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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.)

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quotes

QUOTE: Dr Foster on Clarity

“Filtered beers are always bright and clear, but cask-conditioned beers may not be so… Yet is it necessary for a beer to be completely clear? Surely it is taste and not looks which really matters? Is it true that a heavy yeast suspension will give the beer an unpleasant, bitter taste, but a slight cloudiness caused by yeast will not affect the flavour… [Demand] for bright beer is a fairly new development… [A] booklet published in 1947 to celebrate the centenary of John Smith’s Brewery… tells of the appointment of a new Head Brewer in 1889 who held the view that since glasses had by then come into common use for serving, the beer in them should be bright. It also says that his views were met with some suspicion by the consumer… Now, John Smith… brew only bright, filtered beer… and what was once a fine individual beer is now characterless. Perhaps if we were still drinking from pewter mugs and tankards then keg and bright beers might never have been invented, and CAMRA would never have needed to come into existence.”

Terence Foster, Dr Foster’s Book of Beer, 1979, pp.43-44.

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Beer history pubs quotes

QUOTE: Annual Booze-Ups

“These special customs, and especially those associated with the annual booze-ups of New Year’s Eve (when you may kiss almost anybody in public), St Patrick’s Eve, Whitsun, Oak Apple Day, Trinity Sunday, June Holiday and Christmas, are a simple part of the pattern of the year, its pre-industrial, pre-Christian even, background. A background of sowing and reaping, winter death and spring rebirth, a rhythm that, like the rhythm of the week, determines so much of behaviour… now dominates Worktowners who never think what it’s all about or know the difference between wheat and barley.”

Mass Observation, The Pub and the People, 1943.

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Beer history pubs quotes

QUOTE: Women in Pubs, 1968

To the Editor of A Monthly Bulletin

The inn life of England is one of the few things that makes me feel optimistic about the future. It seems to me that here there has been real progress since the war. As a woman, sometimes driving long distances alone, I now no longer need to take picnic lunches with all the paraphernalia of thermos flasks and sandwiches. I can have the fun of stopping at an attractive inn — truly they are as nice as your descriptions of them — and enjoy a drink and a sandwich, with no sense of embarrassment as a single woman in a bar. The increase in civilisation in this respect is to me quite remarkable. I remember the time when one entered a dingy tavern, smelling of stale beer only to feel an acute atmosphere of suspicion, not to say hostility. This to me is ‘progress’ in the best sense, and, therefore, very welcome indeed.

MRS. M. PHILIPS, J.P.

From the Brewers’ Society pub propaganda magazine, December 1968. (With thanks to Martyn Cornell for very kindly donating his spare copies.)

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Brew Britannia quotes

QUOTE: Outside Influences

“What we had done by hiring an Italian [Stefano Cossi] and Martin [Dickie] straight out of Heriot-Watt was get people who weren’t weighed down by tradition. We’ve continued to hire brewers from overseas, like Kelly Ryan who joined just before Martin Dickie left in 2006, because that helps to keep things fresh, and makes it possible to stay ahead of some of the very good breweries that are now getting established… Each of the brewers we’ve had has left something behind, and we’re still brewing beers created by a Steff, a Martin or a Kelly amongst others…”

Simon Webster, co-founder of Thornbridge, from an interview we conducted in 2013. This is an extended version of a quotation given on p.199 of Brew Britannia.