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Beer history pubs quotes

QUOTE: Annual Booze-Ups

“These special customs, and especially those associated with the annual booze-ups of New Year’s Eve (when you may kiss almost anybody in public), St Patrick’s Eve, Whitsun, Oak Apple Day, Trinity Sunday, June Holiday and Christmas, are a simple part of the pattern of the year, its pre-industrial, pre-Christian even, background. A background of sowing and reaping, winter death and spring rebirth, a rhythm that, like the rhythm of the week, determines so much of behaviour… now dominates Worktowners who never think what it’s all about or know the difference between wheat and barley.”

Mass Observation, The Pub and the People, 1943.

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American beers Beer history beer reviews bottled beer

Pre-WWII US IPA and a Euro-Mashup

We tasted two beers from our end of 2014 wish list last night: BrewDog’s collaboration with Weihenstephan, India Pale Weizen, and a recreation of the fabled Ballantine IPA.

Well, sort of. The latter was not the recent effort released by Pabst, which we’re still desperate to try, but an entirely different beer produced as a collaboration between two US breweries, Stone and Smuttynose. Will it soon be possible to have a bar selling nothing but Ballantine clones? Possibly.

If there’s a theme to this post, it’s old meets new, and the idea of sliding scales. You’ll see what we mean.

India Pale Weizen

6.2%, 330ml, from Red Elephant, Truro; £2.60 at BrewDog’s own online store

With apologies to the ‘all that matters is the taste’ crowd, what got us interested in this beer was the idea of the Scottish upstarts BrewDog collaborating with the centuries-old German brewery Weihenstephan. Our assumption was that they would meet halfway and create the perfect beer for a pair of fence-sitters like us.

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Beer history Brew Britannia

Where Did Christmas Ales Come From?

For a long time, Britain had beers associated with Christmas that weren’t explicitly billed as Christmas beers.

If Frank Baillie’s 1973 Beer Drinker’s Companion is anything to go by, there were certainly winter ales released in November or December in time for Christmas, but they didn’t feature Father Christmas on the pump clips or labels; they weren’t called things like Rudolf’s Throbbing Conk; and they weren’t dosed with cinnamon and nutmeg.  As far as we can see, Shepherd Neame’s bottled Christmas Ale was the only one with Christmas is in its name at that time.*

Based on looking through old copies of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide (thanks again, Ed!) it looks as if the idea of marketing ‘winter warmers’ as Christmas beers really took off in the increasingly competitive real ale scene of the 1980s. The 1987 GBG (published in 1986) lists around ten beers that we would classify as definitely Christmas seasonals, such as Mauldon Christmas Reserve, Wood’s Christmas Cracker and the Bridgewater Arms’s Old Santa.

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Beer history

GALLERY: Manet Paints Beer

Artist Édouard Manet (1832-1883), a pioneer of impressionism, liked to paint Parisian street scenes, bars and cafés, and had a particular knack for capturing the look of light glinting from a cool glass of golden beer.

The frequency with which he depicted women drinking beer — positively chugging it — is also striking.

The gallery begins with a painting much over-used in books and articles about beer but which we couldn’t ignore. We’ve also pulled out a couple of interesting details for closer attention.

We referred to these pictures a lot while working on Gambrinus Waltz — it might have been the wrong city, but lager came to London via Paris, and the atmosphere of London’s lager beer saloons was similarly racy.

All of these images were taken from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain.

Categories
Beer history pubs quotes

QUOTE: Women in Pubs, 1968

To the Editor of A Monthly Bulletin

The inn life of England is one of the few things that makes me feel optimistic about the future. It seems to me that here there has been real progress since the war. As a woman, sometimes driving long distances alone, I now no longer need to take picnic lunches with all the paraphernalia of thermos flasks and sandwiches. I can have the fun of stopping at an attractive inn — truly they are as nice as your descriptions of them — and enjoy a drink and a sandwich, with no sense of embarrassment as a single woman in a bar. The increase in civilisation in this respect is to me quite remarkable. I remember the time when one entered a dingy tavern, smelling of stale beer only to feel an acute atmosphere of suspicion, not to say hostility. This to me is ‘progress’ in the best sense, and, therefore, very welcome indeed.

MRS. M. PHILIPS, J.P.

From the Brewers’ Society pub propaganda magazine, December 1968. (With thanks to Martyn Cornell for very kindly donating his spare copies.)