text:
FAQ – False Ale Quotes
Myth 1: Ralph Harwood invented porter as a substitute for three-threads
Myth 2: Hops were forbidden by Henry VI
Myth 3: Medieval ale-conners wore leather breeches and tested ale by pouring some on a wooden bench and then sitting in it and seeing if they stuck to the bench
Myth 4: George Hodgson invented IPA to survive the long trip to India
Six more myths about hops
Myth 6: "As early as the ninth century, the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland had three breweries in full operation"
Category Archives: Beer news
Beer, Beer ingredients, Beer news, Beer styles, Brewery history, History of beer
The legendary Mercer's Meat Stout returns after 75 years
20th November 2019 Martyn Cornell	15 Comments
There is not a lot will make me drop everything and rush 200 miles north to Blackburn, but a message saying that the recipe for the legendary Mercer's Meat Stout had been discovered in an attic and the beer was being brewed again got me on the first available train out of Euston.
Guinness might be good for you, but meat stout is better …
Mercer's Meat Stout must be the weirdest beer ever brewed by a mainstream British brewer. It first appeared just before the First World War, and early advertising claimed that it was "brewed with the addition of a specially prepared meat extract." It was introduced by Harold Irving Mercer, son of the founder of the Plough brewery in Adlington, Lancashire, John Mercer, who had died in 1907, and advertised in 1914 as "The Body Building Beverage for Brain Bone and Blood".
It was part of a trend for "nourishing stouts" in vogue since a London wine merchant named George Raggett passed off Truman's stout as "Raggett's Nourishing Stout" in 1860, and which had seen "invalids' stout" appear as early as 1861, "nursing stout" in 1867, "oat malt stout" (celebrated for its restorative properties) in 1895, and milk stout ("anti-rheumatic, energising") in 1909.
Mercer's was taken over by its bigger rival, Dutton's of Blackburn, ten miles to the north, in March 1929, and the following month someone (presumably Mercer's head brewer, perhaps Harold Mercer him self) typed up, or had typed up, a complete seven-page document headed "Meat Stout Brewing", clearly instructions for Dutton's on how to produce what was a popular beer in Lancashire. Mercer's brewery closed in 1936, and the brewing of meat stout continued at Dutton's Salford brewery in Bow Street, Blackburn until around 1943: it was still on sale in April 1942, priced at one shilling and five pence for a pint bottle, 9½ pence for a half-pint, against Mackeson milk stout and Guinness at one shilling and sixpence per pint bottle and Whitbread's Oatmeal Stout and John Smith's Milk Stout at one shilling and four pence a pint.
Mercer's Meat Stout advertised on the outside of an unidentified Dutton's pub some time in the 1930s
Quite likely the end came because of the increasing difficulty in the middle of the Second World War of getting hold of the large quantities of the tightly rationed sugars of various types that went into the brewing of meat stout: more than 14 pounds to the barrel. (Harold Mercer died in October 1943, aged 64, at his home in Bare Lane, Bare, Morecambe, meaning his best-known beer disappeared off the planet around the same time that he did.)
The recipe remained in Dutton's possession even after meat stout stopped being made, and when the brewery in Blackburn closed in 1978, 14 years after it had been bought out by Whitbread, a brewer at Bow Street named Derek Malcolm Dixon decided that he did not wish to transfer to the new Whitbread brewery at Salmesbury and, though only 50, he would take his pension – and the recipe – and retire. (Today Salmesbury is owned by AB InBev and produces Stella and Bud.) Derek died a few years later, aged just 58, and the recipe for meat stout that he had removed from work was inherited, along with a couple of brewing books and a hydrometer, by his son Phil.
Phil then misplaced the recipe for more than 30 years, until the boom in craft brewing spurred him to look for it and, when he found it, to take it to a local craft brewery, Three B's, based at the Black Bull inn, in the countryside just outside Blackburn, to see if they would like to try to reproduce it. Brewery founder Robert Bell and his son Mark did their best with matching the original ingredients from 1929, which included more than 200 pounds of something called "meat extract caramel", made by the food additives and flavourings manufacturer A. Boake, Roberts & Co of Stratford, East London, which disappeared about the same time that Dutton's brewery did.
The yeast "goes a bit daft" on its introduction to Bovril
Not having "meat extract caramel", the Bells improvised with Bovril: two catering packs-worth, 900 grams in all, added at the whirlpool stage. The recipe they came up with also included pale Maris Otter malt, roast barley, black malt, wheat malt and treacle, with Goldings, Fuggles and Northern Brewer hops. The yeast certainly appreciated the Bovril: when Rob Bell came back three hours after pitching, it was "going a bit daft," in his own words, with a river of foaming, frothing yeast pouring from the four-barrel fermenter all over the brewhouse floor.
The final result was a 5.5 per cent abv deep black stout with a fine creamy head, and complex layers of flavour, matching sweetness with bitterness, and a touch of dryness in the finish. The Bells called it Winter Warmer Stout, rather than meat stout, worrying that drinkers would be put off by the name, but the reaction in the Black Bull pub from customers has been highly enthusiastic, and Phil Dixon is delighted: "I'm over the moon with the beer – I couldn't have expected it to be any better, they've done a really good job of brewing it," he told me. Phil is one of the few people around to be able to make any sort of comparison with the Mercer's Meat Stout of old: his father was a home-brewer after he retired, and "as far as I'm aware this is one of the recipes he brewed at home. I remember tasting a brew that can't have been anything else, it was very similar.
Phil Dixon at the Black Bull with a pint of the revived Meat Stout
"It was mashed in a bath, and then the wort was transferred into one of those top-loading washing machines to be boiled with hops, and then it was pumped out and fermented. So we couldn't have a bath for a week and we couldn't wash our clothes."
Although the Three B's brewery, which is now 20 years old, though it only moved to its present site a former Daniel Thwaites pub, in 2011, delivers its beers to 30 or 40 pubs a week, the revived Mercer's Meat Stout will only be on sale at the Black Bull. If you want to try it, be warned that the pub is closed Mondays and Tuesdays and only open from 4pm Wednesdays to Fridays, though it opens at noon on Saturdays and Sundays. The Black Bull does not serve food, and it has no televisions and no fruit machines – "it's a talking pub," Mark Bell says.
The original recipe, meanwhile, is a fascinating document, revealing much about the methods used by a small North of England brewer in the 1920s. Three different types of coloured malt went into Meat Stout, for example, amber, black and crystal, made by Charles E. Seed Ltd of Clayton, Bradford, Yorkshire, and the recipe is firm about their use: "These Patent Malts should be mashed within about 48 hours of being roasted. Seeds send them to us newly roasted specially for each brew by passenger train [a journey of some 40 miles]. We pay half the carriage. (note: Black Malt is NOT mashed. It is added to copper at start of second 50-minute boil.)" Those three made up seven per cent of the grain bill each: 68 per cent was "high dried" Norfolk and Californian malt from the Leeds maltsters W.J. Robson & Co, and 11.5 per cent was flaked maize from the Liverpool Malt Co Ltd.
The hops were a real mix, though annoyingly the author of the recipe gave only the geographical origins of the hops used, not their varieties: not quite a quarter 1928 Worcesters, the same amount of 1928 Kents, 15 per cent each 1927 Kents and Worcesters, nine per cent 1927 "Continentals", the same amount of 1927 "Oregons" (possibly Fuggles, through probably Clusters), three per cent 1925 Oregons and three per cent "sundry pieces to use up end of pockets". There were also 18 pounds of "stew hops", a mixture of 1928 "choicest" Worcesters and Kents, which were placed in a bag with a chain attached and hung in the copper for 20 minutes after the 110-minute boil was over, to be retained and reused in the next brew; and 4½ pounds of White, Tompkins & Courages Hop Concentrate, equivalent of 54 pounds of leaf hops, to give 192 pounds of hops for 80 barrels, or two pounds 6.4 ounces of hops per barrel.
Other wacky ingredients in the recipe besides that mysterious "Meat Extract Caramel" (Boake, Roberts & Co's records are at Hackney Local Archives, apparently: time for a trip to East London) are "copper wort adjunct" from George Clark & Son Ltd of Millwall Docks in London, "a slowly fermentable sugar for use in the copper with all types of beer", designed to give palate-fulness at a lower gravity; "Jetose Caramel", which looks to be a typographical error for "ketose caramel" (j and k are adjacent on the keyboard) from the Liverpool sugar manufacturer Harvey Steel; and "block juice", "a solid block, resembling coal, but with the overpowering liquorice flavour and bitter-sweet taste", from the Manchester-based chemists J. Woolley Sons & Co. It is notable, though of course, not surprising, that most of the suppliers were from the North of England.
Other points from the recipe: the stout was dry-hopped at a rate of two ounces of 1928 Worcesters, two ounces of 1928 Kents and 1½ ounces of 1927 Oregons per barrel for the draught version and five ounces of 1928 Worcesters, two ounces of 1928 Kents and three ounces of 1927 Oregons per barrel for the bottled version, and the draught version was primed with around two pints three fluid ounces of 1148ºOG priming solution to give a gravity equivalent to 1056º; and the bottled stout was delivered "as near as is practical … new bottled to the customer. The ideal is to bottle it and load it on the motors direct off the bottling machine."
Very many thanks indeed to Phil Dixon's late father for preserving the recipe for Mercer's Meat Stout, and to Phil for finding it again and persuading the Three B's brewery to reproduce it, and then telling me about it (this is not such a great scoop as I thought it was at first, as there is apparently a version of the recipe in the Whitbread archives, and Brian Glover mentions it in one of his books, though it appears to be two pages shorter than the Dixon version) and very many thanks to Rob and Mark Bell for picking me up at Blackburn Station, driving me to the Black Bull and filling me with excellent stout. I very sincerely hope this will not be the last time we see Mercer's Meat Stout on a bar top again.
Rob and Mark Bell: thanks very much, guys, athat's a great beer you brewed
Mark BellPhil DIxonRobert Bell
Beer, Beer business, Beer industry, Beer news, Beer nonsense, Beer reviews, Beer styles, Bottled beer
Carlsberg's new lager: the verdict is in and it's 'This is NOT the future of beer'
14th May 2019 Martyn Cornell	13 Comments
A few years back, when I was still involved in hospitality trade journalism, I would get occasional invites from Carlsberg to PR gigs. One was to Wembley to see England play San Marino. The match itself was the predictable turkey-stuffing (5-0) but it was the entertainment beforehand we were particularly supposed to appreciate: Northampton's Danes had taken over part of Wembley town hall and turned it into an "If Carlsberg did pubs" pub, with unlimited free pints of lager delivered on sushi-style conveyor belts, the Lightning Seeds as the pub band and Ian Wright, Paddy McGuinness and Jeff Stelling as pre-match pundits. It was quite fun, as quite fun goes, but the big drawback was the beer: Carlsberg.
Carlsberg's rfevamped "Danish pilsner' in a glass older than the marketer who thought it was a great idea to drop the word 'lager' from the product
I don't have anything against big-corporation beer in itself, but I do have a big problem with dull beer: I can't drink it. I have a very low boredom threshold with food and drink (and most other experiences, actually) and I would literally rather drink nothing than drink more than a couple of pints of beer with no interest. And that Carlsberg: it wasn't actually bad, or faulty, it was simply a cypher, a blank hole where beer should have been. There was no pain in drinking it, but it was a hedonistic vacuum that actively repelled me, that made me not wish to experience this beery nothing.
The one upside, I thought, was that at least I wasn't going to get embarrassingly drunk on free beer, since I couldn't bring myself to bring it near my mouth. So I waited, faintly bored, until the drinking was over and we could go and watch the match – which was a similar sort of experience to the beer, ironically. Had it been a ten-nil walloping, that would have been good to watch. Had it been decent opposition, that would have been good, too. But five-nil against San Marino, a country with a population the size of Letchworth: meh.
So: come forward to the present day, and the Cobblertown-based Danes are now apparently admitting that, indeed, their beer really hasn't been up to much: the San Marino of beerdom. In the run-up to a relaunch last month of the basic 3.8 per cent abv "Green" Carlsberg, the company started retweeting tweets from drinkers comparing the beer to drinking stale breadsticks, or the bathwater your granny died in, using the increasingly popular "beat us, we're bad" strategy marketeers seem to think makes consumers love them because they're apparently being deeply honest, for a change. Then its VP of marketing in the UK, Liam Newton, pulled on the sackcloth, dumped a pile of ashes over his head, threw himself on his knees and wailed: "At Carlsberg UK, we lost our way. We focused on brewing quantity, not quality; we became one of the cheapest, not the best. In order to live up to our promise of being 'probably the best beer in the world', we had to start again." Actually, Liam, you used to say "Probably the best lager in the world", you little fibber, not least because prosodically the two beats of "lager" make for a better-sounding slogan that the single beat of beer: cretic, trochee, spondee, cretic rather than the clunkier cretic, cretic, cretic,
Green Carlsberg is now calling itself a Danish pilsner, rather than a lager: presumably "consumer feedback" suggests "pilsner" sounds posher. Poor Bhavya Mandanna, head brewperson at Carlsberg UK, ventriloquised the following nonsense, courtesy of Carlsberg's PR people: "Our new Pilsner has a fuller body and a perfect balance of bitterness and sweetness made possible through modifications to our brewing process and the addition of bittering hops in the brewhouse." Wow, they're adding bittering hops in the brewhouse! There's innovative! Tell us more, Bhavya, and let's see if you can say it while the PR man sits you in his knee with his hand up the back of your jacket as he swallows a pint of supposedly perfectly balanced lager: "Aroma hops with citrus and floral top notes give a greater depth of flavour whilst maintaining the light and refreshing qualities of Carlsberg."
Enough guff. Just because PR people make it appear you're as filled with marketing bollocks as they are, it doesn't mean you're automatically a bad brewer. It's only fair to put Bhavya's new-style Green Carlsberg in a taste-off to see how it performs. I decided to pair it against Camden Town's new "Weeknite Any Day" lager, a 3 per cent beer I suspect only escaped being called "Everyday lager" because that would have given the Portman Group the blue giptions for suggesting you could drink every day. And the result is (the envelope, please …)
The result, I'm actually disappointed to say, is exactly what a cynic might expect. The "new" Green Carlsberg, selling for £1 a 33cl bottle in your local corner offie (that's £1.72 a pint), is scarcely less dull than its previous incarnation. It smells of almost nothing. It tastes of almost nothing. There's a faintly meaty, metallic aftertaste that lingers for too long. More flavour comes through as the beer opens up in the glass, but so does a bitterness just hovering on the edge of unpleasant. A slight malt sweetness is present, but the main sensation is of something massively watered down. I'm bored even thinking about it.This is NOT the future of beer, and Carlsberg are only wasting time on what should be a controlled rundown of a beer in terminal decline.
Camden Week Nite: is this AB Inbev's secret weapon in the fruity lager war?
Camden Town's Week Nite, though, is a little bit of a revelation. It's one of a growing number of what might be called "floral" or "fruity" lagers, cold-fermented beers made with hop varieties more normally associated with warm-fermented American IPAs: Galaxy, a strongly flavoured Australian hop with lots of tropical fruit/peach aromas, Topaz, another Australian hop, with hints of clove and lychee and Mosaic, from the US, with more tropical/floral/citrus flavours – that are becoming increasingly popular – see, for example, Guinness's Hop House 13, very likely to be already on a bar top near you just three years after its launch.
What this new style of lager is delivering is taste, something that, 20 years after the American IPA revolution, is finally becoming a mainstream demand, plus "cold refreshingness"' something beers such as Carlsberg once had tied up and held down on the ground, but which is no longer enough. What Week Nite is delivering as well is relatively low alcohol: it used to be that a three per cent beer would have to be made with roasted or high-dried malts, like a brown ale or a dark mild or a sweet stout, to deliver flavour. Brewers are now discovering that it is possible to deliver flavour in a low-gravity beer with American-heritage hops:
Week Nite has Motueka, a New Zealand hop with Saaz in its family tree but also NZ hops to give a distinctly tropical fruits aroma, and Centennial, one of the classic American "C-hops", adding more citrus flavours, as whirlpool hops, and it is then dry-hopped with Motueca and Centennial again, plus Cascade, another citrussy American C-hop, and left unfiltered and unpasteurised – but moves likely to increase the flavour in a low-gravity beer. The result is a somewhat austere beer with a restrained mango, physalis and passionfruit nose, mango juice in the mouth, just enough bitterness to hold it all up and the body of an ultra-marathon runner: not so much thin as wiry. That sounds harsher than I mean to be on this beer: for a three per cent alcohol brew it stands up very well, and it should hit the target market, people wanting something tasty that won't lay them out, right in the eye. The 33cl can represents exactly one UK unit of alcohol: pace yourself and you could drink one of these every 40 minutes while staying totally sober.
You don't have to stare too deeply into a beer-filled crystal ball to predict that (1) there will be a constant flow of launches of floral/fruity lagers, in the wake of Hop House 13, and (2) this poses big problems for the "standard" lager giants, who can't reformat their existing beers, for fear of alienating their existing drinkers, but who are not recruiting new drinkers in enough numbers to maintain market share. The "lager louts" of the 1980s are now, to revive an old joke, becoming Saga louts, 30 years on, as they close in on their 60s, and nobody aged 18 wants to drink the beer a 60-year-old drinks. It looks like Carlsberg's pet British micro, London Fields, has already had an attempt at a "fruity" lager with the launch of Broadway Boss, using a "traditional" hop in the boil but "a new American variety in the whirlpool to give it a lemony zing." Unfortunately the whole first batch has had to be recalled after high levels of DMS in the final product, but they'll be back …
What, then, do AB InBev and Heineken do, with so much invested in Stella, Budweiser, Fosters and the rest? Will we see the launch of Stella floral, of Fosters fruity, or will they try new brands entirely, using, perhaps, their recently acquired "craft" breweries as cover? Those of you at the back shouting "Camden Town is owned by AB InBev!" – yes, exactly. What we have here with Week Nite is a floral/fruity toe in the lager by AB InBev's marketers, to see if anybody bites. If it doesn't work, no problem: no embarrassment for the big brands. If it does, then woo-hoo, roll that baby out round the distribution network.
And on cue, *ding* into my email intray today comes a release from Shepherd Neame about its new Bear Island Triple Hopped Lager, hopped with Saaz, pretty much the standard "noble" lager hop, from Bohemia, somewhat herby, but also Challenger, a British hop with a touch of orange marmalade, and, that one again, Mosaic, for the floral/tropical/citrus delivery. There'll be plenty more along soon.
AB InbevAmerican hopsCamden TownCarlsbergDanish pilsnerLagerLondon FieldsWeek Nite lager
Ageing beer, Beer, Beer ingredients, Beer myths, Beer news, Beer styles, Brewing beer, History of beer, malt
AB Inbev's new 1840 London porter and the hornbeam question
25th April 2019 Martyn Cornell	14 Comments
I am green – viridian. Ron Pattinson has been dropping hints every time I see him about his secret big new project with Goose Island in Chicago, and it's now been revealed: a reproduction of a London porter from 1840, including authentic heritage barley, properly "blown" brown malt, and blending a long-vatted beer with a much younger version. Who do I have to kill to get hold of a bottle?
Of course, some people have knee-jerked in and slapped this down because it involves the Evil Empire, AB InBev, owner of Goose Island and, in the opinion of many, too many other formerly small craft breweries, from Four Peaks to Wicked Weed. The PC line is "I'll never drink anything produced by a company that is fundamentally bad for, and opposed to, small independent operators and their survival."
As it happens, I've just finished reading Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out Josh Noel's deservedly award-winning book from last year on the take-over of Goose Island by Anheuser-Busch – do try to get hold of a copy, it's an excellent, even-handed and sympathetic analysis of what happened and why it happened. You'll certainly put it down after 345 pages and conclude that AB InBev is indeed interested in nothing more, ultimately, than getting you to buy its product in preference to anybody else's, and if that meant using its weight, wealth and power to crush the entire global craft beer scene, it wouldn't care. But that's what big corporations do: criticising them for wanting to dominate the world is like criticising lions for chasing down and killing wildebeest. It's the nature of the animal. Run faster, wildebeest.
Ron Pattinson outside the Anchor, Southwark, about all that remains of the former Barclay Perkins brewery, once the largest in the world
And if AB InBev wants to spend silly sums of money flying my mate Ron, and Derek Prentice, former brewer with Truman's of Brick Lane, then Young's, then Fuller's, and now Wimbledon, out to Chicago to advise on recreating an almost 180-year-old beer, and take enormous pains getting the ingredients and the methodology just right, in the hope that this will greenwash their corporation and get people like me to write admiringly about them, rather than attack them for trying to squeeze smaller rivals out of the market, then they're partly correct: I'll still criticise where necessary, but I'm also writing admiringly about the Obadiah Poundage porter project, because I think it's wonderful to be able to drink this beer from the past, and I don't believe very many other organisations would have the big wallet, or the commitment, to undertake such a recreation. This is an expensive beer made with unusual ingredients back in March last year, which was then left sitting around occupying valuable real estate in Chicago for a year before being blended with the newer version and put on sale. Most companies' accountants would have been screaming themselves puce. If not AB InBev, who else would undertake such a journey?
Anyway, watch this fascinating 20-minute video about the project, listen to Mike Siegel, research and development boss at Goose Island explain it all, see if you can spot John Hall, founder of Goose Island, popping into shot uncredited occasionally, and then come back here and I'll discuss a few interesting points that arise, so pay attention and listen out in particular for the mentions of hornbeam, there will be questions afterwards.
Derek Prentice, brewer at Truman's in Brick Lane in the East End of London51 years ago, compares the street scene of today with that of 1841
I didn't expect to find anything to criticise about the history when I watched that. I nodded along as Derek Prentice accurately recounted the role of porters in 18th century London, and as Ron described the change from the all-brown-malt porters of the early 18th century to the more complicated grain bills of later porters, with pale malt, "patent" black malt and "blown" malt dried and browned over faggots of hornbeam wood, and I sat awed as Andrea Stanley of Valley Malt in Massachusetts showed the making of just such a batch of "blown" malt over a fire of hornbeam. And then something strange happened. My subconscious popped up and said: "Hornbeam – are you actually certain about that?" So I checked.
For the past 18 months I've been writing what is meant to be the definitive history of porter and stout, and I've read several hundred books and articles to pull that together. All that information goes down into the subconscious, where, as is the way of the human brain, new connections are formed that the conscious mind is unaware of until something bubbles up from the id. Now, "maltsters made blown malt for porter by drying the grains over blazing hornbeam" is a solid received fact among historians of brewing. I never doubted it. Hough, Briggs and Stevens's Malting and Brewing Science from 1971 says so: "dried in a fierce heat from a fire of hardwood faggots made from oak, hornbeam, ash or beech" (p166). Steeped in Tradition, a history of the malting industry from 1983 by Jonathan Brown says so: "These kilns were fired by wood, mostly and preferably oak, but beech, hornbeam and ash were also commonly used." It makes sense: blown malt was a speciality of the maltsters of Ware and other towns in East Hertfordshire, and hornbeam, which burns with a bright, hot flame, is abundant in the woods of East Herts.
Grain being dried at high temperature over a hornbeam fire at Valley Malt in Massachusetts to make 'blown' or 'snapped' malt
But as my subconscious prompted me into confirming, if you go and look, you will not actually find any references to hornbeam being used by maltsters during the time that blown malt was still being made. Many authors do not specify any particular wood. Of those that do, William Black in his Practical Treatise on Brewing of 1844 says blown malt is heated with "faggots of dry, hard wood, commonly beech or birch; fir imparting a tarry taste." (p26). Henry Stopes, who was the 19th century's Mr Malt, spoke only of billet and faggot wood "generally of oak but occasionally of beech" in making the blown variety (Malt and Malting, 1885, p159). E.R. Southby's Systemic Handbook of Practical Brewing from the same year says blown malt is "dried rapidly over a fire of beech or birch wood" (p215). Herbert Edwards Wright's A Handy Book for Brewers from 1892 says blown malt is made by subjecting the barley to "a sudden blast of intense heat generated by heating up the kiln fire with oak or beechen faggots or billets" (p309). (Wright also says that the fire risk "and the high rates of insurance demanded in consequence" meant this was a variety of malt generally made only by specialists.)
So, what to say to Ron, Derek, Andrea and Mike: "Er, thanks for all the trouble you went to, guys, that was amazing, especially the hornbeam, but, um, you might have been better off with beech …" I'm not saying nobody ever used hornbeam to make blown malt: I think it's very likely they did. It was available, in the right place, and has similar characteristics to both birch (which is in the same botanical family) and beech, which we DO known were used (indeed, the hornbeam is known in some parts of Britain as the "ay beech", for its habit of keeping its leaves through winter, that is "for aye".)
Mike Siegel, r&d manager at Goose Island, tries some Obadiah Poundage at the brewery's barrel ageing warehouse. Where's mine?
Best not to say anything to dampen the party, really. And let's not mention that the American hornbeam that Andrea used is a slightly different species to English hornbeam: that would be taking my (deserved) reputation for picky pedanticism too far down the road. Nor let us question why an 1840 porter is named for a man who probably died at least 70 years earlier, the pseudonymous commentator whose letter to the London Chronicle in 1760 about the tax on beer provides historians with so much information about the history of porter. (Someone in the film wonders where the original "Obadiah Poundage" got his name from: "Poundage" is an old word for tax, and one of the many Obadiahs in the Old Testament was a porter "keeping the ward " [Nehemiah 12:25].) And please, let's not ask why you have to query every single damned received historical fact because too often what you thought was indisputably true isn't indisputably true at all. No, there's a much more important question than all that: where's my bottle?
AB InbevDerek PrenticeGoose IslandhornbeamJohn HallMike SiegelObadiah PoundageporterRon Pattinson
Anti-alcohol campaigners, Beer, Beer and health, Beer campaigning, Beer industry, Beer news, Beer nonsense, Bottled beer, Kirstie Allsopp, Rants
The Portman Group is trying to destroy Britain's proud history of strong ales
5th March 2019 Martyn Cornell	13 Comments
Fabulous reproduction of a classic 19th century brew that the Portman Group wishes to see banned
It is as well the Portman Group wasn't around when Admiral Sir Edward Belcher was fitting out his expedition to the Arctic in 1852 to try to find out what had happened to Sir John Franklin and his gallant men, lost on their voyage in search of the North West Passage seven years earlier. The Portman Group would have tried to tell Sir Edward that the Arctic Ale he was taking with him to sustain his men, brewed by Allsopp's brewery in Burton upon Trent to around 11.25 per cent abv and shipped in "reputed quarts", a whistle under 75cl, smashed its guidelines, being 8.4 units of alcohol in a single container, or more than twice as much as was permissible. Sir Edward would doubtless have replied in sailorly fashion, leaving everybody's ears severely scorched.
The Portman Group's "Code of Practice on the Naming, Packaging and Promotion of Alcoholic Drinks", which has just been updated, is fundamentally an exercise in arse-protecting by the drinks industry, an attempt through "self-regulation" to persuade the government not to listen to the nanny-state neo-prohibitionists who would like, in lieu of total prohibition, as many restrictions on the sale of alcohol as possible, accompanied by as much tax as the market will bear. The group, the self-styled "drinks industry watchdog", is there to assure politicians that the makers of alcohol are doing sufficient to prevent harm caused by alcohol for there to be no need for any more government legislation.
Unfortunately you can never satisfy the wowsers enough without banning alcohol altogether, and the Portman Group appears to be incapable of standing up to people like the neo-prohibitionist Institute of Alcohol Studies and pointing out that whatever harm alcohol does, it brings much pleasure to a far greater number of people than it hurts. The result is the pursuit by the group of policies that will actively reduce the legitimate pleasure possible, in particular, from the consumption of strong beers such as barley wines and imperial stouts, with their massive depths of flavours, apparently under the misapprehension that the only people who want to drink a beer over seven per cent ABV are tramps sitting on park benches, and that tramps need to be prevented from getting drunk
Duvel Barrel Aged: one of a range of strong bottled beers that faces a Portman Group red card
SIBA, the small brewers' group, has been getting seriously upset at changes in the new guidelines over the strength of beers, with its chief executive, Mike Benner, declaring that they "threaten new, innovative speciality beer styles like Imperial stouts, porters, IPAs and British interpretations of traditional strong Belgian styles," and "SIBA is disappointed the Portman Group is pressing ahead to introduce new guidance, which says that 'single serve', non-resealable containers shouldn't contain more than four units of alcohol."
But this isn't new at all: the attack on strong beers has actually been Portman Group policy for years – the guidelines already specifically stated that "putting in excess of four units in a non-resealable single-serve container indirectly encouraged immoderate consumption of alcohol, contrary to rule 3.2(f)." Carlsberg was found in breach of the guidelines in 2015 over its 500ml cans of nine per cent abv Special Brew, which contained 4.5 units of alcohol, which is why it is now only available in the UK in 440ml cans at 7pc abv, which is three units.
That ober dicta was based on the Chief Medical Officers' drinking guidelines, which, at the time, suggested no more than four units of alcohol for men per day. When the CMOs came out with new guidelines in 2016 which dropped the daily limit in favour of a weekly one, the rug was tugged sharply from under the Portman Group's justification for ruling against Special Brew, since producers could argue that as long as a drinker wasn't having a can every day, there was no problem. They haven't said so, but I'd bet what worried the Portman Group after the CMOs changed their line was having to argue in court in support of a four-unit limit per can or bottle if they were challenged.
In its summary of the responses to the consultation document it put out before the new guidelines were formulated – I recommend reading it – the Portman Group declared that it has decided that in future "containing more than four units becomes a contributory rather than an absolute factor: if the producer is able to demonstrate that mitigating factors should be taken into account – for instance, premium quality of the product, whether the product is typically decanted/shared, price at which it is typically sold, accompanying promotional material, et cetera." In other words, convince us you're an aspirational, upmarket product, preferably designed to be shared, and not tramp juice meant for solitary sipping while surrounded by pigeons, and we'll think about letting you off. So in fact the new guidelines represent a slight relaxation of the previous restrictions, and if Carlsberg were to print "please share responsibly" on cans of Special Brew it might, perhaps, get away with putting the size of the cans back to 500ml and the strength up to nine per cent again. (Errr – though probably not …)
A 12 per cent abv Thomas Hardy Ale in a 33cl bottle would just squeak in under Portman Group guidelines
However, the Portman Group is still declaring that "single-serve, non-resealable containers that contain upwards of six units will be difficult to justify, even with mitigating factors," with this upper limit "in line with UK binge drinking measure which is currently set at six units of alcohol in a single session for men and women." It says its research shows that while nearly two thirds of people think a 75cl bottle of wine is for sharing, fewer than half think the same about a 75cl bottle of beer, making that bottle "single-serve", according to its rules, and thus a container that should not have more than six units of alcohol inside. If a 75cl bottle of beer is "likely" to be regarded as designed to be drunk by one person, this would rule out any beer over 8 per cent abv in a 75cl bottle.
Among the beers that break the new Portman Group guidelines, and therefore face a potential ban, by being stronger than eight per cent and sold in 75cl bottles, are beautiful brews from the US, such as Brooklyn Brewery Black Ops, or Local 2, Rogue's XS Old Crustacean barley wine and Lost Abbey's 10 Commandments; a rake of great beers from Italian craft brewers, who go for 75cl bottles in a big way – pun semi-intended – including the wonderful Xyauyù Barrel from the Italian brewer Baladin; and a fair number of beers from the Netherlands and Belgium, including Chimay Grand Reserve, De Molen Hel & Verdoemenis (and several other De Molen beers), Duvel Barrel Aged (I had some of the third iteration of that earlier this week: excellent beer, like oak floorboards smeared with blood oranges), and Dupont Avec Les Bons Voeux.
There are not so many examples of big beers in big bottles from the UK (indeed, not the least problematical aspect of this policy is that since it vastly disproportionally affects overseas producers, and the Portman Group is funded by UK producers, there is a very good argument for saying that it represents an attempt at an illegal restraint of trade – not that that may matter so much in a post-Brexit world). Sadly, unlike Belgium or the Netherlands, Britain has long lost that tradition of hefty strong stouts and barley wines in anything but nips: 33cl at best. Even a 12 per cent beer in a 33cl bottle just misses a rap on the knuckles from the Portman Group, at 3.96 units. But half a degree over that and you'll be on the carpet and asked to explain yourself: what mitigating factors are there that we should wave you through and let your beer be sold to responsible adults perfectly able to make their own purchasing decisions without nanny hovering?
A £5 bottle of 12 per cent abv wine? No problem at all with that, sir – would you like it wrapped?
And if you're thinking of reproducing great beers from the past such as Allsopp's Arctic Ale, in the original style of bottle, to give a good change of some bottle-age (because smaller bottles age worse than larger onea, for a variety of reasons), fuggedaboutit: you'll be red-carded as soon as some do-gooder spots your beer on the shelf and grasses you up to the lasses and lads at 20 Conduit Street. The result is, indeed, as Mike Benner says, that innovation by British brewers is being cramped: we had a long history in this country of super-strong beers, from the thumping pale ales that the squirearchy used to brew on their estates in the 18th century as a substitute for bandy during our many years of war with France to the huge Burton Ales we exported to Russia and (somewhat surprisingly) Australia, and, of course, all those thumping stouts that eventually earned the name "imperial". But if the Portman Group prevails, anyone trying to reproduce those beers from the past in any bottle size worth laying down will have to prepare a lengthy brief justifying themselves for daring to exceed four units a bottle. It seems clear the "watchdog" is hoping its barking will scare away strong beers entirely.
I cannot avoid seeing a strong streak of snobbism in this. The Portman Group gives the impression that it still sees beer as an inferior drink, and beer drinkers as people who need protecting from themselves. My local off-licence will sell you two 75cl bottles of 12 per cent abv Spanish red wine for the equivalent of £5 a bottle. If someone were selling large bottles of 11.5 per cent Arctic Ale at that price, there would be howls, from the Portland Group to the Daily Mail. But it's OK: wine drinkers are nice people like us, and don't need to be policed.
Arctic Alebarley wineImperial stoutInstitute for Alcohol StudiesMike BennerneoprohibitionismPortman GroupSIBA
Beer, Beer business, Beer industry, Beer news, Brewery trips, Brewing beer, Craft beer, Mission statement
The world's quickest brewery tour
27th February 2019 Martyn Cornell	1 Comment
There ARE smaller breweries that Poppyland, but not very many: the room that the 2½-barrel brewkit sits in measures about 160 square feet. Your living room is probably larger. So the "brewery tour" consists of standing in a corner and pivoting on one heel through 180 degrees. That's it: you have now done the Poppyland experience. Maybe we should copyright it …
Your ten-second brewery tour, conducted by Dave "chief yeast wrangler" Cornell: copper, mash tun and FV on your right, barrel-ageing department centre, "grain store" on your left … Click to embiggen
Poppyland, in West Street, Cromer, on the North Norfolk coast, named for the nickname given to the area around Cromer in the late 19th century, was founded by Martin Warren in 2011, and built a reputation for well-made and eclectic beers: Poppyland was probably the first brewery in the UK to brew with kveik, Norwegian farmhouse yeast, for example, and its smoked porter with smoked hops, smoked in the local fish smokery in Cromer has been very popular, while Roger Protz featured its East Beach IPA in his book IPA: A Legend in Our Time.
'You don't want to brew that!'
Martin has now decided to retire, and the brewery was bought by my brother Dave at the start of this year. It's a small enough operation to really not need more than one man and his missus (the lovely Mandy) to run, but I have a small role as part-time adviser and consultant, probably much in the style of Harry Enfield's Mr Only Me ("You don't want to do it like that!"). I look forward to saying to Michael Turner some time soon: "Hello, Michael, I'm a family brewer, and you're not …"
The brewery is in premises that were once a small garage operation, and the sign outside on the fascia that says "ALES GAS 'N LAGER" is an anagram of "ALLEN'S GARAGE". Next to the room where the brewing takes place is another room where beer, currently, is stored, which has a tiny (really tiny) bar. The plan is to move most of the beer storage elsewhere and stick in a couple of armchairs and a pair of stools, so that a maximum of four people can be accommodated for beer tastings and the like. Unfotunately there are no lavatorial facilities on site, which limits the amount of hospitality that can be put on somewhat: I doubt the White Horse just up the road will be excited by people popping in from the brewery to use their loos …
The Poppyland brewery premises: currently only the ground floor, but who knows …
Brewing has been slow to restart, not least because of the bureaucracy that has to be gone through. This includes, but is not limited to
● Signing up to the alcohol wholesaler registration scheme (this may involve a 45-day wait …)
● Obtaining a certificate of recognition to be a producer and holder of beer
● Obtaining a premises licence
● Obtaining a personal licence (this involves a police check, and passing an exam …)
● Obtaining permission to discharge waste
● Obtaining a licence to be a holder of acid
At the same time my brother has been undergoing a swift education in how to brew, courtesy of, among others Norfolk Brewhouse in Hindringham some 16 miles to the west of Comer.
So: hopefully, Poppyland should be ready to roll under its new owner within days. The first brew under the new management, my brother tells me, will be called Coddiwomple, which, he says, is an old English word meaning "to travel purposefully towards an as-yet-unknown destination". I hae ma doots about that, but the motto of Poppyland since Martin Warren started it eight years ago has always been "adventures in beer start here", and that's certainly true. I'll be keeping you up to date with our adventures, as we travel towards that as-yet-unknown destination …
CoddiwompleCromerDave Cornellfamily brewersMartin WarrenMr Only MePoppyland brewery
Beer, Beer business, Beer industry, Beer news, Brewery history, History of beer
A short history of Asahi, in which beer gets called 'bitter horse-piss wine'
30th January 2019 Martyn Cornell	5 Comments
In view of recent events, I thought people might be interested in a short history of Asahi Breweries …
Beer was introduced into Japan by the Dutch, who were the only Europeans allowed to trade with the country after the expulsion of the Portuguese early in the 17th century, and who would take biiru with them when they made their compulsory once-a-year trip from their base in Nagasaki to the Emperor's palace in Edo (now Tokyo). However, it was not until Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy arrived in Japan in the 1850s to try to push the shogunate into opening diplomatic relationships with the United States that the locals made any proper analysis of this new drink, after the American delegation on Perry's second trip to Japan in 1854 presented officials with gifts including three casks of beer. Japanese opinion was divided: one called it "magic water", while another described the beer as "bitter horse-piss wine".
The treaties signed between Japan and the US saw Yokohama opened from 1858 as a place for European traders to settle, and in 1863 military forces from Britain and France arrived in Yokohama to protect the increasing numbers of their nationals based in the city. Two years later, according to an article published in the China Mail newspaper in Hong Kong on October 19 1878, two foreigners, one an Englishman called Campbell and the other an American called Langthorne, began to brew beer in Yokohama, at the first commercial brewery in Japan. Campbell and Langthorne are deeply obscure and nothing more seems to be known of them, not even their first names. Their business did not last long, according to the China Mail, at least in part because of increasing imports of beer from Europe and America: the newspaper wrote that "either because in those days the foreign denizens of Yokohama were so rich or so extravagant as to despise any but the produce of the famed distant vats of Burton, Edinburgh and Dublin, or because the projectors had not sufficient knowledge of their art to make their liquor palatable, or capital enough to work and wait until it had created a reputation and a market, they soon abandoned their enterprise; and the buildings they erected were subsequently pulled down."
In 1868, however, the wonderfully named Marinus Johannes Benjamin Noordhoek Hegt, born in the Netherlands in 1821, a sea captain and merchant who came to Yokohama in 1860, opened a small brewery at No 46 Bluff, part of Yokohama's designated European district, where there was a deep well on the site. Hegt hired as his brewer Emil Wiegand, a brewer from Germany who had emigrated from Hessen at the end of 1853, aged 19, via Bremen, arriving in New York on January 6, 1854. Wiegand was apparently naturalised in Philadelphia in 1856, and looks to have spent 11 years in the eastern US, presumably working in local German-run breweries, before leaving New York on December 1 1867 to travel to California via Nicaragua. He spent barely a year in San Francisco before moving to Japan, arriving there, according to a deposition he made later in a tribunal at the US consulate general, in 1869 after signing a contract to manage the "Japan Yokohama Brewery".
Hegt's brewery inspired a man called William Copeland, born Johan Bartinius – sic– Thoresen in Tromøy, in southern Norway, in May 1834, to build a brewery of his own on the site first used by Campbell and Langthorne, No 123 Bluff, which had as its chief attraction a source of "singularly pure" water, and which became known as the Spring Valley Brewery. Copeland, who had arrived in Japan in 1864 (and whose middle name changed to Martinius at some point) made his first brew in January 1870, shortly after Hegt had moved to larger premises at Bluff lot 68 in 1869. The two rival breweries ran in competition with each other until June 1876, when the owners agreed to a merger, and Copeland and Wiegand brewed at the Spring Valley Brewery site, using Bluff lot 68 as a maltings, until the maltings were destroyed by fire in 1877.
The Spring Valley Brewery made lager during the summer, and "'English ale', 'Bock' and 'Bavarian' beer, demanded by the better sort of customer" during the winter. The beer was exported to Tokyo, Nagasaki and other Japanese towns, and as far away as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Copeland and Wiegand brewed together as co-partners until the end of 1879, when Wiegand filed a bill with the US consular court in Yokohama for a dissolution of the partnership, alleging "fraudulent acts and other irregularities" by Copeland. The American consul general, who had the legal right to hear cases in Japan involving American citizens, found Copeland not guilty, but it was agreed that the partnership should be dissolved anyway and the firm wound up, with its assets sold. The brewery was estimated to be worth some £32,500, and Wiegand, who had bought much less to the partnership than Copeland, was due $6,250 of that. Unfortunately the only bidder for the brewery was Copeland, who bought the business back in February 1880 for just $12,000, which meant that not only did Wiegand not get anything, he now owed Copeland several thousand dollars. Wiegand eventually died in San Francisco in 1887, aged 47.
In 1880, meanwhile, Copeland was involved in another lawsuit between himself and his head clerk, which was again settled by the US consul in favour of Copeland. However, the suit bankrupted the Spring Valley business, and though Copeland continued brewing by himself until 1882, the business went under in an economic recession. Two years later, on July 1884, the Spring Valley brewery was sold by the US Marshall by order of the US Consular Court for $11,500. The London and China Telegraph of September 22 1884 wrote that "this property is estimated to have cost the late proprietor over $60,000." Who bought it remains unclear, but on April 27 1885 the London and China Telegraph reported that two fires had recently broken out at the premises of the Spring Valley Brewery on the Bluff, Yokohama, and in the first, which began at 8pm on March 13, the block was destroyed which housed in its lower portion the "extensive" brewery plant. The plant and buildings were insured for $5,000 in the Lancashire and the City of London Insurance Companies, but "the brewery plant could not be replaced for at least three times that amount."
Two months after the fire, in May 1885, the first meeting was held of resident foreigners in Yokohama that would eventually lead to the foundation of the Japan Brewery Company Ltd, set up with mixed Japanese and foreign investment. This company quickly acquired the Spring Valley brewery site to build its own brewery, taking advantage of the site's water supply. The new concern eventually launched its "Kirin beer" in 1888, and changed its name to Kirin in 1906.
By now the Japanese brewing industry had become thoroughly "Nipponised", helped by men such as Nakagawa Seibei. Nakagawa (in Japan, surnames are given first) travelled at his own expense from his homeland to Germany in 1872, hoping to learn a foreign skill he could use back in Japan. He was advised to study brewing, and spent more than two years, from 1873 to 1875, at a brewery in Fürstenwald owned by the Berlin brewery Tivoli.
It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like for Nakagawa, who was only 24 when he arrived in Germany, where everything – the language, the architecture, the food and drink, the clothing, the entire way of life – was utterly alien to all he had known previously. On his return to Japan with a certificate of study from the Tivoli brewery, Nakagawa was hired by the Japanese government to build a brewery in the newly founded city of Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, which was being rapidly developed in response to a possible invasion threat from Russia. The brewery made its first German-style lager in 1876, and was sold by the government to private investors ten years later.
Between 1869 and 1872 there were more than a hundred brewery start-ups in Japan, most being small and deeply obscure, with very little now known about them. All, or at least all those about whom sufficient details are known, concentrated on producing German-style beers, mostly because Japanese beer drinkers needed the reassurance that domestic brewers were using the same techniques and ingredients as foreign brewers in order to buy Japanese-brewed rather than imported beer. Among the start-ups was one begun by Torii Komakichi, a well-known sake brewer from Sakai, south of Osaka, a city in the south-central region of Japan's main island, Honshu. In 1888 Torii's Osaka Beer Brewing Company sent Ikuta Hiizu to Germany to study brewing at the brewery school in Weihenstephan, Bavaria. Ikuta returned to Japan in 1889, where he was appointed manager and technical director of a new brewery built at Suita Mura, on the edge of Osaka, which was completed in 1891. The plans for the brewery were drawn up in Germany, although it was built by an Osaka constructor, and all the brewing machinery was from Germany, though most of the malt and hops was imported, initially, from the US west coast.
The Asahi brewery in Osaka circa 1902: double-click to embiggen
In 1892 the company launched a beer under the name Asahi, meaning "morning sun". The Osaka brewery showed its beer at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where it was noted that the company was using Japan-grown barley of the Golden Melon variety, which stood up to the hot and humid climate of Honshu, and which had been introduced into the country from the United States in 1885. The same year Osaka was reorganised as Osaka Breweries Ltd. An "Asahi Beer Hall" was opened in nearby Kyoto in 1896 to promote the company's beer to thirsty tourist. By 1901 it was the second biggest brewery in Japan, at 53,500 hectolitres, well ahead of the Japan Brewery Company/Kirin at 28,500hl and Sapporo at 24,517hl, but behind the Nippon Beer Co of Tokyo, whose main brand was Yebisu, on 59,450hl.
An advertisement for three beer brands then owned by the newly formed Dai Nippon Beer Company, Yebisu, Sapporo and Asahi, from the China Mail, Hong Kong in 1907
The same year the Japanese government introduced a "brutal" new beer tax, which hammered the smaller brewers. The "big four" battled on, but in 1906, in an attempt to reduce competition, which was damaging profits, Sapporo, Osaka Beer Co and Nippon Beer agreed to merge under the name Dai Nippon ("Greater Japan") Beer Company. From then until after the Second World War, the Japanese beer industry was almost totally dominated by Dai Nippon Beer and Kirin, both producing – until 1941, at least – heavily German-influenced beers. However, the pair were unable to stop retail outlets conducting a vicious price war. This only ended in 1933, when the two giants of Japanese brewing signed an agreement to form the "Co-operative Beer Sales Company Inc", a deal brokered by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which gave Dai Nippon 70 per cent of joint sales and Kirin 30 per cent. In the total market, Dai Nippon had a 56 per cent share and Kirin 28 per cent, giving the Co-operative Beer Sales Company 84 per cent of the domestic Japanese beer market. Through the 1930s Asahi and Kirin fought each other for the title of Japan's best-selling beer brand, with Asahi on an average of 30 per cent of the market and Kirin on 27.5 per cent. Meanwhile Dai Nippon Beer's Asahi division was opening new breweries, in Hakata, Fukuoka, on Japan's southernmost large island, Kyushu, in 1921 and Nishinomiya, a few miles from Osaka, in 1927.
When Japan went to war with China in 1937, a conflict which eventually widened into bitter conflict with the United States and the UK in 1941, the beer industry in Japan became more and more tightly controlled by the government, not least because through taxation it generated essential funds for the war effort. In 1939, sake was still the dominant alcoholic beverage in Japan, selling 4.5 times as much as beer, which was largely an expensive middle and upper-class luxury. But as rice production was diverted into foodstuffs, sake production was halted by the end of 1940. Beer took its place, since barley was only a grade-B foodstuff. At the same time, with supplies of hops no longer available for import from Germany, Japan's brewer began to make their beers less bitter. Small brewers disappeared completely, leaving only Dai Nippon and Kirin by 1943.
After Japan's defeat in 1945, in the seven-year occupation that followed, much effort was made by the occupiers to break up Japan's economic conglomerates, the zaibatsu. Dai Nippon did not wait to be broken up, instead putting forward its own arrangement in which, in 1949, it split into two, one side taking the Asahi brand, the other, initially called Nippon Breweries, the Sapporo and Yebatsu brands. Asahi had 36 per cent of the market, Nippon Breweries 38.7 per cent and Kirin 25.3 per cent. The three operated an informal cartel that eliminated price competition, while Japan's ministry of finance kept import duties on foreign beers high, with an (under world trade rules, illegal) agreement that the three brewers would, as a quid pro quo, buy expensive Japanese-grown barley rather than much cheaper foreign barley.
Until the middle of 1949, the occupying forces had barred Japanese from going to restaurants, bars or beer halls. The reopening of the "on-trade" saw beer sales boom: one bar in Osaka was selling 120 wooden crates of 24 bottles each night, an entire truckload in a day. In 1954 Asahi began to pull ahead of its rivals, capturing 37 per cent of the market, after leading the way in marketing efforts that included sponsoring radio and television programmes, films (including Gone With the Wind when it returned to Japanese cinemas in 1952) and boxing matches. In 1958, Asahi introduced Japan's first canned beer. Meanwhile the Japanese alcohol market was changing, with sake falling from 71 per cent of all alcohol beverages sold before the Second World War, against beer's 16 per cent share, to 29 per cent in 1959, against beer's 44 per cent.
As well as canned beer (which today has more than 60 per cent of the Japanese market), Asahi also pioneered the first outdoor fermentation and lagering tank, the "Asahi Tank", launched in 1965 and soon licensed to a German brewery construction firm, Ziemann.
By now Asahi had seen its share of sales drift down, leaving it with just 27.9 per cent of the Japanese market in 1961, barely ahead of Sapporo on 27.8 per cent, while Kirin had 41.7 per cent. Kirin's dominance enabled it to set prices that hampered its rivals' attempts to match them and still be profitable, and by the mid-1980s its share of the market was more than 60 per cent, with Sapporo on 20 per cent and Asahi on 11 per cent, while Suntory, a distiller that had entered the beer market in 1963, had seven per cent.
At the same time, the beer produced by the three firms continued to be the comparatively light, lightly hopped drink Japan's brewers had been forced to change to during the Second World War, a style of beer which both proved popular with the increasing numbers of women drinkers, and beer rapidly left sake sales far behind. While the trend in the 1950s and 1960s towards less-bitter beers could be also seen in, for example, the United States, from the 1970s, Japan's brewing industry began to exhibit some peculiarly Japanese developments. One was the introduction of "beer-like" brews, or happoshu (literally "sparkling spirit"), containing little or no barley, a reaction to both the high price of barley itself and the high taxes on barley brews in Japan. Another was the rise of "draught-style" bottled and canned beers from the late 1970s, with Asahi launching its own Draft Beer brand in 1986.
This did not stop Asahi striking deals with brewers elsewhere in Asia: in 1971 it signed an agreement with United Breweries of New Guinea that saw a brewery built in Port Moresby to make Asahi beers, and in 1986 another contract was signed with San Miguel to start brewing Asahi brands in Indonesia. In 1990 Asahi bought just under 20 per cent of the Australian beer giant Foster's Group (sold in 1997 back to Foster's).
A three-litre can of Super Dry, the beer that saved Ahasi
What saved the company, however, was the introduction of "dry beer" in 1987 to try to compete with Kirin, which by then had 63 per cent of the domestic market, with Asahi far behind in third place on just 10 per cent. In 1982 one of Japan's leading banks, Sumitomo Group, which held 12 per cent of Asahi's shares, sent in a bank executive specialising in corporate turn-arounds, Murai Tsutomu. Murai made the brewery conduct market surveys which came back with the message that 98 per cent of beer drinkers surveyed wanted Asahi to change the taste of its beer. Drinkers said they wanted a beer that was rich but left no aftertaste. Asahi's brewers told Murai that was not possible. Murai insisted that it had to be done, and the result was Asahi Super Dry, stronger, at 5 per cent alcohol, than most Japanese mainstream beers, generally 4.5 per cent, but with less sugar, sharper and with no aftertaste. It became instantly popular, particularly among younger drinkers. The launch doubled Asahi's share of the domestic beer market in a year, and sent it to 37 per cent by 2001. This was the only Japanese brewing initiative to have any impact overseas, with US and European brewers also introducing "dry" beers: by 1990 there were more than 20 "dry" beers on sale in the US market.
Japan's brewers had been protected for many years from new entrants into the market by a law that required a minimum annual output for anyone wanting a brewery licence of 20,000 hectolitres. In 1994 the country's Ministry of Finance cut that requirement to just 600 hectolitres, making it viable at last for new microbreweries to start up. The first opened in Japan in 1995, and by 1999 the country had 242 new small breweries. In an attempt to head off this new competition, in 2001 Asahi opened its own "microbrewery" operation, Sumidagawa Brewing, a brewpub in Tokyo.
Super Dry was launched Canada in 1994 and the United States in 1995. It went into in 12 European countries in 1997, and in 2000 Asahi struck a deal with Bass in the UK for a Czech subsidiary of Bass to brew Super Dry under licence. But with the UK becoming the biggest market for the beer in Europe, in 2005 production was switched to Shepherd Neame in Kent. Meanwhile at home beer sales were falling, with the "big four" of Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Suntory suffering a volume decline between them of 23 per cent between 1994 and 2000. At the same time, sales of the cheaper happoshu were climbing, hitting 30 per cent of the Japanese beer market in 2001, the year Asahi finally launched a happoshu of its own. Two years later sales of happoshu for home consumption passed those of "real" beer.
Asahi had regained the number one spot among Japan's brewers in 1998, and its share of the "real" beer market rose past 50 per cent by the end of 2008, though its share of the total "beer-like" market was only 37.8 per cent, barely ahead of Kirin on 37.2 per cent. Domestic beer sales were badly hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and took several years to recover, but Asahi was seeing big rises in sales to China, where increasing affluence was powering what was becoming the biggest market for beer in the world. It began acquiring shares in five Chinese breweries in 1994 and 1995, and entered into an agreement with the then largest brewer in China, Tsingtao Brewery, to build a brewery in Shenzen, near Hong Kong, which opened in 1999. In 2009 it bought a 19.9 per cent stake in Tsingtao Brewery, reviving a link from before the Second World War, when Dai Nippon Beer Company owned Tsingtao.
An Australian craft beer brewery, Cricketers Arms, in Melbourne, was acquired in 2013, followed by a second in 2015, Mountain Goat Beer in Richmond, Victoria. The next year, as part of the fall-out from AB InBev's acquisition of SAB Miller, Asahi bought SAB Miller's beer business in Western Europe, including Peroni in Italy, Grolsch in the Netherlands, the St Stephanus "abbey" brand from Belgium and, in the UK, Meantime Brewing Company, for a total of $2.9 billion. Meantime, based in Greenwich and founded in 2000, had only been bought by SAB Miller two years earlier, for £125 million. Early in 2017 Asahi swallowed SAB Miller's Eastern European business as well, including Pilsner Urquell in the Czech Republic; Dreher Breweries in Hungary; Ursus Breweries, the biggest beer brewer in Romania; Tychy and Lech in Poland; and Šariš in Slovakia, for another $7.8 billion. The deal made Asahi the third biggest brewing company in Europe, with 9 per cent of the market, after Heineken and Carlsberg. The same year it sold off its interest in Tsingtao for $844 million, as part of a general pull-out from the Chinese market to concentrate on Europe.
Earlier this week it was announced that Asahi had acquired the brewing assets of the London-based craft ale specialist, family brewer and pub and hotel owner Fuller, Smith & Turner, for £250 million. The deal includes the brewery in Chiswick, but not, it is speculated, the entire brewery site. It gives Asahi ten breweries in Europe, against the eight it runs in Japan, including the Hokkaido brewery in Sapporo, opened in 1970; Ibaraki, on the coast north-east of Tokyo, opened in 1991; and on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, opened in 1998. It is currently the biggest brewer in Japan, fifth biggest in Asia and seventh biggest in the world.
AsahiFller Smith & Tuernerm William CopelandNakagawa Seitake-oversTsingyaoYokohama
Beer, Beer campaigning, Beer education, Beer industry, Beer news, Cask-conditioned beer, Craft beer, Uncategorised
Why, nearly 50 years after the birth of Camra, can I still not be guaranteed a decent pint of cask beer in most pubs?
28th September 2018 Martyn Cornell	28 Comments
Why is finding a properly kept pint of cask ale such an appalling lottery in Britain's pubs, despite the existence since 1971 of a consumer organisation dedicated to beer quality – before most pub staff were born – and the existence of a trade organisation dedicated to raising the standards of draught beer, Cask Marque, since 1998, two decades ago?
The answer is actually ridiculously simple. Almost nine out of ten pints of cask beer sold in Britain are sold after the cask they came from has been open for at least three days. According to CGA, almost 90 per cent of cask ale brands sold at below the rate of 18 pints per tap per day required to maintain quality. The typical cask of beer is still on sale seven or more days after it has been opened. This is exactly the same as making a sandwich on Monday, and still having it on sale a week later. The bread will be stale, the filling long past its best. Anybody buying that week-old sandwich is unlikely, after trying it, to buy a sandwich from you again. Cask beer is a perishable product: it loses its best qualities very quickly, certainly within a few days. Most pubs ignore this, and as a result most cask beer is sold a long way off from peak condition.
Paradoxically, there is also a big problem of pubs selling beer too young. Almost three in five publicans confess to putting beer on sale before the recommended three days of cellar conditioning. So there is a fair chance that just as your pint is finally coming into condition, it's already past its best because the cask has been open too long.
Adding to the problem of poor quality caused by age, the evidence clearly shows most pubs keep their cask beer too warm. This is obviously more of a problem in summer, but cellar air conditioning has been available for many decades: that picture at the top shows a pub cellar from 1947, with aircon units. However, in July this year, Cask Marque found that almost seven out of ten pints of cask ale were served warmer than the recommended 11ºC to 13ºC. Two per cent were served at an alarming 20ºC – almost 70ºF. How is this possible?
Hilariously – or not – more than 90 per cent of pub landlords insist that they are aware of the advise on how to keep cask beer well, advice which strongly recommends arranging turnover so that a cask is emptied within three days, and they claim either that they do their best to follow that advice or don't actually need it because they are expert cellarmen. And two thirds of landlords insist their cask ales never stay on sale for longer than three days. Unfortunately, the evidence shows clearly that this is totally untrue. Vianet, a company that monitors what happens in pub cellars, found that the majority of pubs sell less than a cask of beer per tap per week. Let's be generous and say that half of each cask is sold within the recommended three-day period after the first pint is poured. That means half of all pints from the majority of pubs are going to be four days older or more. Would you reckon to buy a sandwich from a place where half the sarnies on offer were between four days and a week or more old?
One underlying reason for all these problems is that too many publicans are either indifferent to or don't like cask beer. To quote Pete Brown, in the latest Cask Report, out yesterday, "Among publicans who love drinking cask themselves, every single quality measure is significantly better." Perhaps we should be saying: "If you don't actually adore cask beer, please don't sell it."
In the past five years, cask ale sales have dropped by 20 per cent, while the overall beer market has fallen by just over nine per cent. At that rate of decline, cask ale will effectively have vanished in a few decades. Meanwhile "craft" beer, defined for the purposes of this argument as non-mainstream keg beers made by small brewers, has leapt from nowhere ten years ago to six per cent of the on-trade beer market in 2018. I drink "craft" beer in a pub occasionally, but I do not believe I will ever have a pint of "craft" as wonderful as the very best cask ale can be. If cask ale disappears, then to misquote Hilaire Belloc, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the best of England
The Cask Report has a number of tips to try to stop this apocalyptic scenario. Here are mine:
1) Every pub or bar that sells cask ale must have a cask ale champion whose specific job it is to ensure that every pint is perfect. If this is not the publican, it should be someone else senior.
2) Every pub company, too, must have someone in the organisation to champion cask beer and ensure every outlet is selling the best cask ale it can.
3) Pubs should be taught that a big range of different cask beers on sale at the same time is not automatically a bonus, but a likely contributor to quality problems.
4) Before any pub gets Cask Marque accreditation, it should be able to show a record of how long every cask beer has been on sale, and also a record of every customer complaint about the quality of a pint, and what action was taken about that complaint. Pub companies should also regard this as best practice.
5) If "craft" drinkers are avoiding drinking cask because they perceive it to be all "boring brown bitter", pubs should urge "craft" beer drinkers to try those modern cask beers closest in flavour to the most popular sorts of craft ale – American pale ales and the like. Then use those beers as a gateway to the joys of traditional cask ales. Staff need to know enough to be able to explain that, actually, the earliest American Pale Ales were directly inspired by Timothy Taylor's Landlord.
6) Camra members over 65 (and yes, I fall in that segment) should STFU about how awful Doom Bar is, and should be taken behind a wall and shot in the head if they utter the phrase "Remember Watney's Red Barrel!" Nobody except you DOES remember Watney's Red Barrel, grand-dad, and it's the image you and people like you bring to cask ale – slippered, cardiganned, smelly – that is part of the reason why under-30s would rather drink "craft".
cask beerCask MarqueCask Reportcraft beerPete Brown
Beer, Beer business, Beer industry, Beer news, Rants
There is no such thing as the 'craft beer community'
6th July 2018 Martyn Cornell	64 Comments
Of all the multiple nonsenses written about the acquisition of a minority stake in Beavertown Brewery by Heineken International, perhaps the stupidest came from someone called Kirk Hilton on Twitter, who declared this week that Logan Plant and his crew had "chosen to turn their back on the craft beer community" and "should know about the effect" its "sell out" had had on "the community as a whole".
Let's be clear. There is no "craft beer community", any more than there is a "Stella Artois community" or a "Nescafe community" or a "sourdough bread community". I drink craft beer, whatever "craft beer" is, but I certainly don't regard myself as part of a "community" as represented by Kirk and his pals on the Facebook UK Craft Beer Forum, where, as part of the general tedious posturing, cask beer is regularly dismissed as "twiggy" and "boring". That's not a "community", it's a group of snobby elitists with their heads so far up their bottoms they can probably see their own tonsils. The laugh is that the hop-laden brews they love (and indeed I love many of them too) sprang from beers developed originally by people like Fritz Maytag at Anchor Steam and Ken Grossman at Sierra Nevada that were themselves inspired by the "twiggy" bitter beers of England: Anchor's Liberty Ale, the first highly hopped Cascade-driven West Coast pale ale, sprang directly from a visit Fritz Maytag made to Keighley in Yorkshire around 1974, where he sampled Timothy Taylor Landlord.
What is particularly crass about the reaction from Hilton and the rest of the UKCBF crew is their demand that Beavertown must stay small, or else it is guilty of "betraying" the "craft beer community". What they ought to be doing, of course, is cheering until the rafters shake at the success of one of the best four or five start-ups in the UK beer business, which will now be able to bring its beers to even more drinkers.
Logan Plant, like all successful businessmen, wants to see his business grow even larger: only a fool, frankly, sits on something that could potentially become massive and declines to allow it to grow as big as possible. (The reason why that's foolish, in case you can't work it out, is because what will happen is that someone else with fewer scruples about making a fortune will come along and replicate what you've done, overtake you, steal your market because they've grown big enough to have the marketing clout to do so, and put you out of business.)
However, like others – Meantime, Camden Town, even BrewDog – Plant discovered that there are few or no ways to bring in the money required to step up to the next level without shaking hands with Big Capital. The £40m Heineken is pumping into Beavertown will enable it to build (if the Caterer's figures are correct) a 275,000-barrel (450,000hl) brewery on three acres of land, tn tims the size of their current plant, creating 150 jobs. For a company founded only in 2012, that's fantastic. But as Plant told the Caterer, when he first looked at how to get the cash for that project, "Crowdfunding simply couldn't achieve the funds we need, so that option came off the table quickly. We then started looking at private equity, which initially looked solid. However, the more we looked at the offers, it became clear that it was only an option for the short to medium term.
Logan Plant: 'sensible and stable'
"That was when we concluded that the most sensible and stable option was the one that sat furthest away from our minds at the start of the process, one that at first glance felt alien but on closer and more detailed inspection offered us boundless opportunities to grow and develop in the right, safe business manner: finding another like-minded brewery as a partner."
The finance people Plant used in the negotiations with Heineken, incidentally, are Arlington Capital Advisors of Georgia in the United States, who were the same gang that advised BrewDog last year when the Aberdeenshire lads sold a £213m stake in themselves to TSG Consumer Partners, the $5bn San Francisco-based private equity firm that owns Pabst, the American "industrial" lager brand. You might think that as a result James Watt is being a tad hypocritical in declaring that BrewDog will no longer stock Beavertown beers after Heineken bought a minority stake in the East London firm – I couldn't possibly comment.
What too few people in the craft bubble fail to grasp is that the overwhelming bulk of beer sold in the UK – nine pints in 10 – is mass-produced, and if we want that to change we have to cheer on those successful craft beer brewers who are attracting investment to grow larger, and expand the craft beer market. Ah, but as Kirk Hilton tweeted to Beavertown: "You're not craft beer any more." Silly Kirk thinks he can spot the change in the taste of a pint of beer the moment someone else buys a stake in the brewer that made it. Fortunately the UK Craft Beer Forum represents perhaps 0.08 per cent of all British beer drinkers, and Beavertown, I am sure, will succeed and thrive without its approval.
BavertownBrewDogHeinekenLogan PlantUK Craft Beer Forum
Beer, Beer ingredients, Beer news, malt
Red beer, green lager, immature barley beer: the innovations I drank on a 'jolly' to Carlsberg
30th August 2017 Martyn Cornell	1 Comment
Beer made from immature "green" barley – who knew such a thing was possible? Or "red lager" made from actual red-coloured barley? And what does a beer taste like made with barley so controversial it caused a protest led by a marching band through the streets of Munich back in June?
One for the tickers: Plane Ale, from Mikkeller, only available at 35,000 feet on SAS flights. Thanks to the wonders of GPS-enabled smartphones, I can tell you I was six and a half miles above the small Dutch village of Rottum, in Groeningen province, while drinking this beer
If you're one of the people who believes no beer writer should ever accept hospitality from a brewer, for fear of being corrupted, then you'll need to stop reading this post now, because everything that follows was gathered on a trip to Copenhagen last week paid for by Carlsberg. I wasn't on my own, of course: there were also a dozen or so beer writers and trade journos, and, more importantly from Carlsberg's viewpoint, 250 or so assorted others including customers from key markets, staff from Carlsberg operations around the globe (I met some very nice men and women from Tuborg Turkey who insisted on having their pictures taken with me, having seen me in the film I was paid to appear in about last year's Carlsberg ReBrew project, recreating an 1883 lager), people from PR and design companies who have Carlsberg as a client and mates of the Carlsberg Foundation (Carlsberg's owner), all there to help celebrate 170 years since JC Jacobsen opened the Carlsberg brewery in the Copenhagen suburb of Valby.
The brewing kit at Warpigs, the joint-venture restaurant/brewery by Mikkeller and Three Floyds in Copenhagen's meat-packing district
For unknown reasons, this trip has encouraged a mountain of scorn and mockery from the rigidly puritan, obsessively put on public record every free pint anybody ever bought you end of the beer-writing world, with the top of that mountain of scorn claimed as the moral high ground. There are a host of reasons for believing this is a stupid and nonsensical position to take, but here are just three before we return to the important stuff. If you believe you have responsibilities to your readers as a writer about beer, you ought to take every opportunity to uncover information they will find interesting. If that includes accepting a free trip from a brewer, and you prefer to insist that your integrity will suffer unless you stay at home, you're badly letting your readers down by refusing to go and learn stuff on their behalf. Next, if you accept payment in magazines or newspapers for your writings on beer, what do you think the ultimate source of that payment is? The advertising budgets of those brewers you refuse to accept direct hospitality from, of course. Continue reading Red beer, green lager, immature barley beer: the innovations I drank on a 'jolly' to Carlsberg →
CarlsbergCarlsberg LaboratoriesDennis VansantErik Lundgreen barley beerjolliesKoelschipMikkellerNy Carlsberg Glyptotekred barley
Hurrah! The ten-sided beer mug is back!
10th August 2017 Martyn Cornell	11 Comments
In these times of gloom and grey skies, it's great to have some good news. So hurrah, rejoice, the ten-sided pint mug, iconic symbol of all that is great about British beer, is back in our pubs! If that doesn't make you feel at least a little bit happier, you're beyond help, frankly.
The ten-sided mug, known, for fairly obvious reasons, as the lantern tankard (though it goes under several other names, as we shall see), looks to have been introduced in the early 1920s, and was picked up by the Brewers Society in the 1930s as, literally, the face of British beer in its long-running "Beer is Best" promotional campaign: the campaign's Mr XXX was a man with a ten-sided beer mug as a head.
The face of beer: the Brewers Society's Mr XXX in the 1930s had a head that was a lantern beer mug
By the 1950s, however, the lantern tankard was being challenged for its position as the number one favourite by the dimple mug, which eventually vanquished its rival some time soon after 1965, and the ten-sided mug disappeared from production. By the early 1990s the only place lantern tankards could be found by those who loved them (as I do) was in charity shops, the harvest of post-death house clearances, those glasses having clearly been stolen from pubs 40 or 50 years earlier by people who had been in their late teens and early 20s when the ten-sided mug was common, and who were now dead and leaving their relatives to dispose of decades of household junk in the most conscience-salving way they could, by donating it to Oxfam or Cancer Research. Within 15 years even that supply had vanished, since the cohort of dying pensioners from 2005 onwards had been stealing pub glasses when the dimple had pushed the lantern off the bartops of Britain
Henry Stephenson of Stephensons with the original 1949 lantern beerglass made by the Crystal Glass Company, and the reproduction modern glass his company is now selling to pubs and bars
Now the lantern tankard is being brought back, by Henry Stephenson, managing director of Stephensons Ltd, a 149-year-old supplier of catering equipment to the pub, restaurant and hotel trade.
Continue reading Hurrah! The ten-sided beer mug is back! →
BagleyCrystal Glass CompanyGeorge DavidsonHenry StephensonJohn Artislantern tankardQueen's ChoiceRavenwoodSowerby EllisonStephensonsten-sided beer mug
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text:
Lions Eye Hospital – Butwal was established in November 1996. It is located at Lions Chowk, Butwal-4, Rupandehi district, Nepal.

The hospital is running in its own building constructed by the Lions Club of Butwal. The hospital has 40 beds and 29 staff members.

History
Initially, the hospital was supported by Lumbini Eye Institute (LEI) providing visiting services twice a week. In 2008, the local supporters of Lions Club of Butwal and LEI signed a MOU to support and provide surgical services at the hospital.

Services
The hospital provides following services
 OPD examination
 Refraction service
 Cataract and other surgeries
 ophthalmologist service
 Spectacles sales service ( low cost)
 medicine sales
 Diagnostic screening camps
 School children screening camps
 Eye care awareness training and programs

References

External links
 Nepal Netra Jyoti Sangh

Hospitals in Nepal
Eye hospitals
1996 establishments in Nepal

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia