Tag: books

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Beer history

Yellowing Pamphlets

During the last few months, we’ve acquired a few obscure second-hand books and magazines from charity shops and on Ebay.

Though none of them is exactly essential for the scholar of beer and pubs, each has some little nugget or other.

Pubbing, Eating & Drinking in the South WestPubbing, Eating & Sleeping in the South West is a paperback guidebook first published in 1972. Our faded copy (still lurid enough to damage the eyeballs of anyone who might glance at the cover without suitable protection) is the 1974 edition, and cost us 10p less than the original cover price.

It’s not a deep or complex piece of work but does give details of the beer, food and facilities at various pubs in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Many listings are accompanied by line drawings like this one of the Ship Inn, Mevagissey:

Ship Inn, Mevagissey.

There are also a couple of nice vintage advertisements (‘Take it Easy! Worthington E’) and the restaurant guide is an added bonus for those with a desire to time travel to the land of prawn cocktails and steakhouses.

Inn & Around: 250 favourite Whitbread pubsWe haven’t finished digesting Inn & Around: 250 Whitbread pubs (1974) but have already found lots to enjoy.

It was, we suspect, intended as a ‘stopper’ for the Campaign for Real Ale’s own Good Beer Guide which was first published in paperback in the same year, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being so loyal to one large, rather unpopular brewery that they’d want a guide to only their pubs.

Those who cling to a particular vision of the pub as a Victorian-Edwardian, essentially male space, designed for hard drinking, will find here evidence of where it all ‘went wrong’: “The pub today is a place for family entertainment. And — with the increasing spread of children’s rooms and beer gardens — that means all the family.”

Whitbread’s flagship post-war pubs are given plenty of coverage alongside established classics such as (yet again) the George Inn at Southwark. This one was named after the Daily Express cartoonist:

Giles, Prebend Street, London N1.

It doesn’t appear to be there any more. How many of these flat-roofed, wood’n’plastic boxes survived more than twenty years?

As well as illustrations, there are also some splendidly groovy colour photographs.

countryman

Finally, there’s the Winter 1977/78 edition of the Countryman magazine, which contains an article by Michael Dineen called ‘Real Ale Returns to the Pubs’, as well as a short spread of photos of Hook Norton brewery by John P. Crook.

There isn’t much new in the tale as told here, but it does give a concise account of the big brewers’ response to CAMRA:

However, one of the acceptable facets of capitalism is that it can turn criticism to its own advantage. Benefit from the strictures…. The result is that many brewers have appropriated CAMRA’s enviable nationwide propaganda, calling their cask-conditioned ales ‘real’ or attempting in other ways to cash in on the publicity by naming so evocatively that drinkers’ memories are stirred again by words like old, tap, genuine, Burton and fine.

The conclusion of the article could be read as a comment on our post from yesterday:

[CAMRA] want quality with tradition… [They] may also be yearning for the glorious uncertainties of, say, La Romaneé Conti, the rarest and finest of Burgundy’s red wines which… stubbornly refuses to be defined scientifically; which may one year be the stuff of dreams and memories and the next, just another wine. [Real ale] has something of that uncertainty.

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Belgium Blogging and writing

Magazine Review: Belgian Beer & Food

Cantillon Bio Gueuze, 2007.
One of our Belgian beer photos — the photography in Belgian Beer & Food is much nicer.

Paul Walsh is the editor and publisher of a new magazine, Belgian Beer & Food, and kindly sent us an electronic copy of the first issue, out now.

Belgian Beer & Food Issue 1Every now and then, someone asks, ‘Why isn’t there a decent beer magazine?’

Though BB&F has a very specific remit, could it be the publication everyone has been hoping for?

First impressions: it looks like one of those Borsetshire Life type society magazines aimed at people with ‘lifestyles’ — the kind you find in hotel rooms and in first class lounges. The typography and layout is tasteful, while the photography is downright gorgeous, but there is little immediate evidence of the cobwebs and character we associate with Belgian beer. It’s not very brown, in short.

The articles, however, are more imaginatively conceived than the rather glossy look of the magazine led us to expect, and we took the inclusion of Joe ‘Thirsty Pilgrim’ Stange’s name on the credits page as a sign of good things to come. His contribution is a solid, very readable guide to drinking in Brussels — one to cut out and keep.

There are also good pieces by writers we don’t know. We particularly enjoyed Emma Beddington’s consideration of women in the world of Belgian beer. She is not a beer drinker — her boyfriend smuggles gin into beer festivals on her behalf — which gives her tasting notes a certain refreshing originality.

Another highlight is the opening piece by Alan Hope, ‘Beer Without Borders’, which is an illuminating investigation of what beer culture means in Belgium, and the significance of beer as a kind of glue which binds an otherwise fragmented, fragile nation.

Less exciting, though readable enough after the manner of in-flight magazine copy, are uncritical pieces on various breweries and bars. We asked Mr Walsh if any of the articles were sponsored and he confirmed that three pieces (on Mort Subite, Bosteels and a restaurant called Bed Van Napoleon) were written as part of a package with paid advertising in the magazine. In future editions, arrangements like this really ought to be flagged.

Individual issues cost €6 while a year’s subscription (four issues) costs €14 (including UK delivery). We have decided to subscribe — there’s enough meat here to justify £3 a copy, and the glorious photography offers a cheaper alternative to a trip on Eurostar — but this is not the One Beer Magazine to Rule Them All.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Book Review: Cooked by Michael Pollan

1899 illustration of brewing yeast.

Michael Pollan Cooked.Michael Pollan’s book is a mix of history, philosophy, personal memoir and cookbook, which amounts to an extended pep talk: cook more! Eat more dirt!

The book is built around the conceit that the four primary methods of preparing food each correspond to an element: grilling (meat) is fire; stewing is water; leavening bread is air; and fermentation with fungus and bacteria is earth.

Pollan’s approach to understanding the act of cooking is hands-on, which leads him to question repeatedly why anyone bothers to make their own bread, beer or sauerkraut. One of his conclusions is that preparing at home, at great expense and with highly variable results, versions of products that can be bought at the shops for next to nothing is enjoyable and meditative: it is ‘adult play’.

This is certainly a fair description of our own attempts at home brewing, and perhaps (no offence intended) even of some small commercial brewing operations.

In his exploration of ‘the Balkans of barbecue’, we found echoes of the debate over categories of beer in the UK. What ‘barbecue’ means in the US, Pollan explains, varies from region to region, state to state, city to city — some ‘tribes’ use sauce, others don’t; sauces can be based on mustard, vinegar or tomato; they might use the whole pig, the shoulder, the belly, or specific cuts thereof. Each region thinks the others is doing it wrong. Those differences, he suggests, are a form of social glue — a way for members of one group to bond, while also excluding outsiders.

When he quotes a friend saying ‘So barbecue is basically kashrut [kosher food law] for goys?’, and barbecue aficionados dismissing the slow-cooked pork from the next town with, ‘Okay, but that’s not barbecue,’ we hear the voice of a Campaign for Real Ale member or Brewdog shareholder: ‘Okay, but that’s not real ale/craft beer.’

Back-to-basics artisan, or rock-star?

Pigs

Throughout the book, Pollan grapples with a few problems which also affect the world of beer, such as the arrival of the ‘rock-star’ artisan. When he meets world-famous barbecue pit-master Ed Mitchell, he observes with some disappointment that not only is Mitchell a touch hypocritical (he uses both charcoal and propane for convenience, despite having railed against them), but is also a walking ‘brand’ whose job is to sell a particular vision of ‘authenticity’ (Mitchell is black) on behalf of the wealthy investors who actually own ‘his’ restaurant.

Some of this exists in beer already, and more of it is on the way.

‘Craft beer’ drinkers will also recognise the tale of how the $2.75 barbecue sandwich became the $8 ‘premium product’: it takes more time and uses more expensive ingredients, and, as a result, only people in suits can afford to eat them, in sanitised, theme park surroundings. With pork products, however, the argument is somewhat more compelling — the $2.75 sandwich uses factory-farmed ‘commodity pork’, while the more expensive version uses fattier and reportedly tastier meat from rare breed pigs. There is no such thing as battery-farmed malt or hops, as far as we are aware.

Craft: instinct and fingers?

There are also various compelling illustrations of ‘craft’ as a verb. For example, Pollan describes a miller knows when the grains are overheating because he literally puts his nose to the grindstone. Of a rockstar sourdough producer, he says this:

[Chad] Robertson seemed to be suggesting that success as a baker demanded a certain amount of negative capability — willingness to exist amid uncertainty. His was a world of craft rather than engineering, one where ‘digital’ referred exclusively to fingers.

‘Negative capability’, just to be clear, means ‘lack of ability’: it helps not to be technically competent. (See comment below.) We can imagine some brewers bridling at that, especially those who seem (to borrow another of Pollan’s pithy turns of phrase) ‘less like… cooks than twenty-something computer geeks trying to master a new software platform’.

Elsewhere, Pollan tells a familiar story of the march of progress and the resulting blandification of processed, industrialised food. He suggests that attempts by hippies to revive ‘whole grain’ bread in the nineteen-seventies did more damage than good, producing black, indigestible bricks that created an image bread-makers are still trying to shake-off forty years on. (We thought, once again, of ‘real ale’.)

‘The cheese and the sex’

When we finally got to it, the section on fermenting was, perhaps inevitably, a let down, though there were a few interesting nuggets which demand further research.

A long meditation on why people would voluntarily eat rotting shark meat or cheese that smells like toe-jam — ‘the erotics of disgust’ — applies just as well to sour and otherwise ‘funky’ acquired-taste beers. After consulting Freud, talking to a cheese-making nun, and reading the insane website of an apparent cheese fetishist, Pollan concludes that humans fundamentally love body smells (feet, shit, sweat) but (except in France…) are then socially-conditioned to pretend they don’t.

While making mead with wild yeast, he is told that they typically ‘crap out’ at around 5% ABV, which leads Pollan to suggest that is arguably the ‘natural’ strength for primitively-produced alcoholic beverages. European beer culture would certainly seem to have decided as much.

We were also amused and intrigued by his argument for why drinking is inseparable from socialising. When animals are given access to booze under laboratory conditions, he explains, not only do they love the stuff, but they gather together to drink in group ‘sessions’, apparently because being drunk makes them more vulnerable to predators, and there is safety in numbers. Suddenly, the pub makes much more sense.

* * *

Though it occasionally tips over into self-righteous disgust at the eating habits of the masses, and isn’t always successful in avoiding a certain middle-class smugness, Cooked is an entertaining, amusing book which anyone who has ever felt the urge to make pickles, bacon or beer ought to enjoy.

And we dare anyone to read it and not come away wanting bake a wholemeal sourdough loaf, or roast a whole hog.

We were given our copy as a gift by a friend but the recommended retail price for the hardback edition is £20.

Categories
Beer history pubs

Gallery: Old Inns of Old England (1906)

Bear Inn, Devizes (large)

Ten illustrations from The Old Inns of Old England by Charles G. Harper (1906), via The Internet Archive, and tidied up a bit by us.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Book Review: IPA by Mitch Steele

India Pale Ale No. 1

This single-topic epic by Mitch Steele, ‘brewmaster’ at Stone Brewing Co. in California, contains more information about India pale ale (IPA) than most people will need or want to know, and only brewers will get full value from it. Detail junkies, however, will find plenty in which to wallow.

IPA-cover-197x315We don’t know Steele or anything about him and went into IPA: brewing techniques, recipes and the evolution of India pale ale expecting something, after the house style of his employers, ‘aggressive’ and ‘passionate’ in style. In fact, the tone is quietly scholarly, and reassuringly deferential to researchers and historians who have gone before, such as Mark Dorber, Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell. Nor is there any sense that this is a publicity opportunity for Stone: where they are mentioned, it is only where it might have seemed crazy to omit them.

The first half of the book is among the best attempts to synthesise the entire confusing history of IPA in the light of recent work by Pattinson, Cornell and others. Steele acknowledges that some old myths have been demolished without crowing about it, and negotiates the intricacies of the story (the sticking points, you might say) with care. East London and Burton upon Trent are given due attention and credit, before the focus switches, rightly, to America and the American influence elsewhere. All the history is thoroughly referenced, too, with footnotes on almost every page. (If you are put off by footnotes, go and watch Spongebob Squarepants or something and stop ruining books for everyone else.)

Our favourite nuggets: the story in the introduction about Anheuser-Busch’s abortive attempts to brew an IPA in the 2006; the slyly euphemistic admission that many American ‘double IPAs’ have levels of ‘hoppiness’ only possible using ‘alternative hop products’; and another excellent if unsuccessful attempt to pin down ‘black IPA’, which makes it sound like strong, hoppy dark mild.

Brewers and home brewers will be excited by the second half of the book which, thanks to Steele’s industry connections, contains recipes for a startling number of well-regarded recent IPAs, along with historical recipes from trusted sources. We were particularly fascinated to see a recipe for Thornbridge Jaipur, though a little bird at the brewery told us it had been tweaked in recent years and no longer contains Vienna malt as per Steele’s instructions. There are also some clever selections: J.W. Lees Harvest Ale is included as the best present-day equivalent of an ‘October Beer’ (the ancestor of IPA), and their Manchester Star as an example of an ‘East India Porter’, the original ‘black IPA’.

One of our favourite parts of the book is at the back: a short guide to interpreting historic brewing records. Ron Pattinson coached us through this St Austell recipe from 1912 but, from now on, IPA will act as a handy desk reference for attempts to decode the mysterious scribblings of long-dead brewers.

The obligatory last paragraph complaint before we sum up? Perhaps as a result of attempting to be diplomatic at every turn, Steele ends up lacking much in the way of a voice, and the book can be a touch dry at times, which made us wish this had been a straight-up collaboration with Pattinson and/or Cornell, both of whom can be trusted to put the boot in now and again. Overall, though, like For the Love of Hops, it is much more than a text book and well worth any beer geek adding to their library.

The book has 352 pages and was published by Brewers Publications in 2012. We bought our copy through Amazon for £10.44 but the US retail price is $24.95.