It’s a comment on the public perception of beardy beer buffs that people who know I like pongy ale* frequently look surprised when they discover that I drink lager too. My response, of course, is that there’s plenty of great beer not brewed to traditional British criteria, that often a cold one from the fridge is exactly what I need, and anyway, there is a growing number of British brewers committed to brewing top-quality lager.

So hurrah, there’s now a group dedicated to pushing the message that British-brewed lager isn’t all Stella and Carling, they’re called Lager of the British Isles (LOBI – can’t decide if that’s creakingly bad or rather clever) and their website is here. You can also join them on Facebook, here. Maybe if LOBI lobbies hard enough, fewer people will drop their beerglasses like bystanders in a Bateman cartoon when they see the one the beer buff is holding has a lager in it.

But whoops, the “historical inaccuracy” alarms have gone off: LOBI’s Facebook page claims that “Britain has a long heritage of brewing fine lagers, with the country’s first lager brewery, the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery, open in 1864.” WRONG. A little investigation shows that LOBI has based this claim on, yes, bleedin’ Wikipedia, which has an article on the Anglo-Bavarian showing its usual mixture of inaccuracies, misunderstandings and historical assumptionism. However, one of the reasons I started this blog was to put proper historical details up on the web, and try to counter the mountain of misinformation available to anyone with a PC and an internet connection. So let’s state the facts: the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, despite its name, never brewed lager and it wasn’t Britain’s first lager brewery. And it wasn’t opened in 1864, either.

Well, to be accurate a brewery was built on the site of the later Anglo-Bavarian in 1864, in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, by a firm called Cox, Morriss and Co: in October that year the workmen digging out the spot where the copper was to go discovered the remains of a Roman pottery. It did not last long. In December 1870 the Bristol Mercury announced that the premises of the Shepton Mallet Pale Ale Brewery would be put up for auction on Friday January 13, 1871. It looks as if nobody bought the brewery at the auction, for on March 11 1871 the Mercury was reporting that “the extensive premises lately occupied as a pale ale brewery” in Shepton Mallet were being considered as a site for a barracks for the militia.

By November 8 1871, however, the Hampshire Advertiser was announcing that the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery Company of Southampton had “recently purchased the new buildings in Shepton Mallet known as the Pale Ale Brewery, and are taking active steps to get their arrangements complete as early as possible … it is expected that by Christmas it will be in good working order.” The Advertiser expressed regret that the Anglo-Bavarian would be leaving the district: for the firm, which was run by a brewer called William Garton, had been brewing for at least a couple of years in Southampton, on a system using a form of invert sugar he had invented and which he called saccharum. Garton’s methods were designed to make ales “which possess all the essential properties of the highest class ales of Bavaria and Burton-on-Trent”. It brewed English ales, not Bavarian lagers, however. An ad for its “Anglo-Bavarian Ales” from the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle on March 27 1869 showed it was selling India Pale Ale, mild and strong ales, and amber ale. However, it had outgrown its Southampton site, where Garton also made saccharum for sale to other brewers, and acquired the Shepton Mallet premises to expand.

An advertisement for the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery Company, Shepton Mallet from the Daily News in London just before Christmas 1871 suggests operations were now fully transferred from Southampton, since it said that “orders can now be registered for the October Brewings of this Company’s Pale Ales, which are so well known for their soundness … also for their celebrated Amber Ales, as supplied to the leading London Clubs.”

(Incidentally, it looks as if one of the partners in Cox Morriss & Co continued brewing in Shepton Mallet, since the December 20, 1871 edition of the Daily News in London carried an ad for “Shepton Mallet Pale Ale – Leonard Cox and co, proprietors of the original Pale Ale Brewery, Shepton Mallet … their export ale, which is so well known in India and the Colonies for its delicacy of flavour.”)

Garton’s obituary in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing in 1905 says that he and his brother Charles, who was a brewer first in Bath and then in Bristol, invented not only the idea of using invert sugar but also the idea of treating brewing waters to give them the necessary chemical elements for whatever type of beer was being brewed, and also the “dropping” system of cleansing ales. He appears to be rather an unsung hero in British brewing history, and it is ironic that he is best known for something he didn’t do: for at no time in its history did the Anglo-Bavarian make lager.

‘The first Lager Beer Brewery erected in the United Kingdom’ – OK?

What was the first purpose-built lager brewery in Britain? That would be the similarly-named Austro-Bavarian Lager Beer and Crystal Ice Company, in Tottenham, North London. The Austro-Bavarian Brewery, situated between Tottenham High Road and Portland Road, close to the junction with Pelham Road, opened in 1881, using proper bottom-fermenting brewing methods. There is very little known about the Austro-Bavarian: the man behind its was evidently called Leopold Seckendorff, but we don’t know how he raised money to build what, judging by an illustration from 1884, was a fair-sized operation (though the size that brewers made their buildings appear in their advertising materials and the size they really were are seldom the same). The British Library claims, on what evidence I don’t know, that it was staffed entirely with immigrant German-speakers and their English-born families, and it seems to have been backed solely with German capital. It had its own 450ft borehole for brewing water.

We know that the brewery made four types of beer, in 1884, at least: Tottenham Lager, Tottenham Bock, Tottenham Munich and Tottenham Pilsen. The last two would be dark and light lagers respectively: my guess is that the first was a Vienna-style, solely because that’s the one well-known (at the time) sort not otherwise mentioned. Each kind cost three shillings and sixpence for a dozen pint bottles, when the standard take-home price for British beer was two shillings and sixpence a dozen bottles.

According to The Lancet, reviewing the company’s products in 1884, the Pilsner was “a light table ale”, the Bock and Munich “are akin to porter and stout”. The Lancet also revealed that the beers were available on draught, “aerated by a force pump, which brings it to the tap.” The Lancet liked the idea of lager being available in Britain: “considering its lightness and excellence, we are glad to see its popularity increasing so rapidly.” However, the “peculiar flavour” of the beers, The Lancet said, “compared by some to garlic and by others to curry, is, we believe, generated by the manufacture, and is liked by those who are used to it.”

Damned by this faint praise, perhaps, the Austro-Bavarian brewery was forced to reform as the Tottenham Lager Beer Brewery in 1886. Baedeker’s Guide to London in 1894 reported that “English-made Lager-beer is supplied in the Tottenham Lager Beer Hall, 395 Strand,” brewed, clearly, by the Tottenham brewery. An analysis that appears in the Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry in June 1897 showed Tottenham Lager Beer at 4.52 per cent alcohol (by weight, probably), its Pilsener at 4.3 per cent and its Munich Beer at 4.92 per cent: “real” Munich lager, the Journal found, was between 3.7 and 3.93 per cent, generally, and Vienna lager was 3.89 per cent.

However, in 1895 the brewery collapsed into liquidation, tens of thousands of pounds in debt. It rose again in February 1896 as the Imperial Lager Brewery, but closed finally in 1903. All the same, an operation called the Imperial Cold Stores Co seems to have run on the site until the 1980s, a last echo of Britain’s first purpose-built lager brewery.

Don’t make the mistake, however, of thinking that the Austro-Bavarian, while the first purpose-built lager brewery in Britain, was the first brewer of lager in Britain. It was beaten to the pull by almost 50 years. But I’ll repeat that story another time.

*© Cooking Lager

Just one day into six months or more of continuous “royal” wedding bollocks, and already I’ve made the first sighting of the claim that “the word ‘bridal’ is a corruption of ‘bride-ale’ – a special beer brewed for weddings.” No, it isn’t, all right? I don’t care how many sources you can find that say this – it’s not true.

“Bridal” does come from “bride-ale”, in Anglo-Saxon brýd-ealo, but “ale” was being used here in its secondary sense of “a festival or merry-meeting at which much ale was drunk” (just as “tea” means both the drink and – as in “afternoon tea” or “high tea” – the meal). By the 14th century “bridal” had come to mean the whole proceedings of the wedding or marriage, and it eventually became used, through misanalysis of the “-al” element, as the adjective for things to do with brides, as in “bridal gown”. But until Elizabethan times, or a little later, “ale” still mean “festival” or “celebration” as well as alcoholic drink, and “bride-ale” still meant the whole wedding shebang.

When Queen Elizabeth I visited Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, home of the Earl of Leicester, in July 1575, for example, among the entertainments put on for her, ranging from fireworks to feasting, was a “country bryde ale” that included a bride and bridegroom picked from the local peasants, the traditional wedding sport of “running at the Quinting” or quintain, that is, tilting on horseback with lances at a pole set into the ground, and “Morrice dancing”.

Now, very probably special ales would be brewed for weddings: bride-ales could be expensive, and sometimes the bride or bridegroom brewed a wedding ale to sell. With all the drinking, things could get out of hand, and though one Elizabethan writer noted with satisfaction that there had been an improvement in his time in people’s behaviour and “the heathenish rioting at bride-ales are well diminished,” the authorities sometimes took pre-emptive action.

In 1572 the burgesses of the borough of Halesowen in the West Midlands declared that “A payne ys made that no person or persona that shall brewe any weddyn ale to sell shall not brewe above twelve stryke of mault [enough to make perhaps two barrels, 576 pints, of strong ale] at the most and that the said persons so marryed shall not keep nor have above eyght messe of persons at hys dinner within the burrowe [a "messe" was four people, so that meant no more than 32 diners, giving an allowance of 18 pints a head!] and before hys brydall daye he shall keep no unlawfull games in hys house nor out of hys house on payne of 20s[hillings, or £1].”

More light is shed on the brewing of ale for bride ales or weddings by another ruling from the manorial court of Halesowen eight years later, which declared that no one should hold bride ales unless they had been approved by the high bailiff and five other “most substantial persons”, and afterwards by the lord of the borough; that no one making a wedding ale should brew or sell the ale except on the day of the wedding and one day before and after; and that the ale should only be sold at the price charged by the victuallers of the borough (perhaps the local inn and alehouse owners were complaining about the competition), the fine for each offence being this time 40 shillings.

The man to blame for muddying the glass over the origin of the phrase “bride-ale”, incidentally, is Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, Church of England priest and antiquarian, who claimed in a book called Encyclopædia of antiquities: and elements of archaeology, classical and mediæval, published in 1825, that “It was called Bride ale … from the bride’s selling ale on the wedding day and friends contributing what they liked in payment.” Wrong, Mr Fosbroke. Utterly incorrect.

There are a number of ceremonies and traditions around weddings that involve beer and ale, including one called “running for the bride’s door”. In the Craven district in North Yorkshire, after the wedding ceremony had taken place at the church, according to a 19th century writer, “there took place either a foot or horse race, the first to arrive at the dwelling of the bride, requested to be shown to the chamber of the newly-married pair, then, after he had turned down the bed-clothes, he returned, carrying in his hand a tankard of warm ale, previously prepared, to meet the bride, to whom he triumphantly offers the beverage.” The bride, in return for this, “presented to the ale-bearer a ribbon as his reward.”

This is tame compared to what happened among the Turkic people of Chuvashia, on the banks of the Volga river in European Russia, some 400 miles east of Moscow. With the Chuvash, beer featured both before and after the wedding as a vital part of the ceremonies. Today Chuvashia is Russia’s hop-growing centre, and it also, apparently, has gypsum-bearing strata in its geology, just like the district around Burton upon Trent, Britain’s great brewing town. Unsurprisingly, then, Chuvashia is known in Russia for the quality of its beer. A visitor in the 18th century described how the bride, covered with a veil, hid herself behind a screen; from which after some time she went and walked round the eating room “with a grave and solemn gait”. Some young girls “bring her beer, honey and bread, and when she has gone three times round the room, the bridegroom enters, snatches off her veil, kisses her, and changes rings with her. From this instant she bears the name of schourasnegher, or betrothed girl, in quality of which she distributes bread, honey and beer to the guests, with which they refresh themselves.”

After the bride and bridegroom have retired to bed, the next day the guests come to check for confirmation that the bride was a virgin – “the Mosaical proofs”, as a writer in 1793 said, referring to Deuteronomy chapter 22, verses 15-17. “If it appears that the bride had been deflowered before, a boy presents a mug filled with beer to one of the principal assistants. In the bottom of this mug is a hole, which the lad stops with his finger, but [he] draws it away when the other has the mug at his mouth, by which means the beer runs down his beard and bosom. This excites much laughter from the company and a blush from the bride. But this terrible ceremony is never followed by any more serious consequences.” I can’t see this one happening at Bill and Kat’s wedding – sadly. (The “serious consequences” called for in Deuteronomy if the bride wasn’t a virgin involved her being stoned to death. Happy times.)

Beer also featured in the marriage ceremony of the Chuvash people’s near-neighbours further to the east, the Udmurts or Votjaks, a Finno-Ugric people who live in Udmurtia, and who are said to be the most red-headed people in the world. An 18th century visitor from England said that a pagan Udmurt wedding began with the bridegroom paying the yerdoun, or bride price, to his wife-to-be’s father. The wedding guests then assembled in the bridegroom’s father’s house. The bride, after having been clothed in the dress of a married woman, was presented to her new father-in-law. After this, while the tor-kart or priest made an offering of a cup of beer to the gods, the bride sat in the doorway upon a piece of cloth: the object of the offering was to ensure bread, riches and children to the newly married couple, who drank the beer blessed by the priest. “This done, one of the bridesmaids presents beer or mead to all the guests and the bride kneels down before every one of them till he has emptied his goblet: then they eat and drink as much as they are able, and dance till the young people are put to bed.”

(You can see a Chuvash wedding ceremony here – it looks tremendous fun.)

Doubtless plenty of brewers will be making their “royal wedding ales”, as almost 150 did for Balding Bill’s doomed parents 29 years ago. One of the first mentions of a special beer made for a royal wedding was in 1761, when Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg married the young George III, Willy’s ancestor, at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, when she was 17 and he 23. The playwright and theatre manager George Colman, writing just before the wedding that September, said that the owner of an alehouse in the next lane from his apartments in London had ” hung out a paper lanthorn to advertise the neighbourhood that he sells the best Mecklenburg purl and Coronation porter” – purl being an early “beer cocktail” made of hot ale, gin, ginger and sugar. Who brewed the Coronation porter is not recorded.

The word “bride” itself, incidentally, probably has beery connections: it comes from a word that originally mean “daughter-in-law” in the ancestor language of English, spoken in Jutland and Southern Sweden nearly 3,000 years ago, which looks to have come itself from a root word meaning “to brew” and “to cook, make broth” – the duties of a daughter-in-law in ancient times.

A very early Russian Stout ad from 1922

It was terrific to see a positive story on the BBC about beer, with the coverage of the Great Baltic Adventure, the project to take Imperial Russian Stout back to Russia by boat, just the way it was done 200 and more years ago. But what’s this claim here, at 1:05 by BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg, talking about the first exports of stout from England to the Baltic:

“The problem was that by the time it had got to Russia it had frozen, so the brewers back home bumped up the alcohol content to make sure it didn’t turn into ice-lollies.”

Nooooooooooooo! Please, there are enough myths about beer history already, without new ones being started. Let’s make it clear, right now: the stout exported to Russia was NOT brewed strong to stop it freezing. If it had been cold enough to freeze the beer, the ocean itself would have frozen over, and the ships wouldn’t have been able to get through. It was brewed strong because that’s the way the customers liked it.

Actually, and with respect to Tim O’Rourke, whose idea the Great Baltic Adventure was, and who roped in 11 British brewers from Black Sheep to Meantime to supply Imperial Russian Stouts to take to St Petersburg by sea, the Russians also liked another strong English brew in the 18th century, Burton Ale, the thick, sweet, brown ale brewed in Burton upon Trent and shipped out of Hull. But on March 31 1822 the Russian government introduced a new tariff that banned almost every article of British manufacture, from cotton goods to plate glass, knives and forks to cheese, umbrellas to snuff boxes – and “Shrub, Liquors, Ale and Cyder”. Porter, however – and this included what we would now call stout – was left untouched. The Burton ale trade to the Baltic was wrecked, but British porter brewers could send as much of the black stuff to St Petersburg as they wanted.

Allsopp reacts to the Russian ban on English ale, 1822

Porter was left alone, presumably because it was the beer the Russians felt they could not duplicate: although porter was reported as being brewed in St Petersburg in 1801, there was a long-standing myth that only Thames water could make good porter, and certainly Russian porter had a bad reputation later in the 19th century. One English writer in 1841 wrote of St Petersburg that “The stuff manufactured here under the name of porter is little better than the rincings [sic] of blacking bottles.” The Russian tariff in 1822 (a similar one had been introduced in 1816, but seems not to have had any effect) had three important results as far as British brewing history was concerned: it encouraged the Burton brewers to start selling more of their Burton ale at home; it encouraged them to look for new markets abroad, which led to the first Burton-brewed India Pale Ales (or to be exact, what became known as India Pale Ales); and it encouraged the London porter brewers and their imitators to carry on brewing extremely strong stouts.

There was already a good market for porter in the Baltic: the traveller William Coxe, who went to Russia with Samuel Whitbread, son of the founder of the Chiswell Street brewery, wrote in 1784 of the Russians that “Their common wines are chiefly claret Burgundy and Champaigne [sic] and I never tasted English beer and porter in greater perfection and abundance.” The average imports of porter and English beer into St Petersburg between 1780 and 1790, according to William Tooke, writing in 1800, were worth 262,000 roubles a year, when the rouble was five to the pound sterling. Tooke also wrote of the Russian upper classes that “The ordinary table wines are Medoc and Chateau-Margot; besides porter and english ale, quas [kvass] and mead, which are always placed on the table, that the guests may help themselves when they please, without speaking to a servant.” In 1818 almost 214,000 bottles of porter were exported to St Petersburg, with the figure for 1819 being just under 122,600 bottles.

St Petersburg was not the only port for porter: a writer in 1815, James Hingston Tuckey, said that London porter was also imported through Riga, and Danzig, then in Prussian Poland. This was not a one-way trade, however: the ships coming back from the Baltic brought staves of Memel oak to make beer casks with: and also isinglass, used for clearing beer. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine in 1799 quoted from a travel book recording a journey in the “southern provinces” of Russia:

The most valuable produce of the sturgeon fishery is the isinglass prepared from their air bladders. This article is principally exported from St Petersburg to England, where it is used in the beer and porter breweries in large quantities. The English supply the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and French with this commodity for clarifying their wines. According to the list of exportation printed by the English factory at St Petersburg, there were exported in British vessels from 1753 to 1768 between one and 2,000 pood of isinglass; from 1769 to 1786 from two to 3,000; in late years, however, usually 4,000, and in 1788 even 6,850 pood of that article. The exportation to other countries has also amounted within these few years to more than one thousand pood. This large and almost incredible exportation has tended considerably to increase even in these last-mentioned years the price of the different qualities of this article at Astrakhan itself; and on the Exchange of St Petersburg, where, previous to the year 1778, isinglass of the best quality did not exceed thirty-six rubles a pood, it has recently been advanced to ninety rubles.

“Factory” there was being used in the sense of “trading centre”: and a pood was equal to just over 36 pounds, so 6,850 pood is a little more than 110 tons of isinglass – a lot of sturgeon swim bladders. (Just for comparison, in 1889 Barclay Perkins, then one of the biggest breweries in the world, was using just 10 tons of isinglass a year.)

The evidence is that from late in the 18th century, at least, an especially strong porter was being specifically exported to Russia. The landscape painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary for August 20 1796: “I drank some Porter Mr Lindoe had from Thrale’s Brewhouse. He said it was specially brewed for the Empress of Russia and would keep seven years.” (“Thrale’s”, of course, was still the operating name at that time of the Anchor brewery, Southwark, controlled since 1781 by the partnership of Barclay Perkins, and “Mr Lindoe” was probably John Lindoe of Norwich, who was related to the Barclays by marriage.) A history of St Saviour’s church in Southwark in 1795 said of the local big brewer: “Thrale’s intire [that is, porter] is well known as a delicious beverage, from the frozen regions of Russia to the burning sands of Bengal and Sumatra. The empress of all the Russias is indeed so partial to porter, that she has ordered repeatedly very large quantities for her own drinking, and that of her court.”

Was that porter sent out to the Russian imperial court (and remember, “porter” at this time still covered what we would separate out today, because of its strength, as “stout”) already being called “Imperial”? The records suggest that this may be a usage that sprang up long after the beer itself was first brewed, much like India Pale Ale was an expression that appeared decades after hopped pale ales were first exported to India. And “Russian” seems not to have been attached to “Imperial Stout” until the early 20th century. Indeed, the first nation to have its name linked to Imperial stout looks to be Ireland.

“Imperial Porter” in 1821

The earliest use of “Imperial” to describe a beer that I have found comes from the Caledonian Mercury of February 1821, when a coffeehouse in Edinburgh was advertising “Edinburgh Ales, London Double Brown Stout and Imperial Porter, well worth the attention of Families”. So “Imperial Porter” comes before “Imperial Stout” – although to a late Georgian drinker, stout, or at least brown stout, WAS porter, just the strongest version thereof. The next also comes from the Caledonian Mercury, two years later, and this time the beers mentioned are “Best London Porter”, “Brown Stout”, “Double Brown Stout” and “Imperial Double Brown Stout”.

These are both retailers’ advertisements, and do not show what terminology the brewers themselves were using. The first evidence for THAT comes in a historic announcement made by the “great London Beer Brewers” in the first week of October 1830. The timing is hugely important: this was just over a fortnight before what was known later as the Beerhouse Act was due to come into operation. The Beerhouse Act was meant by the Duke of Wellington’s government as a massive “free trade” exercise, liberating the brewing and beer retailing businesses from perceived restrictions and barriers to entry. The Act allowed any householder who was eligible to pay the poor rate to sell beer, ale or porter (but not wine or spirits) by retail by purchasing a one-year excise licence for two guineas (£2 2s). The licensing magistrates, that is, in effect, the local gentry (supposedly the allies of the larger brewers) had no say over who could be granted one of these new beerhouse licences, unlike the “full” licence, which was under their control. The tax on beer was removed (though it stayed on malt), while the brewer’s licence was fixed at 10 shillings for the smallest operators, and only £2 for anyone producing 100 to 1,000 barrels a year. The expectation was that there would be a huge increase in the numbers of retail beer outlets, and also in the numbers of small retail brewers.

The London porter brewers announce the brewing of “Imperial Ale”, 1830

The “great London Beer Brewers”, that is, the 11 or so big London porter houses, which included the biggest brewers in the country at that time, in a reflection of the soon-to-be-lower tax on their product, and an apparent attempt to deter all the expected new beerhouse retailers, in London at least, from brewing for themselves, announced together that they would be cutting their prices by 12 shillings a barrel, equivalent to a penny a quart pot. They also made what contemporary commentators said, correctly, was the “remarkable” announcement that they were about to commence brewing ale. New readers may need telling that we were still, in the early 1830s, in the period when ale was seen as a different drink to beer, less hopped and, generally pale: the porter brewers were “beer” brewers because their product was hoppy and dark, and there was an entirely different set of specialist “ale” brewers in London at that time. The fact that the porter brewers, for the first time, started brewing ale as well in the 1830s has generally been seen (well, by me, anyway) as a reaction to the growing popularity of sweeter, less hoppy ale and the beginnings of the decline in sales of porter. But it looks from that announcement that a large part of the reason for starting to brew ale was also for the big porter brewers to give the new beerhouses even less of a reason to want to become brewers themselves, by offering them a “one-stop shop” where the beerhouse proprietors could obtain both their porter and their ale from the same supplier.

Not all the big porter brewers rushed into ale brewing in the 1830s, incidentally: Meux in Tottenham Court Road, for example, remained a porter-only brewery until 1872, and Reid’s only began brewing ales in 1877. But that’s an aside: what is relevant to this discussion is what the big London brewers called their different grades of beer and ale in their circular of October 1830 announcing the price cut. There were Porter, as 33 shillings a barrel, Stout at 43s, Double Stout at 53s – and Imperial Stout at 63s. On the other side there were X Ale at 48 shillings a barrel, XX Ale at 58s, XXX Ale at 68s – and Imperial Ale at 80s.

Barclay’s Imperial Double Brown Stout, 1844

“Imperial” here seems to be being used simply to mean “our biggest”, with no specific reference to Russia, or just porter/stout. “Imperial” without “Russia” attached (although often with other adjectives in the mix) is a usage that carries on through the following decades: there’s a reference to “London Imperial Brown Stout” from a retailer in Southampton in 1832, for example, and “Imperial London Stout” on offer in a newspaper in 1834. In 1844 Barclay’s “Imperial Double Brown Stout” was being advertised in The Times, one of only a very few mentions I have found of Barclay’s brewing an Imperial stout in the 19th century (“IBS”, or Imperial Brown Stout, appears to be Barclay’s usual “in-house” name for the beer). Others brewed Imperial stouts too: Jenner’s of the South London brewery from at least the late 1840s to the 1880s (as I’ve mentioned before, Miles Jenner of Harvey’s is a descendant, so he is carrying on a family tradition by brewing an Imperial stout in Lewes); there was “Imperial Extra Stout” from the big London porter brewer Truman Hanbury & Buxton in 1847, at what seems to be the standard price of seven shillings for a dozen quart bottles, 75 per cent dearer than bottled porter; “Imperial Irish Stout” in 1848 (which looks to come from Davis Strangman of Waterford), Imperial Brown Stout from the Dublin brewers Findlaters in 1855; and “Dublin Imperial Invalid Stout” from Manders in 1872. (One Welsh wine and beer merchant, in Rhyl, in 1868 was claiming to sell “Guinness’s Imperial Stout”: that, I think, was definitely the retailer’s description and not the brewery’s.)

Imperial Irish Stout in 1848

London and Dublin were not the only Imperial Stout brewers. Samuel Allsopp was advertising an Imperial Stout alongside its Burton ales and EIPA in 1865 (Bass Imperial Stout “drawn from the wood” was on sale alongside draught Bass Barley Wine and Allsopp’s Burton Ale at Klein’s Raritan House in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1901, for late Victorian American extremophiles). In 1882 the Nelson Evening Mail in New Zealand was advertising the arrival of Tennent’s Imperial Stout from Scotland. In 1900 Seth Senior’s brewery in Shepley, Yorkshire would sell you Imperial Stout at 1s 4d a gallon, the same as its IPA and Strong Ale. But London looks to have specialised in the drink. The Salisbury Hotel, Fulham, was boasting that it sold Watney’s Imperial Stout in 1886. A 19th century price list for Young’s brewery in Wandsworth (exact date unknown but probably about 1870) included draught Imperial Stout. The East End of London brewer Manns was apparently bottling an Imperial Stout in 1893, although as this was six pence a dozen pints cheaper than the 3s 6d India Pale Ale, it may not have been that strong. Whitbread’s Imperial Stout was on sale at the Admiral Keppel in Shoreditch in 1903. The little West’s brewery in Hackney, north-east London, would sell you a pin (four and a half gallons) of “Imperial stout (for invalids)” for 7s 3d, which implied an original gravity of 1080 or a little less.

But none of those advertisements talked about “Russian stout”. For part of the time 19th century brewers would not have wanted to mention Russia in connection with their products, of course: we were at war with Russia in the 1850s, an event commemorated in such pub names as the Alma, the Inkerman Arms, the Florence Nightingale and the Lord Raglan. Even ignoring the impact of the Crimean War, however, there seems to be a remarkable lack of regular correlation between “Imperial stout” and Russia in the 19th century.

Indeed, for at least one exporter of stout to Russia, the “Russian” stout appears to have been different from the “Imperial” stout. Walter Serocold, author of The Story of Watneys said of Reid’s brewery, just off the Farringdon Road in London, in the 19th century:

There was vast cellarage under the breweries to accommodate the various types of stouts and ales which had to mature in cask before consumption. Some six stouts of gravities varying from 1100° (Russian stout) to 1045° (porter) were brewed; the famous Reid’s Imperial Stout was 1080°.

Findlater’s Imperial Brown Stout from Dublin, 1855

That Reid’s brewed both an Imperial Stout and a Russian Stout is confirmed by Alfred Barnard’s description of the brewery in 1889, when it still had one racking store devoted entirely to XX imperial stout, and another store filled from end to end with stout for Russia, “for which this house is justly celebrated”. One place that advertised Reid’s Imperial Stout for sale was the St John’s Gate Tavern, previously the Jerusalem Tavern, in Clerkenwell in 1880.

Manders’ Dublin Imperial Invalid Stout, 1872

The export trade of beer from England to Russia appears to have fallen quite early on into the hands of the firm of A. Le Coq, which dated back to 1807, and which was claiming in 1912 that its business “for a great many years” consisted “almost exclusively” of exporting “Special Stout” brewed in London and “Ale” brewed in Burton – a clue that Burton Ale continued to be popular in Russia. alongside strong stout. Le Coq’s problems were that the tax on its imports had risen from 15 kopeks a quart bottle in 1881 to 72 kopeks, or 1s 6d, in 1900, while the tax on beer in casks was about 175 per cent, and railway rates in Russia were four or five times higher for imported beers than for Russian ones. The result was that the retail price of Le Coq Stout or Ale was 2s 6d a quart – and millions of fake bottles of Le Coq beer, produced by “several” different brewers, were on sale.

Le Coq’s answer was to buy for £91,000 the Tivoli lager brewery in Dorpat, the town now known as Tartu, in modern Estonia, then part of the Russian empire. In its prospectus in 1912, Le Coq said the water at the Tivoli brewery “is, for all practical purposes, identical with the water of the London Brewery which has hitherto supplied Messers A. Le Coq and Co,” and it would thus be able, once the brewery plant had been extended, to supply “a first-class Stout at a price within the reach of the general Russian public.”

Unfortunately for British investors in A. Le Coq, two years after the start of attempts to brew within the borders of the Russian empire, the First World War erupted, with Russia eventually banning alcohol as part of the war effort. This was followed by the convulsions of the Russian Revolution, which saw Estonia gain its independence, but meant the Tartu brewery was cut off from its intended market.

Russian Stout – or “Russian Imperial Stout”? – in 1934

Barclay’s is generally reckoned to be the brewery that supplied A. Le Coq with its stout: is it a coincidence that the brewery in Southwark began selling a beer in Britain under the name “Russian Stout” in 1921 or 1922, when it must have become clear there wouldn’t be a market in Russia again for such a British-brewed beer for an exceedingly long time? Ron Pattinson’s researches show this beer in 1921 was still known internally as “IBS”, “Imperial Brown Stout”, though it was marketed as “Russian Stout”, and the labels, from 1931 at least, said “Russian Imperial Stout”. In 1970 the name on the labels was tweaked to say “Imperial Russian Stout”, and it is this form of the name that influenced the many subsequent revivals of super-strong stouts.

So, then: “Imperial porter” came before “imperial stout”; there’s no conclusive evidence that the “imperial” bit definitely came from any connection with the Russian imperial court (although I think it’s reasonable to assume it probably did); and “Imperial” has been used with brews other than stout for more than 180 years to mean “biggest we do” – meaning nobody can complain about “Imperial Pale Ale” and the like.

There’s an amazing amount of inaccurate, made-up rubbish that has been written about the history and origins of IPA, or India Pale Ale. So read on, and turn yourself into  an IPA mythbuster for #IPA day:

Myth 1: “IPA was invented by a brewer called George Hodgson from Bow, in East London.”

Fact: Hodgson was the best-known of the early exporters of pale ale to India. But there is no evidence at all that he “invented” a new beer style. Pale ale was already being brewed in England before Hodgson. And the beer Hodgson brewed wasn’t called “India Pale Ale” until more than 40 years after he is first recorded as exporting beer to the Far East. Indeed, there is no evidence that IPA was “invented” at all. It looks more likely the style developed slowly from existing brews as “Pale Ale prepared for the India market”, and was eventually, around 1835, given a new and separate name, East India Pale Ale.

Myth 2: “IPAs started life as a British export to their troops stationed out in India back in the 1800s.”

Fact: Pale ale was around from at least the 17th century and pale ales were being exported to India from at least the 1780s, if not before. And they weren’t drunk by the troops, either those of the East India Company’s forces or the later British Army forces in India, who much preferred porter, and continued drinking porter in India right through to the end of the 19th century. The pale ales exported by Hodgson, Bass, Allsopp and others were drunk by the middle and upper classes among the Europeans in India, the military officers and the “civil servants”, the civilians who worked for the East India Company, trading, administrating and collecting taxes.

Myth 3: “British brewers discovered that if they put lots of hops and alcohol in the beers they were sending out, the strong beer wouldn’t go sour on the four-month voyage around Africa.”

Fact: Beer did not need to be strong to survive the journey to India, and IPAs were not particularly strong for the time: they were only about 6 per cent to 6.5 per cent abv. Certainly by the 1760s brewers were being told that it was “absolutely necessary” to add extra hops to beer if it was being sent to somewhere warm. But this was not limited to India. And there is absolutely no evidence that George Hodgson of Bow introduced the idea of hopping export beers more strongly than beers for home consumption.

Myth 4: “A few India-bound beer ships were wrecked on the coast of Scotland, which gave locals the chance to sample the cargo. The secret was out, and IPA has been a staple in the UK ever since.”

Fact: There is no record of any shipwreck being associated with the sale of IPA in the UK. “Pale Ale brewed expressly for the India market” and “suitable for warm climates or home consumption” was on sale in London in 1822, no shipwreck needed. But in fact IPA never took off in Britain until around 1841, after the railway had arrived in Burton upon Trent and made it much easier for the Burton brewers to send their bitter beers to markets around the UK.

For more about the history, and myths, of IPA, go here for a summary of IPA history, here for a (much) longer version and here to learn more about what George Hodgson really did.

Excellent news, I think, that Wells & Young’s has acquired the Scottish brands McEwan’s and Younger’s from their current owner, Heineken.

The announcement last week that W&Y was bringing back Courage Imperial Russian Stout genuinely excited me, and not just because it’s a fantastic beer. It showed that the Bedford company has a shrewd understanding of the sort of niche a medium-sized brewer can exploit with the right brands, and it has cottoned on to the growing desire of drinkers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to drink authentic, heritage beers again. McEwan’s and Younger’s have plenty of heritage – Younger’s No 3, for example.

But I’d like to make it clear, now, that if I notice ANY references by the brand’s new owners to Younger’s being “established in 1749″, I shall be driving up to Bedford and administering a few slaps. Because it wasn’t. This claim of a 1749 foundation date has been around since at least 1861, making it 150 years old, or more, and it still regularly pops up. Only yesterday the Scotsman newspaper printed this rubbish

“William Younger founded Edinburgh’s historic brewing industry when he set up his firm in Leith in 1749.”

There are two big errors in that one sentence: Edinburgh’s brewing industry is, of course, far older than 1749: the city was stuffed with breweries long before, so much that its nickname, “Auld Reekie” (“Old Smoky”), is sometimes said to have come from all the smoke that came out of the brewery chimneys. In addition, William Younger never started a brewery in Leith, in 1749 or any other year. In fact he was almost certainly never a brewer at all.

William Younger was only 16 in 1749, which was actually the year he moved to Leith from the family home in West Linton, Peeblesshire. It has been claimed that his first job was working for a brewery in Leith, sometimes said to be the one run by Robert Anderson, one of the town’s bigger brewers, with an output of 1,500 barrels a year. Unfortunately, there is no known documentary evidence to back this up: if there had been, the book printed to celebrate Younger’s “double centenary” in 1949 would have trumpeted it. Instead the author quietly danced around the issue of whether William had been a brewer or not.

By 1753, aged 20, William was working as an excise officer, and married to a young woman from his home village, Grizel Sim. Their eldest son, Archibald Campbell Younger, was born in 1757, to be followed by at least two more boys, Robert, and William Younger II, born 1767. Less than three years after William II was born, however, his father died aged only 37. Two years later Grizel Younger married Alexander Anderson, who had been brewing in Leith since at least 1758. When Anderson died in 1781, Grizel ran Anderson’s brewery herself before retiring in 1794, aged 65. It was Grizel, therefore, who was the first of the brewing Youngers.

Archibald Campbell Younger had been apprenticed to his stepfather’s brewery when he was 15. When he reached 21, in 1778, Archibald left Leith to start his own brewery in the precincts of the Abbey of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. If any date can be given for the start of the Younger’s brewing concern, therefore, 1778 is the year. The site Archibald chose had excellent well-water, and, because it was within the abbey precincts, it was outside the jurisdiction of Edinburgh Town Council: thus Archibald and the three other brewers in the abbey precincts did not have to pay the council’s 2d-a-pint beer tax.

The Abbey brewery, Edinburgh in 1861

After eight years, in 1786, Archibald was able to buy a larger brewery nearby in Croft-an-Righ (“Farm of the King” in Gaelic), a lane behind Holyrood palace. He had become famous for brewing Younger’s Edinburgh Ale, according to the writer Robert Chambers in 1869, “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle.” It sold in the bothies of Edinburgh for three pennies a bottle, 20 per cent more expensive than ordinary ale. Five years later, in 1791, Archibald moved again, to a new brewery in North Back Canongate with a capacity of some 15,000 barrels a year, where he was in business with his brother-in-law, John Sommervail.

Archibald’s brother Richard was running a brewery just off Canongate in Edinburgh from at least 1788, though by 1796 he had moved to London. That was the same year that William Younger II opened his own brewhouse within the Holyrood Abbey precincts. By 1802 Mr William Younger’s “much admired” ale was being advertised for sale at the Edinburgh Ale Vaults in London, in cask and bottle. The following year he acquired James Blair’s Abbey Brewhouse, Horsewynd, Holyrood. William and Archibald were briefly partners in a venture to brew porter, from 1806 to 1808, but this seems not to have been successful, and William acquired new partners, while in 1809 Archibald retired from brewing.

William Younger, ‘Established 1749′ – not

In 1818 the Abbey concern became William Younger & Co, with William II in partnership with Alexander Smith, the brewer and superintendent of the Abbey brewery. In 1836, when William II was 69, he made his son William Younger III, aged 35, a partner in the business, along with Andrew Smith, son of Alexander Smith. William Younger III had no particular desire to be involved in the business, but Andrew Smith had worked there since he was 16, and it was under his command that the company began bottling for sale overseas in 1846, and exports started to grow. The reputation of Younger’s India Pale Ale and Edinburgh ale helped it rise to be easily the biggest brewer in Edinburgh by 1850, mashing 10,292 quarters of malt. This was nearly a third as much again as its nearest rival, Alexander Berwick, who had bought Richard Younger’s old premises off South Back Canongate (now Holyrood Road), 300 yards away.

Eight years later Younger’s bought Berwick’s premises from his nephews for £1,600. Eventually production of India Pale Ale (brewed, like the Burton article, in unions) was concentrated at the Holyrood brewery, while the Abbey brewery made the Edinburgh ale. By the early 1860s the the firm was exporting its ales as far as Honolulu and New Zealand, using a red “triple pyramid” trademark, greatly annoying Bass, which felt it resembled its own red triangle trademark too much.

A description of the Abbey brewery in the Official Illustrated Guide to the Great Northern Railway in 1861 included mention of two 50-quarter “mash tubs” equipped with Steele’s mashers; two wort coppers, one holding 116 barrels; and the tun and fermenting rooms, “each having 30 fermenting tuns, and beneath them 12 settling synores [sic].” It’s clear from the context what a “synore” is, but I have never seen the word before, and it appears to exist nowhere else in Googledom but here. If anyone has any more information I’d be delighted to hear it. “Synore” there is evidently a typo for “square”.

The GNR guide is also the first reference I have found to the “established in 1749″ canard, though I am sure there are earlier ones out there. By now William McEwan had started his own brewing operation at Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, but although he would become a ferocious rival, Younger’s continued to thrive: it was the first brewer in Scotland to register as a limited company, in 1887, and by 1905 it was reckoned that Younger’s produced a quarter of all Scotland’s beer.

In 1930 it was announced that Younger’s and McEwan were linking up as Scottish Brewers, though their three breweries continued until 1955, when the Abbey brewery was shut and converted into offices. (In 1999 it became part of the site for the new Scottish parliament building.) The consolidation of the brewing industry in the UK saw Scottish Brewers join up with Newcastle Breweries in 1960 to form Scottish & Newcastle, which would eventually, by the start of the 1970s, be the smallest of the “Big Six” UK brewing conglomerates. That was how it stayed, until the 1990s, when another storm hit the UK brewing industry, and by 1995 S&N had acquired what had once been the Courage and Watney brewing empires to become the biggest brewing concern in Britain. It was clear, however, that consolidation was not just a regional, UK, phenomenon, but global. S&N tried to expand enough to compete on the world stage, buying the French brewer Kronenbourg to become the second biggest brewing concern in Europe.

It also started a joint venture with Carlsberg, Baltic Beverage Holdings, to run the Baltika brewing operation in Russia. Carlsberg, however, seems to have eventually decided it wanted all of Baltika’s profits for itself: knowing it would never be allowed to take over S&N on its own (too many markets where it would own too great a share), in 2007 the Danish firm invited Heineken to join it in carving up S&N, with Heineken getting the UK brewing operations.

Slowly Heineken appears to be realising that comparatively “niche” products are best run by a specialist, hence the sale of McEwan’s and Younger’s to Wells & Young’s, which at a bound becomes the third largest premium ale producer in the UK, after Marston’s and Greene King. I wish them well: just don’t mention 1749 in the promotion literature.

If there is one blessing the Oxford Companion to Beer has brought us, it’s the beginnings of a much better, and myth-free understanding of the origins of the world’s most popular beer style, pale pils lager, and the brewery that first made it, Pilsner Urquell, which is in what is now the Czech Republic. We didn’t get this new understanding from the OCB itself, obviously, but from Evan Rail, who lives in Prague, who writes with insight and erudition about Czech beer, Czech beerstyles and Czech brewing history, and who knows the number one rule about writing history: go back to the original sources – an apt commandment here, since “Urquell” – “Prazdroj” in Czech – means “original source”.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read his latest blog post adding, clarifying and correcting the OCB’s Czech-related entries.

Evan has done something few, if any, writers in English about the origins of Pilsner Urquell, the “world’s first pale lager”, have bothered doing. He has uncovered, and read, the document in 1839 which effectively founded the brewery in Pilsen, the “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse”, made by 12 prominent Pilsen burghers. He has also read the brewery’s own history, written for its 50th anniversary, Měšťanský pivovar v Plzni 1842-1892.

Among the fascinating facts that Evan has revealed so far, the following seem particularly worthy of note:

• The town of Pilsen was already being “flooded” by bottom-fermented “Bavarian-style” beer in 1839, the 12 would-be founders of the new brewery declared, and it seems one big reason why they wanted to build their own new brewery was to fight back against imports of lager beers from elsewhere, by making their own bottom-fermented brews in Pilsen.
• The builder of the new brewery, František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December 1839, the brewery’s architect, Martin Stelzer, “travelled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”
• The yeast for the new brewery was certainly not “smuggled out of Bavaria by a monk”, as far too many sources try to claim (did anybody with their critical faculties engaged ever believe that?), nor even, apparently, brought with him by Josef Groll, the 29-year-old brewer from the town of Vilshofen in Lower Bavaria who was hired to run the new brewery. Instead, “seed yeast for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria,” according to the 1892 book. (The Groll family brewery, incidentally, no longer exists, but another concern in Vilshofen, the Wolferstetter brewery, still produces a Josef Groll Pils in his memory.)
• The maltings at the new brewery were “dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”, that is, loosely, “equipped with English-style malt kilns”, according to an account from 1883. That meant indirect heat: the same 1883 account says the kilns were “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření“, which looks to mean “heated by heat from the boiler-room”. Indirect heat makes it easier to control the heating, and easier to produce pale malt, which is just what the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery did to make its pale lager.

That still leaves THE big mystery: if the burgher brewers of Pilsen wanted to compete against Bavarian-style bottom-fermented lagers, which would still have been quite dark (think “Dunkel”), why did they make a pale beer? Were they attempting to imitate English pale beers? Since pale bitter beers were only just taking off even in Britain in 1842 (although pale mild ales had been around for a couple of centuries), I don’t personally find that particularly likely.

However, Evan has promised “more on the origins of Pilsner Urquell coming up”, and I am hugely looking forward to reading additional revelations. I was delighted to read that Stelzer had toured the big breweries of Munich before the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery was built, because I suggested in an article for Beer Connoisseur magazine in the US two and a half years ago that he must have done. In Munich he surely met Gabriel Sedlmayr II, of the Spaten brewery, who had been round Britain looking at the latest brewing and malting techniques being practised in places such as London, Burton upon Trent and Edinburgh, and Sedlmayr would have been able to tell him about English malting techniques. Munich, at that time, was becoming a magnet for brewers in Continental Europe because of the advances in brewing methods being made by Sedlmayr, as he perfected the techniques of lager brewing.

Sedlmayr wasn’t, at that time, making pale malts: however, the man who accompanied him to Britain on one of his trips, Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery near Vienna, DID come back and start producing paler English-style malts, allied with Bavarian-style lagering, which resulted in a copper-brown beer, the first “Vienna-style” lager. Vienna was then, of course, the capital of the Austrian empire, of which Bohemia (and Pilsen) were still a part: it would not be surprising if Stelzer, a citizen of the Austrian empire, also visited Vienna and met Dreher (whose name, it always amuses me to note, translates as “Tony Turner”), and talked about malting techniques, but there seems to be no evidence as yet that he did so.

I’d also love to know why Josef Groll was hired (apparently by Stelzer) to run the new brewery: Vilshofen, while nearer Pilsen than Munich is, is a comparative backwater, and if Stelzer had been to Munich, why did he not bring a Munich brewer back with him to Bohemia? This site claims (on what authority I know not) that Groll studied under both Sedlmayr and Dreher, but both allegedly complained about his rudeness, obstinacy, stubbornness and lack of self-control. If that’s true (I have no idea), it doesn’t look as it Stelzer bothered checking up on Groll’s references before he hired the young brewer …

You’ve read the stories, I’m sure: you’ve probably got, as I have, a mental picture. The mailcoach rattles through the arch into the straw-strewn innyard, chickens flying out of the way, the outside passengers ducking to avoid losing their hats – or heads. The ostler and stable-boys, alerted by the sound of the guard’s horn as the coach came down the High Street, rush to unhitch the old, tired, sweat-spattered team of horses and lead them away, at the same time bringing out a fresh team. The red-faced landlord, in tan breeches, black waistcoat, white shirt and white apron, his hair tied back in a short ponytail by a black bow, hands up a yard-long glass brimful of ale to the overcoat-laden mailcoach driver, who has no time in his schedule even to get down from his box. In a swing perfected by daily practice, the driver drains the long glass without a spill, hands it back down to the cheery publican and, refreshed, whips up his new horses, who gallop off back out onto the highway, the passenger-laden coach bouncing behind them and 10 more miles of muddy, rutted road ahead before they can all rest at the next stop. If there’s not a painting of that scene on the oak-panelled walls of some pub dining room with 18th century pretentions somewhere in England, I’ll swallow the nearest tricorn hat.

It’s a great tale, repeated often, and I never dissected it until I read it again in the Oxford Companion to Beer, where it appears in the entry for “drinking customs”:

“The diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706) mentions a yard of ale being used to toast King James II but the vessel has more plebeian origins. It was designed to meet the needs of stagecoach drivers who were in a rush to get to their final destinations. At intermediate steps the drivers would be handed ale in a yard glass through an inn window, the glass being of sufficient length for the driver to take it without leaving his coach.”

Perhaps because this occurs just four paragraphs after a claim that King Edgar, a pre-Conquest king of England, tried to limit villages to only one alehouse each in an attempt to cut drunkenness, which is definitely a pile of Anglo-Saxon pants (the permanently established alehouse as a village institution was probably at least three centuries away when Edgar was on the throne, and there wasn’t the infrastructure in his time to enforce such a law anyway – and nor is there a single parchment scrap of evidence for such a decree), myths were at the front of my brain, which is why this time when I read about coach drivers and yards of ale I finally went: “?”

I’m lucky, living in West London, a very short walk from a train station. I can get up to the British Library at St Pancras in less than the 50 70 minutes advertised time between ordering books via the online catalogue and those books being brought up from the shelves. Turn right out of King’s Cross past the stores built for Thomas Salt, brewer of Burton upon Trent, in the 19th century to keep shipments of pale ale in, up the Euston Road and into the BL, one of my favourite places on the planet (it even has a couple of hop plants growing up one wall). Check my coat in the downstairs lockers, up the wide stairs, walk through the doors of the Humanities A 1 reading room, find a seat among a couple of hundred or more other scholars researching who knows what, go up to the collection desk and pick up the haul: half a dozen or so Victorian and Edwardian books and periodicals.

A footed ale-yard

There was certainly a fair amount of interest in the “ale-yard” glass, though as H Symer Cuming, who presented a paper on “The Ale-Yard or Long Glass” to the British Archaeological Society in 1874, declared: “The ale-yard and its parts form a singular group of vessels which are far more spoken about written about.” Symer Cuming, who gave the capacity of a yard of ale as a quart, said he had “searched in vain in printed books” for the history of the ale-yard: and I have searched in vain myself for any mention at all from earlier than my lifetime of stage coach drivers drinking from yards of ale.

Symer Cuming definitely doesn’t mention stage-coach drivers, though he gives a nod to the Alma beerhouse, near Galley Hill, Swanscombe, Kent, built in 1860, which in his era had a sign saying: “London Porter and Ales Sold by the Yard” (a joke also found at the George Inn, Bexley High Street, Kent, according to a writer in 1889, although see later). He mentions the mock “corporation” at Hale, Cheshire (now in Trafford, Manchester) that had the “Hale-yard” as its mace (another repeated joke: in Hanley, in the Potteries, the mock “corporation” swore in each new member with a ceremony that involved drinking from a yard-long glass, though the contents were apparently port when the ceremony began in 1783, before changing to beer and, by the start of the 20th century, champagne. Over the years the Hanley revellers broke their ale-yard at least twice). Symer Cuming also says that yard-of-ale glasses came in both footed and footless forms, the latter the familiar bulb-ended version. But coachmen in a hurry: not a word, though Symer Cuming was writing within 20 years of the last mailcoaches being driven off the road by steam trains.

The magazine Notes and Queries, Victorian England’s answer to Wikipedia, covered the subject of the yard of ale glass, or yard of beer glass, multiple times in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. One of the first mentions, in 1869, describes the ceremony of the “long glass” at Eton, when “RHBH” wrote:

There still exists at Eton the custom of drinking a yard of ale, or, as it is called there, the long glass. Once a week, in the summer half, about twenty to thirty of the boys in the boats, or of the principal cricket or foot-ball players, invited by the captain of the boats and the captain of the cricket eleven, assemble in a room at a small public house for luncheon. The luncheon, or “cellar”, as it is called, consists of bread and cheese, salads, beer and cider-cup. At the conclusion of the luncheon, a boy, previously invited for the purpose, is requested to step forward; he sits down on a chair, a napkin is tied round his neck, and the long glass filled with beer is presented to him. Watches are pulled out, and at a given signal he begins to drink. If he does it in good time he is greeted with loud applause; but if he leaves a drop at the bottom of the bowl it has to be refilled and he has to drink again. Two or three fellows are asked to drink at each cellar, and after this initiation they are entitled to be asked on future occasions. This is a very old institution.

These were schoolboys, of course, aged probably between 15 or 16 and 18. The “beer bong” is not new. (A brief article in the Lincolnshire Chronicle in April 1899, incidentally, agrees the Eton glass held a pint, indicates the “long glass” ceremony still took place, and says the record time for emptying it was nine seconds.)

Another N&Q correspondent, “Ellcee”, in 1869 said that for public houses, possession of, and flaunting, a “yard of ale” glass was “not at all an uncommon mode of inducing custom fifty or sixty years ago”; that is, around 1809 to 1819, and a third pointed out that the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) possessed what it called a “forfeit glass” a yard long and with a bulb at one end, which was apparently made in Venice in the 17th century, and had been donated by the Duke of Bucchleuch. Others mentioned ale-yard glasses that could be seen at places such as Knole House in Sevenoaks, the Red Lion, Retford, a pub in Sandgate, Kent, the Wrestlers Inn, Cambridge, and elsewhere. In 1882 a description was given of the custom associated with the yard of beer glass around Bexley, Kent:

In several houses may be seen an advertisement that “Beer is sold by the yard.” And so it is, in accordance with a local custom. There is a glass vessel exactly three feet in length, with a very narrow stem, slightly lipped at the mouth and a globular bowl at the bottom … This is filled with beer, and any one who can drink it without spilling it may have it for nothing, but if he spills one drop he pays double. It looks so easy and it is so difficult, not to say impossible, to a novice. You take the vessel in both hands, apply the lip to your mouth and then gently tilt it. At first the beer flows quietly and slowly, and you think how admirably you are overcoming the difficulty. Suddenly, when the vessel is tilted a little, more the air rushes up the stem into the bowl and splashes about half a pint into your face. The cheapest plan is to treat the barman to a yard of beer and see how he does it. He will be only too happy to oblige you, and the Bexley ale vanishes with a rapidity only equalled by that of the beer consumed at Heidelberg among the students. The custom has extended far beyond Bexley and not only in the neighbouring villages but even near Oxford the yard of beer is advertised.

(A later correspondent revealed that it was only, again, the George Inn, Bexley that provided the yard of ale, and even it had stopped doing so “within the last twelvemonth” when the glass was accidently smashed.) But again, not one writer talked of coach drivers in connection with yards of ale.

The same absence of evidence occurs in specialist books on drinking glasses. The history of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, published in 1898, has a drawing of the Eton “long glass”, but no coach drivers. Beverages Past and Present by Edward Randolph Emerson, published in 1908, calls the ale-yard “decidedly original” to the English, describing it as “a trumpet-shaped glass exactly a yard in length, the narrow end being closed, and expanded into a large ball.” Emerson gave a good account of the problems of drinking from a yard of ale:

Its internal capacity is a little more than a pint, and when filled with ale many a thirsty tyro has been challenged to empty it without taking it from his mouth. This is no easy task. So long as the tube contains fluid, it drains out smoothly, but when air reaches the bulb it displaces the liquor with a splash, startling the toper, and compelling him involuntarily to withdraw his mouth by the rush of the cold liquid over his face and dress.

Nowhere, however, does he mention coach drivers.

Emerson’s claim as to the difficulty of draining a yard of ale is challenged by Percy H Bate, author of English Table Glass, published in 1905, who describes ale yards (and half-yards) as coming in two forms,

those with feet and those without. Those without feet generally have a bulb at the base … and this bulb is supposed to render the emptying of them at one draught very difficult, the ale leaving the bulb with a rush and drenching the drinker. But, so far as I know, the difficulty is more imaginary than real; at any rate I have not found it at all difficult to empty the only one I ever had in my possession.

Bate added that

Being used as tests of skill at merry-makings and convivial assemblies, in which horse-play was not an unknown factor, most of the many that must have existed have been destroyed, and they are now distinctly rare.

Among the vessels Bate mentions are footless “travellers’ glasses”, which, he said, would be filled with spirits as the coach arrived at an inn for a change of horses, emptied by the passengers “without delay”, and “the coach would roll on.” (Apparently some inns would trick the passengers with glasses that, when filled with gin, looked of normal capacity, but which actually had extra-thick walls and contained much less than the tuppence-worth of spirits charged for. The whole operation was done so quickly that the coach was off out through the archway before the passengers realised they had been diddled.) But on the coach drivers themselves, and how they might have been refreshed, he is again, silent.

Specialist books on coach travel also fail to supply references to coach drivers and ale-yards. Stage-coach and mail in days of yore by Charles H Harper, published in 1907, says the coach-horn was known as the “yard of tin”, but that is the closest it gets. The yard of ale continues to be mentioned as a curiosity through the first half of the 20th century, along with the difficulty of drinking from it – “gardyloo!”, a correspondent in the Western Mail writes in March 1934 in a description of an ale yard to be seen at Exeter museum – but still the coach driver makes no appearance in the story.

An engraving of a painting by the great 17th-century Dutch brewer-painter Jan Steen, ‘Le Roi Boit!’, which is sometimes said to show a yard of ale: it doesn’t, that glass is clearly only 15 or so inches long

The earliest reference to the coach driver legend I have found is from 1952, just 60 years ago, in a report of a day trip by the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art:

On the return journey the party visited the ancient coaching inn at Hatherleigh [west Devon], this proving one of the most attractive features of the excursion, for the hostelry dates from 1450 … To enter the rooms is to recapture the spirit of ancient times: for on the old walls are hung scores of objects of former use, powder-flasks, leathern bottles, mulling-slippers, and many other implements, particularly the “yard of ale” and “yard-and-a-half of ale” glasses handed to drivers of stage coaches.

(Mulling slippers, incidentally, are not what you put on your feet while wearing your thinking cap, but tin or copper slipper-shaped containers for filling with mulled beer and poking into the coals of a fire to warm the contents.)

By the 1960s, barely a decade after this first mention, the “yard-of-ale was a means of quenching a stagecoach driver’s thirst at an inn stop so that he could remain in the box” story seems to have become mainstream, and any inn worth its fake oak beams had a yard of ale on the wall as well. Here’s a description from the Brewing Review of a “pub” built as part of a British Week exhibition in Copenhagen in 1964 – read and weep:

It was entirely built of wood with a false ceiling and a roof of realistic wooden tiles, and contained a collection of sporting prints, a darts-board, a yard of ale glass, horse brasses and post horns and in every way typified the traditional “local”.

Along with the yard of ale glass on the wall came the revival of the yard-of-ale drinking contest, so that pubs from Boston to Sydney had men drenching themselves in beer as they tried to emulate the Eton wet bobs and dry bobs of the 19th century and finish their yard in under 10 seconds. (The current record is five seconds, apparently.)

But with all that, I hope you’ll agree, we have found no evidence that the yard of ale was originally “designed to meet the needs of stagecoach drivers” in a hurry. In fact, there is no evidence that the yard of ale was ever used to refresh coach drivers at all (and if it had been, it certainly wouldn’t have been handed up to the driver through an inn window, which would be an excellent way to either spill the ale or smash the glass). Instead, I think, it seems clear that the yard of ale was (1) produced as something of a show-off, for the glassmaker and the owner, and (2) primarily or almost solely supplied and bought as a “forfeit glass”, for use in drinking games and contests of skill, just as it is today.

However, the point of all this is not to show that the OCB is wrong, again. It’s to show how difficult it is to verify, or not, even the most widely known “fact”. Given that the coach driver/yard of ale meme has been repeated so often over the past 40 or 50 years, and it takes up only a couple of sentences in an OCB article of several hundred words, the writer was actually perfectly justified in not searching out references to back the claim up. For those two sentences, at the OUP’s rate of five cents a word, the writer would have earned about £1.75. It cost me three times that to travel up to the British Library and back, and I only live in West London. Factor in the time it all took, and researching every sentence you write rapidly becomes woefully cost-ineffective.

The problem is: you can’t afford to check everything. But at the same time, as we have seen, you can’t trust anything, certainly nothing written a century and a half or more after the times it claims to describe. Primary research is paramount, and secondary sources are not enough to be sure. The motto of the historian has to be: “Non lego, non credo“. So, pinned by the horns of this dilemma, what do you do? I don’t know. Certainly, if you are writing a short article, I think it’s entirely forgivable to use solely secondary sources: you don’t have time to do anything else. Not so much if you are writing a book. But the problem with the OCB is that, magnificent though its intentions are, it is really only a collection of short articles, few or none of which were written by people with any time to conduct primary research, and who were not being paid enough to conduct primary research anyway. So, understandably, they repeated the secondary sources: which is unfortunate when, as with the yard of ale/coach drivers story, those secondary sources appear to be completely wrong.

‘Guinness Marmite’ from the 1930s

Is there a brewery business with more books written about it – is there any business with more books written about it – than Guinness? Effectively a one-product operation, Guinness has inspired tens of millions of words. Without trying hard, I’ve managed to acquire 18 different books about Guinness, the brewery, the people, the product and/or the advertising (four of them written by people called Guinness), and that’s not counting the five editions I have of the lovely little handbook that Guinness used to give to visitors to the brewery at St James’s Gate, dated from 1928 to 1955. There are plenty more books on Guinness I don’t have.

Despite all those volumes of Guinnessiana, however, you can still find a remarkable quantity of Guinness inaccuracy and mythology, constantly added to and recycled, particularly about the brewery’s earliest days. The myths and errors range from Arthur Guinness’s date of birth (the claim that he was born on September 24, 1725 is demonstrably wrong) to the alleged uniqueness of Guinness’s yeast: the idea that the brewery’s success was down to the yeast Arthur Guinness brought with him to Dublin is strangely persistent, though the brewery’s own records show that as early as 1810-12 (and almost certainly earlier) St James’s Gate was borrowing yeast from seven different breweries.

Most accounts of the history of Guinness also miss out on some cracking stories too little known: the homosexual affair that almost brought the end of the brewery partnership in the late 1830s, for example; the still-unexplained attack of insanity that saw Guinness’s managing director, great-great nephew of Arthur Guinness I, carried out of the brewery in a straitjacket in 1895; and the link between the writings of Arthur Guinness I’s grandson Henry Grattan Guinness and the foundation of the state of Israel (which takes in the assassination of Arthur Guinness I’s great-great grandson in Egypt).

An advertisement for one-year-old West India porter from 1819

Let’s deal with a few more myths first, before we get into the juicy stuff. All the below are to be found in a book published in 2009 called Guinness: An Official Celebration, with a foreword by Rory Guinness, five-greats grandson of Arthur I:

1) “Arthur Guinness was born in 1725 in Celbridge, County Kildare.” The Dictionary of Irish Biography claims he was born on March 12 1725. However, that does not match the statement on Arthur Guinness’s grave in Oughterard, Kildare that he died on January 23 1803 “aged 78 years”, from which it can be inferred that his birthday must have been between January 24 1724 and January 23 1725. The most accurate statement, therefore is that his date of birth is unknown, but he was born 1724/5

2) “His father, Richard Guinness, was land steward to the Reverend Arthur Price, later Archbishop of Cashel, and his duties included brewing for the workers on the Archbishop’s estate.” There is NO evidence that Richard Guinness brewed for Archbishop Price, and it’s not usually, I suggest, the sort of task the land steward would have done anyway. Many narratives go on to claim that Arthur learnt to brew from helping his father. While it isn’t impossible that Arthur Guinness might have done some brewing or assisted with some brewing at Price’s estate, Bishopscourt – large domestic and farming establishments were somewhere between quite and highly likely to have their own brewing operation to supply ale for the farmworkers, the household servants and even the family – the brewing seems more likely, on the little evidence we have from elsewhere, to have been done by one of the lowlier servants, rather than the sort of educated young man Arthur Guinness obviously was.

(There are also regularly recurring claims that Arthur Guinness, or his father, was already brewing a black porter-like beer for Archbishop Price, which since we know his breweries at Leixlip and St James’ Gate originally only made ale, is another example of people Making It Up.)

3) “In 1752 the Archbishop died and bequeathed Arthur Guinness the sum of £100. Arthur used the money to open a small brewery in Leixlip.” While Price did leave Arthur (and his father Richard) £100 each in his will, this £100 was NOT the money that enabled Arthur to buy the brewery in Leixlip in 1755. As Patrick Guinness’s excellent book on the early years of the brewery, Arthur’s Round, makes clear, the money Arthur used to start in business as a brewer three years after the Archbishop’s death must largely have come from his father’s savings over 30 years of employment with Archbishop Price, plus, perhaps, money Richard had made from three years of running the White Hart inn in Celbridge after Price’s death.

An ad for extra-superior porter and ‘mild-stout Porter’, the latter strong but unaged

4) “Guinness was brewed using roasted barley, which gave it a distinct dark colour and taste.” Using unmalted barley, roasted or otherwise, was illegal when Arthur began brewing porter and stout, and roasted barley only started being used by Guinness around 1929/1930.

5) “Arthur Guinness must have been very confident that his beer would be a success as he signed a 9,000-year lease on the brewery.” This was almost certainly a legal fix to avoid, for whatever reason, a full transfer of the freehold, rather than any sign of confidence.

Arthur Lee Guinness

And now, a scandal or two. In 1839 Arthur Guinness II, the son of the founder, who had run the brewery since before his father’s death in 1803, was now in his 70s, and withdrawing from the business to leave it in the hands of the third generation. Arthur II had married Anne Lee in 1793. His eldest son, William, had entered the Church, and the two younger sons, Arthur Lee Guinness and Benjamin Lee Guinness, had been brought up to run the brewery. Benjamin had become a partner when he was 22, Arthur when he was 23. However, Arthur Lee became snared in a scandal that came close to seeing the business wound up.

Arthur Lee Guinness was living unmarried at the age of 42 in an apartment at the St James’s Gate brewery. He wrote nature poetry, collected pictures and sealed his letters with a stamp showing a young Greek god. His apartment was described by an American relative in 1840 as “crowded with knick-knacks, statuary, paintings, stuffed birds etc. His drawing room is furnished in Chinese style and most richly. In the yard there are plenty of gods and goddesses etc. There is a fountain which plays into a willow tree …” It was hardly the conventional lifestyle of a middle-aged brewer.

In the spring of 1839 the brewery hired as a clerk an 18-year-old would-be actor, Dionysius Boursiquot, the son of a Guinness relative-by marriage, Anna Maria Darley. Dionysius’s father was almost certainly a Trinity College lecturer and engineer, Dionysius Lardner (who is now making his second appearance in this blog), rather than Anna Darley’s husband, the Dublin wine merchant Samuel Boursiquot: Lardner had been their lodger. Dionysius Boursiquot, who later changed his name to Dion Boucicault and became a famous playwright and actor-manager, was slim and lively, with the dark hair and blue eyes typical of a certain type of Irish native – and Arthur Lee evidently became smitten.

Exactly what form the scandal took is unknown: the Guinness family seems to have removed all the records linked to it from St James’s Gate in the 1950s. But money was involved. Arthur Lee had apparently been issuing notes on the brewery partnership without the knowledge of the other partners, his father and brother. The obvious inference is that he was giving money to Boucicault, either as gifts or because he was being blackmailed.

A surviving letter in the Guinness archives from June 1839 from Arthur Lee Guinness to Arthur II shows clearly the pain he felt at his behaviour:

My dear Father, I well know it is impossible to justify to you my conduct if you will forgive me it is much to ask, but I already feel you have & I will ever be sincerely grateful … I know not what I should say, but do my dear Father believe me I feel deeply … the extreem [sic] & undeserved kindness you have ever, and now, More than ever shown me.

Believe me above all that ‘for worlds’ I would not hurt your mind, if I could avoid it – of all the living. Your feelings are most sacred to me, this situation, in which I have placed myself, has long caused me the acutest pain & your wishes on the subject must be religiously obeyed by me. I only implore you to allow me to hope and forbear a little longer, I feel it but just to do so …

Your dutiful, grateful but distressed son
A.L.G.

It appears that Boucicault was paid to go away: he turned up in London in May 1840 with enough money to buy a horse and carriage and entertain his friends “lavishly”. Meanwhile Arthur II and Benjamin agreed with Arthur Lee’s suggestion that, as part of the resolution of the crisis, he leave the brewery partnership, taking enough cash out of the business, £12,000, to buy his own home, Stillorgan Park, south of Dublin, and live “moderately”. Surviving letters in the Guinness archive indicate that at one point during the crisis it was suggested the whole brewing concern should be “given up” on the dissolution of the partnership between Arthur II and his sons. This would have meant the end of Guinness. However, a new partnership was formed without Arthur Lee, but with his father as titular head and his brother Benjamin at the helm, assisted by another partner, the son of the former brewery head clerk, John Purser junior.

The train that took visitors around St James’s Gate in the 1920s

Arthur Lee Guinness’s life after he left the brewery was not that moderate: another American visitor, Amelia Ransome Neville, described Stillorgan Park in the 1850s as “the most enchanting home I have ever known,” filled with embroidered silks, ivories, carved teak, and bronze gods. Arthur Lee organised weekend parties where guests included the Duke of Leinster and the Earl of Clarendon. Every afternoon at Stillorgan Park, Amelia wrote, “a blind harper, with white beard and flowing white hair, sat over at one side of the court and sang old melodies while he played an Irish harp.”

An English visitor in 1853 called Stillorgan Park “a veritable showplace. One saw there a superb house, elegantly furnished, with costly conservatories and gardens about, filled with the rarest flowers, and well-kept lawns and parks with paths through overshading trees, while statuary peeped out from clumps of thickest shrubbery a beautiful demesne indeed with outspread signs on every side of its owner’s wealth.” One of Arthur Lee’s cousin’s, Eliza O’Grady, lived with him at Stillorgan Park, doubtless playing the part of hostess.

Arthur Lee left Stillorgan Park in 1860, dying three years later, aged 65, at his final home, Roundwood House, Wicklow. While the sale of the contents of Stillorgan Park was taking place in 1860, Arthur Lee had a harper in the grounds play funeral dirges. The first Guinness bottle labels bearing the now famous harp trademark were issued in August 1862. We must wonder if Arthur Lee’s obvious fondness for harpers influenced the company’s choice of logo.

The St James’s Gate brewery from the air in 1939

By the early 1880s the brewery was being run by Arthur Lee’s nephew, Edward Guinness. But Edward, although only in his mid 30s, was slowly moving towards disentangling himself from the business. In 1873 he had married a distant cousin, Adelaide Guinness, who was the great-granddaughter of Arthur Guinness I’s brother Samuel. With his eldest son still a child, Edward had apparently solved the problem of maintaining family control by bringing in his wife’s youngest brother, Claude Guinness, as a senior manager in 1881. Claude was 29, he had graduated from New College, Oxford with a first-class degree, and he possessed a natural business brain. Now Edward could find the time to use his wealth in the pursuit of leisure. In 1880 he took a three-year lease on a Scottish grouse moor, an excellent excuse to extend hospitality to the socially influential. In 1882 he bought a schooner from the Earl of Gosford, a good friend of the Prince of Wales, which brought him into the yachting set that surrounded the future Edward VII.

In 1890, three years after the brewery had been floated as a public company, Edward Guinness left the Guinness board. Claude, 38, was managing director, with his older brother Reginald 48, now chairman. Later that year Edward was granted the title he longed for, becoming Lord Iveagh. In 1894 he acquired the stately home to go with the title, buying Elveden Hall in Suffolk for £159,000, the equivalent of £6 million in early 21st century money.

Edward’s plan to leave the daily concerns of St James’s Gate to his wife’s brothers and immerse himself completely in the golden life of an English aristocrat began to be derailed almost as soon as he acquired Elveden Hall. One day early in 1895 the brilliant Claude Guinness had a complete mental breakdown while working at St James’s Gate, and had to be removed from the brewery in a straitjacket. The trauma of the managing director being carried off raving was so great, somebody tore out the relevant page in the daily brewery log. There were rumours in the Guinness family much later that it was General Paralysis of the Insane – dementia brought on by the final stages of syphilis – and Claude was dead within a few weeks, aged 43. However, there is no other evidence to support this diagnosis: he had two healthy daughters, born 1891 and 1893 who, if he HAD been suffering from syphilis, would have been expected to show symptoms themselves. His sister Adelaide, Edward’s wife, also suffered from dementia as she grew older, ending her years out of sight in a private wing at Elveden Hall.

Coppers at the St James’s Gate brewery, 1939

Reginald Guinness, who had only reluctantly become chairman in 1890, now had to become managing director as well. In 1897 Edward rejoined the company board, and when Reginald retired in 1902 aged 60, Edward took back the chairman’s role, though 55 himself. He remained in control until his death in 1927 aged 80. It has been suggested that Claude’s death, by bringing Edward back to be in ultimate charge of the company for so long, prevented Guinness from reacting appropriately to the difficulties it faced after the First World War, with product quality problems and declining demand for its beer.

While Edward Guinness was helping to make the family synonymous with stout, another branch was bringing the Guinness name to the attention of the public in a completely different field: Biblical Zionism. Henry Grattan Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness I’s youngest brother, John Grattan Guinness, had been born in 1835, became an evangelical preacher in his 20s and, like his uncle Hosea, Arthur’s oldest son, had been ordained a minister. Henry worked among the poor in the East End of London, but also turning himself into an expert in “Biblical prophecy”.

In books such as The Approaching End of the Age, which sold 15,000 copies in eight years, and Light for the Last Days (1888), Henry told the world that the Bible showed the “times of the Gentiles” was coming to an end, which would be marked by the return of the Jews to their homeland in Palestine. Using figures obtained from the Old Testament, which he linked to astronomical observations, Henry predicted in Light for the Last Days that a key year in this eventual return would be 1917.

Among the people who read Henry Grattan’s analyses of history as seen through the prism of Biblical prophecy was Arthur Balfour, who wrote to Henry in 1903, when he was prime minister, to say that he was very interested in Henry’s books and had studied them closely. Henry died in 1910, but in November 1917, Balfour, then foreign minister, signed what became known as the Balfour Declaration, a letter to Lord Rothschild which declared that the British government would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Did Balfour act deliberately to bring Henry Grattan’s prophecy to pass? He certainly must have issued the declaration knowing what Henry Grattan had said about 1917. However, late 1917 was strategically probably the first and best time such a declaration could have been made by Britain anyway: the Allied armies had finally begun to overcome the Germans and Turks in the war in Palestine. Five weeks after the Balfour Declaration was issued, Sir Edmund Allenby’s troops liberated Jerusalem.

Whatever Henry Grattan’s influence on the Balfour Declaration, Britain initially encouraged Jewish immigration into Palestine, under its post-First World War League of Nations Mandate to govern the territory. After the Arabs living in Palestine eventually broke out in revolt in the 1930s over the continuing arrival of Jewish settlers, Britain tried to curtail the number of Jews allowed in. During the Second World War, the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine remained in place, a policy that caused increasing anger among Jewish militants in the territory.

Giant storage vats, some 24 feet high, at the Guinness brewery in 1939

In November 1944, as part of a terrorist campaign directed at trying to get those restrictions lifted, two members of a Jewish group known to the British authorities as the Stern Gang shot dead in Cairo the British Minister Resident in the Middle East – Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Ernest Guinness’s third son, and Henry Grattan Guinness’s first cousin twice removed. If Henry did inspire the Balfour Declaration with his predictions, then, arguably, he set off a chain of dominoes that resulted, 56 years later, in his father’s brother’s great-grandson getting hit by three revolver bullets as he sat in the front passenger seat of his black Humber limousine waiting to be let into his official residence after a trip to the British Embassy in Cairo.

(Incidentally, in The Search for God and Guinness, published 2009, Stephen Mansfield claims that “Henry Grattan Guinness, writing nearly sixty years before the event, predicted the miraculous event of 1948 [the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel] when Israel again became a nation. This remains one of the most prescient works of an author in history.” I am not aware, however, that Henry Grattan ever referred to 1948 in connection with Israel in any published work: this appears to be another Guinness myth. The nearest we get to that claim is a note by Michele Guinness in her book The Guinness Spirit that Henry had “scribbled in pencil” 1948 at the end of the final paragraph of the Book of Ezekiel in his “large black Bible”.

The cooperage yard at St James’s Gate in 1939

If all that has given you a thirst for more Guinness, here’s my personal list of the 10 best books about the brewery, its history, the family and the product:

1 The Guinnesses Joe Joyce 2009
Best general study of the brewery and the family, reasonably free from error (though it gets the origins of porter wrong), and far fuller than most on events such as the Arthur Lee scandal: Joyce has a journalist’s eye for a good story, and excellent command of a multi-stranded narrative.

2 Arthur’s Round Patrick Guinness 2008
The essential antidote to many Guinness myths and misunderstandings, and the most in-depth study of Arthur Guinness I’s roots and the early years of the enterprise.

3= Guinness’s Brewery in the Irish Economy 1759-1876 Patrick Lynch and John Vaizey 1960
3= Guinness 1886-1939: From Incorporation to the Second World War SR Denison and Oliver MacDonagh 1998
(only two thirds of the original manuscript, which sits in the Guinness Archives)
Two of the best business history books on any subject, and essential if you want to understand the growth and expansion of the company. Pity about the 10-year gap in coverage between 1877 and 1885 …

5 A Bottle of Guinness Please David Hughes 2008
Primarily meant to be a history of Guinness bottling and exporting, but fabulously detailed on everything from the brewing process to the label printing, and superbly illustrated. Major flaw – no index

6 The Book of Guinness Advertising Jim Davies 1998
13 years later, and therefore more up to date, that the identically titled and also excellent book by Brian Sibley. Guinness porn. Unfortunately now 14 years out of date, which means, for example, the Surfer ad from 1999, regarded as one of the greatest advertisements ever made, is missing.

7 The Guinness Book of Guinness Edward Guinness 1988
Massive collection (540 pages) of anecdotes covering the first half-century of the Park Royal brewery, rammed full of fascinating stuff, such as the way the new brewery was “painted” with vat bottoms from St James’s Gate before it opened to try to ensure the same microflora and fauna were present and get the authentic Guinness flavour right. Major flaw – again, no index.

8 Requiem for a Family Business Jonathan Guinness 1997
A revealing study by the third Lord Moyne of the fading of family control of the firm, which culminated in the appointment of Ernest Saunders and the scandal of the dodgy dealings that went on in the Distillers takeover in 1987.

9 The Guinness Spirit Michele Guinness 1998
500-page volume by a Guinness-by-marriage on the whole family, not just brewers but bankers and missionaries, soldiers, politicians, socialites. Repeats a fair number of myths, but good for appreciating the evangelical strand that powered so many members of the Guinness family, and took them around the world, to China, to the Congo and to New Zealand, as well as the East End of London.

10 Guinness Times: My Days in the World’s Most Famous Brewery Al Byrne 1999
Al Byrne joined Guinness in 1938 aged 14 as a boy-labourer and rose through the ranks, working as a “number-taker” (recording the numbers and destinations of full casks as they left the brewery, and ticking them off when they returned) while, somehow, taking a degree at Trinity College, despite being a Roman Catholic. He graduated in 1945 and was immediately rewarded by Guinness with a staff job, unheard-of in the social conditions of the time. Later he worked as a “traveller” (sales rep) and in the internal communications department, producing the Guinness Times newspaper, before he left in 1978 to be a journalist. It’s an insightful view of conditions at the company over a period when it was starting to struggle, well produced and excellently illustrated.

There is still plenty more to be told about the history of Guinness that has not yet been revealed: I was lucky enough to get a day peeping into the archives at the Park Royal brewery in London before it closed, and there was masses of fascinating stuff, including a fair bit on the long, slow development of nitrogen-dispense draught Guinness, and all the technical problems that surfaced along the way. Must pull those notes out of the attic …

It’s #IPADAY again, and time for some more IPA mythbusting. Despite the best efforts of many, an amazing amount of inaccurate, made-up rubbish continues to be perpetuated about the history and origins of IPA, or India Pale Ale. All the myths below are genuine statements culled in the past few weeks from websites that claim to be experts on beer.

Myth 1 “The original IPAs had strengths close to 8 to 9 per cent alcohol by volume”.

Rubbish: records show early IPAs rarely went much above 6 or 6.5 per cent abv.

Myth 2 “Historians believe that IPA was then watered down for the troops, while officers and the elite would savour the beer at full strength.”

Complete cobblers’ awls. No historian has ever believed that. There is NO evidence IPA was ever watered down, and the troops drank porter anyway.

Myth 3 “Porters and stouts were not suitable for the torrid Indian climate.”

More unresearched rubbish. Considerable amounts of porter – far more porter than IPA, probably – were exported to India, from at least the second half of the 18th century right through to the end of the 19th century. The East India Company actually used to ask brewers to tender for suppliers of porter to India.

Myth 4 “North American craft brewers more closely adhere to early IPA specifications than do British brewers who, as a group, do not.”

Not true. North American IPAs – excellent though many of them are – use hop types completely unknown to 18th and 19th century British brewers, and major on floral, citrussy flavours and aromas in their IPAs, which are designed to be drunk comparatively young. Early British IPAs were designed to be drunk aged anything up to nine months or more, and while they were certainly bitter, they would have lost most of any hop aroma that they originally had. In addition it is becoming increasingly clear that early British IPAs would have showed at least some Brettanomyces character, from their long ageing in cask. Apart from both containing lots of hops, and being similar colours (except for the black ones) modern North American IPAs and early British IPAs could not be much more different.

Myth 5 “‘East India Pale Ale’ was first brewed in England last century for the colonies East of India such as New Zealand and Australia.”

If you’re reading this, DB Breweries of New Zealand, perpetrators of this dreadful piece of marketing fackwittery in connection with Tui East India Pale Ale, “the East Indies” was the term for the Indian sub-continent and South-East Asia, including the archipelagos of maritime South-East Asia, a name used to contrast the region with the West Indies. Trading companies that did business in this part of the world included the East India Company of London, and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or United East India Company. East India Pale Ale is simply a synonym for India Pale Ale, pale ale brewed for India/the East Indies. It has nothing to do with “East of India”, or Australasia. However, since a year or so back Tui East India Pale Ale won the Brewers Guild of New Zealand award for best New Zealand Draught, an amber lager style, it appears the beer is as accurate in style as the history is as accurate in its facts.

(Addendum: I’ve only just noticed, after several readings of the original quote, that it also says “‘East India Pale Ale’ was first brewed in England last century …”. “Last century” was, of course, the 20th century. They presumably meant the 19th century. Which is wrong anyway, as highly hopped pale ales for India were first sent out from England to India in the 18th century …)

You can read last year’s #IPADAY mythbusting from the Zythophile blog here. Have a good one.

This week’s letter comes from a Mr R Protz of St Albans, who writes:

Martyn,
I took a snap of the clip for ‘E’ in the National Brewery Centre Bar y’day. I’ve included it in 300 More Beers … in the Best Bitter section but I notice it’s now labelled Burton Ale. What are your thoughts? Thanks,
Roger

Ale fail: ‘E’ is NOT a Burton Ale.

The answer, of course, is that Roger is completely correct, Worthington ‘E’ is a pale ale or bitter with a strength that puts it in the “Best Bitter” category, and NOT a Burton Ale, which is a different style of beer altogether– darker and sweeter. (Nasty clash of 1920s and 1970s typefaces on that pumpclip there, too, but let’s move on …)

Indeed, back in the 19th century, Worthington ‘E’ was described as an India Pale Ale, as these two ads below from the early 1890s show. Apparently to distinguish themselves from all other brewers, Worthington labelled their brews with a strange and not particularly logical naming system. Their Burton Ales, strong, bitter-sweet and rather darker than an IPA/best bitter, were called G (the strongest, equivalent to Bass No 1), F (the second-strongest) and D (the third-strongest, in the 20th century sold as a mild) – they’re the ones called “strong ales” in the ads. It looks as if the beers, mostly, go up in strength from A mild through B and C and up to G – but what about M light dinner ale, and S and SS, which to most brewers would mean “stout” and “single stout”, but to Worthington mean their cheapest mild and their cheapest light dinner ale, respectively. And XE IPA looks to be weaker than the E …

One of the most interesting bits in that first ad is right down the bottom, “Special line – 570 dozen bottles Worthington’s East India Pale Ale (Winter 89-90)”. Bottled East India Pale Ale was the beer later known as White Shield, of course – the ad was published in April 1891, so those bottles were between 14 and 17 months old. Today that’s pretty much the end of the “best before” time on White Shield. Without a price, it’s guesswork if those almost 7,000 bottles were being sold because they were near the end of their shelf-life or because the age was a bonus …

The second ad, from 1892, also has some noteworthy features. For once in a Victorian beer ad we get a description of a couple of the beers, the M and SS dinner ales, “pale amber colour, extremely delicate flavour”. We also discover that Worthington was making an “ordinary” bitter under the conventional label ‘BB’ (for “best bitter”), and its porter, stout and double stout had fairly conventional names as well, XX, XXX and DS respectively. (Worthington also made an Imperial stout at one time with the perversely logical name ‘I’. although this had been discontinued by 1961 at the latest.)

The price of ‘E’ IPA, 60 shillings a barrel, in the 19th century would indicate, in most brewers’ price lists, an OG of at least 1080, but the Burton brewers always charged a premium for their IPAs, and its strength was actually down around the 1065 OG mark. That price per barrel meant that on occasions ‘E’ was actually advertised by retailers in the 19th century as “60-shilling ale” or “60-shilling bitter”. It retailed for the high price of two pence a (half-pint) glass, twice as much as ordinary mild ale, and the equivalent today of as much as £7.40 a pint.

‘E’ was Worthington’s equivalent of Bass “red triangle” pale ale, and after the two breweries merged in 1927, the two beers were eventually brewed to the same recipe: not that anybody told the drinking public, of course. Worthington ‘E’ and draught Bass continued to be sold in competition to each other as premium draught beers, despite being exactly the same brews (and bottled ‘E’ – ‘BE’ – was the same beer as bottled Bass Red Triangle).

Worthington’s “60/- Ale” (that is, ‘E’), from the Liverpool Echo in 1894.

By the end of the 1950s there was a growing trade in “keg” beer, pasteurised and pressurised, most of which started out as “premium” draught bitters and bottled pale ales. Flowers of Luton and Stratford, one of the pioneers, kegged its Flowers Original best bitter: Watney’s kegged its Red Barrel bottled premium ale. In response, Bass Worthington began “kegging” its own premium bitters. In December 1960, the new chairman of Bass, the former civil servant and wartime MP Sir Percy Grigg, told shareholders that

“in order to meet the demand which exists for a beer popularly known as keg or canister we are now producing our best pale ales in this form. There is no intention that these canister beers should supplant our Bass Triangle and Worthington E draught beers; our aim is rather to put ourselves in a position to supply a beer of character wherever and whenever it may be required.

By January 1964, after the merger in 1961 with the Birmingham brewer Mitchells & Butlers, chairman Grigg was able to say to shareholders:

There has been a spectacular growth in the sales of our canister beers although this to a certain extent has been at the expense of the traditional Bass and Worthington qualities. In producing a variety of canister beers, such as draught Bass, M&B Mild and Worthington ‘E’ we are able to offer a wide choice of excellent beers. Their acceptance by all age groups everywhere has been most encouraging.

You’ve got to love that line about “this to a certain extent has been at the expense of the traditional Bass and Worthington qualities”,  code for “it  horrifies our brewers to be making this stuff but…”. Grigg also announced that the company has introduced “a new luxury line”, the high-gravity Bass Gold Triangle, “designed to meet the most discriminating tastes”, which looks to have sold at two shillings a nip, or third of a pint – more than twice as expensive, ounce for ounce, as bottled Red Triangle pale ale. It does not seem to have lasted long.

Bass Charrington ad 1970, showing keg Worthington ‘E’ and bottled “Worthington ‘E’ India Pale Ale”. Spot the dreadful spelling mistake …

Although “canister” Bass ale remained in the line-up, the company – which became Bass Charrington in 1967 – pushed Worthington ‘E’ as its major keg bitter. Curiously, as this advertisement from The Times in 1970 shows, the bottled version of ‘E’ was still called an India Pale Ale. It was almost as odd an echo of the past as that Toby jug in the Chas Barrington logo, which was originally the badge of Hoare’s brewery in Wapping, East London, taken over by Charrington’s in the 1920s. Apart from that, the whole emphasis was on modernity: only keg draught beers, on show, no handpumps, no Charrington beers (apart from Carling Black Label and Tennents, the lager brands Charrington had brought to the marriage). That year the Bass Charrington chairman, Alan Walker, formerly the boss of M&B, told shareholders: “Worthington ‘E’ again increased its share of the ale market, the demand for Keg Worthington ‘E’ being particularly strong.”

Through the 1970s, Worthington ‘E’ was one of the leading keg beers, simply because Bass Charrington, as the biggest pub owner in the country, with more than 11,000 outlets, had so many bartops to put it on. A survey by the Daily Mirror in July 1972 found it the strongest of the six “national” keg beers, at 1037.8 OG and 4 per cent abv, but its price, 14 to 17p a pint – equivalent to perhaps £2.85 to £3.46 today – was more expensive than anything else except Carlsberg (3.1 per cent abv), at 18p a pint, and Carling Black Label (4.3 per cent abv), at 16 to 20p a pint. Batham’s bitter, for comparison, was 1043.2 OG, 4.7 per cent abv and 13p a pint. (Bottled Worthington ‘E’ was a more respectable 1047.1 OG, 5 per cent abv, and 9p for a half-pint bottle.)

Like all the leading keg beers, however, the rise of the Campaign for Real Ale was not good for Worthington ‘E’, and it became a “skunked” brand, like Watney’s Red Barrel, shorthand for all that was hideous about mass-produced, over-priced, over-fizzy national beers. It looks to have been replaced as Bass’s keg bartop offering by another of those beers advertised back in the late 19th century, Worthington Best Bitter (which as one point was being advertised on television by a series of ads apparently based on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow Advertising agencies with brewery accounts seem to have a fascination with the era of Brigadier Gerard: Whitbread used Stephen Fry (and the marvellous Tim McInnerny, in a vaguely early 19th century military romp for its own Best Bitter, and Charles Wells, of course, is currently using Rick Mayall as “the Bombadier”. Is it because they can thereby associate their brand with something macho and military, but at the same time less threatening than the horrors of 20th or 21st century war?). Keg ‘E’ looks to have survived until 1994, at least, but eventually the brand faded away.

Until, that is, Steve Wellington was put in charge of the Worthington’s brewery at the National Brewery Centre in Burton upon Trent. Steve had the run of the old Bass brewing books, and seeing entries such as “540 barrels of Bass/E” from the 1960s, decided that since he couldn’t brew Draught Bass – because Interbrew had kept the rights to that brand name when it sold the former Bass brewery to Coors in 2000, and Draught Bass is now brewed under licence by Marston’s – he could justifiably brew exactly the same beer under the name Worthington ‘E’.

‘E’ continued under Steve’s replacement at the Worthington’s brewery, Jim Applebee, and I’m guessing that it will continue to be brewed under Ian’s new replacement, Stephano Cossi, formerly of the Thornbridge brewery in Derbyshire. I doubt there was a brewery buff in Britain that did not cheer when they heard Stephano was taking over at Worthington’s: he did some terrific work at Thornbridge, including one of my personal top-10 beers, Bracia, a lovely, lovely beer. But Stephano, if you read this – do get the marketing department to stop calling ‘E’ a Burton Ale. It ain’t – it’s a genuine 19th century IPA.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for new beers to brew, can I suggest a resurrection for Worthington ‘G’? I’m guessing that because Interbrew/AB InBev still owns the Bass trademark, the Worthington brewery can’t brew a top-of-the-line genuine Burton Ale under the name Bass No 1. But it can certainly brew the same beer under the name Worthington ‘G’, which was the Worthington equivalent of No 1, undoubtedly brewed, after the Bass-Worthington merger, to the same recipe to No1 (and which also disappeared some time before 1961). That would definitely be a welcome return for another classic beer.

It’s a story I’ve been guilty of treating a little too uncritically myself: “In the Middle Ages people drank beer rather than water because the water wasn’t safe.” But is that correct? No, not at all, according to the American food history blogger Jim Chevallier, who calls it The Great Medieval Water Myth

Chevallier declares (and a big hat-tip to Boak and Bailey for pointing me in his direction):

“Not only are there specific – and very casual – mentions of people drinking water all through the Medieval era, but there seems to be no evidence that they thought of it as unhealthy except when (as today) it overtly appeared so. Doctors had slightly more nuanced views, but certainly neither recommended against drinking water in general nor using alcohol to avoid it.”

He quotes the book Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, by Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby, which says: “The myth of constant beer drinking is also false; water was available to drink in many forms (rivers, rain water, melted snow) and was often used to dilute wine.” And he concludes:

“There is no specific reason then to believe that people of the time drank proportionately less water than we do today; rather, since water was not typically sold, transported, taxed, etc., there simply would have been no reason to record its use. Did people in the time prefer alcoholic drinks? Probably, and for the same reason most people today drink liquids other than water: variety and flavor. A young man in a tenth century Saxon colloquy is asked what he drinks and answers: “Beer if I have it or water if I have no beer.” This is a clear expression of both being comfortable with water and preferring beer.

It is certainly true that water-drinking was considerably more widespread than many modern commentators would seem to believe, particularly by the less-well-off. In 13th century London, as the population grew, and the many wells and watercourses that had previously supplied Londoners, such as the Walbrook, the Oldbourn (or Holborn) and the Langbourn (which arose in the fen or bog that Fenchurch was erected near), were built around, covered over, filled in and otherwise made undrinkable, to quote John Stowe’s Survey of London of 1603,

“they were forced to seek sweet Waters abroad; whereof some, at the Request of King Henry the Third, in the 21st Year of his Reign [1237], were (for the Profit of the City… to wit, for the Poor to Drink [my emphasis], and the Rich to dress their Meat) granted to the Citizens, and their Successors … with Liberty to convey Water from the Town of Tyburn, by Pipes of Lead into the City.”

The “town of Tyburn” was the small settlement near what is now Marble Arch, about two and a half miles from St Paul’s cathedral, which took its name from the Tyburn River, the middle of three rivers that flowed down from the heights of Hampstead to the Thames (the others being the Westbourne and the Fleet). The water that was taken by pipe to the City came, depending on which source – pun – you believe in, either from the Tyburn river, or six wells at Tyburn village. The “Pipes of lead” eventually became the Great Conduit.

St Hildegard of Bingen

But is it true that “Doctors … certainly neither recommended against drinking water in general nor using alcohol to avoid it”? There were, in fact, influential voices who were not 100 per cent in favour of promoting water over ale. St Hildegard of Bingen, writing in the middle of the 12th century in her book Cause et Cure (“Causes and Cures”), said: “Whether one is healthy or infirm, if one is thirsty after sleeping one should drink wine or beer but not water. For water might damage rather than help one’s blood and humours …beer fattens the flesh and … lends a beautiful colour to the face. Water, however, weakens a person.”

Hildegard’s Physica Sacra of circa 1150 also has a fair bit to say about water and health, and while she says (in the section on salt) “It is more healthful and sane for a thirsty person to drink water, rather than wine, to quench his thirst”, she certainly seemed to have had some qualms about water. For example, talking about pearls, she said: “Pearls are born in certain salty river waters … Take these pearls and place them in water. All the slime in the water will gather around the pearls and the top of the water will be purified and cleansed. A person who has fever should frequently drink the top of this water and he will be better.” That would seem to suggest that she did not think water-drinking was automatically good for sick people without the water being purified.

She also wrote: “One whose lungs ail in any way … should not drink water, since it produces mucus around the lungs … Beer does not harm him much, because it has been boiled,” and someone who has taken a purgative “may drink wine in moderation but should avoid water.”

In addition, in the specific section in the Physica Sacra on water, Hildegard commented on the waters of various German rivers, saying of the Saar: “Its water is healthful neither for drinking fresh nor for being taken cooked in food.” On the Rhine, she wrote: “Its water, taken uncooked, aggravates a healthy person … if the same water is consumed in foods or drinks, or if it is poured over a person’s flesh in a bath or in face-washing, it puffs up the flesh, making it swollen, making it dark-looking.” The Main was all right: “Its water, consumed in food or drink … makes the skin and flesh clean and smooth. It does not change a person or make him sick.” However, the Danube was not recommended: “Its water is not healthy for food or drink since its harshness injures a person’s internal organs.”

Hildegard, therefore, did not universally condemn water, and indeed praised it as a thirst-quencher, but she certainly felt people had to be careful of water, on occasions, when drinking it.

Four centuries after Hildegard, another doctor, Andrew Boorde, was even less enthusiastic about water. In his Dyetary of Helth, first published in 1542, Boorde wrote that

“water is not holsome, sole by it selfe, for an Englysshe man … water is colde, slowe, and slacke of dygestyon. The best water is rayne-water, so that it be clene and purely taken. Next to it is ronnyng water, the whiche doth swyftly ronne from the Eest in to the west upon stones or pybles. The thyrde water to be praysed, is ryver or broke [brook] water, the which is clere, ronnyng on pibles and gravayl. Standynge waters, the whiche be refresshed with a fresshe spryng, is commendable; but standyng waters, and well-waters to the whiche the sonne hath no reflyxyon, althoughe they be lyghter than other ronnyng waters be, yet they be not so commendable. And let every man be ware of all waters the whiche be standynge, and be putryfyed with froth, duckemet, and mudde; for yf they bake, or brewe, or dresse meate with it, it shall ingender many infyrmytes.”

So: water – your doctor doesn’t necessarily recommend it at all times and in all places. But it certainly wasn’t condemned outright, and there is no doubt water was drunk, by the poor, and probably by others as well. The records of St Paul’s Cathedral in the 13th century show that tenants of the manors owned by the cathedral who performed work for their landlord, known as a precaria, were supplied with food and drink on the day, but sometimes it was a precaria ad cerevisiam, “with beer”, and sometimes a precaria ad aquam, “with water”. So the bald statement “In the Middle Ages people drank beer rather than water because the water wasn’t safe” is indeed, as Jim Chevallier says, plain wrong.

On the other hand, they drank a lot of ale (and, once hops arrived, beer as well). Those same accounts of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, in the late 13th century indicate an allowance of one “bolla” or gallon of ale per person a day. Still, while monks, canons, workers in religious institutions and the like might have been that lucky, I doubt strongly that every peasant drank that much, all the time. Indeed, there is a very good argument that the country simply could not have grown enough grain to give everyone a gallon of beer a day, every day, while also providing enough grain to meet the demand for bread as well.

The high allowance for beer in monasteries certainly suggests there was little water-drinking going on behind monastery walls: but out in the wider world, where brewing in the early Middle Ages, outside big institutions, cities or large towns, probably generally relied upon householders with the occasional capital surplus to buy some malted grain, knock up a batch of ale and stick the traditional bush up outside the front door to let their neighbours know to pop round for a pint, it seems likely alcohol was rather more of a treat than a regular daily occurrence. Since there was no tea, no coffee or fruit juices, and milk would not have lasted long, that left only one other drink for the thirsty peasant – water.

Normandy, 70 years ago, and one of the biggest concerns of the British troops who have made it over the channel, survived the landings and pushed out into the bocage against bitter German resistance is not the V1 flying bomb blitz threatening their families back home, nor the continued failure to capture the port of Cherbourg – but the lack of beer in the bridgehead. On 20 June 1944, two weeks after D-Day, Reuter’s special correspondent with the Allied Forces in France wrote to newspapers in the UK that all that was available in the newly liberated estaminets a few miles inland from the beaches was cider, “and it is pretty watery stuff. I saw a British private wistfully order a pint of mild and bitter: but the glass he sat down with contained the eternal cider.”

Tangmere, Sussex, July 1944: in front of a Spitfire IX of 332 (Norwegian) Squadron, a standard 45 gallon Typhoon/Hurricane ‘Torpedo’ jettison tank modified for use on the Spitfire (because of an expected shortage of 45-gallon shaped or slipper tanks) is filled with PA ale for flying over to Normandy while an RAF ‘erk’ writes a cheery message on the tank. The pilot sitting on the wing in this clearly posed government publicity picture is wearing a Norwegian Air Force cap-badge – something no one who has reprinted this picture seems ever to have pointed out. Is the man filling the tank a brewery worker? Surely. Is the beer from Henty and Constable’s brewery in nearby Chichester? It seems very likely …

It would not be until July 12 when “real British beer” finally officially reached the battling troops in Normandy, and even then the quantity was enough only for one pint per man. But long before then, enterprising pilots in the RAF – and the USAAF – had been engaged in shipping beer into Northern France privately, using what the troops called “flying pubs”.

Some of the first attempts to bring beer over the Channel after D-Day used the expendable drop tanks, or jettison tanks to give them their proper RAF designation, carried by aircraft such as the Spitfire and Typhoon and normally filled with fuel to give them extra range. These sem to have been semi-official efforts: the Air Ministry actually distributed a photograph to newspapers showing a Spitfire of 332 (Norwegian) Squadron at Tangmere airfield in Sussex having its 45-gallon jettison tank being filled with beer from two wooden casks supplied by the Chichester brewer Henty & Constable, while the pilot relaxed on the wing.

It was presumably 270 gallons of beer from Henty and Constable that was flown in drop tanks slung under three Spitfire Mk IXbs from Tangmere to an airfield at Bény-Sur-Mer in Normandy, some 110 miles south of England and three miles from the sea, on June 13 1944, D-Day plus seven: the first known landing of beer during the invasion. One of the pilots was Flight Lieutenant Lloyd Berryman of 412 Squadron, 126 Wing, Second Tactical Air Force, Royal Canadian Air Force. The airstrip at Bény-Sur-Mer would not, in fact, be finished officially for another two days when Berryman’s boss, Wing Commander Keith Hudson, singled him out at a briefing at the wing’s Tangmere base to deliver a “sizeable” beer consignment to the airstrip, known as B4. Berryman recalled:

“The instructions went something like this, ‘Get a couple other pilots and arrange with the officers’ mess to steam out the jet [jettison] tanks and load them up with beer. When we get over the beachhead drop out of formation and land on the strip. We’re told the Nazis are fouling the drinking water, so it will be appreciated. There’s no trouble finding the strip, the battleship Rodney is firing salvoes on Caen and it’s immediately below. We’ll be flying over at 13,000 [feet] so the beer will be cold enough when you arrive.’

“I remember getting Murray Haver from Hamilton and a third pilot (whose name escapes me) to carry out the caper. In reflection it now seems like an appropriate Air Force gesture for which the erks (infantrymen) would be most appreciative. By the time I got down to 5,000 the welcoming from the Rodney was hardly inviting but sure enough there was the strip. Wheels down and in we go, three Spits with 90-gallon jet tanks fully loaded with cool beer.

“As I rolled to the end of the mesh runway it was hard to figure … there was absolutely no one in sight. What do we do now, I wondered, we can’t just sit here and wait for someone to show up. What’s with the communications? Finally I saw someone peering out at us from behind a tree and I waved frantically to get him out to the aircraft. Sure enough out bounds this army type and he climbs onto the wing with the welcome: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Whereupon he got a short, but nevertheless terse, version of the story.

“‘Look,’ he said, ‘can you see that church steeple at the far end of the strip? Well it’s loaded with German snipers and we’ve been all day trying to clear them out so you better drop your tanks and bugger off before it’s too late.’ In moments we were out of there, but such was the welcoming for the first Spitfire at our B4 airstrip in Normandy.”

Later, in the 1950s back in in Canada, by chance Berryman actually met the man who climbed onto his wing and told him to bugger off.

Four days after Berryman’s landing, on 17 June 1944, and 11 days after the invasion started, a Spitfire of 416 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force flew over from England to the newly built airfield at Bazenville, just three miles from Gold Beach, with a drop tank full of beer slung below its fuselage. The tank had been scoured out first with steam but “tough luck; it still tasted of petrol,” according to Dan Noonan, a Flight Commander with 416 Squadron.

The heftier Hawker Typhoon could carry even more beer. Pilots of the RAF’s 123 Wing, flying rocket-firing Typhoons and based from 19 July 1944 at Martragny, a few miles east of Bayeux, would run a “shufti-kite” across to Shoreham, 110 miles away, where a local brewery would fill two 90-gallon jettison tanks attached below each of the Typhoon’s wings with beer. Then the pilot would hurry back across the Channel and the RAF personnel at Martragny would drink it, quickly. There was one problem with transporting beer in jettison tanks: according to 123 Wing’s commanding officer, the New Zealand-born RAF ace Group Captain Desmond Scott, on the trip over to Normandy the beer “took on rather a metallic taste, but the wing made short work of it.”

However, the journey over the channel, at 15,000 feet or so, cooled the beer down nicely for when it reached those on the ground: indeed, according to newspaper reports, not only did Spitfires supply beer shortly after D-Day in jettison tanks made from vulcanised paper fibre, but P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, presumably flown by the USAAF, had carried iced custard, or ice-cream, in their drop-tanks to troops on the Normandy beachheads: “They flew at 15,000 feet and delivered their cargo iced in perfect condition.” (This is not as unlikely as it seems: the US army had mobile ice-cream making machines for the troops in the Second World War, and so did many US Navy ships.)

The Typhoons’ exploits were reported in Time Magazine on July 2 1944 under the headline “Flying Pubs”:

A great thirst attacked British troops rushing emergency landing strips to completion in the dust of Normandy. Thinking of luckier comrades guzzling in country estaminets and town bistros, the runway builders began to grouse. They wanted beer. They got it. Rocket-firing Typhoons, before going on to shoot up Nazis, landed on the runways with auxiliary fuel tanks full of beer. Swarms of the thirsty gathered round with enamel mugs. The first tank-fulls tasted bad because of the tank linings; this flavor was overcome by chemical means and later loads were delicious. Just like the corner pub at home.

Unfortunately, United States Army Air Forces P-47 Thunderbolts did for 123 Wing’s beer runs: the Typhoon was easily mistaken by inexperienced American pilots for the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, and according to Group Captain Scott, “our aerial brewer’s dray was attacked by American Thunderbolts twice in one day, and was forced to jettison its beer tanks into the Channel … beer cost us money, and these two encounters proved expensive.” The Wing’s draught beer flights came to a sudden halt, and Scott had to arrange for an old twin-engined Anson to fly in cases of Guinness: “The troops mixed it with champagne to produce black velvet. It was hardly a cockney’s drink, but they appeared to like it,” he wrote.

It may have been 123 Wing’s experience that was covered in a publication called The Airman’s Almanac in 1945:

A possible peacetime use for the auxiliary fuel tanks attached to the underside of fighter planes in World War II to increase their range was demonstrated in the Normandy invasion of 1944. British ground crews, rushing emergency landing strips to completion in the dust and heat of the French province, complained of thirst. Their complaint being heard, rocket-firing Typhoons coming over from England on their way to German targets landed on the newly built strips with their military fuel tanks full of beer. The first tankfuls tasted awful because of the tank linings. Before the second ‘beer trip’ the tanks were treated chemically and the air-hauled brew was reported extremely palatable.

Ironically, Thunderbolt pilots learnt what the Typhoons had been doing, and copied it themselves. Lieutenant William R Dunn of the 513th Fighter Squadron, USAAF, the first American air ace of the Second World War, was a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in Normandy. He recorded:

During our brief stay at A6 airfield, we learned another trick of the trade from our neighbouring RAF allies, a Typhoon squadron based near Caen. Periodically they’d send a kite with a clean belly tank back to England, where the tank was filled with beer. A flight back to France at an altitude of about 15,000 feet and the beer arrived nice and cold. We soon followed their lead, with our 150-gallon belly tanks. Those British types sure know how to take all the comforts of home to war with them.

The other method used was to attach casks to the bomb racks. Pilots with the RAF’s No 131 (Polish) wing, flying Spitfire Mk IXs, (probably 302 Squadron or 308 Squadron, both fighter-bomber units) claimed to have invented the idea of the “beer bomb”, using casks that had home-made nose-cones fitted to make them more streamlined, which were fitted to the Spitfire’s bomb racks. On 3 August 1944 131 Wing moved from England to the airfield at Plumentot, near Caen, and “beer bombing” began:

Even more popular was the ‘beer-bomb’, invented and first used by No. 131 Fighter Wing when still stationed in England. The bomb has nothing atomic about it, so the details can now be divulged. The invention is, in fact, simplicity itself: it entailed a barrel of beer, a bomb-carrying aircraft, and a willing pilot (the three were available in increasing order of magnitude). The procedure, freely disclosed for the benefit of thirsty humanity, was for the aircraft to be carefully ‘bombed up’ with a barrel of beer, flown off with every precaution to Plumentot in Normandy and landed with equal care. Never were bombs more warmly welcomed. Not least because of the dust.

Pictures exist of the “beer bombs” being put together: presumably at Ford airfield in West Sussex, where 302 and 308 squadrons were based just before they were moved to Plumentot, in which case, again, the beer may well have come from Henty and Constable, eight or so miles away at Chichester.

Above and below, ‘beer bombs’, wooden firkins being fitted with streamlined ‘nose cones’ for transporting in bomb racks underneath Spitfires by members of 131 Fighter Wing, probably in August 1944, possibly at Ford airfield in West Sussex. Pictures taken from Polish Wings 15 by Wojtek Matusiak, pub Stratus, 2012, p216, and © Stratus

One Kentish brewery that apparently supplied beer for transport across by fighter plane was Bushell Watkins & Smith of the Black Eagle brewery in Westerham. According to Westerham villager Edward “Ted” Turner

I worked at a garage called Brittain’s Engineering in Peckham in London making Bailey bridges for sending to France for the invasion … We were also making ‘jettison’ auxiliary fuel tanks for fighter planes to carry extra fuel to enable them to fly further into Europe and still get back home. Once refuelling facilities were established over there, the Westerham brewery used to fill those auxiliary non-returnable petrol tanks with Westerham ales for our troops in Europe. Black Eagle lorries delivered it in barrels to Biggin Hill [four miles from Westerham] where the auxiliary dual-purpose tanks were filled with Bitter on one side and Mild on the other. We made them of 16 gauge metal with baffles for safe landing, the RAF’s version of the brewer’s dray.

There is also a photograph of a cask at the Black Eagle brewery with a sign on it declaring: ‘This Cask containing “Westerham” Bitter was flown to France “D” day, June 6th 1944, by the Royal Air Force’. Unfortunately there are problems with the Westerham claims. The three fighter squadrons that had been using the airfield departed in late April 1944 for Tangmere, where they would be closer to the Normandy beaches. In any case, Biggin Hill was abandoned by the RAF soon after the Normandy landings. On June 13 1944, V1 “doodlebug” flying bomb attacks on London began, and Biggin Hill – right in the V1s’ flightpath – was deemed too dangerous to continue to be used by aircraft, with Balloon Command taking the airfield over as part of the line of barrage balloons put up against the doodlebugs. Flying operations did not begin again at Biggin Hill until September 1944, and fighter aircraft do not seem to have returned until the October. However, one of the squadrons that had been based at Biggin Hill until April 1944 was 412 Squadron, which had made that first “drop-tank beer delivery” to Normandy from Tangmere on June 13. It is possible that the beer in the tanks might have come from the Westerham brewery, 50 miles away, which the pilots of 412 would have known very well.

The Westerham Brewery’s ‘D-Day cask’. But were there any flights from nearby Biggin Hill over France on D-Day? © Westerham Brewery

Certainly, pilots were happy to fly long distances to pick up beer. Thorsteinn “Tony” Jonsson, the only Icelander to join the RAF, was flying North American Aviation P-51 Mustang III fighter-bombers with 65 Squadron, based at Ford, when the D-Day invasion began. On June 27 his squadron moved to the temporary airfield at Martragny, designated B7, five miles from Bayeux and only some 2000 yards from the German lines. However, Jonsson recorded:

Life in our camp was really quite pleasant and comfortable. Admittedly we missed the luxury of being able to pop into a pub at the end of a day’s work for a pint of beer, and to mix with the ladies that were usually to be found there to add spice to our existence. At the beginning of the invasion and for the next few weeks, beer was severely rationed in Normandy … But some bright lad in our Wing had an excellent brain-wave; why not bring beer over from England in the large auxiliary tanks that could be hung under the wings of our Mustangs? Each tank could hold 75 gallons – this would make an excellent addition to our meagre ration. Action was immediately taken.

Four tanks were sent to a factory for their insides to be coated with a substance to prevent the taste of metal, as is done with preserving cans, and taps were fitted. A contract was made with a brewery in London, and on an appointed day every week a Mustang flew with two empty ‘beer’ tanks to Croydon aerodrome and brought back two full ones; one containing mild and the other bitter. These tanks were placed on trestles in our mess-tent, which quickly became known as the best pub in Normandy. It did not take long for the word to spread to nearby military units that we had a good supply of beer, and our mess was frequently a very popular and crowded place in the evenings. The fact that nurses from a military hospital in the neighbourhood were regulars only helped to boost the attendance … It was not long before the beer trips were increased to two a week. Although most pilots likes to nip over to England whenever possible, to contact families and loved ones, the beer-run was not in demand. The reason was that a full beer tank could easily fall off if the landing was not perfectly smooth. The ‘beer kite’s’ arrival was watched by all available personnel, and woe to the poor pilot who was unlucky enough to bounce!

It was 150 miles from Martragny to Croydon (at the time the main airfield in London), making the “beer run” for 65 Squadron a 300-mile round trip. Croydon’s one brewery was Page & Overton, a subsidiary of Charrington’s brewery in Mile End, and it was presumably Page & Overton’s mild and bitter that flew back in the tanks of the Mustangs.

Confirmation that Henty and Constable supplied much of the beer to arrived in Normandy after D-Day comes from Jeffrey Quill, chief test pilot at Vickers, the parent company of Supermarine, maker of the Spitfire. Quill recalled:

After D-Day in 1944, there was a problem about getting beer over to the Normandy airfields. Henty and Constable (the Sussex brewers) were happy to make the stuff available at the 83 Group Support Unit at Ford, near Littlehampton. For some inexplicable reason, however, beer had a low priority rating on the available freight aircraft. So we adapted Spitfire bomb racks so that an 18-gallon barrel could be carried under each wing of the Spitfires which were being ferried across from Ford to Normandy on a daily basis.

We were, in fact, a little concerned about the strength situation of the barrels, and on application to Henty and Constables for basic stressing data we were astonished to find that the eventuality of being flown on the bomb racks of a Spitfire was a case which had not been taken into consideration in the design of the barrels. However, flight tests proved them to be up to the job. This installation, incidentally, was known as Mod XXX Depth charge.

A Spitfire IX fitted with the ‘Mod XXX Depth Charge’, modified bomb racks that could carry a cask of beer under each wing. Contrary to frequent claims, this is almost certainly a Vickers Armstrong publicity photo, and NOT Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson’s own aircraft

According to one source with a slightly different spin on the story, the job of designing fittings that would secure the kilderkins to the Spitfire’s bomb racks was done at High Post airfield, Salisbury, one of the final assembly centres for Spitfire manufacture, “more or less as a joke”. The plan to put beer in long-range tanks was abandoned “when it was found later that the practice contaminated fuel, so Strong’s, the Romsey brewers, supplied complete barrels of Triple ‘X’. This modification was given a fictitious number to conceal the operation from more official or officious eyes.”

There was already a link between Strong’s and Spitfires: after the Luftwaffe bombed Vickers-Supermarine’s headquarters in 1940, the company’s design and administration offices were transferred to Hursley Park, Winchester, a magnificent mansion requisitioned after the death that same year of its owner, Sir George Cooper, chairman of Strong’s. That Strong’s certainly was involved in the supply of casks to be carried on Spitfire bomb racks is confirmed by the existence of a photograph of just such a cask slung under a Spitfire wing, clearly branded “STRONG ROMSEY”.

A close-up of the “Mod XXX Depth charge” on the ground, showing clearly that the casks were supplied, at least occasionally, by Strong’s brewery in Romsey, Hampshire

The hint that Quill gave about the “flying drays” being replacement Spitfires ferried across to squadrons on the Normandy front line from England is given extra support by a newspaper story from the middle of August 1944:

With beer in their bomb racks, replacement Typhoons from England are sure of a specially boisterous welcome from the thirsty troops in Normandy. For the beer shortage is just as acute over there as it is in England. So at least one Typhoon has solved its problem by importing its own beer.

Whenever a replacement aircraft flies to Normandy the pilot takes a quantity of beer, carrying it in nine-gallon barrels with special streamlined nose fittings slung in the bomb racks. This system has been found to be much better than the original method of taking the beer in petrol tanks, which gave the beer a nasty flavour.

In the event of the pilot running into trouble, the barrels are jettisoned as if they were bombs. Then another kind of trouble awaits him at the end of his journey.

Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson had landed with his 127 Wing, two squadrons of Canadians, at a newly built airfield at St Croix-sur-Mer, designated B3, and just over a mile and a half from the landing beaches, on D-Day plus 3. After several days of tinned “compo” rations, Johnson sent a note to his favourite Sussex landlord, Arthur King at the Unicorn in Chichester, asking for help. Every day a twin-engine Anson flew into St Croix from Tangmere with mail, newspapers and spare parts, and King arranged for items such as tomatoes, fresh lobsters, newly baked bread and “a reasonable supply of stout”.

When news of the arrangement leaked into the newspapers, King was visited by someone from Customs and Excise, who warned him that if he carried on, he would need an export licence. However, Johnson recorded in his memoirs,

Since its introduction to the Service in 1939, the versatile Spitfire had participated in many diverse roles … Now it fulfilled yet another role, perhaps not so vital as some of the tasks it had undertaken in the past, but to us of supreme importance. Back in England some ingenious mind had modified the bomb racks slung under each wing so that a small barrel of beer could be carried instead of a 500-pound bomb. Daily, this modern version of the brewers’ dray flew across the Channel and alighted at St Croix. The beer suffered no ill effects from its unorthodox journey and was more than welcome in our mess.

Johnson’s memoir of the war, Wing Leader carried a photograph of a Spitfire IX in D-Day black-and-white stripes, carrying a kilderkin of beer slung from each bomb rack, and captioned “Our version of the brewer’s dray”. This seems to have given rise to the myth that the picture is of Johnson’s own Spitfire. But the photograph in the book is credited to Vickers Armstrong, and is almost certainly one of the aircraft manufacturer’s publicity shots, and nothing to do with Johnson.

A Spitfire IX bearing D-Day invasion stripes, and carrying beer casks beneath its wings, on the ground. It is probably significant that in none of the shots of beer-carrying aircraft can the identifying letters be seen: these were almost certainly all publicity shots

Eventually, organised supplies of beer for the troops supplanted the “flying drays”. In November 1944 the government actually ruled that supplies of beer for troops overseas should equal five per cent of total national production, meaning all stronger “export” beers, all naturally conditioned beers with a life of six weeks or more and all beers that could be pasteurised had to be put in the hands of the forces’ catering service, the Naafi. At the same time, breweries in liberated areas of France were being put to use.

By then it was the turn of the Home Front to be short of beer, however. Brewers blamed a shortage of labour, saying the women workers who had replaced men called up for the forces had themselves been evacuated with their children as the V1 and V2 threat increased. The Nottingham Evening Post reported that in some pubs there had been outbreaks of “panic drinking”, customers “gulping their beer and shouting for an encore lest their neighbours at the bar got more than they did.” At the same time, in “certain districts” only mild ale was available, because bitter, which kept better, was earmarked for the troops. Many pubs were only open for an hours and a half at lunchtimes and two hours in the evening because they had no beer to sell: and there was little relief even for those harvesting the grain that would be used to make the new season’s beers. In August 1944 it was announced that “In some parts of Lincolnshire the beer famine has become so acute that many inns have announced that they will not be able to continue the age-old custom of supplying harvest beer this season. Cups of tea will be provided instead.”

Wherever you are at 5.30pm this evening, please stop a moment and raise a thought – a glass, too, if you have one, preferably of porter – to Hannah Banfield, aged four years and four months; Eleanor Cooper, 14, a pub servant; Elizabeth Smith, 27, the wife of a bricklayer; Mary Mulvey, 30, and her son by a previous marriage, Thomas Murry (sic), aged three; Sarah Bates, aged three years and five months; Ann Saville, 60; and Catharine Butler, a widow aged 65. All eight died 200 years ago today, victims of the Great London Beer Flood, when a huge vat filled with maturing porter fell apart at Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and more than 570 tons of beer crashed through the brewery’s back wall and out into the slums behind in a vast wave at least 15 feet high, flooding streets and cellars and smashing into buildings, in at least one case knocking people from a first-floor room. It could have been worse: the vat that broke was actually one of the smallest of 70 or so at the brewery, and contained just under 3,600 barrels of beer, while the largest vat at the brewery held 18,000 barrels. In addition, if the vat had burst an hour or so later, the men of the district would have been home from work, and the buildings behind the brewery, all in multiple occupancy, with one family to a room, would have been much fuller when the tsunami of porter hit them.

From a Dr Who cartoon novel in 2012: was the Great Beer Flood caused by time-travellers? (No, obviously not …)

Here’s about the only eye witness report of what it’s like to be hit in the back by a giant wave of beer, written by an anonymous American who had been unlucky in taking a short-cut down New Street, behind the brewery, when the vat burst:

All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Banbury street [sic – now Bainbridge Street], Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers.

Accounts today of the Meux brewery beer flood are full of claims of “besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts” and claims that “many were suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer” and “the death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma”. None of this is borne out by any newspaper reports at the time, and nor are the stories about riots at the Middlesex Hospital when victims were taken there stinking of beer, because other patients smelt the porter and thought free drink was being given away, or the floor at the pub where several of the victims’ bodies were laid out collapsing under the weight of sightseers and more people being killed. All those stories appear to be completely made up. It would be an interesting exercise to track these myths back and see when and where they first arose.

Here’s an account of the accident from a contemporary journal:

DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE

DREADFUL ACCIDENT

Monday night, the 17th October, one of those accidents which fortunately for the inhabitants of the metropolis is of rare occurence threw the neighhourhood of St Giles’s into the utmost consternation. About six o clock one of the vats in the extensive premises of Messrs Henry Meux and Co in Banbury street St Giles’s burst apart; in a moment New street George street and several others in the vicinity were deluged with the contents of 3,555 barrels of strong beer. The fluid in its course swept every thing before it. Two houses in New street adjoining the brew house were totally demolished. The inhabitants, who were of the poorer class, were all at home. In the first floor of one of them a mother and daughter were at tea; the mother was washed out of the window and the daughter was swept away by the current through a partition and dashed to pieces. The back parts of the houses of Mr Goodwin, poulterer, of Mr Hawse, Tavistock Arms, and Nos 24 and 25 in Great Russel street were nearly destroyed. The female servant of the Tavistock Arms was suffocated. Three of Mr Meux’s men employed in the brewery were rescued with great difficulty. The site of the place is low and flat, and there being no declivity to carry off the fluid in its fall, it spread and sunk into the neighbouring cellars, all of which were inhabited. Even the cellars in Russel street were inundated and breaches made through the houses. The inhabitants, to save themselves from drowning, had to mount their highest pieces of furniture. The bursting of the brew house walls and the fall of heavy timber materially contributed to aggravate the mischief by forcing the roofs and walls of the adjoining houses. It was feared at first that the lives lost exceeded 20, but we are happy to find the account reduced to eight, whose bodies have been all recovered.

And here’s a report of the coroner’s inquest:

On Thursday a Coroner’s Inquest was held on the dead bodies at St Giles’s workhouse. George Crick deposed that he was store house clerk to Messrs H Meux and Co of the Horse Shoe Brew house in St Giles’s, with whom he had lived 17 years. Monday afternoon one of the large iron hoops of the vat which burst fell off. He was not alarmed, as it happened frequently and was not attended by any serious consequence. He wrote to inform a partner, Mr Young, also a vat builder, of the accident, he had the letter in his hand to send to Mr Young, about half past five, half an hour after the accident, and was standing on a platform within three yards of the vat when he heard it burst. He ran to the store house where the vat, was and was shocked to see that one side of the brew house, upwards of 25 feet in height and two bricks and a half thick, with a considerable part of the roof, lay in ruins. The next object that took his attention was his brother, J Crick, who was a superintendent under him, lying senseless, he being pulled from under one of the butts. He and the labourer were now in the Middlesex Hospital. An hour after, witness found the body of Ann Saville floating among the butts, and also part of a private still, both of which floated from neighbouring houses. The cellar and two deep wells in it were full of beer, which witness and those about him endeavoured to save, so that they could not go to see the accident, which happened outwardly. The height of the vat that burst was 22 feet; it was filled within 4 inches of the top and then contained 3555 barrels of entire, being beer that was ten months brewed; the four inches would hold between 30 and 40 barrels more; the hoop which burst was 700 cwt, which was the least weight of any of 22 hoops on the vat. There were seven large hoops, each of which weighed near a ton. When the vat burst the force and pressure was so great that it stove several hogsheads of porter and also knocked the cock out of a vat nearly as large that was in the cellar or regions below; this vat contained 2100 barrels all of which except 800 barrel also ran; about they lost in all between 8 and 9000 barrels of beer; the vat from whence the cock was knocked out ran about a barrel a minute; the vat that burst had been built between eight and nine years and was kept always nearly full. It had an opening on the top about a yard square; it was about eight inches from the wall; witness supposes it was the rivets of the hoops that slipped, none of the hoops being broke and the foundation where the vat stood not giving way. The beer was old, so that the accident could not have been occasioned by the fermentation, that natural process being past; besides, the action would then have been upwards and thrown off the flap made moveable for that purpose.

Richard Hawes deposed that he lived at No 22 Great Russel strcet Bloomsbury, the Tavistock Arms Public house; about half past five o’ clock on Monday evening witness was in his tap room when he heard the crash; the back part of his house was beaten in and every thing in his cellar destroyed; the cellar and tap room filled with beer so that it was pouring across the street into the areas on the opposite side; the deceased, Eleanor Cooper, his servant, was in the yard washing pots at the time the accident happened; she was buried under the ruins, from whence she was dug out about 10 minutes past eight o’ clock; she was found standing by the water butt, quite dead.

John Cummins deposed that he was a bricklayer and lived in Pratt’s place, Camden Town, being the owner of some houses in New street where the principal part of the persons who were lost, resided; he attended on the spot all day on Tuesday to render assistance to the sufferers. Elizabeth Smith, a bricklayer’s wife, was the first body they found, about twelve o’clock in the ruins of a first floor. Sarah Bates, a child, was discovered in about an hour afterward in the ruins of No 3 New street. Catharine Butler, a widow, Mary Mulvey and her son Thomas Murry, a boy three years of age, were found about four o clock, on Tuesday afternoon. Hannah Banfield, a girl about four years and a half old, with her mother and another child, were at tea on the first floor; the two former were washed by the flood into the ruins; the dead body of Hannah Banfield was found in the ruins about half past six; the mother was carried to the Middlesex Hospital, and the last mentioned child was found nearly suffocated in a bed in the room.

The Jury without hesitation, returned a Verdict of Died by Casualty Accidentally and by Misfortune.

Why did they store such huge quantities of porter at the brewery in such enormous vessels? Because experience had shown that porter stored for months in vats acquired a particularly sought-after set of flavours, and storing it in really big vessels reduced the risk of oxidisation (since the surface area merely squared as the volume cubed). This “stale” (meaning “stood for some time”, rather than “off”), flat and probably quite sour aged porter was then send out in casks when ready, and mixed at the time of service in the pub with porter from a cask that was “mild”, that is, fresh and still lively, and probably a little sweet. Customers would specify the degree of mildness or staleness they would like their porter drawn, having it mixed to their own preference. Tastes changed over the 19th century, “stale” porter fell out of favour, and by the 1890s the big vats were being dismantled, the oak they were made from recycled into pub bar-tops. Quite possibly there are pubs in London now whose bars are made out of old porter vats.

The Meux (pronounced “mewks”) brewery stood at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street until the early 1920s, but production was shifted in 1921 to Nine Elms (itself now demolished and the site of New Covent Garden flower and vegetable market) and the Horse Shoe brewery was replaced by the Dominion Theatre. The Horseshoe Inn next door remained open until the 1990s or so, but eventually closed itself: you can still get a drink on the site, as a branch of Cafe Rouge now occupies the ground floor, but you can’t, alas, get a pint of porter.

At the Brewery History Society we have been trying to get a plaque put up to commemorate the event, and honour the victims, but with no success: I believe the American company that owns the Dominion Theatre failed even to reply, while the Camden Historical Society, inside whose borough the site now falls, took the strange view that “not enough people died” to make it worthwhile having a permanent memorial. How many dead women and children is enough, Camden?

The Meux brewery at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street exactly 100 years ago, in 1914

(There’s a rather fuller account of the flood, and the history of the Horse Shoe brewery by me here.)

One of the biggest mysteries in the history of beer concerns a drink called three-threads, and its exact place in the early history of porter. Three-threads was evidently a mixed beer sold in the alehouses of London in the time of the last Stuart monarchs, William III and his sister-in-law Anne, about 1690 to 1714. For more than 200 years, it has been linked with the development of porter: but the story that said porter was invented to replace three-threads was written eight decades and more after the events it claimed to record, and the description that the “replaced by porter” story gave of three-threads early in the 19th century does not match up with more contemporary accounts of the drink from the late 17th century.

So what exactly was three-threads? Well, I now believe that enough people have dug out enough information that we can make a firm and definitive statement on that.

It was a tax fiddle.

To understand what was going on, you need to know that from the time when taxes were first imposed on beer and ale, in 1643, during the English Civil War, and for the next 139 years the excise authorities recognised only two strength of beer and ale for tax purposes: “small”, defined as having a pre-tax value of six shillings a barrel, and “strong”, defined as having a value of more than 6s a barrel. To begin with, the tax represented only a tiny proportion of the retail cost, at less than a tenth of a penny a pint for strong drink and not even two tenths of a penny per gallon for the small stuff. But in 1689, when William III of the Netherlands and his cousin, wife and co-ruler Mary had arrived in Britain and pushed Mary’s father James II off the throne, the need to pay for the “war of the British succession” and the continuing Nine Years’ War against Louis XIV of France saw the duty on beer and ale bounced upwards, from two shillings and sixpence a barrel to 3s 3d. The following year, 1690, the tax was doubled, to 6s 6d a barrel on strong ale and beer, more than a farthing a pint, when strong liquor retailed at a penny-ha’penny a pint, or 3d a quart “pot”. The rise in the tax on small drink was proportionate, to 1s 6d a barrel, but still the total tax on small beer and ale equalled only a half-penny a gallon.

The flaw in the system was that extra-strong beer or ale paid the same tax as “ordinary” or “common” strong beer. Unscrupulous brewer, and retailers, could therefore – and did – take a barrel of extra-strong beer and two of small beer, on which a total of 7s 3d of tax had been paid, mix them to make three barrels each equal in strength to common strong beer, which should have paid tax of 14s 3d in total, and save themselves 2s 4d a barrel in tax. This may have been equal to only a fifth of a penny a pot, or thereabouts, but it was still 6% or so extra profit. (Incidentally, for those of you new to this, “ale” at the time meant a drink with less hops in, and generally stronger, than “beer”.)

The excise authorities were certainly wise to this fiddle, and laws banning the mixing of different strengths of worts or beers were passed by Parliament in 1663 and again in 1670-1, 1689, 1696-97 and 1702, with (in William III’s time) a fine of £5 per barrel so mixed. That certainly did not stop people. Some time between 1698 and 1713, on the internal evidence, a manuscript was written, now in the Lansdowne collection in the British Library, titled An account of the losse in the excise on beer and ale for severall yeares last paste, with meanes proposed for advanceing that revenue. It was probably produced by an anonymous Excise or Treasury official, because he had access to official tax data from 1683 to 1698, and it gives a fascinating account of the prices and likely strengths of beers and ales at the time. “Very Small Beer” retailed pre-tax at 3s a barrel, and paid (since 1693) 1s 3d a barrel tax. “Common Strong Beer and Ale”, made from “four Bushells of mault” – suggesting an original gravity of 1075 to 1085 – sold for 18s a Barrel and paid, at the time, 4s 9d a barrel tax. “Very Strong Beer or ale the Barrell being the Strong from 8 Bushells”, suggesting a huge original gravity, perhaps north of 1160, sold for £3 a barrel, but still paid the same 4s 9d a barrel tax as common strong beer or ale.

The fact that very strong brews paid the same tax as “common standard strong drinke” had “begot a kind of trade of Defrauding”, the anonymous author wrote, and he declared that “the notion thereof and Profitt thereby” of mixing very strong ale or beer with small beer and selling it as common strong ale or beer “has been of late & now is generally knowne”, and “the traders therein have turned themselves more and more to the practice of Brewing it,” “very strong Drinke being now Commonly a parte of the Brewers Guiles, and the whole of many who Brew nothing else.” The result, he said, was that “the Consumption of it is everywhere, which you have under several odd names, as Two Threades, 3 Threades, Stout or according as the Drinker will have it in price, from 3d. to 9d. the quarte.”

That “3 threades” was a mixture of ordinary small ale or beer and very strong beer is confirmed by a publication called The Dictionary of the Canting Crew by “BE” (the “canting crew” being those who spoke in “cant”, or slang), published around 1697/1699. This called three-threads “half common Ale and the rest Stout or Double Beer”: both “stout” and “double beer” meant “extra-strong beer”, while “common ale” was the same as table ale or small ale, and brewed at one and a half bushels of malt to the barrel, giving an OG of around 1045. Mix a beer that was perhaps 10 or 11 per cent alcohol by volume with one that was only 4.5 per cent or so, and you’ll have a beer of around 7.5 per cent or so, of course, about the same strength of common strong ale: but one that gave the retailer a better profit that “entire gyle” strong beer did, because it had paid less tax.

In 1697 a tax on malt was introduced alongside the taxes on the finished product, at the bizarre-looking rate of six pence and sixteen 21sts of a penny a bushel. (My best guess on that odd sum is that it works out to not quite 4s 6d a quarter – but six pence and five eighths of a penny a bushel is 4s 6d a quarter exactly, so why the approximately 2% difference? If anyone has a good answer to this conundrum, I’d be grateful …) For the first time, the country’s very large number of private household brewers had to pay tax, if they bought their malt from commercial maltsters, while brewers were also now paying more tax when they brewed extra strong beer than when they brewed “common” strong beer, because of the extra (taxed) malt used. But even on double beer at eight bushels to the barrel, that only came out to around three farthings per gallon more tax, and it failed to stop brewers continuing to cheat the revenue by mixing small drink with extra-strong. A disgruntled former General Surveyor of Excise, Edward Denneston, “Gent”, who had been involved in inspecting breweries since at least the early 1680s, wrote what amounted to a 40-page rant in 1713 with the unsnappy title A Scheme for Advancing and Improving the Ancient and Noble Revenue of Excise upon Beer, Ale and other Branches to the Great Advantage of Her Majesty and the general Good of her Subjects. It claimed that the brewing profession had become rich solely because of the “Frauds, Neglects and Abuses” practised by the brewers to the detriment of the country’s tax take. Brewers, he said, were “Vermine … that eat us up alive” and he told them he wished them “all boiled in your own brewing Cauldrons, or drowned in your own Gile Tunns”.

Denneston was a man with a grievance: he claimed that when he was a General Surveyor of Excise in London, he had spent several hundred pounds of his own money uncovering fiddles at the royal brewhouse in St Katharine’s, by the Tower, which brewed beer for the navy. One such fraud cost the government £18,000 a year, and he had been promised a reward by the House of Commons for stopping it, which, he said, he had never received. He also claimed that the country was losing £200,000 a year in unpaid tax – equivalent, in relative terms, to more than £4 billion today – because of the wider fiddles practised by brewers and publicans, and declared: “before there was a Duty of Excise laid upon Beer and Ale, it was not known any Brewer ever got so much by his Trade as what is now call’d a competent Estate; but since a Duty of Excise was laid upon Beer and Ale, nothing is more obvious, amazing and remarkable, than to see the great Estates many Brewers in and about the City of London have got, and are daily getting.” This, he said, was because “the Brewers in general, ever since there was a Duty upon Beer and Ale, have been more or less guilty of defrauding that Duty in several Methods,” including bribing the excise officers (in October 1708, “T– J–, Brewer” was put on trial at the Old Bailey for allegedly giving 40s a week to four officers of the excise to ignore his mixing of small beer with strong, though he was found not guilty), illegally brewing with molasses rather than malt , like the brewer “lately and remarkably in Southwark”, who was “fined several Hundred Pounds, for using of Molossas in his Beer and Ale”, and, in particular, avoiding the tax on strong beer and ale by mixing extra-strong drink with small.

One such fiddle Denneston claimed to have uncovered when he was working for the Revenue in London as General Surveyor involved the publican at the Fortune of War in Well Close, Goodman’s Fields, just to the east of the Minories, and on the edge of the City. Denneston said that while visiting Well Close on official business, he spotted a sign outside the pub which said: “Here is to he Sold Two Thrids, Three Thrids, Four Thrids, and Six Thrids.” “My Curiosity up on this Subject, led me into the House,” Denneston said. “I call’d for my Host, desir’d to know what he meant by the several sorts of Thrids ? He answer’d, That the meaning was, Beer at Twopence, Threepence, Fourpence, and Sixpence a Pot, for that he had all sorts of Drink, and as good as any in England; upon which I tasted all the four sorts, and found they were all made up by Mixture, and not Beer intirely Brew’d ; upon which I order’d the Surveyor of that Division to go and search that House, where he found only two sorts of Drink, viz extraordinary Strong Beer, and Small, so that according to the Price he Mixt in Proportion; the same Fraud being more or less practis’d through the Kingdom.”

Denneston must have had an extraordinary palate to detect the difference between mixed beers and “intirely brewed” ones, but ignoring that, “Three Thrids” is obviously the same as three-threads, and Denneston confirms that it was a mixture of extra-strong beer and small beer, sold for three pence a pot, or quart, with two-threads costing two pence, four-threads costing four pence and so on. Why “threads”? One definition of “thread” is “a thin continuous stream of liquid”: the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe wrote of “thrids of rayne”, while another writer in 1723 wrote of “fat Liquor” that when poured out would “go on in a long Thread whose Parts are uninterrupted”.

Three-threads is mentioned several more times during the 18th century, but by 1760 the practice of retailers mixing extra-strong and small beers and ales had evidently ceased, and “three-threads”, if talked about, had to be explained. In November that year a letter by someone calling himself “Obadiah Poundage” (“poundage” being another work for duty or tax) and claiming to be an 86-year-old clerk at one of the great London breweries, living at Newington Green, Islington, was published in the London Chronicle under the title “The History of the London Brewery since 1688” – “brewery” here being used in the sense “brewing trade”. Poundage was detailing the rise in the tax on beer and ale in the times of William III and Queen Anne, and how the brewers dealt with that. In a passage that was to become famous, he wrote: “Our tastes but slowly alter or reform. Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others what was then called Three-threads, at 3d per quart; but many used all stale, at 4d per pot. On this footing stood the trade until about the year 1722, when the Brewers conceived there was a method to be found preferable to any of these extremes; that beer well brewed, kept its proper time, became racy and mellow, that is, neither new nor stale, such would recommend itself to the public. This they ventured to sell at 23s per barrel, that the victualler might retail it at 3d per quart. At first it was slow in making its way, but in the end the experiment succeeded beyond all expectation. The labouring people, porters etc. experienced its wholesomeness and utility, they assumed to themselves the use thereof, from whence it was called Porter or Entire Butt.” (“Stale”, here, incidentally, means “matured”, not “off”, and it was the opposite of “mild”, or fresh beer: a mixture of old, matured, sharp beer and fresh, sweet, new beer was a favourite with many drinkers through to the 19th century at least.)

This was the first time that three-threads had been linked with the birth of porter, albeit obliquely, and with the two drinks apparently having nothing in common except the fact that they both retailed at 3d a quart. Poundage’s words were quickly plagiarised – they were reprinted, without acknowledgement in The Gentleman’s Magazine the same month, and reappeared in various publications over the next 40-plus years. More recently the pot has been muddied by the former brewer HS “Stan” Corran, who wrote A History of Brewing in 1975 and seems to have had access to a different version of Poundage’s letter, because he printed a lengthy extract from it in his book in which the line “Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others what was then called Three-threads, at 3d per quart” was replaced by “Some drank Mild Beer and Stale; others ale, mild beer and stale blended together [my emphasis] at 3d per quart.” Corran apparently found this alternative version in the archives of Guinness in Dublin: how it got there is not known and, alas, Guinness’s archivists cannot find it now. It has been suggested by James Sumner, to whom I am grateful for much of the research in this post, that it ended up in Dublin via the private papers of the 18th century Hampstead brewer Michael Combrune. If that alternative version, or another copy, was around at the end of the 18th century, it may have influenced what happened next in the narrative history of three-threads: because suddenly, decades after it disappeared, the drink was given a completely different description to the one Denneston gave it, and it was plugged firmly into the story of the development of porter.

Early in 1802 the Monthly Magazine printed a piece on the history of what was then easily London’s favourite beer which said: “The wholesome and excellent beverage of porter obtained its name about the year 1730 … [formerly] the malt-liquors in general use were ale, beer, and twopenny, and it was customary for the drinkers of malt-liquor to call for a pint or tankard of half-and-half, ie a half of ale and half of beer, a half of ale and half of twopenny, or a half of beer and half of twopenny. In course of time it also became the practice to call for a pint or tankard of three threads, meaning a third of ale, beer, and twopenny; and thus the publican had the trouble to go to three casks, and turn three cocks for a pint of liquor. To avoid this trouble and waste, a brewer, of the name of HARWOOD, conceived the idea of making a liquor which should partake of the united flavours of ale, beer, and twopennyy He did so and succeeded, calling it entire or entire butt, meaning that it was drawn entirely from one cask or butt; and as it was a very hearty nourishing liquor, it was very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained its name of porter.

There are many problems with that story: porter was actually first mentioned in 1721, and while Ralph and James Harwood were porter brewers in Shoreditch, theirs was a small concern compared to the giants such as Truman, Whitbread and Parsons, and there is no evidence from the preceding 80 years that they had anything to do with the development of the drink, apart from a couple of brief and obscure references which themselves said nothing about three-threads. Porter was indeed also known as “entire butt”, but not because it was a one-cask-only reproduction of a drink that had originally been served from three different casks. It was so called because it was brewed “entire”, the technical term at the time for a beer or ale made from a combination of all three mashes of the malt, instead of the first mash being used to make strong ale or beer and the others standard beer and small beer, as was usual, and it was then matured in butts, 108-gallon casks. There is no evidence at all that porter was brewed to replace three-threads; and most importantly to our story, the description of what three-threads was, a combination of ale, beer and “twopenny” from three casks, is totally at odds with what Denneston described being served at the Fortune of War nearly 90 years earlier under the name three thrids, a mixture of just two drinks, extra-strong and small. Just to undermine the Monthly Magazine‘s narrative some more, “twopenny” WAS ale, according to Obadiah Poundage in 1760, who described it as a pale ale retailed at four pence a quart, or two pence a pint, made by the London brewers in imitation of the beers the country gentry “residing in London more than they had in former times” were “habituated to” at home. So according to the Monthly Magazine, three-threads was a tautological mixture of ale, beer and ale – though, admittedly, if the second was pale ale, the first could have been brown ale.

Unfortunately, within a very short time the Monthly Magazine‘s version of history was being reprinted, first in a guidebook called The Picture of London, also published in 1802, and then dozens – hundreds – of times over the next two centuries. Occasionally there were variations: John Tuck, writing in 1822, in a book called The Private Brewer’s Guide to the Art of Brewing Ale, Stout and Porter, said that “a mixture of stale, mild and pale, which was called three-threads, was sold at four pence per quart as far back as 1720,” which, as we have seen, was wrong on both ingredients and price. But everywhere it became the accepted truth that three-threads was a mixture of three different drinks, and porter was brewed to replace it.

I hope I have shown that three-threads was not the drink the Monthly Magazine and almost every other writer on the subject from 1802 has said it was, and also that, fascinating though the story of three-threads is, it has nothing to do with the development of porter. If any beer did, in fact, it was the strong “twopenny” pale ale that the gentry brought a taste for to London. According to manuscript histories of the brewing trade written out by Michael Combrune in the 1760s, this pale ale became “spontaneously transparent” and the established London brown-beer brewers decided to try to match this by ageing their own product much longer than they had previously, adding more hops to help it keep. As it aged, it mellowed, and this mellow brown beer, “neither new nor stale”, as Poundage said, and retailing for 3d a quart, became the beer that porters quickly grew to love above all others.

Not everybody will agree with me. John Krenzke, whose PhD dissertation on the industrialisation of the London beer trade 1400-1750 I have leaned on for much of the information to be found in this post, believes porter to have been brewed specifically to imitate the taste of three-threads. I have the greatest respect for John’s scholarship, which uncovered far more facts about the early history of three-threads than I was able to. But I cannot go along with his conclusion: I see no evidence that porter was anything other than an improved version of London brown beer, and that three-threads was something completely different. No writer until the Monthly Magazine in 1802, in a story demonstrably wrong in many ways, ever said porter was a replacement for three-threads. It looks like my journalistic ancestor missed the true, and much better story – that with every slurp, the three-threads drinker was diddling the tax man

The “IPA shipwreck” is one of many long-lasting myths in the history of India Pale Ale. The story says that IPA became popular in Britain after a ship on its way to India in the 1820s was wrecked in the Irish Sea, and some hogsheads of beer it was carrying out east were salvaged and sold to publicans in Liverpool, after which the city’s drinkers demanded lots more of the same. Colin Owen, author of a history of Bass’s brewery, called the tale “unsubstantiated” more than 20 years ago, and others, including me, being unable to find any reports of any such wreck, nor of any indication that IPA was a big seller in the UK until the 1840s, have dismissed it as completely untrue. Except that it turns out casks of IPA did go on sale in Liverpool after a wreck off the Lancashire coast involving a ship carrying hogsheads of beer to India that, literally, became a landmark – though not in the 1820s – and the true story is a cracker, involving one of the worst storms to hit the British Isles in centuries, which brought huge destruction and hundreds of deaths from one side of the UK to the other.

The story of the IPA shipwreck first turns up in 1869 in a book called Burton-on-Trent, its History, its Waters and its Breweries, by Walter Molyneaux, who described how the Burton brewers began brewing beer for export to India from 1823. Molyneaux wrote: “India appears to have been the exclusive market for the Burton bitter beer up to about the year 1827, when in consequence of the wreck in the Irish Channel of a vessel containing a cargo of about 300 hogsheads, several casks saved were sold in Liverpool for the benefit of the underwriters, and by this means, in a remarkably rapid manner, the fame of the new India ale spread throughout Great Britain.”

Molyneaux’s story has been regularly repeated in the past century and a half. But no one has been able to find a wreck that matched up with his story. This turns out to be, not because the wreck didn’t happen, but because he was 12 years out with the date.

The year after Molyneaux’s book came out, a different version of the tale appeared in the “notes and queries” section of an obscure publication called English Mechanic and World of Science. The account was written by a man who gave himself the name of “Meunier”, and it said: “Forty years ago [ie about 1830] pale ale was very little known in London, except to those engaged in the India trade. The house with which I was connected shipped large quantities, receiving in return consignments of East Indian produce. About 1839, a ship, the Crusader, bound for one of our Indian ports, foundered, and the salvage, comprising a large quantity of export bitter ale, was sold for the benefit of the underwriters. An enterprising publican or restaurant keeper in Liverpool purchased a portion of the beer and introduced it to his customers; the novelty pleased, and, I believe, laid the foundation of the home trade now so extensively carried on.”

Ships off Liverpool in the Great Storm of 1839, painted by Samuel Walters.

The two clues – the ship’s name and the later date – together with the fact that large numbers of newspapers from the time have now been scanned and made available on the web make it easy to trace the story at last. The Crusader was a 584-tonne East Indiaman, or armed merchantman, described as “a fine large ship with painted ports [that is, gun-ports] and a full-length figurehead”, “newly coppered”, that is, with new copper sheathing on the hull to prevent attacks by wood-boring molluscs, and “a very fast sailer”, under the command of Captain JG Wickman. She had arrived in Liverpool early in November 1838 after a five-month journey from either Calcutta or Bombay (different Liverpool newspapers at the time gave different starting ports) with a cargo including raw cotton, 83 elephants’ tusks, coffee, wool, pepper, ginger – and opium, which did not become illegal in Britain until 1916. Captain Wickman and his crew were due to leave for Bombay again on Saturday December 15, after five weeks of roistering in Liverpool, with a cargo that included finished cotton goods, silk, beef and pork in casks, cases of glass shades, iron ingots, tin plates, Government dispatches – and India ale in hogsheads, brewed by two different Burton brewers, Bass and Allsopp, the whole lot being insured for £100,000, perhaps £8 million today.

However the Crusader did not leave on the 15th, possibly because of adverse winds, which certainly kept increasing numbers of ships in Liverpool from Christmas onwards. Finally, on Sunday January 6, 1839, the wind changed, blowing a south-westerly breeze, and some 60 vessels, including the Crusader, left the port. What none of those sailors on board the fleet sailing out from the mouth of the Mersey knew was that a massive, fast-moving depression was coming in across the North Atlantic, travelling from the west-south-west at around 40 to 50 knots, It was bringing hurricane-strength winds, which would batter towns and cities from the west coast of Ireland to the east coast of England, uproot millions of trees, smash down thousands of chimneys, sink hundreds of boats and kill several hundred people. In Ireland, where estimates have suggested between 200 and 400 people died, that Sunday became known as the Night of the Big Wind. Thousands of houses and cottages were stripped of their roofs from Galway to Armagh, with many left on fire. Limerick resembled “a city on which a park of artillery had played for a fortnight.” In Belfast “not a roof escaped”, while Dublin looked, according to one newspaper report, as if it had been sacked by an army, with houses burning or levelled to the ground, and “the rattling of engines, cries of firemen and labours of the military” presenting “the very aspect and mimicry of real war”.

The winds seem to have struck the west coast of Britain late on the evening of Sunday 6th, and did not finally ease up until Tuesday morning. The lowest air pressure measured was about 922.8mb at Sumburgh Head, Shetland around 2pm on Monday 7th, the third lowest figure ever seen in the British Isles. The effects of the storm were felt in London, with “numerous” chimneys blown down in and around Islington and Camden Town, but were far worse in the North: nowhere from one side of the Pennines to the other seems to have been spared serious damage. In Liverpool, thousands spent a sleepness night listening to slates and bricks crashing down into the streets, as even “the best built houses rocked and shook” with the winds, and at least 20 people were killed by falling masonry. In Manchester, where six people died, so many factory chimneys were blown down, it was reckoned between 12,000 and 15,000 workers would be laid off for weeks before the chimneys could be rebuilt and the steam engines that powered the factories restarted. In Bolton, it was said, “not a house escaped”, in Blackburn alone 11 factory chimneys were felled, and in Newcastle upon Tyne “almost every building suffered, more or less”. In Ayr “the streets are covered with slates and chimney cans”, and in Dumfries “the noise during the entire night was more deafening than the battle field”. Birmingham and Wolverhampton, like many other towns and cities, had scarcely a street where houses had not suffered: much of the roof of Birmingham Town Hall was torn off, with lumps of lead weighing almost half a ton crashing into the street or onto nearby houses. Among the windmills demolished were five at Bridlington: others, such as the water company’s windmill in Newcastle upon Tyne, were set on fire by the friction caused when the fierce winds set their sails rotating far faster than their builders had thought possible. In Barnsley, the lead roof was lifted off the Methodist chapel and more factory chimneys demolished, while Leeds saw at least eight mill and factory chimneys levelled, and a church lose 24 feet off its spire. Hayricks were destroyed, pedestrians blown into the air and innsigns made to fly. One remarkable phenomenon reported by the newspapers after the storm was a covering of what appeared to be seasalt on hedges, trees and houses in districts far inland, such as Huddersfield, more than 50 miles from the coast.

Out at sea, the effects of the storm were terrifying and terrible, with ships in peril from the mouth of the Shannon to the mouth of the Humber. Many of the vessels that had left Liverpool on the Sunday escaped the rage of the winds: but many others did not. Ships on their way home from ports far away, and close to the end of their journeys, were also caught. Between 30 and 40 vessels were either sunk or run aground in the Mersey area alone. Several went down with all their crews drowned. Those ships that ran onto sandbanks were then battered by the high winds and huge waves, and began to break up. Lifeboats could not get out to rescue the passengers and crews until the storm lessened, and when rescuers did arrive, they found many of those they were seeking to save had died of exposure in the preceding hours, on deck or in the rigging. The Lockwood, an emigrant ship bound for New York, which had got as far as Anglesey on the Sunday before being driven back by the storm, had then struck sandbanks and begun to list. Of the 110 passengers and crew, 53 died before they could be taken off by rescuers. One of the Crusader‘s fellow East Indiamen, the Brighton, returning from Bombay, struck a sandbank in the mouth of the Mersey on the morning of Monday 7 January and started breaking up. Some 14 of her crewmen made a raft and launched it into the mountainous waves to try to reach land. They were never seen again. The captain and his remaining crew had to cling to the rigging until Tuesday morning before they could be saved by the Liverpool lifeboat.

Packet and Emigrant Ships Ashore, another image of ships from Liverpool in trouble during the Great Storm, published in 1841.

What happened to the Crusader while she was out at sea appears to be unrecorded, but like other ships she was driven back by the violence of the storm, or, having failed to get past the tempest, tried unsuccessfully to return to the safety of port. On the morning of Tuesday 8th January, nearly two days after she had left Liverpool, and after a “fearful night of wind, hail, thunder and sleet and forked lightning”, the Crusader was seen just off the coast at Blackpool, more than 25 miles north of the Mersey. She had struck a sandbank that is still, today, named Crusader Bank, in her memory, and suffered “much damage”. The ship’s crew were firing the Crusader’s guns to try to attract attention onshore, but soon after, according to the Blackburn Standard newspaper, “two boats put from her, and after crossing the breakers, landed a crew of 26 seamen, when a loud huzza proclaimed their safety.”

While the crew were safe, however, the ship had broken her back, and with her hull being almost covered by water at half-tide, her cargo began to wash up along a 15-mile stretch of coast from the Ribble in the south to the Wyre in the north. “A great deal” of the cargo, however, was gathered in by customs officers and locked up, including 79 hogsheads of ale that had been driven on shore, along with other goods, on January 16. (There was much cargo from other ships also cast up on the coast, along with dead bodies from ships that had sunk.) The Crusader began properly to break up only on Sunday 17th February, more than five weeks after she had run aground, though she then fell to pieces within four days. However, the first sale of cargo saved from the wreck of the Crusader had already taken place in Liverpool on Thursday 7th February. It included cotton fabrics, woollen cloth, silk scarves and veils, tin plates – and “India ale, Bass and Alsop’s [sic] brands”.

Advertisement from the Liverpool Mail, Thursday 31 January 1839, for the sale of India ale rescued after the wreck of the Crusader East Indiaman in the Great Storm three weeks earlier

Another two sales of goods saved from the wreck of the Crusader, including more India ale, were held in Liverpool on March 14 and March 28. (There were three more sales of items from the ship, in May, June and July, including broken rigging, chains, pumps and anchors, but no more beer).

The story is true, then, that casks of beer destined for India and rescued from a shipwreck in the Irish Sea did go on sale in Liverpool, though at the end of the 1830s, not the middle of the 1820s. But were these sales in Liverpool of several dozen hogsheads, at least, of India ale brewed by Bass’s brewery and Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent the foundation on which was built the popularity of IPA in Britain? Alas, there is still no hard evidence for that part of the story: and what evidence there is suggests even Liverpool knew about IPA before the Crusader went aground. Beer brewed for the India market had been available in Liverpool since at least 1825, when the Middlesex brewer Hodgson’s of Bow, one of the earliest suppliers of pale ale to the Far East, had an agency in Liverpool for the sale of “pale bottling ale” to “merchants and others”. The first known use of the expression East India Pale Ale in a British publication actually comes from a Liverpool newspaper, but in 1835, four years before the Crusader shipwreck, when Hodgson’s beer, again, was being offered to “merchants and private families”.

Judging by the surge in adverts for IPA in London newspapers, the real take-off for the beer’s popularity appears to be a couple of years after the Great Storm, in 1841. That was certainly the year when Bass finally opened a store in Liverpool for the sale of “pale India ale”, declaring in a notice in Gore’s Liverpool General Advertiser on April 22nd that announced the new store that “This ale, so long celebrated in India, has now become an article of such great consumption in this country (where it is almost superseding every other sort of malt liquor)”, and at the Burton Ale Stores in Ironmonger Lane “a Stock is kept of an age suitable for immediate consumption”. Was this, two years on from the wreck of the Crusader, a result of that ship’s cargo having gone on sale in Liverpool? The verdict here, I think, has to be “not proven”.

Why Molyneaux got the date of the IPA shipwreck so wrong is a puzzle, when there would have been many alive in 1869 who could still remember the Night of the Big Wind 30 years earlier. But while it is part of Ireland’s folk memory – there are poems, and a novel, written about it – the 1839 storm is pretty much forgotten in Britain, probably because in this island it was only the second-worse storm of the 19th century, beaten in impact by the so-called Royal Charter storm of 1859. This was named for a ship that went down off Anglesey with the loss of 450 lives. Another 350 people also died during that storm, which sank 133 ships.

As a footnote, although large numbers of factories were damaged in the 1839 storm, breweries seem to have got off lightly. Newstead and Walker’s brewery in Bolton saw “considerable” damage. In Borrisokane, Tipperary, “the chief part of the Ormond brewery was blown down”. In Dublin, nine horses belonging to Guinness & Co were killed in their stalls by a falling wall. That, however, appears to be it.

On the 12th day of Christmas my True Love gave to me
Twelve draughts of Duvel
Eleven pints of porter
Ten Landlords leaping
Nine Lagunitas
Eight Mackeson milk stouts
Seven Silly Saisons
Six Geuze spraying
Five Golden Prides
Four Caley beers
Three Speckled Hens
Two Ola Dubhs
And a pint of Partridge in the Pear Tree

© Martyn Cornell 2015

It’s depressing and frightening, sometimes, if you start tugging at loose threads in the historical narrative, because the whole fabric can start unravelling. This all began with the Canadian beer blogger and beer historian Alan McLeod emailing me about claims that the “Hull ale” that was being drunk in the 17th century in London was really ale from Burton upon Trent, shipped down that river to the sea, and taking the Yorkshire port’s name on the way. Did I have any views, he asked?

I confess I’ve repeated the idea that “Hull ale probably really means Burton ale” myself, but Alan had several good points to make against it: Hull, like other ports, was known for its own ales, Burton lacked common brewers until the start of the 18th century, and in any case, until the opening of the Trent Navigation in 1712 it was not easy for Burton brewers to get their ales shipped out anywhere. So I hit the internets.

It all began to fall down with Peter Mathias’s reference in the otherwise magisterial The Brewing Industry in England (p150), written in 1959, to Samuel Pepys drinking Hull ale in London in 1660. Mathias wrote that “of course”, this Hull ale was “probably” from Burton upon Trent, with the town allegedly being “well known in the capital for its ale in the seventeenth century”, and the first consignment “reputedly” sold at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane London in 1623. However, once you start digging, these claims appear to be completely wrong. The reference Mathias gives, to back all this up, The history and antiquities of Staffordshire by Stebbing Shaw, published in 1798, Volume 1 p13, is only available in Google Books via snippet view but it appears not to give a specific year for Burton Ale being sold at the Peacock at all. What it says, talking about Burton, is:

“And so great is the celebrity of this place for its ale brewed here, that, besides a very considerable home consumption, both in the country and in London (where it was first sold at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, a house still celebrated for the vending of this liquor) vast quantities have been exported to Sweden, Denmark, Russia and many other kingdoms.”

– but with no date for when Burton Ale was first sold at the Peacock.

Almost a century before Mathias, William Molyneaux, in Burton on Tent: Its History, Its Waters and its Breweries (1869 ) claimed in a footnote (p223) that

“About the year 1630 Burton ale was sold at the Peacock inn in Gray’s Inn Lane and had even then acquired a high reputation amongst the famous ales of England.”

But Molyneaux offered no reference to back this up. This claim was subsequently repeated in several books. However, there is no evidence at all that the Peacock was even open in the 17th century.

Gray’s Inn Lane around 1810 or 1820

One big problem is that very little seems to be recorded of the early history of the Peacock, though what is know is certainly tied up with Burton Ale. The pub was definitely going by 1751, when George Ash, “who was servant to Mr Ford at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane,” opened his own pub under the same name at Charing Cross, where he had in stock “a quantity of Burton Ale, to be sold wholesale or retail”, according to an ad in the London Daily Advertiser on May 25 that year. But the tavern does not appear in the Vade Mecum for Maltworms, the anonymous guide to London pubs and taverns written circa 1718, which if it was famous I would have expected (that book, incidentally, mentions Derby Ale twice, and Burton ale once – and Oxford Ale three times). It was briefly mentioned again in 1755, still being kept by Mr Ford. The poet John Langhorne is said to have drunk Burton ale at the Gray’s Inn Lane Peacock, and he lived in the vicinity of Gray’s Inn around 1764-66. Two other writers, Gilbert Stuart, and William Thomson, both Scottish exiles, drank in the Peacock in the 1780s, where, according to Thomson’s obituary, “in rivulets of Burton ale [they] not unfrequently quaffed libations to their favourite deity, until the clock informed them of the approaching day.” Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1796 said the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, “where Burton ale is sold in nyps”, was known as the “nyp-shop”.

Gilbert Stuart, Burton Ale fan and regular at the Peacock

The antiquarist Richard Warner, writing in 1802 in the orotund style popular with Georgian essayists, called Burton Ale “that rich and glutinous beverage named after the town and well known in the neighbourhood of Gray’s Inn Lane, ‘balm of the cares, sweet solace of the toils’ of many an exhausted Limb of the Law who at the renowned Peacock reinvigorates the powers with a nipperkin of Burton ale and a whiff of the Indian weed,” indicating that the pub was popular with barristers from Gray’s Inn. It was frequented by those who needed barristers, too. In October 1814 a 68-year-old woman named Elizabeth McDonald was sentenced Old Bailey to be hanged after she attempted to pass a counterfeit shilling at the Peacock and was seized by the landlord, William Kilsbey. The pub seems to have changed its name to the Fox and Peacock by 1845, but was back as the Peacock again in 1870, by which time Gray’s Inn Lane was Gray’s Inn Road. It was described as “totally modernised” in 1880, and was still being kept in 1882 by the marvellously named Nicholas Pollyblank who had been there since 1875, according to the 1882’s Post Office Directory. However, it disappears some time after that, evidently when that part of Gray’s Inn Road was redeveloped.

Is it possible that the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Road was actually much older than the year 1751, its (currently) first known appearance in the records? Certainly the advert in the London Daily Advertiser hints that the pub had been going for some time, to built up enough of a reputation that George Ash would want to boast of his connection with it. But it would be wrong to push the pub back more than ten years at the most just based on that. It is certainly true that pubs can stay under the radar for many decades after their founding: there was one pub in Mile End, East London with the excellent name of Why Not Beat Dragon, which first surfaces in an Old Bailey court case from 1723, but which has a name that refers to a race at Newmarket four decades earlier, in 1684, when a horse called Dragon was beaten by (you’re ahead of me here) another called Why Not. The pub must have been opened as the Why Not Beat Dragon very soon after the race took place, but apparently stayed unrecorded for almost 40 years.

An even longer example of an apparently “invisible” pub is the (now closed) Eagle and Child in Whitwell, Hertfordshire. It looks to take its name from the crest of the Stanley family, Earls of Derby, who were lords of the manor of Stagenhoe in nearby St Paul’s Walden from 1488 until 1582. The implication has to be that the pub opened, or at least received its name, some day during this 94-year Tudor timespan when the Stanleys were a big name in the area. But the pub’s first known mention comes in 1725, implying that it remained unrecorded by history for more than 140 years, at least, from the time when the Stanleys were local landowners to almost a century and a half after they had gone.

All the same, despite these examples, I find it highly implausible that a pub in as central a site as Gray’s Inn Lane/Road could have been open for 120 years before 1751 without anybody making some kind of record of its existence that would survive until today. On the evidence, I’d be surprised if the Peacock was much older than the 1710s or 1720s.

I don’t know where Molyneaux got his claim that the Peacock sold Burton Ale around 1630 from, but the reference to Burton ale being sold in London in 1623 appears to come from John Bushnan’s Burton and its Bitter Ale (pub 1853), which says

“In 1623 the Burton ale made itself known in London as Darbie or Derby from which town it used to reach London as we find in a singular work published that year entitled Panala a la Catholica or a Compound Ale.”

What that pamphlet, written by the deeply obscure William Folkingham (and also known as Panala Alacatholica, according to some souces, while the author’s surname is also found as Folkington) talks about, according to the extract reprinted by Bushnan, is:

“a cup of nappie ale (right Darbie, not Dagger ale, though effectually animating) well boyled, defecated, and cleared, that it shall equall the best-brewed beer in transparence, please the most curious palatt with milde quicknesse of relish.”

“Defecated” there, of course, means “cleared of dregs” (what did you think it could mean? Wash your mind out now). But all the evidence is that Bushnan is entirely wrong in asserting that “Darbie Ale” actually meant Burton ale. Derby was famous in its own right in the 17th century as a centre for brewing, with a large number of malthouses and inns, and it was only five miles by packhorse from the Trent, from where ale could be carried away by water to Hull, and from there to London and elsewhere. “Darbie Ale” being mentioned in Folkingham’s pamphlet does not prove it was on sale in London, though it, and other mentions, underline the idea that Derby Ale was well-enough known in the capital in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There is a reference to “Darbie Ale” in an anti-Puritan pamphlet called Martin Junior, published around 1589/90. William Camden, in his great survey Britannia, published in 1607, declared that Derby was “vero celebritas” – truly famous – for “ceruisia, quam coquit optima“, excellent ale. The pseudo-Chaucerian The Cobbler of Canturbury, published in 1608, says that “there must be admitted no compare betweene a Cup of Darby ale and a dish of durtie water.”

Derby in the early 17th century

In 1611 a play by John Cook, Tu Quoque or The City Gallant, performed in front of James I, included the lines: “I have sent my daughter this morning as far as Pimlico to fetch a draught of Derby ale, that it may fetch a colour in her cheeks,” suggesting that Derby Ale was indeed on sale in London in early Stuart times. In 1637, John Taylor, the “Water Poet”, and one of the last campaigners against hops and in favour of traditional unhopped ale, wrote Drinke and Welcome: or The famous historie of the most part of drinks, in use now in the kingdomes of Great Brittaine and Ireland, which hailed the ales of “Yorke, Chester, Hull, Nottingham, Darby, Gravesend”, but does not mention Burton at all. A Civil War Royalist newsletter, Mercurius Pragmaticus, spoke sarcastically in 1649 of “a flagon of Darby Ale” that would make someone’s brains “runne over with the froth of non-sense”. “The froth of non-sense” looks to be a good description of Bushnan’s assertion that “Derby ale” was a synonym for Burton Ale.

Bushnan goes on to say that

“The Dagger Ale here alluded to was that sold at a house in Holborn in the same manner as the ale of Burton was about the same period at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane.”

and this appears to have led Colin Owen in The Development of Industry in Burton upon Trent (1978, p31) to claim that

“by the early 1620s Burton Ale (sometimes under the name of ‘Darbie Ale’) was being sold at the Dagger in Holborn and at the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane, where it was held in high esteem”

referencing Bushnan. But, of course, Bushnan doesn’t say the Dagger sold Burton or Derby ales – it was selling its own Dagger Ale – and Bushnan also gives no source for the claim that the Peacock was selling Burton ale at this time.

However, Burton had 46 licensed victuallers in 1604, so it is certainly not impossible that some of those inn or alehouse operators, who would all almost certainly have been brewing their own ale, were shipping some outside the district. Benjamin Printon, the first known common brewer in Burton, started operations probably some time around the year of his marriage, in 1708, and his business was very likely boosted by the opening of the Trent Navigation in 1712, but there is a hint that Burton innkeepers were already using the Trent to ship beer to other markets before then (Owen, p33), probably carrying casks by horse or cart to where the Trent started being navigable (which would have been Nottingham, six to eight hours away).

The frequently repeated claim that Printon actually began brewing in 1708, incidentally, is again based on Stebbing Shaw. But what Shaw actually wrote in 1798, talking about brewing in Burton, was that

“The first origin of this business here was about 90 years ago, and simply commenced with a few public houses ; and, one Benjamin Printon was the first, who began in a small way (by employing only three men) any thing like the business of a common brewer.”

Taking “about 90 years ago” in 1798 to mean 1708, other writers have used Shaw’s words, wrongly, to make a definite claim that Printon starting brewing that year. But you’ll note that Shaw doesn’t actually say it was Printon that began “about 90 years ago”, merely that Printon was the first common brewer, rather than innkeeper-brewer, in Burton, with the public house brewers being the ones who started exporting their beer “about 90 years ago” and Printon coming along later. (John Bushnan got into a terrible mess over the claim that Benjamin Printon is really Benjamin Prilson, which itself, Bushnan tried to claim, was a misreading of Benjamin Wilson, founder of what became Allsopp’s brewery: all total nonsense.)

Printon, by the way, is regularly said to have been the (or “a”) “chief client” of William Bass before Bass gave up working as a carrier and started in the brewing business himself in 1777. But this is impossible: Printon died in 1729, when Bass was nine years old, and Bass only moved to Burton to start as a carrier in or around the late 1750s. It is possible that Bass carried beer for the family that took over Printon’s brewery, the Musgraves (or Musgroves), whose “genuine Burton ale” was advertised for sale at the St Dunstan’s coffee house in Fleet Street, London in 1751 at the extremely high price of ten pence a quart: ordinary porter was only 3d a quart. But someone else can investigate that …

An advert for Musgrove’s Burton Ale from the London Daily Advertiser of June 15 1751, one of the earliest ads featuring a named brewer from outside London

Incidentally, A Topographical History of Staffordshire: Including Its Agriculture, Mines and Manufactures … By William Pitt, published 1817, claims:

“The origin of this lucrative business was in the year 1610 [sic], when Benjamin Printon began a small brewery, and his success induced others to engage in the same business.”

surely a misprint (or misprinton).

The first definite evidence we have for Burton Ale on sale in London comes from a report printed in the edition of the Spectator magazine for May 20 1712, when at the end of a trip to the Spring Gardens pleasure grounds at “Fox Hall” (Vauxhall) on the south side of the Thames, the author and the fictional Sir Roger de Coverley “concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale and a slice of hung beef.” The Vade Mecum for Malt Worms around 1718 shows Burton Ale on sale at the Guy of Warwick in Milk Street, in the City of London, while on January 11 1718 a London-based newspaper called the Post-Man published an ad showing “Fine Burton Ale, Bottled or in Hogsheads” on sale at “the sign of the Sawyers near Fleet Lane Bridge”.

Still, what about the famous quote from Daniel Defoe, writing in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, that “the best character you give to Ale in London is calling it Burton Ale”, a quote regularly repeated by authors writing about Burton beer? Well, the problem is, Defoe never said it. It’s actually a quote from another travel writer entirely, the Scots spy John Macky, in A Journey through England, which was published just before Defoe, in 1724. Macky, talking of Lichfield, said:

“The Ale is incomparable here, as it is all over this County of Stafford. Burton is the most famous Town in England for it, as also Stafford and Newcastle in this Shire. And indeed the best Character you give to Ale in London is calling it Burton Ale; from whence they send vast Quantities to London: Yet they brew at London some that goes by that Denomination.”

I suspect (though I haven’t researched it) that later editors of Defoe’s work lifted chunks of that quote from Macky and stuck it into later “enlarged and improved” editions of Danny boy’s works. But we can still gather from the quote that by the early 1720s Derby ale had lost its pre-eminence, to be replaced by its neighbouring rival across the border in Staffordshire. And, indeed, mentions in London newspapers in the 18th century of Derby ale are rare to non-existent. (Defoe, incidentally, did not mention Burton ale at all in his original first edition, and says only of Derby: “What Trade there is in the Town is chiefly in good Malt and good Ale.”)

So, to conclude or round up: claims that Burton Ale was on sale in London in the 17th century are unsubstantiated, though Derby Ale certainly was, and despite claims by Burtonians there is no evidence that “Derby Ale” was another name for Burton Ale: Derby ale was exactly what it said on the tin, or rather cask. By the 18th century Derby Ale had been pushed out of the London market, however. Of claims about Benjamin Printon, one is based on a misinterpretation and one is nonsense. There is no evidence that the Peacock in Gray’s Inn Lane was the first place in the capital to sell Burton ale, and it looks unlikely it was doing so in the 17th century. That’s six myths scotched. Thanks, Alan.

Excellent news, I think, that Wells & Young’s has acquired the Scottish brands McEwan’s and Younger’s from their current owner, Heineken.

The announcement last week that W&Y was bringing back Courage Imperial Russian Stout genuinely excited me, and not just because it’s a fantastic beer. It showed that the Bedford company has a shrewd understanding of the sort of niche a medium-sized brewer can exploit with the right brands, and it has cottoned on to the growing desire of drinkers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to drink authentic, heritage beers again. McEwan’s and Younger’s have plenty of heritage – Younger’s No 3, for example.

But I’d like to make it clear, now, that if I notice ANY references by the brand’s new owners to Younger’s being “established in 1749”, I shall be driving up to Bedford and administering a few slaps. Because it wasn’t. This claim of a 1749 foundation date has been around since at least 1861, making it 150 years old, or more, and it still regularly pops up. Only yesterday the Scotsman newspaper printed this rubbish

“William Younger founded Edinburgh’s historic brewing industry when he set up his firm in Leith in 1749.”

There are two big errors in that one sentence: Edinburgh’s brewing industry is, of course, far older than 1749: the city was stuffed with breweries long before, so much that its nickname, “Auld Reekie” (“Old Smoky”), is sometimes said to have come from all the smoke that came out of the brewery chimneys. In addition, William Younger never started a brewery in Leith, in 1749 or any other year. In fact he was almost certainly never a brewer at all.

William Younger was only 16 in 1749, which was actually the year he moved to Leith from the family home in West Linton, Peeblesshire. It has been claimed that his first job was working for a brewery in Leith, sometimes said to be the one run by Robert Anderson, one of the town’s bigger brewers, with an output of 1,500 barrels a year. Unfortunately, there is no known documentary evidence to back this up: if there had been, the book printed to celebrate Younger’s “double centenary” in 1949 would have trumpeted it. Instead the author quietly danced around the issue of whether William had been a brewer or not.

By 1753, aged 20, William was working as an excise officer, and married to a young woman from his home village, Grizel Sim. Their eldest son, Archibald Campbell Younger, was born in 1757, to be followed by at least two more boys, Robert, and William Younger II, born 1767. Less than three years after William II was born, however, his father died aged only 37. Two years later Grizel Younger married Alexander Anderson, who had been brewing in Leith since at least 1758. When Anderson died in 1781, Grizel ran Anderson’s brewery herself before retiring in 1794, aged 65. It was Grizel, therefore, who was the first of the brewing Youngers.

Archibald Campbell Younger had been apprenticed to his stepfather’s brewery when he was 15. When he reached 21, in 1778, Archibald left Leith to start his own brewery in the precincts of the Abbey of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. If any date can be given for the start of the Younger’s brewing concern, therefore, 1778 is the year. The site Archibald chose had excellent well-water, and, because it was within the abbey precincts, it was outside the jurisdiction of Edinburgh Town Council: thus Archibald and the three other brewers in the abbey precincts did not have to pay the council’s 2d-a-pint beer tax.

The Abbey brewery, Edinburgh in 1861

After eight years, in 1786, Archibald was able to buy a larger brewery nearby in Croft-an-Righ (“Farm of the King” in Gaelic), a lane behind Holyrood palace. He had become famous for brewing Younger’s Edinburgh Ale, according to the writer Robert Chambers in 1869, “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle.” It sold in the bothies of Edinburgh for three pennies a bottle, 20 per cent more expensive than ordinary ale. Five years later, in 1791, Archibald moved again, to a new brewery in North Back Canongate with a capacity of some 15,000 barrels a year, where he was in business with his brother-in-law, John Sommervail.

Archibald’s brother Richard was running a brewery just off Canongate in Edinburgh from at least 1788, though by 1796 he had moved to London. That was the same year that William Younger II opened his own brewhouse within the Holyrood Abbey precincts. By 1802 Mr William Younger’s “much admired” ale was being advertised for sale at the Edinburgh Ale Vaults in London, in cask and bottle. The following year he acquired James Blair’s Abbey Brewhouse, Horsewynd, Holyrood. William and Archibald were briefly partners in a venture to brew porter, from 1806 to 1808, but this seems not to have been successful, and William acquired new partners, while in 1809 Archibald retired from brewing.

William Younger, ‘Established 1749’ – not

In 1818 the Abbey concern became William Younger & Co, with William II in partnership with Alexander Smith, the brewer and superintendent of the Abbey brewery. In 1836, when William II was 69, he made his son William Younger III, aged 35, a partner in the business, along with Andrew Smith, son of Alexander Smith. William Younger III had no particular desire to be involved in the business, but Andrew Smith had worked there since he was 16, and it was under his command that the company began bottling for sale overseas in 1846, and exports started to grow. The reputation of Younger’s India Pale Ale and Edinburgh ale helped it rise to be easily the biggest brewer in Edinburgh by 1850, mashing 10,292 quarters of malt. This was nearly a third as much again as its nearest rival, Alexander Berwick, who had bought Richard Younger’s old premises off South Back Canongate (now Holyrood Road), 300 yards away.

Eight years later Younger’s bought Berwick’s premises from his nephews for £1,600. Eventually production of India Pale Ale (brewed, like the Burton article, in unions) was concentrated at the Holyrood brewery, while the Abbey brewery made the Edinburgh ale. By the early 1860s the the firm was exporting its ales as far as Honolulu and New Zealand, using a red “triple pyramid” trademark, greatly annoying Bass, which felt it resembled its own red triangle trademark too much.

A description of the Abbey brewery in the Official Illustrated Guide to the Great Northern Railway in 1861 included mention of two 50-quarter “mash tubs” equipped with Steele’s mashers; two wort coppers, one holding 116 barrels; and the tun and fermenting rooms, “each having 30 fermenting tuns, and beneath them 12 settling synores [sic].” It’s clear from the context what a “synore” is, but I have never seen the word before, and it appears to exist nowhere else in Googledom but here. If anyone has any more information I’d be delighted to hear it. “Synore” there is evidently a typo for “square”.

The GNR guide is also the first reference I have found to the “established in 1749” canard, though I am sure there are earlier ones out there. By now William McEwan had started his own brewing operation at Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, but although he would become a ferocious rival, Younger’s continued to thrive: it was the first brewer in Scotland to register as a limited company, in 1887, and by 1905 it was reckoned that Younger’s produced a quarter of all Scotland’s beer.

In 1930 it was announced that Younger’s and McEwan were linking up as Scottish Brewers, though their three breweries continued until 1955, when the Abbey brewery was shut and converted into offices. (In 1999 it became part of the site for the new Scottish parliament building.) The consolidation of the brewing industry in the UK saw Scottish Brewers join up with Newcastle Breweries in 1960 to form Scottish & Newcastle, which would eventually, by the start of the 1970s, be the smallest of the “Big Six” UK brewing conglomerates. That was how it stayed, until the 1990s, when another storm hit the UK brewing industry, and by 1995 S&N had acquired what had once been the Courage and Watney brewing empires to become the biggest brewing concern in Britain. It was clear, however, that consolidation was not just a regional, UK, phenomenon, but global. S&N tried to expand enough to compete on the world stage, buying the French brewer Kronenbourg to become the second biggest brewing concern in Europe.

It also started a joint venture with Carlsberg, Baltic Beverage Holdings, to run the Baltika brewing operation in Russia. Carlsberg, however, seems to have eventually decided it wanted all of Baltika’s profits for itself: knowing it would never be allowed to take over S&N on its own (too many markets where it would own too great a share), in 2007 the Danish firm invited Heineken to join it in carving up S&N, with Heineken getting the UK brewing operations.

Slowly Heineken appears to be realising that comparatively “niche” products are best run by a specialist, hence the sale of McEwan’s and Younger’s to Wells & Young’s, which at a bound becomes the third largest premium ale producer in the UK, after Marston’s and Greene King. I wish them well: just don’t mention 1749 in the promotion literature.

If there is one blessing the Oxford Companion to Beer has brought us, it’s the beginnings of a much better, and myth-free understanding of the origins of the world’s most popular beer style, pale pils lager, and the brewery that first made it, Pilsner Urquell, which is in what is now the Czech Republic. We didn’t get this new understanding from the OCB itself, obviously, but from Evan Rail, who lives in Prague, who writes with insight and erudition about Czech beer, Czech beerstyles and Czech brewing history, and who knows the number one rule about writing history: go back to the original sources – an apt commandment here, since “Urquell” – “Prazdroj” in Czech – means “original source”.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read his latest blog post adding, clarifying and correcting the OCB’s Czech-related entries.

Evan has done something few, if any, writers in English about the origins of Pilsner Urquell, the “world’s first pale lager”, have bothered doing. He has uncovered, and read, the document in 1839 which effectively founded the brewery in Pilsen, the “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse”, made by 12 prominent Pilsen burghers. He has also read the brewery’s own history, written for its 50th anniversary, Měšťanský pivovar v Plzni 1842-1892.

Among the fascinating facts that Evan has revealed so far, the following seem particularly worthy of note:

• The town of Pilsen was already being “flooded” by bottom-fermented “Bavarian-style” beer in 1839, the 12 would-be founders of the new brewery declared, and it seems one big reason why they wanted to build their own new brewery was to fight back against imports of lager beers from elsewhere, by making their own bottom-fermented brews in Pilsen.
• The builder of the new brewery, František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December 1839, the brewery’s architect, Martin Stelzer, “travelled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”
• The yeast for the new brewery was certainly not “smuggled out of Bavaria by a monk”, as far too many sources try to claim (did anybody with their critical faculties engaged ever believe that?), nor even, apparently, brought with him by Josef Groll, the 29-year-old brewer from the town of Vilshofen in Lower Bavaria who was hired to run the new brewery. Instead, “seed yeast for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria,” according to the 1892 book. (The Groll family brewery, incidentally, no longer exists, but another concern in Vilshofen, the Wolferstetter brewery, still produces a Josef Groll Pils in his memory.)
• The maltings at the new brewery were “dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”, that is, loosely, “equipped with English-style malt kilns”, according to an account from 1883. That meant indirect heat: the same 1883 account says the kilns were “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření“, which looks to mean “heated by heat from the boiler-room”. Indirect heat makes it easier to control the heating, and easier to produce pale malt, which is just what the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery did to make its pale lager.

That still leaves THE big mystery: if the burgher brewers of Pilsen wanted to compete against Bavarian-style bottom-fermented lagers, which would still have been quite dark (think “Dunkel”), why did they make a pale beer? Were they attempting to imitate English pale beers? Since pale bitter beers were only just taking off even in Britain in 1842 (although pale mild ales had been around for a couple of centuries), I don’t personally find that particularly likely.

However, Evan has promised “more on the origins of Pilsner Urquell coming up”, and I am hugely looking forward to reading additional revelations. I was delighted to read that Stelzer had toured the big breweries of Munich before the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery was built, because I suggested in an article for Beer Connoisseur magazine in the US two and a half years ago that he must have done. In Munich he surely met Gabriel Sedlmayr II, of the Spaten brewery, who had been round Britain looking at the latest brewing and malting techniques being practised in places such as London, Burton upon Trent and Edinburgh, and Sedlmayr would have been able to tell him about English malting techniques. Munich, at that time, was becoming a magnet for brewers in Continental Europe because of the advances in brewing methods being made by Sedlmayr, as he perfected the techniques of lager brewing.

Sedlmayr wasn’t, at that time, making pale malts: however, the man who accompanied him to Britain on one of his trips, Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery near Vienna, DID come back and start producing paler English-style malts, allied with Bavarian-style lagering, which resulted in a copper-brown beer, the first “Vienna-style” lager. Vienna was then, of course, the capital of the Austrian empire, of which Bohemia (and Pilsen) were still a part: it would not be surprising if Stelzer, a citizen of the Austrian empire, also visited Vienna and met Dreher (whose name, it always amuses me to note, translates as “Tony Turner”), and talked about malting techniques, but there seems to be no evidence as yet that he did so.

I’d also love to know why Josef Groll was hired (apparently by Stelzer) to run the new brewery: Vilshofen, while nearer Pilsen than Munich is, is a comparative backwater, and if Stelzer had been to Munich, why did he not bring a Munich brewer back with him to Bohemia? This site claims (on what authority I know not) that Groll studied under both Sedlmayr and Dreher, but both allegedly complained about his rudeness, obstinacy, stubbornness and lack of self-control. If that’s true (I have no idea), it doesn’t look as it Stelzer bothered checking up on Groll’s references before he hired the young brewer …

You’ve read the stories, I’m sure: you’ve probably got, as I have, a mental picture. The mailcoach rattles through the arch into the straw-strewn innyard, chickens flying out of the way, the outside passengers ducking to avoid losing their hats – or heads. The ostler and stable-boys, alerted by the sound of the guard’s horn as the coach came down the High Street, rush to unhitch the old, tired, sweat-spattered team of horses and lead them away, at the same time bringing out a fresh team. The red-faced landlord, in tan breeches, black waistcoat, white shirt and white apron, his hair tied back in a short ponytail by a black bow, hands up a yard-long glass brimful of ale to the overcoat-laden mailcoach driver, who has no time in his schedule even to get down from his box. In a swing perfected by daily practice, the driver drains the long glass without a spill, hands it back down to the cheery publican and, refreshed, whips up his new horses, who gallop off back out onto the highway, the passenger-laden coach bouncing behind them and 10 more miles of muddy, rutted road ahead before they can all rest at the next stop. If there’s not a painting of that scene on the oak-panelled walls of some pub dining room with 18th century pretentions somewhere in England, I’ll swallow the nearest tricorn hat.

It’s a great tale, repeated often, and I never dissected it until I read it again in the Oxford Companion to Beer, where it appears in the entry for “drinking customs”:

“The diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706) mentions a yard of ale being used to toast King James II but the vessel has more plebeian origins. It was designed to meet the needs of stagecoach drivers who were in a rush to get to their final destinations. At intermediate steps the drivers would be handed ale in a yard glass through an inn window, the glass being of sufficient length for the driver to take it without leaving his coach.”

Perhaps because this occurs just four paragraphs after a claim that King Edgar, a pre-Conquest king of England, tried to limit villages to only one alehouse each in an attempt to cut drunkenness, which is definitely a pile of Anglo-Saxon pants (the permanently established alehouse as a village institution was probably at least three centuries away when Edgar was on the throne, and there wasn’t the infrastructure in his time to enforce such a law anyway – and nor is there a single parchment scrap of evidence for such a decree), myths were at the front of my brain, which is why this time when I read about coach drivers and yards of ale I finally went: “?”

I’m lucky, living in West London, a very short walk from a train station. I can get up to the British Library at St Pancras in less than the 50 70 minutes advertised time between ordering books via the online catalogue and those books being brought up from the shelves. Turn right out of King’s Cross past the stores built for Thomas Salt, brewer of Burton upon Trent, in the 19th century to keep shipments of pale ale in, up the Euston Road and into the BL, one of my favourite places on the planet (it even has a couple of hop plants growing up one wall). Check my coat in the downstairs lockers, up the wide stairs, walk through the doors of the Humanities A 1 reading room, find a seat among a couple of hundred or more other scholars researching who knows what, go up to the collection desk and pick up the haul: half a dozen or so Victorian and Edwardian books and periodicals.

A footed ale-yard

There was certainly a fair amount of interest in the “ale-yard” glass, though as H Symer Cuming, who presented a paper on “The Ale-Yard or Long Glass” to the British Archaeological Society in 1874, declared: “The ale-yard and its parts form a singular group of vessels which are far more spoken about written about.” Symer Cuming, who gave the capacity of a yard of ale as a quart, said he had “searched in vain in printed books” for the history of the ale-yard: and I have searched in vain myself for any mention at all from earlier than my lifetime of stage coach drivers drinking from yards of ale.

Symer Cuming definitely doesn’t mention stage-coach drivers, though he gives a nod to the Alma beerhouse, near Galley Hill, Swanscombe, Kent, built in 1860, which in his era had a sign saying: “London Porter and Ales Sold by the Yard” (a joke also found at the George Inn, Bexley High Street, Kent, according to a writer in 1889, although see later). He mentions the mock “corporation” at Hale, Cheshire (now in Trafford, Manchester) that had the “Hale-yard” as its mace (another repeated joke: in Hanley, in the Potteries, the mock “corporation” swore in each new member with a ceremony that involved drinking from a yard-long glass, though the contents were apparently port when the ceremony began in 1783, before changing to beer and, by the start of the 20th century, champagne. Over the years the Hanley revellers broke their ale-yard at least twice). Symer Cuming also says that yard-of-ale glasses came in both footed and footless forms, the latter the familiar bulb-ended version. But coachmen in a hurry: not a word, though Symer Cuming was writing within 20 years of the last mailcoaches being driven off the road by steam trains.

The magazine Notes and Queries, Victorian England’s answer to Wikipedia, covered the subject of the yard of ale glass, or yard of beer glass, multiple times in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. One of the first mentions, in 1869, describes the ceremony of the “long glass” at Eton, when “RHBH” wrote:

There still exists at Eton the custom of drinking a yard of ale, or, as it is called there, the long glass. Once a week, in the summer half, about twenty to thirty of the boys in the boats, or of the principal cricket or foot-ball players, invited by the captain of the boats and the captain of the cricket eleven, assemble in a room at a small public house for luncheon. The luncheon, or “cellar”, as it is called, consists of bread and cheese, salads, beer and cider-cup. At the conclusion of the luncheon, a boy, previously invited for the purpose, is requested to step forward; he sits down on a chair, a napkin is tied round his neck, and the long glass filled with beer is presented to him. Watches are pulled out, and at a given signal he begins to drink. If he does it in good time he is greeted with loud applause; but if he leaves a drop at the bottom of the bowl it has to be refilled and he has to drink again. Two or three fellows are asked to drink at each cellar, and after this initiation they are entitled to be asked on future occasions. This is a very old institution.

These were schoolboys, of course, aged probably between 15 or 16 and 18. The “beer bong” is not new. (A brief article in the Lincolnshire Chronicle in April 1899, incidentally, agrees the Eton glass held a pint, indicates the “long glass” ceremony still took place, and says the record time for emptying it was nine seconds.)

Another N&Q correspondent, “Ellcee”, in 1869 said that for public houses, possession of, and flaunting, a “yard of ale” glass was “not at all an uncommon mode of inducing custom fifty or sixty years ago”; that is, around 1809 to 1819, and a third pointed out that the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) possessed what it called a “forfeit glass” a yard long and with a bulb at one end, which was apparently made in Venice in the 17th century, and had been donated by the Duke of Bucchleuch. Others mentioned ale-yard glasses that could be seen at places such as Knole House in Sevenoaks, the Red Lion, Retford, a pub in Sandgate, Kent, the Wrestlers Inn, Cambridge, and elsewhere. In 1882 a description was given of the custom associated with the yard of beer glass around Bexley, Kent:

In several houses may be seen an advertisement that “Beer is sold by the yard.” And so it is, in accordance with a local custom. There is a glass vessel exactly three feet in length, with a very narrow stem, slightly lipped at the mouth and a globular bowl at the bottom … This is filled with beer, and any one who can drink it without spilling it may have it for nothing, but if he spills one drop he pays double. It looks so easy and it is so difficult, not to say impossible, to a novice. You take the vessel in both hands, apply the lip to your mouth and then gently tilt it. At first the beer flows quietly and slowly, and you think how admirably you are overcoming the difficulty. Suddenly, when the vessel is tilted a little, more the air rushes up the stem into the bowl and splashes about half a pint into your face. The cheapest plan is to treat the barman to a yard of beer and see how he does it. He will be only too happy to oblige you, and the Bexley ale vanishes with a rapidity only equalled by that of the beer consumed at Heidelberg among the students. The custom has extended far beyond Bexley and not only in the neighbouring villages but even near Oxford the yard of beer is advertised.

(A later correspondent revealed that it was only, again, the George Inn, Bexley that provided the yard of ale, and even it had stopped doing so “within the last twelvemonth” when the glass was accidently smashed.) But again, not one writer talked of coach drivers in connection with yards of ale.

The same absence of evidence occurs in specialist books on drinking glasses. The history of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, published in 1898, has a drawing of the Eton “long glass”, but no coach drivers. Beverages Past and Present by Edward Randolph Emerson, published in 1908, calls the ale-yard “decidedly original” to the English, describing it as “a trumpet-shaped glass exactly a yard in length, the narrow end being closed, and expanded into a large ball.” Emerson gave a good account of the problems of drinking from a yard of ale:

Its internal capacity is a little more than a pint, and when filled with ale many a thirsty tyro has been challenged to empty it without taking it from his mouth. This is no easy task. So long as the tube contains fluid, it drains out smoothly, but when air reaches the bulb it displaces the liquor with a splash, startling the toper, and compelling him involuntarily to withdraw his mouth by the rush of the cold liquid over his face and dress.

Nowhere, however, does he mention coach drivers.

Emerson’s claim as to the difficulty of draining a yard of ale is challenged by Percy H Bate, author of English Table Glass, published in 1905, who describes ale yards (and half-yards) as coming in two forms,

those with feet and those without. Those without feet generally have a bulb at the base … and this bulb is supposed to render the emptying of them at one draught very difficult, the ale leaving the bulb with a rush and drenching the drinker. But, so far as I know, the difficulty is more imaginary than real; at any rate I have not found it at all difficult to empty the only one I ever had in my possession.

Bate added that

Being used as tests of skill at merry-makings and convivial assemblies, in which horse-play was not an unknown factor, most of the many that must have existed have been destroyed, and they are now distinctly rare.

Among the vessels Bate mentions are footless “travellers’ glasses”, which, he said, would be filled with spirits as the coach arrived at an inn for a change of horses, emptied by the passengers “without delay”, and “the coach would roll on.” (Apparently some inns would trick the passengers with glasses that, when filled with gin, looked of normal capacity, but which actually had extra-thick walls and contained much less than the tuppence-worth of spirits charged for. The whole operation was done so quickly that the coach was off out through the archway before the passengers realised they had been diddled.) But on the coach drivers themselves, and how they might have been refreshed, he is again, silent.

Specialist books on coach travel also fail to supply references to coach drivers and ale-yards. Stage-coach and mail in days of yore by Charles H Harper, published in 1907, says the coach-horn was known as the “yard of tin”, but that is the closest it gets. The yard of ale continues to be mentioned as a curiosity through the first half of the 20th century, along with the difficulty of drinking from it – “gardyloo!”, a correspondent in the Western Mail writes in March 1934 in a description of an ale yard to be seen at Exeter museum – but still the coach driver makes no appearance in the story.

An engraving of a painting by the great 17th-century Dutch brewer-painter Jan Steen, ‘Le Roi Boit!’, which is sometimes said to show a yard of ale: it doesn’t, that glass is clearly only 15 or so inches long

The earliest reference to the coach driver legend I have found is from 1952, just 60 years ago, in a report of a day trip by the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art:

On the return journey the party visited the ancient coaching inn at Hatherleigh [west Devon], this proving one of the most attractive features of the excursion, for the hostelry dates from 1450 … To enter the rooms is to recapture the spirit of ancient times: for on the old walls are hung scores of objects of former use, powder-flasks, leathern bottles, mulling-slippers, and many other implements, particularly the “yard of ale” and “yard-and-a-half of ale” glasses handed to drivers of stage coaches.

(Mulling slippers, incidentally, are not what you put on your feet while wearing your thinking cap, but tin or copper slipper-shaped containers for filling with mulled beer and poking into the coals of a fire to warm the contents.)

By the 1960s, barely a decade after this first mention, the “yard-of-ale was a means of quenching a stagecoach driver’s thirst at an inn stop so that he could remain in the box” story seems to have become mainstream, and any inn worth its fake oak beams had a yard of ale on the wall as well. Here’s a description from the Brewing Review of a “pub” built as part of a British Week exhibition in Copenhagen in 1964 – read and weep:

It was entirely built of wood with a false ceiling and a roof of realistic wooden tiles, and contained a collection of sporting prints, a darts-board, a yard of ale glass, horse brasses and post horns and in every way typified the traditional “local”.

Along with the yard of ale glass on the wall came the revival of the yard-of-ale drinking contest, so that pubs from Boston to Sydney had men drenching themselves in beer as they tried to emulate the Eton wet bobs and dry bobs of the 19th century and finish their yard in under 10 seconds. (The current record is five seconds, apparently.)

But with all that, I hope you’ll agree, we have found no evidence that the yard of ale was originally “designed to meet the needs of stagecoach drivers” in a hurry. In fact, there is no evidence that the yard of ale was ever used to refresh coach drivers at all (and if it had been, it certainly wouldn’t have been handed up to the driver through an inn window, which would be an excellent way to either spill the ale or smash the glass). Instead, I think, it seems clear that the yard of ale was (1) produced as something of a show-off, for the glassmaker and the owner, and (2) primarily or almost solely supplied and bought as a “forfeit glass”, for use in drinking games and contests of skill, just as it is today.

However, the point of all this is not to show that the OCB is wrong, again. It’s to show how difficult it is to verify, or not, even the most widely known “fact”. Given that the coach driver/yard of ale meme has been repeated so often over the past 40 or 50 years, and it takes up only a couple of sentences in an OCB article of several hundred words, the writer was actually perfectly justified in not searching out references to back the claim up. For those two sentences, at the OUP’s rate of five cents a word, the writer would have earned about £1.75. It cost me three times that to travel up to the British Library and back, and I only live in West London. Factor in the time it all took, and researching every sentence you write rapidly becomes woefully cost-ineffective.

The problem is: you can’t afford to check everything. But at the same time, as we have seen, you can’t trust anything, certainly nothing written a century and a half or more after the times it claims to describe. Primary research is paramount, and secondary sources are not enough to be sure. The motto of the historian has to be: “Non lego, non credo“. So, pinned by the horns of this dilemma, what do you do? I don’t know. Certainly, if you are writing a short article, I think it’s entirely forgivable to use solely secondary sources: you don’t have time to do anything else. Not so much if you are writing a book. But the problem with the OCB is that, magnificent though its intentions are, it is really only a collection of short articles, few or none of which were written by people with any time to conduct primary research, and who were not being paid enough to conduct primary research anyway. So, understandably, they repeated the secondary sources: which is unfortunate when, as with the yard of ale/coach drivers story, those secondary sources appear to be completely wrong.