Dan Snow's History Hit - The History of Beer with Pete Brown

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Pete Brown used to advertise lager for a living, until he realised that writing books about beer was even more fun, and entailed drinking even more beer. He appears regularly on television as a beer expert, writes on beer for a variety of publications and is the author of Man Walks into a Pub and the award-winning travel book Three Sheets to the Wind. In this fascinating episode, he discusses the extraordinary history of beer and its rise to become one of the most popular drinks in the world.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Welcome everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got such a treat for you today you're not going to believe your ear holes. We're re-running one of the most popular episodes of Dan Snow's History Hit that has ever been broadcast. It features Pete Brown, who's a beer historian. Yes, that job actually exists. I've brought you a sex historian before, but now I'm bringing you a historian of beer. Pete Brown has written many wonderful books. He's been at the heart of a campaign that has seen beer, proper beer, not lager, proper beer, placed back at the heart of British global drinking culture. He's an activist, he's an author, he's a historian, He's a communicator, as you'll hear.

It's an absolute treat to be rewriting this podcast from 2015 or 16. I don't even know. It was so long ago, I've even forgotten what happened. This podcast could be older than the Trump presidency. Wow. Anyway, enjoy. If you want to go and listen to other episodes of this podcast without listening to ads, or you want to go and watch one of hundreds of hours of documentaries that we've made, please go to History Hit TV. It's been all over the press here in the uk thanks to the remarkable story of john watts the man who was born eight months after his father was killed 80 years ago in 1940 it's been trending here in uk it's been lots of news shows thank you very much for all the attention welcome to all the the new subscribers if you use the code pod1 pod, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free.

So you check it all out for free. Then if you like it, your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So head over there to historyhit.tv and check it out. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy Pete Brown. Pete, I am so excited. We have got beer that we can drink and we've got an excuse because it's history. Absolutely. The history of beer is the history of the British people. And so over a beer you can talk about whatever you like. Exactly. Well, let's open a beer and talk about that. I see you've got a bottle opener there.

Yep. I go everywhere I can with a bottle opener. I've got my bottle opener and my door key, my front door the two essentials yes the two things i need wherever i go what beer have you brought in uh so i thought for the for the day i'd bring in some beers that kind of more historical in their uh in their significance uh and i've kind of got the last 300 years of the history of british beer here in unless it's clear that's not just beer with a funny historical name is this is this because it's beer that's brewed in a different way? Yeah, but it's kind of the history of beer over the last few hundred

years and the different styles that have come out. Beer was one of the drivers of the Industrial Revolution and London was where a lot of that stuff happened. So some of the greatest beer styles in the world were invented here. And, you know, what we saw over the last 50 years or so was a lot of those styles disappearing as people kind of went to big mainstream industrial lager.

And what you've got with the craft beer movement now is people really going back and trying to find these old styles and recreate them. Okay, that's interesting. Is that right? I thought people just were inventing new, nice-tasting beer and giving it an old-fashioned name and claiming it, but are there actual historic recipes and methods of being regenerated? I think that used to happen if you go back into real ale uh and the sort of old country pub style thing with

you know old old ruttox rusty ferret smasher or whatever you know there was that willful kind of uh attempts to make things sound a lot older than they actually were uh real ale as we know it is britain's national drink it's very. Only really goes back about 140 years. What? That's insane. The production methods of it, it's all about producing fresh ale, which, you know, it's brewed in about five days, then it goes into casks, and then it's ready to be served in a pub within a few days. Before that happened, it was a lot more common for beer to be aged for up to a year. And they were very strong beers, they were designed to withstand export,

to be aged for up to a year. And they were very strong beers. They were designed to withstand export. And they were designed to mature and change in the wood for up to a year while they were maturing. And that's why beer kept people alive on long journeys overseas? Absolutely. Okay, fine. Talking of that one, let's open probably the most...

Yes, I thought you'd never open. Probably the most celebrated export beer. Its history is very contentious, but it's been revived as the beer that's really driving the craft beer movement around the world now, and it's an India Pale Ale. Of course, yeah, yeah. Everyone's drinking it. IPA.

I wrote a book about five years ago. Cheers. So this is an IPA produced by Pressure Dropper, a brewery in Hackney. I'm partially responsible for these guys being in business, which fills me with ambivalent feelings. They read a piece I wrote about the Jolly Butchers pub in Stoke Newington, went to the Jolly Butchers, they were so blown away by the beers there,

they quit their jobs in the city and opened a brewery. So it's nice to see them doing well. So let's talk about India Pale Ale. Why is it called that? I'd read something over the weekend that said it was ale that was brewed in India and exported to the UK. I mean, why would anyone want to do that? I don't know. It was actually during the time of the British Raj, and I learned all this when I did my book, was that the British presence in India was originally trading. We wanted to kind of trade silks and fabrics in India.

And, of course, every time ships came over the horizon, the price of fabrics would go up massively. And so the British left behind these little stations full-time that they called factories to buy the fabrics when it was advantageous to buy them and then sort of put them on the ships when the ships arrived. Now, between buying the odd can of bundles of fabric, there was nothing to do,

and the British in India just drank themselves stupid. There was a local drink called Arak, which is made by getting palm sap out of the top of a tree, let it ferment in the sun. The really good quality stuff, the really vintage stuff, only sends you blind. Most of it. Filthy stuff.

The first British, the first European deaths in the Far East were from drinking Arak. So we had to have something. British troops, when they went over, life expectancy about three months. So they needed really good quality beer in order for troops and civilians in India would drink that instead of drinking the local stuff. And it had to be strong because Arak was very strong. The strength helped it survive the export.

And the journey took six months and something about the journey made the beer change and when it got to India, contemporary accounts are all about it being, it's very ripe, it's ripened beautifully. So there was something happening in that beer so I decided to kind of have a barrel of the traditional beer brewed, take it to India with me on ships and see what happened, which

was interesting. What did it come out like? Well, it sort of, it did mature. It did mature. You get this incredible temperature variation when you're going across the equator, which affects the beer. It ages the beer. And you've got this constant movement as well. You've got this kind of total constant rocking for, you know, between three and six months. and it just turned into something that was kind of like half beer half champagne uh it was really special and when i opened it in calcutta uh at this kind of business delegation this one guy came up and said what is this trick you're trying to pull this is

not beer it's wine and i said no no it's beer it's beer now this is ridiculous you take us for fools and then he came back half an hour later saying can i have some more please speaking of beer it's wine and i said no no it's beer it's beer now this is ridiculous you take us for fools and then he came back half an hour later saying can i have some more please speaking of which because this podcast is so brilliant you're doing all the talking i'm doing all the drinking so i'm almost done on the yeah yeah it's absolutely fantastic but so let can we just let's wind it all about this because i'm too excited here beer is one of the oldest sort of recipes and and all this man-made things that we have any record of right so yeah why do we drink beer and not water uh a few reasons quite a few reasons uh in cities and towns the water supply gets polluted pretty quickly you know there's always

beautiful springs out in the countryside but when the population urbanized uh i mean just near here um the john snow pub just up in um near cannabis street that was a sense of a massive typhoid outbreak that they sort of tied back to the local water supply it was safer to drink water because it's been boiled uh when you make beer it was safer to drink water than it so sorry safer to drink beer than it was to drink water so that's one reason another reason is it's readily uh accessible form of nutrients it's got lots of carbohydrates people you heard it here like everything else if you're not drinking too much of it it is positively good for you uh and it used to weak beers used to be given out in workhouses hospitals schools uh because it kept people alive so okay so in ancient mesopotamia all the way through to

britain it was safer to drink beer because, so you do, you boil that water and they didn't know that was why it was good for you because presumably they didn't know that the germs were in the water, but they just knew at some stage of that process it was good for you. We didn't know what made it unsafe. We had no idea what microbes and microorganisms were until about 150, 180 years ago. But we knew from very ancient times that if you boiled water, then it was safer. And if you're going to boil it, why not chuck some barley and hops in it and turn it into beer? Yeah, and it tastes better, there's nutrition in it,

and it gets you a bit tipsy, which is fun. Yeah, I mean, most of our greatest people in our history, all these incredible achievements that people have done, they were half cut when they were doing it. It's remarkable, isn't it? I couldn't agree more. Right, so, speaking of which, speaking of remarkable achievements, let's get this podcast up to the next level. What's the next beer to try? I've got a beer from Fuller's just down the road.

They've been working with a beer historian called Ron Pattinson. Fuller's have been going since 1845. So they've got all these old records, old history books of their recipes. Brewers used to write them in code so that no one else could steal them.

And Ron has spent his life kind of trying to break these codes. And so he's been working with Fullers over the last few years to recreate beers from their archives. So this is Fullers's Passmasters. Passmasters is the name of the series. It's a strong ale, I think from

around the sort of 1880s, 1890s. So this is the kind of thing that people were drinking in London in the sort of late 19th century. It's dark, isn't it? Yeah, you can actually smell some of the age on there. You get that kind of dried fruit character. This bottle's a few years old and that's what's coming through there.

God, that's a weird taste, isn't it? It is. If you get that taste in a weak beer that's not got much body to it, then it's horrible. When you get it in a stronger beer that's got more body in it to counter it. It tastes thick. I mean, not like Guinness, sort of thick as in creamy, but it just has a real thick taste in the mouth, isn't it?

And is that, I mean, not like Guinness, sort of thick as in creamy, but it just has a real thick taste in the mouth, isn't it? And is that, I mean, do tastes change? Are we more sophisticated, less sophisticated? Is this a sort of simpler beer to brew? Why is this an older sort of taste? I think it's a bone of contention, you know, because there's a massive orthodoxy in the beer industry today that people want light refreshments. If you look at lager ads today it's all about easy drinking refreshment and that means it's cold it's fizzy it goes down really quickly and i like that on a hot summer's day that's great but there seems to be tied in with that this idea that people don't like strong flavors and if you go back 100 years this is the kind of stuff people now you know this is this is not for the faint-hearted this is quite strong

powerful beer and this is what everyone was drinking but it's interesting you talk to food historians about food 100 years 200 years older the flavors are insane aren't they i think perhaps perhaps because nowadays we used to so many lovely smells and flavors all day that we've there's less emphasis at the meal times but back then they just sort of threw the kitchen sink at everything didn't they because i think things were so bland the rest of the time you might as well and your ingredients were uh very variable you couldn't really rely on quality the way we can today um i've got one beer here which has been laced with a bit of wild yeast which might be quite interesting when we get onto that but until the 1870s 1880s you couldn't guarantee that you

were getting a clean fermentation from your beer and so if you were getting these off notes from wild yeast, you had to chuck a lot more stuff in there to cover that up and to get roughly the flavour that you were trying to get. And now traditionally in this country, would every family brew their own beer? Town, village, parish? Go back to the Middle Ages, brewing was an activity that happened in every household the way that making your own bread was. And it was always a task of the woman um it was something that women did in the house so the best ones would put up an ale stick outside the house to show the brew was ready people start to barter buy some of the beer off the woman who's making it better than the rest of the village about the 12th sorry about 13th century it starts to get taxed and ale houses start to become public places

uh pubs you know the kind of foreigner of the pub but you might have a front room that was public yeah the family would still live elsewhere in there yeah and yes yes there's there's a handful of places like that left today uh where you find these pubs that are just like people's front rooms and the beer's in the cellar and you bring it up in chugs and serve it i've been to one like that in pembrokeshire which is definitely the best pub i've been to in the uk i'm sure you've just written a book called the pub it's out at the moment i bet you've been to some brilliant historic pubs some insanely brilliant ones um i mean it's interesting because if you get a place like london um you know it's constantly being rebuilt and

reinvented and and repurposed and historic pubs don't really survive very well you get out to the countryside on the old kind of coaching routes, old sheep-droving routes, these inns that were built for travellers and for merchants and the ones that are still there, you've just got centuries of history in a building. And for me to sit there and think, OK, somebody was sitting in this room doing exactly the same thing I'm doing right now hundreds of years ago, that purpose, that function hasn't changed one bit.

Okay, so you've got the women of the house would brew, some of them would take it to the next level, open an establishment and serve to paying guests and everyone would come and drink there. I mean, does that just show that alcohol consumption was at the heart of these communities as they're expanding and changing? Well, this is the thing about, say, alcohol consumption. We're living through a phase, and this is cyclical, by the way. We're coming in and out of this sort of way of thinking.

We're living at a time now when we think that consuming alcohol is inherently a bad thing. That, you know, oh, it's okay moderation, so long as you drink responsibly. But, you know, implicit in that is this idea that, like smoking, it's okay moderation so long as you drink responsibly but uh but you know implicit in that is this idea that like smoking it's somehow bad for you for most of our history we've been drinking it's a natural thing and we're not the only animals that do it um all right yeah um elephants when they smell fermenting beer in india they've been known to

charge factories uh there's there's actually a theory of evolution the uh the drunken ape theory which is that the incredible aromas that rotting fruit gives off when it's being fermented by yeast um attract sort of the most energetic and quizzical apes and they're the ones that survive oh my goodness that's a great theory if it's true i will be very happy and so uh and so i think drinking alcohol is a perfectly natural thing for the human condition. And it's as natural to us as eating. And changing your brain chemistry to relax and to de-stress is, you know, and for most of our history, we've been having to put with a lot of pretty grim situations

and grim circumstances. And, you know, a nice drink at the end of the day takes the edge off. And I think that's what we've done for most of our history. On Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories,

listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Right, let's go. Next beer. What have we got here? Because I am out. I'm dry. So this is the one I mentioned with Wild Yeast. There's a Louis Pasteur and Emile Hansen who worked at the Carlsberg Laboratory

Louis Pasteur worked at the Carlsberg Laboratory Sorry he Hansen was a student of Pasteur who worked at the Carlsberg Laboratory and Pasteur first identified that fermentation was caused by yeast The chemists in the mid 1919th century believed that fermentation,

the conversion of sugar to alcohol, was just this process, this reaction that happened. And Pasteur proved that it was living organisms in the beer that caused it to happen, which was revolutionary. So we've been brewing beer for probably about 10,000 years, and it took Pasteur in the 1870s to say, and the reason it works is these tiny little single cell organisms that eat sugar and crap out alcohol and carbon dioxide that is extraordinary it's a great thing isn't that amazing so as you say all these wonderful women brewing all the way

well from ancient ancient Mesopotamia onwards but medieval they actually didn't know what was happening they just knew to add these ingredients and wonderful things would occur. I spent a lot of time with a cider maker last year, and he said, we simply act as if we know what we're doing. And when we find out what we're doing, it doesn't change much. It doesn't really change, yeah. Just chuck the dead rat, the cider guys chuck the rat in. Absolutely.

So this beer is a porter. Porter was the first industrial beer. In London, from around the 1720s, 1730s, this was when the housewives and the sort of brew pubs moved and it became all about big industrial breweries. A lot of inventions and innovations like steam power, the use of microscopes, the use of hydrometers, was all kind of pioneered by the brewing industry.

And the first big industrial breweries in the world were in London, not far from where we are now. And Porter was the first big industrial beer. Is that right? So that was driving the industrialisation of production. Yeah. So the bigger they got, the cheaper they could supply their beer. It got to the point where they could supply pubs cheaper than pubs could brew it themselves. their beer it got to the point where they could supply pubs cheaper than pubs could brew it themselves and so you get the big names like whip bread names like what knees uh all kind of all coming up in london and this was a beer stall and this was aged in massive wooden vats uh as i said for about a year and there's a slight funky note to this beer yes there is and this. And this is by Eldridge Pope up in Kings Lynn, near Kings Lynn.

And they just said, well, if you were storing these beers in wood for a year, the Britannomyces, these natural yeasts that live in wood, would have got into the beer. And they give it this kind of like slight sourness, a slight dryness. So this is the taste, as far as we can tell, of what everybody in London was drinking through the 18th century. That is brilliant. This and gin. And you could then transport this.

So are we imagining Nelson's Navy, were they drinking Porter beer? Yeah, yeah. I mean, in fact, in volume terms, more Porter went to India than IPA did. It's just that IPA was the big rock star beer, you know. And yeah, the British, the Industrial Revolution was fuelled by Porter and the British everywhere in the world were fuelled by Porter. And our sailors dominating the world's oceans

are fuelled by Porter as well. Definitely, definitely, yeah. So this is slightly, yeah, it's kind of a little bit tart. It's probably not what you expect from a beer. I'm not sure if you like it or not, but it's dark and cloudy. Do you know what?

To be honest, I'm enjoying it very much. It could be the company, but yeah, I think my favourite so far, I think, still is that IPA. Yeah. But that could be the modern, I'm more used to drinking that. Well, this is the thing, and the weird thing about this IPA is that if you could take it to India in, say, 1830, and I love that, by the way.

That's my favourite beer style at the moment. But if you took a bottle of that to Calcutta in 1830. And I love that, by the way. That's my favourite beer style at the moment. But if you took a bottle of that to Calcutta in 1830, they would pour it into the harbour and say, this is green, it's raw, it's not ripe yet. All the beautiful, big, vibrant, fruity, hot flavours that we love now, until about 50 years ago, were considered completely unsuitable in beer because it hadn't aged properly.

Yeah, because these last two, they age they age they taste almost if you have a this is if you have a wine that's a little bit too old i mean there's there's a sense of that age in these ones isn't it yeah it's still very good yeah don't get me wrong i'm enjoying it and uh what what's next so my final one is uh is the daddy of them. This is Russian Imperial Stout. Oh, my goodness. Three words that should never go together. So this was the favourite drink of Catherine the Great.

Okay. Who would demand that all her courtiers drank it. It was kind of, again, originated in London. This is taking Porter and just ramping everything up, just turning everything up to 11. Okay, so I need to ask you about this. So it's really embarrassing. I hope no one judged me.

But what is stout? It's like a lot of things in beer. It's a marketing term originally. So porter was the style of drink. And again, where did its name come from? No one really knows. Arthur Guinness saw how successful porter was in London, started brewing it in Dublin.

They'd brewed ale before that. And then he made a... They sort of pioneered using really dark roasted barley. Now, you get a pale ale or a lager, the barley in that has been very lightly kilned, so you get these kind of biscuity breakfast cereal flavours from it.

You turn the heat up a bit, and it's like roasting coffee beans you know you could get a bit like that isn't it yeah and when you really get roast barley into it you get coffee and chocolate notes and so arthur actually was the second arthur guinness who really cracks that and and he called it extra stout porter because he was stronger oh i see oh extra okay well that makes sense that was just reduced to stout then so this is the big amped up version that was uh the trade between uh england and st petersburg we we ran out of wood to make beer barrels out of so we started going to to the baltic to buy russian oak if you're sending ships to pick up russian oak uh you need to kind of have the ship full of something going that way before you bring the wood back the other way.

So we put beer on there, and the Russians really like British beer. Sending booze to Russia is sure like taking the coals to Newcastle, isn't it? I mean, what's the point? Well, it's good to hear they developed a taste for the British beer. Yeah, so this is another strong export beer designed to survive export. It was originally, it's now Courage, well it's now Charles Wells, the breweries just change hands all the time, but it was originally Anchor Brewery in Southwark that created this beer,

it's been kind of passed down, handed down. And this was the brewery, well it was Thrail's Brewery before it was Anchor Brewery, and when the Thrail family sold it, they were very good friends with Samuel Johnson, and that's when he said, we're not just selling a parcel of vats here, we're selling a potential to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And that's where that phrase comes from. Yeah, brilliant.

Because it was about making this beer. Is this the opposite of small beer? Where's the expression small beer? Yeah, small beer is, so you've got a big mash tun full of malted barley, you put your water through that, you heat it up, and you extract all a big mash tun full of full of malted barley you put your water through that you heat it up and you extract all the fermentable sugar out of the barley and you run that off into a separate vessel add the hops and ferment it that's where you get your

beer from the more sugar in that liquid uh the stronger your beer is going to be small beer you'd keep your leftover grains and you'd put more water through it again and just flush out the very last bits of sugar and flavor and everything else and it would ferment to about two one to two percent abv and that's what you give your kids that's what you get to kids that's your hand out in workhouses schools hospitals you can't get drunk off it but it's still got a lot of nutritional value yeah and it's interesting um nowadays was it was it carlsberg or someone the other day tried to reintroduce a sort of the lunchtime beer idea and it wouldlsberg or someone the other day tried to reintroduce the lunchtime beer idea and it would be 1 or 2% it didn't really work apparently

No, a lot of people have tried it and I think we're just too scared of it at the moment it's like, well it's beer, it's 1% freshly squeezed orange juice is 0.5% of the BV the natural fermentation that happens in in sugary drinks. We're drinking alcohol all the time without even knowing it.

0.5%, 1%, 2%. It really isn't that much. That's fascinating, isn't it? And now the history of beer, I suppose, has come... What's its relationship with wine always been? Because now suddenly it's very fashionable again. But I suppose when you and I were growing up, beer was seen as a bit of a lout drink for younger men and and that's

sophisticated people drank wine and so that that presumably has changed through the oh i say catherine the greats this was her favorite tipple so it must have been very grand at one stage yeah they've had an uneven relationship and the the inferiority thing with beer and it's something that a lot of us in beer have fought against a bit until recently um it kind of comes from two places it comes from romans uh who obviously drank a lot of wine uh when they came north into europe they they thought that beer was a barbarian's beverage you know they came to britain they came to germany and they they found people drinking people they considered to be barbarians drinking this, wine of malt,

they called it and said it was inferior. And then of course you've got, after the Norman invasion, you've got this sort of duality in a lot of British life where the French version of something is classier than the English version. You think about how many French words we use, like a restaurant, you know, or, you know, cuisine is better than cooking and that kind of thing. And wine, wine has done a brilliant, the French have done a brilliant, brilliant job of marketing wine around the world as the classiest beverage. Now, if you've been to France, if you're into your wine, and any honest wine critic will tell you, there's dreadful wine and there's brilliant wine. Same with beer, there's dreadful wine and there's brilliant wine uh same with beer there's dreadful beer and there's brilliant beer and i most of the people i meet who work in the industry the people

who really know and are passionate about wine are also passionate about great beer and and vice versa and i meet a few people go oh we've got to tell people that beer is better than wine no it's not and wine's not better than beer but But the best of each are just wonderful. And we can imagine, so Catherine the Great drinking her Russian stout, so she wouldn't have sort of moved to a French claret for a big state banquet or anything? I mean, has there always been this sort of relationship between wine and beer? I don't know enough about other countries,

but she's on record as being very famously kind of insisting that everyone drank British beer. And she boasted that she could out-drink any Englishman when it came to beer. She was a formidable woman in every way. And now, of course, we've got this unbelievable revolution in beer going on. You can hardly buy an old-school industrial commercial beer in the United States and Canada. And here in the UK, it's changing very rapidly as well. Changing the whole industry.

I think when you look at beer, because it's ubiquitous and because it's the absolute kind of lifeblood of ordinary working people, whatever the biggest forces are in society will shape beer. So after the housewives brewing it, you know, at that time, the monastery's religion was the most powerful force in the country so the monks brewed beer then you get the industrial revolution and so it's big industry that produces beer 40 50 years ago we start to produce from we start to move from more of a simple production focused economy to a more marketing oriented economy and it was classy adverts and big

advertising campaigns and sponsorship that dictated beer now we're living in a time when it's the rejection of that when people don't want things handed to them by big brands they want personal they want artisanal uh they want local they want to know the person who's made whether you're talking about bread cheese beer um this is this is people want. And it actually took beer a long time to catch up with the broader food trend. But now it's finally happened and it's changing the entire industry. Because I'm half Canadian and Canadians, I mean, people thought the US beer was bad. Canadian beer was extraordinary. I mean, it was, I can't mention it, obviously, because I don't want to get sued,

but there were two basic brands. I know them well. And going there as a kid, it was, sorry, as an over 18 year old. Yes. it obviously because i'll get sued but there were two basic brands i know them well and uh going there as a kid it was sorry as an over 18 year old yes it was it was pretty brutal and now you know obviously here in britain but particularly in north america the change is just extraordinary isn't it it really is it really is and although it's still small in terms of like the total share of the market it's where all the action's happening uh and i do some consultancy to the industry and all the kind of manufacturers of big lager brands they're saying tell me about craft what do i do should we be changing our business uh and it's uh it's affecting everything the big

businesses need to give it a silly label with some stupid pros on it and call it a craft beer the problem is they they they educate us out of the state they want us to be in so when we all start drinking lager in the 70s they said oh okay the best lager comes from continental europe and some british people start going to continental europe and come back you go yeah you're absolutely right and the stuff you're serving us is crap imitations of that and so we get more sophisticated then they say okay we need to make ourselves seem a bit more sophisticated we start educating people about ingredients and processes and they go oh yeah okay yeah you're not doing that so so we kind of get educated out of our ignorance by the people who want to keep

us there and then we go well you think it's all about authenticity and quality thank you very much i'm going to go over here to some guy who really does do that well brewing is probably one of the oldest human professions and luckily it seems to be in absolutely fantastic form at the moment. Absolutely, yeah. There is an argument, another argument historically, that the domestication of grain for brewing came before the

domestication of wheat for bread. It drove the whole thing. A whole of civilisation is based on the desire for beer. And as soon as you've got farming, grain farming, you've got permanent settlements, you've got the first cities and beer. And as soon as you've got farming, grain farming, you've got permanent settlements, you've got the first cities and towns. So beer as the root cause of civilisation is my sort of argument, really.

Fill up that stout. The podcast will end on that note. Two blokes drinking beer, putting the world to rights. Absolutely. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge

difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.