A tasty drop: the history of an almost-vanished fermentation system

Brakspear’s Triple is a regular on the Zythophile shopping list: not just because I try to support old fermentation methods, it’s a very tasty beer, marvellously fruity, toffee apples, peardrops and bananas, hints of fruitcake, sweet and bitter in perfect balance, a long and lingering tart, very dry finish, and remarkably light-footed for a beer of 7.2 per cent abv. It ages to an interesting state as well: I tried an 18-month old version at the weekend, sour tartness was coming through much more, which I’m not certain is meant to be there, but it was very pleasing regardless.

The beer gets its name partly because it is hopped three times, and also, and more relevantly, because it undergoes, effectively, a triple fermentation, two at the brewery, using what its brewers call the “double drop” system, and one in the bottle.

Brakspear’s in Henley, Oxfordshire was about the last brewery in Britain to use what most brewers call the “dropping” system of fermentation, (rather than “double drop”); the fermenting wort is “dropped” after 12 or 16 hours from the initial fermentation tun into another vessel below to continue and finish its fermentation, leaving the unwanted “gick” produced in the early part of the fermentation behind. When Refresh, then owner of the Wychwood brewery, purchased the right to brew Brakspear’s beers after the Henley brewery closed, it moved all the “dropping” equipment from Henley to Wychwood’s site in Witney, Oxfordshire.

The fermentation hall at Rogers's brewery in Bristol circa 1889 showing the two levels used in the dropping system

However, although nobody else, or almost nobody, as far as I am aware, still regularly uses the “dropping” method to brew beers in Britain, it was once wide- spread. As the brewing scientist Charles Bamforth has commented, the existence of several different technologies for trying to achieve the same end is an indication that none of them is perfect. One of the important processes any brewer has to perform is to remove the excess yeast from his fermenting beer, and Victorian brewers used at least six different methods to achieve this. The Victorian journalist Alfred Barnard, in his four-volume Noted Breweries of Great Britain & Ireland, published 1889/91, described four of them, saying that while Burton used unions, Yorkshire the stone square and London and the South the skimming system, the beer was finished “in the East of England by the dropping system”.

The Prize goes to Fuller’s

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 Dove, Hammersmith – a tiny mystery

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

The pub’s popularity means a raft of mentions in guidebooks, with most of the “facts” printed about it being demonstrably wrong. At least two current guides to riverside pubs claim Charles II and his mistress Nell Gwyn used to visit the Dove, which would have been difficult without a time machine, as it wasn’t built until around 60 years or more after Charles II died.

Even the 2008 Good Beer Guide entry on the Dove contains four historical errors in 70 or so words. It says the pub was “licensed in 1740 as the Dove’s [sic] coffee house” (it wasn’t), and James “Thompson” (sic – it was Thomson) composed Rule Britannia in an upstairs room (he didn’t – in fact he didn’t “compose” it at all, Thomas Arne composed the tune and Thomson wrote the words, most probably at his home in Kew).

How the Dove came to have such a tiny bar was explained by George Izzard, the pub’s landlord from 1931 to 1965. He wrote one of the best “landlord’s memoirs”, One for the Road, and he made the Dove a magnet for celebrities from Ernest Hemingway to Alec Guinness (who drank Guinness) to Dylan Thomas (whose usual order was mild-and-bitter, according to Izzard).