Categories
Beer history

Lager Beer in 19th Century Manchester

Manchester seems to have got a supply of Dreher’s Vienna Beer only a few months after it first arrived in London, in 1868, but it doesn’t seem to have quite taken.

Though the focus of our short e-book Gambrinus Waltz is London, during our research we picked up a few nuggets about the progress of lager beer elsewhere in Victorian Britain.

Here’s the earliest mention we can find of Vienna on sale in Manchester, we would guess via the enterprising Andres Brothers of London:

Tuesday 17 November 1868 , Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser.
Tuesday 17 November 1868 , Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser.

Here’s what we assume is the Albion Hotel in question in a 20th century postcard from the Manchester History Net archive via Pubs of Manchester:

Albion Hotel, Manchester.
Albion Hotel, Manchester.

In 1869, it was also being advertised for sale at a weirdly unnamed ‘Cafe & Restaurant’ at 19 Oxford Street.

Categories
Blogging and writing london

Gambrinus Waltz: First Review

Our short e-book about the rise of lager beer in Victorian and Edwardian London, Gambrinus Waltz, has been reviewed in the latest edition of the journal of the Brewery History Society.

The editor, Tim Holt, very kindly describes it as ‘well written and superbly researched’ and suggests that we ought to continue the story at book-length. Perhaps it’s time to dust off that draft proposal for a history of lager in Britain and have another go at touting it round?

In the same issue (Winter 2014, No. 160) there is a complementary article about the lager brewery in Tottenham, North London, in which Mr Holt has compiled various pieces from 1880s editions of the Brewers’ Guardian. They confirm what we found to be suggested in census records — that the entire staff of the brewery was of German origin — and add much more detail besides, such as the fact that the brewery was kitted out by Noback Bros. & Fritze of Prague.

And here’s a comment on the beer from 1882 which goes some way to explaining the appeal of lager in Britain:

A bottle of lager beer has been confidentially shown to us, and we must admit that its brightness and clearness really surpasses everything we have hitherto seen about beers.

Any brewers wanting to produce an authentic historic 19th century London lager could do worse than start by mining these pieces for details of, e.g., mashing procedures.

You can get Gambrinus Waltz from the Amazon Kindle store.

Categories
Germany london quotes

QUOTE: Arthur Ransome on Lager, 1907

“These Soho dinners are excellently cooked and very cheap. Only the wine is dearer in England than in France. There you can get a carafon for a few pence, and good it is. But here the cheapest half-bottle is tenpence, and often disappointing. The wise drink beer. It is Charles Godfrey Leland who, in his jovial scrap of autobiography, ascribes all the vigour and jolly energy of his life to the strengthening effects of Brobdingnagian draughts of lager beer drunk under the tuition of the German student. It is good companionable stuff, and a tankard of it costs only sixpence, or less.”

From Bohemia in London, pp113-114, via the Internet Archive.

(And for more of this kind of thing, get Gambrinus Waltz for Kindle.)

Categories
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
Blogging and writing

Our New Ebook: Gambrinus Waltz

We’ve written a short book about lager beer in Victorian and Edwardian London which is now available to buy on the Amazon Kindle store.

Miss Vesta Tilley.It has 13,500 words including footnotes which would equate to about 60 pages if it was a paper book — one-fifth of the length of Brew Britannia, and eight or so times longer than one of our ‘long read’ blog posts.

At £2.06 from the UK store$3.27 in the US, and €2.68 in the Eurozone*, it’s a total bargain — that’s less than the price of a half of Guinness by our reckoning.