where the art of brewing was developed, and we could all get down to some serious drinking – excellent!
M: Beer brewing, from barley, was actually well-established in Britain by the time the Romans got here in the first century ad. The Roman Emperor Julian thought beer smelt disgusting compared with wine – like ‘goat’ compared with ‘nectar’. Maximus Toolus we call him.
Anyway, making wine was a no-no in Britain because of the climate which is much better suited to growing grains than grapes. It is to our eternal chagrin that it was Germans, in the form of colonising Anglo-Saxons, who brought the beer habit with them to England in the fifth century ad. The Germans! I suppose we should be grateful that it wasn’t the French. Anyway the Germans called it ‘ol’ or ‘ale’ and from about the sixth century beer, from the Latin word ‘biber’, meaning drink.
F: I knew you had a good education. Right through the Dark and Middle Ages, making beer was quite rightly seen as an essential part of everyday life. It was safer than drinking water because it had been boiled, and provided nutrition in the form of carbohydrates and protein when food was scarce. Brewing was women’s work, and ‘alewives’ prepared the beer alongside the bread, until the 16th century, when commercial brewing and the influence of the Church prevailed.
M: People don’t realize what a big part the Church played in the development of beer. They brewed beer to refresh pilgrims, and licensed binge drinking among rural folk to help them let off steam safely and raise money. Three-day sessions weren’t uncommon! Monasteries brewed untold amounts of ale and monks drank a skinful. The daily allowance for monks at Burton Abbey in the year 1004 was two gallons (16 pints) of ale!
F: That explains why they took brewing to new heights of sophistication – they needed advanced techniques to guarantee copious amounts of quality product. The most significant development was the use of hops which gives beer its ‘bitter’ taste but, more importantly, preserves it. Dutch traders brought beer to Britain and by the 1520s was here to stay. The basic recipe of beer as we know it was created: barley, yeast, water and hops.
M: Celebration ales were brewed to mark everything! ‘Bride-ales’ or ‘bridals’ (or ‘bridles’ if the wife-to-be was a bit of a horse) were made to celebrate weddings. They were brewed by the Lucky Lady herself, and sold to raise a dowry for the couple for whom, in those days, ‘life meant life’. Eye-weepingly strong ‘groaning-ales’ were fermented, often for seven or eight months, to help mothers-to-be through the painful birthing process – and the expectant fathers, of course. The baby was then often washed in the beer because …
F: …it was safer than water! Recycled grain was used to make ‘small beer’, which was the piss-weak everyday stuff given to women and children and served at breakfast. The better stuff was given to farm-workers, prescribed by doctors, used in religious ceremonies and other celebrations. You didn’t need to have a drink problem to have a drink problem in those days.
M: Which isn’t to deny that getting muntered was high on everybody’s agenda. Because there was no way to measure or control the alcoholic content, apart from re-brewing the grains to make ‘small beer’, ale was often wickedly strong. The eighth-century missionary, St Boniface, wrote that in Britain ‘the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.’
F: Interestingly, drinking from glasses didn’t occur until much later. People drank out of pigskin pitchers, horns and bowls which couldn’t be put down like a glass, so ‘down in one’ was common. Communal bowls were marked by pegs and pins, indicating where one customer’s portion of ale started and finished. Drinking more than your fair share became known as ‘taking someone down a peg or two’. One novelty of the late 17th century was the whistling tankard, which had a whistle at the bottom so you could call the landlord when you needed a top up!
M: That’s one for the Innovations catalogue, methinks. Another change in the 17th century was a bit of a disaster. Because they were worried about losing revenue, the King and Parliament cut duties on gin to encourage people to drink it instead of French brandy. Imagine their surprise when this produced an epidemic of gin-necking which made today’s so-called binge drinking look like a tea dance in Rhyl.
F: And gin in those days was the original rocket fuel, often over double the strength of today’s sophisticated aperitif. This had the unintended but gratifying effect of making beer drinking respectable by comparison. William Hogarth, the 18th century artist, made two engravings called Beer Street and Gin Lane that showed the former as an ordered, happy, pleasant environment and the latter as a horror-filled chaos.
M: Like Harrogate on a Saturday night but actually much worse. The 18th century saw the big commercial brewers establish themselves and take most of the business from small, independent brewers who had been the backbone of British beer-making. Science helped with devices like the steam engine and hydrometer which allowed larger quantities to be brewed with greater precision. Also, better roads meant cheaper, mass-produced beer could be transported to places that had previously relied on alewives and alcoholic monks for their bevvy.
F: Ah yes, science. In the 19th century Louis Pasteur dealt the small beer producers a double whammy when he grew yeast in the laboratory, meaning that brewers no longer had to rely on wild, airborne yeasts for fermentation. He also invented ‘pasteurisation’, which meant beer could be easily treated to stay fresh longer. Beer-remained a mainstay of the working man’s diet until well into the 20th century when food became more plentiful. Industrialisation also saw a drop in the demand for physical labour, which meant more machines powered by oil and less men fuelled by beer. The world changed, Neil.
M: Indeed it did, Foxy. The invasion of bland German lagers, in the 60s, when TV advertising emerged and teenagers flexed their drinking muscles at the pub, saw a big decline in beer drinking, but there are signs of a comeback, with the growth of artisan breweries and specialist beers. It may not be the lifeblood of the nation, as it was in pre-industrial times, but it is still a vital part of life and undoubtedly our national drink. Cheers!
So, how do you make it? Do you want to try? Honestly, you would not believe how easy it is to come up with a good brew. Seven days, a bit of kit, and a lot of patience is all you need. Look in the directory at the back of this book for a list of top suppliers. The stuff you can get these days is way ahead of the pot noodle in a bucket they sold back in the 70s. Here’s what you need.
Brewing beer is as easy as cooking pasta. If you can boil a kettle and follow a recipe, you can make your own home-brew. The ingredients you need are:
1 Malt Malt is mostly made of barley. The barley will give the whole tone of the beer; it’s the canvas on which you paint your flavours. The colour of the beer is strongly linked to the malt from which it is made.
2 Hops Each type of hop adds a different level and variety of bitterness. Using more than one variety or type of hops add to the depth of flavour of the beer.
3 Yeast This is the ingredient that transforms the sugar in the wort (the liquid) into alcohol, so treat it with respect.
4 Liquor Traditional
