Contending liquors: how ale and beer remained separate drinks for hundreds of years longer than generally accepted Martyn Cornell Alone among the Germanic languages, century and beyond, and the original English has two words for fermented ale/beer split still influences styles of malt liquor: ‘ale’, from the supposed root fermented malt liquor in Britain today. word *aluþ- , the same as modern Swedish öl and Danish and Norwegian The historical consensus was summed øl; and ‘beer’, from Old High German up by the historian WH Chaloner, who bior, which gave the modern Dutch and wrote in 1960, reviewing Peter Mathias's German bier.1 The reason is that when great book The brewing industry in German (and later Dutch) brewers began England, 1700-1830: using hops to flavour and preserve their malt liquors, they kept their old name, By the end of the seventeenth century the bier, for the drink, despite its new taste; terms 'ale' (originally a sweetish, unhopped and when immigrant continental brewers malt liquor) and the newer 'beer' (a bitter, first began brewing the hopped drink in hopped malt liquor) had come to describe England in the first half of the 15th centu- more or less identical products following the ry, bier retained its German/Dutch name victory of the latter drink.3 in its new home - slightly respelled for English orthography - to distinguish it Chaloner's conclusion seems to have from the unhopped English ale.2 been based on writers such as Gervase Eventually, after not more than a couple Markham, who wrote in The English of hundred years, ale, too, began to be Huswife in 1615: brewed with hops, and ultimately ‘ale’ and ‘beer’ became effectively synonyms. The generall use is by no means to put any But although the consensus among his- hops into ale, making that the difference torians has been that the merging in betwixt it and beere, that the one hath hops meaning of the two words was complete the other none; but the wiser huswives do within three centuries of hopped beer find an error in that opinion, and say the utter arriving in England, in fact the evidence want of hops is the reason why ale lasteth so shows that ale and beer were still regard- little a time, but either dyeth or soureth, and ed as different drinks among brewers and therefore they will to every barrell of the best drinkers in Britain right through the 19th ale allow halfe a pound of good hops.4 Brewery History Number 144 33 But while the practice of putting hops in ale brewed at that time, and for that age, one ale was clearly taking place in Jacobean pound and a quarter of hops; but if these ales England, blurring the line between the are brewed in any of the summer months two malt liquors, even a century later ale there should be more hops allowed. For and beer were still distinct drinks. Daniel October or March brown beer, a hogshead Defoe, writing in his Tour through the made from eleven bushels of malt boiled an Eastern Counties of England, published hour and a quarter, to be kept nine months, in 1722, about the great hop fair at three pounds and a half ought to be boiled in Stourbridge, on the banks of the Cam just such drink at the least. For October or March outside Cambridge, said: pale beer, a hogshead made from fourteen bushels, boiled an hour and a quarter and As to the north of England, they formerly kept twelve months, six pounds ought to be used but few hops there, their drink being allowed to a hogshead of such drink and chiefly pale smooth ale, which required no more if the hops are shifted in two bags, and hops, and consequently they planted no hops less time given the wort to boil.6 in all that part of England, north of the Trent; nor did I ever see one acre of hop ground Going on Ellis's figures, early 18th centu- planted beyond Trent in my observation; but ry ale contained up to 60% more hops as for some years past, they not only brew than Gervaise Markham's ‘huswives’ great quantities of beer in the north, but also used in ale brewing a century earlier, but use hops in the brewing their ale much more still only around a quarter as much hops than they did before; so they all come south as the beer. This, Ellis said, was because of Trent to buy their hops; and here being ‘Ale … to preserve in its mild Aley Taste, vast quantities brought, it is a great part of will not admit of any great Quantity of their back carriage into Yorkshire and Hops’.7 Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and all those counties; nay, of late since the ‘Obadiah Poundage,’ the aged brewery Union, even to Scotland itself.5 worker who wrote a letter to the London Chronicle in 1760 about the tax on ‘malt The first edition of the London and liquors’ (the general term used for ale and Country Brewer, by the Hertfordshire beer as a class in the 18th century), is farmer William Ellis, succinctly summed usually mined for the light he threw on up the difference between ale and beer in the history of porter. But he is also very the 1730s in terms of their recipes, and revealing on the continuing difference the quantities of hops used in each: between ale and beer. Poundage said that in Queen Anne's reign, about 1710, the For strong brown ale brewed in any of the increase in taxes on malt (caused by the winter months and boiled an hour, one pound expense of the War of the Spanish is but barely sufficient for a hogshead, if it be Succession) caused brewers to look to tapped in three weeks or a month. If for pale make a drink with less malt and more hops: 34 Journal of the Brewery History Society Thus the drinking of beer became There are various sorts of ale known in encouraged in preference to ale … but the England, particularly pale and brown; the people not easily weaned from their heavy former is brewed from malt slightly dried, and sweet drink, in general drank ale mixed with is esteemed more viscid than the latter, which beer.8 is made from malt more highly dried or roasted. This ale seems to have been brown ale (and the beer brown beer), for Poundage Of beer the Complete Dictionary said: says that it was the gentry, It is chiefly distinguished from ale by the now residing in London more than they had quantity of hops, which is greater in beer, and done in former times [who] introduced the thereby renders the liquor bitterer and fitter to pale ale, and the pale small beer they were keep … That beer is reckoned to be the best habituated to in the country; and either which is clear, a pale colour, of a pungent and engaged some of their friends, or the London agreeable taste, that sparkles upon being brewers to make for them these kinds of poured into a glass, and is neither too old or drinks. [The pale ale] was sold by the too new.9 victualler at 4d per quart and under the name of two-penny. [It was the need to counter the Consumers, incidentally, continued to mix success of this pale ale that] excited the their malt liquors: ale and beer together brown beer trade to produce, if possible, a was called in English ‘mixt-beer,’ accord- better sort of commodity, in their way, than ing to the Vollständiges Wörterbuch der heretofore had been made, [an effort that] englischen Sprache für die Deutschen, succeeded beyond expectation an English-German dictionary published in 1794, which said that ‘mixt-beer’ was with the development of what became ‘… eine Vermischung von ungehopften known as porter, because of its populari- und gehopften Bieren, wohen das Ale ty with London's many street porters. But vorschmeckt,’ that is, ‘a mixture of while the ‘brown beer trade’ developed unhopped and hopped beers, in which into the porter brewers, the ale brewers the taste of the ale predominates.’ ‘Ale’ continued to find a market. the Wörterbuch translated as ‘susses, ungehopftes Bier,’ sweet, unhopped The Complete Dictionary of Arts and beer.10 Even in early Victorian times a Science of 1773 defined the word ‘ale’ as popular mixture was half-and-half, ale ‘a fermented liquor obtained from an and porter together in the same pot. infusion of malt and differing only from beer in having a less proportion of hops’ As the extract from the London and (a definition stolen word-for-word by the Country Brewer makes clear, ale could Encyclopedia Britannica nine years be brown or pale in the 18th century, but later). It added: it looks as if, gradually, the expectation Brewery History Number 144 35 grew that ale would generally be a light so for porter: to quote Michael Donovan, colour. A book called Scenes of British writing in Dr Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Wealth, in Produce, Manufactures, and of Useful Arts from 1830: ‘Ale is of a Commerce, by Isaac Taylor, published in lighter colour; it is stronger, sweeter and 1825, claimed: is less hopped than porter’.13 We may say … that ale differs from beer in An article in the Farmer's Magazine in having fewer hops, which, giving less 1837 confirmed this ‘ale is lighter in bitterness, leaves more of the soft smooth colour’ differentiation: sweetness of the malt.