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Beer history london

The Original Great British Beer Festival, 1873

Victorian map showing the location of Victoria Gardens aka the Royal Pavilion Gardens, North Woolwich.

Tim Holt from The Brewery History Society saw our recent post on ‘world beer’ in the UK and kindly sent us a clipping from the Daily News, 9 May 1873 about a very early but strangely familiar sounding beer festival.

ROYAL GARDENS, North Woolwich. — Sole Lessee and Proprietor, W. HOLLAND (the people’s caterer) — GREAT SHOW OF ENGLISH and CONTINENTAL BEER. — The proposed exhibition of Ales, Stout, Porter, &c., for the purpose of comparing and testing the relative values of the productions of the Brewers of Great Britain and the Continent, will be held at the above Establishment, on MONDAY, May 19, 1873, and Five following Days. The Beers will be arranged in a Pavilion especially erected for that purpose and will be divided into compartments, taking each county in Great Britain…

There’s a huge list of British brewers in attendance provided at this point, but sadly no information about what was on at the Bières Sans Frontières bar.

Entrance to the Exhibition will be sixpence beyond the usual admission to the Gardens, and visitors can procure tasting-orders at the office in the building for one shilling each person, entitling them to taste any of the beers offered for competition, and registering their vote for that which they consider best according to price and quality.

Price and quality as judging criteria? Interesting, although perhaps the point was to show how over-priced and over-rated the continental imports were compared to the homegrown stuff.

UPDATE 07/05/2014: almost two years on, we’ve come across some more information in the Brewers’ Guardian for 3 June 1873 which shows that among the Continental breweries in attendance was Dreher of Austria:

Attendee list from the Brewers' Guardian.

This is a bit out of the timeframe for our project but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of what Rita Coolidge would call ‘sweet distraction’. For more on the development of the contemporary beer festival, try this reminiscence of 1975 by Paul Bailey.

Categories
American beers Beer history

‘World Beer’ in the UK: a timeline

Pete's Wicked Ale -- label detail.

This is a work in progress which overlaps with an earlier, more general timeline, and we’re still corresponding with a few ‘insiders’ who should be able to help us fill in gaps.

What seems obvious already, however, is how slowly foreign beer made its way into the UK market over the course of decades (you had to like Chimay Rouge or Anchor Steam) and how sudden the rush of the last ten years seems by comparison.

Is all the ‘Urquell and Chimay aren’t what they used to be’ talk partly a result of those beers having been here the longest? Familiarity breeding contempt?

And is Cooper’s Sparkling Ale even remotely as cool now as it was in 2002?

1955 ‘World lagers’ widely available (German, Danish); Pilsner Urquell; Maerzen, bock, Oktoberfestbier in some outlets; strong foreign stouts on order. According to Andrew Campbell in The Book of Beer, Tuborg imperial stout could be ‘got in’ by specialist off-licences such as the Vintage House in Old Compton Street.The Pilsner Urquell company had an office in Mark Lane, London EC3, in 1968.
1968 Becky’s Dive Bar: 200+ bottled beers. Lots of ‘world lager’, but basically anything ‘foreign’ she could get her hands on.
August 1974 World Beer Festival, Olympia, London Mostly ‘international pilsner’, but also EKU strong lager from Germany.
November 1974 Chimay (Rouge?) becomes regular UK import. Through off-licence chain Arthur Rackham.
1975 Cooper’s Sparkling Ale from Australia available. Mentioned by Richard Boston in a list of desert island beers, alongside Chimay.
1977 Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer. We’re still assessing the impact of this book. Thesis: didn’t sell many copies, but everyone who bought one opened a brewery, import company, pub or bar; or became a beer writer themselves.
1979 Anchor Steam, Duvel available at CAMRA Great British Beer Festival. Hugely expensive: £1.65 for ‘third of a pint’ bottle of Anchor Steam, while British ales were at 35p a pint.
1979 and 1980  Cave Direct and James Clay founded. (We’re still assessing the significance of this.)
c.1980 Chimay Rouge in pubs. E.g. The White Horse, Hertford. (Thanks, Des!)
c.1982 Pitfield Beer Shop opens. By 1988 at the latest, selling Liefmann’s Kriek, Samichlaus,
1988 Hoegaarden arrives. Listed by Roger Protz in his pick of the year.
1989 Liefmann’s Frambozen available. 1989 article lists it among speciality beers at Grog Blossom off licence, Notting Hill, West London.
1990 Brooklyn Lager arrives. Available only in Harrods!
1991 Crazy for bottled ‘designer beer’ takes hold. Mostly ‘world lager’, but Daily Mirror lists Chimay Blue, Judas and other Belgian beers. Also, Pinkus Alt.
1992 Belgos opens in London. Tipped by stock pundits as a good investment.
1993 Hoegaarden in Whitbread pubs.Anchor Liberty Ale available.

German wheat beers slated as ‘next big thing’.

Mainstreaming of ‘world beer’? 

Cascade hops start to be talked about.

1994-95 Several lengthy articles in the UK press about the ‘explosion’ of US craft brewing.
1995 Thresher off-licences run full-page newspaper ads for their ‘world beer’ list. Early use of the term ‘world beer’ in this particular way; more ‘mainstreaming’.
1996 Pete’s Wicked Ale (US) in Tesco stores. Big time mainstreaming!
1998 Belgian beer bar craze.Hogshead pubs (Cambridge, Manchester, Aberdeen) offering large ranges of Belgian beer. L’Abbaye, Charterhouse St, London, offering 28 Belgian beers, including Westmalle, Rochefort, Orval.
Categories
Beer history

The Barley Wine of the English Rhine

Warfleet Brewery -- the Barley Wine of the English Rhine

Dartmouth, Devon, with the holiday season well over, is the perfect place to get lost in time, amongst bent-backed, half-timbered Elizabethan merchants’ houses and the remains of fortifications from war after war. Just out of town, along the coast path, is Warfleet, where there used to be a brewery. In the drizzle, we read a tantalising reference on an information board, and then, back in town, asked about it at the museum. The staff were very helpful, but couldn’t find much information in any of their books or folders of clippings. As is often the case, however, the internet held the answers, thanks to an excellent local history group.

There was brewing in Warfleet by 1840 and, by 1853, it was a ‘well accustomed brewery’, according to a note of its availability for rent in The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (13 Dec):  ‘The Brewery is of stone; it has two coppers, one of twenty-seven barrels, the other of twenty-two barrels, with Coolers, Refrigerator, &c., in proportion.’

In 1875, a someone called Madocks took it on and, by 1882, Madocks & Co were running weekly advertisements in The Dartmouth Chronicle, boasting that their town-centre office was in ‘telephonic communication with the brewery’. Each advert was headed with an illustrated device bearing the text ‘The Barley Wine… of the English Rhine’. (The river Dart is steep-sided and broad at this point, and Queen Victoria noted a similarity with the Rhine when she visited in the 1840s.)

Prices were listed for Pale Ales (numbers 4, 3 and 2); Burtons (4 and 2); India Pale Ale; and ‘Light’. But was the ‘barley wine’ of the slogan a specific product — an ‘old ale’ or strong beer — or just a snappy phrase used to describe beer in general? (And chosen at least partly because it rhymed with Rhine?)

In 1926, the Brewery was ‘amalgamated’ with Heavitree of Exeter (taken over), and ceased brewing in 1929. Since then, the building has been used for various purposes, though a plan by a Ministry of Agriculture man to turn it into an experimental poultry farm in 1948 was turned down.

Almost every town in Britain had at least one brewery. What about yours?

Sources:
Scans of the Dartmouth Chronicle at the Dartmouth Archives Local History Project.
The Story of Warfleet by Ray Freeman. (Link to PDF.)
The British Newspaper Archive.

Categories
Beer history pubs real ale

Raw, rough and rude

Kingsbridge Inn, Totnes, Devon.

Many of the new breweries from the 1970s ‘real ale revolution’ didn’t survive the 1980s but Butcombe did, and their Bitter is, as far as we can work out, one of the few beers from that time (1978) still readily available in British pubs.

At its best (as at the Kingsbridge Inn in Totnes, Devon) Butcombe Bitter illustrates perfectly why people were so excited by real ale in the 1970s: a leaning, Falstaffian mound of froth; a rather stern, chalky bitterness; and a raw, rough-edged rudeness. Compared to some of the beers we enjoyed in Bristol (of which more later) it might seem a little fuddy-duddy or sepia-toned, but that would not have been the case when the alternative was borderline sickly-sweet, weak, smoothed-out keg bitter. (Inflation of expectations.)

“It tastes like the first time I tasted beer, when I was five, and I dipped my finger in my Dad’s pint,” said Boak.

“It smells like the cold air that used to waft out of the door of Newmarket on a summer afternoon,” said Bailey.

“It’s really… beery.”

Regardless of how it tasted, after a couple of pints, we were ready to dash our mugs to the floor, board longboats and set sail for new lands. Rargh!

Does anyone know of other beers from breweries that opened between 1972 and 1980 which are still on the market?

Categories
Beer history

The lager boom and the package tour

Detail from a 1979 advert for SKOL lager.

Having considered whether, er, weather and/or marketing budgets might have prompted the sudden lager boom in the UK from about 1969, we’re now going to take a look at the rise of the package tour as a possible explanation.

Contemporary commentators frequently cited foreign holidays as one cause of the sudden increase in popularity of both lager and wine in the 1970s, and it certainly sounds plausible, not least because, in 1970, the UK government removed restrictions on pricing which had been holding back package tour operators from offering really cheap deals. Could that be our ‘tipping point’? (Thanks for reminding us of that nice bit of jargon, Mark!)

After much hunting, we managed to find a handful of data points for holidays abroad taken by British people between 1951 and 1981 (in ‘millions’, as in 7 million overseas holidays were taken in 1976) and produced this graph.

Graph showing UK holidays abroad mapped against lager share of market.

Does that look like there’s a cause-and-effect relationship to you? It doesn’t to us.

Admittedly, with only figures for 1951, 1961, 1966, 1976 and 1981 to play with, we might be missing a huge peak around 1970, and if you happen to know where we can find those numbers, please do point us in the right direction.

Next, we’re going to map supply of lager in the UK (capacity of new lager production facilities coming on line?) against share of market. The suspicion grows that lager has an intrinsic appeal (cold, light, refreshing) and that all the boom required was for pent-up demand to be met, rather than any magic change in attitudes.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics’ Social Trends 9, 1979, via Britain Since 1945: A Political History by David Childs; and Social Trends 41, 2011.

UPDATE: here’s another graph (sorry, Egbert) which shows the percentage of the UK population between the ages of 18-24 based on census data from 1951, 1961, 1971 and 1981. The post-war baby boom saw a sudden leap in the young population on a similar course to lager consumption a few years later, which might suggest there’s something in Martyn Cornell’s demographic theory: lager was a ‘young drink’, and there were suddenly lots more young people.

Graph showing percentage of the UK population between 18 and 24.