RULES for BREWING

Care must be taken, in the first place, to have the malt clean; and after it is ground, it ought to stand four or five days.

For strong October [ale], five quarters of malt to three hogsheads, and twenty-four pounds of hops. This will afterwards make two hogsheads of good keeping small-beer, allowing five pounds of hops to it.

For middling beer, a quarter of malt makes a hogshead of ale, and one of small-beer. Or it will make three hogsheads of good small-beer, allowing eight pounds of hops. This will keep all the year. Or it will make twenty gallons of strong ale, and two hogsheads of small-beer that will keep all the year.

If you intend your ale to keep a great while, allow a pound of hops to every bushel; if to keep six months, five pounds to a hogshead; if for present drinking, three pounds to a hogshead, and the softest and clearest water you can get.

Observe the day before to have all your vessels very clean, and never use your tubs for any other use except to make wines.

Let your cask be very clean the day before with boiling water; and if your bung is big enough, scrub them well with a little birch-broom or brush ; but if they be very bad, take out the heads, and let them be scrubbed clean with a hand-brush, sand, and fullers-earth. Put on the head again, and scald them well, throw into the barrel a piece of unslacked lime, and stop the bung close.

The first copper of water, when it boils, pour into your mash-tub, and let it be cool enough to see your face in; then put in your malt, and let it be well mashed; have a copper of water boiling in the mean time, and when vour malt is well mashed, fill your mashing-tub, stir it well again, and cover it over with the sacks. Let it stand three hours, set a broad shallow tub under the cock, let it run very softly, and if it is thick throw it up again till it runs fine, then throw a handful of hops in the under tub, let the mash, run into it, and fill your rubs till all is run off. Have water boiling in the copper, and lay as much more on as you have occasion for, allowing one third for boiling and waste. Let that stand an hour, boiling more water to fill the mash-tub for small-beer; let the fire down a little, and put it into tubs enough to fill your mash. Let the second mash be run off, and fill your copper with the first wort; put in part of your hops, and make it boil quick. About an hour is long enough; when it has half boiled, throw in a handful of salt. Have a clean white wand and dip it into the copper, and if the wort feels clammy it is boiled enough; then slacken your fire, and take off your wort. Have ready a large tub, put two sticks across, and set your, straining basket over the tub on the sticks, and strain your wort through it. Put your other wort on to boil with the rest of the hops; let your mash be covered again with water, and thin your wort that is cooled in as many things as you can, for the thinner it lies, and the quicker it cools, the better. When quite cool, put it into the tunning-tub. Throw a handful of salt into every boil. When the mash has stood an hour draw it off, then fill your mash with cold water, take off the wort in the copper and order it as before. When cool, add to it the first in the tub; so soon as you empty one copper, fill the other, so boil your small-beer well. Let the last mash run off, and when both are boiled with fresh hops, order them as the two first boilings; when cool empty the mash tub, and put the smallbeer to work there. When cool enough work it, set a wooden bowl full of yeast in the beer, and it will work over with a little of the beer in the boil. Stir your tun up every twelve hours, let it stand two days, then tun it, taking off the yeast. Fill your vessels full, and save some to fill your barrels; let it stand till it has done working; then lay on your bung lightly for a fortnight, after that stop it as close as you can. Mind you have a vent-peg at the top of the vessel, in warm weather, open it; and if your drink hisses, as it often will, loosen till it has done, then stop it close again. If you can boil your ale in one boiling it is best, if your copper will allow of it; if not, boil it as conveniency serves.

When you come to draw your beer and find it is not fine, draw off a gallon, and set it on the fire, with two ounces of isinglass cut small and beat. Dissolve it in the beer over the fire: when it is all melted, let it-stand till it is cold, and pour it in at the bung, which must lay loose on till it has done fermenting, then stop it close for a month.

Take great care your casks are not musty, or have any ill taste; if they have, it is a hard thing to sweeten them.

You are to wash your casks with cold water before you scald them, and they should lie a day or two soaking, and clean them well, then scald them.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man’s coat, steal another man’s wit, apostatize to another man’s creed, or poison another man’s coffee, all without ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game.” He takes sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that Charles I is a matter of what did happen—or did not. He is Liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a notion that politics should deal with the known. If anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

Read the whole opinionated thing over at Project Gutenberg.

IPA has been in this culture-changing position before. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was the ale that travelled around the world, quenching the thirst of British soldiers in India and elsewhere. Sulphate-rich Burton water suits the large quantities of hops used as a preservative in IPA, making their bitterness more appealing. This happy coincidence made IPA key to the rise of Burton on Trent as Britain’s brewing powerhouse.

As a twenty-first century distribution centre Burton is nearly ideal, being right in the middle of the country. But in the years before the railways, ale had to travel from landlocked Burton along the river Trent to Hull or by canal and road to Liverpool. Traditional ales did not travel well, but the quantity of hops used in IPA to help it survive the journey to India was also useful on its 100-mile journey to the coast. Burton IPAs were introduced into port cities and allowed Burton brewers such as Bass to compete with local brewers in other regions. By the 1840s, when the railways had begun to make national distribution easier, Burton brewers such as Bass already had agents in many of the major port cities. As other brewers scrambled to compete, the national spread of Burton-brewed ales was responsible for a change in tastes across the British Isles so that by the twentieth century brewers routinely ‘Burtonised’ their brewing water.

A similar shift in taste took place in the twentieth century. Since the late 1960s British drinkers have swung away from traditional ales and settled on lager as their beer style of choice. Most of these lagers are bland, nondescript and at best inoffensive, but they are certainly popular. Carling, which is brewed, ironically enough, in Burton on Trent, is Britain’s best-selling beer. In the last few years though, things have been changing. In the face of rising commodity prices, rising taxation, declining pub sales, and downward pressure on price from the supermarkets, traditionally brewed ales have been making a comeback and small brewers seem to be springing up everywhere. In fact sales of ‘real’ ales are rising despite an otherwise flat or falling overall market. Where there is quality, the effects of financial crisis and fiscal meltdown seem to be felt least of all.

So what about IPA and where might it stand in the apparent trend back towards real ale?

Not long ago I had a conversation with a group of friends and the subject of beer came up, as it often does. One of the women asked what that delicious lager was that they had been drinking a few weeks earlier and interestingly the ‘lager’ in question turned out to be Innovation, an award-winning, hoppy American-style IPA brewed by Adnams. One of the great things about Innovation, and many other ales of its type, is that it can stand being drunk straight from the fridge without losing any of that wonderful flavour, making it ideal for the exact situation where lager has dominated. Curiously, while the big name lagers are mostly bland affairs, aimed at the undiscriminating palate, what this little anecdote suggests is that big flavours are not necessarily a problem.

This is a small point, but an interesting one I think. The woman who asked the question is not an ale drinker and would turn down a pint of bitter. But she loved Innovation and what’s more she remembered it, even if she didn’t know what it was. Crucially, she would drink it again, if she saw it. If brewers could get IPAs of this type in front of a enough drinkers of premium lagers I think we might have a real cultural shift on our hands. A problem for smaller and independent brewers is that two generations of drinkers have grown up with the idea that lager is more refreshing, more ‘easy drinking’ than other kinds of beer. Hoppy, zesty IPAs could be the ales to change that perception.

Obviously, for most of the 1940s British life was dominated by war and its consequences. Lives lost, buildings destroyed, ordinary life disrupted. There were shortages of just about everything. Beer and pubs were seen during the war as important for morale, but barley, sugars and so on were needed for food so pubs had a weekly beer ration and when it was gone they had to close. They kept going all week by limiting the opening times quite severely. In major cities, especially when the risk of bombing was at its highest, pubs were deserted at night anyway as people headed for the shelters.

Great efforts were made to distribute beer fairly, though not all the measures were popular with brewers. According to H.A. Monckton in his A History of English Ale and Beer (1966) brewers set up the ‘Beer for the Troops Committee’ to make sure beer was supplied to servicemen. Temporary ‘zoning’ regulations were less popular, since breweries were forced to supply to a set geographical area. This meant that some ‘tied’ pubs had to take their supplies from another brewer, while some larger brewers were allowed to deliver nationally, setting up a network of agents and distribution systems that would give them an advantage after the war.

Shortages also meant that the strength of beer declined further. Allowing for a slight blip in the early 1920s the strength of beer declined fairly steadily throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. Monckton gives the average original gravity of beer in 1900 as 1055°; by 1950 it had fallen to 1034°. In other words, at under 5% ABV Guinness in 2010 is weaker than the average bitter ale in 1910; modern Guinness is around half the strength of the average stout before World War I.

Bottled beer became more popular as bottling technology improved in the 1930s. Before WWI the availability of bottled beer was quite limited, but by 1939 it was about 30% of the market. During WWII paper shortages meant that a lot of brewers didn’t use labels on their bottles, so different ales were distinguished only by the colour of the crown cap, or by a narrow strip of paper over screw tops. Barley wine was popular, perhaps because low gravity beers didn’t last more than a few weeks in bottles.

During the war pine and other woods took the place of oak in making casks, which must have affected the flavour of beer. Beer cans arrived in the late 1940s and Monckton concluded in 1966 that the days of bottled beer were numbered:

Because of its weight and fragility the glass bottle is by no means an ideal container and, doubtless, its days are numbered. Inevitably bottles will be replaced by some other type of container. The metal beer can, used extensively in America, was introduced to the English market after the last war but so far has not been widely or enthusiastically welcomed.

We take a little time to adapt on this side of the Atlantic.

Prices rose fast in the war years and after, partly because of rises in duty, but also because of shortages. According to Monckton, after WWI a pint was about 7d and it was still about that in 1941. By the end of the war it was a shilling and by the mid-1960s, it was 1/6d–nine times what it was at the beginning of the century. On the subject of taste Monckton is instructive, attributing a rise in the demand for sweeter beers, including Barley Wine, to the rationing and shortage of sugar in the 1940s. Following this argument the rise of bitter, hoppy IPAs in the early twenty-first century might be attributable to the excess of sugars in many modern foods.

Scoresby was not a man to harbour grudges, but he must have felt wounded by the rejection, given that he was widely acknowledged at the time to be the foremost expert on the Arctic region. His voyage in 1822, commanding the ship he had designed and had built for the purpose in Liverpool three seasons earlier, was primarily to catch whales. Without government assistance, Scoresby had to make his voyage pay. And pay it did: despite sailing outside the usual fishing grounds around Spitzbergen, and despite narrowly avoiding shipwreck, Scoresby brought back a full ship.

More importantly, Scoresby’s map of the Eastern coast of Greenland, as well as his examinations of the ‘mineralogy’ and botany of the region, were a significant advance on what had existed before. In the section of the map shown here the gaps are obvous. Huge areas of the land back from the coast are uncharted; the assumption was that rather than being a single large landmass, Greenland was in fact a series of small islands joined together by ice. At the end of his 1822 journal, published in 1823 as A Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery in 1822, Scoresby quotes a letter from Sir Charles Giseiké on ‘the Structure of Greenland’:

It is past doubt, that the whole coast of Greenland formerly consisted of Large islands, which are now, as it were, glued together by immense masses of ice.

Such inlets, or rather firths (fiords), which once formed sounds or passages, terminate always, according to my observations, with glaciers filling up the valleys at each end. Such is (to confine myself to the more northern latitudes), the ice-firth, or ice-bay, of Disco Bay, in 68° 40′. Such, also, is Cornelius Bay (North-east Bay, or Omenak’s Fiord), 71½°, the north-eastern arm of which is blocked up at both ends with ice running through a valley, and bending rather towards the ENE.

Scoresby named many of the headlands and islands he discovered after his friends and acquaintances back in Liverpool. If you look closely at the map you will see ‘Scoresbys Sound’ (named after his father) and ‘Jameson Land’ after his mentor Professor Jameson of Edinburgh University, but this section of coastline he names the ‘Liverpool Coast’: names such as Holloway Bay (after a Liverpool minister) and Rathbone Island (after the famous Liverpool shipping family who were close friends) betray Scoresby’s affection for the city. Many of these names did not make it onto the official Admiralty maps or were replaced by later navigators.