Dan Snow's History Hit - Beer

Episode Date: July 14, 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 Lister has a pint with author, broadcaster and beer lover Pete Brown to find out.WARNING this episode includes some fruity languageProduced by Charlotte Long and 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.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi there History Hit listeners. I probably don't need to tell you about this because everyone already appears to be listening to it, looking at the chart position. But History Hit's got another podcast out called Betwixt the Sheets. It's with Kate Lister, brilliant historian. She's been on this podcast many times. It's a history of, I don't know, sex, scandal, society. The stuff that intrigues Kate Lister with her wonderful mind and will certainly intrigue you too. It's going crazy, everyone's listening to it, everyone's talking about it. Join the gang, betwixt the sheets, wherever you get your pods. 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. So boys, we're going to have all of drink and a hug. Maybe we're just hammered in.

A cold pint of pale ale in the sun, a bottle or a tinny on the beach, a smooth stout in a cosy 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 in 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 button. What about ERA?

What about now? What about ERA? What about now? Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, does it? difference. Goodness, what a beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, did it? 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, and well, basically anything that makes life worth living. Pistons at the ready kids, let's begin. Hello 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? It's 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 summing 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 started writing, I thought, right, I just need to do one chapter on the history of beer to 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, 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, back in the 8th, 9th century, regulating what beer could be served in, 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 became 90% of beer in the world. And we stuck with pale ale until about the 1970s. We stubbornly resisted lager. And so 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 that 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 psyching themselves up. And the Brits had just won, or the English rather, had just won the Battle of Stamford Bridge, they'd been pissed celebrating that victory. We're like, we beat the Vikings, we can do this, not easy. And this led us to attack the Normans more with rashness and precipitate fury than any measure of military skill, apparently. So... 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 stage. You're sober or you're pissed. That's true. When you're pissed, you might get a bit more pissed.

You might get very pissed. You might get slightly pissed. And in most other beer drinking cultures, there's this third state between the two. Really? Which might be described as buzzed or we might say merry but we don't really use that you know yeah 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 yeah 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 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. Was that just me? Just you and just me. But the alcohol, total alcohol consumption has been in steady long term decline since that new licensing law came in.

No, really? We don't get drunk half as much as we used to the average 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 i mean are there other nations around the world that enjoy getting hammered like 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 paralytically 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

had 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 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 czechs about exactly this issue in fact i hadn't realized that these guys who are all speaking English as their second language were taking the piss 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, OK, 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 I said, hang on a minute. Are you trying to draw a link

between alcohol consumption and disorderly behaviour? And I said, yes, obviously. And it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. They said, that's ridiculous. You don't get drunk to get leery and have a fight. I said, what would be the point. You don't get drunk to get leery and have a fight. I 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 night. And it was just a completely different point of view. Talk about being lost in translation.

Everyone's in Britain is 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 onto 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 made me think that when you said there's like even a little old lady do it, is beer, not sort of alcohol, but beer, it does still have this kind of like gendered sort of thing 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 dram buie 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 okay when we all worked on farms you know oversimplifying things, 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 arse 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 gruelling, 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 fairs, there used to be bare knuckle wrestling at Whitsuntide, 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. Most of us lived in hovels, in slums, several families to one room. A lot of young unmarried men 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. So 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 busty barmaid standing behind the bar in a low-cut top. And the lads would be kind of trying to impress her or, you know, make fun of her or whatever. And then in the 60s, we drank pale ale

when everyone else was drinking lager. The lager brewers tried all sorts to get us to drink lager. Did they? In the 60s, they said, right, we're going to 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? I said, well, because you've just spent £10 million telling us that it is. And it's like, OK, we need to spend £100 million 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, 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 whiff. Yes. But in Spain, 40% 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. I love a beer. 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 it's 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 tastes nice and then letting it ferment. I assume you 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 design recipes and actually put some of the legwork into making them so I know how it goes but I bet you do but I mean we're talking like it's like way back to the earliest 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 yes 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 fifth 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 yes please We've arranged for both you and I to present a couple of bottles of beer. Yes. So there are two things that these beers demonstrate, which I think gives an insight into how it would have tasted.

Right. The first thing is that what we've got now, since Louis Pasteur and microbiology and everything else, is that the yeast that ferments 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 by-product 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 the last week beer you're drinking they haven't gone for that for the advertising strapline no curiously enough i don't know why but so yeast contributes flavor 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 yeah yeah and in actual fact the first time someone suggested that these

microscopic organisms might be in there eating sugar farting 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 how beer was made, you'd 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? That 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 burn them burn them as a witch yeah and it was you 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 have a star on their logo yes and the star that the monks would hang it hang a star above the brewing vat to drive away the evil yeasts that were going to spoil the beer.

I didn't know that. Is that like when Star of Pram and sort of they use that? I've definitely seen stars before. Yeah, there's a red star. Qingtao in China has a red star on it and Heineken has a star. 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 whatever yeast was in the air you 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,

Gers Boon. Gers Boon. Sounds appetising. This is a beer that's still made using wild yeast cultures and not cultivated yeasts. Oh, so this, is it kind of like sort of a lucky dip of how it's going 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, is it? That's what it tastes really nice. Nice if you've got the taste for it. Yes. That's not a great advertisement, is it? 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 lambic. 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. It's like a little champagne thing yeah okay okay so should i fill half my glass with this yes for a little bit give it 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 thing than that. But that kind of...

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 outdoorsy-ness. Exactly. A donkey duvet or whatever it is. Yes. Wow. Okay. 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, whoo! It's really sharp. It's not what you expect from beer at all. No. It's kind of sourness and funkiness. It's 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 if you're gonna like it but you need to take about three sips because the first sip your mouth is going what the fuck is that the second sip you're slightly getting used to it then the third one is uh 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, Gutz Boone. That was, I like that one.

Yeah, he's the best. He's one of the, probably the best Gerson 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 sourness, that funkiness, that sort of rustic element to it.

A lot of people today think that when you get a mainstream lager like Carlsberg, it's got quite a boring sort of one-dimensional profile. Probably the most boring lager in the world. It was the guys at Carlsberg 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 these characteristics in it. Wow. Now we've got those really clean beers, we take them for granted.

And now we're all getting, you know, beer connoisseurs 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. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so early beer would have probably tasted a bit more sour than we'd be expecting. 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 more alcohol and the more nutritious it is. And is it true that people drank it rather than drink the water? So that's been disputed because 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 where you did your washing up. It was horrible.

It's vile in a way we can't really comprehend. Yeah, and you got a lot of diseases from it. You know, still in the 19th century, there's that famous case of the John Snow pub in Soho where they've realized that cholera is 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 sterilized and also it's got hops in it which act 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? I like that. That was given out to children in schools. It was given out in hospitals because you couldn't get drunk off it. 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 in the armed forces for 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 Southwarkark where they gave out small beer on the wards and one day they mixed it up and they put the first the strong beer instead and so just rioting and all these hospital wards and they got really done for it so that shows us that that both styles were were there and they were used in quite different ways wow 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 and age over the course of the pregnancy and then when the woman went into labour, the birthing ale 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. So, 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 foetus? But I mean, they didn't have pain relief or anything.

So I can, yeah, yeah you get a few down here 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 yes 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 okay 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 as starch and when you trick 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 a barley maltster and i said he 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'd 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 the poisonous gas is in coal. That makes sense.

Since the 16th or 17th century, when coke production started, we managed to get this kind of malt 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 malt was basically fire damaged it stank of smoke in the way that you buy knockoff stuff from a shop that's had a fire in it yeah and so what we've got here is a beer that uses malted 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. Frazzles, that's exactly what that smells like. All right, smoked beer. Okay, wow, like I'm pouring it into the glass and the only way I can describe that is chewy.

Yeah. This is a lager, believe it or not. That's a lager? Yeah. Does chewy yeah this is a lager believe it or not that's a lager yeah does it know it's a lager i don't think it does anyone told it that's it's like that looks really thick it's like the color 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, that's a peculiar sensation. 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 minimise 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 drank. Wow, a smoked beer. And it 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 dovey lambic beer over here and the frazzles one do you think half and half i reckon so right okay if we're doing we're going to do this commercially we'd experiment with different ratios and see what we liked. But half and half seems a good place to start.

Might be about to find out why the Brits lost the Battle of Hastings. 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? Yeah. Only by comparison.

Right. So what we drank was beer at cellar temperature which is not refrigerated but it's about 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 um here we go. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Whoa. That, how would you describe that? I think that's not half bad. That'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. It's hidden quite a lot of it. 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 acidity fruit thing. It's like a smoked fruit pie in a glass.

Yeah. So I think that's as fairly, 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 bollocks, 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 back then. But I like that, that that's where it comes from, that we used to put toast in beer. Yeah, well, punch bowls used to have toast put in them for some reason, which is where you get the toast master.

He'd be in charge of the punch bowl. 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 been grossly you know built up and elaborated. I don't think you can draw 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 into tinctures, whatever, and giving them to people.

If you go to Africa out for a walk with a Maasai tribesman and he was pointed to different trees saying, if a woman falls pregnant, we don't let her eat the leaves from that tree because it will make her 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 and 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 up bubbling up in your cauldron and then as the church became more dominant which was a male pyramid scheme 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 stake up outside the house, the ale stake, 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 ah 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 a name she's great she wrote this show this seven volume treatise in the 12th century of the medicinal properties of plants and she in that said hops add 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. Hildebrandt, 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 sort of positive history. So I'm curious as to where, because I research primarily 19th century history, and 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 hijacked 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 uh 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 clinking 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 workman'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 the workers institutes 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 socialize be with their mates chat play a game of dominoes have a cup of tea then we

can 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 but 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 started building concert halls. And so blokes who were house painters would say, well, I could paint some scenery.

People being given elocution lessons, 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 blokes 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 singing these songs that we used to sing

in the fields 100 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 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 a song about getting on a train and said well 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 in fact women did not have equal rights in the working men's club movement until 2007 but there 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 and 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 at 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 they're in a 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. We've got jobs that required you to be sober a bit more, like clerical jobs and things. So pubs started to compete. Airline pilots.

Yes. So pubs had 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 that's

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 the subject in the 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 they 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 when if you look at any kind of demographic information it's about it's about 40 to actually fallen in a kind of economic definition of working class when if you look at any kind of demographic information it's about it's about 40 percent who actually fallen 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 undeniably middle class now i've been comfortable working class background but i own about half of what a plumber or an electrician makes but uh 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 we've seen the gentrification of gastropubs and now with craft beer, which 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. At 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 californian cabernet 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 bar goes 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 175 ml glass of wine it's the same strength as that 175 ml glass of wine show me a pub in london where you get a

175 ml glass of 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 classist 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 with champagne yeast and i saw a wine writer review it and she was raving about it but her last sentence was still it's only a beer though oh it's like well i've got friends who are wine drinkers and they'll come around for a party and i'll say okay so you want to kind of belgian lambic beer do you want lager do you want ale pale ale ipa so well no i'm not drinking any of that rubbish i want a wine i'm like okay what wine do you want cabernet sauvignon

do you want sauvignon blanc you know riesling white and it's like right you're choosing to drink 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. It's not funny 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 would get some traction I think that would 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 It's been a pleasure Cheers I've actually finished 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 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 right 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'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 you