The History of Beer – Part 2 – From ale to beer
The second part in an exclusive series of articles by one of the world's best beer writers
Wherever humans settle, they have always managed to ferment the local vegetation into booze. Depending where on Earth they are, some plants grow better than others. And while the climate has changed quite a bit over the centuries, grapes have always grown well in southern Europe, while grain has fared better in the north.
So when the wine-loving Romans arrived in northern Europe, they were distinctly sniffy about the local beverage. The Emperor Julian is reputed to have written an ode to ‘wine made from barley’:
Who made you and from what?
By the true Bacchus I know you not.
He smells of nectar
But you smell of goat.
Given the early recorded origins of beer in the Middle East, many have speculated how it made its way from there to northern Europe, especially with the Romans in between. But the likelihood is that brewing evolved separately in various different places around the world. Finds in Scotland and Ireland suggest (without proving conclusively) that barley was being malted there as early as 3000BC. The Celts drank ol or ealu, words which, possibly, evolved into ‘ale’, while the roots of ‘beer’ are Latin.
Wherever it came from, whatever it tasted like and whatever to was made from, the tribes of the British Isles quickly established a reputation for being very enthusiastic ale drinkers. With the vast majority of people being illiterate, written records from the Dark Ages tend to be confined to travellers belonging to the church. In the eighth century CE, St Boniface, a missionary born in Devon who spent most of his life travelling the continent, wrote to Cuthbert, the Archbishop of Canterbury:
In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.
This ‘vice’ may even have cost the English the Battle of Hastings. A century after the conflict, the historian William of Malmesbury said that in 1066 drinking had become ‘a universal practice’, and the English would regularly ‘eat till they became surfeited, and drink till they were sick’. The night before the great battle, the English partied hard as the Normans confessed their sins and psyched themselves up. This led to the hungover English army attacking the Normans ‘more with rashness and precipitate fury than military skill’.
We think of the French and we think of wine, but history suggests it’s more likely that the Normans brought cider with them to England. Wine, too, was widespread, because before the mini-ice age that began around the sixteenth century, grapes grew far more widely in Britain than they do now.
But in towns and cities, ale was the British drink of choice. It’s been widely speculated that one reason for this is that ale was boiled in its production, and this made it a safer alternative to drinking water. But this doesn’t add up. Beer is boiled to cause reactions in hops. And old English ale didn’t contain hops. Ale and beer, until the last few hundred years, were quite different drinks.
Milled, malted barley immersed in warm water will get you a liquid full of fermentable sugar. Brew it at the right time of year, and if you’re lucky, natural yeasts in the environment will ferment it into beer. The raw wort tastes like tea with a digestive biscuit dissolved in it. Wild yeasts then add flavours ranging from sour and tart through to dry and musty, possibly even cheesy or farmyardy. To stop it from spoiling, ale would be brewed to be quite strong in alcohol, which is a natural enemy of bacteria. So naked ale would have been a strong, sweet, and possibly sour beverage. It was also very probably smoky, given that the grain was malted over a fire of wood or straw.
While such ales might sound like a wet dream to the modern craft beer poseur, they are at the very least an acquired taste. Ale was flavoured or seasoned, just like any food dish, with a variety of different herbs, plants and spices – essentially anything that was found growing in a local hedgerow that was deemed to have interesting flavours and aromas.
Along with plants such as yarrow, heather and bog myrtle, hops undoubtedly featured in the cocktail of what was known as gruit in continental Europe, and good old ale in the British Isles. But over time, hops went from being one of the band to being the star attraction.
If you’re a brewer, the hop is a multi-talented plant. Today we celebrate it for its unique aromatic properties, and for its bitter alpha acids that balance the sweetness of fermented barley malt. But as well as these properties, hops are also powerfully anti-bacterial, which means they keep beer fresher for longer. Once brewers discovered this, it unlocked the key to commercial rather than home-scale brewing. Beer could be brewed to keep longer without it being ferociously strong. This meant the brewer could brew lower alcohol beers, which had the dual effect of being cheaper to make, because they required less barley, and the drinker could drink more of it before they fell over, meaning brewers sold more beer.
These were the economic realities that drove the hop to become the dominant flavouring in beer. Hopped beer was common in continental Europe by the thirteenth century, but the British Isles hung onto their unhopped ale for much longer.
From the fourteenth century onwards, Flemish refugees fleeing religious persecution began arriving in Britain. In the sixteenth century they started coming in greater numbers. They’d long been welcomed thanks to the quality of their fabrics, particularly their silks, but when they started importing hops, the welcome turned sour.
The Flemish began cultivating hops in Kent, and brewed beers of such quality that they were soon being exported back to the continent. The British reaction was a mix of concern over preserving a celebrated British style in the face of continental imports – an early and more literally accurate version of the Campaign for Real Ale – and simple racism. In 1542 Andrew Boorde, one of history’s most hilarious miserable writers, claimed that hopped beer was fine for Dutch men, with their fat bellies and fat faces, but it inflamed the gut of a true Englishman and could even ‘killeth them the whiche be troubled with the Colyke and the stone, and the strayne colon’. Henry VIII did not, as is widely believed, ban the use of hops in brewing, but he did insist on his royal palaces only brewing traditional ale, and hops were banned in cities like Norwich, Shrewsbury and Leicester. In the 1540s, the Sheriffs of London issued a writ protecting the right of the ‘natives of Holland and Zeeland from making beer’ from ‘malevolent attempts’ to convince people it was poisonous.
The economics of hops won over, and by the eighteenth century, hops were the norm in brewing, and the linguistic distinction between beer and ale disappeared.
The rise of hopped beer helped usher in the birth of commercial brewing. For most of history brewing was a domestic activity, like baking bread, and was traditionally performed by the woman of the house. (In all ancient mythologies where it appears, beer had a goddess rather than a male god, and she always hands down her secrets to women, not men.)
Over time, some brewers became better than their neighbours, and would start to brew bigger batches more regularly, bartering or selling what they didn’t need. When a new brew was ready, they would mount an ‘ale stick’ over the door of the house, to alert people that beer was on sale. These ale sticks were the forerunners to the traditional hanging pub sign, and these ‘alehouses’ were the first real pubs.
Beer was an absolute staple, a dietary essential. And then there’s this idea that it was also a source of clean water thanks to it having been boiled. Sources of clean water were plentiful, and before hops, beer wasn’t necessarily boiled during its production. But as towns and cities grew, so did pollution, and after a certain point, the sterility of hopped beer – thanks to the boiling that sterilises the brew as it isomerizes the hops’ alpha acids and creates an anti-bacterial affect — must have been a significant factor in its popularity.
But these arguments often miss the additional point that beer is a source of happiness and communion. It was popular then for the same reasons it is now: it brings us together, makes us feel better, and helps us interact. It was vital to the economy, quickly becoming an important source of tax revenue. It was inevitable that such an important commodity would be at the forefront of technological innovation, and wouldn’t remain a household activity for long after that innovation arrived.
/ Pete Brown’s new book Miracle Brew: Hops, Barley, Water, Yeast and the Nature of Beer, is out now.
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HISTORICAL TIMELINE
AD 43: Romans begin to govern Britain and find the populace drinking ‘wine made from barley’.
8th Century: St Boniface wrote to Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury complaining of drunkeness among the pagans.
1066 AD: The night before the Battle of Hastings, historian William of Malmesbury claimed the English forces partied hard and it cost them the battle.
11th Century: The Normans likely brought cider to England with them, but in towns and cities, ale was the British drink of choice.
14th Century: Ale was flavoured or seasoned, just like any food dish, with a variety of herbs, plants and spices.
15th Century: Over time, hops went from being one of the ingredients to becoming the star attraction.
16th Century: Flemish refugees started coming to England in greater numbers and imported hops.
1540s: The Sheriffs of London issued a writ protecting the right of the ‘natives of Holland and Zeeland for making beer’.
18th Century: Hops were the norm in brewing, and the linguistic distinction between beer and ale disappeared.
18th Century: The rise of hopped beer helped usher in the birth of commercial brewing.
18th Century: As towns and cities grew, so did pollution, and after a certain point, the sterility of hopped beer must have been a significant factor in its popularity.
