Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Beer

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Pint, bottle, schooner, tinny … no matter how you drink it, beer is undeniably a part of social life here in Britain and around the world.But how did it come to hold this position? Why has this been more true for British men than for British women? And what did beer taste like before mass production and microbiology?Kate has a pint with author, broadcaster and beer lover Pete Brown to find out.*WARNING this episode includes some fruity language*Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Assistant producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound and archive clips from "Brooklyn Bar Owner Wins Irish Sweepstake", 1937. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's me, as per usual, jumping in here with what I think I'm going to have to call your fair dues warning. This is a podcast about the history of sex, scandal and society, so we may be talking about sex scandal and society, but just occasionally we may veer into topics that shock you, in which case you would have to say, fair do's, she did give us a warning.

So this is your fair do's warning. We're going to be talking about naughty things. Oh, boys, we're going to have all a drink and a house. Maybe we're just having them. A old pint of pale ale in the sun, a bottle or a tinny on the beach, a smooth stout in a cozy pub. Ooh, beer is a staple of British society.

A democratic drink for the ages. But it's also quite a complex drink, and it's decidedly gendered. I remember being called unladylike for ordering a pint back in my teens. So where did that begin? And how's our relationship with beer changed? Well, Betwixt the Sheets is out on the lash to find out.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt.

the sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Beer is a massive business, either manufactured en masse or carefully crafted in small batches. But before this, beer was made in monasteries and before that, creating the perfect pint was the work of women. Of course it was. So how has beer come to be so connected with male culture and lads, lads, lads? Well, I'm joined by Pete Brown A historian of beer, pubs, cider, bacon rolls, fish and chips, well, basically anything that makes life worth living. Pistons at the ready, kids. Let's begin. So, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. Hopefully a drunken Betwixt the Sheets, slightly.

My guest today is Pete Brown. Hello. Hello. It's so nice to have you here, a historian of beer. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. I fell into it by accident, but it's an enormously fun job. How did you get into it? Because it's not just beer.

I'm doing a disservice there, isn't it? sort of alcohol. Yeah, it's kind of beer, pubs, working men's clubs, people drinking through history and today. Drinking culture. Yes, yes, that's probably the best way of something it up. I love that. And that is probably a history of the British people, isn't it? Well, that's how I got into it.

My first book actually was going to be an overview of classic beer advertising campaigns from the 1970s onwards. And I thought, as I was starting writing it, I thought, right, I just did to do one chapter on the history of beer, get us to where we are when we start. And then that turned into two chapters, then three. And by the time the book was finished, there was one chapter on classic beer adverts and the rest of it was a history of beer. Now, this subject is endlessly fascinating for many, many reasons.

But it's particularly fascinating for me because for many, many years, I worked in bars and pubs and stuff. And so I've seen many different sides of beer. And one of the questions that I was always wondered, and I've always been asked, is, is the British relationship with drinking unique? I think every country has its own unique aspects. There's a lot of commonalities.

Beer serves a function, a basic function, that is uniform around the world and goes back as far as civilisation, which is that moment of coming together, that moment of communion when you clink glasses and when you kind of look each other in the eye or cheers or whatever the equivalent is. And every culture that drinks beer has that at its heart. But everyone has different versions of it as well. So we're obsessed with a pint, for example. We do like a pint.

We do like a pint. It has to be served in a pint. The legal measurements of beer, weights and measures for beer, is some of the earliest laws that were passed in Britain, so back in the eighth, ninth century, regulating what beer could be served in, and what measures it could be served in. So we're obsessed with that.

We had a weird relationship where about, in the late 19th century, the rest of the world started drinking lager. And Lager became 90% of beer in the world. And we stuck with pale ale until about the 1970s. We stubbornly resisted Lager. And it's like, now we're all right, we've got this. Bring that foreign muck over here.

Exactly, exactly. And so there's lots of things. And the British pub is unique. If you've worked in them, you know this at least as well as I do. But everywhere else has bars. And I love bar in Manhattan. I love a beachfront bar in Australia. But there's nothing quite like the British pub.

There's so much more cultural and social aspects to that that are unique to Britain. That is very true, isn't it? And why do the Brits love getting pissed? Because there just seems to be such a British thing. And you can see that in historical documents from all throughout history. In fact, I think Julius Caesar even said of Britain, it would be easy to conquer us because we were plastered all the time. Why is that?

According to William of Malmesbury, that's why we lost the Battle of Hastings as well. The night before the Battle, the Normans were fasting and praying and confessing their sins, basically siking themselves up. And the Brits had just won, or the English rather, had just won Battle of Stamford Bridge. They'd been pissed celebrating that victory. We're meeting the Vikings. We can do this, lot easy. And this led us to attack the Normans more with rashness and precipitate fury than any measure of military skill, apparently.

Shit. See, this isn't frivolous history. This has, like, affected crucial pivotal points in our history, hasn't it? Absolutely. And I think there's a curiosity in the language that I discovered about our relationship with drunkenness and intoxication, which is we have this very binary state. You're sober or you're pissed. That's true.

When you're pissed, you might get a bit more pissed. very pissed, you might get slightly pissed. And in most of the beer drinking cultures, there's this third state between the two, which might be described as buzzed or, we might say merry, but we don't really use that, you know, but it's like, okay, I'm not sober, I wouldn't operate every machinery or get behind the wheel of a car, but I'm not drunk. I've just got that kind of lightness of spirit, but I'm still not going to say or do anything that I'm going to embarrass myself with. I'm a long, long way from blacking out or throwing up or anything like that. And so a lot of countries have this kind of three-stage relationship with alcohol. So people in some,

Spain might say, I've been pissed since I was a teenager. I've been drunk since I was a teenager, but I get buzzed two or three nights a week. Oh. We see it as a scale of drunkenness. They see it as a separate state. And there's something about that because actually most of the time when we drink, we're not drunk. We do kind of get that mild buzz on without going absolutely paralytic. We just don't think of ourselves.

We think of ourselves as drunk. That's really true, isn't it? That is a very good point. But we do seem to have, because when they changed the licensing laws, there was this notion that we were going to become like European sophisticants and we were going to be sat outside a bar with a glass of rosé, just sipping it as the sun went down. That didn't happen.

We just got pissed more. That's what happened. That didn't happen, actually. Is that just me? Just you and just me. But the alcohol, total alcohol consumption has been a steady long-term decline since that new licensing law came in. No, really?

Yeah. We don't get drunk half as much as we used to. British Brit now goes to the pub once a month. Before that law passed, it was once a week. So we are actually moderating our consumption. Wow. Or rather they are. Wow.

Are there other nations around the world that enjoy getting hammered? Because that does seem to be like a sort of an end destination for a lot of British people when they're drinking. It's like the idea isn't to get buzzed. It's to get unbelievably paralectically slaughtered. And if you can't remember it, you've succeeded. Yeah. I think that's a generational thing now.

that's changing quite a lot. The generation that's grown up with Instagram and TikTok and smartphones are really conscious now. I'm so glad none of this technology was around when I was at university. I would not have a career if some of the things that I did have been captured

on someone's smartphone, you know. And so people are like, well, if I'm exposing myself or throwing up or embarrassing myself in public, that's on social media forever. And in three years' time, when I'm going for a job interview, I might be presented with it. So there's a big concern among younger people the so-called Generation Z about that.

But in terms of kind of national comparisons, global comparisons, we're not even in the top 10 nations of alcohol consumption. Loads of other people drink more than us. I bet there'll be people listening to that going, we'll fucking see about that. We'll see about that. Who's bigger drinkers? I would put a punt on the Russian.

They're pretty up there in terms of total alcohol units. But in terms of beer, it's the Czech Republic. They're way ahead of anybody else. And the thing about when you go to Czech Republic, It's not just kind of groups of lads going out drinking beer on a Friday night. Old ladies are having it at the market at breakfast time and people having it for lunch and you go to a hot dog stand and you get a beer with your hot dog in the middle of the town square and things like that. It's just so ubiquitous and it's cheap and it's very, very good beer.

And so lots of people drink it all the time without necessarily. And I was talking to the checks about exactly this issue. In fact, I hadn't realised that these guys who were all speaking English as their second language were taking the piss out. out of me. So this guy goes, I like to come to England to go to places like Blackpool to see the men fighting each other. And I was just like, okay, I'm being wound up here. And I said, but you drink way more beer than us?

And they said, yes. And I said, so why don't you have as much drunken disorder? And they said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, we get drunk and we fight. And they said, yes, you do. And they said, you drink way more than us and you don't fight. And they said, hang on a minute. Are you trying to draw a link between alcohol consumption and disorderly behavior?

And I said, yes, obviously. And it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. They said, that's ridiculous. That's amazing. You don't get drunk to get Larry and have a fight. It said, what would be the point of that? You get drunk to get happy. And then if you have a fight, you've wasted your money.

You've ruined your eyes. And it was just a completely different point of view. Talk about being lost in translation. Everyone's in Britain. It's just like, what? That's amazing. They said the British and the Germans fight because you are violent people. You don't fight because you drink beer.

They might be on to something. I think I'm going to aspire to be a little old lady drinking beer at breakfast. That just sounds fabulous. Well, your taste buds are fresh. But yes. You appreciate it more. I like that. We start beer judging at about half nine in the morning in competitions.

Really? My, that, okay. I'm going to assume you know what you're doing with that one. That's impressive. But that kind of, it made me think that when you said there, is like even a little old lady to do it, is beer, not sort of alcohol, but beer. It does still have this kind of, like, gendered. sort of things surrounding it

that it is quite associated with like lads, lads, lads or like real ale drinkers. I love a pint and I remember when I was like 18 drinking pints in pubs and I would regularly get told off by old fellas in there because I should have been having a drambuey or a baby sham or something.

So it's definitely, what is that about? And has it always been there? It's not always been there. It goes back to the industrial revolution. So when we all worked on farms oversimplifying things here, but when we all worked out in the countryside, on farms and that kind of stuff,

whole families would work together. You'd work your ass off when it was harvest time or whatever, when the fruit has to be gotten in and stuff. And then if the work wasn't there to do, you just took it easy and sat under a haystack drinking cider all day. And whole families worked together, and things really weren't gendered at all in a big way. And then suddenly you get men yoked together in factories and mills and coal mines.

We've got huge groups of men doing grueling, back-breaking work while their wives are at home or maybe working domestic service in a very civilised kind of way. And men then went to the pub because there was nothing else for them to do. All the other leisure activities that we did out in the countryside, country fair-fares, they used to be bare-knuckle wrestling at Witson Tide,

pigeon racing, horse racing, gambling. In the cities, everything was banned. Pigeon racing was banned because it was a nuisance. And so men had nothing else to do other than go to the pub. And a lot of men couldn't even go back home But most of us lived in hovels in slums You know several families to one room A lot of young unmarried men

We lived in lodgings where they weren't allowed in Until last thing at night Until first thing in the morning So they had to go to the pub There was nowhere else to go And the pubs were very competitive People drank pints You know, we got this kind of later on

We got this thing about low strength beer Because you needed to wash the coldest out of your throat And that kind of thing It's about drinking quantity So you got this very masculine macho culture Growing up around beer and when pubs grew up in the city, if you were a single woman, it was assumed there was one reason you were going to go to a pub,

and that was prostitution. And so women couldn't be seen in pubs for fear of this kind of social disapproval. That didn't start to break down until after the Second World War, really. So there was a long time there. And then as we get into the later 20th century, beer was advertised as, hey, lads, let's all go out. And the women in beer ads were always the busted bar made standing behind the bar in a low-cut top. And the lads would be kind of trying to impress her,

or make fun of her or whatever. And then in the 60s, we drank pale ale when everyone else was drinking lager. The lager brew has tried all sorts to get us to drink lager. Did they? In the 60s, they said, right, we'd position lager as a female drink then. There were all these kind of ads like,

a blonde for a blonde and this kind of thing. I didn't know that. And so Lager got this very effeminate image, which really turned men off from it. And so in the 70s, they said, why does everyone think that Lager is a woman's drink? So, well, because you've just spent 10 million pounds telling us that it is.

And it's like, okay, we need to spend 100 millions of people. telling you that it's not a woman's drink. So Lager advertising got really vulgar and crass and laddish and sexist as a way to go, no, last one, it's a drink for proper men, this, you know, and that kind of thing. And you can tell it's a cultural construct to a large degree. So I think last time I saw figures in the UK, 16% of beer volume was drunk by women. If you go to Spain, which hasn't had all this kind of laddish cultures.

That was just one woman. That was just a big win-fins. Yes. But in Spain, 40%. sense of beer is drunk by women. So there's a thing about beer being bloating because it's fizzy. But apart from that, there's nothing intrinsic in beer that stops women from drinking it. It varies massively across different cultures, yeah.

I love a bit. I like the white wheat beers. Schneider Weiss is one of my favourite. That's a classic. It tastes like bananas. I love that, but it's not like a kind of a, like I'm supposed to be a fruity beer, but I love that one. And I love a lager as well. Okay, so the pub, as we know and love it today, kind of grows up as there has to be a space.

for men to gather. And we've taken away the pig chasing and cheese rolling. And now they're just stood around getting pissed. But before that, I think I've read this correctly in one of your books. There was a history of that it was associated with women because they were the ones brewing it. Yeah, traditionally it was always a female task. It happened in the home.

It happened in the kitchen. So along with the cooking and making bread, it was a female task. Making beer is just another form of cooking, really. Put some ingredients in a pot and mixing them until it's, taste nice and then letting it it ferment. I assume you've done that. Do you self-brew? I don't. I think for my wife, that would be the last straw. You know, we've got cases of beer arriving every day in the hall.

You know, all the talk is around beer and it's like, no, no, there's got to be a limit somewhere. Drawing the line here. I've been brewing with small breweries where I've helped to design recipes and actually put some of the legwork into making them. So I know how it goes. I bet you do. But, I mean, we're talking like way back, sort of the earliest sort of, sort of, medieval Britain and early medieval Britain

of when people are, they're brewing this stuff. And I suppose it's an impossible question. Maybe it is an impossible question to answer. I don't know. But their beer is going to be very different from what we think of beer today, isn't it? Like, if I go to the local pub and I order half a pint, my conception of what I'm doing

is going to be very different from a woman brewing beer in the 5th century. For so many reasons, yeah. All to do with the ingredients and how they're prepared? Do we know what it tasted like? I can do a rough approximation. Oh, cool, yes, please. We've arranged for both you and 90%, a couple of bottles of beer.

Yes. So there are two things that these beers demonstrate, which I think gives an insight to how it would have tasted. The first thing is that what we've got now, since Louis Pasteur and microbiology and everything else, is that the yeast that foments the beer is kept in laboratory-controlled conditions. It's cultivated as kind of a monoculture.

Yeast does give flavour, sort of characteristics to beer. the banana that you tasted in the wheat beer is a byproduct of the yeast. It's a flavour compound that yeast creates during fermentation. That doesn't sound as nice to say, ooh, yeasty banana. That is not a great image, is it? That's a last week beer, you're drinking. They haven't gone for that for the advertising strap line. No, curiously enough, I don't know why.

But yeast contributes flavour characteristics. It's kept and controlled as much as we can. Now, we didn't really know what yeast was until the middle of the 19th century, We didn't know that it was the agent of fermentation. People thought it was just like the way that water freezes and turns to steam, they thought it was just some kind of reaction, chemical reaction. It's just what happened. Yeah.

And in actual fact, the first time someone suggested that these microscopic organisms might be in there, eating sugar, fat and carbon dioxide and pissing alcohol. I mean, seriously, if someone told you now that that's how beer was made, you go, mate, you've been drinking a bit too much. I think I've dated him. But that's where you get the alcohol from in any way. If you had no conception of that, that does sound mad, doesn't it? Yeah.

In your drink, there are these tiny invisible creatures that are just eating stuff. Eating sugar and pissing alcohol. Yeah, I wouldn't believe that. It's the best example for intelligent design I've ever heard. But it's actually true. But of course, if someone suggested that in the Middle Ages, you'd have thought they were out of their tree. You really would.

Burn them as a witch. Yeah, and it was you used to think it was spirits. If the beer tasted good, it was the good spirits. If the beer tasted bad, it was kind of bad spirits that got into it. And a lot of beer brands today I have a star on their logo And the star, the monks would hang a star above the brewing vat To drive away the evil yeasts

That we're going to spoil the beer I didn't know that Is that like when star are prim and sort of they use that And I've definitely seen stars before Yeah, there's a red star Ching Tao in China has a red star on it And Heineken has a star And that's allegedly word

I thought it was like a communist thing I love that It was to ward off the evil spirits Yeah, and so there's still a sorghum brewing culture in Africa where they get this bowl of wet grain, mushy grain, like porridge, and they get the holy stick out and stir it with the holy stick and then fermentation magically happens. I love it.

This is it being blessed by the ancestors. What's actually happening is there's dormant yeast cultures on that stick because you stir every brew with it. And when you stir it into the new brew, it activates the yeast and they start brewing it again. So when that happened, and before we had microbiology, We had fermentation just happened naturally with whatever yeast was in the air. You've got no idea what microorganisms are there. Everyone behaves differently.

Everyone creates different flavour compounds. And so you're going to get all sorts of weird, funky, interesting, sour things going on in your beer. And so we've got a beer here from Belgium, Boon, Goose Boon. Gersboon. This is a beer that's still made using wild yeast cultures and not cultivated yeasts. Oh, should this is it's kind of like sort of a lucky dip of how it's going to. to turn out? Or is it more controlled than that? It's a bit more controlled than that now because different locations have different bio profiles, microbiological profiles. So there's this area

just to the west of Brussels where when they do this brewing technique there, it tastes really nice. Nice if you've got the taste for it. Yes. That's not a great advertisement, that's what we go for. Nice if you've got a taste for it. It took me about four years. I'll just say that. I've noticed on here that it says Lambick, and I remember that from my bartending days. that means it's going to be quite sour. Yes, so that's the main characteristic you get from these wild airborne yeasts, is you get this sourness. All right, I'm going to pop this because it's like a little champagne thing.

Yeah. Okay. So should I fill half my glass with this? Yes, for a little bit. Give yourself some room to get your nose in and have a good sniff. That's taking me back, that is, to my days in the pub. Wow. That smells, it smells like really, there's a lot of citrus in there.

There's a term that we use a lot, as well as terms you use without really knowing what it is, it often gets described as horse blanket. Horse blanket. I wouldn't have gone with that. What does that mean? That's a kind of mustiness there, but not in a bad way. Okay, horse blanket. A bit sort of wet dog, not wet doggy at all.

It's a really nice beer, everyone. But that kind of farmyard-y, you know how farmyards can smell of stuff that should be, of stuff? That should be unpleasant, but actually it's quite a nice smell. I can kind of see that. It's got a kind of, Like a hay and kind of like an outdoorsiness and a donkey duvet or whatever. Yes.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, I just had a sip of that. I think that's stripped the enamel off my teeth. It's really sharp. That's like, woo. It's really sharp. It's not what we expect from beer at all. No. It's kind of sourness and funkiness. It's like quite lemony. But it's nice, though. It's like grapefruit.

Yes, that's bang on, I think. That does taste quite grapefruity. Apparently, if you're going to like it, you need to take about three. because the first sick your mouth is going, what the fuck is that? The second sit you're slightly getting used to it. And then the third one is like, okay, we've kind of come to an accommodation with this now. I can see that. I think that if you like, sort of gin and tonic, that kind of, like, sort of, there's a lot of tannins in there.

And yeah, all right, yeah, I would go for that. Well done, Goetz-Boon. That was, I like that one. Yeah, he's the best, he's one of the, probably the best, Goers and Lambic maker in the world. That's nice. Just really nice. Would early, early beer have tasted like this, do we think?

So it would have had those characteristics. It would have had that soundness, that funkiness, that sort of rustic element to it. A lot of people today think that when you get a mainstream lag like Kalsberg, it's got quite a boring sort of one-dimensional profile. Probably the most boring larvae in the world. It was the guys at Kalsberg who invented single-strain laboratory-cultivated yeast. I would say imagine what it must be like to be the first brewer in the world who brewed a clean, simple beer that had none of this characteristics in it. Wow. Now we've got those really clean beers.

we take them for granted. But once upon it, and now we're all getting, you know, beer connoisseers are getting into these funky lambic beers. But when that was all you had, when every beer you had had those characteristics to it, it could have been a bit sort of wearying, really. Absolutely. I'll be back with Pete in just a bit.

Throughout June on not just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and all this month with my honour. guests are be exploring the coronations of Tudor Queens, Queen's regnant and Queen's Consort, who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Really, when we begin to look at Queen Consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways at

the Renaissance Court that women could hold informal power through their relationship with the king. Then there's the Queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. What did a 17th century person actually mean by saying, oh, she dresses like a man. If she would have worn male clothing, she wouldn't have been able to rule Sweden. So for a month of all things, magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors from history hit. All right, so early beer would have probably tasted a bit more sour than we'd be expected. Would it have been this strong? It would have been probably, yes. People drank a lot of it.

It would have been. Yeah. They brewed it quite strong. It was nutritious as well. You know, that's all calories in there as well, which is a bad thing for people like me these days. But back then, it was an essential source of calories and vitamins. So the more malt you put in, the more sugar there is. The better. The more alcohol and the more nutritious it is. And is it true that people drank it because rather than drink the water? So that's been disputed because, you know, before we were industrialised,

before it was a built-up country, a lot of people living in rural areas had access to clear, bright mountain flowing streams. They didn't have to drink beer instead of water. But if you were living in the middle of a city or a town, the river was the latrine was the way you did your washing your, it was horrible. It's vile in a way we can't really comprehend. Yeah, and you've got a lot of diseases from it. You know, still in the 19th century is that famous case of the John Snow Pub in Soho

where they realised that cholera was waterborne because all the cases of cholera were mapped around this one well. So, you know, that's proof that this stuff did happen. And beer is boiled during its production, so it's sterilised. And also it's got hops in it, which acts as an antibacterial agent. So it was definitely healthier to drink beer than to drink water. And what you'd do is you'd have a, you'd brew a strong beer like one of these 7% beers. And then you've got the spent grain, the mash, as they call it.

And you'd make another beer with that. So there's hardly any residual sugar left in it. You might get a beer that's 1 or 2% alcohol off that. And that was called small beer. Small beer. That was given out to children in schools. It was given out in hospitals. Because you couldn't get drunk of it.

But it was nutritious and it was source of vitamins and calories. Wow. Okay. I didn't know that. So kids were on the beer as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And do you think that it's a case of like people would have just developed a tolerance for this?

Because when you read back for the historical records, it's things like the amount of alcohol that was given to people in the armed forces for like a daily ration, was given out to people working on the railroads. I mean, we're talking pints and pints and pints of this stuff. They were either unbelievably twatted all the time or they developed a tolerance for it. What do you think? I think they developed a tolerance for it. And also it wasn't all 7%.

As I said, the small beer would have been given out in lots of ways. there is a great story from a hospital in Southwark where they gave out small beer on the wards and one day they mixed it up and they put the first strong beer in instead and so just rioting on all these hospital wards and they got really done for it so that shows us that both styles were there

and they were used in quite different ways particularly strong beers were used when a woman became pregnant you'd brew a really strong beer called a birthing ale a birthing ale a birthing ale the beer would mature an age over the course of the pregnancy. And then when the woman went into labour, the birthing hell was cracked open.

Both the mother and the midwife were drinking pints of this 8% beer to get themselves through it. And then when the baby was born, it was washed in what was left of the beer. Because it was sterile. I've never heard of that. So we were literally baptised in beer. I mean, I'd need, like, a midwife or someone to tell me

is at that late stage, when the woman's actually in labour, would drinking alcohol affect the fetus? but, I mean, they didn't have pain relief anything. So I can, yeah, you get a few down, yeah. I've got another bottle here that you've sent me, and this looks very much like something, kind of a monastery feel to it. It's got that kind of old school monk writing.

So our link to medieval beer in this one is from another ingredient in beer, which is malted barley. So this is the source of alcohol. It's what grapes are to wine. And what you need to do with barley, it's a bit more complicated than wine making or cider making. You need to trick the barley. into germinating.

It stores the sugar of starch, and when you took it to germinating, and it turns the starch back into sugar, so you can now use that for brewing. And then you have to basically kill the little grain inside. So I spoke to Bali Malmolster, and I said, yes, that's technically true, but it's not the kind of message

that we're looking to communicate about the malting industry. And so then what you've got to do is you've got to dry the grain out. And where beer came from in the Middle East, you do that just by laying it out in the hot sun on a rock, and that would be fine. Not so easy to do in northern Europe. No. So we used to try it over a source of heat basically.

Again, now we can control heat directly with gas. Before that, we could do it with Coke. You couldn't do it with coal because of poisonous gases in coal. That makes sense. Since the 17th century, when Coke production started, we managed to get this kind of mould that was, again, fairly clean tasting. But before that, you would dry it over a wood fire or a hay fire. And so your lovely mould was basically fire damaged.

It's stank of smoke in the way that you buy a knock-off stuff from a shop that had a fire in it. Yeah. And so what we've got here is a beer that uses maltered barley, which has been dried over flaming wood. Is this a smoked beer? Yeah. Right.

Okay. Okay. Here we go. Okay. Give it a sniff. So again, you would have had no alternative to get this smoky character in your beer.

That just smells like bacon crisps. It does, doesn't it? Frazzles. That's exactly what that smells like. All right. Smoke beer. Okay. Wow.

Like I'm pouring it into the glass. And the only way, way I can describe that is chewy. Yeah. This is a lager, believe it or not. That's a lager. Does it know it's a lager? I don't think it does.

Has anyone told it? That's like, that looks really thick. It's like the colour of sort of a slightly watered down Coca-Cola. To the manufacturers of this beer, I'm really sorry. I'm not doing it any favours, but okay. Smells like frazzles. Okay, here we go. Oh!

Oh, that's a peculiar, insane. that's really smoky. It is, isn't it? So it's quite intense. You know, they're going for the smoke in this. They want to make a really smoky beer. The old-style maltsters would be looking to minimize it as much as they could. So they'd be using different floors, ventilation, that kind of thing.

So I don't know if it would have been as intense as this back then, but this characteristic would again have been definitely there in most of the beers that they're drunk. Wow, a smoked beer. And they would have been dark like this as well? And would it have had things floating in it? Probably. Yeah, I'm having another sip. So if we wanted to be really brave, we could mix these two beers together,

and that might give us an approximation of what medieval beer would be like. It's not something I've ever done before. Is this experimental archaeology? Yes. Right. Absolutely it is. Okay, so I've got my Donkey Dovee lambic beer over here, and the frazzles one. Do you think half and half? I reckon so.

Right, okay. If we're going to do this commercially, we'd experiment with different ratios and see what we like. Half and half seems a good place to start. Might be about to find out why the Brits lost the back. bottle of hasty. Here we go. Okay. Okay.

Before I have a sip of this, is it true that the Brits drank warm beer? I know we have a reputation for that. Warm beer. Only by comparison. Right. So what we drank was

beer at cellar temperature, which is not refrigerated, but it's between about 11 and 13 degrees Celsius. Okay, okay. Now, if you've been out when it's 11 to 13 degrees Celsius without a coat, you know that's not warm.

Yes. Yeah, okay. But neither is it freezing. Okay. All right. So here we go. Here we go. Oh, that, how would you describe that?

I think that's not half bad. It's not bad, actually. I mean, I may have just had a couple of mouthfuls of this and be well on my way, but I've had worse than that. Yeah. I think the Lambic has really taken the smoke down. Yeah.

It's hidden quite a lot of it. That's, it's got kind of a fruity thing about it now. Yeah, the thickness of the body of the smoke beer is kind of dumping down some of that acidity as well. Yeah. It's got an almost like acidicy fruit thing. It's like a smoked fruit pie in a glass. Yeah.

So I think that's as fairly clear. I think that's within the ballpark of what medieval beer would have tasted like. It's not bad, you know. It's not bad. I read somewhere that the expression to toast, to toast somebody, comes from when they would have had bread floating in the beer. Is that bullocks, do you know? I think I put that in my first book.

Oh, did you? Right, okay. So it may well be bollocks because I didn't know what I was writing about. But I like that, that's where it comes from, that we used to put toast in beer. Well, punch bowls used to have toast put in them for some reason, which is where you get the toastmaster. Ah.

But I can't quite remember what the reason for that was. I think it was something to do with improving the flavour. I see. Okay. What I want to ask you about, I've got this horrible feeling you're going to tell me that this isn't true, and then I'm going to be really upset. Is there a link between women brewing beer and the image of the witch? I think it's based on truth. Okay.

I think it's being grossly, you know, built up and elaborated. I don't think you enjoy a distinction between brewing and witchcraft. When you look at what the witch was in culture, she was a wise woman who knew an awful lot about stuff and could cure people through knowing the medicinal properties of plants. That's true. And putting these plants into potions, into mixes, turning them to tinctures, whatever, and give them to people.

If you go to Africa out for a walk with the Maasai tribesman and he was pointed different trees, saying if a woman falls pregnant, we don't let eat the leaves from that tree because it will make it terminate the baby. If you've got cramp, if you make a tea out of the leaves from this plant, it will help your arthritis and things. Yeah, yeah. So lots of different plants are lots of different

medicinal properties. And traditionally, you know, men out, hunting, women gathering, you would gain over time a really detailed knowledge of the medicinal properties of lots of different plants, which were you kind of brewing, bubbling up in your cauldron. And then as the church became more dominant, which

was a male pyramid scheme of of hierarchy with a male God at the top of it, and his teachings interpreted by male priests, if the woman's knowledge didn't come through that hierarchy, then it didn't come from God, which meant that it must have come from the devil. So suddenly these witches who were enormously helpful to society became seen as evil.

And so if you link that to the fact that women were brewing, and it was women who discovered the brewing properties of hops and all, this kind of thing, it's from the same place. Yeah, yeah. Then it gets elaborated by things like when a household was brewing ale and the beer was ready, they would put a steak up outside of the house, the ale steak, and that was often a broom, a broomstick.

Oh, right. So that's an easy image. I don't think that had anything to do with a witch's broom. But when you see those old pictures now, you go, aha, there's a brewer with the witch's broomstick outside. Oh, that makes sense. Okay, so I love that. So we've got some witches and witchcraft, medieval,

famous women brewers who are kicking ass. Yeah, my favorite one is. a German Benedictine abbess, Hildegard von Bingen. What name? She's great. She wrote this seven-volume treatise in the 12th century of the medicinal properties of plants. And she, in that said, Hops had bitterness to beer, and they also help preserve it and have medicinal antibacterial properties.

Well, she didn't say antibacterial because we didn't know that. But she knew that hops had health-giving properties. And hops are now the one thing that people know about beer, and that's down to her. Hildebrand, thank you very much. Oh, I'm going to have a drink to her. out of our strange medieval concoction. Cheers. Okay. Exactly.

So there's a lot of positive history. So I'm curious as to where, because I researched primarily 19th century history, and I know that's a bit of a, we're doing a bit of a jump, but that's when you start to get the temperance movement creeping in, isn't it? And for those of you that don't know,

that's this kind of idea that we're going to stop people drinking. Yeah. The temperance movement, I think like a lot of things, was a mixture of there was a genuine issue that needed to be resolved. And it was hygiene. jacked by people with their own agendas.

Okay. And what was the issue? So the issue was all these men living in slums, going to work, going to the pub afterwards, getting drunk. A lot of them went home and beat their wives and families. And they were also spending their wages in the pub. Pubs were doing things like putting salt into the beer to make the men more thirsty, so they'd stay there and drink more. Oh, okay. I know.

And so there was an issue with drunkenness. Now, that issue was grossly exaggerated, much like it is today, binge drinking. It's not that there's a problem there. It's presented as being far more serious than it is. And so the temperance movement was quite powerful and quite popular. And there was a sense that men did need an alternative to just go into the pub and getting drunk. But that alternative wasn't just to be cancelled right. You're not allowed to do that either.

Yeah. So what did they come up with? Was there a suggestion? It's interesting that you should ask me that because my new book published this week talks about that in great detail. Well, look at that. What a colloquine. Isn't that amazing? So what they tried to do in the early Victorian period is they came up with all these mechanics

institutes and workmen's institutes where it was like all we need to do is expose men to interesting readings from the classics put on some Shakespeare plays give some recitals from classical musicians and like the beasts of the field they will become enchanted by proper culture and they will suddenly become gentlemen and apart from the wife beating thing this was when men were just about to get the vote right and so the upper classes had to make sure men were voting for the right people and not getting any silly ideas into their head about voting for socialists or anything like that. Okay.

So the Mechanics Institutes and the Workman's Institute didn't work. No one turned up because you just come out of working down the pit and it's like, yeah, please come on to this lecture about aesthetics. And it's like, no, you're all right, mate. I'm going to the pub. And so this guy, Henry Solly, on the 14th of June 1862, exactly 160 years ago this week, said, well, there needs to be a club. And if we can make it a place where men can socialise,

be with a mates, chat, play a game with dominoes, have a cup of tea. Then we could kind of sneak the lectures in. Once we've got them in, we can sneak in the education and the improvements. It was a very clever idea. He got it wrong in that he said it's got to be booze free, and men still went, okay, well, in that case, we're not going. I bet they did.

But when they finally allowed booze in, the working men's club became a place where people drank in a different way, and they didn't just go there to drink. There were newspaper rooms where you could go and read all the day's newspapers. They start building concert halls. And so blokes who were house painters would say, well, I could paint some scenery. but people being given elocution lessons

and they said, well, these bits that we're reading for elocution lessons, we could read them out on stage and put our own plays on. And then some bloke says, well, I can sing a song. I've got quite a good singing voice. And so they start to create this homespun working class culture. And so while the upper classes are still saying, no, no, you've got to be reading Shakespeare. It's like, no, we're seeing these songs that we used to sing in the fields

a hundred years ago and telling a few jokes in between. So you get the whole music hall culture. A music hall started in pubs. It became gentrified into variety of theatre, but it lived on in the Working Men's Club as a place which is a little bit bawdy, a little bit rude and lewd. Performers like Mary Lloyd singing, singing a song about getting on a trainer, so I've never had my ticket punched before and all this kind of thing. And that was all censored out of the variety theatre, but it lived on in working men's clubs.

And so these became places where working class people, they didn't let women, if women did not have equal rights in the Worker Men's Club movement until 2007. But they had been regulars in the club for about 60 years by that point, but they just didn't have the same rights as men. But by the mid-20th century, you've got the women in there playing bingo, the men drinking pints are playing dominoes, then everyone goes to the same room to watch the turn, the comedian or the singer come on.

And there's this whole working-class culture thing, which has got booze to its heart. Everyone's drinking, but not to that drunken excess in a lot of cases. Because it's their club, they own it, and then in the community, and everyone knows them. You don't want to kind of make a fool of yourself in front of your peers. And it's kind of shifted the aim and the intent of it, Whereas in the pubs, the intention is to get pissed.

Yeah. The intention in the clubs was social. The numbers of pubs peaked about the 1890s. People started drinking less. So we've got jobs that required you to be sober a bit more, like clerical jobs and things. So pub started to compete. Airline pilots.

Yes. So pub started to compete for business. And it was more and more about the commercial imperative in pubs. Whereas that commercial imperative wasn't there in working men's clubs. Any profit they made just got plowed back into the clubs. and used to take children on trips to the seaside or create scholarships working class men to go to Ruskin College at Oxford or build convalescent homes for older members who couldn't live on their own anymore.

So they created this proto-welfare state before the welfare state existed. In the club? I had no idea that that's what working men's clubs did. It simply hasn't been recorded. No. This book is pretty much the first that tackles a subject in a comprehensive way. That's absolutely fascinating. I can't keep you here forever because we have to go and drink this.

beer. But one thing that I'd like to finish on by asking you is, because you just touched on it there, do you still think that beer is dictated by class? Does it still have class associations? There's still a big difference, isn't there, between having a glass of wine, darling, and a pint of mild? Yeah, it still does, not to the extent that it used to. And I think there's a thing there, you know, a survey just after Brexit said that 60% of the British population self-identify as being working class. If you look at any kind of demographic information, it's about, It's about 40% who actually fall in a kind of economic definition of working class. Okay.

But these days it's economic, it's cultural and it's social as well. So I'm less affluent. I'm undeniable middle class now. I'm uncomfortable working class background. But I own about half of what a plumber or an electrician makes. But so beer is still seen as working class. But in an aspirational way, in the same way that after Nick Hornby's fever pitch, football became something that was, oh yeah, we're going to the footy with the lads.

And it's just kind of middle class. Hedge fund managers doing that. I think you see the same, the gentrification of gastropubs, and now with craft beer, which, you know, can cost... Oh, it's very trendy, isn't it? Yeah, that could cost eight, nine quid a pint now in London. That really brings out the northerner in me when I have a pint in London. I do...

How much? How much? The obligatory... It's true, though. It is. So wine is always considered more superior. I've drank some of the finest beers I've ever drunk, where you've got things like, let's say,

you've got a 12% imperial stout that's been aged in, barrels that used to contain California and Cabanet Sauvignon. And it's sat in these barrels for a year, taking on some of the barrel characteristics, some of the wine characteristics. Incredibly complex, way more complex than a wine of a similar strength would be, but about 12%.

It's taken over a year to make. If you see it anywhere, you'll get, say, a third of a pint for three quid. And so what the traditional person at the bargain is, hey, that's nine quid a pint, nine quid a pint for a beer. And it's like, well, it's more like a wine than a beer. A third of a pint is slightly bigger than a one, seven, five

mil glass of wine. It's the same strength as that 175 mil glass of wine. Show me a pub in London where you can get a 175 more than wine for three quid. This is true. It's all in the maths, people. Yeah. And people will dismiss that beer as, yeah, but it's still only beer, isn't it? Yeah, that's true. So the classest thing is still there. There's a champagne beer that's aged in champagne caves in France, and it's 15% ABV, and it's brewed of champagne yeast, and I saw a wine writer to review it, and she was raving about it, but her last sentence was still, it's only a beer, though. Oh. And it's like, well, I've got friends who are wine drinkers,

and they'll come round for a party and I'll say, okay, so you want to kind of Belgian lambic beard, you want lager, you want ale, pale ale, IPA. So, no, I'm not drinking any of that rubbish. I want a wine. I'm like, okay, what wine do you want a cabernet and you're serving you on? Do you want a souvenir, blot? You're really like, white.

And it's like, right, you're choosing to trick a wine that is white, and that's as much as you know about it, but you think you're making a more sophisticated choice than I am. The way that works. Oh, Pete, you've been so much fun to talk to. What should we call our beer creation here? I'm kind of leaning towards Kate and Pete's yeasty banana. I cannot better that.

Thank you so much. Do you know what? As a craft beer name, that'd get some traction on the chalkboards of London's craft beer pubs. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you. You've been an absolute joy. Cheers. That's been a pleasure.

Cheers. I've actually done to finish this. It's not bad, you know. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. It's kind of like... Me neither. Yeah, like the sharp lambic takes away the smoky stuff and it's kind of fruity.

Yeah, well done, medieval people. That's great. Exactly. I hope you've enjoyed joining us for a swift pint. Thank you so much to our guest, Pete Brown. And thank you for sending me beers. I'm starting to think I may have to do all the podcasts slightly drunk from now on. If you like what you've heard,

please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. In the next few weeks, we've got episodes on the origins of queer identity, and a colonial bashing queen. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.