east County Limerick
5) Ely O’Carroll in Laois and Eliogarty in Tipperary
6) The country around Ardagh, Limerick
7) The district of O’Dorny in Kerry
8 ) Unidentified
9) Ciarraide Aei, near Castlerea, Roscommon and Ciarraidhe Locha na nAirdneadh in the barony of Costello, Mayo
10) In Longford, on the Cavan border
11) Drumlane, Longford. The Lagenians are the Laigin, who gave their name to both Leinster, and the Lleyn peninsula across the Irish Sea in North Wales.
12) A territory in the ancient Irish kingdom of Bregia, now the barony of Kells, Meath
13) Meaning the hospitality is so great, no one counts the size of the retinue
14) In the county of Louth, bordering the sea between the Boyne and Dundalk, where the legendary hero Cu Chulainn lived
15) Strangford Loch
16) Lecale, the area of County Down between Dundrum Bay and the entrance to Stangford Loch. The “Ultonians” are the Ulaid, the tribe who gave their name to Ulster, and Magh Inis was the home of their ruling dynasty, the Dál Fiatach (nothing to do with Magennis or Guinness, incidentally)
17) North-eastern Antrim, home of the Dál Riata
1 That is, while looking at feats of arms in the drinking hall by torchlight, smaller, easily-handed vessels are used
19) Unidentified
20) The land of the Irish Picts, that is, County Down and southern Antrim
21) The land of King Gerg, who possessed a great bronze cauldron