Category: Beer history

On the brief lives of beer brands

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 1st December 2024
28 Comments on On the brief lives of beer brands

How long can any beer brand expect to remain on the market? And what are the oldest cask ale brands in the UK today?

Carslberg-Marstons announced last week that it was ceasing production of a number of notable cask ales. How bothered you are might depend on how you think about ‘brands’.

Broadly speaking, we’re in camp ‘Who cares?’

None of the beers on the list were among our favourites.

They aren’t, as beers, especially interesting or distinctive. And most of them weren’t especially old brands, either.

Of course ‘Who cares?’ is a massively flippant oversimplification.

As Pete Brown sets out here, the importance of the story is in what it says about the market for cask ale, and the attitudes of those who supply it.

And as Matthew Curtis has observed, the loss of local brands has emotional meaning, too.

The thing is, if you study beer history, you get used to the idea that breweries – especially big ones – simply do not care about these things.

Beers and their brands come and go constantly as the market shifts. It’s subject to fads, trends, and changes in public taste. Beers that seem cool in one decade feel tragically unhip 20 years later.

Dating cask ale brands

Looking at the cask brands on the CMBCo axe-list we can see that most were relatively new to the market, at least with their current brand names.

Jennings Cumberland Ale – launched as ‘Cumbria Pale Ale’, we think, c.1979
Ringwood Old Thumper – 1979
Bombardier (keg) – 1980
Eagle IPA – c.1980
Ringwood Boondoggle – 1997
Marston’s Old Empire – 2003
Banks’s Sunbeam – 2011
Marston’s 61 Deep – 2016

There’s also Banks’s Mild, a version of which was presumably first brewed in the mid-1870s, but that’s arguably not a brand. It’s a description: Brewery X’s Beer of Type Y.

45 years feels to us like a remarkably long time for a beer brand to survive, riding out the real ale revolution, the golden ale and guest beer trends of the 1990s, and the craft beer boom of the 2000s to 2010s.

When we think of cask ale brands that have been around longer than that a few contenders spring to mind.

Hook Norton Old Hooky dates back only to 1977. Adnams Broadside was launched in 1972. Fuller’s London Pride came to the market in 1959. And Marston’s Pedigree was introduced in 1952.

You might make an argument for Bass which is not only still available but also having something of a resurgence in popularity. But it’s also, really, just the name of a defunct brewery. And that famous ‘first trademark’ was actually for ‘Bass & Co’s Pale Ale’, which is not what’s on the pump clips today.

Branding cask beers in the modern style was, broadly speaking, a post-World-War-II trend, driven by the growth of the advertising industry and the volatility of the market. With breweries closing and being acquired at a startling rate ‘Bloggs’s Bitter’ no longer seemed to cut it.

Never mind the brand, what about the beer?

OK, so most of the brands are relatively new in the grand scheme of things – but what about the beer? Isn’t that what matters?

Well, we know that recipes and ingredients change. Many beers with apparent longevity are actually quite different products now than when they launched.

The 2024 model of Bass, for example, doesn’t bear much relation to the product people knew and drank in the 19th century.

Most beers have smaller tweaks throughout their lives, sometimes to retain apparent consistency, or to adapt to changes in consumer taste, or to take advantage of shifting beer duty thresholds.

Is the current version of Ringwood Old Thumper at 5.1% the same beer as the 6% strong ale released in the 1970s?

Then there’s the local connection, as highlighted by Matt Curtis. But the problem there is that many of the cask brands on the CMBCo list had already been cut adrift from the places to which they were nominally connected.

Jennings beers have been brewed in Burton since 2022, for example, and the Ringwood brewery closed earlier this year.

The circle of life

While we understand the emotion and concern these corporate manoeuvres prompt we still feel that, in terms of the big picture, it’s all part of the circle of life.

It also seems to us that it creates opportunities for newer, smaller breweries to fill a growing gap in the market. That so many have, in recent years, been honing their skill at brewing trad styles like mild and bitter puts them in a strong position.

Of course they need to overcome the difficulty of getting into pubs owned by pub companies which restrict which beers publicans can order and sell. But here in Bristol we know pubs do find a way around this so they can stock beers like Butcombe Original and Bristol Beer Factory Fortitude.

So, brands and breweries come and go. If they didn’t, what would we have to be nostalgic about?

For now, though, don’t take the beers you like, or feel fond towards, for granted.

Order ‘boring’ standards every now and then and take a moment to appreciate them – because you never know what news tomorrow might bring.

Tags brands, cask ale, marketing

Beer history

The relatability of beer and pubs in the Roman Empire

Post author By Ray
Post date 9th September 2024
4 Comments on The relatability of beer and pubs in the Roman Empire

I’ve spent much of the past month hiding down a rabbit hole, learning about the Roman Empire and Ancient Rome. And of course I took notes when beer and pubs were mentioned.

I’m not a historian and, unlike Jess, didn’t even study history at university. So, I find I quite easily get lost when trying to understand ancient history.

After visiting Roman ruins in Colchester and the City of London in early August I found myself frustrated at my lack of solid knowledge about Rome. So, I decided to do my homework.

Fortunately, Mary Beard’s 2015 book SPQR offers a relatively concise, extremely clearly-expressed history of Ancient Rome that even I could follow. The Kingdom, the Republic and the Empire made sense, and I understood for the first time which emperor followed which.

With my beer blogging hat on, though, the section that really grabbed me was about the decor of a bar in the port of Ostia in the 2nd century CE (formerly AD):

The main theme of the painting is the standard ancient line-up of Greek philosophers and gurus traditionally grouped under the title of ‘The Seven Sages’: they include Thales of Miletus, the sixth-century BCE thinker famous for claiming that water was the origin of the universe, and his rough contemporaries Solon of Athens, an almost legendary lawgiver, and Chilon of Sparta… But there was a surprise. For each of them was accompanied by a slogan not on their specialist subjects of politics, science, law or ethics – but on defecation… There are many ways to imagine the life in this bar: the rowdy guffawing at the lavatorial humour, the occasional discussion about what exactly Chilon’s claim to fame was, the bantering with the landlord, the flirtation with the waiting staff. The customers would have come for all kinds of reasons: to get a good, hot meal, to enjoy an evening in jollier and warmer surroundings than they had at home or simply to get drunk.

This made me think of those modern pubs where the publican’s personal taste and sense of humour manifests in the pictures on the walls, silly brass signs, and joke books on the shelves.

She also describes the many bars of Pompeii which, at her conservative estimate, numbered at least a hundred:

They were built to a fairly standard plan: a counter facing the pavement, for the ‘takeaway’ service; an inner room with tables and chairs for the eat-in, waiter service; and usually a display stand for food and drink, as well as a brazier or oven for preparing hot dishes and drinks. In a couple of cases at Pompeii… their decoration includes a series of paintings depicting scenes – part fantasy, part real – of life in the bar itself… One image shows the wine supplies being delivered in a large vat, another some snacks being consumed underneath sausages and other delicacies strung from the ceiling. The ‘worst’ signs are one full-on image of sex (hard to make out now because some modern moralist has defaced it), a number of graffiti along the lines of ‘I fucked the landlady’…

Elsewhere, in a discussion of the Romanisation of northern Europe, Beard writes about changing drinking habits:

[As] early as the beginning of the first century BCE, the same Greek visitor to Gaul who had been shocked to find enemy heads pinned up outside huts also spotted that – despite what Caesar had to say about local distaste for the grape – the richer locals had started to quaff imported wine, leaving traditional Gallic beer to the less well off. By the beginning of the second century CE, there were rather fewer beer gardens and rather more wine bars in Roman Colchester; or that, at least, is what the surviving fragments of the jars used to transport the wine suggest.

Keen to learn more, I followed the thread of the Vindolanda tablets – a trove of documents written on thin sheets of wood recovered from a site near Hadrian’s Wall in 1973. That led me to this episode of a BBC radio documentary from about 20 years ago where, yes, beer was mentioned again, at 25 minutes.

If you’d rather read about it, though, an article by Patricia Gillespie on the website of the Vindolanda Charitable Trust sets out the story nicely:

Early garrisons at Vindolanda, the Tungrians and Batavians, were from the northern provinces of the Roman Empire and clearly had a taste for beer. There are several references in the writing tablets to Celtic beer and in writing tablet 628 the Decurion Masclus, from the 9th cohort of Batavians, out-stationed with a vexillation, group, of soldiers is asking for orders on what to do next and ends his letter with ‘my men have no beer – please order some to be sent’.

On two occasions shortly before the New Year and again in February, a metretes of cervesa (beer) is listed in writing tablets. This was a measure containing 100 sextarii, about 50 pints, and the cost was only eight asses. (An as is a very low value bronze coin). The Batavians and the Tungrians clearly consumed beer in large quantities and had their own regimental brewer.

Also, in August, the BBC ran a story about brewing as a “mega industry” in Roman Britain.

Archaeologist Edward Biddulph is quoted as saying that “actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses”.

So much of Roman life and history seems impossible to know. But other aspects seem to telescope history and put us on the bench, in the boozer, next to some lairy lads, wondering what to have for the next round.

Main image: wall decoration at a bar in Pompeii via Nick Fewings at Unsplash.com

Tags roman

Beer history

Smooth and creamy: the story of nitrokeg beer in the UK

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 27th June 2024
9 Comments on Smooth and creamy: the story of nitrokeg beer in the UK

In the 1990s a new type of beer arrived on the UK scene and caused serious disruption to the market. It came to be known as nitrokeg.

We haven’t written anything substantial about nitrokeg before because, frankly, it struck us as boring. Both the beer itself and the narrative around it.

Our interest in beer began in the noughties just as nitrokeg was falling out of fashion. It was something CAMRA diehards grumbled about but felt irrelevant. And beer geeks simply weren’t interested.

Why even think about John Smith’s Smoothflow when you could be drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Meantime IPA?

Now, 30 years on from its appearance on the market, it’s easier to appreciate the significance of nitrokeg, and to understand its legacy.

The arrival of nitrogen in beer

There’s little doubt that credit for introducing nitrogen conditioning to beer goes to Guinness and to one Guinness employee in particular: Michael Ash.

The story is well told by Jeff Alworth in an article for All About Beer from 2016. He explains that Ash, a Cambridge educated mathematician, was brought into Guinness as part of a graduate trainee scheme. He became obsessed with how to replicate the complex multi-cask pouring method used in Irish pubs:

Very early on, he saw nitrogen as the solution. It was “such an obvious gas,” he said. “It’s completely inert and it’s three-quarters of what we breathe. It was perfect for this purpose.” The trick wasn’t selecting the right gas, though; it was designing a keg that would work with it… Eventually, working with a keg designer, he did figure it out… The keg went through two designs before Guinness started sending it out to pubs, rushing at the end to get the project launched by 1959 – the brewery’s 200th anniversary.

For decades afterwards nitrogen was primarily used in stouts. Murphy’s launched a nitrogen version of its draught stout in 1968.

Tags keg, nitrokeg

Beer history

The mystery of avens in ‘Augsburg Ale’

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 13th June 2024
1 Comment on The mystery of avens in ‘Augsburg Ale’

The peril of being a beer geek is that even unconnected questions can take you down a beer-related rabbit hole.

We were sitting in our makeshift beer garden, drinking Jever and Augustiner, when Ray said: “What’s that flower?” It was a somewhat attractive weed that Jess was allowing to grow in one of the wilder corners.

She looked it up and identified it as wood avens, AKA herb bennet (Geum urbanum). She then read the Wikipedia entry and was intrigued by the following section:

The roots contain the compound eugenol which is also present in cloves and are used as a spice in soups and also for flavouring ale. For example, the Augsburg Ale is said to owe its peculiar flavour to the addition of a small bag of avens inside each cask.

This is referenced to A Modern Herbal, a 1931 book by Maud or Margaret Grieve, available and searchable as website.

In fact, the Wikipedia page is pretty much a direct quote from that book, with no further hints as to who “is said to” have said it.

An earlier herbal reference, Nicholas Culpeper’s The Complete Herbal from the 17th century, also available and searchable online, makes reference to the clove character of avens.

It also says it has for a range of health benefits and as an additive to wine, giving it “a delicate savour and taste”.

Martyn ‘Zythophile’ Cornell wrote an extensive piece on herbs in ale in Britain which references avens a few times, including in a recipe from 1430. And there is more in his excellent book, Amber, Gold and Black.

So there’s evidence to back up the use of Avens in beer. But what we remained baffled by is why a British book written in 1931 references Augsburg Ale. Why not use an example from closer to home?

Andreas Krennmair is an expert in German historic brewing and we checked the comprehensive index to his Bavarian Brewing in the 19th Century: a reference guide. It contains a few references to Augsburg Ale including a statement from one 1834 source that says it gained its unusual flavour from the practice of pouring beer into the casks when the pitch was still hot.

Then we emailed him to aske whether he had heard of the use of avens in brewing in Augsburg and he kindly sent us a detailed response with a few sources and suggestions:

Christian Heinrich Schmidt’s 1853 book Grundsätze der Bierbrauerei makes a very brief mention that Geum urbanum is allegedly used in large amounts in the famous Augsburg beer. It also describes how Geum urbanum is used: the dried roots are cut up, put into a fine linen bag, and hung into the cask.

If I had to guess, I’d say that that’s quite likely the source of that claim of Geum urbanum being used in Augsburg beer. But the way it’s formulated is so vague, it’s probably something the author had only heard about but had never seen any confirmation for.

We still don’t know why Mrs Grieve would choose to reference Augsburg Ale, particularly as use of herbs in the beer would, we think, be unusual almost everywhere by the late 19th century.

The next thing to ask is… has anyone brewed with avens recently? Or fancy giving it a go?

Because we know where to find some.

Main image: Geum urbanum adapted from a photograph by Neuchâtel Herbarium at Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

Tags herbs

Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

What is the evolutionary advantage of booze?

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 18th March 2024
1 Comment on What is the evolutionary advantage of booze?

A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is “What’s the evolutionary advantage?” Consider drunkenness, for example.

Ray recently read William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. It’s about a band of Neanderthals struggling for survival in the forests of prehistoric Europe as a new threat emerges – Homo sapiens, AKA modern man, AKA us.

It’s an extremely thought-provoking book in many ways as Golding attempts to demonstrate that the seeds of modern human behaviour, from war to capitalism, have long roots. But of course the thing that stood out for Ray, and that got us talking, is its treatment of drinking.

The Neanderthals (who think of themselves as “the people”) don’t drink alcohol because they don’t have the technology to make it, sophisticated as they are in many ways.

When “the new people” turn up, however, two Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, observe them as they gather round their campfire at night after a day’s trekking. We see what’s going on through Lok’s eyes:

His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer than the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves… The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one of the caves, flat on her back as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a moth with a burnt wing. Round and round he went, crawling, and the other people took no notice of him but went on with their noise.

They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods.

It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly.

Later in the book, Lok and Fa find a jar of mead abandoned in a human camp and get drunk themselves. Golding reiterates the point that the liquid is repellent and attractive at the same time. It burns, but in a way that is strangely addictive.

Having previously been peaceful, rather gentle creatures, the mead also immediately makes them aggressive, competitive, bold, and – this seems important – visionary. Lok finds himself having big ideas, and envisioning great success, the limits of his mind having expanded.

Unfortunately, he also finds that he cannot walk in a straight line and that the trees themselves have become unstable. And the next morning, he has his first hangover: “Lok opened his eyes and yelped with pain for he seemed to be looking straight into the sun.”

Why did we evolve to get drunk?

Golding’s book is fiction, and it’s old. To answer this question we sought some more recent, more academic texts.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been much discussed, often with a focus on understanding why people today (like Golding) might be driven to drink so much, and so often, that it becomes harmful.

This paper from 2023 describes it as an ‘evolutionary’ mismatch: something that was useful in the early days of the species, when resources were scarce, is less helpful in an age of abundance.

This is also the argument for why we crave sugar and fat, both of which are bad for us. In the deep past, we evolved to consume as much as sugar and fat as possible, when it was available, to see us through winter, or periods of famine.

In the case of booze, the suggestion is that perhaps we evolved to be attracted to the smell of ethanol because it might help us find rotting fruit, and so find the trees from which it had fallen. Or, related to the point above, eating rotten, alcoholic fruit might have given us the munchies, stimulating our appetites, so we would consume even more fat and sugar.

Another suggestion is that the ability to process ethanol was itself an evolutionary advantage, meaning that some of our ancestors could eat the ‘bad’ fruit that had fallen on the ground.

Individuals who could “metabolise ethanol” could eat more, and continue to function while pissed. So, at a very fundamental level, we learned to associate drunkenness with pleasure and satisfaction.

But what about getting drunk together, as a social activity?

But why did we evolve to go to the pub together?

One paper from 2017 suggests that there are multiple benefits attached to getting drunk deliberately, together:

[There] is an implicit assumption that its hedonic (physiological reward) and anxiolytic (reduction of anxiety or stress) properties are the main reasons for its universal use. However, alcohol also plays an important role in social contexts by reducing our social inhibitions, as well as being a potent trigger of the endorphin system… In other words, it functions much like the many other behavioural mechanisms (including laughter, singing, dancing and storytelling…) that are used to trigger the endorphin system so as to facilitate large-scale (i.e. communal as opposed to dyadic) social bonding. The other possibility is that alcohol in some way affects our social or cognitive skills in ways that allow us to function more effectively in social situations.

We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’.

From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this.

When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.

And, of course, we know many couples who got together after, in effect, drinking mead together around the campfire before sneaking off into the woods.

Main image adapted from the profile of the restoration of the head of a Neanderthal man via the Wellcome Collection.