"I remember, too, that we had a visit from some Chief Constables from towns in the North of England, including Newcastle and Durham, who had come to tell the Control Board of a serious increase in drinking among women in their towns, which was, they emphasised, a growing evil, one non-existent before the war. D'Abvernon sent for figures of convictions for drunkenness in the town concerned, and remarked that from the figures it did not appear that there had been any marked increase in drunkenness among women in these areas - on the contrary, there was an improvement. The Chief Constables replied that there was little actual drunkenness among women, but that their present purpose was to draw their attention to the large increase in the number of women who now drank. In the old days few decent women would go into a public house at all, and now they were walking in 'bold as brass', putting down their money and calling for beer. The Chief Constables assured Lord D'Abernon that this state of affairs had been practically unheard-of in peace time; they feared that it might continue after the war. I had, of course, known that women in ordinary times used public houses much less up north than in the London district, but I was not aware until then how wide was the difference. It seemed to me strange that leading police officials should be so troubled at what in the south was quite a normal custom.
I have always regretted that it should have been regarded as proper for a man to enter a public house but unsuitable for a woman; however, that view was strongly held, particularly in the north - perhaps one reason was the low standard of public houses in the northern industrial districts - or perhaps one result!"
"Seventy Rolling Years" by Sydney Nevile, page 108.
"Glasgow is to have barmaids again after an interval of fully thirty years.
The magistrates have, by nine votes to six, granted an application by the Licensed Trade for permission to employ barmaids, but have stipulated that women employed should be at least25 years of age.
They refused another application to be allowed to employ youths of of between 16 and 18 years of age as barmen.
Both applications were based on the plea that 50 per cent. of the barmen in the city wre serving with the Forces or were liable to be called up for service.
Temperance organisations opposed the applications on the ground that employment in public-houses was not suitable for women and was not in the interests of public morality.
It was also argued that the presence of women behind the bars might tempt young men into licensed premises and encourage them to drink.
Since the ban, however, the employment of barmaids in hotel, restaurant, and lounge bars has been permitted."
"The Brewers' Journal 1940" page 729.
"Early in the war mass observation revealed that when outstanding war events protruded the number of patrons in licensed houses increased. This wa determined by viviting a cross-section of licensed premises and recording the number of people present at identical times on specified days of the week. The reason assigned by mass observation was that at such times people had more to talk about. The organising secretary of the Alliance News - the principal organ of teetotal thought - has been finding out the same thing, although we suspect that his purpose in setting out his findings was to disparage the public-house. He records:-
"Two passengers in a train entered into conversation concerning the public-house where it was their custom to meet; and presently the younger of the two said that he really did not go for the beer, but for the company. At this I entered into the discussion, and suggested that the same thing was not quite true of a teashop. People only went into a teashop when they wanted a cup of tea."Not so the public-house, where they not only go to slake their thirst, but to play games and, above all, to talk, as in a true democracy people should. Yes the teashop is no match for the public-house. One doesn't go into the teashop "for the company"; but we are gald at this point - the human atmosphere of the inn - which we have stressed so often, is now emphasised from a quite unexpected source."
"Brewers' Journal 1940" page 806.
If I thought the book was crap, my approach would be simple. Silence. But it isn't crap. So I feel obliged to say something."In relation to bottled beer, the growing seriousness of the rubber position is likely to have its repercussions on the supply of stoppers and rings. The Rubber Controller has recently issued a strong appeal to the public to co-operate in returning all screw stoppers - and appropriately enough this has been done in newspaper space provided by the Society in the "What do I do" series. The quantity of rubber, even reclaimed rubber, which is required to produce stoppers and rings will almost certainly have to be cut in the immediate future, and every brewery should do what is possible to promote the utmost percentage of recovery of used stoppers from their customers in order to avoid the curtailment of bottled beer output."
"The Brewing Trade Review 1943", pages 173 - 174.
"There are two distinct statutory provisions in this matter, one designed to deal with beer which has been accidentally destroyed and the other to deal with beer which has become spoiled. The first is contained in Sec 18 of the Inland Revenue Act, 1880, and applies only to beer accidentally destroyed by enemy action or otherwise while on the entered premises of a brewery, apart from certain exceptions relating to bottling depots approved for the purpose.
The second provision arises in the Spoilt Beer Regulations under Sec. 4 of the Finance Act 1915. It permits the refund of duty on beer which has accidentally become spoiled or otherwise unfit for use, and, if it had been delivered to another person, has been returned to the brewery. If, therefore, beer is destroyed in a public-house cellar by enemy action, the proper course is for the licensee to claim the full value, including duty, under the War Risks Insurance Act, but if it is merely rendered unfit for use and is returned to the brewery, the brewery can claim refund of duty under the Spoilt Beer Regulations, in which case the licensee must not include the duty on his claim under War Risks Insurance."
"The Brewing Trade Review 1943", page 174.
If you can be arsed to read it all the way through, you'll find some captivating glimpses into Britain's export trade in beer in the first half of the 19th century. It shows that Porter, far from being driven out of tropical markets by Pale Ale, was still extremely popular in many of the hotter areas of the world. (Which should come as no surprise to anyone who's been to the Caribbean, where Stout is still surprisingly popular.)"The increase of brewers has kept pace with London's increase in other respects. The 26 brewhouses of the reign of Elizabeth had become about 55 in 1759-60, and upwards of 148 in 1841. The number of barrels of beer brewed by the twelve principal brewers in London was—284,145 in 1782; 1,097,231 in 1808; and 2,119,447 in 1836.
The genuine London beer (although we learn from the ' Brewers' Annual' that there are only three brewers in London—Reid, Meux, and Courage—who do not brew pale ale, and that there are a few who brew nothing else) is the brown stout. It is the perfection—the ideal of the "berry-brown ale" and the "nut-brown ale" of the old songs. It is what the poet of those antediluvian days fancied, or a lucky accident enabled their brewers at times to approach. No disparagement to the pale and amber ales, infinite in name as in variety; to the delicious Winchester ; to the Burton, which, like Sancho's sleep, " wraps one all round like a blanket;'' to Hodgson's pale India ale, so grateful at tiffin when the thermometer is upwards of 100, and the monotonousness-creating punkah pours only a stream of heated air on the guests; to the Edinburgh (we mean the Edinburgh as it is not to be had in London *) ; " London particular" is the perfection of malt liquor. As Horace says of Jupiter, there is nothing " similar or second to it"—not even among liquors of its own complexion. Guinness is a respectable enough drink, but we must say that the ascendancy it has gained in many coffeehouses and taverns of London is anything but creditable to the taste of their frequenters. Its sub-acidity and soda-water briskness, when compared with the balmy character of London bottled stout from a crack brewery, are like the strained and shallow efforts of a professed joker compared with the unctuous, full-bodied wit of Shakspere. As for the mum of Brunswick, which enjoys a traditional reputation on this side of the water, because it has had the good luck to be shut out by high duties, and has thus escaped detection, it is a villanous compound, somewhat of the colour and consistence of tar—a thing to be eaten with a knife and fork. We will be judged by any man who knows what good liquor is—by a jury selected from the musical amateurs of the ' Coal-hole,' the penny-a-liners who frequent the ' Cock' near TempleBar, and the more sedate but not less judicious tasters who dine or lunch daily at ' Campbell's' in Pope's Head Alley. Should it be objected that such a tribunal, composed exclusively of Londoners, might be suspected of partiality, let it be a jury half composed of foreigners—Liibeck, Goslar in Saxony, and any town in Bavaria can furnish competent persons to decide such a question. The German students are in general (at least in the north) devout beer-drinkers, but they are of the class who love "not wisely but too well"—they drink without discrimination. It is among the Philister of Germany that you must look for connoisseurs in beer.
But the favour in which London beer stands in so many and various regions of the earth may .be received as the verdict of a grand jury of nations in its favour. Byron sings—
" Sublime tobacco, that from East to West
Cheers the tar's labours and the Turkman's rest;"
and he might have added that wherever tobacco is known and appreciated, there too have the merits of London porter been acknowledged. The learned Mei- bomius.t who, in a Latin quarto, has dilated upon the subject of "beer, tipple, and all other intoxicating liquors except wine,'' with the completeness and minuteness of a true German naturalist, and with that placid seriousness which might make what he says pass for a joke if there were only wit in it, or for learning if it contained anything worth knowing, has judiciously remarked that smoke-drinking and beer-drinking are natural and necessary complements of each other. The mucilaginous properties of the beer are required to neutralise the narcotic adustness of the Nicotian weed; and London beer, being the perfection of its kind, naturally takes the lead of all other kinds of beer. Accordingly we find it not only on the shores of the Baltic, where the habit of swilling their own indigenous malt liquors might be understood to have predisposed the natives to its use, but under tropical skies, and among the disciples of the first great teetotaller, Mahomet.
On the Nile and Niger, as has above been hinted, this is not so astonishing. There the natives had already a kind of beer of their own ; and where once a taste for malt has taken root, it would take a cleverer fellow than Mahomet to eradicate it. Burckhardt, in his Nubian travels, gives us a tolerable notion of how vainly the Faquirs and Santons preach against indulgence in boosa; and the last letter from poor Anderson, the only one of Park's European companions who survived to perish with his leader, boasts of having got drunk upon boosa with a Moor, and licked his boon companion in his cups. That people accustomed to put up with bad liquor should take kindly to good when it came within their reach is quite natural.It is among the Osmanli, and the Arabs, and the multiform sects of Hindustan, that we are to look for the real triumph of London beer. In the country last mentioned it is true the high-hopped pale ale of Hodgson, Bass, and others famous in that line, appears to be in greater demand; yet the genuine brown stout will be found in a respectable minority. Probably, too, a minute examination would show that it is only at the tiffins of the Europeans that Hodgson's beer is most run upon, and that the dusky natives do more affect the generous liquor that comes nearer to their own complexion. In the tropical climates of the West, among the fiery aristocracy of Barbadoes, the shrewd hard-headed book-keepers of Jamaica, the alternate votaries of the gaming-table and the languishing Quadroons of New Orleans, bottled porter reigns supreme.
Pale ale is a favourite of long-standing in India. It and the darker kinds of beer crept into Arabia, through the English merchants trading to the Red Sea, at least as early as the time of Niebuhr. That traveller saw a serious elderly Mussulman tipple down repeated glasses of Mr. Scott's beer ; gravely remarking " that Mahomet had only forbidden drinking to intoxication, but that as the vulgar did not know when to hold their hands, it was necessary to make them take the total abstinence pledge ; that he, it might appear to his respected entertainers, although a learned man, and an aged man to boot, drained no moderate draughts of their beer, but that he did so solely because he knew that it did not intoxicate." The Scheich must either have been a notorious old humbug, or profoundly simple, to say of good London beer that it did not intoxicate.The Turks, of whom Dr. Clarke tells us in his voyages about the Dardanelles and Egypt, were scarcely more candid, but considerably more ingenious. After the French had been driven out of Egypt, a British trading vessel, which had been fitted out to Alexandria by a speculative dealer in beer counting upon the thirst of a British army in a hot climate, arrived just too late for the market it had counted upon. This was a black look-out for the poor fellow who united in his person the responsibilities of skipper and supereargo; but by good luck there were then, as now (though not to the same extent), some of those questionable characters called antiquaries and the like prowling about Egypt, who were on a convivial footing with some of the laxer sort of Turks. The Osmanli tasted the porter at the houses of their Frank friends, and, rather liking it, were not slow to discover that Mahomet could not possibly have prohibited a liquor of which he had never heard, and, without affecting, like Niebuhr's friend, to believe that it did not intoxicate, drank copiously. The skipper found the Turks better customers than the Franks ; and we believe the sale of the article has continued to increase both at Alexandria and Constantinople.
Porter-drinking needs but a beginning; wherever the habit has once been acquired it is sure to be kept up. London is a name pretty widely known in the world : some nations know it for one thing, and some for another. In the regions of the East India Company, where missionary exertions are not much favoured, it is known as the residence of " Company Sahib ;" in the islands of ocean it is known as the place whence the missionaries come ; the natives of New Holland naturally regard it as a great manufactory of thieves ; the inhabitants of Spanish America once looked upon it as the mother of pirates. But all nations know that London is the place where porter was invented; and Jews, Turks, Germans, Negroes, Persians, Chinese, New Zealanders, Esquimaux, Copper Indians, Yankees, and Spanish Americans, are united in one feeling of respect for the native city of the most universally favourite liquor the world has ever known.
*Good Edinburgh ale must be allowed time to ripen into excellence. When bottled, it ought to be cloyingly sweet, and so glutinous that when some is poured upon the palm, and the hand held closed for five minutes, immersion in warm water is required before it can be opened again. After bottling, the ale ought to stand five years in a cool dry cellar, and four months near a Dutch oven in frequent use. It is then at its best; but even then it is more like a liqueur to be sipped than a liquor to be drunk.
"London" by Charles Knight, 1842
Did I mention that Barclay Perkins began experimenting with brewing lager during WW I? At first I thought this was pretty weird, given the level of anti-German feeling. But on reflection it makes sense. The war had doubtless cut off supplies of foreign lager.
Barclay Perkins were one of the first English brewers to get into lager in a big way. Their first experiments were during WW I and by the early 1920's they'd a purpose-built lager plant and were in full production.'The new customs duty of £1 per bulk barrel on non-Empire beers is not really such a big thing as it sounds at first. I attracted a certain amount of attention during the debate on the Budget, and I agree with Colonel Gretton, who pointed out that some members were trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the same time, we, as brewers or lager beer , do greatly appreciate this action of the government in supporting a British industry, but it is too son as yet to judge what result this new Customs duty will have on the imports of foreign lager beer.
Some of the Members who oppose this increased Customs duty in the House of Commons seem to be under the impression that lager beer cannot be brewed in this country, but we have had expert opinion on this from the Scandinavian Brewers; Laboratory, who say: "Basing our judgment on the results of our investigation, we may consider the quality of the beer as of the highest standard possible, and we may reckon this produce of yours equal to the finest lager beer we know."
That is only one opinion, but we can add to that the opinions of lager beer brewers from all over the world who have visited the brewery at various times.
I should like to back these opinions and ours by inviting those M.P.s to come to the brewery and taste any brand of foreign lager beer obtainable in London they like to name against Barclay's lager. I leave it at that.
I referred to the debate on the Budget just now. Sir Joseph Lamb raise the question of the use of British barley in lager beer. I may be of interest to state that this company have for some time in the past has been experimenting with the making of British barley into lager malt. This has now gone beyond the experimental stage, and I can assure you that the Barclay's lager you drink in this country is made from a large proportion of British malt.
The proportion of British malt has gradually been rising each year as our maltsters have mastered the making of lager malt from British barley, which requires a different process than for making malt for the top fermentation beers.'
"The Brewers' Journal 1936", page 396.
Feeling like I've been run over by a steam tram does have its upside. I like to stay positive. Not just time for music. Time for reading.
Number one is listening to music.
XXXX what is that? Well it isn't a Mild, as earlier beers called XXXX were. Really, it's more like a KK. A Burton or Strong Ale, something that still featured on most London bar counters. It being wartime, the gravity has been reduced from a pre-war level of around 1055.
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