It turns out this has been written about fairly frequently especially on ‘Wacky Word of the Day’ type blogs, probably at least in part because of the sheer glorious grottiness of the idea.
The eponymous Tinker of Turvey claims in 1630 to have “drunke double-lanted ale, and single-lanted”. Thirty years later the anonymous Renaissance drama, The Marriage Broker, includes a lament that: “My hostess takings will be very small,/ Although her lanted ale be nere so strong.” John Wright’s burlesque Mock-Thyestes in 1674 has a character “dead drunk with double lanted ale” and by 1691 the practice is so common that it wins a place in John Ray’s North Country Words: “To leint ale: To put urine into it to make it strong.”
But not everyone approved. The brewers’ bible, The London and Country Brewer, complained in 1743 of the “nasty, horrid and detestable piece of cunning and knavery… of putting chamberly, or human urine, into their pale or amber twopenny malt drink.”
Your frequent drinking country Ale with lant in’t,
Have you no hobnayls in your boots, driven in
To save the precious leather from the stones
That pave the streets of London.
But is any of that convincing evidence for this actually happening in practice? The references are mostly in comedy and it strikes us that it’s probably a folk legend highlighting the backward habits of bumpkins, and/or the foul cunning of brewers and publicans. (See also: KFCs mutant chickens.)
Before we’d really be willing to believe that anyone was putting wee in beer we’d want to see something like a brewers’ manual advising on how to go about it, and perhaps explaining why on earth you would bother; or an official document recording instances of it occurring in the real world.
On first glance this branch of BrewDog in Nottingham might seem like your typical hipster hangout, but one thing gives it a slightly different air: numerous hand-drawn maps, some character sheets, and voluminous bags of 20-sided dice…. It’s the bar’s monthly tabletop gaming night – and regulars love it…. “I think the escapism is the best bit,” says 27-year-old gamer Hannah Yeates. “For a few hours you can become a completely different person living a completely different life, making decisions you’d never make and forgetting what’s happening in the real world…. It’s liberating.”
The monks of Westmalle and Achel were forced to flee to The Netherlands. The Belgians, in their defense of Antwerp, destroyed a tower at Westmalle to prevent it being used as an observation post by the approaching Germans. Achel was occupied by the Belgians and shelled by the Germans until they were able to solidify their hold on Belgium. To keep citizens from going back and forth over the border with The Netherlands, the Germans erected an electrified fence along the border. Since Achel straddles the border of The Netherlands and Belgium, the fence bisected the abbey’s lands. When the call went out from the German War Department, the monks of Achel were able to sadly watch as their brewery was dismantled. No beer was brewed at Achel until 2001.
Yesterday we stumbled upon a 2006 ‘top ten bottled British ales’ listicle by Pete Brown which we shared on Twitter, and which reminded us of something we found during research on Brew Britannia: a list of 101 bottled reviewed by Michael ‘The Beer Hunter’ Jackson’s for an article in British tabloid the People in 1994.
It appeared in the Sunday edition for 21 August that year and offers an excellent snapshot of what was then readily available in British shops.
It’s from just the moment when Premium Bottled Ales were coming into existence in their almost-a-pint bottles and at around pub strength, shoving aside traditional half-pint brown and light ales.
There are some surprises but, generally, we think, it brings home how far things have come.
Jackson subscribed to the view that it was a waste of time to write bad reviews when you could focus on things you’d enjoyed but in this exercise was essentially forced to give a short note for each beer, some of which were uncharacteristically stinging. Carlsberg Special Brew, for example, he found “sweet and yucky” and Scorpion Dry prompted him to ask: “Where’s the sting? More like cabbage water.”
On the whole, though, he remained quite gentle, even finding diplomatic words to say about some fairly bland lagers such as Rolling Rock with its touch of “new-mown hay”.
The asterisked beers are those he particularly recommended — quite a high bar, evidently.
We’d love to be able to buy a reference anthology of great writing on the subject of IPA. This post, a manifestation of wishful thinking, is the next best thing.
There is also an idea that when people ask for advice on where to read about the history and culture of IPA, which happens from time to time, we can just point them here.
Hopefully, this series of links, in roughly this order, provides the outline of a narrative without too many details and diversions.
It’s aimed at learners, or people after a refresher, but we hope even jaded veterans will find a couple of items they’ve missed.
Where we have been able to identify free-to-access sources we’ve provided links and in the cases of material you have to pay for we’ve tried to suggest free alternatives.
This one feels like more of a work in progress than the lager list. If you can suggest substantial, solidly researched articles that fill in gaps then let us know either in the comments or by email.
Amongst all the chat about the Campaign for Real Ale’s AGM at the weekend we noticed a few old questions resurfacing: why, exactly, does CAMRA campaign for Real Ale and not Cask Ale? And, of course, “Why is everyone using that bloody awful, meaningless word ‘craft’?”
With that in mind, this isn’t an attempt to justify or promote any one term over another but rather a chronological list of terms and that we’ve noticed in circulation, how they have been and continue to be used, and (to the best of our reckoning) where they came from.
If there is a point we’re trying to make it’s probably that most of these terms are newer than they seem, and that their meanings are less fixed in law or tradition than you might assume.
If there are terms you think ought to be added, let us know in the comments below.
And if you want more detailed accounts of some of this click the links throughout which will take you to old posts of ours, and get hold of a copy of our 2014 book Brew Britannia which covers the birth of CAMRA and rise of craft beer in some detail.
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Beer from the Wood, 1880s. A near-synonym for cask ale, probably derived from ‘Wines from the Wood’ (1850s) which distinguished wine dispensed on tap from bulk wooden casks from the bottled product. The Society for the Preservation of Beer From the Wood (SPBW) was founded in 1963 and were probably drawn to the phrase because of it’s stout yeoman of the bar archaic quality. It was used freely in the 1960s, e.g. in Batsford guides, often but not always referring to what we now call cask ale, even though by this time most casks were not actually made of wood. These days, it refers specifically to cask-conditioned beer served from wooden casks — a growing trend.
Keg Beer, 1955. Keg beer as we know it — stored and served from pressurised containers — was pioneered by Watney’s in the 1930s but this particular phrase was first used by Flowers in the mid-1950s. The terminology was muddled for most of the decade that followed with kegs sometimes called casks and so on. Which leads us to…
Flower’s Keg — not the first keg beer, but the first to use the word in this way, in 1955. It then became (to their annoyance) a generic term.
Cask Beer, 1968. The British Government’s inquiry into monopolies in the beer industry at the end of the 1960s required the firming up of some previously vague terminology. “We use the description ‘draught’ beer to include any beer which is supplied to the retailer in bulk containers and drawn to order in the pub for each customer”, the final report said. “Although the word ‘draught’ is sometimes used to distinguish traditional draught from keg beer, for the purposes of this report we call the former ‘cask’ beer.”
Bière Artisanale, French, c.1970. We’re a bit shaky on this one because it’s harder to access sources, and we understand them less well even when we can dig them up, but there are definitely instances of this exact phrase in print from around 1970 onward. (And see Craft-brewing, below.) Artisanale and direct translations in other languages are used widely on the Continent in a way that roughly corresponds to the late 20th century sense of craft beer in English, i.e. distinctive, special, interesting, and probably from smaller independent producers. The union of Belgian Lambic producers, HORAL, for example, founded in 1997, is De Hoge Raad voor Ambachtelijke Lambiekbieren, and translates its name in English as the High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers.
Real Ale, 1973. In 1971, the founders of the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale (CAMRA) chose the word ‘ale’ rather than beer because it seemed more down-to-earth than ‘beer’. Then at the 1973 CAMRA annual general a decision was made to change the organisation’s name so it would be easier to say (especially after a few drinks) and activist Peter Lynlie suggested the Campaign for Real Ale, to permit the retention of the existing acronym. And so Real Ale, almost by accident, became a synonym for Cask Beer.
Craft-brewing, 1977. Used by British writer Michael Jackson in his World Guide to Beer to refer to rare examples of non-industrial “speciality brews” in France, along with craft-brewers in the section on the American brewing industry during prohibition. It was probably a direct translation of bière artisanale.
Micro-brewery, 1982. A phrase that first began to appear in print with reference to American breweries at around the time of the first Great American Beer Festival, and which saw off ‘mini-brewery’ and ‘boutique brewery’ (see Boutique Beer, below) as competitors. In Britain these were generally called ‘small’ or ‘free trade’ breweries until the 1990s. An ambiguous term, Micro-brewery was also often applied to what we might now distinguish as Brewpubs.
Brewpub, 1982. At the 1982 conference of the American Homebrewers’ Association David Bruce, of Firkin fame, gave a talk entitled ‘The English Brewpub and the Resurgence of the Small, Local Brewery in England and America’. In Britain pubs that made their own beer on the premises were known as ‘home-brew houses’, or ‘home-brew pubs’, which morphed into Brewpub, we would guess, to avoid confusion with home-brewing of the amateur variety.
Bottle-conditioned Beer, 1984. In 1980, CAMRA was describing bottled Guinness as naturally conditioned. By 1983 it was conditioned in the bottle. Then in the 1984 Good Beer Guide it was finally described using the phrase we know today.
Craft Beer, 1986. There are almost certainly earlier uses of this exact phrase but 1986 is when it started to appear in print in US publications such as this newspaper article and Vince Cottone’s Good Beer Guide: Brewers and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest. The earliest instance in a British publication we’ve been able to find is from CAMRA’s What’s Brewing for August 1993, in an article by an American writer, but Roger Protz and other soon took it up. Initially used as a deliberately vague catch-all to distinguish supposedly interesting/distinctive/independent beers (including, but not exclusively referring to, Real Ale) from loathed bland/industrial/macro products.
Boutique Beer, 1988. Used by Michael Jackson in the 1988 edition of his World Guide to Beer and occasionally up until the present day. In Jackson’s usage exactly synonymous with Craft Beer, above. Earlier in the decade a variant, ‘Boutique Brewery’, had occasionally been used as an alternative to Micro-brewery.
Designer Beer, 1991. Overlapping with Craft Beer but with more focus on style and branding than the beer itself. Sapporo, in its weird pint-glass-shaped can, was considered designer, but doesn’t seem to have qualified as craft.
Micropub, 2005. The first Micropub was launched in Herne, Kent, by Martyn Hillier and as far as we have been able to ascertain was described that way from the very start. The term was Hillier’s own invention inspired by the idea that it was the pub equivalent of the Micro-brewery. By his own admission he has spent a lot of time since explaining that, no, it isn’t a Brewpub or Micro-brewery.
Nano-brewery, c.2005. As some of the first wave of Micro-breweries got big a word was needed to describe tiny commercial setups operating on a home-brew scale. We can’t trace the exact roots of the phrase but here’s a 2006 post on Beer Advocate which seems to suggest it was in general circulation among the cognoscenti by this point.
KeyKeg, 2006. This is a trademark for a specific line of products produced by Lightweight Containers, a Dutch company, and launched at a brewing trade fair in November 2006. Whereas traditional Keg Beer is exposed to propellant gas KeyKeg beer sits in a bag inside a pressurised ball and does not come into contact with the propellant. Depending on how the beer derives its carbonation, it may or may not qualify as Real Ale under the standards of CAMRA’s Technical Committee. (KeyCask is also a trademark of Lightweight Containers, applied to essentially the same products.)
Craft Keg, 2010. This is a hard one to pin down but this 2012 article by Adrian Tierney-Jones for All About Beer places a marker point for the term having truly arrived. Before this, from around 2010, most people were carefully referring to “craft keg beer” — that is, Keg Beer, that was also Craft Beer, but looking at old Tweets you’ll see people like Dave ‘Hardknott’ Bailey using it quite freely. There wasn’t really an urgent need for a way to distinguish good keg from bad (yes, we know — just a shortcut) until the 1990s because until then all keg was bad; and that need didn’t become urgent until after BrewDog began to make waves.
UPDATED 26/04/2018: Added entries for Micro-brewery, Brewpub, Nano-brewery, Micropub and KeyKeg, and amended other entries to fit as required.
